Chapter 1
Notes:
hello and welcome to the nightmare zone aka i was a normal person and then i watched the oddinary trailer and in doing so i opened myself up to a demon which has me by the throat and i cannot escape. it has been 4 months since that trailer dropped and in those 4 months we have written 200,000+ words of this, which is — IF WE ARE LUCKY — perhaps half of the total word count it’ll reach. idk. being a vessel for a supernatural force is frankly the only explanation for what has happened to me.
but yes ok this is the skz gang au. new fandom, same old shit in many ways!!! some housekeeping before we start:
1. new chapters should be up every other Friday evening EST. There might be a delay in later chapters depending on how writing goes but right now that’s the schedule.
2. this fic deals with many dark themes, and has some pretty intense scenes in it. i’ve tagged the bigger trigger warnings in the main tags, but i will also include chapter specific trigger warnings in the a/n on those chapters so PLEASE read the a/n for those. once again, the child sex abuse tag refers to something that occured in the past, is over, and will not be detailed out within the fic.
3. i have NOT tagged any of the porn tropes we will be dealing with later, those will also be included in the a/n of those chapters when we get there. otherwise we’d be hitting sexy times with wangxian level of tags and nobody wants that.
4. for plot purposes, jeongin’s age has been changed. we bumped him down a year, but everyone else still has the same age gaps in relation to one another.
5. changbin and seungmin are already together at the start of the fic, however it’s a secret from the others for many reasons, the biggest being that they don’t want to cause drama or mess up the group dynamic. this, as you will see, is very sensible of them.
6. this takes place in a mildly dystopian version of seoul where everything is kind of grotty and there’s a lot more crime going on. this is not what seoul is actually like at all. if nothing else, i probably have more guns in this fic than exist outside of army bases in the entire country.
okay that’s enough, let’s go.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Maniac was in the northwestern part of the city, a standalone building with its name on a fluorescent green sign outside. Felix had looked at that sign enough over the past couple of weeks that he could sometimes see it when he closed his eyes to sleep, tattooed on the backs of his eyelids. It was lit up now despite the fact that the sun had only just begun to set. Felix, tucked into the shadows of an alley opposite the club, tried not to look at it.
He had yet to actually make it inside. At night there were too many people for comfort, and he didn’t have an ID anymore besides, so he had no way of proving he should even be allowed in. He had tried, once, during the day, to talk his way through the staff setting up for the evening, but he did not have the knack of being charming on purpose, or perhaps they just knew to be suspicious of people trying to get inside to talk to their boss. If you give us your contact info and the reason you want to talk to him, we can pass it on, they had told him, wary as they watched him, and Felix hadn’t been able to do any of that so he’d just had to leave without a word.
He’d resorted to his Plan C which was, essentially, stalking. He wasn’t proud of it; actually, he hated it, because as he watched the club night after night it reminded him of how easily someone could be watching him without him knowing about it. How easily someone had watched him, before he’d learned to stay on the move. This time spent lingering around Maniac had been the longest he’d been in any sort of routine in the past six months and it was starting to itch at him. It would be dangerous to let this play out much longer.
The sky above him slowly darkened. Outside the front doors, a member of staff was setting up the barriers that divided the general public on the street from those wanting to get in. There weren’t many people around at this time, but there’d be plenty, later. This street was full of nightclubs and bars, and the area was decent enough that they seemed to draw a clientele of mostly college students or young professionals, those in their twenties who were willing to spend a little extra money on drinks to avoid the thrum of barely hidden violence that happened in other parts of the city. That kind of crowd didn’t discriminate based on the day of the week — Felix had seen as many people waiting to get in on a Monday as he had on a Friday.
His alley looked into the narrow service street that looped around the side of the nightclub, where the side door was opening. The man who stepped out was one that Felix had seen a few times now, coming and going from that employee entrance but never dressed in the employee uniform, all black with the club name on the chest in that same green as the sign outside. He was always dressed casually, and the staff seemed to defer to him, listening carefully when he told them something. Felix did not think this was Chris — there was no way a man like that would be wandering around without some kind of security. But this was, perhaps, someone directly under Chris in the chain of command.
The man leaving the club was wearing a leather jacket, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t look particularly tall, even from this distance, but he moved in a way which suggested— power. He turned left out of his side street and strode along the road with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where he was going. Felix glanced back at the entrance to the club, the doors of which were closed again, and came to a split second decision that he hoped he wouldn’t regret. And then he, too, left his side street.
He’d learned, over the past few months, the knack of simply fading into the background. It was not easy to do, when he’d bleached his hair to the point that sometimes he was afraid it was simply going to fall out, but he’d learned through necessity. Most of it, he now knew, was about simply looking like he belonged somewhere, walking with enough confidence as to not draw suspicion, but not so much as to potentially make himself a spectacle. Being furtive, or seeming skittish, would always draw eyes. He’d made that mistake in the early weeks, when he’d been taking the bus to different parts of the city, trying to just stay ahead of anyone trying to follow him. The rest of it was about staying out of direct eye contact with the people around him. This part, he was particularly good at it. He moved, unobtrusive and careful, down the street, tracking the footsteps of the man who helped to run the club.
In spite of his practice over the last few months, he was still a little surprised to not get caught. Good as he was at this point, he had not tested it against someone who might actually be expecting to be followed. He could see the man checking, too, for anyone who might be tailing him, but Felix was apparently inconspicuous enough in the shadows to go unnoticed. Felix followed him through the streets, a looping, somewhat complicated path, until the man checked over his shoulder one more time and then disappeared down a very narrow alley between two buildings, one of which was semi-crumbling down.
Felix stopped, looking up at the other building. It looked disused, most of the lights inside and outside turned off. The first floor had once been a convenience store but all the windows had been bricked up at some point. The second floor had a sign for a hair salon, but half the characters were missing, the paint on the sign peeling off. Above that was a PC room, which had one character of its name turned on, a yellow light that flickered in a way that did not seem to suggest it was open. The top floor didn’t have any signage at all.
There was only one light on in the entire building from this front view, lighting up some of the windows in the third floor PC room. Felix looked down the side alley again, the absolute darkness down there, and then back at the front doors that must lead to the internal stairway of the building. They were made of metal, unusual in this type of building, which usually had glass front doors. He couldn’t be sure what was waiting for him down the path he’d watched the man from the club take, but when he tried this front entrance, it wasn’t even locked. This, he realised, must be the entrance for their clients.
Felix pulled one of the doors open fully, finding it so heavy that it wasn’t particularly easy, and stepped into the front hallway. It was nothing but bare grey concrete, the corners dusty. There was a series of mail boxes against the wall, all of the business names scratched out from the labels. The junk mail that had been stuffed in there was all yellowed with age. Whoever had been willing to enter to put mail in those boxes had clearly stopped long ago.
He took the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the stairwell. He had just passed the abandoned hair salon when he heard another set of footsteps behind him. He turned back around and saw the man from the club climbing up behind him, a gun held steady in his hands, pointing at Felix.
Felix slowly lifted his hands in the air, palms facing out. “Please don’t shoot me,” he said.
“Who the fuck are you?” said the man, still coming up the stairs slowly, watching Felix with a scowl.
“Felix.” Felix resisted the urge to take a step back, kept his feet planted firmly on the ground. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him, after all, and not even the first time it had been an actual threat, but something about this situation struck him as particularly dangerous. “I’m here to talk to— Chris. About uh. A job.” If Chris was even here, if this wasn’t another dead end.
A raised eyebrow in his direction. “We don’t take walk-ins,” the man said, and Felix’s heart skipped a beat. He’d finally gotten it right. “And how the fuck did you even find us?”
Felix decided it was probably best he didn’t answer that last question. “Sorry,” he said. “I would have made an appointment if I had known how.”
This did not seem to mollify the man holding a gun to him at all. He was looking at Felix like he thought Felix was making fun of him, even though Felix was not doing any such thing. He wouldn’t dare, not right now. After a few seconds of just looking at each other, the man motioned at him with the gun. “Take off your backpack and put it on the floor,” he said. Felix hesitated for a moment before he followed the instructions, dropping his backpack to the ground. He hoped he would get it back. It had everything he had to his name at this point and while it wasn’t much, he didn’t want to have to try without any of it.
The gun motioned again. This, Felix understood, was an order for him to turn around. He did so and a second later felt a hand, strong and heavy, clamp down on his shoulder and the barrel of the gun press to his lower back. He went very still. “Okay,” said the man, very close now. “The third floor. No sudden moves.”
Felix nodded, shallowly, the only motion he felt comfortable making, before he continued up the stairs, awkward now he was being held like this. The third floor landing was the only part of the stairwell actually lit up, light coming through the propped open door of the PC room. Felix, after taking a moment to check it was okay, stepped into the room.
It did not look like any PC room that Felix had seen before, but he’d only spent time in these kinds of places over the past few months, the grottier sort that didn’t mind if someone stayed overnight. There was, first of all, a distinct lack of computers, just a couple of rows along the wall directly opposite where Felix had just come in, most of them switched off. There was a boy sitting at the only computer actually on, his back to the door, hood pulled up. Felix couldn’t make out what he was doing but his mouse was clicking furiously.
Most of the room was taken up by a pool table right in the middle, which looked to have been abandoned in the middle of a game, brightly coloured balls still spread out across the top. Behind that was a DDR machine that, like the computers, was turned off. Along the wall with the front door was what had probably been a check in desk but now appeared to be some kind of bar area. There were shelves of liquor behind it, and a few stools in front. Another guy was sitting on one of those stools, and he glanced up when Felix came in, and then did a double-take and shot to his feet. The phone that had been in his hands clattered to the top of the reception desk.
“Hyung,” he said to the guy behind Felix, who was ushering him further into the room, the gun still poking him.
“Yeah,” said the one with the gun. “I know. Jeongin-ah. Jeongin-ah!”
“He’s got his headphones on, give me a second,” said the one who had been on his phone. He walked across the room to the one named Jeongin, somehow managing to not take his attention off Felix the entire time. He tapped Jeongin on the shoulder and then reached around him and turned his monitor off.
“Hyung!” Jeongin cried, and twisted around, clearly intent on giving his interrupter a piece of his mind, but he saw Felix standing still near the entrance and his eyes widened. He pushed his hood back off his head and with it, the headphones he had been wearing underneath. “Who is that?” he asked.
“This is Felix.” The gun was shoved harder into Felix’s back and he headed further into the room, closer to the pool table now, out of the way of the door. “Jeongin, go grab his backpack, will you? It’s in the stairwell. Go bring it back here.”
Jeongin nodded slowly and got to his feet. As he passed Felix, he gave him a curious look, and Felix realised that he was young, younger than Felix himself, but a little taller, with dark hair that feathered over his face. He slipped out of the door and when he was gone, the man with the gun said to the other one, “Check if he’s got anything on him.”
The other guy nodded. He also looked young, around Felix’s age, which surprised Felix just a bit. His hair was dark too, shaved close at the sides, and he had the kind of face that seemed inherently friendly, even when he was looking at Felix with such suspicion. Felix held his arms out without needing to be asked and stood still through the decidedly thorough pat down. There was nothing to be found until a hand went into his back pocket and came up with the USB that Felix had stored there.
By this point Jeongin had come back, standing in the doorway clutching Felix’s backpack in his arms. The man with the gun, still trained on Felix, said, “Jeongin, go look through the backpack, make sure there’s no tracker or gun or something. Jisung, give me that.”
Jisung did so, tossing it over to the man who caught it easily. Felix watched it, holding the protest back in his throat. He couldn’t, not without explaining himself, and he didn’t want to do that yet. But watching that USB disappear into a different pocket hurt. If they refused the job but kept that, he wasn’t sure what he would do.
Jisung went back to searching him, running his hands firmly down Felix’s calves, apparently checking for concealed weapons there. There was nothing. Jeongin was pawing through his backpack, pulling out the few pieces of clothing that Felix had managed to gather since he had left home; there wasn’t a lot of it, and most of it needed to be washed at this point, but he hadn’t been able to find a laundromat that felt safe enough to hang around for the time it took a cycle to wash. There was nothing in his bag, either, except for—
Jeongin pulled out the chef’s knife that Felix kept wrapped in the remnants of the sweater he’d been wearing that last day. He pulled the wrappings off and then looked uncertainly at the blade in his hand. It was sharp, Felix had checked, viciously sharp, despite having been made for, presumably, cutting vegetables. “Uh, Changbin-hyung,” said Jeongin.
Changbin, the one with the gun, glanced at him and then said, “Oh shit, Jeongin, put that down, okay.” Jeongin did so, a little gingerly. Changbin turned back to Felix. “Why are you walking around with a knife in your backpack.”
“Why are you walking around with a gun,” Felix said, perfectly reasonably, in his opinion. “It was the best weapon I could find at short notice, honestly.” In fact he had lifted it from a store in the nastier part of town, where the people who worked in the stores were less likely to pay attention or care that someone was shoplifting. He hadn’t had to use it but he’d been grateful for it, having it close at hand as he tried to sleep.
Jisung had found the money he had stashed in his left sock. He pulled it out, looked through it, and then tucked it back inside. Felix tried not to sag in relief at that. Jisung then straightened up. “He doesn’t have anything other than that USB,” he said.
“And there’s nothing else here,” Jeongin said. He’d put the backpack to one side and was now opening Felix’s wallet. Felix hoped he left the money in there well enough alone, too. It was barely more than what he was keeping in his sock but it was the only other money he had access to at this point. It would probably be more devastating to lose that than it would be to lose the USB, if he really thought about it. But Jeongin bypassed the money entirely and looked at the empty card holder part. “There’s no ID.”
“I lost it,” Felix said. Actually, he’d thrown it away in the trash can of a high end department store and hadn’t been able to afford a forgery. They didn’t need to know that, though.
Changbin sighed, and finally, thankfully, put the gun away. “Jeongin, would you go let Seungmin know that there’s probably nothing to worry about.” Jeongin nodded and ran out of the room again. “Jisung, you wait here and make sure nobody comes and disturbs us. You—” This was said with a hand grabbing Felix again, this time tight around his arm. “Come with me.”
He led Felix through the door at the back of the room, just next to the row of desks and computers. It opened into a slightly narrow hallway, with four doors, two on either side. He knocked on the furthest left hand door and called, “Hyung, I’ve got someone here to see you.”
A brief pause, and then a muffled call back. “What?”
Changbin let go of Felix and opened the door, then motioned for him to go inside. Felix did, not really sure what to expect, considering the PC room portion had been unusual. This room, however, looked like a normal office, albeit one that seemed as randomly put together as the other room had been. There was one window, set high up on the wall, so most of the light came from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a couch pushed against the wall that held the window, covered in some brightly coloured blankets. Along the perpendicular wall was a desk, solid looking, with a computer with two monitors and a tablet set on a stand. Sitting behind the desk was someone that Felix assumed was Chris.
Chris turned out to be a lot younger than Felix had anticipated. Maybe that shouldn’t have been surprising, after seeing how young the other guys he had met were, but it did surprise him, a lot. He’d been imagining a man more like his own father, austere and cold in his ferocity. But Chris, at least on first glance, just seemed so much more— human. He was handsome, too, even frowning at the door like he was. He was wearing a sweater that had two holes at the stretched out neckline, showing little flashes of collarbone as he got to his feet. On his face a pair of gold-rimmed glasses sat, and his hair did not appear to have been brushed for possibly a couple of days. And yet— he was handsome.
“Changbin,” Chris said. He was looking at Felix with an expression that was, to Felix’s eyes, completely unreadable. “Who is this?”
“Felix,” said Changbin. “He came in through the front door, which was unlocked for some reason. Seungmin’s alarms went fucking haywire, but I guess it’s good to know those front entrance ones still work. You, sit down,” he added to Felix, motioning to the one chair opposite the desk, a hardback, uncomfortable looking thing. Felix sat; it was uncomfortable. “He says he’s here to talk about a job.”
“A job,” Chris repeated. “What job?”
This was directed at Felix. Felix thought about softening it, and then decided to just say it. “I want to hire you to rob the Magpie,” he said.
The unreadability of Chris's face split, revealing shock underneath for a couple of seconds. He sat back down slowly. “You want to rob the Magpie,” he repeated, almost a monotone.
“Yes,” said Felix.
“Buddy, join the queue,” Changbin said, coming around Felix to stand by the side of Chris’s desk. “Hell, we’d do that for free, if we could. What exactly are you wanting to steal, anyway?”
This was the hard part— well, Felix revised. This was one of the hard parts. “I want you to hit Blackbird’s and clear it out,” he said, keeping his voice as bland as possible.
The shocked silence lasted longer now, both of them gaping at him a little bit. Changbin’s appearance of casual disinterest was completely gone. Chris straightened up in his seat, frowning. Now he was looking at Felix in a different way, more appraising. Possibly he hadn’t been taking Felix all that seriously before, and probably still wasn’t, but he’d now recognised that Felix was taking this seriously.
“You’re fucking insane,” Changbin said. Probably, at this point, Felix thought. “It’s impossible. Is this a joke?”
“No,” said Felix. In fact, he had never been more serious in his entire life, although neither of them could know that. “Why is it impossible? What would you need, to make it work?”
“Nothing, because it won’t work,” Changbin said.
“Information,” Chris said, talking across him. He was looking at Felix steadily now. There was an air to him that spoke of being perfectly invested in the conversation, like he listened to a person completely when they spoke. If it was faked, he was doing a very good job. “Money, too, but mostly information. Nobody who doesn’t work there knows how that place works, and nobody who does work there is going to talk to the likes of us. Not if they enjoy having all their fingers.”
“If it’s information you need,” Felix said, “I have it, and I’m willing to give it to you, so long as you promise to do the job for me. You can keep most of the money too, I only want to keep enough to— survive on.”
“And how do you have information on him,” said Chris, mild in a way that Felix suspected was feigned.
Felix steadied his voice, tried to remember how he had sounded all the times he had rehearsed in his head, practised it in various public bathrooms in the days leading up to this meeting. “I used to work for him,” he said. “I used to work behind the scenes at Blackbird’s, on his tech team. I was able to access stuff that most people couldn’t.”
The energy in the room sharpened, turned a little more nasty than it had already been. He’d known that was going to happen, the moment he admitted to having worked for Lee Jaerim. They were less likely to trust him, but he had no other explanation for why he happened to have the information that he did. If he told the truth, they definitely would not trust him. Considering how they had reacted when he walked in the front door, it didn’t seem likely they were going to trust him anyway. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t give him his backpack back, if they just killed him anyway.
“You used to work for him,” Changbin repeated. “So explain to me how you’re here talking to us when, like hyung just said, nobody who does that would ever want to talk to outsiders about it.”
This was the truly tricky part; Felix had included it in his practise but he still wasn’t sure if he could get through it without stuttering or, worse, crying. “I had a younger sister,” he said. His voice, despite the practice, and despite the time that had passed, was still not completely under control. “She’s dead, because of the Magpie. So I can’t work for him anymore, I won’t do it.”
Changbin looked at Chris, a quick little glance that seemed full of meaning. Chris was still looking at Felix, but there was something new there in his face. Something heavy, something that said— this was finally real for him, as it always had been for Felix. “Your sister,” he murmured. “Why did he kill her?”
“I don’t know,” Felix said. That much, at least, was true. “She worked for him too, like I did, and then he killed her.” Chris made a soft noise at that, almost an acknowledgement. “I left, after that, I couldn’t work for him anymore, obviously. I wanted— revenge. I want to hurt him like he has hurt me. And since money is the only thing he cares about, that’s where to hit him.”
“So why come to us,” Changbin said. “There are a bunch of people you could ask for help from in this city, surely.”
“Because I didn’t have any other choice,” Felix said. “After I left, he put out some kind of hit on me. I don’t have the means to move far, and lingering here has proved— dangerous. And I can’t trust the other gangs in this city not to just kill me and pocket the money.”
“But you can trust us to not do that?” Changbin asked flatly.
Felix smiled a little. Chris sat back in his chair. “It’s well known that out of everyone in this city, you guys hate the Magpie more than anyone,” Felix said. None of them had been particularly quiet about it, either. They avoided any outright conflict with Jaerim but they weren’t afraid to intercept deals or get in the way of information. It had always made Felix’s father absolutely furious but he’d never been able to get leverage on them. He’d never even been able to find out where they operated from. “I didn’t think you’d just hand me back over with a smile.”
“That seems somewhat naive,” Chris said.
“Maybe,” Felix said. “But I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I have, quite literally, nothing else to lose.”
He didn’t, either. He had nothing to his name, and if they didn’t do this for him, he had very little hope left. Neither of them looked very convinced by his argument though. Changbin leaned a hand against the desk, too far away from Felix to loom but his posture was intimidating nonetheless.
“I’m going to ask you again,” Changbin said, “because don’t think I didn’t notice you ignoring the question earlier. How the fuck did you find this place?”
“Yes, I’m interested in that as well,” Chris said.
“Oh.” Felix would have preferred to keep waffling around the answer but he couldn’t, not with the two of them looking at him like that. “I uhm. I followed you.” He gestured at Changbin. “From the nightclub. I was waiting for you. I thought maybe you worked for Chris, so I just followed you.”
Changbin cursed under his breath. “Just like fucking Jisung,” he said. “I can’t even blame Jeongin this time either. Please tell me we’re not going to tell Minho-hyung about this.”
“It depends,” Chris said. “Are you going to be more careful next time?”
“If it makes it any better,” Felix said, trying to be helpful, “I’ve been waiting outside the club for weeks now.”
It didn’t seem like it made it any better, judging by the way Changbin and Chris looked at each other for a long drawn out few seconds. Changbin raised an eyebrow. Chris shrugged. Changbin said, “If you can follow me without me noticing, and if you worked with the Magpie, you must be somewhat capable. What are you good at? Can you fight?”
“No,” said Felix. He’d learned taekwondo for years, but to the disgust of his father he’d never quite picked up the trick of actually fighting. He didn’t like the way it felt to hit someone, to hurt them with his hands. He shied away from landing a punch. It did, he could admit, pose something of a problem in this world. He was slightly better with a gun but not by much. He’d made his peace with the knife but he didn’t like the thought of using it. “I’m good with computers, I’m good at getting past security systems and finding data, that kind of stuff. Also,” he added, a little more self-consciously, “I’m good at making bombs.”
“Man,” said Changbin, seemingly mostly to Chris. “That could actually come in handy. That’s something Seungmin can’t do.”
“Yeah, the computer stuff we probably don’t really need but explosives? We could work with that.” Chris looked thoughtful for a few seconds. He really was so handsome, Felix thought, and then had to squash it immediately. “I want something from you,” Chris said. “I want something to show that you— that you’re telling the truth.”
Felix nodded. “You’ve got the USB,” he said to Changbin, who blinked and then pulled it back out of his pocket. It was a small thing, very small, and probably the reason why Felix had spent the last six months in fear for his life. “You guys can have that. It’s got all the blueprints for Blackbird’s on it, for every floor. All the secret passageways, the back rooms, everything. I also know where you can find his personal vault. Most of his money is kept there.”
Chris sat upright in his chair, bolt straight suddenly. Changbin put the USB on the desk like it had shocked him. “You’re just giving this to us?” he said incredulously.
“If you’ll help me, yes,” said Felix. “If you’ll help me, I’ll give it to you, and whatever else I know. But only if you help me.”
“This can’t be real,” Changbin said. “What the hell is really on this USB? Hyung, plug this in and find out what’s on here.” He snatched up the USB, holding it out to Chan, who started to take it when something buzzed, loud and insistent. Changbin got his phone out of his back pocket, thumbed it open and then rolled his eyes. “Seungmin says, do not fucking put that USB into the fucking computer. He sent it seven times in a row.” With great exaggeration, he put the USB back down on the desk, glancing at a corner of the room behind Felix. When Felix quickly checked, he saw a camera nestled up by the ceiling. “I guess Seungmin will look at it later.”
“Fine,” said Chris. He pinched between his eyes for a moment and then looked at Felix again. He really was so young, it was shocking every time Felix realised it once again. “I’m not making a decision now. I need to talk to my team. Why don’t you go wait outside for a bit with the others and I’ll come and get you when I’m ready.”
Felix looked at him, then at Changbin, and nodded. That was good enough for now, although it was a little surprising to hear that Chris was going to discuss it with anyone. He’d already shown more interest in Changbin’s opinions than Felix’s father had ever done in anyone else’s.
Changbin came back around the desk and took him by the arm, saying, “I’ll take him out and get Jisung to keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t go wandering.”
Felix had absolutely no plans to go anywhere, but he didn’t complain about the hand around his upper arm. Changbin wasn’t rough with him, he barely even led him, and once they were back in the PC room he let go again and said, “Jisung, we’ll be a little bit maybe. Watch this guy for us.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jisung. He was laying on the floor now, head tipped back in an uncomfortable way as he looked at them. Changbin nodded and then disappeared back through the door to the hallway. Jisung — and Jeongin sitting on a stool at the old reception desk — looked at Felix. Felix looked back at them, feeling awkward and more shy than he thought he’d ever been in his life.
Jeongin patted the stool next to him. “Come and sit down,” he said, and with no other better options, Felix did as he was told.
——
It was late when Hyunjin got home, full dark outside. Most of the street lamps in this part of town no longer worked so it was easy to keep to the shadows. With his hood pulled up to cover his hair, he faded into the darkness, just another shadow passing through. There weren’t many people out, not at this time, and nobody glanced at him as he made his way through the streets.
He didn’t come in through the side door. He never really did anymore, not after Jisung had demonstrated how to climb up through the fire escape. Hyunjin went into the alley, hopped on top of the empty dumpster they kept around there, and then pulled down the ladder. It was an easy climb at this point, to get to the second floor and disable the security alert that Seungmin had put across all the window ledges. He slid in through the window, set the alert back up again, and then tiptoed over the landing past Minho’s bedroom.
Usually when Hyunjin did this, Minho stuck his head out to check if it was him coming home and not someone he had to kill. The first few times, Hyunjin had made a lot of noise but Minho had said that that was even more unnerving because it was harder to figure out who it was. Now it was almost like a game; testing how silently he could move down the hallway, to see if he could trick Minho into not hearing him. This was unlikely, he knew, to work. Minho was too paranoid to miss something like that right outside his bedroom.
Today, though, Minho didn’t come out when Hyunjin crept past his door, which either meant that Hyunjin had won or Minho wasn’t in his room. The latter was more likely. He gave up on the pretence of quiet and clattered his way to the stairs and then climbed up to the third floor to speak to Chan.
When he came through the door into the PC room, though, there was a stranger sitting on one of the stools at the makeshift bar that Seungmin set up after they first took over the building. Jeongin was sat next to him, talking in that cheerful, non-stop way that he did when someone let him get started. The stranger looked befuddled and overwhelmed, both of which Hyunjin was very used to seeing on the faces of people listening to Jeongin ramble. Jisung lay on the fucking floor next to them, like a heathen; Hyunjin would not even walk on that floor in his socks, never mind lay down on it.
Jisung’s phone was held up over his face, playing a video quietly, but he dropped it on his chest when he saw Hyunjin. “Hi!” he said.
“You’re going to get a staph infection laying on the floor like that,” Hyunjin told him. He shook his hood back off his hair. Then he whirled on the stranger. “Who the hell are you.”
The stranger was, quite frankly, one of the most beautiful people Hyunjin had ever seen, and he looked in a mirror at least three times a day. He had hair that had been bleached to an inch of its life, long enough to be scraped back into a small ponytail, little wisps escaping at the front to frame his delicate features. His nose was dainty and his mouth plush, with a full, boldly shaped upper lip. He had honest-to-god freckles, visible even in the shitty light of the room. The kind of face that made Hyunjin want to slice it off and frame it; the kind of face people would do violence over.
“I’m Felix,” said the stranger. “Nice to meet you?”
“He’s going to work with us!” Jeongin said brightly.
“Maybe,” said Felix. “Your boss is still figuring it out.”
“What the hell,” Hyunjin said faintly. “Why does your voice sound like that?”
“I’ve smoked twenty packs a day since the day I was born,” Felix said, delightfully deadpan.
Hyunjin couldn’t help it; he laughed. In the corner of his eye, he saw Jisung sit up, face tilted in his direction. He ignored it. “You’re going to work with us?” Hyunjin asked, sitting on one of the stools too. “What’s your skill?”
“Uh, I’m not sure it’s a skill,” said Felix. “But I do blow things up.”
“Do we need one of those?” Hyunjin looked at Jeongin, who shrugged. It was so hard to remember, sometimes, that Jeongin was only two years younger than Hyunjin. That he was actually an adult himself. He had this air of innocence about him that was so strong that it almost seemed mocking sometimes. He so rarely questioned what was happening around him, or took umbrage at being left out of things. Merely taking everything as it came. It was like he looked at the world and said: I know you want me to question everything and experience endless existential dread, but I don’t care enough to do so.
Hyunjin wished he was like Jeongin sometimes. But only sometimes.
“I’m also good with computers,” said Felix. “Cyberware, security, that kind of thing.”
“Sure,” said Hyunjin, who had not touched a computer until he was seventeen and even now felt like he was seeing fucking magic whenever he watched Seungmin work. “Well, we already have one of those but you know what I say. The more the merrier.”
He winked at Felix who looked, for a moment, taken-aback. Then he smiled, a slow spread of expression across his face. He looked more human, when he smiled like that. “Who the hell are you,” he said. “I like your hair.”
“I’m Hyunjin. I do not like your hair. Where did you get that bleach job done, your mom’s friend’s trainee daughter’s place?”
Felix touched his hair, pulling a little at some of the wispy bits. Hyunjin was surprised they didn’t snap off. “No,” he said. “I did it myself.”
“Well, it’s terrible,” Hyunjin said. He also did his own hair, in Jisung’s shitty little converted bathroom on the second floor. But he at least knew about things like toners and damage treatment. “I can’t believe you’re walking around like that.”
“We don’t have one of those,” said Jisung suddenly. Hyunjin shot him a look but Jisung was looking at Felix, not him. “Seungmin doesn’t do that kind of thing. The bomb stuff. Did you tell Chan-hyung about that?”
Felix tipped his head to the side, like a little bird. Hyunjin felt the distinct urge to coo at him a little. “No, who is that?” Felix asked.
“Oh,” said Jisung, wincing. “Uh. Chris. Did you tell Chris about it?”
“Yes,” said Felix. “He said my computer skills probably wouldn’t be useful but if I can make bombs that could potentially be utilised.”
“Yeah, no shit,” said Hyunjin. “It might not be useful but we keep a lot of things around here that aren’t useful.” He looked at Jisung, expecting Jisung to laugh, or agree, or turn the joke onto Jeongin who would either not get it or pretend he didn’t get it, but instead Jisung was looking at him now, an intent expression that was disconcerting on Jisung’s face. Hyunjin stared back, a moment of eye contact, before he nodded his head in the direction of Jisung’s phone laying on the floor, still quietly playing something. “Turn that off, it’s annoying.”
“You’re annoying,” Jisung said, which was about the level of maturity Hyunjin expected from him, but he bent and scooped up his phone and tapped at the screen to turn the video off.
Before he could say anything else, the back door opened and Chan stepped out. He paused just over the threshold, looking between their faces as if surprised to see so many of them. He smiled at Hyunjin, though, the way he always did when Hyunjin got home safely from a job. “Hyunjin,” he said. “You got it?”
“Yes,” said Hyunjin. He put his hand in his pocket and flipped the SD card he’d been sent to pick up between his fingers but didn’t take it out, not wanting to show Felix what he had, even if he did instinctively like him. “They won’t know it’s gone for a while.”
“Hmm, good,” said Chan. His eyes flicked to Felix, who was sitting quietly on his stool, his hands tucked up under his thighs. Then he looked back at Hyunjin. “Go put it in the safe in my office. Then will you go and get Seungmin from downstairs? We’re going to have a team meeting in the kitchen.”
Hyunjin glanced at Felix, and then nodded. “You got it,” he said.
——
When they had first moved into this building, Jeongin had felt like the apartment on the fourth floor was the absolute height of luxury. Until then, he had never had a bedroom of his own, never had any space that wasn’t shared with at least Chan, if not other people. All those years of small, cramped apartments, whatever they could afford on whatever small amount of money Chan, and later Changbin, could scrape together, had meant that this apartment, with its four bedrooms that they owned outright, had felt astonishing.
They’d never quite filled it out though, all them just using it as a place to eat or sleep, and he felt that now as he watched Felix look around the open plan living and kitchen area, a little uncertain. The kitchen was the most fleshed out area, with the handful of appliances that people had bought over the years, most of it neat and clean, kept that way by silent agreement. The living room had two couches set opposite each other, both of them actually matching, bought new to replace the ones that they’d had in the old place, ones that Changbin had found on the side of the road.
The dining space, just beyond the island counter in the kitchen, had not been replaced. Truthfully, they maybe should have, but Jeongin liked it too much. The table was old, from the first apartment he and Chan had shared, the surface scratched and worn, and the chairs around it were a random collection that they’d added as needed. The latest addition, which was Jisung’s, was a somewhat nicer dark wooden chair with a light blue cushion, that didn’t at all match any of the other chairs.
“Do you all live up here?” Felix asked, looking at Chan.
“Some of us,” Chan said. “We’re pretty spread out in the building.”
“This is just the only space with enough chairs for a team meeting,” Changbin said. “I still think we ought to gut the PC room and make it a dedicated space.”
Everyone ignored this, mostly because he was right and they all knew it, but nobody wanted to be responsible for getting rid of everything inside the room. It had been difficult enough to get the pool table in there in the first place, Jeongin wasn’t sure if it would even fit through the security door they’d installed afterwards.
Luckily, there was the sound of the keypad outside and then Hyunjin and Seungmin came in, Hyunjin heading straight for his chair at the table. Seungmin stood looking at Felix for a moment or two, then at Changbin, then at Chan. When Jeongin had gone down to let him know that everything was okay, Seungmin had looked like he was a few minutes from having a full-on meltdown. Now he looked perfectly calm and collected.
“Give me it,” he said to Changbin, holding his hand out. Changbin put the USB they’d found in Felix’s pocket into his hand and as soon as it touched his skin, Seungmin snatched it away like he thought someone might take it from him.
“Right,” said Chan, smiling a little, the way he always did when Seungmin — or any of them really — was being a brat about something. “Why don’t we do some introductions and then we can maybe get started?”
“I already introduced myself,” said Hyunjin airily.
“Good job,” Chan told him. Hyunjin spluttered. “Felix, you already know Hyunjin, then. You met Changbin earlier—” Changbin, in the process of hoisting himself up to his usual seat on the edge of the counter island, waved a hand— “and Jisung.”
“Sorry about going in your socks,” Jisung said, getting a soda from the drinks fridge they had.
“That’s okay,” said Felix, very quietly.
“This is Seungmin, our tech,” Chan said, pointing at Seungmin, and then he put a hand to Jeongin’s shoulder and said, “And this is my little brother, Jeongin.”
“Hello,” said Felix. He was looking between Jeongin and Chan the way people always did when they heard they were brothers, searching for the similarities. There were none, Jeongin knew: they looked nothing alike, and by this point Jeongin even had a couple of centimetres over Chan, much to Chan’s chagrin. But it had never mattered that they weren’t biologically related, because in every single way that mattered, Chan was Jeongin’s brother.
“And there’s Minho, but he’s not here right now,” Chan said. “Okay, should we all take a seat?”
“Here, Felix,” Hyunjin said, pulling the seat out next to him. “You can sit next to me.”
Felix glanced at the others and then went tentatively over and took the seat. There was a brief beat of silence, everyone’s eyes flicking to Jisung and then away again. Because that was Jisung’s seat, the one he always sat on during their group meetings, or even just when eating, usually, and Hyunjin had, in typical fashion, very casually handed it over to the new person. Jisung, for his part, took it with his usual style, and just hoisted himself up on the counter island, feet dangling in the air, next to Changbin.
Jeongin took his seat, and Seungmin sat down next to him. He was holding the USB in his hands, turning it around and around with his fingers against the desk. “I know Minho-hyung isn’t here yet,” he said, “but I’ve got work to do. I want to find out what’s on this USB. Can we just get started?”
“He’ll be here,” Chan said patiently, as he took his seat at the head of the table. “I called him and told him that there was somebody here with a job for us.”
“Oh god,” said Hyunjin. “So he’ll be here momentarily then.”
“Quick,” Seungmin muttered. “Someone protect Felix.”
Jisung snorted. Felix, sitting next to Hyunjin, looked startled, like he wasn’t sure if it was a joke or not. Jeongin was just about to reassure him that it was mostly a joke when there was the sound of the keypad outside sliding open, the beep beep of someone putting in the code. Jeongin twisted to look behind him.
“Fuck, see,” said Hyunjin, right before the door flew open and Minho stepped inside.
Wherever he had been, he had clearly run all the way home after the phone call with Chan. He was panting, chest moving quickly, and there was a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. His eyes zeroed in on Felix in an instant, his face in that focused, cold look of anger that he wore so well. Even from across the room, with multiple people between them, the threat was obvious. Minho looked like a previously caged tiger that wasn’t sure if it was going to bother attacking or not.
Jeongin shivered a little. Only years of practice stopped him from showing any other reaction, but he still couldn’t contain everything completely. That barely leashed violence had always gotten to him, and the way Minho was breathing wasn’t helping at all either. He had to look away, for fear that he would reveal himself.
Felix clearly wasn’t having the same unfortunate reaction Jeongin was having. He looked terrified, staring at Minho with wide eyes, face pale. Out of everyone on the team, Minho looked the roughest. A consequence of his years in prison. Changbin could project an aura when he wanted to, but Minho didn’t have to try. It was in the way he moved, written in the scars across his face.
“How did he get in?” Minho demanded, almost snapping the words out, as he stalked further into the room. There was a definite stillness to the energy in the air, everyone waiting to see if Minho would make this physical or not. But he wouldn’t, Jeongin knew — he didn’t even have his gun out.
Of them all, Chan looked the most relaxed. He seemed to have read into the lack of gun what Jeongin had too. “The front door,” he said. “It’s fine.”
“And why,” said Minho, every word crisp and angry as he spoke, “was the front door unlocked?” This he directed at Changbin, who he was glaring at in a way that if looks could kill, Changbin would be six feet under.
“I don’t know,” Changbin said. He sounded exasperated rather than wary, as the energy deflated with everyone realising that Minho was going to just be angry and not actually act on the bloodlust radiating off of him. “Don’t look at me, I didn’t leave it open. Anyway, it was fine, we were on him as soon as he came in. He doesn’t even have a gun, hyung.”
“He had a big knife though,” Jeongin said, helpfully. Minho’s eyes snapped to his face. “In his bag! I found it. But it was just the kind you use for cooking.”
Minho— prowled closer to the group of them around the table, the only word Jeongin could use to describe the way he moved. “You shouldn’t be touching any knives, no matter how big or small, baby boy,” he said.
Jeongin pouted a little at him, which went thoroughly ignored.
Minho came to a stop at the edge of the table opposite Felix, looking down at him. Hyunjin, sitting between them, had brought one leg up and was resting his chin against his knee. Felix glanced at him, then at Minho, and was clearly trying to be as relaxed as Hyunjin now was, but he couldn’t manage it. “Now who the fuck is this,” Minho said.
“This is Felix,” Chan said. “And you don’t need to scare him so much, why don’t you sit down.”
“No,” said Minho, but he did step back away from the table, moving so he was standing, solid and firm, between Jeongin and Seungmin’s seats. He wasn’t close enough for Jeongin to actually feel but his presence there felt like a physical touch somehow, in Jeongin’s mind. Or maybe the ghost of one — he wanted Minho to reach out and put a hand against his shoulder, as firm and solid as his stance.
“Right,” said Chan. “Like I mentioned, Felix has a job that he’d like to hire us for.”
“You told me on the phone that he wants us to rob the Magpie,” Minho said.
That statement sent a ripple through the room. Jisung stopped kicking his feet back and forth. Hyunjin sat up very straight, looking at Felix askance. Jeongin, for his part, just felt mostly confused. How many times had Chan talked about doing just that over the years, of getting revenge for the older brother that Jeongin had never met, only to realise in the end that it was impossible.
“I did tell you that,” said Chan. “That’s the job.”
“And I told you that it’s impossible,” Minho said, almost a snap. “We’ve been through this before, hyung.”
“We’ve never had actual information we can use before,” Chan said.
Jeongin looked at him, carefully, trying to work out if this was just— the same thing it had always been, in the past. Chan got like this sometimes, fixated on vengeance, letting it get in the way of actual logic. He had had this conversation before, with Jeongin, and Minho, and with Changbin more than Jeongin even knew, because they would have it in furious whispers when he was sleeping in the same room. But Chan, right now, just looked perfectly calm and unruffled. Confident. Jeongin didn’t know if he liked that.
“What kind of information?” Jisung asked, his feet swinging a little again.
Chan motioned to the USB in Seungmin’s hands, then to Felix. “Felix here used to work for Lee Jaerim.”
Jeongin didn’t even need to look behind himself to know that that information had sent Minho’s threat level rocketing through the roof. He could feel the tension radiating from him, and he could see that Changbin was watching him carefully. Jeongin wanted to reach around and touch him but he didn’t quite dare.
“He’s willing to give us the information we need in exchange for us doing the job,” Chan added, still sounding calm, like he hadn’t noticed Minho almost having an aneurysm to the side.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me, hyung,” said Minho. He sounded a little bit like he thought this was some kind of hidden camera prank. “This is an obvious set up. He works for the Magpie.”
Felix shifted in his seat. He looked very small, in his oversized hoodie, and when he spoke, his voice was soft but not unsteady. “I used to. I left six months ago. I left after he—” He stumbled here, breaking off for a second before he could continue. There was something a little more unsteady in his voice when he said, “I left after he had my younger sister killed.”
The fact that Chan didn’t react to that let Jeongin know that he already knew about it. It did, he felt, go somewhere to explain why Chan and Changbin had heard Felix out in the first place, and he saw that the rest of the room got it too. They all knew the story.
“Because of something you did?” Jisung asked.
Felix shook his head. “I don’t know why,” he said. “She found out something she shouldn’t have, maybe. He wasn’t about to explain himself to me. He doesn’t explain himself to anyone.”
“Why did you work for him in the first place?” Minho asked. His voice was cold as ice and brittle with it. It was, however, something of a valid question, in Jeongin’s opinion. It was very much common knowledge throughout their city that Lee Jaerim, to put it mildly, sucked. Even the people who worked with him on business stuff didn’t like him.
“Why does anyone work for someone else?” Felix asked. His voice was— bleak, and he was no longer looking at any of them. He was looking at the table, like he was seeing something in the groove of the wood that nobody else could. “Survival.”
It made sense, in a way; Jeongin had never had to worry about that, from the moment Chan started to look after him. He’d had plenty of other worries but it had been Chan who had dirtied his hands in the name of eking out a living. The rest of them, though— they worked for Chan because they believed in what he did, believed in what he stood for. At least, Jeongin had always hoped so — he knew that was the case for Changbin, the first of them to sign up, and he knew that was why Hyunjin had first started picking up jobs, even though he hadn’t needed to. He’d never been fully sure about why Minho chose to continue to stay with them, though.
“So, what is the job, then?” Hyunjin asked. “Like, yes, rob the sick bastard, but what, specifically?”
Chan motioned at Felix, who looked back at him a little unsure. “Blackbird’s,” he said. “I want you to clear it out as best as you can, as much as you can.” Behind Jeongin, Minho cursed under his breath. “And like, uh, Chris-nim said, I have information that will let you pull it off, if you agree to do it.”
“What information do you actually have for us?” Jisung asked, his voice very curious.
“I have the blueprints for the gambling hall,” Felix said. “Every level, including the upper offices where the safes are held. I have the schematics for his security system, but you might not need them, because I’ll be able to get you past it. I basically built the entire thing myself.”
Even as seemingly little as this was, it was far more than they previously had. Chan had only ever managed to get his hands on the most basic blueprint of Blackbird’s, a bad copy of something that had been filed with city hall, the only thing that was available anywhere. It was terrible quality, and showed just the public area of the main floor, and had nothing about the rest of the building.
“Wait,” Seungmin said. He’d sat up a little in his seat at the last thing Felix had said. “You built his security system?”
Felix nodded. Minho said, “And what if he changed it since you left.”
“He probably won’t have,” said Felix. “I may have, uh. Built in some security features that only I’m able to change or switch off. But even if he has changed it, I should still be able to get into it. None of the guys he had working with him were particularly good.” He sounded like he was on more solid ground here, now that he was talking about computers, and the certainty in his voice, the confidence in his skills, made it hard for Jeongin to— not believe him, honestly.
“I also know where his personal vault is held,” Felix added, like this was just a completely normal thing to say and not fucking wild. “It’s where he keeps most of the money that they take in from the gambling hall. I didn’t mention it first because it’d be a higher risk trying to hit it but— I can get you in there, too.”
This led to a much longer silence, everyone trying their best to absorb it. Chan looked at Minho and asked, “What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Minho asked scathingly. “I think it’s something of a fool’s errand and I trust this kid as far as I can throw him.”
“That’s probably pretty far,” said Jisung, mock-thoughtfully. “Since he’s so small.” Minho snarled something, barely more than an incoherent growl. Jeongin had to fight down another shiver at the sound of it. Jisung, safe across the table, just grinned.
Chan cleared his throat pointedly. “What do you think about being able to pull it off, though?” he asked Minho, very patiently.
Jeongin turned to look at Minho, who was looking at Chan like Chan was the bane of his very existence. “I mean, sure,” he said. If his tone had a physical form, it would be sharp enough to cut steel. “Sure, it’s probably doable, because all jobs are theoretically fucking doable, hyung. If what he’s saying is right, if he really has the full blueprints for Blackbird’s, and he can get us past the security, and so on and yadah yadah, then fine, sure, we could probably pull off some kind of job. But would it be worth it?”
“Wouldn’t the money make it worth it?” Jisung asked.
“No,” said Changbin. “Not if the Magpie chooses to retaliate.” He looked over Jeongin’s shoulder at Minho, a grim expression on his face.
“There’s— more than just money, in his vault,” Felix said tentatively. “He keeps most of his paperwork there, not at— at the office he has in his house. There’s definitely stuff in there you could use as blackmail material. Having that should ensure he doesn’t retaliate. Some of it is— pretty damning.”
Jisung muttered, “Mutually assured destruction, if you will.”
“It might be worth hitting the vault more than Blackbird’s to be honest,” said Seungmin.
“We could just hit both,” Hyunjin said, looking towards Minho. “Like, could we do that?”
Jeongin wasn’t prepared for Minho leaning in between him and Seungmin, one hand braced suddenly against the table. His body was suddenly very close, his side brushing against Jeongin’s shoulder. He was so warm. The way he was standing, the way he was leaning his weight against the table, meant that the muscles in that arm stood out in awful clarity. Jeongin wanted him to—
“Hyung,” said Minho, his voice not calm but deadly serious. “If this kid’s information is correct and true, and if we really can get into these places and if we can ensure that the Magpie doesn’t just murder us in response, then yes, I can come up with some kind of a plan. But we’ll have no guarantee that it’ll work.”
“We never have any guarantee it’ll work,” Chan pointed out. “Not for any job we pull.”
He still sounded very calm. Jeongin would have expected him to sound excited, like he was anticipating something — or for him to really be pushing the job, pushing them to do it. But instead Chan really had just taken a step back and let them all hash it out as best they could. Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen as influencing them. Perhaps, Jeongin thought, a little wryly, only mostly joking, this was what growing up was like.
Minho stood back up, taking his body heat with him. Jeongin tried to not miss it and didn’t quite succeed. It was always so hard to get Minho to be so close to him. “It’ll need everyone on the job, though,” Minho said. He sounded thoughtful, like his brain was already starting to put the plan together. “And it’ll depend on if we want to hit one of the options or both. To be honest, we’ll need to hit that vault in any case. If this kid is right, and there’s anything in there that we can use, we’ll fucking need it.”
Chan finally sat forward on his chair, arms folded against the table. “How about this,” he said, “Seungmin needs to check the USB anyway. Once we know what we’re working with there, you can start putting together something concrete, and if we think it’ll work in the end, we’ll do the job. And if at any point it seems like it won’t work, we can simply pull the plug.”
Everyone looked at Minho, Jeongin and Seungmin twisted in their seats like mirror opposites. It was Minho’s call to make here, since he was the one who always put together the jobs. If he didn’t want to take on the work, it would either fall to someone else to try to figure it out, or they’d have to shelve it. Minho looked at Chan, then at the rest of them, and then back to Chan. “Fine,” he said, eventually. “That sounds okay to me.”
Jeongin looked at Felix, who didn’t look overly happy at the lack of guarantee but mostly just looked— relieved, like he hadn’t really had any hope of them taking the job in the first place. He clearly was desperate to do it. He was not drawing any attention to himself, either, sitting in his chair by Hyunjin’s side. “What about Felix?” Jeongin asked. “Is he going to stay with us?” They had never had a client stay with them before, but then they’d never had a client actually come to the house before either. Felix was proving to be something of an unusual case all around.
“No,” said Minho instantly.
“He’s very welcome to stay with us, if he has nowhere else he needs to be,” Chan said. This, Jeongin thought, was fairly obviously the case. Felix looked like he had not had access to basic living arrangements like food or a bed or a shower in quite some time.
Felix, however, looked horrified by this idea. “No, no,” he said in a rush. “I don’t need to stay here! It’s fine, I’m absolutely fine!”
“So where are you going to go then?” Seungmin asked doubtfully.
“I’ll—” Felix stopped, looking a little sheepish. He did not seem to have prepared a lie in advance and couldn’t come up with one on the fly. “Um. I’ll figure out somewhere to sleep?”
“Like under a bridge,” Hyunjin said, very flat, very unimpressed. Felix gave him a little sideways look which very obviously said that he was absolutely planning something along those lines. Hyunjin rolled his eyes. “Yeah, no. No way. You’ll stay here.”
“Where are we going to put him, though?” Changbin asked. He was frowning, but it was in the way where he was clearly already trying to figure out the solution, his brain turning naturally to the question of domestic matters. This was where Changbin excelled — almost everyone tended to put team matters such as this in his hands and ask him to figure it out. “There’s that little room next to your office, hyung, but it’s kind of—”
“Depressing,” Jeongin said. The thought of putting someone in there for any length of time made him feel like he was going to break out in hives. He’d rather give up his own bed than let a guest sleep there.
“He could just sleep on the couch,” suggested Jisung.
“I don’t want to put anyone out,” Felix said, sounding a little desperate. “I can just take the couch.”
“Hyung,” said Minho. He, too, sounded desperate, in a very different way to Felix.
“He can’t sleep on the couch or in that little room,” Chan said, firmly. The mere idea of it clearly went against his instincts of being a good host. It was funny to see it happen, because they never had anyone here who wasn't literally on the team. “Perhaps a couple people could double up. Changbin, if you—”
“It’s fine,” interrupted Hyunjin. “He can stay with me.”
The silence that filled the room at that announcement was somehow more shocked than it had been at the idea of robbing Lee Jaerim. Changbin looked like he thought he was hearing things, and was glancing at the others as if trying to see whether they’d heard it too; Jisung looked like he’d just been slapped.
“What?” said Chan, after a long stretch of quiet.
“He can stay with me,” Hyunjin repeated. He was using that tone he used when he thought everyone around him was being needlessly dramatic about something, which never failed to annoy everyone in the room because of all people, Hyunjin had no right to call someone else dramatic. “I don’t mind. So long as Felix doesn’t mind sharing with me.”
Everyone’s eyes swivelled to Felix, who was blushing and looked the most uncomfortable he had in this entire conversation. “I don’t mind, but Hyunjin-sshi, really, it’s—”
“See?” said Hyunjin, before Felix could finish. “He’ll stay with me. Is the meeting finished? Good.” He stood, rising gracefully to his feet, and then tugged Felix up by the upper arm. Felix got to his feet looking very confused about what was going on. “Come on, you can take a shower while nobody else is using the bathroom.”
Felix scooped his backpack up from where it was resting against his chair and let Hyunjin lead him into the hallway, the sound of Hyunjin’s bedroom door clicking shut shortly after.
Seungmin stood too. “I’m going to go check out this USB,” he said, already halfway to the door. Jisung, who usually raced out after team meetings too, was still sitting on the counter, staring in the direction of the hallway, a little frown on his face.
As soon as the apartment door swung shut after Seungmin, Minho took his place at the table. Again, that sense of— proximity. Jeongin felt hyper aware of his body in a way he simply had not been when it was Seungmin sitting there. “Hyung,” Minho said, very intently, leaning almost into Jeongin’s space in his attempt at getting Chan to listen to him. “This is a bad idea.”
Chan sighed. “Minho, he has nowhere else to go.”
Minho’s nervous energy was so high that he started tapping his fingers against the table. Jeongin did not think he’d seen him do that in literal years. “I know that,” he said tersely. “I see that. I’d suggest we put him up in a hotel but— I don’t want him out of my sight now he knows where we live. And if Hyunjin is willing to take that risk, then it’s on his head, I guess. I’m just registering my deep objection to everything.”
It was not the first time Minho had registered a deep objection to something, and not the first time Chan had simply ignored it and made a different call. Minho had hated it when Jisung joined too, and he’d gotten over it; he’d get over it with Felix, too, Jeongin thought. He wasn’t sure why, but he liked Felix. There was something about his shyness in the face of them all that made Jeongin inclined to like him. He got a good feeling from him, which he would never be able to explain to the others. If he tried, they would make fun of him, or would tell him that his naivete was getting the better of him. Even Minho wouldn’t take it seriously.
They were too convinced of Jeongin’s inherent kindness, to be honest. They saw the way he was friendly to every new face that Chan introduced to their group and assumed that Jeongin was just like that. He hadn't had a chance to explain that wasn’t— exactly true.
“How do we know this isn’t a trap and he doesn’t still work for that bastard?” Minho asked, his jaw tense, his words clearly coming through almost-gritted teeth.
“Well, if he did still work for Lee Jaerim,” Jeongin said, “then why would they bother sending someone who looks like they haven’t eaten a proper meal in six months to hire us for an impossible job we might not even take, instead of just like, blowing us up?”
He thought this was a very reasonable and sensible question. Chan and Changbin both flinched. Jisung was still not paying attention to any of them. Minho made a noise that Jeongin couldn’t place, and then looked at Jeongin with an expression just a couple of steps off from a glare. He never glared at Jeongin, not anymore, but this was close enough. “Do not say things like that, baby boy,” he said, clearly distressed at the thought.
“But I’m right though, aren’t I?” Jeongin insisted.
“Right or not, it’s a pointless thought exercise,” Chan said. “Seungmin is going to look at the USB. Once he’s done with that, he’ll let us know. Okay, Minho?”
There was a long moment before Minho nodded. He didn’t say anything else, didn’t look at any of them, as he too got to his feet and then left the apartment. Jeongin wasn’t sure where he was going — to his room, perhaps, or maybe back to patrolling. Perhaps to train, to work off some of that energy buzzing inside him. Chan sighed.
“To be honest,” Changbin said, “I think that went quite well.”
——
Originally, Seungmin’s workshop had been the abandoned remnants of a convenience store. The large windows out the front had already been bricked up carefully to keep people out, but the inside just looked like what it was: a gutted store. They’d emptied it out over the course of a week, everything but the freezers which Seungmin had taken the doors off to use as shelving units, and then Seungmin had slowly but surely taken over the entire space. What had once been the back storage room had become his bedroom, a small space barely big enough for his bed, along with the attached employee bathroom.
The workshop itself was a large, open space, the flooring of the store pulled up so that it was the bare concrete that had been underneath. A large part of the room was taken up by his worktable, a huge wooden thing where he worked on the projects that needed manual labour. The others worked here too, at the varied stools they’d collected over the years to be a part of it. Along the back wall he had his computer, four monitors strung up to it. He was working on a fake ID for Felix, listening to music quietly, when he saw Felix himself coming down the stairs on the camera feed playing on the closest monitor. He watched as Felix came to the heavy door of the workshop, hesitated, and then, remarkably, knocked.
Seungmin wasn’t used to people knocking on his workshop door. “Come in,” he called, and then turned in his chair to watch Felix step into the room. The shower had done Felix some good — even just washing his hair meant that he looked younger, less like some kind of helpless waif, although the narrowness of his face, the hollow areas under his cheeks, meant he still very much looked like that. He’d changed his clothes, too, wearing some checked pyjama pants that clearly belonged to Hyunjin, because they’d been rolled up a couple of times at the bottom, and a white t-shirt that was much too big.
Felix’s gaze travelled across all the machinery, somewhat clinical, but his eyes lit up a little when he took in Seungmin’s computer setup. Seungmin watched him silently, until their eyes met and Felix smiled and said, “Hello, it was Seungmin, right?”
Seungmin nodded. “Hello, Yongbok,” he said.
Felix went white in an instant. The panic was clear on his face, and Seungmin thought for a moment that he was simply going to turn tail and run away. But then Felix took a deep breath, obviously pushing down his first reaction, and he said, stutteringly, “I— how did you—”
Seungmin turned back to his computer, turned off his music, and then shut off his monitors. When he turned back Felix was still standing in the same spot, without moving. Seungmin did think better of him for not having run away. He was glad too that Felix hadn’t immediately attacked him. It seemed to bode well for the conversation as a whole.
“Don’t worry,” Seungmin said. He kept his tone perfectly conversational, like it wasn’t a big deal. “Your online footprint is about as small as anyone’s could be. There isn’t even a photo logged on your old schools’ databases, it’s all been wiped. Your father has been very thorough in his security.” When Felix just kept staring at him, he added, “I didn’t think you recognised me. You, however, have a very distinctive face. Don’t you remember? We were in middle school together.”
Felix gave him an obviously bewildered look. Seungmin wasn’t overly surprised by that — it had been a while since middle school for both of them, and at the time it had been very obvious how little attention Felix had been giving the rest of them. Some of the other boys had called him stuck up for it, thought he was acting better than the rest of them because of his father, but Seungmin had never believed that was the case. There had been something in Felix’s face even then, something that Seungmin had recognised earlier, when he had spoken about the man who had apparently been sent to kill him — something haunted, something hunted.
“Oh,” Felix eventually said slowly. “Yes, I— Kim Seungmin? Kim Seungmin, right? You were in my homeroom class. First year?”
“Second year,” Seungmin corrected. “I figured you wouldn’t remember me. You didn’t really pay much attention to the rest of us.”
Felix flushed, even though Seungmin had said it without bite, without any kind of judgement. If nothing else, middle school was over half a decade ago, and Seungmin had gone through a lifetime since then. He didn’t care if Felix hadn’t been particularly friendly at the time. Seungmin wasn’t particularly friendly now.
“Sorry,” Felix said. “I— I still should have recognised you, maybe.”
He didn’t look happy that Seungmin knew who he was, and Seungmin couldn’t blame him. If his plan had hinged on them not recognising his true identity, then it was already scuppered. Seungmin watched him, a little warily but not too concerned, truthfully. It was not that he thought he could take Felix on in a fight, it was that he knew Felix had no weapon and Seungmin could bring the others running at the push of a button. But he did not think Felix likely to attack him. It would expose him more than anything else could.
“It makes sense that you didn’t,” Seungmin said. Probably nobody expected their old middle school classmate to show up in the middle of a den of criminals.
“You didn’t say anything,” Felix said tentatively, looking at Seungmin through his lashes, face tilted down. Unsure. “You didn’t tell them who I was.”
“No,” agreed Seungmin. “I didn’t.”
“Why?” Felix whispered.
Seungmin watched him for a long few moments. “Maybe I thought you were telling the truth,” he said. “Were you? Was what you told Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung true? Apart from how you stepped around your real identity, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Felix. After a moment of hesitation, he motioned to one of the stools around the workbench. Seungmin nodded so Felix sat, his hands held together in front of him. He was almost wringing them, an obvious nervous gesture. “I worked for him. I want you guys to steal everything you possibly can from him. That’s the truth.”
“And your sister?” Seungmin asked. “Was that true?”
He knew why Changbin had asked him to look into the story, to check on what Felix was saying. This story of a sister dead at the hands of the Magpie was a little too perfect, a little too dovetailed into what had happened to Chan. But it was the fact that it was too perfect that made Seungmin inclined to believe it, somehow. After all, the youngest Lee child had died — it had been in the news, the story had been one of a tragic hit and run accident near her after school academy. It was not a lie that she had died.
“It wasn’t a hit and run,” Felix said. His voice sounded particularly grim when he said it, and he didn’t seem like he was going to go into any further details about it. Something about that reluctance, the way Felix wasn’t giving him a story, wasn’t spinning some tale of woe and misery, made Seungmin— believe him more.
Maybe it was more than that, though. He could remember the Felix of middle school. Every time the question of the Magpie came up among them, Seungmin would remember that miserable looking kid who had come to school each day and answered the teachers’ questions in a quiet voice. The one who had not had any friends. The one who, when they had changed for gym class, would have new bruises on his body. He’d wondered how that kid was growing up. Now, apparently, he stood in front of Seungmin — small, as delicate in his features as he had been when he was thirteen, though decidedly more worn. Felix just looked tired, like exhaustion was a part of his bone marrow at this point.
It was probably naive of Seungmin— and he was so rarely naive. But he knew that exhaustion, had lived with it himself, in those long few months after his father’s arrest and suicide, through the destruction of his entire life as he had known it. A story could be faked, a tale woven; a con man could tell Seungmin exactly what he wanted to hear. But tiredness like that couldn’t be faked.
“So your father killed your sister, his daughter,” Seungmin said, watching Felix’s face carefully, taking in the little flinch at the words, “and now you want us to help you get your revenge?”
“Yes,” said Felix.
“Okay,” said Seungmin. “Of course, it’s not like you said, is it? You didn’t work for him as part of his team or whatever. You worked for him as his heir. Is that the real reason you have whatever is on that USB?”
Felix nodded. “I wasn’t lying about what’s on it,” he said. “It’s got the blueprints, and some other stuff. Some financial records. It’s not a lot, to be honest, just what I needed to do my work for him. It’s what I had on me, the day I— I left.”
“Right,” said Seungmin. “Speaking of that USB.”
He rolled his desk chair over to the corner of the room nearest his bedroom door, where he had set up an old computer on a desk that was almost falling apart. This particular computer usually stayed in storage, but he’d dug it out the moment he’d ascertained that he was going to be responsible for checking this USB, and set it up. The computer was about fifteen years old, and did not even have the capability to connect to WiFi. He kept it as far away from ethernet cables as possible like he was afraid the internet could jump into it that way. It had taken ten minutes to start up.
“Wow,” said Felix, climbing off his stool and coming over to the computer. “How old is that thing?”
“Now that is a question,” Seungmin said dryly. “That’s not important. What’s important is this.”
He wiggled the mouse and the screen flickered to life. He had spent most of the time that Felix was showering and changing his clothes and whatever else he had been up to upstairs trying to get into this USB. He’d gone into it thinking it shouldn’t be too hard — he had programs to figure out encryption on files, and he’d been given seemingly impossible tasks in the past that he’d been able to crack. His record was something taking him fifteen minutes to break into, and that had been kind of embarrassing at the time. He’d been trying for almost an hour to get into Felix’s USB and nothing seemed to be working.
“Yeah,” said Felix, looking at the folder open on the screen. “That’s why I came down, I figured you might need my help getting into it.”
“I don’t need your help,” Seungmin said. “At this point, I need your mercy. How the hell did you manage this?”
Felix shrugged. The most galling part of it was that he didn’t even look like he was particularly proud of it. If Seungmin had built something that the best in the industry couldn’t get into, he’d ride that smugness for the rest of his life. “Here,” he said. “I’ll let you in.”
He bent over the computer and started typing. Seungmin watched him and just about managed to keep up. If Felix was self-taught like Seungmin was, then he’d dedicated himself to this line of work much more fully than Seungmin ever had — but then Seungmin had been forced to spread himself out as much as he could without sacrificing the quality of his work. Techs who could really only do one thing were functionally useless, unless they were working for one of the bigger gangs. That probably explained why Felix had had the leisure to get this good at it.
“There,” said Felix, stepping back and motioning to the monitor, where the folder was now showing a short list of files. “That’s everything.”
Seungmin looked at the folder, read the file names in a quick scan. None of the files were named anything that made sense, at least not if Felix was right about what they were. But that was something Seungmin would have done, too, so he didn’t think much of it. He’d have to look through them one at a time to check everything was right. “Okay,” he said, already settling in front of the screen. “You can go now.”
Felix looked a little surprised at that — perhaps at his bluntness, which was something that people didn’t always like about Seungmin. People expected a certain level of antisocial behaviour from the techs in this industry but Seungmin tended to cross the line. It had caused problems in his first team, before he had proven himself, but here everyone had mostly just shrugged over it. It was probably lucky that Minho had already been working for them before Seungmin had arrived and sometimes, compared to Minho, Seungmin was positively bubbly.
But Felix just nodded after a moment or two and then turned to the door. Seungmin listened to his footsteps get further away, the sound echoing in the room. He wasn’t surprised when they stopped again, and Felix said, “Seungmin.”
Seungmin looked at him over his shoulder. Felix was by the door, his fingers twisted together. “Will you really not tell the others?” he asked. “About who I really am?”
Seungmin just kept watching him, keeping his expression cool and detached. Inside, he felt like he was going mad between a rock and a hard place. But the truth of the matter was that he simply didn’t want to tell them about Felix, because he thought— no. He knew, at worst, they’d kill him. At best, they’d throw him out, and Felix would probably die anyway, one way or another; if nothing else got him, the winter would. And Seungmin would be responsible for that, in a way, enough so that he could not live with it on his conscience.
Because in the end, he believed Felix. Which meant that if Felix paid the ultimate price, it would be for something he’d had no control over. Felix had not asked to be the Magpie’s son. It would be nothing more than the early death of an innocent, who’d endured so much violence already in his short life.
No, Seungmin was many things, but he could not condemn Felix to death.
“I really won’t tell them,” Seungmin said. “Not unless I have to.”
Felix nodded again. “Thank you,” he whispered. Seungmin thought about telling him to not bother but Felix had already slipped out of the workroom, the metal door clanging shut after him. Seungmin watched the door for a long few seconds, hoping that he was making the right decision, something that wouldn’t come back to bite him down the line. If he was wrong about this, he was risking more than his own life.
Eventually he sighed and turned back to the computer and opened up the first file. Holy shit, he thought, as the pictures unfolded on the screen. It really is the fucking blueprints.
——
Seungmin had barely stepped into Chan’s office before Minho asked, “Was he telling the truth?”
Seungmin stopped just inside the doorway and gave him a cool little look. In the interest of staving off one of their fights, Chan said, “Why don’t you let Seungmin come in and he’ll tell us.”
Minho huffed but settled down against the back of the couch. He had come in here as soon as Chan had texted him, even though a specific time had been given for the meeting. Chan had been a little worried that Minho had gone off prowling the streets after he’d left the team meeting earlier but apparently not. Instead he had spent the last ten minutes sitting on the couch like a dark stormcloud, doing nothing but watching the door. He had seemed to take Changbin being the next one to arrive as a personal affront from Seungmin.
Seungmin came in and let the door swing shut behind him. Changbin had taken his usual position leaning against the back wall, so Seungmin took the chair opposite the desk, rather than sit on the couch next to Minho. Chan kind of expected him to make a show of getting settled, just to drag it out, but Seungmin sat down and said, “He was telling the truth about what was on the USB, yes. It’s got the blueprints for Blackbird’s on it and as far as I can tell, they’re both unredacted and accurate.”
There was a short silence, Chan absorbing that. He could feel it, inside him, the rising excitement. He had spent the past few hours trying very hard to not let it get the better of him, so he could keep his mind focused on the facts. How many times had he let his emotions run away with him, only to feel it so much harder when his pie in the sky dreams crumbled around him? It did not matter that this was the best information they’d had in years, or ever. He was too old to let it go off the rails.
“It includes every floor?” Changbin asked.
“Every floor,” Seungmin confirmed. “All the back passages, too, and the upstairs offices, including which one is the Magpie’s office in the building.”
“Christ,” said Chan. He felt a little faint at the thought of it. “No wonder someone got sent to kill him, walking around with that in his pocket.”
“Yes,” said Seungmin, looking a little thoughtful. “If the Magpie knew he had this on him, then he’s been wandering around with a target on his back.”
“And now we have it,” Chan said. “We have it, which means we can do the job. Right,” he added to Minho. “Do you think we can do it?”
Minho looked like he was one step away from rolling his eyes directly in Chan’s face. “Let me put together that fucking plan first,” he said. “Then I’ll let you know.”
“If he was telling the truth about designing their computer systems,” Seungmin said, “then we’re going to need his help on this job, because even with the basic schematics he has on the USB to study from, I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to get past his security.”
Chan blinked at him. Minho said, a little scathing, “You won’t be able to get past his security? Aren’t you supposed to be the best?”
“I am the best,” Seungmin snapped. “Ask any person in this stupid city and they’ll tell you that, and yet I still had to get him to let me in to this USB. I couldn’t get into it myself.”
“What?” said Changbin. “Like, you couldn’t guess his password or something?”
Seungmin gave Changbin a nasty look, like he wanted Changbin to drop dead and he was going to do it through his eyes as best as he could. “I will end you,” he said, very darkly. “You don’t have the right to talk to me after you almost plugged the damn thing into Chan-hyung’s computer.”
“Would it make you happy if I went and knelt in the corner with my arms above my head in supplication?” Changbin asked, the grin obvious in his voice.
“It depends,” Seungmin said. “Would it make the lesson stick to your teflon brain?”
“Alright, alright,” Chan said. “Calm down.” Seungmin did settle, but he was still squinting at Changbin, who, when Chan glanced over his shoulder at him, was smiling. Chan shot him a quick warning look. Nothing good ever came from baiting Seungmin; he could get belligerent or simply refuse to work if pushed too far. They needed him, right now, perhaps more than they ever had.
“I don’t like that we’ll have to rely on him to get us past his own systems,” Minho said.
“I don’t particularly like it either,” said Seungmin. “But we don’t really have much of a choice in the matter, if we want to do this.”
That, Chan thought, was the main sticking point for Minho. He liked to have other options, liked to have exits available at every point. Chan thought he probably had an exit planned for this team, too— or perhaps planned was too strong of a word. He had no doubt that Minho had an idea of what he would do if anything ever went wrong here. That was just the kind of person he was.
“Fine,” said Minho. “Print all the stuff off for me so I can look through it and I’ll come up with something. It’s going to take a few days, though, hyung. Maybe more. I’ll need time to figure it all out, and I want to talk to that kid about what else he can give us.”
Chan nodded. To Seungmin, he said, “I assume you’re running some kind of background check on Felix.”
He said it with a smile, because Seungmin did background checks on everything. He’d almost certainly done them on this team before agreeing to join, although Chan didn’t know what exactly he would have found at the time, considering both Jeongin and Hyunjin had fallen off any kind of official radar at very young ages. The only reason Chan had not wiped himself off was because he had known he’d need a trail for his future business. It was hard to get a bank account when the government thought you were likely dead.
Seungmin, however, blinked for a moment and then said, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking into him. Right now everything he told us checks out.”
Chan nodded again. “Okay,” he said. “You can go, if you want. Once Minho has a plan, I’ll let you know what we need from you.”
Seungmin got to his feet. Changbin pushed himself off from the wall and said, “If you’re going down to the workshop, I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind? I want to check out what’s on the USB myself.”
Seungmin narrowed his eyes at him but said, “Yes, you can come down. I’ll try to teach you about computer security again.”
They disappeared out the door together. Chan hoped that Changbin didn’t actually piss Seungmin off, like he seemed to be determined to do tonight. He looked at Minho and said, “I’m gonna lock up. Sorry to dump more work on you, by the way.”
Minho did roll his eyes at that, as he got up from the couch and headed to the door. “Hyung,” he said. “I’d be more surprised if you didn’t give me more work.”
Chan winced; that was fair. He followed Minho to the door, shut and locked it after them. “I know,” he said, starting to lead them down the corridor to the PC room. “But you have to admit, you’re the best at it. And I couldn’t give it to Seungmin, he’d revolt at this point.”
“Yes, well,” said Minho. He sounded very sardonic, as they stepped into the PC room, all the lights off and everything powered down. “There’s a reason I do this work and the others are the ones going into the field, isn’t there.”
Chan didn’t wince but it was only through long practice at not doing so. Yes, there was a reason for that, a reason they’d seized on Minho’s job planning skills as soon as they realised he possessed them, using them more than they used the other, more specialised skills they’d originally hired him for. There just wasn’t much call for a pile of dead bodies on most jobs, as it turned out.
The stairwell was quiet, the overhead lights humming. Chan was a little surprised to find that, rather than head downstairs to his room, Minho turned to come upstairs with him. Chan looked at him, an eyebrow raised — it was, after all, getting very close to the time that Minho usually disappeared into his room, if not slept — and Minho said, “I want to search his bag myself.”
It would be pointless to stop him — if nothing else, stopping this felt a little unfair to Minho, who really was having to deal with so much by having Felix stay with them in the first place. Chan had already had to ride roughshod over Minho’s boundaries, and he really didn’t want to have to keep doing it, when the task felt relatively harmless. They’d already thoroughly violated Felix’s privacy anyway.
The apartment was very quiet, very still. No doubt Jeongin was already asleep. In his early teens, Jeongin had kept the latest hours of them all, coming up to bed in the early hours of the morning. That had changed, later, as he got older. Now he went to sleep before any of them, and Chan was sometimes relieved by that, to know, now, exactly where Jeongin was during the night. That felt a little wrong of him sometimes, though, considering he knew exactly what the instigating event had been.
He half expected Minho to bang on Hyunjin’s door but instead he very politely knocked. Chan was not sure if this was because he wanted to avoid disturbing Jeongin, whose room was next door, or because he had decided to be nice to Hyunjin, who sometimes got a little skittish about people coming to his room at night. In either case, he knocked and then waited the few seconds it took for Hyunjin to open the door with something like a modicum of patience.
Hyunjin did not look upset about finding them both outside his door, but he didn’t look particularly impressed either. “What,” he said in greeting. “It’s past Felix’s bedtime.”
“Hyunjin-sshi,” they heard Felix say from somewhere in the room.
“I want to search his bag,” Minho said. “Can I come in?”
“Not if you’re going to insist on wearing your shoes,” said Hyunjin, motioning to where Minho was still wearing his sneakers. This was an ongoing feud between them: Minho refused to take off his shoes anywhere other than his bedroom — and they were having to assume he took them off there, since nobody had ever been inside his room — and it drove Hyunjin up the wall that he kept wearing them inside the apartment too. Minho’s only capulation to the fight had been to buy what Changbin referred to as his house sneakers.
“Fine,” said Minho, his jaw rather more tense now. “Then bring his fucking backpack out here and I’ll do it in the kitchen.”
Hyunjin opened his mouth, probably to deny the request, but the door swung open a little further and Felix sidled past him out into the hallway, holding his backpack in his arms. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Minho. “You can look, I don’t mind.”
It was very clear that no matter what Felix did, Minho was going to treat it as suspicious. If he’d refused to hand it over, that would have been a disaster, but his willingness seemed to strike Minho as very odd. He took it from Felix’s hands and then strode purposefully off to the kitchen.
The rest of them trailed after him, Hyunjin with his arm slung around Felix’s shoulders. Seeing that easy touch made Chan’s brain feel a little wobbly. Felix looked very small indeed tucked under Hyunjin’s arm like that, although maybe that was just because Hyunjin had dressed Felix in his clothes and they were not the same size. Hyunjin often went slightly too large with what he wore, and on Felix right now it looked a little like a kid playing dress up in his dad’s clothing.
In the kitchen, Minho already had the backpack open and was pulling things out one at a time. Each piece of clothing he turned inside out, pressed his fingers against the seams like he thought some absolutely miniscule listening device could be sewn into them, and then dumped it on the table next to him. He was not being careful with any of it, but nobody said anything about it.
If this was the grand sum of Felix’s possessions, it was a particularly paltry amount. Chan and Jeongin had had more to their name when they’d ran away from the group home, and they’d had basically nothing. If any of the clothing Minho was currently off-loading had been bought new, it had been worn enough that it didn’t look like it anymore. One of the t-shirts had a hole near the bottom hem that Chan could probably fit two fingers through. Most of it needed to be cleaned, too.
Minho emptied out the backpack and then turned to Felix. He was too far away to loom but the effect was the same, and Chan watched Felix lean a little into Hyunjin’s side. It didn’t help that the scars on Minho’s face gave him a sort of permanent snarl, puckering and tugging at one half of his mouth. Chan had grown accustomed to it, could read around how the scarring warped Minho’s features, but a newcomer wouldn’t be able to tell. “Where’s your phone?” Minho demanded.
“I don’t have one,” said Felix. “That’s everything.”
Minho squinted at him, then looked back at the clothing. Felix’s wallet, as battered as the rest of the stuff, lay on top of it. Minho opened it up and flicked through it, but he didn’t seem to care much about it, perhaps seeing, like Chan could see even from near the hallway entrance, that it was already held together by tape that Felix had found somewhere.
He’d been like this when Jisung had arrived, too. They’d avoided it with Seungmin, perhaps because Minho had recognised a fellow paranoid spirit in him, but Jisung had been given this exact treatment, and then more, because Jisung had arrived with a lot more stuff. Minho had gone through all his clothing, scanned all his shoes, inspected his duffel bag, and then taken a pocket knife to the lining of Jisung’s suitcase. That had been the point that Jisung had protested, asking if Minho knew how expensive suitcases were. It had not deterred Minho in the slightest. He had, at the very least, allowed Jisung to save his photos and files to a USB provided by Seungmin before he’d dumped the phone in a bucket of water and made Chan get Jisung a new one.
Felix was, all things considered, getting off pretty lightly, but that was only because he didn’t have things.
Minho turned back to the backpack and started to turn it inside out, apparently determined to give it the same treatment he’d given Felix’s clothes. It did not quite fall apart in his hands but it was a close enough thing — one of the seams along the side ripped, a long hole opening up. The sound of it was a little shocking in the quiet between them all. Felix winced.
“Hyung!” said Hyunjin, scowling at Minho, who looked a little surprised at how easily the bag had broken. “What the hell? You owe poor Felix a new backpack now.”
Minho glanced across at them. “Fine,” he said, the surprise falling from his face, which settled back into blankness. “Does that mean I can go throw this in that dumpster three blocks away so I can know it’s out of the fucking house?”
Everyone looked at Felix, who did not look happy at the attention. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You can throw it out.”
“But you have to get him a new one,” Hyunjin insisted.
“I’ll get him a new one,” Minho said, teeth sounding a little gritted. He put the ruined backpack back on the table and then said, “Okay, where are your shoes? I need to run a metal detector over them.”
“You are so ridiculous,” Hyunjin complained, but Felix had already slipped out from under his arm and headed to the door, where their shoes were all piled up. He picked up his sneakers and brought them over to the table and set them on top of the backpack, clearly trying to not let the soles touch the surface.
“There you are,” he said, as they all looked at the shoes. Much like everything else Felix seemed to own, they looked like they’d either been bought second hand or worn to the point of ruin. The laces were an awful grey colour rather than their original white, the ends of them fraying. It would not be possible for anything to be concealed inside the soles of them, because as far as Chan could tell, they no longer had soles. They’d been worn away almost completely. “Those are the only shoes I have.”
Oh, thought Chan, the thought striking somewhere deep, deep inside, as he looked at those sneakers, with the hole in the left one where the sole met the rest of the shoe. Oh, I’m so glad he’s here, actually. He needed this, I think he really needed us.
Minho looked at the shoes, then at Felix’s face, and said, “Fine. Fine! I’m not going to bother with that.” He pointed at Hyunjin. “Get him to look up what bag he wants and then send me a link. No,” he added, as Hyunjin opened his mouth, looking excited. “No designer shit, I’m serious, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin started trying to barter with him. Chan tuned them out, trusting that Minho wouldn’t get too annoyed over Hyunjin being a brat about something, even if it was this close to his bedtime. Instead, he was watching Felix, who had quietly picked his shoes back up and carried them to the door and was walking back to the table, perhaps to tuck himself back under Hyunjin’s arm. Their eyes met, though, before Felix was halfway across the room, and he stopped, and looked back at Chan.
He really was so pretty, Chan thought, unable to stop himself. He’d thought it the moment Felix had stepped inside of his office. In the hours since, the hours that he had not spent looking at Felix, he’d almost managed to convince himself that he’d been making it up, that it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought; his brain was romanticising, he’d told himself, as it was wont to do. But now, here, Felix looking at him with those eyes, his hair fluffy and clean, dressed in Hyunjin’s cosy looking pyjamas, it was impossible to deny or downplay — Felix was beautiful.
Maybe this is going to be a problem, he thought, somewhat grimly.
Felix looked away first. He did go to Hyunjin, who had managed to eke an actual monetary amount out of Minho for the bag, and was looking very pleased with himself. Minho looked like someone who had named a value just to make the conversation stop. Hyunjin started pulling Felix’s stuff into his arms, and Felix followed suit. It was so little that it was easily carried by the two of them. “We’re going to go sleep now,” said Hyunjin. “Nobody better disturb us for the next nine hours so Felix can sleep.”
“Hyunjin-sshi,” said Felix, exactly like how he had said it earlier: a little exasperated, a little amused, mostly like he didn’t quite know what to make of him.
“Nobody will disturb you,” Chan said. “Goodnight, Hyunjin. Goodnight, Felix,” he added to Felix, who looked startled by it and murmured something which sounded like a goodnight too, before Hyunjin towed him away down the hall and his bedroom door slammed shut behind him.
There was a stretch of silence, Minho just looking at the torn backpack. Then he picked it up, holding it like the thing offended him. “I’m going to go patrol,” he said. “Throw this away.”
“Okay,” said Chan. He didn’t remind Minho of how late it was, or point out how tired Minho looked. He was a grown man, he could do what he wanted. What he did say was, “I’m going to test him, tomorrow. See if he can fight or shoot a gun. More than the resources he can bring us, I want to know what we’re working with in him.”
Minho nodded. “Okay, hyung,” he said. “Let me know.”
——
Felix stood as Hyunjin set his pile of Felix’s clothes on the top of the set of drawers in his room, on the little bit of space that wasn’t taken up by boxes of pencils and a painting of flowers. “Here,” he said, holding out his hands for the clothes in Felix’s arms too. “I’ll find you some space in my wardrobe tomorrow, this can do for now.”
“It’s really okay,” Felix murmured, but Hyunjin wasn’t even listening to him.
“I can’t believe he broke your bag,” he was complaining, as he put the clothes carefully with the others and then hunched down to open the bottom drawer. “Minho-hyung is like that, sometimes, you should have seen what he did to Jisung’s stuff, but still! When you only had that one bag.”
His outrage over it tickled Felix a little. He would be more upset about it if Minho hadn’t immediately agreed to buy him a new one. If he was staying here, then he didn’t need to keep everything packed into a backpack, and it sounded like he was going to get a much better one out of the deal. “It cost me ten thousand won,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter, Hyunjin-sshi.”
“It does matter,” said Hyunjin. He stood up, holding a pair of shorts in his hands, grey flannel things, and a new t-shirt. They were clean but clearly well-worn, old things he must use for pyjamas. “Here,” he said, holding them out to Felix. “You can wear these for bed.”
“Oh,” Felix said, surprised. “But you gave me these to wear, I thought—”
“Not when you’ve been down to Seungmin’s workshop with them on,” Hyunjin said. “That room is covered in stuff I don’t even want to think about. You can wear these to sleep in.”
Felix took them, feeling unsure about all of this. It had been bad enough when Hyunjin had given him the clothes after his shower in the first place; every piece of kindness felt like something Felix simply didn’t deserve. He had expected the bare minimum when he had come here, he hadn’t even been sure they would take the job in the first place. The fact that they were opening up not only their home but their bedrooms to him felt just a step too far.
“Right,” said Hyunjin. He had this way of talking that was so self-assured that Felix could see how easily a person could get swept up in it. He could feel it happening to himself: the way it was easier to just do as Hyunjin said, rather than try to argue differently. It helped that Felix didn’t want to argue differently, because doing as Hyunjin said had, thus far, gotten him a shower and clean clothes and some leftover kimchi fried rice sitting warm and welcome in his stomach. “I’m going to go brush my teeth while you change into those. Don’t touch any of the painting stuff because some of it isn’t dry.”
Felix nodded, and Hyunjin swept out of the room. Felix changed slowly into the new clothes, looking around the room. Not touching any of the painting stuff was going to be something of a difficult task, because Hyunjin’s room had the air of a space that had once been a bedroom but was now being consumed by an art studio of some kind. There were two easels set up, both with canvases on them. One of the canvases showed a sunset over a beach; the other seemed to be a half-finished picture of Jeongin.
There was a large window along the outside wall and under that was a desk, long and sturdy looking. There wasn’t a computer on it but instead an incredible amount of pots filled with pencils and paintbrushes and at least one set of make-up brushes. There were three sketchbooks that Felix could see, and random pieces of paper everywhere. In the middle sat a small vase filled with the same flowers that were on the painting atop the drawer set, slightly wilted now. He had a couple of wooden figures, the moveable kind that Felix recognised from middle school art class, but these were strung with random pieces of jewellery.
He stood next to the bed, pushed against the wall furthest from the window, and looked around at everything. It felt like a remarkable amount of personality shoved into a not especially large space, but Felix liked that he had known, as soon as he walked into the room, what kind of person Hyunjin was. He had photos strung up on clothes pegs along the wall behind his desk, and from here Felix could see one of Hyunjin and Jeongin laughing together, one of Changbin half-looking away from the camera. Here, Felix thought, was someone creative, someone who loved the team he worked with.
Would any of his father’s men choose to hang up pictures of the people they worked with? The thought made him let out a bark of laughter, which he hoped Hyunjin, in the bathroom next door, couldn’t hear. This kind of sentimentality wouldn’t fly in Felix’s father’s world. His own bedroom back at his old house had been utterly bare, apart from a couple of decorations used to showcase a version of himself aimed at pleasing his father. Anything of note, anything special or important to him, had been kept in a locked box hidden in the base of his wardrobe.
Hyunjin came back into the room, his hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. He’d changed too, into a different pair of shorts that came down to his knees and a black t-shirt. He looked very tall and slim in those shorts, now that Felix could see the bones of his knees when he moved. “You can take the inside, if you don’t mind,” Hyunjin said, when he saw Felix just standing there. “I’d prefer to be on the outside.”
Felix blinked at him. It took him a couple of seconds to parse out what Hyunjin was saying, because it was so unexpected. “You mean on the bed?” he asked.
“Yes, on the bed,” said Hyunjin. “Why the confusion?”
“I just thought,” Felix said, feeling a little flustered, “I would be sleeping on the floor or something. Like, with a sleeping bag.”
Hyunjin looked as baffled as Felix had felt a few moments earlier. “What the fuck, Felix,” he said. “Why on earth would I offer to let you share my room if I was just going to make you lay on the floor? The couch would be way better than that.”
Felix wasn’t sure why he had thought that, honestly, because when Hyunjin pointed out how stupid it sounded, he realised that it did sound completely stupid. But he had not even contemplated that Hyunjin would mean that they should share his bed. He supposed the shocked expressions on the faces of the others made a little more sense now. “But, Hyunjin-sshi—” he started.
“Okay, first of all,” Hyunjin interrupted, holding up a hand to cut him off, “don’t call me that, you’re going to make me break out in hives. When were you born?” Felix told him the lie he’d prepared in advance, only the year accurate. Hyunjin nodded. “Right, so we’re the same age, so just call me Hyunjin, please. Second of all, I’m not arguing with you about this. We’re both sleeping in that bed, it’s large enough for us both.”
It was, but Felix still wasn’t happy about it. “But,” he said, talking over Hyunjin when Hyunjin made a spluttering noise at him, “it’s your bed! I really can just take the couch, I know Chris-nim wasn’t—”
“God, do not call him that,” Hyunjin said. “The hives, Felix.”
“Chan-nim,” Felix tried.
Hyunjin gave him a flat look. “You’re killing me here.”
“Well, what am I supposed to call him?” Felix asked. He really had no idea. His father’s men all called him boss or something even more polite. Clearly Chan wasn’t interested in being called that, but Felix couldn’t just call him Chan, or even Chan-hyung like Hyunjin did.
“Call him hyung,” Hyunjin said. Felix gave him a particularly beseeching stare. How was he supposed to do that? Hyunjin huffed at him, and patted his head. It felt— nicer than maybe it should have. “Don’t give me that look. I’ll literally text him right now and get his permission, okay?” He pulled out his phone, tapped at it for a long few seconds, and then pointed at the bed. “We’re going to sleep now.”
“Fine,” said Felix. He was too tired to keep arguing about it. Hyunjin pulled the covers down and Felix climbed onto the mattress. It was— soft, some sort of memory foam, maybe. When he settled down on his back, his arm touching the wall, it felt like the most comfortable thing he had laid on in literally months — and that was because it probably was. None of the hotels he’d stayed at for a single night over the past six months had been interested in the comfort of their guests. Some of them hadn’t even provided bedding.
Hyunjin turned the lights off and clambered in after him, his body weight only moving the bed a little under Felix. With the lights off, and the heavy curtains drawn over the window, it was very dark. The only light was the glow of Hyunjin’s phone as he, too, settled on his back, phone held up above his head. It illuminated his face in strange ways, the cut of his jaw suddenly very sharp.
Felix turned on his side to look at him. Maybe it was a little weird, but this just felt— good. It was not at all where he’d expected to end up when he’d woken this morning from a half-sleep in a bus shelter in a different part of the city. To be warm and clean like this felt like something of a miracle. And it should have been weird, to be laying in a bed with another person who he had just met, but it didn’t. It didn’t feel weird at all. It just felt very comfortable.
“Hyunjin,” he said very softly. Hyunjin made an inquisitive sound at him. “Thank you.”
“Why are you thanking me?” Hyunjin asked, not looking at him but instead squinting at his phone screen. “Oh look, there, see? Chan-hyung says you can call him hyung. I told you.”
Felix thought about telling him that he didn’t have to sound so smug about it, but his eyes had already slid shut. Sleep took him with a swiftness that would have shocked him if he’d been conscious enough to realise it.
BONUS TEXT MESSAGES:
chan: yeah he can call me hyung!
chan: of course
hyunjin: cool.
hyunjin: aw he already fell asleep
hyunjin: he’s so cute
hyunjin: his hair is so fluffy
hyunjin: thnx for letting me keep him hyung
chan: he’s not a pet hyunjin
chan: don’t leave me on read hyunjin.
Notes:
i do not want to talk about how long this chapter is don’t look at the wordcount do not perceive me
if there’s anything in this fic that doesn’t make sense (e.g. computer security protocols, how casinos work, heists??? etc), please understand that i am very stupid and if i couldn’t get a simple answer with 5 minutes of googling, i simply went with the Vibes. full csi approach to everything, please just roll with it
similarly, if you read this and you’re wondering why it’s uk spelling but mostly american terminology throughout, it’s called “i am from the uk but i’m taking mercy on my american wife”
thank you for reading ♥
Chapter 2
Notes:
yes this chapter is longer no i don't want to talk about it ♥
Chapter Text
When Felix emerged from Hyunjin’s bedroom the next morning, dressed in jeans and his only sweater, which was big enough that the sleeves fell past his fingers and had a hole in it to boot, it was to find that the only person in the apartment was apparently Jisung, sitting at the table eating cup ramen. He looked up when Felix appeared at the end of the hallway and smiled at him, a boyish grin. “Hello!” he said.
“Hello,” Felix said, a little warily, as he came further into the room. “Do you know where, uh, where Hyunjin is?”
“He went out, said he was running errands,” Jisung said. “Did you need him for something? Did you eat yet?”
Felix shook his head. “No, I don’t need him, really,” he said. “I haven’t eaten, either.”
He was not quite sure what to make of Jisung, who last night had seemed at times very friendly and other times like he had not liked Felix one little bit. Felix was not unused to people not liking him, his own father didn’t like him, but the hot and cold nature of it all had thrown him, and he’d had no real idea how to react to any of it. Now, though, Jisung was smiling, as he left his own food and got to his feet saying, “Do you know where everything is? No? Here, I’ll show you. When I first moved in, it took me a while to figure out where everything was.”
Despite the somewhat ramshackle appearance of the apartment as a whole, the kitchen seemed relatively well put together, with plenty of cooking utensils and bowls and plates. Most of the food seemed to be of the instant kind — there was an extensive collection of ramen in the cupboards, as well as one that contained only microwave rice. The fridge seemed to be mostly full of leftovers in containers labelled with the date they had been put in there, all of them done in the same handwriting.
“Minho-hyung does that,” Jisung said, when he noticed Felix looking at them. “I guess sometimes the food they served when he was inside would be bad so he’d get sick a bunch and now he’s kind of anal about it.”
Felix wasn’t sure what to make of that little information drop. “He was in prison?”
“Oh,” Jisung said, with the same wince at himself he’d done yesterday when he’d accidentally used Chan’s real name. “Yeah.”
Is that where he got those scars, Felix wondered, knowing already it was a bad idea to ask it aloud, so he didn’t. He was no stranger to people who’d been scuffed up in fights, and Felix himself had old, healed wounds, mostly on his back. But Minho looked like he’d been raked across the face by an animal, though it had probably been something much more ordinary, maybe even a knife, though there was a jagged quality to the wounds that suggested it had been something not quite so sharp. Whatever it was, it had left deep gouges down the left side of his face, a groove in his eyebrow that continued all the way down his cheek and to the corner of his mouth, another that looked like when it had been fresh it had sliced fully through his upper lip.
“Uh. Anyway,” Jisung said quickly into the suddenly awkward silence, “he cooks sometimes, and it’s really good, but you have to catch him on a good day if you want some of it.”
That, Felix didn’t doubt. Unlike Jisung, who had wavered, and Hyunjin, who had welcomed him with open arms, Minho’s spiky reluctance over Felix’s presence didn’t seem likely to soften any time soon. Hearing that he could be prickly even to the others here only reinforced the idea. Felix had mostly decided to just give Minho a relatively wide berth if he could.
“What do you want to eat?” Jisung asked him, looking like he was about to start making whatever it was that Felix requested. This flustered Felix more than he could have expressed. If he wanted to not be a nuisance while he was here, there was no worse way to do it than by expecting people to cater to him like that.
“I’ll just have some cereal,” he said a little desperately, when Jisung just kept waiting for an answer. “Uh. That’s okay, right?”
“Sure,” said Jisung. “You remember where the bowls are?”
Felix nodded. Jisung nodded back, in a way that made Felix smile, although he couldn’t quite place his finger on why it was so funny, it just was. Jisung sat back at the table and started eating again. He had his phone propped up and as Felix got one of the bowls from the cupboard, Jisung pressed play on a video.
It was nice, actually, Felix thought, to be making breakfast in this quiet room, where the only sound was someone speaking in what sounded like French very quietly from Jisung’s phone. At home, breakfast had often been quiet, but there had been a tension in it, especially if his father was home eating with them. Maybe it should have been awkward, since he didn’t know Jisung at all, but it wasn’t, somehow.
Perhaps that was just because Jisung was paying him absolutely no attention, but in a way that did not seem dismissive. It was like Felix was merely part of what was happening around him without being a disturbance — or perhaps he was just really engrossed in whatever he was watching, because when Felix sat down at the table to eat, Jisung didn’t even look up from his phone.
He was so focused on whatever he was watching — Felix could not figure out what it was, his knowledge of French being zero — that he was still eating when Felix finished. Felix washed his bowl out, set it to the side to dry, and then stood by the sink, at a bit of a loss. He wished Hyunjin was here, to give him a sense of what was allowed, what was not allowed. He could go down to the PC room and see if anyone was there. He didn’t particularly want to do that; he really was wary of poking around too much. Maybe he should just go wait in Hyunjin’s room.
The apartment door opened and Chan stepped inside. He was wearing black sweatpants and a black t-shirt, his hair looking somewhat less unruly than it had the night before. When he saw Felix he smiled and said, “Oh good, you’re up. You ate? Good. Come with me, then.”
Felix blinked at him a couple of times. “Where are we going?” he asked, wondering if he would need to go grab his jacket or something.
“Oh, just the basement,” Chan said. “I want to see what your skills are like.”
Basement? Felix thought, but out loud he said, “My skills?”
“Yeah, how you shoot, just some of the basics.” Chan was holding the front door open for him, like he expected Felix to just go with him immediately. Felix wasn’t opposed to it, he just didn’t really know what to make of all this. Besides which, although he’d noticed the tattoos Chan had on his hands the night before, he’d been wearing something with long sleeves, and it was only now that he was wearing a t-shirt that Felix realised the tattoo continued up his left arm, mapping out his bones underneath. It gave way just above his elbow to something a little more abstract, swirling black and white lines. It was beautiful, but mostly hidden under the sleeve of his shirt, and Felix wished that he could see underneath— and then caught himself thinking it with no small amount of annoyance.
He went to the door and found his battered shoes amongst the others. As he pulled them on, Chan said, “Jisung-ah.” Then, louder, “Jisung-ah!”
Jisung jolted in his seat and then twisted to look back. “What,” he said, in a way that would have gained Felix a beating and another employee something worse if they’d spoken like that to Felix’s dad.
“I’m going to take Felix to the basement,” Chan said, like he hadn’t even noticed the rudeness. “Come down in twenty minutes, I want you to try sparring with him.”
Felix looked at Chan, then at Jisung. Shooting and sparring in the same half hour sounded like hell to him, to be honest — it was questionable which one he was worse at. It was one thing to make a fool of himself in front of Chan, with his handsome face and his careful way of listening, quite another to do it in front of an audience. There almost certainly wasn’t any point in arguing about it, though. What would happen would happen.
“Okay,” said Jisung easily.
“Twenty minutes,” Chan repeated in a pointed way.
“Ah, hyung!” Jisung whined. “I know! I’ll remember! Twenty minutes, okay.”
Chan raised an eyebrow at him, but said nothing more, just motioned for Felix to follow him out of the apartment. He took him down all the stairs and then down the first floor hallway that Felix hadn’t seen down the night before. There was a back entrance, which appeared to have had a keycode lock fitted to it, and a camera trained directly on it. There was another door, which Chan opened to reveal yet another staircase, this one going down. “After you,” he said, holding the door again.
Felix rather wouldn’t, since there did not seem to be a light on, but as he stepped into the stairway the lights flickered on. The walls and stairs were the same unpainted grey concrete as the rest, but the sound echoed differently in the relatively enclosed space. When he got to the bottom, there was another short entryway which opened out into a cavernous space that had clearly, Felix realised, once been an underground car park. He could see, on one of the walls, the opening to where the cars would have driven in and out, although it had been bricked up just slightly inside.
The space itself was informally split into two sections. The space closest to where Felix had entered was some sort of work out area. There were a couple of treadmills, unplugged from an extension cable that snaked into the wall. Most of it seemed to be free weights, with one bench press set up, and a handful of other things that Felix didn’t really recognise. He’d spent one long summer training with a few of his dad’s men, trying desperately to bulk out the way his dad had wanted, and ended up lithe and wiry rather than bulky. That had been when his father had finally let him transition into just doing his tech work for him.
On the other end of the room was a makeshift shooting range. Against the wall were gun safes, a couple small ones and then a larger one, and then in the middle of the floor was a table with ear protectors laying on it. The range itself was mostly made up of paper targets set up on stands, five of them in staggered locations down the length of the room. There were a couple of mannequin targets too, apparently made from corkboard, some of it showing through the paint on the outside where they’d been shot. It was not quite the professional set up his father had built in the side building of their house, but it seemed like it served Chan’s team’s purposes well enough.
Chan crossed over to the range and hunched down in front of one of the smaller gun safes. “Grab some ear protectors,” he said over his shoulder as he put in the code for the safe, his body hiding it from Felix. “If you need some smaller ones, I’ll find where Jeongin stashed old his pair.”
There was no need; thankfully the ear protection on the table fit. He positioned them so just one ear was covered as Chan came over the table with a gun in one hand and a magazine in the other. He held both out to Felix, who just looked at them for a second and then back at Chan. He didn’t really want to take them. Luckily Chan just looked amused. “You’ve had training on this, right?”
“Yes,” said Felix. He’d had extensive training, long hours of it. That didn’t mean he wasn’t shit at it.
“Right,” said Chan, shaking the gun a little in his hand as if to get Felix to take it. “Then you should be fine.”
He wouldn’t, but it felt humiliating to say it out loud with words. So he did as Chan was silently asking and he took the handgun from him, then the magazine. He slid it into place with a click. “What am I shooting at?” he asked, resigned to it.
“Any of the paper targets you want,” Chan said, as he picked up his own ear protection. “I really do just want to see what you can do?”
Felix nodded. He pulled his ear protectors on properly and watched Chan do the same. Then he stepped up to the orange tape line on the floor and thumbed the safety off and raised the gun.
If he were better at shooting, he would— test the gun, or something. It was unfamiliar in his hands, not just because it was a gun, but some make that he had little, if no, experience shooting, a little smaller than the guns his dad’s men had usually used. He wasn’t better at shooting, though, so there was no point. He simply got into the form-perfect stance that he had always been good at, the one thing he could do, and aimed at the second nearest target, because there was no point in going for something further away. He shot once, and felt the recoil shudder up his arm and throw his aim completely off.
It hit the target stand, punching a hole through the wooden board, but not touching the actual paper target pinned up there. It was particularly bad even for him. He didn’t look at Chan. He didn’t need to compound his embarrassment. He could feel Chan’s eyes on him anyway, a steady gaze, the same way Chan had watched him in the office the night before. Felix lifted his gun again, trying to redeem himself a little bit, but now that he was aware of Chan looking at him, it was impossible to think about anything else. The feeling of those eyes on him made his heart beat hard in his chest, made his hands shake a little. It was, in a word, terrible.
The second shot was not much better, although now he was a little more braced for the strength of the recoil, he at least hit the target itself. It was a pathetic showing, though, and when he broke and glanced over at Chan, he saw that Chan was frowning a little, his brow creased. He had one hand raised to his face, thumb pressing against his bottom lip. The expression didn’t fade when he saw that Felix was looking back.
Felix pulled his ear protectors off and put the safety back on the gun and had a moment of wanting to simply throw it onto the table. “I’m not very good,” he said, which was something of an understatement.
Chan watched him for a moment longer and then he smiled, something which seemed real and true. “You’re fine,” he said, without removing his thumb from touching his mouth which was really quite distracting to be honest.
“No, I’m not,” Felix said. He was blushing to his hairline, he knew, and even now that he wasn’t holding the gun up, he could feel his hands still shaking. “But I am usually better, you’re making me flustered.”
Chan smiled even wider. Felix looked helplessly at the dimples that smile produced. “I’m not even doing anything,” Chan said, clearly amused by him.
You’re watching me, Felix didn’t say, because that was the whole point of what was happening, Chan needed to watch what he did. But Chan watching him was setting him so off balance that he knew he would never make any kind of decent showing.
“I’m not very good,” he repeated.
“Here,” Chan said. He stepped up a little closer and pointed to the nearest target. “Why don’t you try that one? It might be easier to hit.”
Felix sighed a little but dutifully pulled his ear protectors back on. It was not as though he’d been trying to show off by not aiming there in the first place. It had been hope, really, that he’d do something a little impressive, that it wouldn’t be as bad as he’d known to expect. It was somewhat galling to be wishing for his usual standard, considering how many times he’d been punished for that substandard level.
He shot three times, the recoil still not any easier to deal with but his body getting used to it at least. He hit the target every time now, none of them close to the centre but each one just slightly closer each time. Not his best but not as bad as before, and he would certainly take it when he could still feel Chan’s eyes on him, that look making the hairs on his arms raise slightly. It was simply too intense, to be looked at like that.
This time when he pulled the ear protectors off, Chan’s hand landed on his shoulder. Felix almost startled, not just because he hadn’t realised Chan was close enough to touch him, but because as he’d done so, Chan’s little finger had come to a rest against where the neckline of Felix’s sweater dipped a little low, touching the skin of Felix’s neck.
“Good,” Chan said, voice quiet, perhaps to avoid it echoing around the large room. “That was pretty good, Felix.”
Something about the words, something about the warmth of his hand against Felix’s shoulder, even as he adjusted it so there was no more skin to skin contact, shivered through Felix. It felt a little bit like his brain was full of lightbulbs and Chan had reached inside and turned a few of them off. He stood there, knowing he was blushing again, his entire focus on the heaviness of Chan’s hand on his body.
“Here, I’ll take that,” Chan said.
Felix turned, feeling like he was in a trance of some kind, and gave him the gun. Their eyes met, a moment of startling intimacy, their bodies too close for Felix’s comfort. It felt dangerous, to him, the way his body felt like it did not quite belong to him, the way he got sometimes when he— made some of his worst decisions. Chan, for his part, just looked at him, face still and solemn; whatever he saw on Felix’s face didn’t seem to perturb him. Perhaps Felix was succeeding in showing none of it.
Then Chan took a step back, ejecting the half-used magazine from the gun and setting everything back down on the table. “If you like,” he said, voice casual, glancing back at Felix, while Felix still felt his arms had been stuck into a very gentle electrical socket, “I can get Changbin to give you some pointers. Or Hyunjin, he’s not our best but you might be more comfortable with him.”
Felix wouldn’t be comfortable with any of them, since he had absolutely no desire to learn how to shoot, but instead of saying that, he just murmured, “Okay.”
Chan nodded, and smiled again. Those dimples, Felix thought, ought to come with a health warning. “Well then,” Chan said. “Jisung should be down soon. Let’s see what else you have for me then.”
Great, Felix thought.
——
Jisung rocked back and forth easily on the balls of his feet as he waited on the training mat. When he’d come down, Chan had been getting Felix to show him what kind of weights he was able to lift, and he’d waved Jisung over to the mat to wait for them. That little adventure seemed to be winding down, because it didn’t seem Felix was capable of lifting really anything. They hadn’t even progressed past the hand weights.
This didn’t surprise Jisung. It was not even that Felix was short, because he was around the same height as Jisung, but because Felix had a particularly frail look about him. If he had ever lifted weights in his life, it certainly hadn’t been in the last six months when he had, apparently, been running around homeless. Jisung could probably snap his wrists like twigs.
He was not going to do that, of course. Even the thought of it made him feel uneasy. He hadn’t learned how to fight just to use that strength against those weaker than him; it had been the exact opposite. But, he thought, as he watched Chan take the weights back off Felix, who looked a little defeated already, he wondered what Chan was actually thinking, getting Jisung down there.
Jisung supposed, though, that lack of physical strength was not a sign that someone couldn’t fight. None of their designated fighters were particularly tall, and of them all, only Changbin was what could be considered well-built in the usual way. Jisung should probably not assume that Felix wouldn’t be able to fight. He’d seen men make that mistake when facing up against Minho. It was usually their last mistake.
He watched as Felix slipped his sneakers off and stepped uncertainly onto the mat. Jisung grinned at him, trying to put Felix at ease. Felix gave him a very weak smile back, nothing at all like the one he had given Jisung in the kitchen. He had seemed far more comfortable up there than down here.
“Alright,” said Chan, waiting at the side of the mat, his arms folded over his chest. “I just want you to spar, nothing too extreme. Jisung, try not to be too rough.”
“Hyung,” he complained, windmilling his arms a little to loosen up his shoulders. “I’m not Minho-hyung.”
“You certainly are not,” Chan said dryly. “But I said what I said.”
Jisung almost rolled his eyes but instead he just turned back to Felix and said, “I promise to go easy on you.”
He’d meant it as a joke, expected to get something a little snarky back in response — if he’d said the same to Hyunjin, he’d have been verbally eviscerated; if he’d said it to Jeongin, Jeongin would have tried to punch him in the throat. Felix, however, just gave him a wide-eyed look and said, “Oh, um, I appreciate that.”
Jisung settled into a simple stance, something that was his own mix of his early taekwondo lessons and his later boxing classes. Felix, when he too took a stance, seemed to have the basics down. He knew at the very least how to plant himself, how to lower his centre of gravity. This was very unlike Hyunjin again, who had refused to learn to fight from any of them and had instead developed his own way of moving in a fight that really just focused around not being touched if he could help it.
Felix did have some of that same look about him, though. Someone who knew how to take a punch but deeply did not want to.
The irony was, Jisung really did take it easy on him. He let Felix come to him, smiling encouragingly the whole time. He blocked Felix’s first punch, which was, to put it kindly, sloppy and well-telegraphed. The second punch was a lot better, swung with what Jisung assumed was Felix’s dominant hand, but also easily blocked. He heard Felix curse under his breath and had to fight the urge to laugh.
Instead, he lowered himself closer to the ground, swung his leg out, and knocked Felix’s knees gently out from under him. Felix crumpled to the floor in a heap of skinny limbs, letting out a small yelp as he did so. Then he just kind of sat there, head tipped forward so that the only part visible was the red tips of his ears through his hair.
“Hmm,” said Chan from the sidelines. “Why don’t we try that again?”
There was a pause. Jisung felt a little bad for knocking him down so easily, but when he looked at Chan, he saw that Chan had seen what Jisung had seen — it was not that Felix had not been taught how to fight. Someone, at some point, clearly had taken that time. So Jisung didn’t say anything, and just waited until Felix nodded and clambered back to his feet.
This time Felix settled into something more obviously inspired by taekwondo, although like with Jisung it had been adapted slightly. Jisung mimicked him, feeling calm and ready. He always liked sparring like this, just practising without any expectation at causing pain, although to be fair it was usually something he did with Changbin and they were known to rough each other up a bit, just for fun. He’d fought with Chan once or twice, and had his ass handed to him, and Jeongin a handful more times, which he’d always won. Hyunjin refused to fight him. He’d not quite worked up to asking Minho for it.
This bout went considerably better, mostly because Felix seemed to have just fallen back onto basic taekwondo, and whoever had taught him had done a good enough job that if he’d been thirty pounds heavier, he could have packed a punch. But it had been like Jisung had suspected at the start: Felix was completely lacking in any kind of strength. Jisung even let him land a few punches, just to see, but it didn’t feel like anything. On the plus side, Felix was fast, and relatively light on his feet. It was just a shame that Jisung was also that, and could actually throw a proper punch.
What Felix did have, however, was stamina. Every time Jisung put him to the ground, Felix took a moment and then picked himself up and got ready to go again, without Chan needing to say anything. If Felix hadn’t looked so thoroughly miserable about it, Jisung would have been enjoying himself.
He looked across at Chan after the fourth time he knocked Felix to the floor, and found that Chan was not watching the two of them, like he’d expected, but instead was watching Felix with a look on his face that made Jisung uncomfortable. He couldn’t have said if it was a good look or a bad look, just that it was intent, a focused kind of expression that made Jisung wonder what Chan was really looking for here.
It was possible he thought Felix was faking this level of weakness, but it was obvious to Jisung that he wasn’t. The skills he did have were rusty, clearly disused for a long time, and he didn’t look like he was being half-hearted about this. After that first time, he was clearly doing his best, but it was a losing endeavour.
“Okay,” called Chan, after they’d been going for perhaps fifteen minutes. “Why don’t we take a little break?”
Felix nodded immediately and fell to the mat like his strings had been cut. He lay flat on his back in a starfish pose and closed his eyes, his chest rising and falling in something just less than a heave. Jisung, looking down at him, hadn’t even broken a sweat. The sight of it made him want to smile, a little.
It made a bit of sense, he thought, looking at Felix now, why Hyunjin had so obviously liked Felix from that first moment. He was cute, and pretty too, as pretty as Hyunjin was if in a slightly different direction. Hyunjin liked pretty people, pretty things, and he also liked Jeongin the most out of them all, so of course he liked Felix — they had the same friendly sweetness, and it was not tempered by Jeongin’s bossy stubbornness in Felix. Anyone else would have called for a break themselves, but Felix had simply waited to be told.
That didn’t make it easier to swallow the way Hyunjin had taken an immediate and obvious shine to Felix, the way he never had to Jisung. It definitely hadn’t made it easier to accept the sound of Hyunjin’s laughter, bright and lovely, filling the room at Felix’s very first joke. Jisung dreamed, sometimes, that he had made Hyunjin laugh like that. It was his own fault that Hyunjin tolerated him, at best, he had nobody else to blame for it, but it didn’t make it easy.
Chan was still watching Felix. Jisung ambled over to him, wondering what he was thinking, wondering what that look meant. Jisung was, generally, very happy to go along with whatever Chan — or Changbin — decided was the best plan, and if they wanted to trust Felix to live with them, enough to do a job for him, then Jisung wasn’t the one to question it. He didn’t have the same level of paranoid distrust that Minho had, or Seungmin. It suited them, to be as unfriendly as humanly possible. Jisung had found that the opposite approach served him better.
To be honest, he didn’t really have any room to question them about this, not after his own welcome into the group. At least Felix had come in the front door and not simply climbed in the first open window he’d found.
Chan glanced at him as Jisung came to a stop at his side. Jisung lowered his voice, enough that even despite the only other sound in the room being Felix’s breathing, Felix probably wouldn’t hear. “Is something up?” he asked.
Chan looked confused. “What do you mean?” he asked at a normal volume.
“You’re watching him super closely,” Jisung said, still quiet. “Just wondered if I should know about something.”
Chan went a little pink, probably embarrassed at being caught out; if Jisung had noticed, Felix probably had too. “Ah, no, no,” Chan said. “Nothing is wrong. I just don’t want to miss something that might be important. So, what do you think?”
Jisung looked across at Felix still laying on the floor and then shrugged. “I think he’s had training,” he said. “But he probably was just really a tech.”
“Yeah, I think you’re probably right,” Chan said. He motioned back to the mat. “But it’s probably worth making sure.”
Jisung grinned at him, and then went to help Felix back to his feet.
——
When Hyunjin clattered down the basement stairs, his bag of supplies swinging at his elbow, he found Felix sitting on their sparring mat looking tired while Jisung, wearing pale sweatpants and a dark sweater, stood over him, one hand out as if he’d been about to help Felix to his feet. Chan was standing off to the side, arms folded across his chest, and they all looked over when Hyunjin appeared in the entryway and took in the scene. Jisung actually waved at him. Hyunjin ignored him.
“Are you guys done with my baby yet?” he asked, hands on his hips.
“Your baby,” Jisung said, confused.
“Yes, Felix, my baby,” Hyunjin told him, his voice tilted at his most obnoxious angle, the one which let Jisung know exactly how stupid Hyunjin thought he was. Jisung shifted a little on his feet like he had flinched. “You knuckleheads have been hogging him all morning and I need to fix his hair for him.”
Felix climbed to his feet, smiling a little. Although he still seemed tired, the night of sleep had clearly done him some good. His smile was a little less fragile around the edges. He looked across at Chan and said, “Are we done? Apparently Hyunjin wants to play hairdresser.”
Chan was looking at Hyunjin with an amused expression, but also one that seemed— soft. Hyunjin didn’t always like it when Chan looked at him like that, and he didn’t like it now, because maybe he just didn’t want Chan to know him so well. Chan sometimes looked at Hyunjin like he was seeing things that Hyunjin was very actively not looking at.
“We’re done,” Chan said to Felix, looking back at him. “You can go with him. If he gets too rough, make sure to shout.”
Felix laughed as he went to the edge of the mat and slipped his shoes back on. Jisung was frowning at Hyunjin, the same way he had done the night before when Hyunjin had laughed at Felix’s joke. When he saw that Hyunjin was looking back at him, though, Jisung smiled at him again, with no apparent strain. It was like he’d never been frowning in the first place.
“I’m using your bathroom,” Hyunjin said to him, a little haughtily.
“Of course,” Jisung said.
He always said that, or something along those lines: of course or feel free or okay, come let me know when you’re done. He never questioned Hyunjin’s right to use his bathroom for dyeing his hair, even though Hyunjin had not even asked for permission the first time. He had shown up at Jisung’s bedroom door armed with an old towel and the new box of bright red hair dye and said, Let me use your bathroom, I don’t want to destroy the one upstairs, and Jisung had just let him in and gone off somewhere for the duration.
What was it like, Hyunjin thought grumpily, to be so good of a person? Hyunjin could not relate. And he couldn’t even glare resentfully at Jisung like he wanted to, because Jisung was doing him a favour. Disgusting.
“Come on,” he said to Felix, who came over and let Hyunjin take him by the hand. Hyunjin flicked a glance back at Chan, who was watching them, and Jisung, who had turned his back and was picking something up from the floor.
“Have fun,” Chan said, with a wave at him.
“We will,” Hyunjin told him.
He led Felix up to the second floor, where Jisung and Minho’s bedrooms were. Their rooms were side by side, which to begin with had been a precaution. They hadn’t had any space for Jisung in the main apartment, and Minho had been so perturbed and upset by the way Jisung had broken into the building to talk to Chan that he’d insisted Jisung stay on the same floor as him so he could keep an eye on his comings and goings. This, as it turned out, had been something of a bust, because if he wasn’t on a job, Jisung usually didn’t go anywhere, and eventually the placement of Jisung’s room had stopped being a way to keep an eye on him and started to just be where his room was.
Realistically, Hyunjin should have been using Minho’s room for his hair dyeing adventures, considering it had once been a hair salon and as far as Hyunjin knew, still had most of a hair washing station still set up. Hyunjin, however, had never even thought of asking to use it, because the thought of intruding into Minho’s space even a little bit was something he did not have the stomach for. He’d never seen inside Minho’s room, had never even tried to peek to see what was in there. Everyone left Minho’s room well enough alone.
Jisung’s room, on the other hand, he had been inside a fair number of times. He let himself in now, rolling his eyes at how Jisung hadn’t even locked it when he’d left. It had once been a real estate office, a sole business owner, just to the side of the hair salon, and until Jisung had moved in there, all of the old furniture had just been left.
He’d kept the desk but replaced everything else. It was a small room, especially once they’d put a double bed in there, shoved into the corner, and Jisung had painted it a pale green in an apparent attempt at making the space seem larger. The desk was along the opposite wall from the bed, the fanciest thing in there, with the ugliest gaming computer chair Hyunjin had ever seen shoved next to it. Jisung had stolen one of the computers from the PC room upstairs and brought it down as his own personal set up, but Hyunjin had never once seen him playing games on it so he didn’t quite know why he’d done that.
Most of the room was taken up by what he called Jisung’s Clothing Hoard. Chan had originally produced a wardrobe from somewhere when it became clear that Jisung would be staying with them, a narrow thing that was never going to be enough to hold all his clothes, so eventually Jisung had ended up with two separate rails, a set of drawers, and a metal rack to hold most, not all, of his shoes. The end result had been that most of the space was completely dedicated to his clothing collection. It looked a mess, but there was a method to the madness, Hyunjin knew, he had just never figured it out himself.
He did Jisung the courtesy of stepping over the t-shirt that he had left on the floor as he made his way to the bathroom on the wall opposite the door, tucked between the edge of Jisung’s bed and the edge of his desk. Felix followed after him, looking a little dubious. “It’s okay for us to be in here?” he asked, as he skirted around some of Jisung’s shoes that were flung next to his desk. “Jisung really won’t mind?”
“Jisung doesn’t mind,” Hyunjin said. “He’s used to it. I always do my hair in his bathroom.”
The bathroom showed it, too. It had originally been a little bathroom for the real estate agent, a toilet and a sink with an overflow drain set into the floor. They’d bought a shower head that could be attached to the taps and set it up on the wall for Jisung to use as a bathroom, because at that point it would have been five people using the one big bathroom upstairs and it was starting to get ridiculous. Jisung’s bathroom had worked out so well that they’d eventually done the same thing for Seungmin with his employee bathroom downstairs too.
Jisung’s bathroom, however, had seen considerably more wear and tear that Seungmin’s had. Hyunjin had been as careful as he could be — he wasn’t actually wanting to destroy Jisung’s space, no matter how much he might joke about it — but his decision to not do it upstairs had been the right one. Most of the white grouting in the tiles had been stained pink at this point by the runoff from Hyunjin’s hair dye, in a way that no amount of scrubbing with a toothbrush was likely to fix.
“Sit there,” he said, pointing to the closed toilet lid. Felix sat, his hands tucked under his thighs. Hyunjin left the door open for ventilation and set his bag in the sink. “Okay,” he said. “Let me see what I’m working with here.”
He ran a hand through Felix’s hair. Looking at the hair had been bad enough — touching it felt awful. He was a little worried it was going to break off in his hands. Hyunjin had always been so careful with his hair, despite the nonsense he put it through; he’d probably spent a good chunk of the money Chan paid them on treatments for it. He supposed it made sense that Felix hadn’t taken care of his own — from the sounds of things, being able to wash it in the first place had been something of a spotty process. But still. Hyunjin was determined to help him.
“Felix,” he said, “my angel, the light of my life. Have you ever heard of toner?”
“No,” said Felix. “What’s that?”
Hyunjin was about to explain when he saw the way Felix’s mouth twitched a little, an amused little tilt to his lip. Hyunjin swatted him on the shoulder. “Brat,” he said. “Listen, I’m going to fix this, okay?”
“Okay,” said Felix easily. He had not questioned any of this, not Hyunjin making him come in here, not Hyunjin demanding to fix his hair for him. He had just followed and obeyed, so easy-going that if it had been anyone else, Hyunjin would have accused him of faking it, or of hiding his true thoughts behind a false smile. Yet somehow, with Felix, that was so clearly not the case, to Hyunjin’s eyes. He was just— easy-going. He was perfectly happy to do what Hyunjin wanted him to do, to let Hyunjin do whatever he wanted to him in turn. How had a person like this ever managed to work with Lee Jaerim.
“Where did you do this in the first place?” he asked, motioning to Felix’s hair. “If you tell me you bleached your hair in a gas station bathroom or something, I’ll cry.”
Felix shifted a little uncomfortably. “No,” he said. “I uh. I rented a love hotel room for a few hours, just long enough to do the job.”
It was marginally better than a gas station at least but not by much, and something about the thought of Felix in one of those places, even knowing they weren’t anything bad, made Hyunjin feel a little nauseous. Beyond anything else, who knew how clean those places were— or weren’t.
“Why did you bleach it anyway?” Hyunjin asked. If it were him on the run, he wouldn’t have been worrying about things like dyeing his hair. When he’d been on the run, he hadn’t even been wearing shoes in his size.
“I was trying to not look like myself,” Felix said after a moment, softer than before, looking at the tiled bathroom floor.
“I mean, you succeeded,” Hyunjin said. “But you turned yourself into a beacon, babe.” He plucked at the shoulder of Felix’s sweater. It was a drab thing, a washed out red, obviously old or possibly even second-hand, and so oversized on Felix that, while it looked cute, it drowned him. Personally, Hyunjin thought it deserved to be in the trash at this point, but he was also very aware that all of the clothing Felix owned, he’d had in the backpack that Minho had ripped and then dumped. “Do you mind this getting fucked up or do you want to take it off?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ll take it off,” Felix said hastily.
He did so without blinking, without hesitation, pulling it up over his face, folding it up and then handing it to Hyunjin. Hyunjin leaned out to put it on the desk, then found the towel he used for this kind of thing in his bag and handed it to Felix. “Put that around your shoulders,” he said.
Felix put it around his shoulders and immediately looked like he belonged in one of the charity adverts that popped up sometimes on the shows Hyunjin watched with Jeongin. Put him in black and white and add some sad piano music and people would be phoning in by the hundreds, Hyunjin thought. Felix was very pale, and very skinny. Hyunjin had noticed that the night before, noticed it once Felix had changed out of his normal clothes and into the pyjamas that Hyunjin had found for him, but like this, it was much more striking. His collarbones stood out in stark relief, each of his ribs visible.
It made Hyunjin’s head spin. It was like looking in the mirror circa five years ago.
“Christ,” he said. “You’re so skinny.”
It was not a compliment, and he saw Felix wince a little. “Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t— it’s been hard to get food.”
Hyunjin didn’t doubt it, considering his description of the past few months, but seeing it really hammered the point home. “Maybe if we stick you shirtless like this in the living room, Minho-hyung will cook food for you,” he said. “Make your eyes all big and pathetic— oh there, see, there you go.”
Felix laughed. “I don’t need anyone to cook for me,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”
That, for some reason, Hyunjin doubted. He made a disbelieving little sound and moved everything from the sink onto the desk outside and then said, “Turn around on the toilet, see if you can stretch far enough back to lean your head against the sink here, I don’t want to have to do it with your face hanging forwards.”
Felix did what he said, and they found that he was just tall enough to rest his shoulders against the rim of the sink, but that he was perched somewhat precariously against the toilet as he did it. “It’s okay,” Felix said, laying there awkwardly. “It’s not uncomfortable.”
This Hyunjin also doubted, but if Felix felt like he could cope with it, then Hyunjin wasn’t going to call him out on it. Instead he just pulled the shower head down and turned on the water, angling it away from Felix’s head as he waited for it to warm up. If it were anyone else, Hyunjin would spray them with the cold water but there was something so vulnerable about the way Felix looked with his head tipped back that he couldn't bring himself to do it.
When the water felt warm enough, he tested it tentatively against Felix’s head. “Is that okay?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Felix said. His eyes had slid shut at the first touch of warm water against his hair. “Yeah, it’s good.”
Hyunjin hummed at him and then got to soaking Felix’s hair properly. The water was warm against his hands, Felix’s hair not exactly soft, but better when damp. Felix had washed his hair last night but then Chan had made him do god-knew-what downstairs so Hyunjin bent to squeeze some of Jisung’s shampoo into his hand. Doing so brought him face to face with a bottle of the same brand of hair treatment that he used, which had appeared in Jisung’s bathroom after the third time Hyunjin had dyed his hair in there. This, Hyunjin knew, was meant for his use, because the bottle was untouched by Jisung. It was untouched by Hyunjin too; it was something of his version of the cold war, in his head. If he didn’t acknowledge it, then he didn’t have to thank Jisung for it.
He started to work the shampoo into Felix’s hair, firm but not too hard. He watched as Felix’s face smoothed out, any expression dropping away to leave only an empty contentment. It was fascinating to see, all of the tension in Felix’s face that Hyunjin hadn’t even known was there leaving him all of a sudden.
One time, one of the first times he’d left the old apartment after he started living there, he and Jeongin had found a cat on the street, one that Jeongin, fourteen and pretty dumb with it, had insisted on petting. Hyunjin hadn’t known to stop him and so they’d spent a solid fifteen minutes petting a half-feral street cat before Changbin found them and scolded them until Jeongin had cried about it.
But the look on Felix’s face reminded him of the one he’d seen on that cat’s face, an absolute sense of peace under the ministrations of Hyunjin’s hands building the shampoo into a lather. He looked perfectly content to be laying here, to have Hyunjin’s hands on him; it was like he had no idea of how vulnerable he seemed, how vulnerable he was. Like he had absolutely no inclination of the blood caked onto Hyunjin’s hands at this point.
He didn’t speak as he picked the shower head up and turned on the water. Felix didn’t say anything either, just let Hyunjin move his head this way and that, and for a bit Hyunjin wondered if Felix had simply fallen asleep, his breathing was so steady. He wouldn’t have blamed him if so, because he still had purple shadows under his eyes, but when he’d finished washing the shampoo out and murmured, “Lix? Are you sleeping?” Felix blinked his eyes open.
“No,” he said, his deep voice a little slow. “Should I sit up?”
“Yeah,” said Hyunjin, and helped him, unsure if the position would have hurt Felix’s back. But Felix seemed fine, blinking a bit more as he turned on the toilet seat to face Hyunjin again. Movement was coming back to his face but as slow as his voice had been; he looked a little like he was coming out of a trance. Hyunjin felt the distinct urge to cup his face and smoosh it.
Instead of doing that, he grabbed a towel and stepped in close so he could start scrubbing it at Felix’s hair. The urge to be gentle, to be softer than he usually would be, was here too. It left him feeling a little wrong-footed, the desire so strange inside him that he rubbed harder just to spite it. Felix took it for a long few seconds and then, when Hyunjin caught his ear with his finger, he went, “Oof.”
Hyunjin stopped. Lord, he felt guilty. “Sorry,” he said, and tossed the towel on top of the cistern behind Felix. Felix looked up at him, hair falling in damp strands around his face, every one of those freckles visible. He was so pretty, Hyunjin thought, with an odd sense of wistfulness, although he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because there was something innocent about that beauty, in a way that Hyunjin had never had the privilege to have.
“What’s next?” Felix asked, pulling the towel around his shoulders a little closer.
“Next,” Hyunjin said, “I’m going to put something that smells really bad on your hair and you’ll just have to sit with it.”
Felix smiled, then the smile dropped away. “Oh, but this is Jisung’s room,” he said. “Won’t it make his room smell bad? Maybe we should have done this in another place.”
Hyunjin had never really thought about it like that. Jisung had certainly never complained, but then he probably never would have, not to Hyunjin’s face. “Hmm,” he said, and then picked his way out of the bathroom again to go open the one window that Jisung had in his room, a large one that opened onto the street. It would have set off the alarm, which was probably going to annoy Seungmin, who would have to shut it back off, but Hyunjin was of the opinion that Seungmin had to get used to there being people actually living in the damn building. He’d have to remember to close it later, but it should hopefully deal with the smell of the toner.
“Right,” he said, picking up his gloves and starting to pull them onto his hands. “You just sit still and let me work, okay.”
Felix nodded. He watched as Hyunjin got out his mixing bowl, the bottles of developer and toner, and then his applicator brush. He shifted on the toilet seat, almost a little wiggle. “Wow,” he said, smiling again, so wide his face was almost scrunched up. “It’s like you’re a professional. I didn’t know you could do this kind of thing at home.”
Hyunjin rolled his eyes. “Of course you can,” he said. “I wouldn’t recommend it if you were doing it yourself, but luckily for you, I am a professional.” He might as well be, at this point, with the amount of research he had done before he’d bleached his hair that first time. He’d had nightmares of turning his hair green.
Felix nodded. He looked a little amused by it all, although Hyunjin wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, if he hadn’t thought they could do it like this at home. Maybe he really didn’t have any idea. Maybe he’d never changed his hair colour before he’d bleached the fuck out of it in a love hotel bathroom.
Hyunjin mixed in the developer with the toner, stirring it as he felt Felix’s eyes on him. Felix looked curious more than anything, and although Hyunjin usually hated it when people watched him working at something, he didn’t mind it when it was clearly just interest and not fear that he would hurt himself, like the way Changbin usually watched him, or the way Minho sometimes did when he was cooking in the kitchen. He thought about maybe putting on a show for Felix, but that would probably end up with everything on the floor and he didn’t feel like cleaning it up.
“Okay,” he said, brandishing the applicator brush like a weapon. “Close your eyes. This will be cold.”
Felix looked like he was physically bracing himself for it, when Hyunjin brought the toner to his hair. He flinched at the first touch of it but then calmed; he seemed to have thought that by cold, Hyunjin meant icy, not just a little surprising. His face, after a few swipes of the brush through his hair — Hyunjin making sure to hit every single bit of that awful yellow-blonde — smoothed out again. It was less so than before, like it was different with the brush but he still just looked— happy enough to be here.
“This is nice,” Felix said, after a few minutes, when Hyunjin was just over halfway finished.
Hyunjin hid his smile, even though Felix had his eyes closed and couldn’t see him. “Yeah?” he asked. “Not too cold?”
“I got used to it,” Felix said. “And it feels a lot better than the bleach did.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Hyunjin said, trying to carefully work around Felix’s ears. “Everything feels better than bleach.”
“Feels nice,” Felix said again, sounding sleepy now. “I like it.”
He really was sweet, Hyunjin thought, as he started on the last bit of damp hair. If someone had done this for Hyunjin, offered to help him fix his hair, he would have insisted on doing everything himself. He did not like people touching him if he could help it, and he especially did not like people touching his hair. It reminded him too much of being held like that, of fingers gripping him hard, pulling it out sometimes. He would not have sat with his eyes closed, patiently and obediently.
“Alright,” he said, a few minutes of silence later, setting the brush back down in the bowl, trying to ignore all the hair in it. He stripped off his gloves and leaned slightly out of the room to dump them into Jisung’s little trash can under his desk. Felix opened his eyes again, a slow blink exactly the way that cat had done it all those years ago.
“Come and sit out here on Jisung’s bed,” he told Felix. “We’ll use his computer.”
Felix followed him out of the bathroom and sat gingerly on the edge of Jisung’s bed. He did not look like he believed he really had permission to be there, but Jisung wouldn’t mind, Hyunjin knew. He was less certain that Jisung wouldn’t mind him helping himself to Jisung’s computer, but if he really cared he should have changed his password after that time he told it to Hyunjin, and he had never. So it served him right.
He typed in the password — a mix of Jisung’s birthday, favourite rap artist, and what Hyunjin thought must be the mangled name of his high school — and had a brief moment, just before he hit enter, of realising that he hadn’t given any thought to what Jisung might have been doing before he put it to sleep. If Hyunjin opened this computer and was greeted with porn, he’d go murder Jisung himself.
But no, the computer opened onto an article about — Hyunjin squinted at it — something to do with the history of baseball, a sport that Hyunjin knew Jisung did not play and did not have any interest in. He did not understand this man at all sometimes. He opened up Youtube in a new tab and then looked back at Felix, who was watching him with the bare shadow of a frown.
“What do you want to watch?” he asked.
“You knew his password,” Felix said. “How do you know his password?”
“He told me,” Hyunjin said dismissively. “I know you’re some kind of computer security guru but ignore it for now, he just told me one time. What are we going to watch? We have to wait fifteen minutes for that stuff to really work.”
Felix gave him a little squinty-eyed look but said, “Oh, I don’t know. Have you ever watched dog grooming videos? They’re pretty fun.”
Hyunjin had not, and now he needed to see them more than he could possibly express. He’d wanted a dog, when he was a kid, and he wanted one now, too, although he’d never worked up to asking Chan if they could get one. The thought of having some kind of fluffy little creature running around under their feet felt a little silly, undermining, almost. They could get something bigger, something more akin to a guard dog, but Hyunjin didn’t want something like that. He’d always wanted something small and pretty.
After fifteen minutes of watching some of the most impossibly adorable animals to grace the planet get made, somehow, even cuter, Felix showed him how to set the computer back to sleep mode and then dutifully went back to the bathroom. Hyunjin helped him lay his head back against the sink, once again feeling like it must have been so uncomfortable, yet Felix showed none of it. He was even smiling.
Hyunjin watched as that smile dropped away at the first touch of the warm water, the blank expression coming to Felix’s face even faster now. Had Hyunjin ever experienced something like that, the way Felix seemed like his entire brain had switched off as Hyunjin ran his hand through his hair, the first swipe through to clear out the toner. Hyunjin didn’t think he was this relaxed even in sleep, and yet here Felix was.
Hyunjin had washed Jeongin’s hair for him a couple of times, when Jeongin had his broken arm and couldn’t manage it around his cast. Jeongin had not been like this, happy to lay still and let Hyunjin work. He’d been very grumpy about the whole thing, annoyed at not having full control over something, and embarrassed about his scrawny teenage body, even though Hyunjin hadn’t looked much better at the time. Felix looked like he was in a trance or something; he looked the way the articles on meditation had said Hyunjin would feel if he tried it. Instead, he’d just had panic attacks.
He slid his fingers through Felix’s hair again, watched as Felix tilted his head into the touch and sighed a little. “Oh, angel,” Hyunjin murmured, filled with a shocking sense of tenderness at the sight of it. “Angel baby. How on earth did you survive for so long on the streets?”
Felix’s voice, when it came, was so slow and quiet it sounded like he was half-asleep. “I moved around a lot,” he said, barely audible over the sound of the water. “I used to ride the bus a lot at the start, but then I had to save my money, so I walked a bunch.”
“Where did you sleep,” Hyunjin asked.
“Wherever I could,” Felix said. “I didn’t sleep a lot. Sometimes I would rent a hotel room if I really needed to, or I found a jjimjilbang sometimes, but mostly it was just— wherever I could find something that seemed safe.”
None of it would have been safe, Hyunjin knew. Not for someone like Felix, small and skinny and not obviously able to defend himself. He started to rub shampoo into Felix’s hair, trying to figure out what he wanted to say. He was filled with visions of Felix doing what he had done, laying in some doorway somewhere with no blanket or anything, and no Jeongin to find him and bring him home. It was more distressing than he’d thought it would be, to imagine it.
“But you had money,” he said, almost like he was trying to reassure himself more than anything else. He hadn’t had any money, he technically hadn’t even had the clothes on his back since he’d taken them off a dead body.
“A bit,” Felix said. His voice was getting slower and slower the longer Hyunjin washed his hair, and there was a note there that suggested that he wasn’t even really aware of what he was saying. He sounded like Jeongin did when someone woke him up suddenly from a nap. “Not now. It’s why I came here.”
He fell silent. Hyunjin started to wash the shampoo out, keeping his hands as gentle as he possibly could, more gentle than he had been the first time. “Why you came here?” he prompted, after long seconds of nothing but the rush of the water.
“Mm,” Felix mumbled. “I almost ran out. No money. No food. I was tired.” He paused for a moment, then sighed again. Despite the topic of the conversation, he still sounded so perfectly content. “I was desperate.”
Hyunjin knew that feeling, knew it down to his bones. He’d experienced it in different circumstances, wildly different, but he knew what it was like to have nothing, absolutely nothing. He’d been rescued, found and brought into this place when he had needed it most, before the reality of the situation could have really sunk in.
But no wonder he could count every single one of Felix’s ribs, no wonder the bags under his eyes were visible from space. He felt, the emotion so strong it surprised him all over again, so grateful that Felix, who let Hyunjin wash his hair, trusting and sweet, had found his way to them in turn.
“We really do need to feed you up,” he said, in lieu of saying something else, something more— open than he wanted to, as he turned the water off. “Get some meat on your bones. That way I won’t be afraid of breaking you if I accidentally roll on top of you in the night.”
He expected Felix to laugh but instead Felix just lay there, like he hadn’t realised the water had been turned off, for a few seconds. Eventually Hyunjin put a hand against his shoulder and slowly raised him, and watched as Felix came back to himself. “You like people playing with your hair,” he said, an observation more than anything. Felix went a little pink.
“I guess,” he said. “I didn’t— nobody ever did that before. I didn’t know I liked it. But it was nice. This is nice,” he added, that slow sunshine smile coming back onto his face as he looked at Hyunjin. “It’s strange, but I feel like— like I’ve known you longer. Like I’ve known you forever. Is that weird? That’s probably weird.”
“No,” said Hyunjin slowly. “Well, yes, it’s weird, but— I know what you mean. I know what you mean.”
Felix kept smiling at him. Hyunjin felt himself smile back, unable to do anything otherwise in the face of a smile like that. God, he thought, fucking hell. Was this what it had been like for Chan and Changbin all those years ago, was this what the urge to protect and care for felt like? No wonder they’d done so much for him.
“Come on,” he said, draping his hair drying towel over Felix’s head. “Let’s get you finished up.”
——
Minho had been staring at the blueprints for about ten minutes without moving when the keypad outside sounded. He looked up to see who it was and watched as Hyunjin came in, followed by Felix. “You,” he said, pointing at Felix, who stuttered to a stop so suddenly that the door tried to swing shut on him, and hit him in the shoulder.
“Oh, um,” said Felix, as he shuffled out of the way and the door clicked shut. “Yes?”
“He has a name, hyung,” said Hyunjin.
He did have a name, but that didn’t mean Minho had to use it. He pointed at the empty chair opposite him. “Sit down,” he said. “I need to ask you some stuff about this job.”
“Oh,” said Felix again. He did not look enthusiastic about the idea. In fact, when he had come in, he had been smiling at something Hyunjin had said, and that smile had been replaced almost completely with a very wary look. Minho wondered if he was going to refuse, but instead he just came to the table and sat in the chair Minho had pointed to.
“Hyung,” said Hyunjin, who had also wandered over to the table and now stood with a hand against Felix’s shoulder. “If I go take a shower, will you promise me to be nice?”
Minho had no idea what had happened here to make Hyunjin this protective of an absolute newcomer, but he wasn’t sure he liked it. Hyunjin was not like Jeongin, automatically friendly with everyone. Hyunjin had treated every new addition with mild discomfort at best, or outright hostility at worst. His first meeting with Jisung had gone so badly that for a while Minho hoped it meant they could throw Jisung out again. That hadn’t happened, and he was grateful for it now, but it made Hyunjin’s easy acceptance of Felix stand out considerably.
“Am I ever nice?” he asked dryly, then when Hyunjin opened his mouth, he added, “Don’t answer that. I’m not going to hurt him, okay? I just need some information from him so I can come up with something for Chan-hyung.”
Hyunjin was frowning at him but instead of saying anything he just leaned over Felix to look him in the face and said, “Will you be okay here while I go shower? I can stay if you want.”
Felix shook his head. “Hyunjin, I’ll be fine. I don’t mind answering some questions.”
Hyunjin nodded slowly, then disappeared into the hallway, the sound of a door opening and shutting sounding soon after. Minho turned back to the table, where he had spread everything Seungmin had printed out for him. He’d checked over the financial records that had been included; they were over six months out of date but they provided some indication of how much they might be able to take on the night from just the gambling hall itself. The blueprints had been printed out in duplicate, each time in a different colour, and he’d chosen a copy of each floor in a different colour to distinguish them at first glance. These took up centre space: the first floor, mostly familiar from Chan’s redacted version but far more detailed; the second floor, with the private rooms and the employee area; and the third floor, with the offices and in-take area.
Minho pointed to this last page. “Is it as confusing up there as it looks on this blueprint?” he asked.
Felix nodded. “Yeah,” he said, tracing a finger from the staircase along a series of hallways until he reached the room labelled as the Magpie’s office. “I labelled everything here with what’s actually inside, but none of the hallways are named and all the rooms just have numbers on them when you’re up there. So if you don’t know which room you want, it’s difficult to find.”
“I thought that would be the case,” Minho said. It’s what he would have done, after all. The Magpie’s office was right in the middle of it all, an internal room that would have no windows and apparently only one entry point. “And what’s the security like?”
“For the main office or for the place as a whole?” Felix asked, looking up at him. He watched Felix’s eyes flicker across the left side of his face before settling very firmly on Minho’s right eye instead. It gave Minho a grim sense of satisfaction.
“All of it,” he said simply. “Start with this main office.”
“It’s pretty bare, up here,” Felix said. “There’s always two guys outside the doors. The trained kind, with guns. Most of the security up on that level is through the cameras, which feed through to the security room here.” He tapped the room, on the third floor just beyond where the staircase let up. “There’s cameras over every inch of the place, there’s not any kind of blind spot. I know because I checked myself.”
Minho nodded slowly. The cameras could be a problem, but probably not, if they could get Seungmin, or Felix himself, close enough to hack the feed. They’d done that so many times before that if it hadn’t been for whatever security Felix had added to it, Seungmin could probably do it in his sleep.
“You said you could get us past the security system,” he said. “That includes the cameras, I presume?”
Felix nodded. “But not from here, we’d have to be much closer to Blackbird’s to do that. You’ll have to be close enough to the network to hack it.”
Minho nodded. “We’ll probably need some sort of base we can move then,” he mused aloud. “A van, perhaps. Something Seungmin can fit up for the purpose.”
There was the sound of another door in the hallway opening. It was not Hyunjin in the bathroom, because they could hear the faint noise of the shower. A moment later Jeongin padded into the room. His feet were bare, and he was wearing a pair of grey sweatpants and a white t-shirt with a design on the front, so faded that it was almost gone completely. It was a shirt that he had owned before Minho had even joined them. It was considerably tighter across the shoulders than it had been back then. He was carrying a book, and his hair was ruffled, his face a little puffy, like he had just woken up.
“Hello, hyung,” he said, as he trailed his way to the couch. “Oh, and Felix-hyung, hello.”
“Hello, Jeongin,” said Felix. He looked a little surprised to have been greeted, and so casually too.
“You look like you just woke up, baby boy,” Minho said. He couldn’t keep the amusement from his voice, although he managed to prevent anything else from slipping out. How many times through the years had he seen Jeongin look like this, just woken up and a little grumpy with it, and yet it still was cute every time.
“Maybe I did,” said Jeongin. He flung himself down on the couch, curled up against the arm in such a way that Minho, from where he was sitting, could only see the top of his dark hair. Minho did not smile at the sight. Instead, he turned his attention back to the papers on the table.
“How much security is there throughout the rest of the place?” he asked Felix.
“A lot,” said Felix, a little grim. “Mostly on the first floor, where most of the patrons are. A mix of obvious security, in uniform, and plainclothes guards too, who blend in, but they’re usually more focused on making sure people aren’t obviously cheating at the tables, since the cameras might not pick that up.”
“Those won’t matter if we go in during the daytime,” Minho said. “Security will be lighter then.”
Felix shook his head. “Lighter on a technicality,” he said. “There are the same number of uniformed guards in the daytime as at night.”
“And how many is that?” Minho demanded.
“Twenty,” said Felix. Minho almost cursed. “They’re on a pretty regular rotation, covering all the entrances and exits, and between them and the cameras, every inch of the first two floors are covered. The cameras run twenty-four seven too, someone is watching them the entire time. It’s better to go in at night, when it’s busy. More people means nobody will notice any noise you make, or even strange faces, there’s new people there every single night.”
Minho stared at the blueprints, the gears in his brain turning round and round. It was something of a spanner in the works to realise that things would be just as well guarded in the daytime as nighttime, but perhaps the cover of all those patrons really would mean they could go as unnoticed as possible. If the crowd was anything like it was at Maniac, they should probably be able to get to the second floor at least without much trouble.
His phone buzzed on the table next to him. He glanced at it and saw a message from Seungmin: send Felix down here. Minho flicked a glance at where he knew the camera was set up in the corner of the room, and then turned his phone over so he couldn’t see the screen.
Felix shuffled through the papers until he found a print out of the second floor plan and put it on top. “The problem is here,” he said, pointing at where the staircase up to the third floor started, in the depths of the employee only section. “There are two guards on this staircase at all times, stopping anyone without authorization going up there.”
“And it’s only employees who have authorization?” Minho asked. “All the employees wear uniforms, yes? Could we disguise ourselves?”
“It would work on the waiters, and the other staff,” Felix said. “It could maybe get us into the back area if we were lucky. But all the security are trained to recognise every face who works there, and they’d notice immediately if they didn’t recognise whoever was wearing the uniform. Besides, not every employee has authorization. Most of them don’t, the only people allowed up there work for the Magpie directly, not for the casino. And the guards assigned to the staircase know the faces of everyone allowed.”
“What about the elevators?” Minho asked, still thinking, trying to reason his way out of this. “Could we pop the ceiling, go up through the elevator shaft?” They’d done that before, on one of the bigger jobs. Jisung had come back complaining about how next time they needed to take a stepladder with them.
“There are elevators for the clients,” Felix said, “but they only go up to the second floor.”
“Even with an access key?” Minho asked.
“They literally only go up two floors,” Felix said. “And now that I think about it, it’s probably to prevent exactly what we’re planning on doing from happening.”
Minho sat back in his chair, looking at the blueprints: the first floor in black, the second in blue, the third in red. There was a solution here, he knew. There was always a solution, to every problem that a plan threw into his face. It was like he had told Chan the night before. Every job was theoretically doable, every job could have a plan assigned to it, it was just that there was no way of knowing if it could work. Chan had dismissed that concern but it was a concern that Minho felt keenly. A shoddy plan, one that leaked in any direction, would be likely to get one of them killed. Minho did not want to be responsible for that.
He glanced up at Felix, who was also frowning down at the blueprints. It disturbed him, a little, how much information Felix was giving him — perverse, perhaps, when he was demanding said information, but it was how he worked. Felix’s answers had been thorough, and more than that, they had been helpful. He did not seem to be leading Minho down any one path or another, and instead seemed perfectly happy to shoot down most of Minho’s ideas with relevant information that he actively volunteered. Minho had been expecting to have to pry most of this out of him.
That did not mean that he trusted Felix. He still found it a little far fetched that someone would simply place all of this into their hands without wanting anything in return. But he could not deny that Felix was helpful.
There was a shuffle; Jeongin, getting to his feet. Minho’s instincts said to look at him immediately, to see what he was doing, and so instead of doing that he waited a couple of seconds before he glanced over. Jeongin was coming to the table, looking a little bit more alert and awake now. He rested a hand against the table, leaning over all the blueprints, scanning them. Then he said, “What about the roof?”
“What?” asked Minho.
“The roof,” Jeongin repeated. “All the buildings are pretty close together, after all. Could we get in through the roof and go down to the third floor that way? That seems much easier than trying to get up from the ground level somehow.”
“There is a roof entrance,” Felix said. “It’s kept locked with a single guard.”
Minho looked at Jeongin, who had his head slightly tilted as he looked back. The feeling inside Minho was beyond words — part of his brain was ticking along at a pace that was remarkable, figuring out new ways of dealing with the problem. Most of him, though, was filled with the kind of affection that he, before he met Jeongin, had not known himself capable of.
“Baby boy,” he said. “You’re fucking brilliant.”
Jeongin blushed, red all over. He looked away, putting a hand to his face, mumbling something that Minho couldn’t make out. But he meant it — and he thought that Jeongin needed to hear it. The others never really asked him for his opinion, not on things like jobs. Despite him being the same age Minho had been when he joined up, Chan seemed determined to keep Jeongin from the fray of things for as long as possible. Minho did not blame him, necessarily — or he didn’t blame him now. It had pissed him off when he’d first joined. But Minho at nineteen had been experienced, had spent time inside and had done jobs with other crews. Jeongin had none of that.
But that didn’t mean Jeongin didn’t have insight, or intelligence. He knew Jeongin was sometimes inclined to deny these things himself, a little self-conscious about his lack of real education. But that didn’t matter, it never had done. Jeongin was smart where it was needed, and he had been smart here, picking up on something that Minho had completely overlooked.
“It is a good idea,” Felix said. “I don’t think they really expect people to come down from the roof.”
Minho nodded slowly. If it was a single guard on a roof, they could easily deal with that. Provided they could stop the rest of the security from finding out their buddy on the roof was dead, they didn’t need to worry about that. Locks could be picked, or hacked. And it would be much easier to come down from the roof into the hallways and bypass all the other guards, than trying to get upstairs. Quieter, too.
Jeongin, still red, walked back to the couch and lay down on it this time, his legs up against the wall. Minho couldn’t see his face at all now. It was a bit of a shame, since Minho saw him blush so rarely nowadays, but it was almost certainly for the best. There were things Minho was allowed to do, and those he was not, and staring at Jeongin just because he was cute was certainly one of the latter. He very much did not have that right.
He motioned to the blueprints. “There’s nothing here about the vault,” he said. “You said you know the location. Have you been inside?”
Felix nodded. “Not often, though,” he said. He definitely looked more uncomfortable with this line of questioning already. “I set up the security there, which meant I had to be on the premises, but I didn’t go there more than that. I did see the blueprints a couple of times, too.”
Minho fished around until he found the financial record printouts and turned them over, sliding the blank side over to Felix along with a pencil. “Draw me as much of a blueprint as you can,” he said. “I don’t care about sizing or whatever, I just want a basic layout, preferably showing a route from the door to where they keep all the money.”
Felix took the pencil hesitatingly. This was where Minho thought he might actually refuse — of all his claims, the knowledge of the vault had struck Minho as a little off, although he supposed if Felix had done the security, he very probably had visited the place. But Felix just said, “Uh, I can draw it, but it might take a little time. Do you need it right now? If you give me until tomorrow, I can try to remember as much as possible.”
Minho had wanted it now, preferably five seconds ago, but he could admit that it was something that would be better if time was taken on it. So he nodded reluctantly. “Tomorrow,” he said. “As soon as possible.”
Felix nodded back. “If you do get some kind of van,” he said, “and we can get close enough to the vault, too, I can get into the security cameras and take some screenshots. That way we could cross-reference my map.”
Minho watched him, watched as Felix’s eyes flickered back into something unsure, something wary, as the seconds ticked by and Minho didn’t speak. Minho thought — is he being too helpful? Was this just someone who wanted a job to get done, someone enthusiastic and willing to give their information up? More than that, it was striking Minho as odd that someone so young had apparently been in charge of something as important as the entire security for the casino and the vault.
It was not unheard of, he supposed, for there to be geniuses working in the industry — what was Seungmin, if not something of a genius. What was Chan, with his little cut of the pie set up at such a young age. It was just that Minho could not help but feel that something didn’t add up here. And he could not be sure if it was gut instinct or simply paranoia telling him that.
The keypad outside again. Minho looked past Felix to the door where Seungmin had just stuck his head in. He didn’t bother coming all the way inside. Sometimes it felt like Seungmin was allergic to the trappings of normal life, which was something Minho could certainly relate to, but it was weird, on Seungmin. He so rarely left his workshop, rarely came upstairs to the apartment if it wasn’t just to retrieve food, and yet Seungmin was expressly welcome here. He was not like Minho, who tried to avoid coming here if he could help it, not wanting them to be uncomfortable in his presence. Seungmin did not make any of them uncomfortable.
“Fuck you,” Seungmin said to Minho, scowling. Minho gave him one of his nastier smiles, feeling the stiffness of his scars pull at the left corner of his mouth. Seungmin ignored him and addressed Felix instead. “Nice hair. Will you come down to the workshop with me? I want to show you around.”
“Oh, sure,” said Felix, then he looked back at Minho uncertainly. “Unless, I mean, do you still need me? If you need anything else, I can stay here.”
Minho sighed. Seungmin was glaring at him from across the room and while it was like being given a death glare from a puppy, Minho had very little interest right now in annoying him further. They were finished, besides. Until he had that map of the vault, he didn’t need Felix for anything else. He could work on this by himself. He waved a hand. “No,” he said. “You can go with Seungmin.”
——
Seungmin followed Felix into the workshop, hoping that when Hyunjin got out of the shower and checked his phone, he would see the five text messages from Seungmin and feel suitably guilty about making Seungmin climb all the fucking stairs up to the apartment to fetch Felix. Minho was a lost cause, and Seungmin should have known that, and Jeongin’s phone had been sitting on Seungmin’s desk for two days because he’d left it in the workshop and Seungmin was seeing how long it took for Chan to text them all asking if they’d seen it. None of that surprised him. Hyunjin taking a shower in the middle of the day was just stupid, in Seungmin’s opinion.
“Right,” he said, as the door clicked shut behind him. “You were in here last night but welcome to my domain.”
The workshop was a little messier than it had been the night before, because Jisung had been down to fix some faulty wiring in a trip alarm that Seungmin had made for him a while back, and he was useless at cleaning up after himself. There were tools left out on the table, strips of wiring scattered everywhere. Seungmin’s computer monitors were open to the camera feeds — Minho and Jeongin in the living room, Chan in his office hunched over his laptop, Jisung nowhere to be found and probably in his room.
Felix, standing in the middle of the room, looked around at the table, the make-shift shelving units filled with lidded containers of everything they could possibly need, and said, “It really is well-stocked in here.”
Seungmin shrugged. It was, he could admit that. He had only worked with a couple of teams before he joined with Chan, but none of them had given him the kind of seemingly unlimited budget that Chan had bestowed upon him. This had, Seungmin knew, been something of a retention tactic when Seungmin had first joined up. Chan had not been the only gang leader itching to sign Seungmin to their crew when his last group had fallen apart at the seams, and he had offered Seungmin this space and the money to do what he liked as a way of getting Seungmin on board.
Seungmin had never told Chan this, but Seungmin had been willing to join him as soon as Chan extended the offer; he had not really needed all of this to sweeten the deal. Chan had already had a name for himself, a reputation. The work he was doing resonated with Seungmin, made him think that maybe he and Chan could see eye-to-eye. Seungmin had spent most of his career with slightly larger groups, getting caught in the crossfires of the drama and petty power squabbles that came with that.
When Seungmin had joined Chan’s team, he had not even known that Jeongin and Hyunjin existed. All he had known was that Chan’s right hand man had been with him since they were young teenagers, and that Chan had managed to recruit and keep Lee Minho. People had talked about that as if Chan had somehow leashed and tamed a wild animal. Something about that had screamed stability, to Seungmin. And he had been craving that for years.
“Chan-hyung is a no expense spared kind of guy,” he said. “Changbin-hyung said something about you being good with bombs, is that true?”
“It’s a side interest,” Felix said. He looked far less comfortable talking about this than he had the night before talking about his work on computers. “More self-taught than my stuff with the computers is, although I still mostly taught myself that too.”
“What sparked the interest in bombs?” Seungmin asked. He could understand, he thought, a little of where Felix’s discomfort was coming from. It did not seem to match him — or what little Seungmin knew of him. He had watched Felix all day on the cameras, through his trip to the basement with Chan, his terrible shooting, his defeat at Jisung’s hands. He did not seem like a violent person, and when Seungmin thought back to middle school, he would not have said that boy seemed like one either. The bombs seemed like a departure from that somehow.
“The programming part,” Felix said. “I was working on alarms at first, the kind I could program to only go off in certain situations or at certain points of time. Then I started making small charges with whatever I could get out of my dad’s workshops, programming them to explode when I wanted them to go. It kind of built from there.” He scratched the back of his neck, shrugging a little. “It was never meant to be anything more than personal interest, my dad didn’t even know I was really experimenting with it. But I figured it was worth bringing up.” He pointed to the monitors. “After all, you probably saw how little I can fight, right?”
“I did see that,” Seungmin said. “Don’t worry, I can’t fight either.” Seungmin refused to learn, too. Chan had never mandated it for him, possibly too afraid that Seungmin would leave over it. Changbin had tried to coax him down to the basement a few times but Seungmin had, at first, simply ignored him, and then later threatened to stop sleeping with him if he kept pushing it.
I want you to be able to defend yourself, Changbin had said.
Hyung, I never fucking leave the house, Seungmin had retorted.
“Anyway,” Seungmin said. “The tour. You’ve seen my computer set up, please don’t ever touch it. If you need a computer, we have about ten of them upstairs that I’ll set up for you.”
This was another example of the bluntness that people often didn’t like from Seungmin, but Felix just smiled, perfectly easy-going, and said, “Okay, that seems fair, I won’t touch it. Will you show me it, though? It looks great.”
Seungmin did so, and then showed Felix the shelving units, all the old drink coolers with the doors taken off. They really did, at this point, have almost everything Seungmin could possibly need, and some things he did not think he would ever need but liked to have regardless: tubs of wires in every colour; spanners and screwdrivers and drill bits in every possible size; hammers that ranged from barely anything to one that was slightly too heavy for him to actually use; replacements for the clamps attached to the work desk and his soldering iron; a motley collection of electronic circuit boards.
Felix looked through it all with an expression on his face like a kid on Christmas morning. “Wow,” he said, as he rummaged through all the wires. “I had to literally steal this stuff back when I worked for the Magpie.”
It was interesting, Seungmin thought, how Felix only ever referred to his father by his title. It was a distancing technique, Seungmin knew, because he referred to the man by his title all the time as a distancing technique too. It was easier to forget that he had once run in something of the same circles as the man if he did not use his name — he had not been in the industry, not at that time, but his parents had almost certainly had friends in common before everything went to shit. Seungmin preferred to let him be the Magpie, the monster, who was not a flesh and blood man in the slightest.
“What did Minho-hyung say about his plan?” he asked, as Felix moved into picking out different sizes and shapes of circuit boards.
“Oh,” said Felix, dropping the circuit boards back into their tub. “Well, the security systems for the casino and the vault are on different, private networks. We won’t be able to hack into them from here, we’ll need to be close enough to access it. So he says we’re probably going to need a van.”
Seungmin bit back a curse. He’d suspected that, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise — what security system, in this day and age, wasn’t held on a private server — but that made it sound like he’d have to actually go on the job itself. “Doesn’t that mean we’ll need two vans?” he asked. “One for each place?”
“They’re close enough together that if we can pick a good spot, we might be able to just have the single van,” Felix said. “But we’ll have to do test runs for that.”
Seungmin sighed. “Either way, it sounds like I’m going to have to be on the ground.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Felix, sounding a little surprised. “I figured you’d be with me?”
That was true — maybe Seungmin had always been destined to go on this job, because if there was one thing Minho was unlikely to do, it was to leave something as important as getting them past the systems and cameras up to someone he did not know and had not properly vetted. Seungmin would have to go along just to make sure Felix did what he was supposed to do. It was mostly just annoying, for Seungmin. He’d chosen his role in this industry very carefully. It had not just been about his natural talent for this sort of thing; he did not want to go on jobs.
He’d done it before, when there’d been no other choice, and he’d do it for this one, because the job was too big, too potentially important to refuse, but that didn’t mean he was going to be happy about it. In fact, he was going to be a big brat about it and everyone could deal with that.
“A van,” he said. It couldn’t be anything too big, nothing obtrusive that would draw too much attention, but it would have to be big enough to contain all the equipment. They would need computers and enough screens to see everything he would need to see, and if it were him and Felix in there together, they’d need the space.
He looked at Felix, who had gone back to exploring all the boxes and tubs that Seungmin had. He’d bypassed anything that could be considered a weapon and was now poking through a small box of tiny screws. Seungmin said, “You said you were self-taught, mostly, your dad didn’t get you training for it?”
Felix paused for a moment but when he spoke, he glanced back over his shoulder at Seungmin and met his gaze easily enough. “Ah, no, for the most part, he didn’t want to encourage it. He wanted me to be— more of a muscle guy, if I’m honest. That didn’t work out so well, so eventually he let me stick with this. By that point, I’d already learned everything on my own.”
“But he didn’t know about the bombs,” Seungmin said.
“No,” said Felix. “I didn’t want him to know. He’d want to utilise them, if he knew.”
Interesting, then, that Felix had not only brought it up with them, but actively used it as something to sweeten the deal. Was that a sign of him trusting them to not abuse it, or simply knowing how much destruction his father could do with weaponry like that so easily available? Probably the latter, Seungmin thought. Felix really, truly, did not seem to have any scales left on his eyes when it came to his dad.
“This place really is amazing,” Felix said, turning to look at him fully now, playing with a hole in the bottom of his sweater. He seemed like he maybe did that as a nervous thing, but it was making the hole bigger before Seungmin’s eyes. “You’re so lucky to have something like this.”
Seungmin knew he was — and he could hear, too, the wistful note in Felix’s voice. He could have offered to let Felix come down here to make stuff, but he wouldn’t. If Felix needed to make something for a job, then he could have the space, but Seungmin would ensure he was there to watch over him. He would not allow Felix access to this space without supervision. He was not that naive, not that careless of the safety of his— team.
“Let me know what else Minho-hyung comes up with,” he said. “Tell him that if we do need a van, I can source one for us.”
Felix nodded slowly, already stepping to the door. Clearly, he had read the dismissal in Seungmin’s tone. Was he really that easy-going, to simply accept this level of rudeness from someone without any word of complaint? If so, no wonder he was already getting along with Hyunjin. If not, Seungmin wondered when he might snap. Who he might snap on. Seungmin seemed to be making himself a hell of a target, but he supposed that’s what happened when you, and only you, knew the truth of something.
He watched Felix slip out of the workroom door, which shut heavily behind him. Seungmin turned to his wall of supplies and started picking things out. He would work on something, he had decided, somewhere in the midst of that conversation. Something that required his hands, something tangible that he would be able to hold afterwards, and hold up to show that he was real, and alive. All of this living in the memories of his past was starting to take a toll on him.
——
Chan climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, his brain still buzzing despite the tiredness he felt. It had been a long day: an early start after a late night, and more things to get done than he had felt was possible. This was not unusual, and he preferred it this way, preferred to sink himself into his work whenever he could, but it took a toll nonetheless, and now he was hungry and happy to be done with it.
He let himself into the apartment, smothering a yawn against his hand, and then almost stopped dead. He had not forgotten about Felix — how could he — but his tired mind had lapsed a little, and he got a jolt of shock when he saw Felix’s pale hair, the boy himself sitting on one of the couches. Whatever Hyunjin had done to his hair made him look different enough that for a moment, Chan hadn’t quite recognised him.
Felix’s face snapped to him, and Chan moved — smoothly, he thought — into the apartment fully, trying not to make too much of a fool of himself.
He smiled, shutting the door carefully behind him, and said, “Hello, everyone.”
Jeongin, laying on the couch opposite Felix’s with his legs and feet up against the wall in the way that Changbin tried to get him to stop doing weekly, looked across at him and said, “Hi, hyung!”
Minho, sitting at the kitchen table, had already been looking at him from the moment the door had opened, likely zeroed in from the moment he heard the beep of the keypad outside, and gave him a nod. Felix waved a little, an endearingly awkward motion, and then lowered his hand, looking a little pink.
What had Hyunjin done, Chan thought, a little despairingly. Gone was the patchy yellow-blond that had so washed Felix out, left him looking even more gaunt than his skinniness would have left him anyway. Now Felix’s hair was a softer, platinum blond that no longer seemed so frizzy and dry. It was pulled back, too, into a little half-ponytail, all of the wispy bits of hair around Felix’s face looking soft now that it was clean and fluffy with it. Someone, and Chan was guessing this was Hyunjin too, had tied a ribbon around the ponytail, a red one almost the same shade as Felix’s sweater, the ends long and dangling. It looked— pretty. It looked prettier than Chan knew what to do with.
He was staring, maybe; he’d certainly been staring earlier, in the basement, as he’d watched Felix spar with Jisung. How humiliating, to have been caught at it by Jisung of all people. He was lucky that Jisung had just thought he was preoccupied with the fighting and not— anything else. Not with the growing sense of respect he had felt at how Felix had constantly picked himself up off the floor and tried again, even though he was obviously tired and never going to win. Not with the admiration Chan had already felt for Felix’s looks, his boyish prettiness, those freckles.
Not with the way, still playing on his mind hours later, it had felt when his finger had touched Felix’s bare skin.
It was why he was so careful to avoid touching Felix even a little for the rest of the session, doing his best to keep his absolute distance. His reaction had shocked him. He had adjusted his hand quickly, but not quickly enough. Felix’s skin had been soft and warm, his eyes so big as he had looked at Chan. There was something about him, probably his skinny waifness, that made Chan surprised every time he looked and did not have to look down.
He wrenched his eyes away, looked at Minho instead. “How are you getting on?” he asked.
Minho shrugged. It was probably a good sign that he was sitting in this room with Felix, and Felix didn’t look upset or even any more nervous than he had looked with Chan in the basement. Jisung had been very skittish around Minho for the first few weeks, after Minho had snapped at Jisung’s too-early attempts at getting to know him. “It’s coming along,” Minho said. “I think we need a van.”
Chan raised an eyebrow but didn’t question it. There would be time, later, to get into the details, but right now he was tired and it was getting late. He nodded, and then turned to Jeongin on the couch. Jeongin had apparently been reading a book; it was open on his chest. Chan went over to him and plucked it up. It was one of Jisung’s comic books. “I didn’t know you knew how to do that,” Chan said, flipping through it with his thumb holding Jeongin’s page.
“What?” Jeongin asked, looking up at him, not moving his feet from the wall.
Chan grinned. “Read,” he said.
Jeongin half-rolled on the couch and punched Chan in the thigh, hard enough that Chan let out an ow, dropped the book back on him, and then darted out of the way, laughing. He heard Felix laugh too, quickly smothered, and when he glanced over, Felix had a hand pressed to his mouth, smiling. Cute! thought Chan’s stupid hindbrain.
“Hyung, you are so rude,” Jeongin complained, as he rolled the rest of the way off the couch and to his feet, book forgotten.
“If you couldn’t read,” Minho said, packing up his papers and folders from the table, “then it would be hyung’s fault, baby boy, since he’s the one who taught you.”
“That’s true!” Jeongin cried, pointing first at Minho, then at Chan. “What would that say about you, huh?”
“I did not teach you how to read,” Chan said, still laughing. He reached out to ruffle Jeongin’s hair and got his hand thoroughly smacked away for his trouble. “Calm down. What do you want for dinner, huh? I’ll order something, we should have a group dinner to say hello to Felix.”
“I want—” Jeongin fell silent, biting his bottom lip, and then said, “Felix-hyung should get to choose, since it’s his dinner.” Chan wanted to crush him into a hug for that, but he knew Jeongin would never allow it. He really was too independent these days.
When they both looked at Felix, though, he looked like a deer caught in headlights, the most uncomfortable Chan had seen him. He hadn’t looked this uncomfortable last night at gunpoint. “Oh, no,” he said quickly. “I don’t know what everyone here likes! Jeongin, you choose.”
Jeongin brightened again. “Pizza!” he said. “I want pizza. Is pizza okay, Felix-hyung?”
“Yeah,” said Felix. The discomfort had fallen away and he was smiling again, as he looked at Jeongin, looking as charmed by him as everyone else was. The warm feeling in Chan increased at the sight of that smile. “That sounds good, Jeongin.”
“Okay,” said Chan. He tried to ruffle Jeongin’s hair again, and this time managed to catch Jeongin by surprise. Jeongin yelped and ran off to try to hide behind Minho, who rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything about Jeongin’s hand snagging his shirt as he hid. “Pizza it is.”
——
Changbin and Jisung were sent to pick the food up and when they got back, Jeongin went down to help them and to also summon Seungmin, who had a habit of ignoring text messages about this kind of thing and either accidentally or on purpose not coming up until everyone else had left. It wouldn’t be right if he didn’t come when everyone else was eating together.
“Hyung,” he said, sticking his head into Seungmin’s workshop. Seungmin was sitting at the workbench, a soldering iron in his hands, the smell of melted metal in the air. He was wearing goggles and he squinted at them when Jeongin appeared. “Hyung, we’re having a pizza party.”
“I’m busy,” Seungmin said, waving the soldering gun in the air.
“Yah, Kim Seungmin,” Changbin shouted from behind Jeongin, where he and Jisung were struggling to carry a ridiculous amount of pizza boxes in their arms. “Come and help us, you lazy jerk.”
Even behind the goggles, Jeongin saw the way Seungmin’s eyebrow twitched. It worked though; he threw down whatever he was working on and got to his feet, took off the goggles and dropped them on the table. “What did you call me,” he said, voice a little dangerous as he neared the door. “I’m the only one who does any work around here.”
“And what is it that I do,” Changbin said. Jeongin stepped back to let Seungmin out of the room and found that Changbin was just grinning. Before Seungmin could do anything more than take a step outside, Changbin shoved two of the boxes into his arms and Seungmin had to take them before they simply dropped to the ground. “What is it that I do, if not work?”
“You’re a glorified errand boy,” Seungmin said. He started up the stairs before Changbin could respond, but Changbin was just laughing as he followed him. Jisung rolled his eyes and offloaded some of his boxes into Jeongin’s arms and together they went upstairs.
In the apartment, Hyunjin had appeared out of his room and was apparently engaged in hassling everyone for their opinions on Felix’s hair. “I did a good job, right?” he was asking Chan in the kitchen when Jeongin came inside. “It looks good, right?”
Chan was laughing. Felix, sitting on the couch, was bright red, hands tucked under his thighs. “Hyunjin,” he said. “It’s just hair.”
“But it looks so good,” Hyunjin said. “Changbin-hyung, look at Felix’s hair and tell me I did a good job.”
Changbin grinned at Felix, who looked a little like he wanted to die, and said, “Yes, Hyunjin, you’re a miracle worker. Come and help me with these pizzas.”
Hyunjin did so, grumbling a little bit. But he was right, Jeongin thought, Felix’s hair really did look good. Jeongin especially liked the ribbon, which was such a nice little touch. Hyunjin was good at that, good at the small details in almost everything, but especially when it came to fashion, make-up, art. He’d self-taught himself how to draw and paint, and taught himself make-up by watching videos online, and he was good at it in ways that Jeongin, even if he’d watched all the same videos and tried all the same things, never would be.
Jeongin set his boxes down on the kitchen table and set about opening them with Changbin, the pizza boxes and the cartons of side dishes. It wasn’t exactly unusual for them to have a big group meal like this, although it was usually the case that someone would leave the food out and everyone else would pick at it when they wanted it. Something about this night, everyone gathered together, reminded him of the times before Minho and Seungmin had come to live with them, before they’d even moved into this place. Just him and Chan and Changbin and later Hyunjin sitting around this same table, eating whatever food Changbin had brought for them.
“Right,” said Chan, stepping back when everything was set out. It really was a ridiculous amount of food, Jeongin thought; they’d be eating leftover pizza for a couple of days. “Everybody grab a plate and help yourself.”
Jeongin got to go first, as he always did. There was a hierarchy to this, although unspoken. He’d always been given that privilege, Chan and Changbin wanting to make sure that he got the best parts of whatever food they were eating, to make up for the years where they hadn’t had much of anything. Even then Jeongin had known what Chan was giving up so that Jeongin could eat, all the food that Chan took from his own plate to give to Jeongin.
After Jeongin stepped back with his food, the horde descended. Jeongin made his way to his preferred couch, to let them all bicker and elbow each other, the noise level spiking considerably in the room. None of it was serious, so he didn’t intervene where sometimes he would, but he could see Felix hovering on the outskirts of it, smiling a little but also looking very overwhelmed. He’d get used to it, Jeongin thought. It was a sink or swim kind of situation.
Seungmin was the first out of the fray, still looking as grumpy as he had when Jeongin tried to fetch him but— there was a smile, there, underneath, and when Jeongin beamed at him as Seungmin sat on the couch opposite, Seungmin rolled his eyes. “The pizza was my idea,” Jeongin told him.
“Was the Hawaiian also your idea?” Seungmin asked. “Because that shit isn’t going to get finished.”
Jeongin shook his head, still smiling as he took a bite of his own, perfectly normal slice of pepperoni. One of the wooden chairs from around the kitchen table got shoved into his line of vision and when he looked up, Minho was sitting down on it, his body language somewhat looser than normal. Part of a growing list of evidence, compiled in Jeongin’s head, that Minho actually liked these loud group dinners.
“Here,” said Minho, as he tossed a carton of garlic dip onto the coffee table. “I stole this before the others could get at it.”
Jeongin snatched it up before anyone could realise and try to take it away again. “Thanks, hyung,” he said. Minho huffed a breath at him.
Things seemed to be calming down over at the collection of food, and Jeongin saw Felix break from the crowd and come over to the couches, looking very unsure. Jeongin waved at him and then patted the empty space next to him. Felix skirted around Minho on his wooden chair and then sat down on the couch next to Jeongin, tentative, like he still wasn’t sure of his welcome. Jeongin smiled at him as brightly as he could. “I really do like your hair colour,” he said. “It looks very nice.”
“Oh,” said Felix, looking surprised but pleased. “Thank you.”
Jeongin glanced at Felix’s plate, wondering what he’d chosen, and found that Felix had taken a single slice of cheese pizza and nothing else. Jeongin was wondering whether to say anything — in this family people tended to comment on these things, but he knew vaguely that that wasn’t the case with other people — but Hyunjin beat him to the punch.
“Lix,” he said, appearing in front of them, his own plate piled considerably higher. There were so many slices it looked a little dangerous. “Are you kidding me? You need more food than that.”
Felix looked at Hyunjin, then at Jeongin, and then glanced quickly around the room. Jisung and Changbin were bickering over something still, but Chan and Seungmin were watching, and Felix went pink. “Hyunjin, it’s fine,” he said.
“It’s not,” Hyunjin said. “I said earlier, we need to fatten you up. Here, I got this for you.”
Hyunjin offloaded two of his pizza slices from his plate, along with a mozzarella stick and two pieces of garlic bread. Felix watched the food transfer onto his own plate with an expression that looked hungry but deeply uncomfortable. He looked like he wanted to stop Hyunjin but knew it was fruitless, which was something Jeongin could have told him. Hyunjin was rarely this fussy with anyone other than Jeongin, but he’d experienced it a lot over the years and once Hyunjin had it in his head to coddle, there could be no dissuading him.
“There,” Hyunjin said, after the plate in Felix’s hand threatened to buckle under the weight of everything on top of it. “Eat all that and then I’ll leave you alone.”
Felix looked up at him, eyes pleading. “Hyunjin,” he said quietly. “I told you earlier, I don’t have— money, to pay for this. I can’t pay for my share.”
“What on earth are you talking about,” Hyunjin said.
“Felix,” said Chan, breaking into the conversation. He was smiling, his most winsome and friendly smile, one of the ones Jeongin liked best, although he’d never let Chan know that. “Don’t worry about it, it’s all my treat.”
It was said in a particularly dry way, and Jeongin and Hyunjin both laughed; Seungmin smiled and then tried to hide it by biting into his pizza. Felix, however, clearly didn’t get the joke, and Jeongin wondered if anyone had explained to him how it worked here. All of their food was Chan’s treat — he was in charge of household expenses. It had been that way from the beginning, from the moment Changbin had joined them. They were paid a salary, of course — well, the others were. Jeongin’s money was probably more along the lines of pocket money, since he didn’t actually do any jobs with them, but still. Their salary was for their personal use only — food, housing, anything along those lines, Chan paid for directly.
He’d have to let Felix know that, later, he thought. So he didn’t worry.
Jeongin had noticed it though, the skinny flesh-over-bones look of Felix’s wrists, the sharpness of his jaw line that was, even just looking at him for the first time, obviously unnatural. Just because Chan had done his best to make sure Jeongin had enough to eat did not mean that they had always had that, and for so long, Jeongin had been skinny and scrawny and small, which had been a source of great consternation for many, many reasons. He was taller now, better built, the years of scrimping well behind them. But he knew the effects of lack of food, and it was clear on Felix’s frame.
“Here, hyung,” he said, moving his plate over so he could roll his mozzarella stick off his plate and onto Felix’s, where it rested somewhat precariously amidst the rest of the food.
Felix gave him a dismayed look as Jeongin sat back out of his space. “Jeongin, no,” Felix said, moving like he was going to give it back. “You should eat it.”
“No, you eat it,” Jeongin said, holding his plate out of reach. “It’s your welcome dinner, you should eat it.”
“What a good boy you are,” Hyunjin cooed at him, using that voice he had like Jeongin was a baby and not just less than two years younger than him. “Lix, eat your damn food.”
He sat down next to Felix, the three of them squished together on the couch, and started pretending like he was going to physically feed Felix with his hands if Felix didn’t start eating. This successfully distracted Felix from trying to return Jeongin’s mozzarella stick. Jeongin sat back, his attention turning to his plate, and found— a mozzarella stick sitting on top of his slice of gorgonzola pizza.
He looked at it, confused for a long few seconds. “Wait,” he said, mostly under his breath. “Did I have two of those?”
“Must have, baby boy,” Minho said.
Oh, thought Jeongin. He looked up and found that Minho wasn’t really looking at him: he was watching Jisung try to steal what seemed to be the last onion ring from Seungmin. A quick glance showed that Minho’s plate was missing the mozzarella stick that had been on there.
“Where’s yours, hyung?” Jeongin asked.
“I ate it,” Minho said. He still did not look at Jeongin as he said it. Jeongin looked down at his plate, trying to hide his smile. It surprised him, sometimes, when Minho was a terrible liar about something. He seemed like the type of person who should be good at it in every circumstance but he really wasn’t — his ears were red.
Jeongin wasn’t going to call him out for it, though. Instead, he ate the mozzarella stick slowly, savouring it. It had been so unnecessary for Minho to give him his; Jeongin would not go without by not having a single cheese stick to eat, and he knew Minho knew that. Jeongin wanted to thank him, but he knew that Minho would pretend like he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Even with everyone eating, the noise in the room was considerable. Jisung had not managed to steal the onion ring, but when Changbin had asked nicely, Seungmin had given him it, so now there was an ongoing argument about who Seungmin liked more. Seungmin was maintaining that he didn’t really like either of them.
“I’m Seungmin-hyung’s favourite,” Jeongin put in, nibbling on the edge of his pizza.
“That’s right,” said Seungmin. “Jeongin’s my favourite.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t count,” said Jisung dismissively. “You’re everyone’s favourite. It cancels out.”
“Right, we have to ignore Jeongin,” said Changbin. “So ignoring Jeongin, who is your favourite, Seungmin-ah?”
“Chan-hyung,” said Seungmin, very deadpan.
Jisung and Changbin groaned. Chan laughed, and leaned over to give Seungmin a high-five, every one of Seungmin’s movements indicating his great reluctance to do such a thing.
“I agree with this order,” said Hyunjin. “Jeongin, then Chan-hyung.”
“Wow,” said Changbin. “This is the thanks I get? The years of raising you with my own two hands, only to be punted to third place?”
“I never said you were in third place,” said Hyunjin bluntly. Changbin reacted like Hyunjin had shot him in the heart, theatrical even for Changbin, and Jeongin watched Hyunjin hide his smile around his own slice of pizza. Beside him, Felix was still working his way through his second slice, his pace slow but steady. He seemed very focused on the food; Jeongin was not sure if he was really paying attention to the conversation around him. Jeongin remembered hunger like that, when nothing mattered more than the need to simply eat what was in front of you.
“Am I really your favourite?” Jeongin asked, leaning across the coffee table to catch Jisung’s eye. He watched Jisung look at him, then glance across at Hyunjin, eating and not looking back, and then Jisung looked back at him, grinning.
“Of course,” he said. “Who else is it going to be? You’re our baby, after all.”
Ah, there it was, Jeongin thought. He was the baby, with everything that came with it. Still, he felt too content, sitting like this with Hyunjin’s thigh pressed against his, and Minho almost close enough to touch, and Chan watching over all of them with a soft smile, to really mind it. So he just grinned back and nodded.
“The question really is,” said Seungmin, setting his empty plate down on the coffee table, “who is Jeongin’s favourite?”
Jeongin managed to avoid glancing at Minho by the skin of his teeth. He wasn’t sure if Minho was looking at him, but it seemed like the rest of the room was. He laughed, unable to help himself; it was just so funny, the way they were all waiting for his answer, like it mattered. “That’s easy,” he said. “Chan-hyung.”
Chan punched the air in triumph. “No way,” said Jisung. “You can’t pick your brother.”
“I can so,” said Jeongin. “What are you going to do about it?”
This was his hill to die on, because if Chan wasn’t allowed to be his favourite, he was going to end up offending some people with his other choice. Besides which, he wasn’t sure he could say the words Minho-hyung is my favourite without something of his true feelings showing on his face, and he did not want that to happen in front of everyone at a family dinner.
Minho snorted. “He has a point,” he said to Jisung. Jeongin risked a glance across at him, and found that Minho was still loose-limbed in his chair, perhaps even more so now. His plate rested on the floor by his feet. He noticed Jeongin’s eyes on him and looked across at him with one of his small smiles, the kind that made Jeongin feel like he had just missed a stair.
“He’s saying Chan-hyung because everyone knows I’m his favourite and he doesn’t want to upset Changbin-hyung,” said Hyunjin snottily.
“In what universe,” said Changbin. “Jeongin, if you really put me in third place, I’m quitting, I’m serious.”
“How about this,” said Jeongin sweetly. “I don’t like any of you.”
That made Minho laugh, a soft huff of it. The pleasure Jeongin felt at having made that happen was really quite embarrassing. It made Seungmin laugh too, and Chan, and maybe Hyunjin would have too, because he liked it when Jeongin was a brat, but instead he said, “God, Lix, give me that plate.”
He took Felix’s plate off him and set it carefully on the coffee table among the others. Jeongin looked around him and found Felix slumped against Hyunjin’s side, looking most of the way asleep. He rubbed at his face with his hand and said, “Sorry, I’m just tired.”
“Aw,” said Hyunjin, trying to pinch his cheek and Felix actually let him do it. Jeongin would have smacked him. “It’s been a busy day for the baby.”
This did garner him a glare from Felix. Tired as he obviously was, the effect was greatly diminished. Hyunjin just cooed at him, patting the side of his face. “Alright, alright,” said Hyunjin. “I guess it’s time for bed for us, huh.”
“It’s 8pm,” said Jisung. He was smiling, a little, like he thought Hyunjin was joking. It was, to be fair, earlier than even Jeongin slept, which meant it was obscenely early for Hyunjin, who had been known to welcome the sunrise more often than not.
“So?” asked Hyunjin, as blunt as he’d been with Changbin but a little— less tempered with teasing. He was scowling at Jisung, just one step off from his usual glare. “He’s tired, he can go to bed whenever he wants.”
He started to slide off the couch. Felix looked like he wanted nothing more than to go to bed, but he said, “Hyunjin, it’s okay, Jisung is right, you don’t need to come too.”
“It’s fine,” said Hyunjin. He got to his feet and held out both of his hands. “I have to work on a painting anyway.”
He glanced at Jeongin as he said that, which meant he was working on Chan’s birthday present. When Hyunjin had asked Jeongin to pose for a photograph, he had not realised that Hyunjin planned to use it as a reference for a painting of Jeongin’s face. This was to be Chan’s birthday present, and every time Jeongin was reminded of this fact, he wanted to sneak into Hyunjin’s bedroom and burn it. But he could never do that, so instead he had to just suffer.
Felix took Hyunjin’s hands and let Hyunjin tug him to his feet. He seemed a little clumsy with it, almost stumbling. Hyunjin steadied him, laughing a little. “Okay,” said Hyunjin, putting his arm around Felix’s shoulders. “Say goodnight to everyone.”
“Urgh,” Felix said to him, but to the rest of them, he said, “Goodnight.”
There was a round of goodnights, the only hold out Minho who was looking at Hyunjin and Felix with a little frown. Earlier, in their meeting, he had been perfectly civil to Felix, but he clearly still wasn’t very happy about Felix being here. He looked a little like he suspected the tiredness was some sort of act.
Jeongin glanced at the rest of them, as Hyunjin started to shuffle Felix off to his bedroom, talking about Felix brushing his teeth like he was a mother reminding their small child. Changbin was still eating, as was Seungmin, but he was still working his way through his second slice of sweet potato pizza, the slowest of them all at eating. Jisung was fiddling with the ring pull on his can of coke, and Chan—
Oh, thought Jeongin, looking at his older brother. Chan was watching Hyunjin and Felix, or more exactly, he was watching Felix, who had come back to the kitchen because he had been holding a tissue in his hand that he had forgotten about. Felix was laughing a little at himself, the sound sleepy, his voice deep with it, and Chan was looking at him in a way that Jeongin had never, ever seen his brother look. He knew what it meant, though, because he had caught himself looking a bit like that whenever he was brushing his teeth and zoned out thinking about Minho.
Chan just looked— soft, as he watched Felix. It was subtle, a barely there shifting of his face, really, but Jeongin knew him so well, the best of them all. He had been with Chan the longest, had grown up with him, and he knew how to read him. And it was not the soft look he gave Jeongin, nor Hyunjin, whenever he thought they were being cute, whenever he found them endearing. No, this was warmer than that; it was in his eyes.
Felix disappeared into the hallway. Chan turned back to the group, asking Seungmin something about tracking down someone they needed to find for a job that Jeongin didn’t really know about. Jeongin wriggled down into the seat cushions, so much space now he had the whole thing to himself. About time, he thought, buzzy with happiness at the thought and wishing he could tell someone, anyone about it. Chan was so loved, had been for so long, but it had never been that kind of love, and he deserved it so much. He deserved it more than any other person Jeongin knew. About fucking time.
Chapter 3
Notes:
this was originally one chapter and we said "too much is happening, this will be too long," so we split it and wrote it that way and then when it came time to post we were like "oh no this is better as one chapter actually" and now you get this very long chapter.
some additional tags/content warnings for this chapter: Graphic violence, eye horror, original minor character death. That tag about Minho do be murdering people comes into play, basically. If there’s anything else that you think needs a warning for this chapter, let us know~
also wanted to note that Hyunjin’s thought processes in this chapter (and the fic in general) on how he isn’t “normal” because of his mental responses to his trauma don’t reflect our personal views. He is an unreliable narrator with a lot of things he needs to unlearn and heal from. truthfully they’re all unreliable narrators and many of them aren’t kind to themselves in their own heads.
Chapter Text
It had been fairly early when Changbin left the house to go pick up the van that Seungmin had sourced for them. Only Jeongin had been up when Changbin had come out of his room, making coffee in the kitchen. It had certainly not been early for the rest of the world, though — there had been enough traffic on the street, people going to work and school, to have meant that a roundtrip which should have taken maybe thirty minutes had taken an hour and a half, and it was a relief to make it back to the house.
Seungmin had said that he’d very carefully chosen the van as something that would both suit their needs and also fit through the service door built into the back of his workroom, which opened onto the small parking lot at the back where they kept the car. It had seemed a little more effort than Changbin really felt necessary, since it had meant moving stuff in the workroom around to fit the van in, and it wasn’t cold enough yet that they couldn’t just work on it outside. But Seungmin had been determined that it should come inside; Changbin suspected it was because Seungmin had an allergy to fresh air at this point.
Seungmin let him in when he arrived, yawning just inside the doorway as Changbin carefully drove in. He was still dressed in his pyjamas, soft flannel bottoms and a t-shirt with a picture of a puppy on the front which had been a birthday gift from Jeongin last year. If it was early for Changbin, it was practically the middle of the night for Seungmin, and he looked suitably grumpy about it.
Changbin had only managed to get the front end of the van inside when Seungmin reached up and rapped his knuckles against his window. Changbin stopped and rolled down the window. “What?”
“Don’t hit any of my stuff,” Seungmin said, a tired scowl on his face.
Changbin undid his seat belt and then put his head out of the window, looking that little bit down at Seungmin. “I promise I won’t if you come here and give me a kiss,” he said.
Seungmin squinted at him for a moment but he did step up close to the van again, his face tilted up to Changbin. Changbin leaned out further, watching Seungmin’s eyelids slide shut as he did so, and pressed his mouth to Seungmin’s, a gentle but firm kiss. Seungmin made a little noise, more sleepy than anything, and shifted his head so he could kiss Changbin back. Everything was quiet, still; it was like they were the only two existing right then, like this, Changbin kissing Seungmin in a place where nobody could see them.
Seungmin pulled back, but didn’t step away. His eyes opened, already a half-glare. “Seriously,” he said. “Hit any of my stuff and I’ll castrate you.”
“You’d be very much cutting off your own nose to spite your face,” Changbin reminded him, and worked an arm out of the window so he could put it on Seungmin’s shoulder and pull him back into the kiss. Seungmin went easily, his softness in this always so at odds with the bite in his voice. It had surprised Changbin, back when they first started sleeping together almost a year ago, the way Seungmin could sound so— grumpy, so put-upon, even as his hands and mouth and body had clung to Changbin with heated desperation.
Was it any wonder Changbin adored him? He certainly kept Changbin on his toes, and if there was something Changbin abhorred, it was being bored.
Seungmin rocked back the bare minimum it took for him to be able to speak while Changbin could still feel the warmth of his mouth against Changbin’s lips. He said, a little indistinct, “You just got home and I’m already sick of you.”
Changbin laughed, let him go. Seungmin took a short, sharp step backwards, like he was afraid that Changbin might grab him again. A valid fear, because Changbin wanted to take advantage of the quiet morning, wanted to coax Seungmin into his bedroom and kiss him until Seungmin was gasping for him. But he had too much to do, and could not spare the time for it right now. Besides, the others would be getting up, by now, and someone would come poking into the workroom at some point. Seungmin wouldn’t like that.
“Where do you want this?” he asked.
Seungmin pointed. Changbin put the van into drive and resumed his slow roll into the workroom, manoeuvring it to where Seungmin had indicated, lengthways along the back wall. He glanced back at Seungmin, who had walked with the movement of the van, presumably to make sure Changbin really didn’t hit anything, and found that Seungmin wasn’t even watching him. Instead, he had one arm folded across his stomach, the other touching his bottom lip. He was smiling, looking down at the floor.
Changbin really did almost hit something, at the sight of that smile. It had been Seungmin’s smile, so rarely seen, that he had first liked — his smile and his eyes, which somehow managed to be sharp and limpid at the same time, so beautiful that Changbin felt like he was drowning in them. It had been surprising, how quickly he had fallen in love with Seungmin when they’d started up this relationship, but it made sense, when he thought back on it. He’d maybe been halfway there at his first look at Seungmin’s eyes years ago.
He hit the brakes before he knocked into one of the open coolers filled with tubs of fiddly little things. The sudden jerky stop of the van meant Seungmin looked up at him, the hand dropping from his mouth, his smile giving way to a judgemental little look that he really wore so well. “Hyung,” he said.
“I didn’t hit anything,” Changbin said. He opened the door and got out of the van, figuring that if Seungmin wanted it in a more precise position, he could get it there himself. “Will this do, for now?”
“I suppose,” said Seungmin. He walked up to the back doors of the van and opened it up, looking at the exposed insides of it. It was an old thing, a little battered in the way people expected work vans to be, but it meant that the inside was dusty and smelled just a little bit off. But it should fit both Seungmin and Felix inside, along with all their equipment.
Seungmin looked for a long few moments, Changbin just watching him, before he stepped back, leaving the doors open. “Are you busy today?” he asked, going to the work table and picking up a little slip of paper. “Can you go out later, if not?”
“Yeah, I’ll have time this afternoon,” Changbin said. “Why, do you need me to get something?”
Seungmin handed him the paper, which turned out to be a shopping list in Seungmin’s writing which was a scrawl that somehow managed to be neat; Changbin had no idea how he did it. He recognised very little of what was on the list, but that didn’t matter. The vendors he usually went to for Seungmin’s stuff would know what it all was. He nodded, and put it in his pocket.
“I’ll get it,” he said. He put his hand on Seungmin’s hip, a little surprised Seungmin let him, and kissed him again. Perhaps it was because it was so early for Seungmin, but he made that little noise again, his head dipped to meet Changbin’s. His t-shirt was soft under Changbin’s hand, and underneath he could feel the sharp point of Seungmin’s too-skinny hipbones.
“Ah,” Seungmin said, after the kiss had gone for— a few too many honeyed seconds. He did shove Changbin away now, towards the door. “Get out, please.”
He was so cute. “You’re so cute,” Changbin told him. “I love you.”
Seungmin went bright red immediately, blushing to the very roots of his hair. “Shut up!” he said, almost loud enough to be classified as a shriek. “Get out!”
Changbin got out, laughing to himself the entire way.
——
It was still a novelty, waking up in a bed that was soft and comfortable, in a room that didn’t feel dangerous to be in. More than that, it was amazing how quickly Felix’s body had adapted, the way he had already stopped jerking awake each morning in a panic, freaked out at the sense of another body in the bed with him. Maybe that was just because it was Hyunjin, though. His body had grown too used to his presence.
Hyunjin was still asleep when Felix woke up, curled up on his side facing Felix, his back to the wall. He had his face mashed into his pillow, his hair obscuring most of his features. Felix looked at him for a long few moments, unable to stop himself from smiling a little. The Hyunjin that he had first met, the one who had come into the PC room tall and beautiful, who had sassed everyone in the room including Felix before leaving again— that Hyunjin wasn’t in this room with Felix right now. It was easy to see, in the Hyunjin asleep beside him, that he was as young as Felix was himself.
Eventually Felix sighed and stretched his legs out, pointing his toes. Then he clambered off the bed, making no attempt to be sneaky about it. Hyunjin mumbled something half-coherent and then squinted one eye open to glare at Felix. “No,” he said, a clear sound.
“I’m not saying you have to get up,” Felix said, very reasonably, as he pulled his sweatpants on over the boxer shorts he’d been wearing to sleep in. He’d have to ask about laundry soon, he thought; they had a machine in the apartment, so he wouldn’t have to carry everything out again, but he didn’t know how to use it, one of those combination machines with all the different buttons and settings. He’d never done his own laundry before he’d run away, and it had taken some trial and error to figure out the machines in the laundromats. Maybe Hyunjin would help him with this one.
Hyunjin made a grumpy little noise. Then he said, “Breakfast?”
“Mm, breakfast,” Felix said, smiling at him, even though Hyunjin had closed his eyes again and wasn’t looking. “I’ll save you something, okay?”
“Okay,” mumbled Hyunjin, and then seemingly went back to sleep.
He wouldn’t be for long, Felix knew, even from his short experience. Hyunjin took a little while to wake up but he was not in the habit of lazing in bed for a long period of time. It had not always even been a given that Felix was the first to wake. Yesterday Hyunjin had simply seized the blanket from him to get Felix to wake up. Felix thought he was being remarkably magnanimous, given that.
Outside their bedroom, everything was still mostly quiet, although he could hear music from the kitchen, soft enough to not disturb anyone still sleeping, and the sound of movement, of someone preparing breakfast. He padded down the hallway, the wooden flooring a little cold on his bare feet, and walked into the kitchen area to find Chan standing by the counters, in the process of making toast.
He was not wearing a shirt.
Felix— stared. Chan stood with his back to him, singing under his breath to the music playing over the little speakers set up on the counter. It was something older, something jazzy, the kind of thing that Felix had always liked to listen to. He was wearing a pair of dark boxer shorts and nothing else, the skin of his back bare and pale under the kitchen lights. Felix had sensed it before, seen the way Chan filled out his shirts, but like this it was obvious — Chan’s back was broad, his shoulders wide, the muscles moving under his skin as he shifted on his feet. He had a few scars, paler knicks in his skin, and when he turned slightly to the side, Felix’s eyes dropped to where his boxers slung low, the curve of his ass obvious.
He should, he knew, make a noise, do something to alert Chan to his presence, but instead he just stood there and stared. How was it possible, he thought, for a man to be so handsome, so attractive. When he looked at Chan, it felt like someone had taken all the secret, furtive little fantasies in Felix’s brain and fashioned them into a person. It made him want to cry — he hadn’t planned for this, hadn’t factored in this kind of distraction. At no point had he ever anticipated the Chris that his father had always ranted about being this hot.
Actually, rather than alert Chan, he wanted to escape quickly, maybe run to the bathroom and brush his teeth. He hadn’t even brushed his hair. Oh god, he thought frantically, I haven’t even brushed my hair.
It was too late, though. Chan had turned to where the coffee machine was slowly doling out his black coffee and in his peripheral noticed Felix standing there. “Oh!” he said, his eyes widening a little before he broke out into an easy smile. “Good morning.”
Felix had to take a moment, looking at that smile, to gather himself back together. What the hell was wrong with him, to be so thrown by the sight of a back. Chan just kept smiling at him, looking a little amused, like he thought Felix was just still mostly asleep. “Hi,” Felix managed eventually.
“Do you want some toast?” Chan asked, still smiling at him. “You can have these slices, if you want.”
Felix made himself take a step forward, even though that brought him a step closer to where Chan stood shirtless. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m going to have—”
He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember what food they had. He’d been carefully taking the least expensive option since he hadn’t been able to buy his own food yet, but he couldn’t remember if there was any cereal left. He thought maybe not.
“I like this song,” he said a little desperately, trying to change the subject.
“Oh, you do?” Chan was turned fully away from him again, buttering his toast now, but he still kept flashing quick smiles over his shoulder in Felix’s direction. Felix was rather heroically fighting down the urge to flatten his hair. He had no doubt that it looked a mess, but he didn’t want to draw attention to it. Chan’s hair was fluffy too, sticking up at the back, but it was a good look on him, boyish and cute. Felix probably looked like a scruffy child. “Do you like jazz?”
Felix nodded. He took another couple of steps into the room and then sat at the kitchen table, on the little wooden chair with the blue upholstery that he had taken that first night here. He was just about to say something — to ask who the singer was, to ask if Chan listened to jazz regularly — when the front door to the apartment opened and Changbin came inside.
He was fully dressed despite the relatively early hour, in jeans and a hoodie, and when he saw Chan standing there with his plate of toast he groaned and said, “Hyung, you couldn’t even wear a shirt to spare the new guy?”
“Why?” said Chan, smile morphing into something more like a grin.
And then he turned around.
Felix— felt his brain go a little sloshy. He’d been able to tell from just the back how muscular Chan was, but the front was— he had abs, clearly defined. His boxer shorts fit snugly against his flat stomach, not low enough to be dangerous but not high enough for Felix’s sanity. If he’d thought watching the muscles in Chan’s back move as he made his breakfast, that was nothing compared to watching Chan walk to the table with his plate and coffee and then sit down.
He realised, after a brief few seconds of silence, that Chan had said something to him. He had to give himself a little shake to snap himself back into his body. “What?” he said. He hoped to god he wasn’t blushing.
Chan laughed a little at him, not meanly. It was a nice sound, actually, like a joke they were in together. “I said that you don’t mind,” he said. “If I don’t wear a shirt, I mean. You really just woke up, huh?”
Felix made himself smile, hoped it was appropriately sheepish and not stiff. “Yeah, I’m pretty out of it,” he said.
There was the sound of a door down the hallway opening and then closing, then the bathroom door doing the same. Changbin went to the coffee machine and started messing around with the little pods there. Felix watched him for a moment, because otherwise he’d watch Chan’s arms move as he lifted his coffee mug to his mouth. They’d had one of those coffee machines at home, one that had mostly belonged to his older sister. Felix had never used it, so he watched Changbin load one of the pods into the slot at the top, curious about how it worked.
“Felix,” said Chan. His voice drew Felix’s attention to him like a snap, although to be honest Felix had been so focused on not paying attention it felt like it had circled all the way back around. Chan was looking at him with a little frown between his brows, expression concerned. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“Um,” Felix said. “Sure.”
He would, he needed to, but something about doing it when Chan was in the room, seeing what Felix was taking from the cupboards, was so much worse than doing it around some of the others. It felt too much like he was stealing money directly out of Chan’s hand. He had fifteen thousand won to his name; if Chan demanded that he pay for his share of what he took, Felix was quite honestly fucked.
While Felix sat there waffling over whether to get up and forage for something small to eat, Changbin asked from his stance beside the counter, “You busy today, boss?”
“I need to go to the club,” Chan said around his mouthful of toast, “but I think I’m going to put that off until tomorrow.”
Changbin made a thoughtful noise. “Yeah, I need to pick up some more stuff for Seungmin, so if you went you’d have to go with Minho-hyung.” He grinned as Chan wrinkled his nose.
“The club,” Felix said, lilting it into nearly a question.
“Maniac,” Chan said, an amused little sparkle in his dark eyes. “You’ve seen it.”
“I— yes,” Felix said, face feeling warm at that gently pointed reminder of how he got here in the first place — by staking out said club. “The outside.”
Another mouthful of toast, and a raised eyebrow in his direction. “You never went in?” Chan asked, and Felix shook his head. “I’ll take you, one of these days, if you’d like.”
Felix found, to his surprise, that he would actually like that a lot. He was curious what sort of business Chan was running. So he nodded, feeling very shy, and Chan gave him a soft smile that made Felix’s insides do all kinds of twisty things.
He heard the bathroom door opening again and then Hyunjin trailed sleepily into the room. He was wearing the grey sweatpants he’d worn to bed and then a black hoodie on top, the hood pulled up over his hair so that only parts of it showed underneath, a shock of bright red against that black. He looked thoroughly miserable to be awake, and when Chan said, amusement clear in his voice, “Good morning, Hyunjin,” Hyunjin gave him a half-asleep glare and then said, “Urgh?”
Changbin smiled and said, “Yeah, we know.” He held out the coffee he had made, which had apparently been for Hyunjin. “Here, drink this, I made it for you. It’ll make it easier to deal with.”
“No, it fucking won’t,” Hyunjin grumbled, but he traipsed to Changbin and took the coffee off him and then came to the table where he slid into the chair next to Felix like he didn’t have any bones in his body. He lay his head flat on the table, squinting across at Chan. “Hyung,” he said. “I beg you to wear a shirt.”
“You’re lucky I’m wearing pants,” Chan said, before biting into his toast.
Felix— twitched. What did that mean? Hyunjin groaned again and rubbed his face into the wood of the table. “You’re terrible,” he said. “The worst. My poor eyes. Felix’s poor eyes.”
“Felix doesn’t mind,” Chan said. “He said so himself.”
Hyunjin lifted his head to look across at Felix, who knew he was blushing a little. He hoped Hyunjin just put it down to being brought in as the focus of the conversation but something about the way his eyes sharpened made him suspect that Hyunjin knew exactly what was going on here. This was excruciatingly embarrassing. If Hyunjin said something right now about it, Felix thought he might actually expire on the spot.
“Hmm,” Hyunjin said. “Lix, did you eat?” Felix shook his head, and Hyunjin pushed back to his feet. “I’ll make us some eggs.”
“I can help,” Changbin said, leaning against the counter as he ate some of the grapes he had pulled from the fridge.
Hyunjin smiled at him, so sarcastic that Felix almost laughed. “Hyung, get the hell out of this kitchen.”
Changbin did laugh. “Fine, fine, you brat,” he said. He squeezed Hyunjin’s shoulder — Hyunjin smacked his hand away — and then skirted around him to the table. “Anyway, I just came up here to let you know, hyung, that I went and got the van this morning like you asked. It’s with Seungmin, he seemed happy enough with it. He doesn’t need you yet,” he added to Felix, perhaps sensing that Felix was about to ask. “He’ll let you know when he’s ready for you to help him.”
Felix nodded slowly. He hoped that it was soon — something about sitting around like this, waiting to have something to do, was starting to grate on him. It wasn’t even that he wanted to be busy, because he could still feel it inside him, the tiredness that clung to his bones. Over the past couple of days he had found himself sneaking away to nap in Hyunjin’s bed, using up some of this sudden downtime that he had. But even so, he didn’t want to keep doing that, because the longer he went without being useful, the more he felt like he was taking advantage of how nice these people were being to him.
Maybe there was something else, he thought, something else he could do to give back to them, while he waited. He didn’t have many useful skills in this arena but he could bake, and if he planned carefully, it was possible that the little money he had left would cover the cost of the ingredients. They may not need cookies, but perhaps they’d be grateful for them all the same.
He was shaken from his thoughts by the sound of a chair scraping on the floor: Chan, getting to his feet, giving Felix another clear view of those abs. He had to look away, staring at the table, tracing the groove of the wood with his eyes in a desperate attempt at clearing his mind. He shook his hair a little just to make sure it covered his burning ears. Chan was saying something to Changbin, something about meeting him in his office in ten minutes, but Felix could barely focus on it, not over the rushing of blood in his ears. What was happening to him. He felt like he couldn’t breathe until Chan had left the room, gone to his bedroom, and Changbin had left the apartment entirely.
A plate clattered down in front of him, two fried eggs and a slice of toast that Felix hadn’t even realised Hyunjin was making. Felix looked up, startled. “Here,” Hyunjin said, setting his own plate down too. “Eat this. What are you spacing out for, hm?”
Felix looked at him, saw the sharp little look in Hyunjin’s eyes, and wanted, frankly, to die a little. “Nothing,” he said. He took the fork that Hyunjin was holding out for him and gave him a smile. “This looks good, Hyunjin, thank you.”
“Hmph,” Hyunjin said. He rubbed his hand against Felix’s hair, his nails just scratching a bit. He’d been doing that a lot since he’d helped fix the hair colour, and every time it made Felix feel like he was going boneless. He slumped down into his seat but didn’t miss Hyunjin’s quick smile as he took his seat.
“Hyunjin,” Felix said, cutting his eggs as he spoke so Hyunjin wouldn’t accuse him of not eating. “Will you show me where the grocery store is, after? If you’re free?”
“Sure,” said Hyunjin. He had not started eating yet. He was sitting with his coffee mug directly under his nose, breathing in the coffee smell. “Why do you need to go there?”
“I want to make cookies,” Felix said.
“Oh, yes,” Hyunjin said, face brightening in a way that seemed to— make him look younger, more like his actual age. “I fucking love cookies. We should ask Jeongin to come with us, he loves going to the grocery store. Weird kid.”
“Yeah,” said Felix, unable to help his own bright smile, feeling warm and pleased in the face of Hyunjin’s enthusiasm. “Let’s do that.”
——
“Okay,” said Felix, stepping back with the scissors he had just used to open the bag of flour in his hands. “Just pour some of that into the bowl and I’ll measure it out properly from there.”
Jeongin nodded, hefting the bag of flour into his arms. The weight of it surprised him — it had surprised him in the grocery store, as they’d went from aisle to aisle, picking out all the things that Felix had said they’d need. He had not checked a recipe at any point in the process, simply seemed to have the knowledge in his brain. Between carrying the flour and the bags of sugar and the blocks of butter all the way home, he thought he’d probably had his arm workout for the day.
Jeongin moved the bowl closer to him, then tilted the bag of flour over it to pour some out. He’d thought he’d been holding it securely but something about the weight— shifted, and the bag tipped, and flour exploded all over the counter top.
Both Hyunjin and Felix yelped in surprise and Jeongin cried, “Oh no!” He was aware even as he said it that he sounded like a distressed grandmother. Opening his mouth had been a mistake though; somehow the flour got in and then into his throat and he started to cough.
Felix was laughing now, seemingly not upset in the slightest, hunched over with his hand against the only clean part of the counter, his face bright with it. He had a nice laugh, even if it came at Jeongin’s admittedly deserved expense. Jeongin started to laugh too, even as he was still coughing up a lung, feeling the keen joy of it inside him.
It had been a while since he’d had fun like this. Fun with other people, silly and not important. Jeongin had always been the one required to fill in his time with ways of entertaining himself, and he’d grown used to it, over the years — long hours spent watching television, reading whatever books he could find, playing on the Nintendo DS that Changbin had bought for him secondhand for his birthday when he turned thirteen. It was very old at this point, and he’d never bought a new console. He had simply played the same four games for the past six years.
So this was nice, to have company, to be doing something new and fun, for once. He liked Felix, too, who was willing to let Jeongin help out and did not get angry when Jeongin messed something up. It was good to know that he liked Felix, considering the times this week he had caught Chan looking at him.
“Ah, Jeongin,” said Felix, wiping at the tears in his eyes.
“I am not helping to clean that up,” Hyunjin put in from where he’d retreated away to the kitchen table, eyeing the flour warily like it might jump at him if he got too close.
Jeongin and Felix caught each other’s eyes and they started to laugh again. Hyunjin was looking at them both like he thought they’d lost their minds but there was a smile there, too, Jeongin could see it. He was having fun, even if he wasn’t going to admit it to them. If he wasn’t having fun, he wouldn’t be here with them, he’d be locked in his room working on that damn picture of Jeongin’s face.
“You don’t have to help clean it up,” Felix reassured him, once they’d managed to stop laughing again.
Jeongin was looking at the counters, their thin layer of white coating them. It was all over his clothes, too, and he ran a finger through it, so that a streak of the slate grey countertop showed through. “Why does this have the consistency of dust?” he asked, genuinely surprised by it.
Felix lifted the flour up and started to pour it, expertly. He seemed to know exactly how to account for the shifts in weight inside the bag. “You’ve never baked before?” he asked.
“No,” said Jeongin. “Minho-hyung doesn’t really like it.”
It seemed to be the only area of cooking that Minho shied away from, and Jeongin had not yet worked out why. He thought it might have something to do with the precise nature of it, the way it was apparently so easy to get the balance off with the measurements. A lot of what Minho cooked had some room for error built into it, some room for experimentation.
“You’ve never tried it yourself?” Felix asked, as he set the flour back down and rolled the top of the bag down.
“Jeongin isn’t allowed in here unsupervised,” Hyunjin said, taking a seat at the table to watch them.
Felix looked at Jeongin, who shrugged and grinned at him. It was true, he was not, and it was the only area of coddling from the rest of them that he was pretty okay with. There had been a number of smaller inciting incidents, but two much larger ones that had solidified this rule in the house: the first had been in the old apartment, when he had sliced his hand with a knife to the point that he had almost needed stitches. That had resulted in a blanket ban from him handling knives. The second had been a couple of years ago, when he was cooking ramen on the stove and had misjudged how close he had gotten and burned his wrist badly on the edge of the pot.
The latter time, at least, had gotten him Minho shoving his wrist under the cold water tap, his fingers holding Jeongin tight, as he’d said, a low intensity in his voice, what were you thinking, baby boy, didn’t your Chan-hyung ever teach you to not touch hot things?
Jeongin had been in so much pain that he had only tearfully been able to say, hyung, you know my spatial awareness is shit.
This had been enough to get him banned from cooking almost indefinitely, unless there was someone around to closely watch. Usually this meant that whoever was around just offered to cook for him, which was perfectly acceptable to Jeongin, and had, in practice, meant that he’d gotten Minho to cook for him more times than anyone else.
“Oh, right,” Felix said. “I remember. The knife you found in my backpack.”
“Yeah!” Jeongin said. “I’m not allowed those.”
Felix laughed again. From his seat at the table, Hyunjin whined, “How long are these cookies going to take, I’m hungry.”
Felix rolled his eyes, which was what Jeongin’s reaction would have been too. Felix went to the cupboard and found a small bowl, the kind they used for rice on the rare occasions they actually cooked it properly and didn’t just microwave it. He brought it back to the counter, opened up one of the bags of chocolate chips he’d bought at the store, poured some into the bowl, and then took it over to the table.
“Here,” he said, putting it down in front of Hyunjin. “Eat these and stop being a baby.”
“I’m not a baby,” said Hyunjin. “You guys are the babies.”
Felix tapped him on the nose with a luckily clean finger. Hyunjin tried to snap at it with his teeth, and then laughed when Felix snatched his hand back like he was afraid Hyunjin might actually do it. He pulled the bowl of chocolate chips closer to him and picked up a few. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Go and make your cookies. Hyunjin-hyung is here to supervise.”
——
Chan let himself into the apartment and was greeted by a kitchen that looked like the baking aisle had thrown up on it. There was flour all over the counters, a carton of milk left out, the smell of chocolate in the air. He’d never seen it so messy, and had not really thought it was possible for it to be in such a state.
Jeongin and Felix stood by the counter island, Jeongin stirring something in a bowl furiously, but laughing as he did so. Felix was cheering him on, laughing too, the expression bright on his face. Jeongin had flour all over him, smears of it across his cheekbones. Felix had fared better, but there was white in his hair and on his neck, and the black t-shirt he was wearing, oversized and swamping him, had speckles of flour all down the front.
Hyunjin was sitting at the kitchen table, well out of any danger, and he was the one who looked over when Chan came through the door. He was eating from a pile of chocolate chips in a small bowl in front of him. “Hey, hyung,” he said. “You want some chocolate?”
“Uh, no,” Chan said. “What is happening here?”
“Hyung!” Jeongin cried from the kitchen. “Hyung, we’re making cookies.”
Chan looked over at him, his smiling face. Felix next to him was smiling too, grinning at Chan, leaning on his palms against the counter. Days of sleep and food had brought some of the colour back to his cheeks, and like this, radiating joy, he really was so beautiful that Chan felt his breath catch. The two of them standing side by side, one dark head, one light, made something squirm in the pit of his stomach.
“I see that,” he said, as he came to stand at the start of where the wooden flooring gave way to the tiles of the kitchen floor. “How on earth did you make this much of a mess?”
“Oh,” said Felix. The smile had dropped off his face, replaced by something so distressed that Chan felt like he’d just walked up and kicked a puppy. “Oh, I’m sorry, we had an accident pouring the flour, but I’ll clean it up, I swear!”
“No, no,” said Chan quickly. “It’s okay, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it!”
“Yeah, he has no room to complain,” Hyunjin said, leaned back in his chair and dropping a handful of chocolate chips into his mouth one chip at a time. “I, for one, remember the ceramic casserole dish incident of three years ago.”
“I thought we agreed to never talk about that,” Chan said. He was watching Felix, the way his smile had flickered back onto his face as he looked back at Chan. Chan had to make himself look away, to look at Jeongin, who had continued stirring through the entire conversation. “You look like you’re having fun,” Chan said to him.
“I am!” said Jeongin brightly. Chan smiled helplessly at him. It was so lovely to see, Jeongin getting along with Felix, with someone new. Once they’d left the group home, Jeongin had never had friends his own age, and until Hyunjin arrived, had not even really had a friend, just two older brothers who didn’t always have time for him. His social circle had been extremely limited for so long it was somewhat shocking that he was as sweet and well-adjusted as he was. But for a long time, Jeongin hadn’t wanted friends, hadn’t wanted anyone other than Chan. The group home had left him shy and stilted around people.
Chan wasn't sure when that had changed. Possibly it had been after he had found and brought Hyunjin home, his quiet younger brother seeing something wrong and trying to fix it the only way he knew how: taking it and putting it into Chan’s hands for safekeeping. After that, Jeongin seemed to take each new addition to the team as some kind of companion for him, personally. He had not cared that Minho had been sharp and biting at them having a kid around, or that Seungmin had been quiet and easily irritated by noise, or even that nobody else had quite trusted Jisung for a long few months. He had just quietly, carefully, made his friends.
And so, too, was he doing it now with Felix, who seemed very happy to be made a friend of. That Jeongin had warmed quickly to Felix was not a particular surprise — that Hyunjin had was, a bit, to Chan. Hyunjin had made friends with Seungmin quickly, both of them inclined towards paranoia and solo pursuits, but he still gave Minho a relatively wide berth despite the years, and his relationship with Jisung often felt like a work in progress. But Felix had become his new best friend overnight.
Jeongin held the mixing bowl out to him. “Hyung, you should help,” he said. “Since you’ve got those arms.”
Chan laughed. “And you don’t have arms?” he asked, but he took the bowl and started to stir it too, not entirely sure what he was supposed to be doing but happy to help out. He was grateful, too, that Felix was happy to spend this time with Jeongin, who had so often had nothing to occupy himself when the others were busy with jobs. Felix, too, he thought, could use something to fill his time.
“Here,” Felix said. He was holding up another bowl, this one with dry flour in it. “I need to add more of this, can you— thanks,” he added, as Chan lowered the bowl he was holding, and let Felix pour some over. Their arms brushed as they did so, Felix’s skin very warm. He stepped away as soon as he was finished, putting the bowl of flour down on the counter behind him, and Chan had to work remarkably hard to not feel the loss of that soft skin against his.
He thought, maybe, he might be losing his mind. That seemed to be the only explanation for why he felt like this, for why every time he was around Felix he felt somewhat like he couldn’t breathe. He’d had crushes on people in the past, people he was attracted to, but there was something about Felix that felt like it had wriggled under his skin at that first meeting and now he was just stuck living with it.
Chan stirred the mixture in his bowl, trying his best to not keep looking at Felix as he did it. Jeongin came and leaned against him, his body much heavier now than it had once been but not something Chan couldn’t easily take. Jeongin often didn’t like it if other people initiated contact like this, so Chan had learned, through the years, to never react when Jeongin did it to him. He just stood there, stirring steadily, wondering a little how he was supposed to tell them that he’d only come up for a drink and probably couldn’t stay to help them make cookies.
“How many of these are you making?” he asked. There was, he realised now, a remarkable amount in this bowl, and still a considerable amount of flour in the one Felix had held.
“Oh, at least three dozen,” said Felix, sounding a little absent, as he went to the fridge and put the milk away. “Maybe more.”
Hyunjin got to his feet, saying, “I hope you know that half of these are for you, baby.”
Felix smiled at him, so sweet that even though it wasn’t directed at Chan himself, he felt the edge of his own mouth twitch up. “Hyunjin, I can’t eat that many cookies,” he said.
“You’re going to do your damn best,” Hyunjin said, very darkly. He caught Felix by his t-shirt and then pulled at it, balling the material up in his hand behind Felix’s back, so that it pulled taut against Felix’s body. Felix made a little flustered sound, trying half-heartedly to wriggle away, but Hyunjin held him still and said, “You’re still so skinny, like, hyung, look at this, look at how small his waist is.”
Chan was looking. He hoped to god that Jeongin, still leaned against him, hadn’t felt the way he’d twitched a little at the sight of it. Felix was still too skinny, so skinny that it made Chan want to help Hyunjin feed Felix these cookies later, but it was clear also that even without the weight loss of the past few months, Felix’s build was still small and slim. The urge to fit his hands around that waist, to see how far his fingers would spread around it, was almost physical.
Felix was pink with embarrassment, smacking at Hyunjin’s hands to get him to drop the shirt, hissing his name. Hyunjin did so after a moment, letting the material fall until it was once again obscuring every line of Felix’s body. Knowing now how small Felix was under those shirts was going to be like torture for Chan, he could already tell. It had been bad enough already but knowing meant that he could picture it all the more.
Jeongin said something, Chan barely even registering it under the haze of his libido stretching its toes. It had been a while since he’d been out to find someone, scratched that itch, too busy to find the time. He was grateful to be busy, to have so much in his life, but right now he thought maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad if he’d done that.
“You’re certainly not that skinny now,” Hyunjin was saying in response to Jeongin, very archly. “Not with all that muscle. Hey, angel, you’re not allowed to get muscle like Jeongin, it’ll ruin the aesthetic.”
Felix rolled his eyes. “Oh, well,” he said. “If it’s for the aesthetic.”
Hyunjin laughed, a bright little sound, and then slung himself across Felix’s back. It looked like he was resting all his weight against him, the way he sometimes did to people. Felix managing to take it and remain standing seemed something of a minor miracle. “Hyung,” Hyunjin said, his eyes back on Chan. “Earlier, when we went to the store, Felix tried to pay for all this stuff with his own money.”
“We had to fight him to let us pay,” Jeongin said.
Chan blinked, the statement taking a moment to pierce through. While he was still processing it, Felix said, “Hyunjin, I don’t want to be a burden.”
“You’re not a burden,” Chan said, almost automatically. He did not want Felix thinking that, especially not when what Chan said was true — housing and feeding Felix was easily absorbed, not remotely a problem for them. Even if it had been, he still would have done it. Sacrifices could be made, to help people. It’s what he had done for Jeongin and Hyunjin, and he would have done it for Felix too.
“Hyunjin said that you pay for the food,” Felix said. He sounded uncertain, like he thought maybe that had been a lie. “I thought you were just joking, when you said it was your treat. I don’t want— you don’t have to do that, for me, I can try to help out, I can earn it—”
“Felix,” said Chan, interrupting what he sensed was going to be a babble of words. “You don’t need to earn it. That’s not— how we do it here. While you’re living here, I’ll pay for any food you need, any living expenses you need. Stuff like this—” he lifted the mixing bowl in his arms, which he’d stopped stirring somewhere around the time that Hyunjin had pulled Felix’s shirt tight around his waist — “this is stuff that I’ll pay for you. You don’t need to spend any of your money while you’re here.”
“See?” Hyunjin said. He was still slumped across Felix’s back, although he was clearly holding himself up more now. “That’s what I told you. Hyung, he has fifteen thousand won, can you get him one of the credit cards or something?”
“I don’t need one,” Felix said, very quickly.
“Yes,” said Chan, as firm as Felix had been quick. “I’ll sort one out for him. In the meantime, if you need something, make sure you ask someone for their card. You can ask me, whenever you want. Whatever you need, okay, Felix? Whatever you need.”
Felix was staring at him. The expression on his face was one that Chan could not quite parse — surprise, and gratitude, and something else entirely all mixed together, his mouth slightly parted. Chan wanted to kiss him, wanted to cross the length of the kitchen and push him up against the fridge and kiss him. What a wild thought — how inappropriate it was, when Felix had nothing to his name, when they had just established how dependent he was on Chan’s money, on Chan’s indulgence.
If Chan wanted to kiss him, would Felix feel like he could say no? Probably not. Chan didn’t want that. Chan hated that idea. And yet the urge to kiss him was still thrumming through him.
He turned and passed the bowl to Jeongin. “Here,” he said, striving to keep his voice as casual and normal as could be, smiling his usual smile. Jeongin took it, smiling at Chan in a way that was both like and unlike his usual smile. Chan had never seen that look on Jeongin’s face, and he definitely didn’t like it. It was too knowing. He suddenly remembered— god, out of everyone in this room, Jeongin knew him best of all. If anyone could read him, Jeongin could.
“I’ll leave you guys to your baking,” he said, feeling a little desperate now to get away. “I only came up here to grab a drink.”
“Oh,” said Hyunjin, peeling himself away from Felix. “I’ll get it, hyung, what do you want?”
“Uh, give me one of the Toretas,” Chan said. Hyunjin opened the mini fridge they’d set up next to the built-in one that had come with the apartment and got out a bottle for him. Chan had to brush past Felix to take it, trying his best to give him as much space as possible but unable to avoid the way their bodies almost touched. He felt Felix take a half-step back as he did so, pressed back against the counter, and wasn’t sure if Felix had done that on purpose or not.
He took the drink from Hyunjin and said goodbye, leaving before any of them could call him back. Just before the apartment door shut behind him, he heard Hyunjin shriek, “Jeongin, if you get any of that on my clothes, I’ll—” And then the door shut, cutting off the sound. He could only hope the day wouldn’t end in a murder.
He slowly made his way back downstairs, through the empty PC room and into his office, where he had three new emails waiting for him, along with two missed calls from a contact. He sat at his desk, looking at his inbox, but seeing none of it, eyes unfocused. Instead, in his head, all he could think of was the t-shirt hugging Felix’s body; Felix’s smile, the way his eyes crinkled as he did so; and that little half-step back, when Chan had come too close.
Fuck, he thought, putting his head on his desk. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
——
Jisung was trying to sort out the piles of laundry that he’d neglected to put away over the past few weeks when the knock came on his bedroom door. “It’s open,” he called, in the middle of folding a sweater.
It took a moment for the door to open, and when it did, Hyunjin was standing on the other side, holding a plate of what looked like cookies.
Jisung tossed the sweater into a drawer and gave up the laundry quest as a waste of time. “Hello,” he said, unable to help the smile on his face at the sight of Hyunjin standing just outside his bedroom, looking like he didn’t know if he wanted to come in or not. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a black sweater and his hair was pulled back into a half-ponytail, a style that always made him look devastatingly handsome. His hair had been styled like that when Jisung first laid eyes on him, but blond, back then. He’d been one of the most beautiful men that Jisung had ever seen in his life; he still was. The red hair was more striking, but a warning, in the same way that those frogs Jisung had watched a video on were brightly coloured: look but don’t touch, the red hair said.
Luckily, Jisung was very happy to simply look. He didn’t need to touch.
“Felix made these,” Hyunjin said, voice a little stilted, as he shoved a plate of cookies in Jisung’s general direction. “Jeongin helped. Not me. We’re giving them to everyone.”
Jisung took the plate off him. They were chocolate chip, and looked like they might still be warm, if not hot. “Thank you,” he said. “You didn’t need to bring them down.”
“We’re giving them to everyone,” Hyunjin repeated. “Well, not Minho-hyung. Jeongin set some aside for him for later. But I thought you might like them now. When they’re— warm.”
Jisung knew the look on his face was helplessly fond, and he simply couldn’t help it. He liked this version of Hyunjin too much — although truthfully he liked every version of Hyunjin. But this one, the awkward one, who stumbled over his words even as he tried to be thoughtful, was so endearing. It was such a contrast to the Hyunjin he’d first thought was some kind of a model, and the Hyunjin he saw on jobs, focused and primed to his objective.
“Thank you,” he said again. He was a little surprised that Hyunjin hadn’t already left. When he was in this kind of mood, he tended to run off, like he was embarrassed by himself. Jisung had never quite managed to figure out how to explain to Hyunjin that he liked it when Hyunjin was like this, without accidentally spilling too much of his heart in the process. Usually he just defaulted to making a bigger fool of himself so Hyunjin felt like he actually did have his shit together by comparison.
But Hyunjin hadn’t left yet, so Jisung said, “Do you want to come in and eat them together?”
He saw Hyunjin visibly hesitate. It was not like Jisung expected him to stay, so that hesitation, rather than Hyunjin flouncing off immediately at the question, shocked him. He was even more surprised when Hyunjin said, quietly, “Sure.”
For a moment, Jisung didn’t know what to do with himself. The response had thrown him off so much that he floundered. It was possible he was gaping, a little bit, and by the time he pulled himself together and stepped aside to let Hyunjin in, Hyunjin was looking at him like he regretted saying yes. But he didn’t turn and leave, and he didn’t say anything else: he just sat, awkward and uncomfortable looking, right on the very edge of Jisung’s bed.
Jisung sat on his desk chair, trying to not lose his entire mind completely. It was not like he’d never had Hyunjin in his room before; Jisung had even been in the room some of those times. Hyunjin, though, never lingered, never stayed here with him. He had certainly never sat on Jisung’s bed before. He was trying to not let his brain go sideways with it, both because it meant nothing, but also because it made him feel— gross. Even just thinking about Hyunjin and a bed in any context felt inappropriate.
He held out the plate of cookies to Hyunjin. “Here,” he said. “You get first pick, since you helped make them.”
“I did not,” Hyunjin said, but he took a couple from the top of the pile anyway. “I sat at the table and ate the spare chocolate chips.”
“That’s an important part of the process too,” Jisung said. Hyunjin rolled his eyes but took a bite from one of the cookies, a delicate movement. Jisung took one too and bit into it. It was still warm, soft with it, the chocolate inside melting into his mouth. “Wow,” he said, surprised. “These are so good.”
“They are,” said Hyunjin. He was already finishing his first cookie, that sweet tooth of his giving him away. “Lix is really good at this.”
Jisung was so happy to have Hyunjin in here with him that the nickname didn’t even make his stomach feel like it was dropping out of his body like it normally did. He’d spent the last week or so feeling like he was watching a train wreck in slow motion, except the train wreck was just his heart slowly crumbling. Realistically, it changed nothing, if Hyunjin liked someone. Jisung had always known where he stood, but still. It hurt, though he tried to tamp it down, lock it away with the rest of his feelings for Hyunjin.
“Here,” said Jisung, holding out the plate of cookies to him. “You hold this, so I don’t accidentally knock it off the table. I want to show you something.”
“I’d kill you,” Hyunjin said, casually enough to be a joke, as he took the plate and held it in his lap, something about his body language as if he were trying to securely hold a baby there.
Jisung shook his mouse, waking up his computer. It opened up to the last thing he had open, which was his edits to the plan for the hotel art gallery job. It reminded him, though, opening his computer like this, Hyunjin’s presence like a little alert in his brain. “Oh, right,” he said. “Last time you were in here, with Felix, you left one of those dog grooming videos open, and god, Hyunjin, I lost three hours of my life to watching those things.”
Hyunjin sat up a little straighter, looking— excited, in a way that felt so young, reminded Jisung of Jeongin somehow. That same awkward Hyunjin of earlier, filtered in a different way. “Did you see the one where they groomed the pomeranian to look like a teddy bear?”
“Yes,” said Jisung, who had watched that video twice, the second time after it had come up as a related video and he had not been able to resist. “I loved it, that dog was unbelievably cute.”
Hyunjin slumped a little. He was still eating the cookies, and had not seemed to notice that Jisung had mostly stopped. This had been Jisung’s plan all along; Hyunjin had spent a week commenting on how skinny Felix was, but he was too skinny too. “I wish we could get a dog,” Hyunjin said, voice wistful. “I always wanted one.”
“God, me too,” Jisung said, his most heartfelt. He’d also always wanted one, from when he was a kid, but even if he’d managed to convince his mom to let him have one, he’d have never risked bringing a pet into that house with his stepdad. Things Jisung liked tended to get broken at best in that house. “But I doubt Chan would let us have one, not that kind of dog.”
Hyunjin looked at him for a moment, something— assessing in his eyes. Jisung held himself still, pinned by that gaze. Then Hyunjin blinked, the expression going out of his face, and he said, very wryly, “Maybe if we got Jeongin to ask, he’d let us.”
Jisung laughed, feeling warm all over with his affection for Hyunjin. Of course he would think like that, of course he would say it in that dry way, funny without trying. “Here,” he said, turning back to his computer and opening up a new Youtube tab. “I have a video I wanted to show you, is it okay if you stay a little longer?”
He thought Hyunjin might hesitate, the same way he had earlier, but instead Hyunjin had— settled, at some point in the conversation. He was sitting further back on the bed, no longer perched on the edge like a bird about to take flight, and his shoulders looked looser, more relaxed. So instead of hesitating, he just nodded, and said, “Yeah, I have time.”
Jisung smiled at him, helpless with it. He loved Hyunjin so much he didn’t know what to do with all of it, how to hold it in his hands without it spilling over in a way that let Hyunjin know. Maybe it showed on his face right now, but Hyunjin didn’t seem to notice. He was just looking back at Jisung, expectant, waiting. So Jisung said nothing more, and just opened up the video he’d been keeping in the back of his mind in the wild hopes that something like this might happen.
——
Felix took the final batch of cookies out of the oven, leaving the tray on the stovetop to cool a little. The oven was pretty small so cooking all that dough had been a process. A veritable procession of cookie making. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, then the door. “Hyunjin’s taking a while,” he said, feeling the slightest stirrings of worry, which even he knew was silly. Unless Hyunjin had fallen down the stairs, there was little other danger to be found here.
“He’s probably trying to escape helping us clean up,” Jeongin said wisely. He was carefully using a spatula to move some still-warm cookies off the other tray and onto plates.
Felix looked around the kitchen, at all the bowls and utensils and flour. They really had made an absolute mess. When Chan had commented on it, Felix had immediately anticipated a scolding. But Chan, in what Felix was beginning to realise was his typical fashion, had just accepted it easily. Felix sort of wished he’d stayed and helped them longer, but also was aware of himself enough to know it was probably good that he hadn’t.
“Alrighty,” Jeongin said, sounding pleased. He put the spatula down and then took a sheet of saran wrap and laid it over one of the plates of cookies, and then he took another plate and stacked it on top, so there were two plates of six. He picked the whole thing up and turned to Felix. “Here, you take these down to Chan-hyung and Seungmin-hyung, and I’ll get started rinsing.”
Felix— stared down at the plates. He was going pink again. “Oh, I thought— I can do the cleaning, you should take the plates down,” he said, a little soft.
Jeongin smiled. He had a wide smile, cute, but there was something shrewd in his eyes. “You did most of the baking, so you should get to deliver some of them,” he said, still in that lighthearted tone. “I’ll take a plate down to Minho-hyung later, so you should take these ones.”
Protesting more would make himself more obvious than not, so Felix took the plates, and Jeongin beamed, flouncing over to the sink, happier than anyone Felix had ever seen to be stuck with doing the dishes.
Felix bit back a sigh and let himself out of the apartment. He’d brushed some of the flour off himself earlier once they’d gotten past the mixing stage, but he was still gritty with it, faint smears over his arms, more obvious across his black shirt. Chan had already seen him like this, so he supposed it didn’t matter.
As he descended the stairs, he reminded himself it didn’t matter regardless. Chan didn’t need— didn’t need to think Felix was attractive. It was better, in fact, if he didn’t.
The PC room was empty and dark, the vibrant red LED lights up in the corners the only source of illumination. The adjacent hallway though was properly lit, Chan’s office door closed.
Felix took a deep breath, berating himself for being stupid, and then knocked on the door. There was no reply.
“Hyung?” he called, knocking again.
Chan either was wearing headphones, busy, or simply not here. Felix touched the doorknob uncertainly and then snatched his hand back. He couldn’t go in without permission, whether Chan was in there or not. For a moment, he waffled over if he should leave the plate on the floor beside the door, but thought better of it. Someone could trip.
Well, he’d tried. He wouldn’t say he fled back out into the stairwell, but he did move quickly. Rationally he knew he was allowed to wander, but he didn’t like the idea of anyone catching him poking around the third floor alone. It just did not feel like a domain he was quite welcome in yet, somehow.
The workshop was easier, Felix frequently was in there and predicted he’d be spending even more time there in the future. Seungmin was easier too, in many ways. Right now, he was easier just in that Felix knew he’d be there.
The second floor landing was clear of people, Minho and Jisung’s doors closed, and Felix passed through and on to the ground floor. There, the door to Seungmin’s workshop had been left slightly ajar, and Felix reached out to push it the rest of the way open and then paused when he heard the low tones of Chan’s voice. He peeked through the gap in the door, keeping quiet, and saw both Seungmin and Chan in the workshop with their backs facing Felix, Seungmin sitting at his desk and Chan hovering near him. All of Seungmin’s monitors were on, the low glow giving both boys a halo. Chan looked good, even from this angle, the broad lines of his back visible through the shirt he was wearing.
Seungmin was speaking now, clicking around as he did so. “He’s made some really interesting suggestions, things I wouldn’t have thought of,” he was saying, and Felix got a little jolt as he realised they were talking about him. “I’m learning from him, which is kind of new, and also kind of nice.”
“So he’s— you like him?” Chan asked, something odd in the tone of his voice. “You think he’s trustworthy.”
“Do I like anyone?” Seungmin retorted dryly before saying more neutrally, “So far all he’s done is given us good info. Nothing seems off, if that’s what you’re asking.” Seungmin glanced up at Chan over his shoulder, Felix saw the way the top of his head swivelled even over the back of his high desk chair. “Why?” Seungmin asked, less curious and more suspicious. “Did something happen?”
“No, no,” Chan said, quickly, too quickly, too high, like he was nervous, maybe. He stepped back as he said it, rolling his shoulders in a shrug and shaking his head. “I’m just following up.”
Seungmin fully swivelled his chair around now, and Felix could see his narrowed eyes, the cocked eyebrow. He opened his mouth for some retort, but then caught sight of Felix in the doorway. “Oh, Felix,” he said, and Chan’s face whipped around.
Felix felt himself pinken, just a little. It hadn’t been his intention to eavesdrop, per se. He mostly just hadn’t wanted to interrupt what might have been an important conversation, and then he’d realised they were talking about him and he’d frozen. But this probably didn’t look great.
Chan came in to easy motion, turning the rest of the way towards Felix and then making his way over. Felix pushed the door fully open but stayed standing under the frame of it, feeling intensely awkward as Chan stopped next to him, almost in the doorway with him.
Felix clutched the plates closer, glancing at Chan through his lashes. “Checking up on me?” he asked, keeping his voice light, though it still sounded a bit stilted.
Chan, for his part, also looked like he’d been caught doing something questionable. “I have to know,” Chan said, an apologetic note in his voice, but it didn’t soften the steel of the fact of it. And Felix understood. This was more than Chan’s operation, this was his family. And Felix was an unknown variable.
“Oh, no, I—” Felix stammered out before he had the thought fully ready, rushing to reassure Chan. “I totally get it,” he tried again, hoping his sincerity bled through in his voice.
Chan blinked slowly at him, his gaze roving over Felix’s face like he was— searching, trying to pick all of Felix’s little nuances apart. “Thank you,” he murmured, “for understanding.” He said it so seriously, so honestly, never looking away, and Felix felt his breath catch. He found that he couldn’t look away, not when Chan was so close, not when his eyes were so dark and glittering and practically pinning Felix in place. Why did Chan have to look like that, Felix thought with no small amount of despair, why did he have to have such pretty brown eyes and such a full mouth, why did he let his curls fall soft over his forehead, why—
Felix was staring— felt the wideness of his own eyes, realised he still wasn’t breathing, his mouth hanging open slightly like an idiot. “Uhm,” he blurted, and it was a fucking squeak, and he did not even stop to clear his throat. He shoved the plates toward Chan, saying far too loudly, “Cookies?”
Seungmin snorted; he tried to muffle it, but Felix still heard. Felix’s face was hot, a wash of prickling warmth that went all the way to his hairline. He was pink if not fucking red. Strangely enough, Chan was— a little pink cheeked too, Felix thought, as he startled into motion and grabbed the topmost plate from Felix’s hands. “Yeah,” Chan said, his voice pitched oddly, “yeah, these look— they look great, Felix.” He flashed a quick smile at Felix, as if to emphasise his sincerity. Then he jabbed his thumb toward the hallway, the plate held in his other hand, and said, “I gotta— I got work to do.”
“Right, yeah,” Felix said, juddering out of the doorframe so Chan could pass through. They brushed against one another as Chan left, and Felix bit back a hysterical sound. His grip on the remaining plate was so tight it was a wonder it didn’t shatter. For a moment after Chan was gone, all he could do was stand there and stare down at it, at the cookies, trying to get a handle on himself.
Then he let out a shaky breath and wobbled to Seungmin’s desk, avoiding the other boy’s eyes. He placed the plate carefully next to Seungmin’s mouse pad.
“Uhm, cookies?” Seungmin said mockingly, voice pitched so it was nasal and lilting. Felix tried to glare at him but absolutely crumpled under the unimpressed look Seungmin was giving him in turn.
“Oh my god shut up,” Felix halfway wailed, stepping away and scrubbing at his face like that would chase away the blush. He’d been planning to stay and chat a little but now he just— couldn’t. So he just stomped around the workbench and let himself back out into the stairwell, closing Seungmin’s workshop door behind him as he went.
While climbing up and up back to the apartment he worked to clear his mind, to calm himself. This was— bad, this was so bad, Felix couldn’t afford to lose his head. His task was too important to get— distracted. And Chan was so distracting, he just had something to him that drew Felix in, as the moon drew the tide. That something lay heavy on Felix’s consciousness every time they were in a room together, like a physical presence leaning on him.
But he had to try to keep distance between them. Professional distance. Chan was just a man. Just flesh and bone, mortal, nothing Felix hadn’t seen before. Nothing so supernatural as to sway Felix, if he didn’t want to be swayed.
And yet— Felix couldn’t stop thinking of Chan, blushing and flustered. Chan, staring at Felix like he, too, felt that pull. If Chan wanted him too—
This, Felix thought grimly as he knocked on the apartment door, is going to be hell.
——
Seungmin sat at his desk, staring at the plate of cookies Felix had just left for him. For a long few moments he wasn't really sure what the feeling sitting heavy in his chest was, and then he realised — he was simply conflicted.
He peeled the layer of cling film off the top of the cookies. Some of the chocolate chips were still somewhat melted, so it stuck, and he had to work it off carefully. Once it was gone the smell of them was thick in his nose, sweet and rich.
That paranoid little voice always in the back of his mind whispered, poison. And that was very stupid, because he didn't actually think Felix would do that. Budding trust aside, it would just be a sloppy plan. If Felix wanted them dead, there were far more efficient means of accomplishing that.
And Seungmin had watched on the monitors as they’d been baking, had seen Hyunjin pick up a cookie and stuff it into Felix's mouth. So no, no poison.
He nibbled one of the cookies, found it a bit oversweet for his taste. Jeongin would like them like this, as would Hyunjin. Seungmin put it back on the plate for Changbin to pick at later, replacing the cling film over the top.
Then he sighed and got to his feet, thoughts swirling in slow movements. As he climbed into the back of the van he considered Felix: his past contrasted so completely with the place that he was making for himself here. It seemed unreal, suspicious at times, and so Seungmin had to turn it over and over in his mind, ascertain it wasn’t something potentially dangerous. It fell to him to make sure Felix wasn’t secretly plotting against them, even more so than usual, considering Seungmin was the only one aware of Felix’s origins.
A drill as well as several other tools, rulers and levels, were strewn about the floor of the van. The back seats had already been removed when the van had been purchased, and Seungmin had spent the morning tearing up the carpet. Now was the process of drilling holes into the plastic interior so he could mount the surfaces upon which some of the monitors would eventually sit. Seungmin set about drilling where he’d previously marked. This was something Changbin or Jisung would be better suited for, and if Seungmin asked they’d probably do it, but he was persnickety enough that he’d hover the whole time anyway. It wasn’t like it would save him time.
The taste of chocolate lingered in his mouth as he worked. In his mind’s eye, he could see Felix’s tentative posture, his fierce blush. The cynic in him knew seducing Chan would be an excellent stratagem, for someone here to tear them apart from the inside. Felix hadn’t seemed like he was faking, but then the best actors never did. That blush though— Seungmin didn’t think a person could control that, not like the way tears could be summoned. A blush came or went, outside a person’s will.
And if Felix hadn’t been faking— was that any better. Maybe if Chan was ambivalent to it, but he clearly was not. Seungmin wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Chan be so— clumsy, so easily put out of step by another person. Scrawny and in need of about a month’s worth of food and sleep, Felix had still clearly caught Chan’s eye. If they continued like this, Chan would soon be sharing a bed with the Magpie’s son. Which would be— fine, Seungmin supposed, if only Chan knew. But Seungmin didn’t think they’d get to a point where it’d be safe to tell him any time soon. So he was going to have to stand aside and watch Chan fall for Felix, not quite knowing all of what he was falling for.
Seungmin heaved a heavy sigh, putting the drill down on the floor of the van again. His hands were covered in dust from drilling, and his hair was tickling his forehead, sticking with the beginnings of sweat. He used his arm to brush his fringe out of his face, huffing softly.
The room had been silent, his ears ringing a little after the sound of the power tools, and an insistent pinging broke through the quiet suddenly. Seungmin poked his head out of the van, looking across the room to see his monitors lit up with an alert that one of the building’s alarms had been triggered. This happened from time to time — he had all the windows rigged to go off if anyone opened them, and so they often did, especially when the weather was nice. And the side door too, if someone incorrectly input the keycode. Changbin was usually the culprit of this, Seungmin having to slap the alarm silent every time it happened.
Retrospectively, it was foolish to get complacent, especially what with Felix having waltzed in here not long ago. But Changbin was out, had left to get Seungmin his supplies, and instead of alarm it was annoyance that zinged through Seungmin as he climbed out of the back of the van. Annoyance that even after years, his beefheaded boyfriend couldn’t input a keycode right.
Seungmin had begun to make his way to the workbench, was stranded in the open middle of the room, when the workshop door suddenly swung open. It was— not Changbin. Instead a stranger, a man, taller than Seungmin, broader, stood in the doorway, catching sight of Seungmin and pausing. His hair was close shaved and he had sweat beading all over his forehead, dripping over a scowl. They stared at each other for one long moment, Seungmin’s computer still pinging away. His computer, on the long desk at the far end of the room, all the way on the other side of the workbench, too far. Beside his mousepad, sat his phone. He’d never make it.
The man twitched. Seungmin dove for the workbench. In his periphery he saw the man spring into sudden motion as well, but Seungmin kept his focus on his prize. There was a screwdriver sitting on the edge of the bench and a little further on, underneath, was a panic button. But he didn’t make it to either.
A hand clamped painfully around his upper arm, and while his own momentum wanted to carry him forward, the man ripped him backwards. The force of it wrenched his arm out of his shoulder socket, and Seungmin cried out as he went tumbling to the concrete floor, the sound abruptly cutting off with a pained wheeze at the contact.
“Where’s the little red-haired bitch?” the man demanded, prowling towards him while Seungmin struggled to catch his breath. Hyunjin, Seungmin thought, scrambling away across the floor, his injured arm held to his stomach. “Come here, you—”
Seungmin kicked out from the ground, catching the guy in the groin hard enough to make him give a small shout and stumble back, but not hard enough to down him and Seungmin internally cursed. No matter how much the others had tried to help, Seungmin just wasn’t a fighter, could never get a knack for it.
But he took advantage of the man’s momentary pain and darted for the workbench, never making it fully to his feet but managing to slam his hand up under the table. As soon as the panic button was pushed the real alarm began to sound, insistent and shockingly loud through the whole building.
Seungmin turned frantically to check if the man was still hunched over, and was immediately hit across the face, knuckles connecting painfully with his cheekbone. He went down and this time, he didn’t try to get back up.
——
Minho was reading in his room when the alarm went off. His body reacted before his brain had quite worked out what the sound was — other than when Seungmin did tests, they’d never actually heard it before. But he’d surged to his feet and was halfway out of the room before the first blaring note had faded.
He took the stairs three at a time down, the alarm still screaming over the intercom. He couldn’t hear anything coming from above him but it would take the others a moment longer to react, he knew. His body had been trained for this, for sudden reaction times that came from unusual sounds, from alarms and sirens. He’d learned to move without thinking about it, because delays had meant a prison guard’s stick in his face, a beating or something worse; sometimes, especially after he had gained a reputation for himself, him laying in bed when the morning alarm went off had meant a stint in solitary. He’d learned, very quickly, to get up.
The door to the workroom was hanging open a little, something Seungmin was always yelling at them about. When Minho shoved it fully open, he found a stranger in dark clothing looming over something curled up against the wall next to the row of computers. Seungmin, Minho realised, trying to protect his head with one arm as the man hit him with a closed fist.
The violence inside Minho, which he usually tempered, was singing like a lit forge now. He strode forward with focused purpose and snatched up a spanner from the workbench as he went past, not overly large but heavy enough.
The man lifted an arm to hit Seungmin again. Minho shouted something, something he was barely aware of; he was not sure if it was wordless or just incomprehensible. He had hit that point where nothing was real but the promise of blood.
The man had half-turned to look back at him when Minho was abruptly on him, arm swinging in a tight, controlled arc so that the head of the spanner slammed into the intruder’s temple. Minho had moved too fast to be stopped, and the other man went stumbling sideways, thrown immediately off balance. Before he could catch himself, Minho hit him again, a hard backwards jab of the other end of the spanner into his throat, almost hard enough to pierce the flesh.
The intruder let out a wet choking sound and this time when he stumbled he went to the floor, landing heavily on his side. He was still breathing though, still alive. Minho thought dispassionately that if he’d managed to hit him harder, he might have been able to crush his windpipe. It was a shame that he hadn’t. He got down on top of that scrambling, writhing body, straddling it so that it was pinned, still on its side, arms held still between Minho’s body and the floor. Nothing better than an animal, not something that deserved better than what Minho would do to it.
He hit it in the head with the spanner again. The sound of that fleshy thunk made the blood sing in Minho’s veins, the way it always had done. The body went a little slack, and when Minho let it slump onto its back, on his knees over it, the man who had hurt Seungmin was blinking up at him, looking dazed, confused. His mouth formed the word what, and Minho hit him in the face, his weapon turned so that both little points of the spanner pierced the flesh, blood welling up immediately. It was only then that the man started to scream.
The screaming pissed Minho off, honestly; he never liked it when they screamed. The sound always went through him, like nails on a chalkboard, and with the alarm still sounding overhead, it was too much. Be quiet, he thought, as he hit that face over and over again, driving the sharpened edges into the flesh again and again, shut up, be quiet, be dead, be dead.
The screaming stopped, not too long after it had started. It was replaced by a gurgling, groaning sound that wasn’t much better but Minho could hear the wet thump thump thump of each hit now. Every so often there was the crack of bone fracturing. Under Minho’s thighs he could feel the body jerking, the last spasms of nerve endings firing off desperate, ill-fated signals, until at last it went still. He hit, and hit, and hit, until he was no longer aware of anything but the feeling of his arm lifting up and slamming down, hard and rhythmical. His mind was empty of everything but the need to keep going.
“Alright,” he heard, Jisung’s voice, then arms grabbed his, hauling him up to his feet. Minho went with the movement, didn’t try to fight it, and then once he was standing took careful aim and kicked that mush of features with the toe of his sneakers before he was dragged far enough away from the body to not be able to reach. “Alright, that’s enough of that.”
Minho caught his breath, willing his body still. “Let go of me,” he said, voice almost calm again. “I’m okay.” Jisung did so, hands held up warily as if prepared to grab Minho again if necessary, and Minho stepped away sharply. There was coppery blood in his mouth: not his own, just the backspray, but he hadn’t realised he’d had his mouth open through all that. He spat on the floor, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Christ fuck, Minho-hyung,” a new voice — Hyunjin — said, and Minho wasn’t sure what that was in reponse to until he lifted his head and saw Hyunjin had stopped in the doorway and was staring across the room at the body. His face was doing something that implied he wanted to throw up but was determined not to. "I get it, but fuck, hyung, we’re going to be cleaning blood off the ceiling for days.”
“Oh well,” Minho snapped, not giving a single shit. “Fucker. What the hell did he do to Seungmin.”
It was only then that Minho realised the alarm had been turned off. He searched, found Seungmin semi-upright against the wall, one hand braced on his desk for support. His other hand was pressed against his stomach, the angle of his arm odd, body hunched forward. He was panting, and his face was bloody, but unlike the blood splashed on Minho’s face, the blood dripping slowly off Seungmin’s jaw was his own. There was a nasty looking cut on his forehead, another across his cheek, one of his eyes already visibly swelling.
“My shoulder is dislocated, I think,” Seungmin said, barely moving his lips. Hyunjin immediately went to him, putting a great deal of distance between himself and the corpse as he did so. He took Seungmin by his uninjured elbow, and began to lead him slowly toward the beaten-up couch. Seungmin, prone to snapping when people coddled him, simply accepted Hyunjin’s help without a word of sarcasm. He leaned against Hyunjin, eyes still closed, and almost fell onto the couch, letting out only a bitten-back noise of pain as the movement jostled his arm.
Footsteps, in the stairwell, and Minho whipped around, widening his stance and restrengthening his grip on the spanner. But it was just Chan, positively clattering into the room, his gun drawn. Once he saw Minho standing there he relaxed, lowering his gun back to his side.
Jeongin and Felix were with him, and as Chan stopped just inside the door, Jeongin poked out from around him. “What happened, what was the alarm for,” Jeongin said, right before he saw the body lying on the other side of the room.
The high of the violence that had already been slowly dissipating from Minho’s system absolutely vanished at the expression on Jeongin’s face, leaving Minho feeling cold and empty. He watched Jeongin recoil, horror in his gaze as he looked from the mangled corpse and then to Minho with a kind of wide-eyed shock that didn’t really make any sense. He’d seen what Minho was capable of before. Perhaps for someone like Jeongin, this sort of thing was a new kind of awfulness every time he saw it. It made sense, for Jeongin to be like that. For him to be so good he just would never be desensitised.
Not like Minho, who looked at the body and felt— nothing. Not disgust nor upset, but not triumph either. It was nothing more than a body, another one created at his hands. Looking at it now, through Jeongin’s eyes, he could understand the horror, understand Hyunjin’s pale face and Jisung’s wary eyes. But in him, there was nothing.
Minho dropped the spanner, his fingertips tingling a little, and it clattered down onto the concrete floor.
He watched, numb, as Jeongin flinched under the sound. “Hyung,” he said softly, a slight tremor in his voice, “are you hurt?”
The blood splattered across Minho’s face, over his hands, was starting to grow tacky. “It’s not my blood, baby boy,” he intoned flatly.
Jeongin nodded, and then he— he ripped his gaze away, and Minho could sense the relief in him once he did it. Like he’d been forcing himself to look, trying to prove something, to act the way he thought he needed to. He moved now to the couch, speaking softly to Seungmin, and that was better. Jeongin touching light, gentle fingertips to Seungmin’s shoulder, while Seungmin winced.
Chan came forward to stand over the body, one hand pushed through his hair, the other on his hip, where he’d holstered his gun. “At least this room doesn’t have carpet,” Chan muttered, eyeing the pool of blood. Behind him, Felix still lingered in the doorway, pale, eyes wide. Probably he’d never seen a dead body before, soft kid like him.
“Hyung, his shoulder is dislocated,” Jeongin called to the room at large. “I think it’ll be okay if someone can set it for him.”
“I’ll do it,” Jisung said, making his way over to the couch.
Minho leaned back against the worktable and didn’t look at Seungmin, sitting there bracing himself for the pain. The body was dead, he could do nothing more to it, and yet if he thought too hard about what the man had done, the urge for violence sprung up again inside him. So he didn’t look at Seungmin, but instead at Jeongin, who was holding Seungmin’s hand as Jisung aligned his shoulder, still talking quietly to him. Minho didn’t bother trying to work out what Jeongin was saying. Instead he let the murmur of it wash over him, until the anger had faded to a background hum.
The crunch of Seungmin’s shoulder being shoved into place echoed around the room. This time Seungmin did cry out in pain, almost drowned out by Jisung’s sorry, sorry. “It’s okay,” Seungmin said, once he had the breath to do so. “It’s okay.”
Chan stepped away from the body and walked to Seungmin and hunched down in front of him, a hand on Seungmin’s knee. “Are you okay?” he asked quietly. “Really?”
“Yes,” said Seungmin. He sighed. “I’m sorry about the alarm. I was working in the van when he came in, my phone was on my desk. I probably should have just screamed but I didn’t know if Minho-hyung was in his room so I just hit the panic button. Sorry, it wasn’t really a big deal.”
“Please don’t apologise,” Chan said, getting back up to his feet.
“Hyung, you’re bleeding,” said Jeongin.
“Yeah, he hit me a few times,” Seungmin said. “He was wearing some kind of ring, too.” He touched his face with the tips of his fingers. He seemed, for a moment, shocked to find that there was actually blood there. He almost poked at the wound before Jeongin caught his hand and put it firmly back down into his lap.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll get something to patch you up with.” He got up off the couch and darted across the room.
With Seungmin’s care well in hand, Minho hunkered down next to the lump of flesh that had once been a man and began to paw through his pockets. There was no gun, no other weapons. There was a cell phone, locked, with a wallpaper of a woman sitting with a dog. There was also a wallet, with very little money inside it, two bank cards, and an ID card. Minho pulled that out and passed it up to Chan.
“Park Hanyoung,” Chan read aloud. “Does that ring a bell for anyone?”
Everyone shook their heads. Minho, straightening back to his feet, shook his, too. He’d never heard the name, and he hadn’t recognised the man at all. Whoever this man had been before Minho had happened to him, he had not been particularly tall, nor, Minho saw now, particularly bulky. He was wearing perfectly normal clothing, things seen every day on the street, and was not wearing gloves. Seungmin’s blood was stained onto the knuckles of his right hand. He had not even covered his face. A precaution that would have been rendered unnecessary anyway, after Minho’s brutality; there was nothing of his face left now.
Jeongin came back from where he’d been shuffling through one of the cabinets, a white metal box in his hands. He sat back down on Seungmin’s right side, Jisung still on Seungmin’s left. While Jeongin began parsing through the contents of what appeared to be a home-made little medic kit — when had they gotten that, Minho wondered — Chan handed the ID card to Jisung, who examined it for a few moments before shaking his head. He then held it out next to him for Seungmin and Jeongin to look at.
Jeongin gave a small shrug, and Seungmin shook his head, saying, “No, I don’t think I’ve seen him before today. He was asking for Hyunjin, though.”
“Me?” said Hyunjin incredulously, as all eyes swivelled in his direction. “Why me, what did he want?”
“I don’t know,” Seungmin said. Jeongin was cleaning his face with something now, a little wipe. Seungmin kept wincing. “He just kept asking where the guy with red hair was because he knew you lived here. He kept calling you a bitch, which I did think was rude.”
“Huh,” said Hyunjin. He eyed the body for a moment before turning his face away again. “I mean, I can’t say that I recognise him, but then he doesn’t really have a face.” Jisung held out the ID card, and Hyunjin dutifully squinted at it. “Nope, still nothing.”
Felix wordlessly held out his hand, and Hyunjin passed the card to him. He looked white, and he’d taken a seat near Hyunjin around the workbench. His chosen spot placed him as far away from Minho as possible, Minho couldn’t help but notice. That, he thought, really was fair enough.
“I recognize him,” said Felix very softly as he looked down at the card. Minho’s attention on him sharpened. “I think he’s that guy from earlier today, the one who you flipped off when we were walking home from the grocery store.” Hyunjin gave him a blank look, so Felix elaborated, embarrassment colouring his features, “He asked how much to watch us fuck and you made fun of his dick size.”
“Ohhh,” said Hyunjin, realisation lighting up his features. “Did he follow us or something? Just because of that? Wow, he’s really not having a good day, is he? First he dealt with me and then he dealt with Minho-hyung and now he’s dead.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Chan muttered. “Really, that’s it? Fucking hell.” He took a step back away from where the slowly spreading pool of blood was threatening to brush against his shoes. “Jisung, can you go get one of the tarps from the storage room? We’re gonna need to wrap this up and take it out to the river.” Jisung looked at Minho, looked at the body, and then nodded. He looked completely unaffected by it now. That was something Minho had always liked about Jisung — he was fast to adapt as necessary.
Jisung left the room to go to the storeroom on the third floor. As he went, he grabbed a gun from the edge of the workbench; he must have set it down there, when he’d moved to pull Minho off the body. After the door swung shut behind him, Hyunjin said, “I am so not touching that.”
Chan sighed a little. “No,” he said. “You and Felix can go back upstairs. You too, Jeongin.”
Jeongin shook his head. “I want to stay here,” he said. The with you was unspoken but not unheard by the rest of the room. He’d replaced the wipe he was using at some point, a fresh one in his hands, and the blood was almost entirely gone now. Like this, they could see the wounds on Seungmin’s face, two ragged-edged cuts. Nasty things, probably the worst Seungmin had ever suffered, although not as bad as they could have been.
“Alright,” said Chan, very softly, touching Jeongin’s shoulder for a moment. Then he looked around at Minho. “You and Jisung will have to be the ones who’ll dispose of this.”
“Of course,” Minho said tonelessly. It was his mess; of course he needed to help clean it up. If he could do it on his own, he wouldn’t even drag Jisung into it.
Chan’s eyes did something that was not quite a wince, something Minho couldn’t quite place. “You uh— you’ll need to wash off, Minho. You look like you just committed a murder.”
Yes, Minho knew exactly what he looked like, with the blood splattered across his mauled face. He nodded. It was settling in— the numbness, that always came after the violence, as whatever had gripped him in the moment, that snarling animal, settled back into slumber, leaving only what there was of a hollowed out human behind. Hyunjin was pulling Felix out of the door by the hand, and Felix glanced back, once, at Minho, and the spark of fear on his face was both surprising and not. Chan, too, was still looking at him, still with the expression that Minho didn’t recognise on his face.
They saw him, he knew. The truth of him, the one that he tried to hide most of the time. Maybe he should have been used to it but he hated it, actually, to be seen like this, to be so exposed — this bloody thing, this brutal creature. Different from them, in all the ways that truly mattered.
He left without a word, climbing the stairs to his room with a body that felt a little heavier than before. Seungmin had a bathroom he may have been able to use, but he would need to change his clothes, too. He had not looked down at himself yet but if there was blood splattered across his face it would be on his shirt, too.
He let himself into his bedroom, didn’t bother flipping the light on. His room was— threadbare, was perhaps the nicest word for it. The only interesting part of the room was the tiled floor that had mostly remained intact during the time the building had been abandoned and before Chan had moved in. It was simply a large room that he had never even attempted to fill up. He had his bed, which was just a mattress on the floor, and a wardrobe against the wall, which contained a small collection of clothing, and then his books. Lots of books, all of them just stacked in piles on the floor, with no real attempt at organisation. The piles closest to his bed acted as a kind of bedside table, where he kept his glasses and his phone during the night, but most of them were just— stacks, that he added to every so often. It was really the only thing he spent his money on.
He’d never felt the need to own— stuff. Things, to be carried with him where he went.The books were a little different, mostly because they were easily left behind. But he had never had much to his name, not even when he was young. A childhood spent with the bare minimum a child needed to not draw attention, and then after he’d been thrown in juvie the first time he had learned to get by on mostly nothing. There was no point in assigning sentiment to objects.
He went into the side room, ducking behind the curtain he had set up there back when he first moved in. This time he did flip the light switch on, unable to avoid it now. Most of the equipment back here was untouched, and all he’d done for the most part was move some of the hair washing stands out of the way so he could get at one of the sinks. The showerheads had already been attached, a nice little bonus. It had meant, from the very beginning, he had not had to ask to use the bathroom upstairs.
He’d taken most of the mirrors down from the wall. He’d left one up, a necessary evil perhaps, but he avoided looking in it now, as he unbuttoned his shirt and it fell to the tiled floor, probably getting blood on it. He didn’t like being shirtless right now, in this big empty space, but he never really liked that. Sometimes it reminded him of the prison shower rooms, but at least here he had absolute privacy, nobody watching him.
He turned the water on and bent over the sink to begin the process of washing the blood off his hands and face. It was not always easy, washing blood off skin, especially not when it had started to get tacky like it had on Minho by this point. He scrubbed at his hands until the water ran clear, and then started on his face, more careful with this, taking his time to make sure. He could still taste it, too, in his mouth. He wanted to brush his teeth, but there was probably no time.
In his head, only— Jeongin’s face, as he’d seen that body. Jeongin’s face, too, those years ago, the way he too had had blood in his mouth. Minho should have warned Chan, somehow, stopped Jeongin from coming in that room until they’d covered the body up, so that Jeongin wouldn’t have had to see it. Was it not enough, to have caused him nightmares once before?
He’d have to apologise. He owed that to Jeongin. Of all the things he owed, that was the least of it.
He looked in the mirror only at the end, when he could not feel any stickiness still clinging to his skin. In the bare overhead lighting, his face was oddly shadowed when he looked at his reflection, the grooves of his scars standing out in sharp relief, his skin paler than normal. Odd, that, when he had been rubbing at it with hot water. It was painful to look at himself, which meant that he had to do it, and so he did, checking for blood, any last traces of it, and seeing only his face looking back at him.
Clean, he thought, and the irony of it almost undid him.
——
Changbin balanced his bags in his arms as he shut the car door behind him. It had taken slightly longer than he’d expected to collect all the things that Seungmin had written on that shopping list for him. One of the usual vendors had been out of something, so he’d had to take a little trip out to one that did have it, and now, as he walked his way to the back door, the sky was beginning to darken, the late afternoon giving way to evening.
It had been something of a long day, with the early start to collect the van, but he felt— good. Pleased with himself, or perhaps, more, thinking that maybe Seungmin would be pleased with him, for having gotten everything he had requested. He liked when Seungmin was pleased with him — not just because Seungmin was always a little sweeter in bed when he was, but because he tended to smile more, when Changbin had done something good for him. Seungmin deserved to smile more.
The first floor stairwell was cool as usual, filled with that musty concrete smell that Changbin associated with home at this point. It was quiet, no echoing footsteps of anyone upstairs, no voices to be heard. He couldn't hear anything from the workroom, but that was nothing unusual, since the door was closed. If Seungmin was alone in there, even if he was playing music, Changbin wouldn’t be able to hear him.
But when he opened the door to the workroom, he found that Seungmin wasn’t alone. Chan and Jeongin were in there with him, Chan leaning against the workbench, and Jeongin on the couch with Seungmin, holding one of his hands. They all looked over at him when Changbin entered and Changbin looked back, his hands suddenly shaking so hard he thought he might drop his bags.
He came into the room and put everything very carefully down on the workbench. There was— blood, on the floor, blood that had clearly been cleaned up somewhat but not enough, paper towels resting near the smears of it. It was a struggle to keep his voice steady when he spoke. “What happened?”
Seungmin had a vivid red cut across his forehead, one that had clearly just stopped bleeding, and another one on his cheekbone, which looked like it was just short of needing stitches. His left eye was visibly bruised, swollen until it looked like Seungmin was squinting a little. He held himself in a hunched over way that Changbin recognised from seeing other people after fights — unable to hold themselves normally, making accommodations for pain. Changbin felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“Someone broke in,” Chan said heavily. Changbin felt his blood run cold, looking between Seungmin and then Jeongin, whose face was set in a strained blank expression. “Apparently just a random guy, I don’t think we need to worry about it. Seungmin managed to set the alarm off so Minho got to him before— well, not before, I guess. God, Seungmin, I really am sorry.”
Seungmin rolled his eyes. Seeing that, something so entirely Seungmin as a response, made relief pulse through Changbin. He was okay, really okay — he didn’t even seem that shaken up, although it was often hard to tell with Seungmin, what he was really thinking, how he was really feeling. Even so, the urge to go to him, to fold Seungmin up into his arms, was almost overwhelming. It wouldn’t even be for Seungmin’s sake, it would be for his own.
“I’m fine,” Seungmin said. “I’m really fine. You don’t need to fuss like this over me. Like you said, Minho-hyung got here before he hurt me too badly. I’m sure you have plenty of work to do and I need to talk to Changbin-hyung about the equipment he bought anyway.”
Chan scrubbed a hand through his hair. He looked tired, which Changbin couldn’t blame him for. “If you’re sure,” he said.
“I’m sure,” said Seungmin firmly.
“Okay,” Chan said. “Okay, we’ll leave you to it. Jeongin,” he added, “you wanna come and hang out with me?”
Jeongin looked up at him. He was pale, but when he smiled, it didn’t look too much different to his normal one. Changbin knew he should feel worry for him, should be checking in on him to make sure he was okay, but he couldn’t think of anything other than the bruise on Seungmin’s face, couldn’t think of anything but how badly he wanted to go to him but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the brain power to spare on worrying about Jeongin right that moment.
“Yeah,” Jeongin said. “I’ll come and hang out with you.” He looked down at where his hand was still holding Seungmin’s, who also looked down at it, looking a little surprised, like he hadn’t realised it was still happening. “Are you sure you’re okay, hyung?” Jeongin asked him. “I know how— scary it can be.”
“I’m really okay,” Seungmin said, exasperated but gentle with it, because it was Jeongin. He let go of Jeongin’s hand and patted it a little. “Go with Chan-hyung, okay? I’m fine.”
Jeongin nodded and got to his feet. Changbin unstuck his mouth, managed to say, somewhat normally, “You’re okay, too, right, Jeongin?”
“I’m okay,” Jeongin said, smiling at him, but when Chan held out his hand, Jeongin didn’t roll his own eyes or tell him he wasn’t a baby or anything like how he had usually reacted over the past couple of years. Instead, he just took it, holding onto it, and let Chan pull him from the room.
The second the door shut behind them, Changbin said, “Fuck. Fuck.”
Seungmin closed his eyes. Then he held out a hand, arm outstretched. “Hyung,” he said. His voice shook.
Changbin didn’t quite remember crossing the workroom, going to Seungmin as quickly as he could. The transformation once the others had left the room was distressing — Changbin hadn’t realised quite how stiff Seungmin was holding himself until all the tension had bled from his shoulders. When Changbin sank onto the couch with him, Seungmin gave him a look that was almost pleading but when Changbin tried to put his arms around his shoulders, Seungmin flinched away.
“Ah, no,” he said, when he saw whatever the expression on Changbin’s face was. “It’s just— he dislocated my shoulder, he pulled me too hard. It just— hurts.”
“God, Seungmin,” Changbin said. He took Seungmin’s hand now, instead of holding him, feeling the tremble in Seungmin’s fingers. Changbin himself felt cold, more scared than he could remember being in a while, which was pointless when everything was over and done with and Seungmin was, as far as he could be, genuinely fine. But he was scared, because he had not even known what he was coming back to. He had not known to worry about Seungmin simply— not being here, when he got back.
“Don’t,” Seungmin said quietly. “Not here, not where someone could come in. Can we— hyung, I don’t want to be in here.” He looked at the blood on the floor. It must have been a lot, to still have that much of a presence even after someone had tried to clean up the worst of it. He wondered what Minho had done to whoever it was who had broken in. Changbin was not upset to have missed that bit, exactly. They’d had to replace the carpet in the PC room the last time.
“Come on,” Changbin said. He helped Seungmin up. Much like Jeongin had done earlier, where normally Seungmin would roll his eyes or get mad at the coddling — he had been mad at the coddling, not two minutes earlier — Seungmin just let him put his arm carefully around his back and lead him to his bedroom door. Seungmin let out a soft noise of pain as they walked, and he was leaning a little into Changbin, letting Changbin take some of his weight.
Seungmin’s room was a tiny thing, even smaller than Changbin’s room up on the fourth floor, an old storage room that they’d taken all the shelves out of. There was room for a narrow twin bed and a rail of clothing, with a small set of drawers next to the bed. It was perhaps lucky that Seungmin didn’t own much clothing, or much of anything beyond his tech stuff, because none of it would have fit in here anyway but Changbin had always thought it was kind of sad that Seungmin had so little to personalise his space. He worried, sometimes, that it was a sign that Seungmin really didn’t consider this his home.
He gently deposited Seungmin onto his bed. Seungmin winced, his body taking on that awkward hunch of hidden pain again. Changbin sat down next to him, took in that body language, and said, “Maybe we should have taken you to a doctor after all.”
“No,” said Seungmin, more tired than angry, which was what Changbin expected. “I don’t need one, really, hyung.”
“Did you take any pain meds?” Changbin asked. Seungmin nodded, a weary movement. “Okay. You’ll feel better when they kick in. Do you want to lay down? I can find some more pillows to rest your shoulder against.”
“I’m okay,” Seungmin said. “I’m really— hyung.” And he leaned against Changbin, the exact way Changbin had tried to get him to do earlier outside. Changbin carefully put his arm around Seungmin’s waist now, holding him as close as he could without accidentally hurting him again. Seungmin put his head against Changbin’s shoulder and sighed. “I was scared,” he said, very quietly. “I knew I’d be okay, that someone would come before he could hurt me too much, but I was scared.”
How scared must he have been, to admit that now to Changbin? There would be more security, Changbin knew, more cameras set up around the place by Seungmin. More patrols, if needed; Minho, at least, would want to be sure. They would need to make sure they were safe. He did not like, at all, that someone had found them, so close after Felix had too.
Changbin put his mouth to Seungmin’s hair, breathed in the smell of him — there was the scent of antiseptic, from when someone had cleaned the wounds on his face. “How did he— did he come in through the front?” Changbin asked.
Seungmin shrugged, and then hissed in pain. Changbin resisted the urge to clutch him closer, as Seungmin said, “He must have, but the door didn’t seem broken, and we’d definitely locked it, after what happened with Felix. I’ll need to check the cameras later.”
“What the fuck did he want?” Changbin asked, confused by the entire thing. Chan had said it was someone random — but why would someone random go through the effort of breaking in, just to get in to beat up Seungmin?
“Hyunjin, apparently,” Seungmin said. Changbin felt the horror wash through him again. Not the same as walking into the workroom and seeing the cuts on Seungmin’s face, something different: a longer, more deep-standing horror. But then Seungmin added, “Hyunjin cursed him out on the street earlier today and I guess this guy followed him, stewed in it, and then came back to find him.”
“Christ,” Changbin said. “This city fucking sucks.”
He felt the puff of laughter against his neck. Changbin felt another piece inside him settle at that sound, more evidence that Seungmin was here and alive and whole, if a little battered.
He eased Seungmin back, looking at his face. They would be lucky if the cuts didn’t scar; probably the one on his cheekbone would, a little. Seungmin’s face was not something that was meant to have scars, not like this. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he said, very seriously.
Seungmin sighed. “You couldn’t have done anything, hyung,” he said. “I was caught by surprise, and you couldn’t have gotten down here any quicker than Minho-hyung did.”
Changbin shook his head. He knew that, logically, but that didn’t matter. He was sorry that he hadn’t been there, if only to help Seungmin after. Who had set his shoulder for him, who had cleaned up his face? He would have bled, he would have been in pain, and Changbin had not been there to help him.
He ran his thumb under the cut, softly, to avoid pulling the tender skin. He wanted to say: this is why I wanted you to learn how to defend yourself. But it was unlikely to go over well, and besides, he knew, in his heart, that Seungmin could train with him all Changbin wanted; he was unlikely to ever throw a punch even in his own defence.
“Why are you being weird,” Seungmin said, after a long minute of Changbin doing nothing but gently touch his face. Seungmin turned his face slightly to the side but didn’t actually pull away.
Changbin gave him a flat look, not letting go. “Because I love you,” he said.
Seungmin flushed red, ridiculously charming to watch. He always got so flustered when Changbin said that, which was a small part of why Changbin tried to say it as often as possible. It didn’t make Seungmin uncomfortable — discomfort, on Seungmin, looked very different. It was more that he didn’t know what to do in the face of Changbin’s affection for him, in the face of Changbin’s love for him.
The first time Changbin had said it, confessing it because he could not stand to keep it in any longer, Seungmin had looked at him with those dark eyes that Changbin liked so much and said, hyung, so simply. And Changbin had said, I’m saying this just so you know how I feel, there’s no obligation on you, and Seungmin had nodded. And he had not broken this off, he had not told Changbin to leave him alone. That said more than Seungmin’s words ever could.
“Do you want me to stay with you, tonight?” he asked. “I’ll set an alarm, sneak back up before even Jeongin gets up in the morning. Nobody will know.”
Seungmin closed his eyes, looking tired, maybe a little defeated. “I don’t know, hyung,” he said.
Changbin leaned in and kissed the very corner of Seungmin’s mouth, lingering for a moment, not pulling back as he felt Seungmin exhale shakily through his nose. “Let me stay with you,” he said, mostly against Seungmin’s mouth. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”
Seungmin leaned into him. “Stay, then,” he said, the words blunt, the tone gentle around the edges. “You’ll be the one sneaking through the house at 4am.”
Changbin felt the warm weight of Seungmin’s body finally, finally properly settle against him, Seungmin going slack in his hold, knowing that Changbin would keep him up and steady. And Changbin did, holding him as close as he could, wishing— for many things. A 4am alarm was a small price to pay, to have even a fraction of those things.
——
Hyunjin wiped the damp cloth over the kitchen counter, a bright clean streak through the flour still dusted over the surface. Behind him, Felix was washing the bowls they’d used for mixing, and there was nothing in the room but the sound of the running water and the clink, every so often, of whatever he was handling against the metal edge of the sink.
Neither of them had spoken for a while. They had mostly wordlessly come upstairs and started to clean together, saying nothing other than to divide the tasks up. Felix had taken the lead, because it seemed like he knew what he was doing most of all, having clearly done this before. Hyunjin wondered, a little, at how a boy who had been working for Lee Jaerim for apparently a while also learned how to bake, but he supposed they all needed their stress relievers. It was why he had taken up art, after all. It was impossible to think when he sunk into the mindset that let him create.
He’d wondered, right at the start, whether he should go and get Jeongin to come up and help. It would be good, he thought, for Jeongin to have something to do with his hands, something to occupy his mind for a bit, even if it was just mindless mostly repetitive work. It was why Hyunjin hadn’t complained or said much of anything about having to help clean up when he had made literally none of the mess. For once in his life, he didn’t feel like being a brat about anything. He needed the distraction. He needed the work.
He hadn’t gone to get Jeongin though. He knew that Jeongin would be sticking with Chan for a while, the same way he had done last time. Hyunjin wasn’t going to get in the way of that, not when he knew both Chan and Jeongin needed it. He could do Jeongin’s share of the work, and let Jeongin have the time with his brother.
He glanced at his phone, resting on top of the counter next to the sheathed knife, for the third time in probably five minutes. Minho and Jisung had left about an hour ago now, and outside the sky was full dark, the evening settling in. They would have taken something of a long way around to the river, Hyunjin knew, trying to avoid cameras as best as they could, and it would be an equally convoluted journey back. If they got pulled over at any point— well.
Hyunjin scrubbed at some crusted cookie dough that had somehow been squished into the countertop. He hated being this on edge, the anxiety juddering through him with every minute that passed without the car returning home. Like a woman waiting for her husband to return from the war, he thought a little hysterically, and almost flung the cloth he was holding across the room.
Behind him, the sound of the water shut off. He heard Felix sigh a little, and turned around to find that Felix was holding a towel and was starting to dry all the bowls and spoons. “Lix,” Hyunjin said, “those can just air dry, you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” said Felix, very quietly, without looking back at him.
Hyunjin studied his back, the tense lines of him. Looking at him from this angle, it was like looking at the Felix that had first come here, the one who had seemed imminently breakable. Even beyond the generally subdued atmosphere between them, Felix had been quiet. He was avoiding Hyunjin’s eyes, and was not really letting Hyunjin see his face. What would Hyunjin see, he thought, if he looked Felix in the face right now? Was it that shameful to be scared?
Hyunjin had still been with Jisung when the alarm went off, eating those cookies, watching a video Jisung had found for him. An art video, someone working with water colours in a way that had made his hands itch to try. It had been— nice, to be in there with him, the flavour of the chocolate in his mouth, Jisung asking him questions about what the person in the video was doing, and then— the alarm, so loud that Hyunjin had dropped the cookie he was holding straight onto the floor.
Jisung had startled too, which had been somewhat mollifying to see. They had heard, in those couple of seconds that they just looked at each other in shock, the sound of Minho’s door slamming open. Jisung had recovered then, much faster than Hyunjin, who didn’t like to be shocked like that, and had surged to his feet out of his desk chair and put himself between Hyunjin and the door.
Hyunjin had been— afraid. He hated that feeling. He’d never heard that alarm outside of tests, and this wasn’t a test, because Seungmin always warned them, because he knew that Hyunjin hated the sound of it. That had meant it was real, another intruder, and that had terrified him. He could still remember the bruises on Jeongin’s face. “What the fuck,” he had said.
“Hyunjin,” Jisung had said, very calmly, very steadily, pitched so that it carried over the sound of the alarm. He had not taken his eyes off his bedroom door the entire time. “Can you find my gun from the top drawer next to you and hand it to me, please?”
Hyunjin had done so, handling the gun gingerly, and passed it to Jisung, who had clicked the safety off. “Right,” Jisung had said, still in that calm voice. “I have to go help Minho-hyung with whatever this is. After I leave, I want you to lock the door after me and do not open it until I come and get you, okay?”
Whatever fear Hyunjin had felt before paled in comparison to this, the idea of Jisung leaving him here alone, of Jisung going off to face whatever it was that had come for them alone. Hyunjin couldn’t bear the thought of it. “No,” he had said, a little shrill, not at all like the calm way Jisung was speaking. “I’m coming with you, you can’t just leave me here, Jisung, I can help.”
Could he? That was debatable. There had been no other gun in that drawer and he was not their best shot, besides — he could do it but he didn’t like it, and Jisung knew that. And while he could hold his own in a fight, if there was someone, or someones down there capable of beating Minho, Hyunjin would have no chance. But Jisung had not pointed any of this out. He had looked at Hyunjin, just for one brief second, and then said, “There’s a knife in the second drawer down.”
Hyunjin had fetched the knife. It was— sturdy, something built for practical use and not just ornamental. Hyunjin had many knives, small and large and in between, and this one had felt like a knife that was meant to kill. He had not known that Jisung owned any knives — that was Hyunjin’s thing, it always had been.
“Hyunjin,” Jisung had said, right before he let them out of the room, his body language so tense, primed for action. Like this, he looked— taller somehow, although Hyunjin knew that was just his imagination. But when Jisung was serious in this way, Hyunjin always felt an odd relief about it, at the way he could rest everything on Jisung’s shoulders, maybe. “You have to do exactly as I say. Okay? Exactly as I tell you. Stay behind me, do not move from behind me.”
Hyunjin had nodded. He had no intention of doing anything different. If nothing else in his sorry life, he could trust Jisung with this. He’d always been able to trust Jisung with this, because Jisung had always protected him when he needed protection. And so he had done as he was told for once, sticking close to Jisung’s back as they had crept down the stairs and through the open door to the workshop, where Minho had been straddling a dead body and there had been— blood, everywhere. But not as much blood as last time, at least. It would be hard, for there to be as much blood as last time.
Felix dropped a bowl, plastic, onto the counter, his wet hands losing grip. It made Hyunjin startle, brought him back into the now.
“Felix,” he said. “Can you look at me?”
Felix paused in his shaky scramble to pick up the bowl again, and instead put it and the towel down. He turned to look at Hyunjin, his face pale. His expression was mostly blank, nothing but tiredness visible on it. Hyunjin set his cloth down and came forward and took Felix’s hands in both of his own. Felix’s hands were warm from the water, his fingertips pruney.
“You don’t have to worry about stuff like this,” Hyunjin told him. “It never usually happens, it’s a complete fluke. It’s just bad luck that it happened so close to you starting to live with us.”
Felix tried to smile at him, Hyunjin watched it happen. But it didn’t work and after a moment it dropped back off. “I know,” he said, but he didn’t sound certain.
“I’m serious,” Hyunjin said. “We have so much security set up. More, now, after you finding us, Seungmin has gone a little crazy. You don’t need to worry about it, so stop, okay? Don’t look so scared.”
Felix squeezed his hands but said nothing for a while. They just looked at each other — Hyunjin wondered what Felix was seeing on Hyunjin’s face in turn. He didn’t want Felix to be scared of living here. He would hate for that, after Felix had so obviously been settling into a sense of safety here. Hyunjin wanted that for him, the same way it had always meant safety for him.
“I’m okay,” Felix said eventually. “I’m going to go get ready for bed.”
He untangled their hands gently but firmly, not letting Hyunjin cling at all. Hyunjin let him walk away, around the corner into the hallway and then he heard the click of their bedroom door. Hyunjin turned back to the counter and finished off his task, cleaning up all the detritus that had been left and then— doing a little more, cleaning even when there was nothing to clean, looking at the clock on his phone the entire time until he felt like he was going to go crazy.
When the keypad outside beeped and the door opened, he thought he was going to fly out of his skin, but it was Jeongin, looking drawn and tired as he slipped his shoes off and padded his way through the room without looking at Hyunjin. “They’re back,” he said. He sounded tired too, but not any more than he normally would after a long day. He slept so much earlier than the rest of them, and it was nearing that time for him. Jeongin was like this, especially when he was tired — how many times had they been looking for him, only to realise he had gone to bed without saying anything to them.
Hyunjin felt all the tension and stress drain out of him, leaving only his own form of tiredness behind. “Did you eat?” he asked, before Jeongin could disappear into his room like he clearly meant to.
“I ate with Chan-hyung,” he said, a little short, but he lifted his hand and waved at Hyunjin before he too went into the hallway out of Hyunjin’s sight. As soon as Hyunjin heard his bedroom door click shut, he threw his cloth vaguely in the direction of the sink, grabbed his phone and the knife, and left the apartment.
His footsteps echoed strangely in the stairwell. He kept them quiet, so Minho would know it was him, but he didn’t bother trying to be silent like he often did. He didn’t have the energy, and maybe Minho was owed a respite from that game, from having to listen out for something like that. On the second floor, just before the automatic light flickered on, he saw that light was seeping out from under both Minho’s and Jisung’s bedroom doors.
He knocked on Jisung’s, more tentative than he’d meant to. It took a moment for Jisung to answer, and instead of calling a greeting like he usually did, he opened the door himself. Hyunjin regretted, instantly, coming down here at all.
Jisung had, quite clearly, just finished taking a shower to get rid of the blood that had no doubt gotten on him when moving that corpse. What have I done, Hyunjin thought, as he saw one brief flash of a look, the pale skin of Jisung’s shoulders, so much broader without clothing covering them up. He was wearing just a towel fastened around his narrow waist, and his hair was still damp, his skin flushed even now. Hyunjin could only manage that one look before he had to look up over Jisung’s head. He could not do it, he couldn’t; torturing himself would serve no purpose.
Jisung, for his part, seemed utterly unperturbed to have been caught mostly naked by Hyunjin, and of course, why wouldn’t he be? “Oh,” he said, blinking a couple of times. “Hello. Are you okay? Do you need me?”
“No,” said Hyunjin. The shock of this had flustered him. He wanted to ask Jisung to put on a shirt but he could not let Jisung know that he was in any way affected by seeing him like this. His voice, to compensate, was a little cold. He kept his gaze fixed on the wall above Jisung’s bed and did not look at him. “I came to give you your knife back.”
“You didn’t need to bring it back,” Jisung said. “I figured you could just keep it.”
No way was Hyunjin keeping his knife, as nicely made as it was. That would be too much like owing Jisung something. If he kept this knife, every time he used it he would remember how Jisung had looked when he’d gotten in between Hyunjin and the door through which an enemy could have appeared, and he couldn’t live like that.
“I don’t need your knife,” he said. “I have plenty of my own. So you can have it back.”
Jisung didn’t argue, but then he so rarely did with Hyunjin, not about stuff like this. Instead he just nodded and held out his hand for the knife. Hyunjin dropped it into his palm like it had been burning him this entire time. As soon as Jisung’s fingers had closed around it, Hyunjin turned on his heel and left, his pace as hurried as it could be without actively seeming like he was running away. Because he wasn’t, not really, he just needed— space. He needed to be away from that sight, of Jisung half-naked, when he couldn’t do anything with it. A normal person would be able to take that image and use it for something — a normal person could enjoy it, would probably feel warm and breathless. A normal person could touch themselves and fantasise. But Hyunjin couldn’t even manage that at the best of times, and it certainly wouldn’t be happening with Felix sharing his bed with him.
He paused, halfway up the stairs between the third and fourth floors, and rested his head against the cold concrete of the wall. It was soothing, in a way, but not soothing enough. How frustrating a person he was. What a long fucking day this had been.
——
It was remarkably early when Chan made it up to his bedroom to sleep, but he was tired. It felt like it had been the longest day he’d had in a while, every single part of it weighing on him in a new, unexpected way. It had been— so long since they’d had someone break in like that, because he wasn’t counting Felix. No, Felix had simply come calmly in the front door and walked up the stairs, no harm intended. Nothing like what had happened today.
Chan brushed his teeth, staring at himself in the mirror above his sink. He could not stop thinking about Jeongin’s face, the whiteness of it as he had gone to Seungmin on the couch, or the quiet way he had spent most of the afternoon in Chan’s office, curled up on the couch in there on his phone. Chan hadn’t known what to do, what he could say that could help. The only thing that had stopped him asking about it was that if Jeongin wanted to talk, he would have done. Chan had made sure to keep those lines of communication open.
He spat into the sink, rinsed his mouth out, rubbed tiredly at his eyes. What a mess, what a god awful mess. He’d thought, after the first time, that the security they’d set up, especially with Seungmin involved, incidents like this weren’t likely to happen — and if they did, nobody would have to get hurt. The blood on Seungmin’s face had put paid to that idea. The fact that it was, apparently, a random attack by someone who had no connection to them didn’t make him feel any better. Random meant he had no way of stopping it.
The knock on his bedroom door made his heart jump to his throat. Fuck, he thought, already knowing it would be Jeongin standing outside. He’d been waiting for that knock since he walked in the room. The nightmares, he knew, would definitely be making a return on a night like this. Nobody would be surprised at Jeongin seeking him out again.
He left the bathroom and crossed to his bedroom door. When he opened it, though, it wasn’t Jeongin waiting on the other side; it was Felix, half-turned away like he thought the delay in Chan getting there meant that Chan wasn’t in the room. For a moment, Chan was so surprised that it was him and not Jeongin that he could only stand there blinking.
Felix turned back to him. He, too, was dressed for bed, absolutely drowning in a white t-shirt that somehow, in combination with his new hair colour, managed to make his freckles stand out in excruciating detail. The t-shirt was so oversized that it fell to mid-thigh, and he was wearing a pair of shorts that Chan thought maybe belonged to Hyunjin. His legs were bare from the knee down, his feet clad in fuzzy socks that definitely belonged to Hyunjin. It was, in all, a devastating combination. Chan was torn between the urge to put his hands on his waist — a desire that would be ever-present in the coming days, he rather thought — and the urge to wrap Felix in a blanket and feed him soup.
“Hello,” he managed.
Felix looked— nervous, perhaps, some expression on his face that Chan hadn’t really seen on him before, his hands twisted together in front of his stomach. “Hello,” he said, very softly. “I’m sorry, I know it’s— late. Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”
“No,” Chan said hastily, before Felix could do what he seemed like he was building up to, and run off. “I wasn’t sleeping. Are you okay, is something wrong?”
Because he’d recognised that look, now, after Felix had started talking: Felix looked distressed. It was there in his voice too, a little fluttering note of it, that had gotten stronger the longer Felix had spoken. It was not that the t-shirt and hair made his freckles stand out; it was that he was pale, face completely washed out.
“Nothing is wrong,” Felix said slowly, in a way that sounded like he was trying to convince himself of it. “I just— can we talk?”
“Yes,” said Chan. “Of course. Do you want to come in?” he added, as he stepped back and held the door open, gesturing for Felix to come inside.
Felix hesitated, glancing at his face quickly and then away. When he came into the room it was with that same hesitancy, like a young deer taking cautious steps into an open field, wary of danger. As if Chan might snap at him, even though Chan had been the one to ask him in.
Chan shut the door behind him, wondering to himself if maybe he should have left it open. Even though Felix wasn’t looking at him, the effect of having Felix in his bedroom was a little overwhelming.
Felix didn’t say anything. Chan went to shut off his bathroom light, annoyed by the humming of the overhead fan, and then came back to where Felix was standing. He’d thought that Felix was just gathering his thoughts perhaps, but Felix looked like— he wasn’t quite there. It was like a side-stepped version of a look that Chan had seen on Hyunjin’s face a lot: not quite as bad as with Hyunjin, not quite as severe, but it was a look as if the person had simply taken a step to the side and left their own body. It was awful to see on Felix, his eyes open but unseeing.
“Felix,” Chan said softly, coming close to him, waiting to see if his voice alone would help. When it didn’t, he said, “Felix,” again, and put his hand very gently on Felix’s shoulder.
Felix jerked like he had been electrocuted, the movement snatching his shoulder out from under Chan’s hand. Chan let him go, didn’t try to hold him or keep that contact. He saw, though, the awareness come back into Felix’s eyes, his own consciousness snapping back into him. He made a little noise, smothered quickly. The only thing stopping Chan from pulling him into a hug was the way that Felix had jerked at his touch.
“Hey,” Chan said, still in that soft tone. “It’s okay, you’re okay. It’s just me. Let’s sit down, okay? I think you need to sit down.”
Felix didn’t say anything but he let Chan herd him to the bed, where he sat down in a shaky way. His hands were still knotted up together, resting in his lap. Chan sat down next to him, keeping a careful distance. The one saving grace was that he was so preoccupied by how upset Felix looked that his brain didn’t make more than a single peep over Felix sitting on his bed.
“What’s wrong, Felix?” he asked. “Can you tell me?”
Felix looked at his hands in silence for a long time. This time he did look like he was thinking, like he was mulling over his own words. “Minho-hyung,” he said eventually, very quietly. “Is he— always like that?”
“Oh,” said Chan, almost a sigh.
Of course, he thought, of course that would be it — he should have expected it. Of them all, only Felix had never seen what Minho was capable of, had never been witness to that violence. He reached out to put a hand on Felix’s shoulder again, and this time Felix let him, didn’t react to the touch other than looking up at Chan properly. His eyes were so wide in his face, dark and beautiful. He looked desperate for reassurance.
“I’m sorry,” Chan said. “It’s been so long for me that I didn’t think about what it must have looked like to you. I understand that it must have been— upsetting.”
“Hyung,” Felix whispered. “There wasn’t a face left.”
Chan squeezed his shoulder, the only movement he felt safe doing. There was a desire inside of him, strong and insistent, to pull Felix into his arms and hold him, to comfort him close like that. He’d noticed, faintly, Felix freezing in the doorframe, staring across at that body, but he had been so preoccupied with making sure Seungmin was okay that he hadn’t been able to really assess what the expression on Felix’s face meant.
“I know,” Chan said gently. “It wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t— pretty, what he did. And I can’t lie to you and say that he isn’t often like that, but you don’t need to worry about it.”
Felix fell back into silence. Chan could tell that he was sinking again, his eyes going unfocused. His voice was slow again when he spoke. “I thought,” he said, voice low and deep with it, “that when everyone joked about being scared of him, it was just a joke. Because nobody— nobody avoids him, nobody seemed serious. But that, today— hyung.” He stopped but shuddered a little, Chan feeling it under the hand he still had resting against Felix’s shoulder. “I didn’t like it,” he finished, not even a whisper this time, barely audible.
Chan couldn’t imagine how he could have. Nobody liked it, as much as it was a necessary evil, as much as they’d hired Minho for that violence. “Felix,” he said. “You don’t have anything to fear from him.”
Felix just looked at him. He did not look like he believed Chan in any way. There was something resigned in his expression, something fearful. This, too, Chan had seen before, seen so many times before. He’d seen it in Jeongin, and in Hyunjin, and sometimes he saw it in Jisung, on those rare occasions that Jisung was too tired or stressed out to not simply get over it like he usually did.
“Was it the killing that you didn’t like?” he asked. “Or was it how violent it was?”
“The violence,” Felix said, without hesitation. “I don’t care that he killed someone, it was just that he seemed— out of control.”
Chan struggled for a few seconds to find the right words to explain it to Felix. It was difficult, when it came to Minho, because when he was in a rage like he had been earlier today, it was a lack of control. He could not, would not, stop until somebody made him — but he could stop. But when he thought about it, he remembered— Felix had not seen Jisung stop Minho, did not know that it wasn’t a mindless kind of violence. Minho was focused. He would never go into a rage at an enemy and then lose himself enough to turn it on one of them.
“Felix,” he started, but Felix interrupted him.
“When I—” Felix stopped. He was breathing a little fast, not like he was panicking but like he was— struggling, just a bit. “I got used to it, working for the Magpie. The— random violence, I guess. I don’t like it, hyung. I don’t like it at all.” His voice dropped back down to a whisper. “He scared me.”
Of course he had, of course Felix was scared now. Chan ached for him in a way that he was trying to not think about because the intensity of it was freaking him out. Perhaps like Jeongin, like Hyunjin, Felix had come to expect a certain level of safety in this place, and now, what scared him was not the random intruder but the apparent threat that existed among them. Chan didn’t know how to reassure him.
He allowed himself one thing that he had been trying to avoid doing all this time, because he couldn’t stand to watch Felix wring his own hands any longer. He moved his hand from Felix’s shoulder and took one of his hands gently, tugging it away from the other one. This was, he knew, an immediate mistake; Felix’s hand was cold, smaller than his own, in a way that made it so easy to hold. Felix in turn held back, almost clinging in how hard his grip was.
“He’s not a threat to you,” Chan told him, firmly. “It may have seemed like he was out of control, but he was not a threat to you at all, and he is not a threat to you now. He will not hurt you.”
If nothing else, Chan was certain of that. Minho was not a threat to any of them, never had been, no matter how loudly he had barked in the beginning; he had never shown his bite to them. Chan would never have brought him into the fold if he had thought that Minho was dangerous in that way — he certainly would never have let him near Jeongin or Hyunjin all those years ago if he had thought Minho liable to snap. Jeongin back then had been naive to the point of idiocy sometimes, Chan could admit it, and Hyunjin had only just started to learn how to function. Minho had been short with them on occasions, sharper with his words than certainly Jeongin had experienced since he was a child, but he had never harmed them. He never would.
No, he thought, remembering the way Jeongin had sobbed in his arms all those years ago, Minho standing over another, a different dead body. Minho would never hurt them. Not unless he had to.
Felix looked tired, still, even after a week or so of an actual bed to sleep in. “I know he doesn’t like me being here,” he said. There was a heavy note to it, and he said nothing more. The implication was clear. Worst of all, it was true — Minho did not like Felix being here. But Minho hadn’t liked Jisung being here either, not for a long time, and he eventually got over it. He’d get over Felix, too.
“Look at me,” Chan said softly. Felix did, eyes snapping to Chan’s. Chan shook off the urge to touch his face, to cup his cheek, and instead just squeezed his hand again. “Trust me. Felix, you have nothing to be scared of here. Nobody is going to hurt you.”
After a moment or two, Felix nodded. He was so pretty it was unbearable, his mouth, his eyes. Chan had been so caught up in reassuring him that he hadn’t realised how close they were sitting; he thought he might have shifted closer at some point in the conversation and now their knees were touching, his hand still holding Felix’s. It was too close, too much. He had to detangle himself from it, but he— couldn’t, not for a long stretch of time. He felt like he was pinned by Felix’s eyes on his.
“Oh, right,” he said, seizing on a topic. He squeezed Felix’s hand one last time and then let go. “I ate the cookies you made earlier, they were so good!”
Felix blinked and then went pink. Chan was very glad he had let go of his hand, but he still had to stand up a little hastily so he wasn’t sitting pressed against him, because seeing that blush made him a little afraid that the entire span of the room wasn’t going to be enough distance. What the fuck was wrong with him, he thought in despair. He’d never been this undone by a pretty face before, never felt his self-control slipping so regularly just because he thought someone was attractive. He met pretty people every day of his life and never once felt this pull like he did with Felix. He needed to get himself together if he was going to make this work.
“Thank you,” Felix said, a low murmur. He stood too, arms hanging loosely by his side now. “I’m glad you like them. If you have a kind you like, I can try to make them next time, hyung.”
“Oh,” said Chan, somewhat more touched by that than he knew he should be, since Felix was probably taking requests from all of them. “No, I liked what you made this time. But I know Jeongin likes double chocolate, he’d be really happy if you could make those.”
Felix smiled at him, a small thing that nonetheless made Chan feel like he’d just been hit with the sun. “Then I’ll make those next,” Felix said. “I’m sorry I interrupted you, hyung.”
“No,” said Chan, gently but very firmly. “Felix, I’m glad you came to talk to me about this. I’m glad if I can reassure you, about anything. Please don’t apologise.”
This, for some reason, made Felix stare at him in a way that Chan could not place. It was not the distress from earlier, or the fear, or anything along those lines, but it was something Chan had never seen on Felix’s face. Then after a moment he watched the expression vanish, like a door had slammed shut, except that Felix did not look any different to normal. He smiled again. “Okay, hyung,” he said. “I’ll say goodnight, I think. Hyunjin will be wondering where I went. I told him I was going to the bathroom, but I saw your light was on.”
“Ah, yeah,” Chan said. He almost made a joke about Hyunjin sending out a search party but something about that in conjunction with Hyunjin made him feel a little gross. So instead he just walked with Felix to the door and opened it to let him out. He was reminded, forcibly, of that awkward moment in the doorway of Seungmin’s workroom, unable to find words to say in the face of Felix’s earnest reassurance that he didn’t resent Chan for checking up on him, aware the entire time of Seungmin’s keen eyes on his back.
This time, right before he left, Felix hesitated and turned back to look at him again. “Goodnight, hyung,” he said quietly.
“Goodnight, Felix,” said Chan. “I hope that you sleep well.”
“You too, hyung,” Felix said, before he left the room. Chan watched him pad across the hallway and let himself into Hyunjin’s room. Chan heard Hyunjin’s voice say what the hell took you so long right before the door closed and the noise was cut off.
Chan closed his own door and stood staring at it for a long, long time. Then he slowly and carefully leaned his head forward so that his forehead touched the surface without making a sound. God, he thought, a whole world of despair welling up inside him. He was so fucked.
——
The faint sound of cutlery clinking woke Jeongin up. Such a level of noise wouldn’t normally rouse him, but he’d only been halfway dozing, keeping an ear out for exactly this.
He shoved the blankets off himself and slipped out of his room, padding into the hallway on bare feet. It was late enough that everyone had retired to their rooms, the apartment dim, only one light on in the kitchen. The crack beneath Chan’s bedroom door was dark, its occupant likely asleep. From the closed door of Hyunjin’s room Jeongin heard voices, that particular sound of Felix’s voice rumbling as he spoke. He wondered, briefly, what they were talking about. He had seen Felix’s face earlier, the white shock of it. He hadn’t been sure what had caused it, the break in itself or what Minho had done, but he hoped that Hyunjin was reassuring him either way.
Upon exiting the hallway, Jeongin found he’d been right — it was Minho in the kitchen, standing at the stove and stirring something in a pot. Jeongin had tried to be as quiet as he could be, but when he came into the room Minho was already looking in his direction and didn’t seem to be surprised to see that it was Jeongin who had come upon him. Perhaps Minho had a sense for him, as Jeongin had for Minho.
Jeongin half-expected Minho to leave again but he didn’t. He stood there, still stirring his pot from which the smell of ramen was emanating, and just looked at Jeongin with a steady gaze.
With no words to go on, Jeongin took that as permission. He came further into the kitchen and took a seat at the table, opposite where Minho had already set up a place setting for his pot. Minho returned to his cooking, his back to Jeongin now. He was dressed as casually as Jeongin was, sweatpants where Jeongin was wearing the shorts he wore for bed. Where Jeongin was barefoot, Minho was wearing shoes — different ones to before, a pair of much older looking sneakers, the backs worn out from use. Jeongin had never seen Minho not wearing shoes, and sometimes he wondered if he slept in them too. Maybe one day he’d be in a position to find out.
Neither of them said anything until Minho had turned off the stove and brought the ramen over to the table. Only then did Jeongin say, “Can I have some?”
Minho looked at him for a long moment and then he sighed and got up and went to the drawer where they kept all the disposable chopsticks they’d picked up over their time living here. Jeongin hadn’t really expected Minho to say yes. The question had almost just been a way to break the silence between them, but he took the chopsticks that Minho held out to him, and the small bowl he’d picked up too, and broke them open as Minho began to eat.
Minho had avoided them, that evening. He had not come up for food, had stayed locked away in his room, and none of the others had seemed particularly bothered by it — or more, they had not questioned his need to be alone. It seemed like it was a given that Minho should be given his space, the time to decompress from that violent rage he had descended into. Jeongin didn’t know though — he’d become increasingly concerned over the years that perhaps what Minho needed was the exact opposite. Sometimes he thought that the last thing Minho needed was more time alone with his thoughts.
“I thought you might be the one cooking,” he said now, as he helped himself to some of Minho’s food. “Since you didn’t come up for dinner earlier.”
Minho still didn’t say anything. He wasn’t looking at Jeongin as he ate, but he hadn’t told Jeongin to go away, and he didn’t seem irritated by his presence, so Jeongin stayed. He wouldn’t have gotten the chopsticks if he minded Jeongin being here. Jeongin wanted to touch his leg under the table with his foot but knew that would be— too much. Even under the best circumstances, it would be too much, but he wasn’t sure of the reality of touching Minho right now in any way.
“I was going to bring you something,” he continued, “but Chan-hyung told me to leave you alone. Weren’t you hungry?”
“No,” Minho said. His voice sounded a little rough, like it was the first thing he had said for a while. “I wasn’t.”
“Oh, okay.” Jeongin ate some of the noodles and said, “This is good, hyung.”
Minho didn’t reply. He just kept eating, and Jeongin kept helping himself to small amounts, until the pot was empty and silence had fallen throughout the entire apartment, no sounds coming from any other room at all now. Jeongin wondered if Minho was going to clean up and leave immediately but instead, once he put his chopsticks down, he just sat at the table with Jeongin, not saying anything for a long while. Jeongin sat with him, not really sure what to say. There were so many parts of Minho that he still didn’t quite know, so many small potholes in the road for him to stumble on. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and have Minho sink further into himself.
In the end, though, it was Minho who spoke first. “I’m sorry,” he said, so stiffly he didn’t even seem to be moving his lips. “For what you saw earlier.”
Jeongin found this so surprising that for a moment he didn’t even know what Minho was talking about — what had he seen that needed an apology? Then he realised Minho was apologising for what he had done to that body, for Jeongin having seen it. “Why are you saying sorry for that?” he asked quietly.
“You shouldn’t have had to see it,” Minho said. Both of his hands were tucked away under the table, where Jeongin couldn’t see them, and he was holding himself so still that it was a little like looking at a statue. Jeongin often wondered how he did that. “Nobody should have had to see it but— especially not you. I’m sorry.”
Why not me, Jeongin wanted to ask, but instead he just said, “Hyung, you don’t have to apologise for what you did. You never have to apologise for it. You keep us safe.”
Minho’s jaw tensed. He was not looking at Jeongin at all, but over his shoulder at the wall behind him. Jeongin’s heart ached for him. Was this what Minho had been thinking about, all that time locked away two floors down, when the others had told Jeongin to leave him be. Sitting alone thinking of apologising to Jeongin for what he had done to keep Seungmin safe, for the violence that Minho seemed to think was a character flaw, a stain on his soul.
“Do you remember,” Jeongin said into the stretched out silence that had fallen between them, “when you killed that man who broke in and hurt me?”
Minho’s eyes snapped to his. He looked— surprised, probably at Jeongin bringing it up. He’d noticed through the years, but especially today, how the others would tiptoe around it. Like if they didn’t bring it up in so many words, Jeongin might forget it had happened.
As if he could forget. As if it hadn’t been something he’d thought about so often that it was less hazy than it maybe should be, less like an old memory and more like— something which had just happened to him, just without any of the fear he had felt back then.
They had only just moved into this building at the time, and Minho had been with them an even shorter amount of time, had moved in a scant few months prior. This was before Seungmin joined them and set up all the security in every possible place. It wasn’t that they hadn’t given thought to security, but they had thought— they were safe, maybe. A mostly secret base, the location given to only a handful of trusted contacts.
The man had used the fire escape to get in, the same way Jisung would a couple of years later. Unlike Jisung, there hadn’t been any alarms to set off at the time, and the man had climbed all the way up, slipping through a window and out into the third floor landing. That had been a sticking point, when they’d been looking for a building to move into; a fire escape was a good idea, but Chan hadn’t wanted one that led directly into any of the actual rooms. If he’d not made such a distinction, that night would have gone very differently.
It had thrown a wrench into the man’s plan— maybe he’d thought the window would go straight into the apartment. Maybe he simply hadn’t counted on the metal door closing off the apartment from the stairwell, installed after they’d moved in to replace the flimsier original wooden one. At the time, that was the only door they’d replaced, splurging on something heavy that didn’t take an old-fashioned key and instead used a keycode. Impossible to pick.
Jeongin had been the only one awake, favouring late nights back then, playing on one of the computers in the PC room on the third floor. He hadn’t heard the man break in, not when he’d climbed into the third floor landing, not when he’d come into the PC room with him. His headphones had been on over his ears, blasting the soundtrack to the game he was immersed in. And the original glass door to the PC room would have offered Jeongin no protection, even if it had been locked. But they hadn’t even done that. None of them had ever really expected this to happen.
One moment everything had been normal and then suddenly there had been an arm around Jeongin’s neck, hauling him to his feet, his headphones clattering to the floor. The man had not been after him: he’d wanted Chan, wanted into the apartment where Jeongin knew Chan was sleeping peacefully. He’d come prowling downstairs hoping to find someone unguarded— and had gotten that, in Jeongin.
Jeongin had never seen the man’s face — truthfully, even now they didn’t know who he was. He had been wearing a balaclava, and he’d held Jeongin still with that arm around his neck, and a hand on his wrist, twisting his arm around his back until it hurt.
The man had demanded that Jeongin tell him what the code to the apartment was. Jeongin, more bravely than he’d thought himself capable of being, had refused. He’d been so scared, sure he was going to die. After that the man had moved his arm from around Jeongin’s neck, and instead pressed his hand over Jeongin’s mouth, holding his head steady against his own shoulder. And then— he’d begun to twist Jeongin’s arm further, higher, up his back, until Jeongin squirmed and squealed, muffled against the man’s palm. He twisted until Jeongin had felt the bone simply— give. Not nicely, not a clean break — the doctors had said that later, not a clean break. It hadn’t felt like a clean break at the time. It had hurt, like nothing else had hurt in Jeongin’s life, and he’d screamed, and screamed, the sound not nearly loud enough with his mouth covered.
Tell me, the man had snarled, and Jeongin could only sob in response, incapable of telling the man what he’d wanted even if he had been inclined to do so. Which he wasn’t going to do— Jeongin would not give up Chan like that.
Jeongin had been spun around roughly, and then the man had punched him in the face. Scrawny as he’d been, small, he went straight down to the floor. And then the man had climbed on top of him and kept hitting him. Jeongin had started screaming properly then, as loud as he possibly could, no hand to muffle him. He was going to die one way or another, he had thought, and maybe if he screamed someone would come for him. He remembered, with an odd clarity, being more scared that the man would break another one of his bones, than he had been about dying. At least if he died, the pain would stop.
He’d screamed until the man had picked up his gun and hit him across the face with that. That new pain made him break off screaming to gasp for air, and then the door to the PC room had burst open.
Jeongin had not, until that moment, seen what Minho was like when he was in a rage. He had never been allowed on a job, especially not one where they had needed that particular aspect of Minho’s skill set. He had seen it that night — Minho had flown into the room and took the man to the floor in a flailing mess of limbs. Jeongin had scrambled away, sobbing, and watched as Minho got the man onto his back, dug his hands into his face, ignoring the way the man had scratched and hit at him as if it weren’t even happening. He’d dug until one of his thumbs got into the hollow of an eye socket, and the eye had popped like a crushed grape. The man had screamed, then, like Jeongin had screamed. Minho had looked across at Jeongin with a wild expression on his face and then, almost calmly, popped the other one. Then he had picked up the gun that still had Jeongin’s blood on it, and started beating the man to a slow death.
Jeongin had watched him, the entire process of it, the inside of his mouth filling with blood from where each hit had cut the inside of his mouth against his braces. He kept having to swallow it, the taste making him gag. His broken arm rested uselessly in his lap, bent at an angle that made him dizzy to look at. His face hurt more than it had ever done before, worse than he had ever felt at the group home. The man who had attacked him was dead long before the others arrived but Minho had not stopped hitting him. Today Jisung had easily pulled him up but that day it had taken both Changbin and Chan and eventually Hyunjin to wrestle him up, to stop him smashing that head with the butt of the gun. Truthfully, by that point, there hadn’t been much of a head left. They’d had no way of knowing who it had been.
“I remember,” Minho said, after a long few seconds. “I remember. You had nightmares, after that.”
Jeongin nodded. He’d had nightmares, long months of them. For weeks after, he had slept in Chan’s bed, like he was a child again, although he’d just turned sixteen shortly before it had happened. He’d been too scared to be alone, too fearful that someone would come and hurt him — or someone would come for Chan and Jeongin wouldn’t be able to prevent it. He still had nightmares about it now, although they were increasingly rare. Nightmares where he screamed and screamed and nobody ever, ever came.
“I did,” he said. “And you remember what I told you then, too, when you asked me about them. The nightmares weren’t about you. You kept me safe, back then, just like you kept Seungmin-hyung safe today. Hyung. You make me feel safe.”
He watched— something pass through Minho’s body. It was not quite a shiver but it was something similar, a slight, very slight, ripple of movement. He wondered what Minho would do if Jeongin admitted the real truth of those nights he had nightmares — that he had slept in Chan’s bed only because he hadn’t been able to ask to sleep in Minho’s, knowing even then that it was a line he couldn’t overstep, that Minho would never have allowed it. Minho hadn’t even liked him, back then. He’d been very vocal about his disapproval of keeping Jeongin around, his baby boy a condescending insult. The ferocity of his reaction had shocked everyone involved.
He’s so young, he’d said, after the body was gone and Chan had brought Jeongin back from the hospital with his arm in a cast, his broken nose set into place. That fuckhead had no right hurting someone so young.
Minho said nothing now, staring at the empty pot in the middle of the table between them. There was a long stretch of silence, not comfortable exactly, the apartment completely still around them. Eventually though, Minho started gathering Jeongin’s empty bowl into the pot along with the chopsticks. Jeongin tried to help but Minho had already finished. “It’s late, baby boy,” he said as he stood, holding everything in his arms. “You really should be sleeping.”
He went to the sink. Jeongin watched his back for a long few seconds, as Minho arranged the dishes in the sink and reached for the dish soap. Then Jeongin stood too, took his chopsticks to the trash, and then, tentatively, not entirely sure how Minho would react to it, went to the sink and gently touched Minho’s elbow.
Minho went still at the touch, looking down at the point of contact, as if he had to see it to fully understand what was happening. He didn’t jerk away though, so Jeongin slid his fingers around, gently gripping Minho’s forearm.
“Hyung,” he murmured, and Minho’s eyes flickered up to his. “You should try to rest too. I know you might be a bit keyed up still but— try?” He cocked his head to the side a little, blinking slowly. “For me?”
Minho’s lips slightly parted on a quiet exhale, and Jeongin watched as some of the tension he’d been holding simply melted away. Nothing about him even moved, really, there was just— an easing, of his very being.
Jeongin desperately wanted to close what little distance there was between them and kiss him. Minho’s skin was so warm under his hand, and even this small point of contact made Jeongin feel a little dizzy.
“Yeah, baby boy,” Minho said, voice husky. “I’ll try. For you.”
The weight of his gaze was a special kind of torment. Even though it was difficult, Jeongin made himself take his hand back. He did not want to overwhelm Minho, not when he was so obviously tender. So instead he smiled at him, his usual, bright grin, pulling it on like armour, and said, "Ah, I meant to tell you earlier, but with everything that happened— well. Anyway. We made cookies! That’s why there’s some, uhm, flour around. I had a little incident.”
Minho blinked at him. Jeongin didn’t let his smile waver, turning to the section of counter beside the sink, where a very large tupperware container sat full of cookies from earlier. Next to it, was a plate with six cookies on it, covered in clingfilm. He tugged the plate nearer, glancing at Minho through his lashes.
“There's a lot left but I have a feeling Hyunjin-hyung and Changbin-hyung are going to decimate them, so I set some aside specifically for you,” Jeongin continued, fingers toying with the loose edges of the clingfilm. “Felix-hyung supervised, so don’t worry— they’ve definitely got sugar in them and not salt.”
Minho didn’t laugh, was just staring at Jeongin with a very carefully blank expression that Jeongin could not parse through. Beyond, of course, that it was a crafted blank expression, and not a natural one. Which meant Minho was concealing something. Something deep in Jeongin quivered under that look, under the sheer force of his longing to pry Minho open and see everything he kept hidden.
“They’re soft too,” Jongin babbled on, trying to make up for Minho’s ever lengthening silence, “which I know you like— you’re always buying that sort of packaged cookie from the convenience store up the street. I notice, you know.” He laughed, a short, nervous sound, forcing himself to shut up. His words were growing dangerous, too close to revealing his real emotions. I see you, he wanted to say. I love you so much.
Minho stayed silent for another long moment, giving only one careful blink. Finally, he said, “Hands.”
“Mmm?” Jeongin chirped.
“Show me your hands, baby boy,” Minho said, and Jeongin understood his meaning. He held his hands palm out, for Minho to examine. After a few beats, he flipped them over, to show chewed-on cuticles but no burns nor cuts. Minho gave a curt nod, looking away to set about putting the plug in the drain so he could wash up.
Jeongin supposed that was a dismissal. He patted the cookies, kind of a pointed reminder, and then said, “Anyway, good night, hyung.”
“Good night,” Minho said, turning on the faucet to begin filling the sink. Jeongin had already begun to move away, when Minho murmured, barely audible over the rush of the water, “And thank you, baby boy.”
Jeongin turned, but Minho’s back was to him, hands busy in the sink, so he just smiled to himself and went into the hall. He hid around the corner, one eye peeking, and watched Minho glance repeatedly at the plate of cookies.
The tips of Minho’s ears were pink. Jeongin slipped away, heading back to bed, his heart both light and heavy at the same time.
——
The glowing numbers of the clock on Jisung’s desk read 3:17. It was old, that clock, something he had bought in high school in an attempt at improving his sleep hygiene by not having his phone right by his head. The clock had gone with him when he was kicked out of his house on his eighteenth birthday, gone with him to the various couches and shitty goshiwons he had stayed in for the next year or so, and then it had come here, where Minho had taken the back off it to check for bugs. It had gone through a lot, that clock, and right now Jisung hated it more than he had ever hated an inanimate object in his life.
He huffed and sat up in bed, scrubbing his hand through his hair. It had been a while since he had felt like this, tired but unable to fall asleep. Usually, on nights like this, when he couldn’t make himself shut down enough to sleep, he would go down to the basement and train until his muscles were sore and shaking, until there was nothing he could do other than fall asleep. But his body, today, was already tired; it was his brain that wouldn’t shut up.
He climbed off his bed, bringing the blanket that usually lay folded at his feet with him, and sat in his desk chair. The blanket went around his shoulders, his feet came up to tuck underneath his body, so that he could curl up against the armrest, trying to be smaller, for once. He spent all of his life trying to appear bigger than he was, trying to project himself out — the world fucked with you less, when you did that. But sometimes, he didn’t bother.
Sometimes he just didn’t have the energy for it.
He wiggled his mouse to bring his computer back to life, squinting a little at the brightness in the dark room. He hadn’t used it since Hyunjin had been here, and it was open to the video they’d been watching together, paused as someone added some final details to a watercolour picture of a snowy landscape. It had been— lovely, more lovely than Jisung had known what to do with, to have Hyunjin’s voice quietly explaining things that Jisung didn’t know.
Hyunjin’s art astonished him, every time he got to see another thing he had worked on. He gifted pieces sometimes, to the others — never Jisung, and that was no surprise, but to Chan and Changbin and Jeongin, little drawings and bigger paintings that he did. He’d done a little coloured pencil drawing of a puppy and given it to Seungmin, who had, uncharacteristically, stuck it to the wall behind his monitors, mostly hidden by the chain of them but there nonetheless. The talent in Hyunjin was unquestionable, his dedication to the craft even more so.
The leftover cookies were on the desk, too, the three of them that had been left when the alarm had gone off. It had all been nice, was the thing, so nice, and then, the alarm. And then, Jisung had made it worse, had flung them back to the beginning, by answering his stupid door without dressing first.
He found one of the videos he usually watched on nights like this, an animal documentary in English that he didn’t understand. He didn’t bother with the sound anyway. He didn’t need the sound, he just needed the moving pictures to give his eyes something to focus on. He’d chosen somewhat carefully, though. It was a video about monkey family structures, catered towards children; there was nothing bloody or violent in this.
Tonight had hardly been the first dead body he’d helped dispose of. It was not even the first dead body that Minho had created that he had helped to get rid of, although that usually happened on jobs and not in the middle of Seungmin’s workshop. It was always vaguely unpleasant, though, the way the body went so heavy, all of that weight to be lifted. The dead body today had been much more unpleasant. Jisung prided himself on his strong stomach, but even he had felt somewhat nauseous at the way things had squelched as they’d lifted it onto the tarp.
Most of the bodies Jisung had dealt with, over the past two years, though, had been at the hands of Hyunjin. There was never any gore, really, with Hyunjin’s kills: they were tidy, if murder could be tidy. Artfully slit throats, wounds that avoided the larger arteries so there was no blood spray. The people Hyunjin killed had time to realise they were dying before they bled out, and the cognizance for it too. No blunt blows to the head to make them dazed, like with Minho’s kills. Jisung supposed the people Minho beat to death probably did have the opportunity to realise they were about to die, but the hard strikes to the head definitely muddled them.
Hyunjin preferred them lucid and knowing, except when he was on a job, where he preferred stealth and swiftness. But Hyunjin seldom killed people on jobs. No, most of Hyunjin’s kills weren’t officially sanctioned, so to speak, although Jisung had no doubt Chan knew. None of them talked about it though, just let Hyunjin do what he needed. Chan looked away, and Jisung took the bodies to the river, let them be swept out to sea, maybe turn up on a beach somewhere down the line and hopefully not terrify any civilian who came upon it.
It had never occurred to Jisung to tell Hyunjin no. Jisung helped take care of all the other bodies — he may as well help with these too, just as important, even if he technically wasn’t being paid for it. He owed that to Hyunjin. He owed so much.
Jisung rubbed his face with the side of his hand, as on the screen a baboon groomed another one. There had been a single thought playing in his head, over and over on a loop, for the past four hours as he tried desperately to sleep: you made Hyunjin uncomfortable again. The guilt felt like it was drowning him. Two years of trying to make it up to Hyunjin for what he had said the first time they met, and he’d undone it in seconds.
He should have known better. As soon as he’d opened the door and seen it was Hyunjin — and not Chan as his guess had been — he should have asked Hyunjin to wait, closed his door and put something on. But he had been shocked, to see Hyunjin back in the doorway to his room, the second time in a day, and he had been afraid that if he’d asked Hyunjin to wait, Hyunjin would not. He’d thought, maybe, that it was better to be shirtless with Hyunjin here, than to be clothed with Hyunjin gone, but— it had been a selfish impulse, he had realised, when he had seen the way Hyunjin couldn’t look at him, heard the cold detachment of his voice. It had been cruel, probably, to do that to Hyunjin.
Jisung should have known better. He should have known better.
He tipped his head back, did not let the tears that had sprung to his eyes spill over. He did not have the right to that. And besides— it was because he was tired, he knew. This kind of exhaustion always brought his emotions too close to the surface. It was harder to switch it off when he was this tired, and if he slept, once he slept, it would be— better. He could apologise to Hyunjin, maybe, if it seemed that Hyunjin was still upset in the morning. If he seemed okay, Jisung would drop it. There was no point in dredging things back up, with Hyunjin. Sometimes he just pretended to not know what Jisung was talking about.
He focused his eyes on the flickering screen in front of him. He would watch this until his mind caught up with his tired body, and then he would sleep. He would feel better in the morning. He always, somehow, felt better in the morning.
Chapter 4
Notes:
HERE IT IS HERE IS THE GRATUITOUS CLUBBING CHAPTER. much like it is not an inkin fic without copious angst, it is also not an inkin fic without a clubbing/ball/party scene. i refuse to apologise tbh.
this chapter has no right being this long.
the writing is however going according to schedule and the next 5 chapters are almost done, which means that the every-two-week posting schedule should theoretically continue for the next 10 weeks!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
In the week since the attack, Jeongin had spent so much time in his television room that even he was starting to feel stir-crazy. He was used to this, in a way — to staying home, spending time in his own company or whoever he could get to come hang out with him. He’d spent basically months as a teenager never leaving the house. But he’d had a little more freedom over the past couple of years, more people to do things with, and this was starting to grate on him.
“Jeongin,” said Hyunjin, his head pillowed in Jeongin’s lap. “This show sucks.”
Jeongin stroked his hand over Hyunjin’s hair, humming under his breath. He couldn’t tell if the show sucked or if it was simply that it was a random episode of something he had found on television, with absolutely no context to go off. Hyunjin sighed but didn’t say anything else for a while.
Hyunjin hadn’t gone out much either. There was an air of affronted guilt around him, like he felt bad for being part of why Seungmin had been hurt, but would be on the defensive if anyone tried to blame him, which nobody would. Staying home had seemed to have a lot more to do with Felix, who also had shown no inclination to leave the house, but right now Felix was somewhere else doing something and Hyunjin was here, with Jeongin, watching this show that sucked.
It was nice, nostalgic, maybe. Certainly familiar. They’d done this so much when Hyunjin first started living with them, Jeongin showing him shows both as a way to introduce Hyunjin to things he didn’t know about and also to get out of doing all the schoolwork that Chan and Changbin insisted he do. It had even been exactly like this, a lot of the time: Jeongin sitting cross-legged on the couch, Hyunjin laying quietly with his head in his lap, long legs curled up near his chest. It looked cute, although Jeongin wasn’t going to be the one to tell Hyunjin that.
“Jeongin,” Hyunjin said, as a man on the screen yelling something at another man; Jeongin had not managed to pick up anyone’s names. “Have you had any nightmares, this week?”
The question was surprising only in that nobody had asked him that in the past week. He’d known they were wondering it, because Chan kept bringing up out of nowhere that if Jeongin needed him, Chan didn’t care how late it was, and Changbin kept offering to bring him pastries from the bakery that he liked. But nobody had actually outright asked him, which made him feel like they were a bit of the Schrodinger's cat of nightmares: if nobody brought them up, it seemed, then he probably wouldn’t have them.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t had any.”
This was the truth, in as far as it answered what Hyunjin was really asking. He had not had any nightmares about that awful night when his arm had been broken. He’d had one about the group home, though, but it had been fuzzy when before he’d woken up, and he’d shook it off. That part of his life was too far in the past to hurt him much now.
It probably helped that Minho, early the morning after the attack, had gone a little overboard with the front door and chained it shut in three places, before taking one of the metal shelving units out of Seungmin’s workroom and shoving it up against the door, too. Seungmin had not been happy, since he’d left all the tubs and boxes from the shelves on the floor, but it had provided peace of mind. For Jeongin, it was difficult to have nightmares about someone getting in, with the knowledge that Minho lay between the door and where Jeongin slept.
It was Hyunjin’s turn to hum under his breath now. “Good,” he said. “Change the channel, would you? This show makes me want to poke my own eardrums out.”
“No, I’m watching it,” Jeongin said. This was not the truth, not in the slightest, but this was his TV room and he knew that Hyunjin would make him put something even worse on, some awful variety show, the editing of which would set Jeongin’s teeth on edge.
“No you aren’t,” Hyunjin said. He shifted so that he was glaring up at Jeongin, the effect very much diminished when his head was still resting against Jeongin’s thighs. “Don’t lie, you brat.”
“I’m not lying,” lied Jeongin. He took his eyes off Hyunjin and fixed them on the television screen, where the yelling men had now started actually fighting, grappling each other in a way that looked less like a fight and more a prelude to some of the porn that Jeongin had watched over the years. Even so, it managed to be dull.
“Wait until I tell Changbin-hyung that you’ve started lying to people,” Hyunjin said, which was ridiculous, because Jeongin had learned the art of lying to people at a young age and Changbin knew about that already. He’d only gotten better, once he met Minho, and had a reason to be good at concealing things. But Hyunjin didn’t fight him, didn’t try to grab the remote from where it was sitting on the arm of the couch next to Jeongin, within easy reach. Instead, he just rolled back over in Jeongin’s lap and quietly went back to watching the stupid drama.
They’d been existing in bored silence for about another fifteen minutes when there was a rap of knuckles on the door. They looked over listlessly to find Chan sticking his head into the room. “Aw,” he said, looking at them. “Having fun?”
“Not in the slightest,” said Hyunjin. “Tell Jeongin to change the channel.”
“Why can’t you do it yourself?” Chan asked, and then, perhaps sensing that he was stepping into an on-going argument, added, “Anyway, Jeongin, I’m just here to tell you that I’m heading to the club with Changbin for the night. Send me a message if you need anything, okay?”
Jeongin nodded. Beside him, Hyunjin straightened up. “The club,” he repeated.
“Yes, Hyunjin,” Chan said, smiling at him. “The club. That I own.”
Hyunjin gave Chan a look like he wanted to peel Chan’s skin off. This was not overly unusual for Hyunjin, so Chan didn’t even react. “Felix hasn’t seen the club,” Hyunjin said. Jeongin, hearing the note of expectation in his voice, sat up a little bit straighter.
It wasn’t clear that Chan, however, had heard that note, because he just said, “Oh, yeah, I mentioned to Felix about taking him to see the club sometime during the day, just to show him around.”
Hyunjin scoffed. “You want to take him during the day?” he asked, sounding overly disdainful of the idea. “When it’s boring? Come on, hyung.”
Chan was still smiling at them. He always found it funny when Hyunjin or Jeongin sassed him, like he had no expectation of being respected by either of them. Truthfully, they all got away with a level of irreverence that no other team leader would have allowed, but for Hyunjin and Jeongin, he had been their brother and caretaker before he was ever their team leader. That would always take precedence.
“If you want to bring him over tonight,” Chan said, “then I certainly won’t stop you.”
Jeongin and Hyunjin looked at each other, Hyunjin already grinning. Not the smirk he usually had, nor a soft smile, but a full grin of excitement, one that Jeongin felt reflected on his own face. It had been a week of nothing to do, nothing of interest, and now, finally, here was something interesting.
“Club night!” Hyunjin crowed. “Oh, I’m going to—”
“But,” said Chan, his voice cutting through. “You have to get Changbin or Minho to come too. I want one of them there to keep an eye on you lot.”
This was nothing unusual; a group trip to the club always required Changbin or Minho there to chaperone, for lack of a better word. Even so, Hyunjin groaned like this was some kind of unfair burden to put on him. “Ah, hyung, we can look after ourselves, you know.”
“I don’t know that,” Chan said. “I’m especially not having you drag Jeongin and Felix there without someone to watch over you all. So if Changbin or Minho agree, then yes, you can bring Felix over tonight.”
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, the thought hitting him. “I can drink, right? Now that I’m basically of age, I can drink tonight, right?”
Chan looked at him. Jeongin tried to put on his very best puppy dog eyes, the ones he knew Chan could never resist, and after a few seconds Chan sighed and said, “Sure. I’ll let the bar staff know. But someone really has to come with you guys, in that case.”
Jeongin beamed at him. God, this was more than interesting — this was actually exciting now. He’d never been allowed alcohol before when they went to the club, was always stuck somewhere drinking a soda while he watched the others all have fun without him. He didn’t even care that he’d had to ask permission; so had Hyunjin, almost two years ago.
Hyunjin clambered to his feet, pulling Jeongin up by the wrist behind him. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s try Changbin-hyung first, he’s our best bet.”
Chan stepped back out of the doorway to let them scramble past, laughing at them a little bit. Jeongin shifted his hand so that Hyunjin was no longer gripping his wrist but instead they were holding hands, Hyunjin’s palm warm in his. Hyunjin squeezed their hands together, and used it to tow Jeongin down the hallway and into the PC room, where they found Changbin apparently attempting to teach Felix how to play pool.
It was not clear how well this was going. Changbin was decent at the game but as they burst into the room, Felix, bent over the table, hit the white ball and immediately potted it. “Damn it,” he said, and then slumped down against the table.
Changbin cracked up. Jeongin looked behind himself at where Chan had just stepped into the room and had to hide his own laughter at the look on his face when he saw Felix laying like that against the table. When he moved to look back over at Changbin, though, he caught Hyunjin’s eye; Hyunjin, it seemed, had been checking Chan’s reaction too, and when their eyes met, Jeongin realised— Hyunjin knew, too. This was not surprising, considering how obvious Chan had been becoming over the past couple of weeks, but it still sent a spark of mischief through Jeongin, to see the look in Hyunjin’s eyes.
“Hyung,” said Hyunjin, breaking their eye contact and focusing in on Changbin again. “Chan-hyung said we can all go to the club if you’ll watch us, you will, right?”
Felix straightened up, looking between Hyunjin and Changbin. “You’re going to the club?” he asked, putting the cue back down on the table.
“We’re going to the club, angel,” said Hyunjin. “So long as Changbin-hyung agrees, which he will.”
“No, he won’t,” said Changbin cheerfully. “I am not babysitting you lot, no way.”
Jeongin felt his heart sink a little. Changbin had, very obviously, been the easy option, and his quick rejection was certainly a potential problem in the plan. Hyunjin said, “Hyung, you’re going to be there anyway with Chan-hyung, can’t you just hang around for our sake?”
“Going there to do my job and going there to watch over you all be drunken fools are two very different things,” Changbin said. “I didn’t get up this morning with that on my agenda. I’ve been awake since 5am, Hyunjin, give me a break, huh.”
Hyunjin did not look like he wanted to give Changbin a break. He looked like he wanted Changbin to go jump in a vat of spiders. But he did say, “Urgh, hyung, fine. Fine!”
Felix was watching them, chewing on his bottom lip. “Does that mean we’re not going?” he asked. He sounded a little disappointed, although Jeongin had no doubt that if they didn’t get to go tonight, Chan would take Felix along sometime anyway. But they all knew it wouldn’t be the same, in the day, with all the lights on and the staff milling around and the dance floor empty and bare. Jeongin had been there plenty of times when it was like that, and even he found it disappointing every time.
“It means we have to ask Minho-hyung instead,” said Hyunjin, very grimly. “Which is something of the nightmare scenario.”
“Good luck,” Changbin said cheerfully. “I’m going to go get my stuff, hyung.”
He sauntered out of the room, ignoring the way Hyunjin flipped him off as he went. Jeongin could hear Chan laughing a little, right before he started walking across the room too. “I’m going down to the car,” he said. “Hyunjin, text me to let me know if you guys are coming. If Minho says no, please don’t come anyway. We’ll figure out another time, okay?”
Hyunjin waited until Chan had also left the room before he whirled on Jeongin and said, “You’ll have to go ask Minho-hyung, he’ll say yes if it’s you.”
Jeongin felt himself blush and could do nothing about it. Luckily Hyunjin didn’t seem to think anything of it. “What does that mean?” he asked, trying to play it off.
“Everyone knows you’re his favourite,” Hyunjin said. He said it so dismissively, like this was old news, and like it also meant nothing. Like it wasn’t making Jeongin feel like his insides were cramping to hear something like that asserted so casually. “He’ll say no if I ask just out of principle. You need to go ask him.”
This, Jeongin could admit, probably was true — Minho was unlikely to agree if Hyunjin asked, and he definitely wasn’t going to agree if they sent Felix for some reason. “Okay,” he said “I’ll go ask him.”
This, as it turned out, was even more difficult than he’d expected, because when he ran up to the apartment, Minho wasn’t there. He trekked down to Seungmin’s workshop and found that only occupied with Seungmin, who swung around in his desk chair to raise an eyebrow at him. “Do you know where Minho-hyung is?” Jeongin asked him. “He didn’t go out, did he?”
“Not that I saw,” Seungmin said. “He’s in his room, I think.”
Oh no, Jeongin thought, as grimly as Hyunjin had been earlier, then he remembered that nobody had mentioned the plans to Seungmin. “If he agrees to come, we’re going to the club,” he told Seungmin. “Do you want to come too, hyung?”
“Absolutely fucking not,” said Seungmin. This was not a surprise to Jeongin, because Seungmin had never come with them on a night out to the club. He’d gone there once, during the early afternoon with Chan, done something with the camera set up there, and then never set foot in the place since. But Jeongin thought it was just polite to ask him, just in case. “Why are you bothering Minho-hyung about it? I just saw Changbin-hyung leave with Chan-hyung.”
“Changbin-hyung said he wouldn’t,” Jeongin told him. “He said he didn’t want to babysit us.”
Seungmin pursed his lips for a moment and then said, “Good luck, I guess.”
“That’s what Changbin-hyung said,” Jeongin said on a sigh, before he slipped back out of the workshop. He did not want to have to bother Minho in his room. Nobody bothered Minho in his room, except for Chan or Changbin on occasion. But it would take a lot less time to just go and ask, rather than going up and getting his phone from his room (kindly returned to him a couple of days ago by Seungmin) and text him and wait for an answer. He didn’t like texting Minho anyway. It was a lot harder to read him over text than it was when Jeongin could look at his face.
He stood for a long few moments outside Minho’s bedroom door, trying to work up to it. When he finally raised his hand and rapped his knuckles against it, the sound was more tentative than he’d meant it to be. It took so long for Minho to open the door that Jeongin was a little worried it had been too tentative and Minho hadn’t heard him. But the door did open, eventually, and Minho stood on the other side.
“Baby boy?” he asked, looking and sounding very confused to find himself looking at Jeongin.
Jeongin looked back at him, the little line of confusion in his eyebrows, and asked, “Can I come in?”
Minho stared at him. A few seconds passed in absolute silence before Minho said, “No.”
Ah well, Jeongin thought. It had been worth a shot. Minho hadn’t even opened the door all the way, and his body was blocking any view of what it looked like inside. Jeongin was not looking, because he knew how much Minho valued his privacy, but he wanted to know what it was like in there so badly. The last time Jeongin had been in there was before Minho had even moved in and he was desperate to know how Minho had decorated such a huge space.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, when no other ways of broaching the subject appeared to him, “Chan-hyung says that we can go to the club if you or Changbin-hyung agree to come with us, but Changbin-hyung already said no, so you’ll come with us, right? You’ll say yes, right, hyung?”
He made his eyes as big as possible, his expression as pleading as any he had ever tried before. The puppy dog eyes he had given Chan earlier had nothing on this look. This was a shameless ploy, and one that would work on anyone else in his family, but was not always guaranteed to work on Minho. As it was, he watched something flicker in Minho’s eyes, and a moment later Minho leaned against the frame of his bedroom door, arms folded across his chest.
“I don’t know, baby boy,” he said, suddenly playful in the way that never failed to make Jeongin’s silly little heart beat faster. “What’s in it for me?”
Wasn’t that a question. There could be a whole lot in it for Minho, if he simply asked Jeongin for it; he’d go to his knees right now if Minho wanted him to. This was unlikely to be the kind of thing Minho was meaning, but that didn’t mean it was not true. In reality, Jeongin had very little to barter with other than what he was already trying, so he just blinked prettily and said, “Free drinks?”
Minho actually laughed at that, a soft little chuckle, smiling at Jeongin. He was always unbearably handsome, in Jeongin’s eyes, his delicate features at odds with the scars that ripped through them. They didn’t detract from his beauty, not at all, gave him an intensity most of the time, and in moments like this, made him appear almost roguish. Smiling, he looked— his age, perhaps. Less like a man damaged by prison and all the things that Jeongin didn’t even know yet, and more like someone at ease with the world. What Jeongin wouldn’t do, to keep Minho smiling like that.
“Okay,” Minho said. “I’ll come with you, baby boy.”
The happiness filled Jeongin so quickly that he couldn’t help beaming at Minho. He hadn’t expected Minho to agree so easily to it, but he had, and he did not seem like he felt it was some kind of imposition, either; he seemed genuinely willing to go with them. Jeongin wanted to throw his arms around him in a hug but he knew that was a terrible idea. Instead of doing that, he wriggled a little, stamping his left foot and then his right in excitement. “Ah, hyung!” he said. “Thank you!”
He turned and ran off up the stairs before Minho could say anything, or laugh at him for being so obviously excited. He couldn’t help it. He’d been looking forward to it anyway, knowing he could drink and actually enjoy himself for once; knowing that Minho would be there too was almost too much.
In the PC room, Hyunjin had taken over teaching Felix how to play pool. The problem with this was that Hyunjin had not ever learned how to play and when Jeongin walked in, Hyunjin was posed dramatically over the table, the two of them giggling so hard Felix was crying a little. Jeongin didn’t bother to ask what the joke was, he just said, “Minho-hyung said yes!”
Hyunjin threw the pool cue down like it had burned him suddenly. “Fuck yes!” he crowed. “Jeongin, you beauty!” Jeongin flashed him a peace sign, feeling bright with triumph.
——
“Okay,” said Hyunjin, pointing at his desk chair. “Sit down there.”
Felix followed the order, sitting down facing Hyunjin. He had his hands tucked under his thighs, his usual habit which was devastatingly cute, and was very clearly unconsciously done. His hair, freshly washed the night before, could probably have done with a trim at this point, to clear the split ends, but Hyunjin hadn’t gotten around to it yet, and he didn’t feel like going at him with the scissors when they didn’t really have that long before they would be leaving. It would do, for tonight. Hyunjin could pull some of it back into a little ponytail, make Felix look even more elfin.
“Have you ever been to a nightclub before?” Hyunjin asked him.
“Yes, I have been to a nightclub before,” Felix said, radiating a kind of amused patience. It was a valid question, though, in Hyunjin’s opinion, because something about Felix did not suggest that he’d ever set foot in a nightclub. It was a little hard to imagine him, in Hyunjin’s borrowed pyjama pants, on some kind of night out with friends. He was not even sure that Felix had had friends, before he came to live with them. He always seemed a little too surprised by kindness shown to him.
“It’s not that I don’t want to go,” Felix added, “but Hyunjin, I really don’t have any clothing suitable for a nightclub.”
This was something of the understatement of the century. Felix had a grand total of one pair of jeans, two pairs of sweatpants, one sweater, three t-shirts and a hoodie to his name, along with that particularly battered pair of sneakers that he said he had found for cheap in a thrift store. Hyunjin hated those sneakers so much that he thought a store charging any money at all for them had committed daylight robbery. As soon as Felix got a new pair Hyunjin was going to throw them out of the window.
“You’ll wear some of my clothes,” Hyunjin said.
“Sure,” said Felix, grinning at him. “Are we going to roll your pants up five times so they fit?”
Hyunjin wasn’t sure if he wanted to say you’re not that short or I’m not that tall so he just rolled his eyes and said, “Wait here.”
Felix gave him a mock salute with two fingers, the corners of his mouth twitching, and Hyunjin fought back the urge to roll his eyes again as he left his room, and then the apartment entirely. He headed to the second floor, stopping in front of Jisung’s door for a moment, before knocking.
He always knocked, when he wanted to go into someone’s room. He knew that surprised some of them, at odds with his personality, but he knew— he knew the value of privacy. And the others gave him that courtesy too, so that nobody, before Felix, had ever entered his room without announcing themselves.
More than that, Hyunjin did not want to stumble in on Jisung in a state of undress again. A potentially worse state of undress. Shirtless had been bad enough. He did not want to fling open this door and find even the towel was missing.
So he knocked, and waited for Jisung to call yeah, before he pushed open the door.
Jisung was at his desk, one of his weird animal documentary videos playing on his computer, swivelled around on his chair to look at who had come in through the door. Fully clothed, thank fuck. He looked surprised to see Hyunjin. “What’s up?” he asked, pausing his video.
“Nothing,” said Hyunjin, as he swept into the room towards Jisung’s ramshackle closet area, picking his way through a couple of piles of sweaters on the floor. “I need black jeans, do you have anything with a high waist?”
“Um, maybe,” Jisung said from behind him. There was the sound of the desk chair moving, then Jisung’s footsteps coming closer. Hyunjin ignored him. “But they’re not going to fit you.”
“They’re not for me,” said Hyunjin, a little scornfully. “They’re for Felix.”
There was a long pause, before Jisung said, “I mean, you can have them, but is there a reason you’re stealing my clothes for Felix?”
Hyunjin made himself turn around and look at him. He had not been back here since the day that man had broken in, and being here like this reminded him too much of how nice it had been, to spend that time with Jisung. This was competing against the knowledge of how the pale skin of Jisung’s shoulders had been, and combined it was starting to make him a little twitchy.
Still, he managed to say, “We’re going to Maniac tonight. Minho-hyung said he’d babysit. Felix doesn’t have anything to wear, and you’re the closest size to him. We’re leaving in an hour. You can come too, if you want,” he added, and was proud of himself for getting it out without stumbling over the words.
Jisung smiled at him, that boyish grin he wore so well. “Oh, okay,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll come! Thanks for inviting me!”
This was excruciating. Hyunjin held himself very still and did not respond.
“I’ve got some jeans that’ll work,” Jisung said. He brushed past Hyunjin slightly, before hunching down next to the drawers and pulling out the bottom one. He rummaged around until he tugged out a pair of black jeans, which he handed to Hyunjin. He didn’t straighten back up, just half-knelt on the floor, smiling up at Hyunjin. “Anything else?” he asked.
“No,” said Hyunjin. Actually, he’d been wanting to ask for a pair of Jisung’s boots, but there was something about the way Jisung was looking up at him, face utterly relaxed in his presence, that made him want to flee the room. He couldn’t do that, not the way he wanted to, but he could simply turn around and stalk out, so that’s what he did.
He was in the doorway though when he heard Jisung say, “Hyunjin-ah, wait.” Hyunjin jerked to a stop, even though he hadn’t really wanted to; sometimes, when Jisung said his name, it was like being a dog whose leash had been pulled. When he turned his head to look over his shoulder, Jisung was behind him, holding out the boots that Hyunjin had wanted to ask for. “Take these,” he said. “Felix will look good in them.”
Hyunjin looked at the boots. They were knee-high, black leather that zipped up the side, and he had never seen Jisung wear them. He’d been there when Jisung had bought them though, and made fun of him for it, because the idea that Jisung, who lived most of his life in oversized clothing that he’d probably owned since high school, would wear boots like this had been hilarious. Jisung had grinned at him at the time and told him that he’d find an occasion but he never had. Hyunjin almost felt bad about taking them. Almost.
He did say, quietly, “Thank you,” as he did so, though. Jisung grinned at him, that smile that always made Hyunjin want to smile back, infuriating in its way. He did flee now, back up the stairs and into his bedroom like the devil was on his heels. Felix, who had been poking around at Hyunjin’s make-up collection, looked startled to see him.
Hyunjin dumped the boots on the floor and the jeans on the bed. “Okay,” he said, before going to his own wardrobe — built in, like all the ones in the apartment, considerably larger than Jisung’s. Truthfully Hyunjin had known what he was going to dress Felix in from the moment Chan had mentioned them going to the club. Much like the boots, it was a shirt that Hyunjin had bought and then never worn, mostly because he had never had the chance. He could have worn it tonight himself but he knew, now, that he bought it for this, without even knowing Felix would be an option.
He held it up for Felix to look at. It was a see-through mesh shirt, sleeves long enough that on Felix they’d probably go over his wrists, with lacey trailing vines and flowers in black across it. It was one of the more unusual items in Hyunjin’s wardrobe, strange to look at. Felix raised an eyebrow at it. “You want me to wear that?”
“Yeah,” said Hyunjin. “I’ve got a jacket you can wear too, with the boots and your hair it’ll look insanely hot.”
Felix looked unsure, like that concept was a little new to him, but he also just shrugged lightly and said, “If you say so. Is that what people wear to nightclubs?”
“They do if they’re hot,” Hyunjin said bluntly. “Listen. You’re going to wear this shirt and I’m going to put a bunch of eyeliner on you and we’re going to get you laid tonight.”
“I don’t need that,” said Felix, very calmly, smiling like he thought Hyunjin was funny.
“It’s an expression,” Hyunjin said, although he’d been somewhat serious about it. Not even a stranger either; maybe if he dressed Felix up hot enough, Chan would snap. That would be fun, for everyone involved. Hyunjin had first noticed Chan looking at Felix a little too long and a little too warmly a few days into Felix being here, and that did not seem to be getting any better. Chan, it seemed, had developed a decided crush on Felix very quickly.
This made sense, to Hyunjin, and was something he was inclined to encourage. Felix was easy-going but he was no pushover, and there was a streak of sass in him that Hyunjin knew would delight Chan, if he ever got to see it. He had not yet, because Felix was strangely shy in front of him. Hyunjin wasn’t a fool; he knew what that meant too.
“Anyway,” he said, “are you opposed to eyeliner? And maybe a little bit more make-up besides that?”
“I don’t mind,” Felix said. “Do your worst.”
Hyunjin fetched his make-up from his dresser and brought it over to his desk. Truthfully, his collection was not huge, and he did not usually experiment with it. He only used it when he went to the club, but he had meticulously taught himself how to wear it, because if he was going to wear it, no matter how rarely, then he wanted it to be perfect. He wasn’t going to bother with most of it tonight, even for himself, because even if he’d been inclined to put foundation and concealer on Felix, he didn’t have anything in Felix’s shade. But he didn’t want to do that anyway. What a shame, to cover up those freckles.
Eyeliner, then, and some mascara, maybe something to fill in eyebrows, and maybe a little lip tint, berry dark on the inside of Felix’s mouth. He wouldn’t have to do much, not when Felix looked like— that, naturally. Felix peered at the little collection he had set down on the table, and then the set of make-up brushes he pulled closer to him, and said, “Do you ever get the make-up brushes and paint brushes mixed up?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Hyunjin said. Felix laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners. If he found that funny, he’d probably find the number of times Hyunjin had tried to drink from a mug of tea only for it to turn out to be paint water hilarious. Hyunjin wasn’t going to tell him that, either, though. He brandished the eyeliner instead. “Close your eyes,” he said.
Felix did so, as obedient in this as he had been when Hyunjin had sorted his hair for him. When Hyunjin touched his eyelid with the wet brush, Felix flinched, a little aborted movement. Hyunjin put his fingers to the side of his face, trying to hold him still, and watched something akin to the peaceful expression from the hair washing come onto Felix’s face.
Touch seemed to do that, to Felix. Hyunjin had applied himself to a study of it, the past couple of weeks, watching as Felix melted into it. He’d woken up numerous times to Felix wrapped around him like an octopus, instinctively seeking out another body while he slept. Hyunjin would have said, if someone had asked him beforehand, that it would be a step too far for him — he’d expected to wake up with a start if someone tried to touch him while he slept. Instead, he had not stirred, waking only in the morning to the almost-too-much warmth of Felix against him. Hyunjin wasn’t sure if it was a sign of his progress, or if it was just that Felix didn’t register as any kind of threat.
He had just about finished the right wing, his hand perfectly steady as he drew, when there was a bang on his door, loud and sudden; Jeongin, who was the only one that knocked like that. Hyunjin took the eyeliner away from Felix’s eye before he accidentally stabbed him and said, “Jeongin-ah! Stop giving me a goddamn heart attack!”
Jeongin opened the door and stuck his head in. “Hyung,” he said, looking miserable. “You have to help me.”
Hyunjin sighed and motioned for him to come inside. Jeongin did, closing the door behind him, much more gently than when he’d banged on it. He was wearing a wine-red t-shirt, fitted tight against his body in a way that Hyunjin did not usually see Jeongin wear. The sleeves were short, showing off the muscles in his arms, which was a thing Hyunjin was, quite simply, never going to get used to. On his legs were dark grey jeans which Hyunjin did recognise, his feet in black socks, and he padded to Hyunjin’s bed and threw himself down on it. “Hyung, make me look good too, please,” he said.
“Aw, Jeongin,” said Felix. He somehow managed to make it sound fond and affectionate and not sarcastic like it would have sounded out of Hyunjin’s mouth.
“You already look good,” Hyunjin said, turning his attention back to Felix’s eyeliner. Felix shut his eyes again, face smoothing out into that empty expression he’d had earlier. Hyunjin wanted so badly to ruffle his hair, to find out what was going on in his mind as Hyunjin carefully drew the wing onto his left eye. He looked completely at peace. Hyunjin did not think he’d ever experienced that level of mind-empty in his life.
Jeongin, like the good kid that he was, waited until Hyunjin was finished dabbing the tint onto Felix’s mouth and had put everything back down before he said, “I want to look good like you and Felix-hyung.”
Hyunjin looked at him sceptically. A couple of mean things went through his head, replaced some true things, which happened to be kinder. He didn’t say any of them. He just said, “What, you want some eyeliner too or something?”
“How do you mean, Jeongin,” said Felix kindly, kicking his feet a little against the wheels of Hyunjin’s desk chair.
“You know,” said Jeongin. “Sexy, hot. Like you guys.” Hyunjin would have expected him to get shy or flustered saying it but he didn’t, other than his ears going obviously red. “Every time we’ve gone there in the past, I haven’t been allowed to drink and I just have to sit somewhere drinking a soda and it’s so annoying. But now I can drink and Chan-hyung isn’t here to tell me I can’t wear something fun, and I just want to look good.”
Felix looked at Hyunjin with a raised eyebrow. Hyunjin sighed. He shouldn’t, he knew, give into it. There was no way he could allow Jeongin to wear anything along the lines of what he was going to dress Felix in, or even what he was going to wear himself, that much he knew for certain. Chan might not be here, but Minho was coming with them, and he was just as likely, if not more, to make Jeongin change. The perils, Hyunjin thought, of being someone who everyone had known since you had braces.
So no, he couldn’t dress Jeongin in a mesh shirt, and he probably shouldn’t try to put lip tint on him. He sighed and opened his jewellery box, rummaging around in it until he found a delicate silver chain, strung with little stars and red jewels, which he handed to Jeongin. “Wait here,” he said, before going to his wardrobe and finding a small plastic tub he kept next to his shoes, which had his large, weirder accessories.
He tossed a couple of belts aside before he found the black, thin-strapped leather body harness that he’d worn a couple of times before to the club. The others would know he’d given Jeongin it, but perhaps that was okay; perhaps it was better that than they think Jeongin had bought it himself. “Here,” he said, giving it to Jeongin, who held it up looking a little unsure. “Wear that. No, just over this t-shirt. The chain goes across your face, hung over your ears, it’ll highlight your cheekbones. You should wear your combat boots, to contrast with the chain. If I put eyeliner on you, will you be able to keep from rubbing at your eyes?”
Jeongin thought for a moment before he admitted, “No, probably not.”
Hyunjin rolled his eyes. He found his pencil liner from his make-up bag, and brandished it at Jeongin. “This one won’t look completely stupid if you smudge it everywhere,” he said. “Now sit still and don’t move while I put it on you.”
This was easier said than done, like Hyunjin had known. Jeongin kept accidentally flinching when the eyeliner pencil touched his skin, so Hyunjin simply did his best. With a layer of mascara, it really didn’t look too bad. He helped Jeongin pull the harness on, two straps over his shoulders, and one which wound snug around his waist, meeting across his chest in a metal ring. On Hyunjin it had always been a little loose, but on Jeongin it seemed to fit just right, tight without being constricting. After he helped put the face chain on, the effect was quite impressive.
“There,” he said, as Jeongin looked at himself in Hyunjin’s full length mirror. “Don’t say hyung never does anything for you.”
“Thank you, hyung!” Jeongin trilled, and then turned around and kissed Hyunjin quickly on the cheek. Hyunjin spluttered at him. He was not sure Jeongin had ever done something like that.
“You really do look good,” Felix said. “What did you mean about Chan-hyung saying you can’t wear something? He’s not going to be mad you’re dressing me up with that, right, Hyunjin?” He pointed at the outfit laid out on Hyunjin’s bed.
“No,” said Hyunjin and Jeongin in unison. They looked at each other, and then Jeongin smirked a little. Hyunjin had suspected it, from Jeongin’s look earlier, but they were clearly on the same page. “It’s a Jeongin thing, not really a Chan-hyung thing,” Hyunjin added. “Changbin-hyung can be just as bad.”
“They treat me like a baby,” Jeongin grumbled. He threw himself back down on Hyunjin’s bed, staring at the ceiling.
“That’s because you are a baby,” Hyunjin said. “Felix, you’re done, go change into those clothes so I can do my own make-up.”
Felix vacated the seat and Hyunjin took his place. It was a little easier to do make-up on himself, drawing his eyeliner on a bit more dramatically than he’d done for Felix, his own lip tint a shade brighter, closer to his hair colour, letting Felix and Jeongin’s chatter fade into white noise in the background. He liked, so much, that they liked each other. It made sense that they would — they were both, it seemed, the kind of person who could get on with any other person. But it pleased him deeply to see it.
When he’d finished, he turned and found Felix fully dressed, the mesh shirt tucked carefully into the high waist of Jisung’s skinny jeans. They fit him almost perfectly, perhaps just a little baggy on the legs, but not noticeably so. He looked almost too good; Hyunjin had, frankly, outdone himself with this one.
“This shows a lot of skin,” Felix said to him. It did not seem to be a complaint, merely an observation. He did not seem self-conscious at all, standing in front of them with said skin on display. Hyunjin just nodded at him, feeling pleased with himself, and went to his wardrobe to find his own clothes.
His outfit, compared to Felix’s, was fairly simple — black jeans, tight to his body, and a dark grey shirt made of a silky material, that clung to him as he moved. Over the top he wore a leather jacket that was another piece that he’d picked up at some point and never actually worn before now: it was long sleeved but cropped to just above the bottom of his rib cage, with straps that wrapped snug around his body, He put it on, tied the straps, and Felix said, “And you make a fuss about my waist being small. Jesus Christ, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin struck a somewhat ridiculous pose and said, “Yeah, I’m hot, we don’t need to talk about it.”
“One day,” Jeongin said to him, “you’re not going to be able to get through the door with that inflated head of yours.”
Hyunjin whirled on him, fist raised in the air as if to hit him. He never would, and Jeongin knew that, but Jeongin still yelped and scrambled to his feet. “Get out, you ungrateful brat,” Hyunjin scolded him, chasing him to the door, “and go get your fucking boots already, we’re leaving in like five minutes.”
Jeongin ran out of the room, slamming the door after him. When Hyunjin turned back, Felix was smiling at him, warm and maybe a little wistful. “You get along so well with him,” he said.
Hyunjin shrugged, because he wasn’t sure how to articulate it all. Although they’d never formally worded it, the way Chan and Jeongin had always called each other, Jeongin was a brother to him in all the ways that mattered. But it was a little bit more than that, too. He could not begin to explain that Jeongin was one of his saviours, the person Hyunjin really had to thank for everything he had in his life right now, without getting into subjects that he had no interest in telling Felix about.
“Here,” he said, pulling the last piece of Felix’s outfit out of his wardrobe. It was a black velvet blazer, cut cropped and tapered at the waist. It was something he had bought a few years ago, which had become too tight over the shoulders at some point but which he liked too much to bear to throw out. Now he could pass it onto Felix, so at least someone would get some wear out of it. “Try this on and check it fits.”
It did fit, like a glove. Hyunjin was a little surprised at how well the outfit had turned out. He’d had a vision and it had come together perfectly. “You ready to have boys eating out of the palm of your hand?” he asked.
“Something like that,” Felix said.
Jeongin was sitting in the living room when Hyunjin came out, doing up the laces on his combat boots. Those were the nicest pair of shoes that Jeongin owned, barely worn since he usually just wore his sneakers whenever he left the apartment. Hyunjin handed Felix the boots he had borrowed from Jisung, and was about to start putting his own shoes on when the keypad sounded and Minho came in through the door.
“You guys are late,” he said.
Hyunjin squinted at him a little. Minho was as dressed up as he ever got, which meant he was wearing greyish-blue jeans and a white t-shirt and the black and red bomber jacket that he’d had for a couple of years. Hyunjin had felt the urge to steal that jacket the first time he laid eyes on it, and if it belonged to anyone else, he might have asked to borrow it, but nobody asked to borrow Minho’s stuff. He was wearing black combat boots too, his considerably more battered than Jeongin’s. He did not look like he was heading out for an evening of fun; he looked like he planned on kicking someone’s head in over the course of the night.
He watched as Minho’s eyes flickered dismissively over Felix, then to Hyunjin, and then to Jeongin, where they paused. A muscle moved in his jaw, and Hyunjin was filled with the dismayed realisation that Minho was, after all, going to insist that Jeongin change. Hyunjin might have to— well, not fight him, but at least argue tenaciously against that, if Minho tried. Jeongin was not actually a baby, and he wasn’t even wearing anything that bad. Hyunjin had been careful with his choices.
Minho didn’t send Jeongin back to change though. He just said, after a couple of beats of silence, “What on earth is that on your face, baby boy?”
Jeongin touched the face chain, looking a little unsure all of a sudden. “Hyunjin-hyung gave it to me,” he said. “Is it too much? Does it look stupid?”
“No, it doesn’t look stupid,” Hyunjin said, glaring at Minho before he could open his mouth again and damage Jeongin’s confidence a little more. “It looks hot, Jeongin. Keep wearing it, okay.”
Jeongin looked at him, still unsure, and then back at Minho, who said, “You don’t need to take it off.” Jeongin nodded, and left the chain where it was. “You’re after attention tonight, are you?” Minho added, addressing Hyunjin suddenly.
“When am I not after attention?” Hyunjin asked.
“Good point,” Minho said. He held the door to the apartment open and motioned with his free hand. “Come on, let’s go.”
They traipsed downstairs, Jeongin chattering to Felix about all the drinks that were available at the club, none of which he had ever been able to drink. Apparently he had made a list, over the years, of everything he was going to try as soon as he was able to, and Hyunjin listened to him talk and interjected with his opinions and recommendations, until they were on the second floor stairwell and Minho rapped his knuckles against Jisung’s door.
There was a pause for a couple of seconds. Minho lifted his hand again, his body language suggesting that this time, the knock would not be so polite, but the door opened and Jisung tripped outside. “Sorry,” he said, looking a little flustered. “I’m here, I’m here.”
Hyunjin looked him over, then wished that he hadn’t. Jisung was wearing black pants too, though these had a slight shine to them, an almost wet look but not quite, belted somewhat high on the waist, highlighting his narrow hips. He had a sleeveless shirt tucked into them, plain as far as Jisung’s shirts went, grey with a word in English in black across the front. When he turned to the side to make sure that his bedroom door had shut properly behind him, Hyunjin saw that the arm holes of the shirt were cut low, almost to the base of Jisung’s rib cage. It was too much skin, too much toned muscle. Hyunjin wanted to bite him, and not actually in a sexy way.
He’d done something to his hair, too, pushed it back so that his undercut was on full display. He’d only gotten the undercut for the first time a few months ago, and when he’d appeared in the apartment with it, Hyunjin had been so overwhelmed he’d walked out of the kitchen and into his bedroom without saying a word.
Hyunjin could barely even look at him. Maybe, he thought viciously, he should not have invited Jisung after all.
“Right,” said Minho, glancing over at them all gathered in the hallway and looking a little too put upon already, considering they hadn’t even left the house. “Should we get this show on the road?”
——
There was already a small crowd outside of Maniac when they walked up to it, groups of young people milling about, chatting together or lining up to get in. It was dark, although not overly late, autumn settling in properly now, the streetlamps above their heads casting their shadows in growing and shrinking black lines as they walked.
Felix, his arm tucked around Hyunjin’s, drew a little closer to Hyunjin as they got to the door. Seungmin had given him a fake ID but he had yet to actually use it, and he wasn’t sure how this worked, anyway. They were bringing Jeongin in the front door with them, after all, and even if Jeongin had a fake ID, it sounded like everyone who worked here knew he was underage.
Minho was at the front of them, walking alone, Jeongin and Jisung behind him, both chatting in excited tones. As they neared the crowd waiting to be let into the club, Felix expected them to have to join at the back of the line, but instead Minho simply walked past everyone, skirted past the bouncer, and pulled the door open.
“Excuse me,” said the bouncer, and then he seemed to actually realise who it was in front of him. Considering the man had about a whole foot of height and at least fifty pounds on Minho, it was somewhat amusing to see the way he flinched a little when Minho gave him a cool little look over his shoulder. Or it would have been, if Felix didn’t have the clear knowledge of the kind of damage Minho could do, given the chance and inclination. “Oh,” he said, all of the aggressiveness of earlier wiped from his voice. “I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you.”
“I’m sure you’re just doing your job,” Minho said. There was a note of something dry, but not overly amused, in his voice.
“Hello, Dongmin-hyung,” said Jeongin cheerfully.
“Hello, Jeongin-sshi,” said the bouncer, a little faint. “Please, go right ahead.”
Minho held the door open for them. There were a few grumbles from the people waiting in the line that Minho’s glare didn’t quite settle. To be fair, they were mostly seeing him in profile, and it was his unmarked side. But Hyunjin sweeping an ice cold look of disdain over them all certainly did the rest of the job. The bouncer gave Felix a curious look as he walked past, but didn’t stop him from entering, still clinging to Hyunjin’s arm.
There was an entrance hall immediately inside the door. Felix hadn’t been lying earlier — he had been to nightclubs before, in the past. He’d started going to them as soon as he came of age, but he’d always picked clubs in the shittier part of town, where he could get drunk as quickly as possible and find someone to satisfy him hopefully faster than that. He’d never been inside a nightclub that had a coat check like this one did, an attendant taking people’s jackets off them and handing them tickets back.
They, apparently, weren’t going to be leaving anything there, because Minho didn’t even glance at it. He just kept walking, and they followed him like little ducklings into the club proper, Hyunjin and Felix still bringing up the rear. This meant that only Hyunjin noticed the way Felix almost tripped over his feet when he got his first look at what Maniac was like on the inside.
It was big, was his first thought. The door proper led straight onto a balcony that lined the periphery of the huge space, so when they first entered, they could see the entire expanse of the club. Down a set of stairs was the sprawling dance floor, a dj set up against one wall, and a long bar on the adjacent wall. It was dim, most of the illumination coming from the moving lights over the dance floor, and the neon green strip lights that lined the walls, the staircases, the balcony’s railings. The bar area had another glowing sign which said Maniac above it, in the same font as the one outside.
It was not terribly packed, but it was certainly not empty. Plenty of people on the dance floor, the atmosphere energetic, and the music as loud as Felix would have expected, playing something he only half-recognized. Up here on the balcony some people loitered, little tables for drinks set up at about chest height were dotted beside the railings, so people could stand up and chat. There were a few hallways, Felix could make out, darkened.
Overall, it was a little overwhelming, in that way clubs could often be, but unlike some of the ones Felix had visited in the past, Maniac felt fun, with no undercurrent of edginess to be wary of.
Minho led them down the stairs, onto the main floor, and from there to the left, where there was a series of circular booth tables set up along the wall that Felix hadn’t been able to see from his angle up top. There were four of them, upholstered in black leather, all of them empty right now, and they had been cordoned off from the rest of the club. There was another bouncer hanging around there, and he clearly recognised at least one of them, or had been waiting for them, because as they got closer, he simply undid the cordon and let them into the private area.
Minho slid into the first booth he came to, taking up position right against the wall, where he could look out across the whole club. Jisung motioned for Jeongin to go next, so Jeongin slid in next to Minho, close enough to leave space for Jisung on that side, but Jisung didn’t sit. Instead, he stepped back to let Hyunjin and Felix get to the other entrance into the booth and said, “I’ll go get the first round of drinks.”
“You make it sound so gallant,” Hyunjin said, his eye roll audible in his voice. He pushed Felix gently ahead of him, so that Felix got into the booth first. This meant Felix was sitting next to Minho, which made him— a little uncomfortable, honestly, but there was space enough, and Minho seemed as relaxed as Felix had ever seen him. He tried to keep Chan’s words in his mind — no one is going to hurt you. “You’re not even paying. Make sure they know about Felix, I don’t want them to argue about his drinks if he goes up there.”
“I’ll tell them,” said Jisung. He had his hands in his back pockets, rocking back and forth lightly on his feet. “What do you want to drink?”
Felix was not sure if this was directed at the table at large or Hyunjin in particular, but it was Hyunjin who answered. “We need shots,” he said. “Choose something that isn’t disgusting. And I want one of those blue drinks too.”
“Is that the kind with the umbrella?” Jeongin asked him, and then, when Hyunjin nodded, he said brightly, “Oh, I want one of those too!”
He seemed incredibly excited, almost vibrating in his seat beside Minho. Felix found it so charming he just kept smiling at him. He knew that Jeongin had been here in the past, and at night too, but it clearly meant something to him that he had been given the okay to drink. This, Felix thought, was what a first experience drinking in a nightclub should be like — nothing at all like what Felix’s experiences had been. Alone, lonely, and no idea what to drink besides.
“Jisung,” said Minho, leaning around Jeongin, who didn’t move to make space for him. “Get me a coke, and a glass of water, too.”
Jisung saluted him, then gave Felix a quick grin. “And what about you?”
“Oh,” said Felix. “Um. Whatever Hyunjin and Jeongin are having, I guess.”
Whatever Hyunjin and Jeongin were having turned out to be very blue indeed, when Jisung returned with three of them on a tray. He also had four shot glasses of something tinged pink, Minho’s soda and water, and his own drink of something dark, something that looked like it had been mixed with coke. He set everything down with a slight flourish and almost knocked over one of the glasses.
“Ooops,” he said, as Hyunjin sighed at him and reached across to rescue his drink before it could get spilled everywhere. Jisung handed everything out, looked at Hyunjin for a moment and apparently judged that there wouldn’t be enough space next to him, because he slid into the seat next to Jeongin instead.
“Here,” said Minho. He slid the glass of water to Jeongin. “Drink this with the alcohol. One glass of water with every drink.”
“Aw, hyung,” Jeongin said, but he’d already pulled the water closer. It didn’t seem even being babied like that could ruin his good mood.
“You’ll thank me in the morning,” Minho said. This was probably true, Felix thought. He certainly wished he’d had someone around to remind him to drink water.
Felix sipped his drink, mouth pursed around the straw, and was very surprised to find that it actually tasted— good. Sweet, without too much of the bitterness of alcohol, although he could taste too that it was strong, very strong. He’d never had an alcoholic drink that actually tasted good before, but then he’d never had a cocktail, either, which he guessed was what this was. He’d always had to pay for his drinks with cash, unable to let the receipt of a club or bar show up on his card bills, and that had meant getting as much alcohol in his system as possible for the lowest price. He had drunk more shots of cheap, turpentine-tasting vodka than he wanted to remember.
In fact, he couldn’t quite remember. Most of those nights had ended up in decidedly fuzzy territory.
Hyunjin nudged him with his shoulder, sliding one of the shot glasses over to him. “Tastes good, right?” Hyunjin said, correctly deducing the look on his face. Felix nodded, and took the shot glass. “This probably won’t,” Hyunjin added, taking up his own shot glass.
It didn’t, although it wasn’t overly bad, when the four of them knocked the shots back, Minho just watching them. It certainly tasted more like alcohol, with a slight burn as it went down, but it wasn’t the worst thing Felix had drunk, far from it. “Ack,” said Jeongin, his face a twist of disgust as he slammed his shot glass back down.
“What the hell was that?” Hyunjin asked, looking at the shot glass like it had personally slapped him.
Jisung shrugged. “I don’t know, I asked the woman at the bar for something that wasn’t disgusting.” He had set his own glass down and was sipping at his proper drink, looking unbothered by all of it. “Your mileage may vary on that one, I suppose.”
Felix said, “It wasn’t that bad.”
Hyunjin patted him on the head. “Drink your blue drink,” he said.
Felix hid his smile, leaning so he could sip at said drink. Jeongin was doing the same thing, while Minho was looking at them all like he thought they were idiots. “This is going to end in disaster,” he said, and then added, “Oh, here’s Changbin.”
Changbin was indeed coming into the private area, a hand on the bouncer’s shoulder as he was let in. He came to the table and stood looking down at it, eyebrow raised slightly. “You guys started off strong,” he said.
“If I can’t drink Chan-hyung out of house and home,” Hyunjin said, very seriously, “then what’s the point of him having a nightclub.”
Changbin laughed, and reached out to try to ruffle Hyunjin’s hair. Hyunjin shrieked and ducked away, trying to hide behind Felix, who laughed too, shifting forward in his seat so Hyunjin could wriggle down behind him. Changbin let him go in favour of turning to Minho and saying, “Hyung, I’m going to head out. I can leave Chan-hyung in your capable hands too, right?”
Minho quirked his mouth at him, the unmarked side of his lips pulling up just a little. Felix would not have said that it was a smile, except that it wasn’t not a smile, either. It was like the expression version of his tone of voice when he had spoken to the bouncer earlier. “You don’t need to worry about Chan-hyung,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
Changbin nodded, tried to ruffle Jeongin’s hair this time and got his hand smacked away for it, and then looked like he was going to do the same to Jisung before he noticed how much product was in Jisung’s hair. He squeezed his shoulder instead, giving him a look that seemed loaded somehow. Jisung nodded back at him, silently. Behind Felix, Hyunjin was straightening up warily.
“Have fun,” Changbin said to the table at large. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“You’ve given us contradictory orders,” Hyunjin said, very snarky. Changbin raised his hand again, laughed when Hyunjin dived out of the way, and then turned and left their area at a saunter.
Jisung, his drink half-empty already on the table, looked around at them. “More shots?” he asked.
——
Seungmin saw Changbin on the cameras first, coming down the street outside the house at a casual pace, a plastic bag dangling from his hand. The sight of him sent a spark through Seungmin, his heart rate kicking up for a few seconds before he managed to calm it. The reaction annoyed him. He’d been expecting it, of course, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying still.
He’d like to say that he hadn’t been watching the camera feed this entire time, but even he, used to lying to himself, couldn’t really deny that, as soon as the others had left, he’d been keeping at least one eye on them. Even knowing the time it would take for them to arrive at the club and get settled in, and then with no idea how long it would take from there before Changbin was able to actually leave, he had watched the feeds.
This is ridiculous, he’d told himself the entire time, but that hadn’t mattered, not to his stupid brain. He hadn’t been able to concentrate at all, not from the moment he’d heard it would be Minho, not Changbin, babysitting the others at the club tonight. This was not the usual state of things; it very often was Changbin who went with them, and Minho who stayed behind, so Seungmin had known, immediately, what Changbin’s plan had been. The knowledge had been aggravatingly distracting, keeping him just on edge enough that he’d gotten absolutely nothing done most of the afternoon.
So now he watched Changbin walk down the narrow alley that led to the back parking lot, where he punched in the keycode to the door, his plastic bag now hanging heavily from his elbow. Seungmin watched him, his progress from the back door down the darkened hallway, and then just before Changbin opened the door to the workroom, he turned back to his main computer.
There was the sound of the door opening, and then nothing else, for a long few seconds. He’d expected Changbin to say something to him, but there was nothing. No words, nor footsteps, which meant he hadn’t even come inside the room, not properly. The idea that Changbin was just standing there watching him made both a shiver run down his spine and, somewhat typically, made him all the more determined to not be affected.
He was clicking a little at random, eyes focused on his computer screen as he scrolled through some documents he’d mostly accidentally left open. After a while, he heard the door shut and then Changbin’s footsteps sounded across the floor, his shoes echoing a little in the silence. There was the clink of something being set down on the workbench — bottles, by the sounds of it, whatever it had been in that plastic bag Changbin was carrying — and then Changbin’s hands came to a rest against his shoulders. His hands were heavy, so— real, so present, and this time Seungmin actively forced down the shiver than wanted to run through him.
“I know you’re not busy,” Changbin said, sounding amused.
Seungmin didn’t take his hand off his mouse, nor his eyes off his screen. “I could be,” he said, with a little flare of irritation at being so easily caught out. “I could have a lot of work to do. I do have a lot of work to do.”
Changbin snorted. He stepped closer, slung his arms over Seungmin’s shoulders and down his chest, hanging over the back of his desk chair. Even with the back of the chair in the way, Seungmin could feel some of his body heat — his hands, however, touching just below Seungmin’s rib cage, were a little cold from outside. “Yeah,” he said. “But you’re not doing it. So therefore, you’re not busy.”
Seungmin didn’t answer for a long time. He opened up the photoshop file he was supposed to have been working on most of the day, moved something slightly to the left, realised it was wrong and that he’d have to undo it later. “Can I help you with something?” he asked, when Changbin just kept hanging half on him.
“I’m being very good,” Changbin said, his mouth suddenly very close to Seungmin’s ear. “And not making a very crude joke that I know you won’t appreciate. Won’t you reward me for that? Pay attention to me.”
Seungmin sighed a little. He clicked a couple more times, and then Changbin leaned around his chair and took the mouse off him. “Hey!” Seungmin said, smacking at the offending hand, as Changbin tried to move to the save button. “Hyung!”
But Changbin just ignored him. Seungmin quickly hit ctrl+z to undo the stupid mistake from earlier, right before Changbin saved the file and then went about minimising all the windows so that only the camera feeds showed across the screens. Seungmin let him do it, falling quiet now. Truthfully, he felt it inside him, that buzzing excitement that came from this game, of pretending that he didn’t want it and letting Changbin pretend to tempt him into it. If he said no, seriously and firmly, Changbin would stop. But Seungmin didn’t really need to be tempted into this, he never had been. That had been the whole reason he hadn’t been able to do any fucking work in the first place.
Changbin stepped to the side, looking down at him. After a second or two, he smiled — not a sexy smile, not trying for that, just his smile, the one that Seungmin— liked so much. “Seungmin,” he said, still smiling, and then he ducked down and kissed him.
Seungmin leaned into it, one of his hands coming up to wrap around Changbin’s arm, the hand of which was cupping Seungmin’s face gently. Changbin kissed him carefully, not hard, even though they had well established by now that Seungmin was hardly breakable. But, Seungmin knew, he still had those bruises on his face, the cuts across his forehead and cheekbone. Changbin had been kissing him like this ever since the attack, like he was wary that the mere act of kissing would cause Seungmin pain.
“Hyung,” he murmured, pulling back a little so their mouths were just brushing. “You’re this afraid to kiss me properly but you want to fuck me?”
“Brat,” Changbin said, like Seungmin had known he would. When Seungmin opened his eyes, he found Changbin looking back at him. They watched each other for a couple of seconds; it should have been awkward but very little was when it came to being with Changbin. “Ah,” Changbin said after the silence had strung out like toffee between them. “I love your eyes.”
Seungmin blushed, feeling it happen and hating himself for it. He always did, when Changbin complimented him like that, open and frank with it in a way that Seungmin could never be. Changbin seemed to have been born with the skill for easy communication, whereas if Seungmin had ever had that skill, he’d certainly lost it through disuse over the past few years. It never failed to surprise him, too, when Changbin said things like this, even though he’d heard plenty of the like over the past few months. He’d hoped that he’d be able to guard himself against it, to get used to it, but it got him every time — and not only that, he thought it might be getting worse.
Changbin slid his hand across Seungmin’s jaw and just into his hair, and used that touch to gently tug, to draw Seungmin upright. Seungmin unfolded his legs from his chair and went with the movement, allowed Changbin to pull him to his feet. This time, it was Seungmin who had to lean down to kiss him, Changbin’s head tipped up to meet his mouth, as Seungmin’s arms wound around Changbin’s shoulders, both resting there and kind of just— feeling him up, if Seungmin was honest. Changbin’s shoulders were one of Seungmin’s many favourite parts of him.
“Do you want me to fuck you?” Changbin asked, an unknown number of minutes later. Seungmin had sunk into the kiss, into the feeling of Changbin’s mouth moving against his, so familiar by this point but not boring, never boring. “We could go watch a movie if you want, see what’s on TV.”
Seungmin gave him his very best unimpressed look, which just made Changbin laugh a little. “You want me to beg?” Seungmin asked dryly. “Is that the game tonight?” He put on a mocking tone. “Oh, hyung, give me your cock?”
Changbin pulled a disgusted face which was ruined by the fact that he was putting it on around a smile. “No,” he said, the hand on Seungmin’s face moving to card through his hair, pushing Seungmin’s bangs back. “I just want you to want it, that’s all.”
“Argh,” said Seungmin, who could not stand him sometimes. He was blushing, again. He was probably going to blush most of the way through this, if this was the mood that Changbin was in. He should have known, too, after the attack, that the next time they got to do this, Changbin would want to be sweet about it. “Yes, yes, I want it, okay? I do want it. But hyung, you can’t treat me like I’m fragile, please don’t do that.”
Changbin looked at him, the smile dropping into something more serious. It took Seungmin a moment to recognise the look, but then he saw the little glint in Changbin’s eyes, right before Changbin said, “Okay. I won’t treat you like you’re fragile.”
Something about the low way he said it, that intent look in his eyes, made the arousal drip thick and delicious down Seungmin’s spine. God, he liked this, he liked it so much. He had not come to Changbin a blushing virgin, far from it, but it had never been fun in the way it was with Changbin. Maybe that was what happened when you did it with someone you— liked, and not as a means to an end.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked, as Changbin’s hand slid slowly down the curve of his back, then to his ass, which he shamelessly groped. Seungmin resisted the urge to let his hips bump forward into Changbin’s, stood still as the now-warmth of Changbin’s hand bled through the thin pyjama bottoms he was wearing.
Changbin grinned at him. “Ah,” he said. “That’s for you to find out, isn’t it?”
——
Minho came back from the bathroom with a tray of four shots and also four pint glasses of water, which he set firmly in front of them all before sliding into the booth next to Jeongin. He gave them all a narrow eyed look. “I can’t make you drink those,” he said. “But I strongly recommend you do so.”
“Oh, but you can make me drink it?’ Jeongin asked, even as he lowered his head to sip at the full glass without using his hands.
Minho gave him a blank look. “Yes,” he said, before he turned and nudged Jisung’s water closer to him pointedly.
Jisung grinned at him, taking it with a nod. Truthfully, maybe he could use it. When Jisung went to other clubs, the ones where he had to actually pay for his own drinks, he tended to choose drinks on the cheaper end of the scale — cheaper brands, single shots in his mixers rather than doubles. Here, at Chan’s place, he didn’t have to do that. The staff tended to give them the expensive stuff as a matter of course, and they certainly didn’t skimp on the servings. Hyunjin had also been on something of a tear tonight, insisting on some kind of shot with every round of drinks. Jisung was certainly feeling it.
“Boring,” Hyunjin said. “Water is boring. What’s this?”
He held up a shot glass, holding it to the pulsing light as if that would let him know what was inside. It was a dark liquid, apart from a small layer of paler alcohol at the top. Minho said, “Why don’t you try it and find out?”
That probably meant he had done the same thing that Jisung had done and asked for something the staff recommended, because Minho knew even less than Hyunjin did about the names of drinks. It wasn’t quite the same as with Hyunjin, who simply didn’t want to learn, and so Jisung had had to memorise all the different ways he referred to the things he liked to drink. Minho just had no interest in alcohol, and seemed to find their desire to drink something decidedly odd. The fact that he had even gotten them the shots in the first place was something pretty special.
Hyunjin didn’t seem happy about the lack of answer, but he handed the glass he was holding to Felix. “Here you are, angel,” he said, before taking his own. He clinked the edge of it against Felix’s carefully and said, “Bottoms up.”
Somehow over the course of the night, Jisung had ended up next to Hyunjin, sitting on the end of that curve of the booth seating. This, normally, would have made tonight one of Jisung’s better nights out, but Hyunjin had paid, even for him, an unusually little amount of attention to him. As soon as Jisung had sat down next to him, Hyunjin had scooted up closer to Felix, practically on top of him at that point, but it had meant that at no point in time would a single part of Hyunjin’s body touch Jisung’s.
This hadn’t surprised Jisung. At this point, it had barely even hurt. The one real sting of the evening, the one thing that had actually pricked him, a little, was the way that Hyunjin was not even really looking at him. He was not so egotistical to have thought, when he was getting dressed, that Hyunjin would look at him in any particular way, but he had not quite expected the looks of— apparent disgust that Hyunjin had shot him a few times on the way over to the club.
He watched as Hyunjin knocked the shot back, the graceful line of his throat, the way his hands dwarfed the glass. He knew it was wrong, to even be looking at Hyunjin in this way, never mind to be thinking— about those hands, the long length of his fingers. If he knew someone else was having these kinds of thoughts about Hyunjin, Jisung would probably make like Minho and try to gouge their eyes out a little. It was wrong, and the knowledge of how wrong it was, meant that he turned his head away and gulped desperately at his water.
“Wow,” said Felix. He hadn’t set his glass down after he drank it, but was instead just staring at it in surprise. “That tasted really good.”
“It was,” said Hyunjin, sounding just as surprised. “Best shot of the night and Minho-hyung doesn’t even know what it’s called.”
“Drink your fucking water,” Minho said.
Hyunjin did not drink his water. Instead, he put his arm around Felix’s shoulder and leaned in close to him, saying something into his ear that made Felix giggle a little. Jisung felt every inch of the space that separated him and Hyunjin like this, all that black leather seating that Hyunjin had carefully put between them. Would it have felt better or worse, if Hyunjin maintained that level of space between himself and all the other people in his life too, if it weren’t just Jisung? Worse, maybe, because he didn’t want Hyunjin to be alone like that, cut off from the physical affection that he deserved. But better, too, if it wasn’t so obviously just Jisung that he couldn’t bear to touch.
It had been a long two weeks. Somewhere along the line he had realised that part of him had never thought that Hyunjin would show this kind of interest in another person. Self-serving as a concept, perhaps, but he thought it was justified — Hyunjin had never shown interest in another person, not like this, not like the way he hung all over Felix. Hyunjin had been vaguely disgusted by the romance in the dramas that Jeongin watched, even, so perhaps Jisung could be forgiven for thinking Hyunjin would never— fall in love. Not just with him, but with anyone.
It was happening now, though, right before his eyes. He was watching Hyunjin fall in love with Felix, and even if there was something he could do to stop it, he never would. The worst part was, he didn’t blame Hyunjin. He couldn’t even blame Felix, who he liked, a lot. What better person for Hyunjin, after everything he had been through, than someone as sweet and kind as Felix, who baked cookies when he had spare time and took requests with earnest sincerity.
Someone beautiful, as beautiful as Hyunjin was. Even Jisung, in love with the most beautiful man in the world, knew that Felix was something special. Tonight, dressed up in Jisung’s jeans and boots and in a shirt that must have belonged to Hyunjin, he looked stunning, in a way that Jisung would never manage.
Someone who made Hyunjin laugh. What must that be like, he wondered.
A hand stretched into his line of vision — Hyunjin, reaching for the shot glass that Jisung hadn’t touched, hovering hesitatingly over it. “Do you want this?” he asked. “Can I have it?”
Jisung smiled at him. He knew it was pathetic, to be charmed by someone asking permission before they stole something from him, but thus it was with Hyunjin. “Yeah,” he said. “You can have it.”
Hyunjin took it and drank it quickly, like he thought Jisung was going to change his mind. This time, Jisung didn’t watch him, and instead shuffled out of the booth. Jeongin noticed and said, “Hyung?”
Jisung flashed him a quick smile. “I’m going to go get a soda,” he said. “I think I need to calm down a little bit.”
Hyunjin wriggled the empty shot glass at him in the air. “Boring,” he announced. “You’re boring.”
Jisung nodded at him, mock-seriously. “I know,” he said.
The bar was busy when he got there, the night crowd finally having settled in at this point. It was, however, only a Thursday, and he had been here when it was worse than this. He hopped onto a barstool, willing to wait until one of the staff had a moment to spare for him — he didn’t need them to drop everything for him, not when he was costing them money.
He had not been sitting long when he sensed a presence by his side, someone sidling up a little too close. Whoever it was wasn’t setting off his warning alarms, and when he turned to look he was a little surprised to find it wasn’t one of their group, Jeongin perhaps. Instead, it was a young woman, around his age, smiling at him.
“Hello,” she said, voice just loud enough to hear over the music.
“Hello,” said Jisung, smiling back at her. She was pretty, with long dark hair in waves around her face, wearing a dress with thin straps that showed the delicate points of her collarbones. “Do you need me to get the attention of one of the bartenders?”
She shook her head. She was leaning very close indeed, now that he noticed it, close enough that when she shook her head like that, her hair brushed against Jisung’s forearm. “I don’t need a drink,” she said. “Unless you feel like buying one for me?”
Ah, thought Jisung. He shifted a little on his seat, not away from her but turning to face her more properly, which did take his arm away from the dangling ends of her hair. “I can certainly get one for you,” he said, watching as her smile grew a little at the way he hadn’t moved away. “What is it that you want?”
“Is there a price limit?” she asked.
“No,” said Jisung, grinning now, mostly at himself, at this whole situation. “For a pretty face, I can be a big spender.”
She laughed, a surprisingly full-bodied sound. It was— nice, to make someone laugh, to have someone’s attention on him this way. He’d always bonded with people through his humour, which probably explained why his relationship with Hyunjin was so fraught.
She reached out and touched his arm, dancing her fingers up the bare skin. Jisung let her, feeling the drag of it. Even if it wasn’t the person he wanted in his heart, at least someone was admiring the effort he’d gone to tonight. It was odd though — perhaps it was the demographics of the crowd that came to Maniac, maybe something about his particular energy, but it was only ever women who hit on him here, only ever women who wanted to take him home. Whenever he wanted to pick up a guy, he had to take himself to another part of the city, to the gay clubs where he had to spend his own money, which was always a pain.
He’d stopped doing that, over the past few months though. It was too difficult to stop himself from imagining it was Hyunjin fucking him, and the guilt he felt over that wasn’t enough to make up for any pleasure he found from the sex.
“I’m Eunji,” she said, her hand now simply resting on his arm, fingers curled warm around the muscle of his bicep.
“Jisung,” he said. “And I’ll get you your drink, but I’m afraid I’m here on business and not pleasure tonight.”
This was not exactly a lie. Even if he was off-duty, technically, and even if nobody would expect him to really do anything tonight, that did not mean he didn’t have a responsibility to the others. With Changbin gone, and Minho occupied with making sure Jeongin didn’t drink too much for his first time, Jisung had a duty of care to Hyunjin, and perhaps by extension, Felix. Changbin had reminded him of that, before he left, and Jisung knew he needed to take that seriously. He could not go off tonight.
The implicit rejection didn’t seem to put her off though; she raised an eyebrow playfully at him, and squeezed her fingers a little bit. “What sort of business means being dressed like this in a nightclub?” she asked.
He leaned in a little, resting his head against his other palm, his elbow braced against the bartop. Her eyes flickered to his other arm, and he felt his smile grow even wider. Definitely not a waste then, to be dressed like this. “The secret kind,” he said.
She looked at him for a long moment, the lights above their heads reflecting in the darkness of her eyes. Then she let go of his arm, slowly, her fingers lingering just a little as if she didn’t want to let go. “Get me a vodka orange,” she said, her voice still playful, not sounding upset in the slightest, “and I’ll leave you in peace.”
He nodded. Just before he lifted a hand to motion to one of the bar staff, he looked over his shoulder, just checking up on the group — he had, he could admit, been a little too distracted just now. He wished immediately that he hadn’t, wished that he had just kept not looking, perhaps kept his attention on Eunji in front of him. Because he was watching as Hyunjin, lithe in his skinny jeans, his waist beautiful and narrow under the straps of that jacket, was tugging Felix onto the dance floor, one of his arms already snug around Felix’s waist.
They looked picture perfect together. Jisung felt his stomach drop a little out of his body. When the bartender did arrive, he said, his mouth feeling numb, “Yeah, a double vodka orange for my friend here. And for me, I want two shots of tequila.”
——
Hyunjin pulled Felix closer into his arms, close enough that their hips bumped a little. Felix didn’t seem to mind that. He laughed, in fact, a low sound, and put his hands against Hyunjin’s shoulders. “I don’t know how to dance,” he said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Hyunjin said. It didn’t matter, because nobody really knew how to dance in these places, including him. He didn’t even really dance all that often when he came to Maniac; he never had anyone to dance with, and it took a lot for him to work up to going out onto the floor to find someone he could try it with. Those were his most desperate nights, when he wanted nothing more than to feel normal, to be someone who danced with another person, flirted with someone, without the fear taking the wheel.
He felt like that, tonight. Thank god he had Felix, skinny and warm against him, so that he didn’t have to try to find someone else. It never ended well, when he tried. He always finished the night with the coldness inside him filling him up, the feeling of someone’s hands against him like ants crawling on his skin. He could never even bring himself to do more than kiss, and yet— the fear, the panic, every time.
“I bet you know how to dance though,” Felix said, as Hyunjin moved them just a little slower than the beat of the music, letting Felix get into the swing of it. “You have the body for it.”
“Ah, you say the sweetest things, baby,” Hyunjin said, teasing, ducking his head to press their foreheads together for a moment. He caught Felix rolling his eyes as he pulled back, but Felix was smiling too, a wide grin across his face.
Hyunjin let himself focus on that smile, the brightness of Felix’s eyes, let it soothe all the upset still roiling through him. No, it was more than upset — but he could not quite put the emotion inside him into words. Something, a nasty and nauseating, that went bone deep. It was nothing new, but it was never easy to deal with.
He’d read once, somewhere, that toddlers had meltdowns over small things because for them, it was literally the worst thing to have happened to them; they had never experienced pain like that before. It was shocking that after everything Hyunjin had been through, there were still first and painful experiences for him to suffer through, but so it was, with this. It felt so bad because he had never experienced it before.
He had been on his way to the bar himself, annoyed that Jisung had not asked if he wanted another drink before he left, when he had seen the girl leaning into Jisung. He had stood there, frozen, watching as she put her hand against Jisung’s arm, and Jisung had not thrown her off. Jisung had, in fact, smiled at her, continued speaking to her with his head tilted in her direction. Hyunjin had seen that much, before he had turned and made his way back to the table and pulled Felix up to dance.
It should not have hurt him, to have seen that. It was hardly the first time he had seen Jisung get hit on here, some beautiful girl coming up to him and asking for what Hyunjin could never have. Only ever girls, Jisung with his arm around their giggling shoulders, Jisung saying goodbye to them as another girl tugged him away by the hand. Jisung, Hyunjin knew, from vast experience, did not even look at men.
It should have made it easier — what was the point, of feeling this way about someone not interested in men? But it didn’t make it easier. It just made Hyunjin more wretchedly frustrated.
He shook his head, tried to shake it off. He used his hold on Felix’s hips to move Felix in a slow body roll, his thigh sliding just a little between Felix’s knees to hold him steady. Felix, still grinning, went with the movement, as his arms slid around Hyunjin’s shoulders, his hands clasped behind Hyunjin’s head. “There,” Hyunjin said, moving his own body in a small grinding movement. “You’ve got it.”
He could feel the eyes on him, people watching him and Felix dance together like this. It was easy to ignore, with Felix dancing against him, to block it out. Truthfully, everything was easy when it was with Felix. There was no worry right now, like this, even though Felix’s body heat was bleeding into him. The fear that so often paralysed him was completely missing. It was fun. It was only— fun.
“We’re gonna have someone else asking if they can watch us fuck again, at this rate,” Felix said, his voice very dry.
Something about that — the dryness of his voice, the way the word fuck had sounded coming out of Felix’s mouth — tickled Hyunjin enough that he was laughing before he was even aware of it, head tipped back with it. “They wish they could be so lucky,” he said, letting his head hang back down so he could waggle his eyebrows at Felix, comically suggestive, and felt the last of the sadness wash out of him at Felix’s answering laughter.
——
Jeongin watched Hyunjin and Felix dancing, their giggling faces pressed close, and found himself smiling too. He really liked Felix so much, but more than that, he was glad Hyunjin liked — and was comfortable with — Felix. If Jeongin hadn’t had friends growing up, then neither had Hyunjin, and it really was so nice to see Hyunjin finally have that bond with someone. He deserved it.
“I wanna dance,” Jeongin declared, entranced by the movement of the strobing lights over the people moving on the floor. Minho at his side did not respond, and Jeongin looked at him, blinking the colours out of his eyes. The alcohol gave Jeongin the courage to say, “Dance with me, hyung?”
The look Minho gave him was sharply assessing— but Jeongin rather thought Minho was likely just wondering, exactly, how drunk Jeongin must be to have asked him that. “Fuck no, baby boy,” Minho said flatly.
Jeongin looked back out across the expanse of the club, heaving a very heavy sigh. Minho never danced when he came out to the club with them, and Jeongin had wondered if that was because he was just stuck babysitting Jeongin. But maybe he simply never did it. He certainly did not seem to enjoy being here, did not enjoy the crowd nor the booming music. And yet— he did come here, sometimes, on his nights off. Vanishing from home late in the evening and then coming back in the small hours of the morning, smelling like a stranger. Jeongin found himself wondering how Minho picked people up, got them to take him back to their places, if he refused to dance.
No sooner had he thought it than he banished that entire line of thinking from his mind. He was in way too good of a mood to sour it by thinking of Minho fucking other people. He’d picked at that particular scab enough through the years, and tonight he had Minho at his side.
“You don’t like clubbing, huh, hyung?” Jeongin asked, poking his straw into the slush of his last drink, now nothing but dregs and melting ice.
“It is loud,” Minho said simply, “and warm.”
Jeongin’s eyes dipped down, for the barest flicker, to Minho’s chest, his exposed arms. He’d taken off his jacket as soon as they’d gotten into the booth, and that white t-shirt was tight and thin. His arm was laying along the back of the booth seat, not behind Jeongin, but on the other side. Jeongin was very determinedly not looking at the curve of his bicep. “Yeah,” Jeongin said, “you never get dressed up like the rest of us.”
Which was fine, because, yeah, Minho didn’t need to dress up. If ever there was a man who could wear a pair of jeans, it was Minho. But the people who came to Maniac often dressed a certain way, sort of— avant garde, Jeongin supposed. It was that kind of club, where Hyunjin and Felix’s fashion, their bright hair, melted into the crowd. Minho looked hot but he also wouldn’t turn heads at a grocery store. Not for his clothing choices, at least.
“I think,” Jeongin said suddenly, “I’d like to see you dressed up.”
Minho gave him a heavy-lidded, unimpressed sort of look. “You want me to look like Felix?” he asked.
Jeongin laughed, the sound startled but true. Minho didn’t smile back at him, didn’t really move, but Jeongin could tell he was pleased all the same. “No,” Jeongin said, breath still hitching a little with the laughter, smile wide. “But, you know—”
Before he could think better of it, he unhooked the face chain from his own ears and leaned over, quickly setting it across the bridge of Minho’s nose, over his cheekbones. Shockingly, Minho let him — if you’d asked Jeongin, he’d have said Minho would probably slap his hands away. But he didn’t, and Jeongin looped the chain over his ears to secure it, fingertips brushing lightly over Minho’s hair.
And then— Jeongin’s hands dropped, and Minho just stared at him, those intense eyes Jeongin loved so much peering at him from overtop dangling jewels and stars, catching the moving lights.
Oh, Jeongin thought, dismayed, I have made a mistake.
Some of his feelings must have shown through on his face, because Minho tilted his head to the side, scarred eyebrow raising, as he asked, “You alright, baby boy?”
“Hyung,” Jeongin croaked sadly, “you’re so handsome.”
Minho made a noise that could probably be categorised as a snort. “I’m sorry my appearance is a source of such disappointment for you, baby boy,” he said, immediately removing the chain from his face. Jeongin halfway hoped Minho would put it back on his face instead, but Minho just set it in a glittering little pile on the table.
Jeongin stared down at the chain, feeling the pout on his own face. Minho had been beautiful with it on. But, Jeongin supposed, Minho was beautiful with it off too. And so warm, right next to Jeongin. Warm and beautiful. His cheekbones sharp and delicate in the flashes of lights, the unique notch in his upper lip shadowed and enhanced. His muscled thighs straining against the seams of his tight jeans—
“I,” Jeongin said as he suddenly smacked his hands down on the table, making the ice in the glasses rattle, “need another drink.”
“Do you?” Minho asked, dry, but he’d already begun to shift as if to move out of the booth.
“No,” Jeongin said, smacking his hands on the table again. Minho paused, looking at him. “I wanna get it myself,” Jeongin said, face setting into stubborn lines because he anticipated an argument. The glare he levelled at Minho just made Minho look amused, which was— unfortunate. Amused Minho was Jeongin’s second favourite Minho, right after Heated Gaze Minho, which Jeongin only saw in small bursts.
“Be my guest, baby boy,” Minho said, and Jeongin scoot-wiggled out of the booth before he could change his mind. He did not sway once he was on his feet, but the room was a bit— swooshy, was probably the best word for it. The bar, on the other side of the dance floor, looked a lot further away now. But Jeongin was not a quitter, and so off he trekked.
It was fun, the walk across the floor. The music thrummed under his skin, a song he did not know, and people flickered around him, like pretty ghosts. Sometimes they brushed against him, shockingly real considering how fuzzy they were around the edges to his eyes. The alcohol was warm and electric in his veins.
Jeongin put both hands on the bar once he reached it, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Can I have another of that cherry lime drink?” he asked the bartender sweetly. She gave him a sharp little look, but moved off to grab a glass and the necessary bottles.
“Any chance I can buy that for you?” a voice asked from beside Jeongin, and he turned to look— up, at a man who’d come to lean on the bar beside him. He was in his early twenties, maybe a little older, with a charming smile. He was easily twice as bulky as Jeongin, taller, his arms on display in a black tank top.
Jeongin beamed up at the stranger, watching the shift on the man’s face as he took in Jeongin’s smile. It was— an appreciative look that was being levelled his way. Jeongin wasn’t interested but that didn’t mean it wasn’t nice to be admired, especially when he was generally surrounded by people who were perpetually determined to see him as a toddler. This man did not, and it was obvious in his expression. Jeongin preened a little under the attention.
“I get drinks for free here,” Jeongin said brightly.
The man cocked an eyebrow. “Is it because you’re so cute?” he asked.
Jeongin blinked and then giggled, feeling a pleased blush come to his cheeks. He felt— so floaty, it was very nice. “No, my brother’s the owner,” he said, still laughing a little.
“Here,” the bartender said suddenly, smacking a coaster down and putting Jeongin’s drink in front of him firmly. “That’s the last one, I’m cutting you off.”
Jeongin pouted and she ignored him, swanning off to tend to another customer. He was drunk, to be fair, he supposed. Minho would’ve probably cut him off soon anyway. He picked up the drink and took a sip at it so it wasn’t so full for his trek back to the booth. While he wasn’t exactly stumbling on his feet, he could definitely be more steady.
“I’m here with someone,” he said to the man, his smile turning apologetic even though he wasn’t sorry at all. The guy was a handsome man but he— he wasn’t what Jeongin wanted.
No, what Jeongin wanted was sliding out of their booth with a frankly dangerous look on his face. Jeongin pushed off from the bar, hoping the man wouldn’t touch him— not that he minded a bit of manhandling in this respect, but he didn’t want to have the night marred with bloodshed.
Crisis was averted because the guy let him go without trying to convince him otherwise. Maybe he saw Minho prowling towards them. Minho was shorter and slimmer but his capacity for viciousness was obvious in the way he moved. And well— the scars. Minho had once sardonically said the scars were useful, no one called him pretty boy anymore when squaring up to him. Now, people usually just skittered out of his way. They were certainly doing so now.
Jeongin beamed at Minho as he weaved his way toward him, feeling unconquerably smug. “Coming to my rescue?” he asked once he was in front of Minho, making Minho stop short on his way to the bar. Minho glanced at him for a moment then went back to glaring off somewhere over Jeongin’s shoulder. “You’re silly, hyung.”
Minho’s eyes narrowed for a moment, still looking over Jeongin’s shoulder, and he huffed out a short little breath through his nose. “What did he want?” he asked lowly.
“To tell me I’m cute,” Jeongin said, tongue poking out from between his teeth. He looped his arm around Minho’s, clutching it to his chest, and proceeded to drag him back to the booth. Minho gave a little resistance, but ultimately went with it. Jeongin leaned his head on Minho’s shoulder, saying dangerously close to his ear, “Which I am. Cute, I mean.” Minho looked down at him sharply, and Jeongin’s smile grew even wider. “Aren’t I, hyung?”
“You’re drunk, is what you are,” Minho said tightly.
He helped steady Jeongin as he climbed back into the booth, who in turn scootched in so Minho could resume his place beside him. Jeongin was pleased he managed to do so without spilling his drink. Was more pleased when Minho sat so close their thighs were almost touching. Jeongin’s little run in seemed to have made Minho even more inclined to hover than he’d been before. Possessive. Jeongin grinned into his drink.
Minho leaned closer so he could be heard over the music when he said quietly, “He could have been from a rival gang.” His gaze kept floating back toward the bar, where the man had taken a seat on a stool.
“Maybe,” Jeongin said, though he didn’t believe it, and he didn’t think Minho did either. He shoved his first two fingers into his drink, pushing through the ice to fish out the cherry. “Or maybe he just wanted to fuck me,” Jeongin said idly, gratified to see Minho’s face snap toward him in his peripheral. He turned to blink up at Minho with wide eyes, brandishing his prize. “Cherry? Since you refuse to drink.” He dangled the cherry by the stem, feeling some of the wetness on his fingertips drip down the side of his hand, his wrist.
Minho visibly swallowed, and for a brief flash, Jeongin saw the heat he hid away behind his calm demeanour so well. It was gone just as fast, and Minho looked away from him to resume his cold surveyance of the club, settling back against the seat. “No,” he said flatly.
Jeongin licked at the drop of alcohol on his wrist, working to suppress his grin and failing.
——
Chan locked his office door, slipped the key in his pocket, and then stretched, hearing his spine click about five times as he did so. Even despite the ache in his upper back from sitting hunched at his desk for so long, he felt— relaxed, far more relaxed than he’d felt when he’d first arrived at the club to find the pile of paperwork and accounts books waiting for him to go over. That’s what he got, he supposed, for not coming here for a couple of weeks.
As usual, there were simply too many demands on his time. The club generally ran itself for the most part, and Changbin checked in more regularly to sort out any problems that were happening, but Chan still had to show his face; he was the one responsible for the actual decisions to be made. But recently, with Felix arriving, and client meetings and the other jobs they had taken on before they’d known a big one would drop into their lap, he’d left it a little too long.
The paperwork was finished, now, the expenses sorted to the best of his ability. With it had gone most of the tension in his body and he was, quite frankly, very ready to meet the others and have something to drink.
Even outside in the hallway, a floor up and behind soundproofing walls, there was still the pulse of music. He made his way downstairs and through the back office door, which was guarded by a bouncer — Kangwoo, tonight, someone who had worked here for a year or so now and nodded respectfully at Chan when he saw him. Chan clapped him on the shoulder and headed out into the club.
On the main floor, the night was considerably underway. It might have only been a Thursday but there was a decent crowd, the college students always ready to come and party no matter what day of the week it was. Chan headed to the bar first, to check up on things, make sure there were no problems that he should know about, and found Jisung already sitting there, not with the others.
“Jisung,” he said, patting his back as he neared. Jisung turned to look at him, his shoulders slumped. He looked flushed, either from the warmth of the air or from the line of tequila shots he had lined up in front of him, most of them empty.
“Hey, hyung,” he said. “Do you want some tequila?”
“No, I don’t,” Chan told him. “And I’m not sure you need any more. Are you okay?”
Jisung waved a hand at him dismissively. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,” he said. “I always am, aren’t I?”
He didn’t sound like he was fine, or even going to be fine. He sounded miserable, in a way that Chan had never heard from him. But it was always pointless to push with Jisung. He was not stubborn, not like Jeongin, or allergic to talking about emotions, like Hyunjin, but what he was good at was simply— deflecting. He was too good at turning things around on the other person in a conversation if he didn’t want to talk about something. A joke here, a well timed question there, and suddenly the conversation had completely moved on. He’d once managed to do this with Seungmin, of all people, so Chan didn’t have a hope in hell’s chance if Jisung didn’t want to talk.
Chan squeezed Jisung’s shoulder. “I’m here if you want to talk about it,” he said. “Seriously, Jisung. Anything you want to talk about, I’ll listen.”
Jisung looked at him, the expression in his eyes both obviously drunk and far, far more serious than Chan expected. “I do know that, hyung,” he said. “Thank you.”
Chan nodded. He would leave it, see how Jisung was in a few days, see if he still looked like this. Alcohol tended to bring out emotions in people that they otherwise didn’t feel so strongly — once, Changbin had drunkenly cried on Chan because he was sad that they’d booked to get Jeongin’s braces removed. Perhaps Jisung would feel better after he’d slept whatever this was off.
One of the bar staff appeared in front of them, her hair a little frizzy. “Hey, boss,” she said, managing to project an air of general calm despite a slightly hassled look on her face. “Can I get you something?”
Chan smiled at her. “Do you have something mostly finished?” he asked. “A bottle of one of the whiskeys, or rum? Not vodka.”
She nodded, and ducked back down the length of the bar, and came back with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. “This is almost done,” she said, handing it over. “We’ll use up the other brands instead. Let me get you a glass for it.”
She grabbed one of the clean glasses, passed that over to him, and then disappeared to go serve a couple of giggling girls further down. Chan held the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other and said, “Jisung, do you know where the others are?”
Jisung pointed somewhat morosely over in the direction of where the private booths, set up on a slightly higher level, were. Chan murmured a thanks and headed in that direction, skirting around the edge of the floor where the crowds of people were dancing, their voices rising over the music every so often as a particularly popular part of the song came on.
Chan did not spend a lot of time on the floor of the club itself. Despite owning a nightclub, he wasn’t actually one for partying, or even drinking to the extent he saw people do almost every night here. The club had been, almost, a means to an end — he had needed a business, something he could use as his linchpin in this city, and this one had been offered at a price that was not cheap but also not horribly expensive by the widow of a man Chan had once worked for. Something that Chan had been able to afford with the money he had made over the years, and now — he had this, his own business, thriving despite all the other nightclubs that existed in this city.
He was proud of it. He could admit to that pride in his own head, at least.
There weren’t many people using the private booths, the use of which usually came at a premium, so it wasn’t hard to find out where the group had apparently settled. When he neared, it was only Minho and Jeongin sitting there, Jeongin on the inside, nearer the wall. He was smiling a little, Chan didn’t know what at, slumped against Minho’s side, fiddling with something under the table. He was wearing some kind of body harness, fastened snug across his chest, something that could only have belonged to Hyunjin originally, with eyeliner a little smudged around his eyes. There was a glittering chain of some kind in a pile on the table in front of him, something Jeongin probably had been wearing and then taken off.
It made Chan’s eyebrows raise, to see him dressed like that. He looked— so grown up, too grown up, in a way that caused Chan’s chest to ache. But he was glad, too, to see that Jeongin had wanted to dress up, and that Hyunjin had helped him with it. These were things that Jeongin had missed out on, he knew, experiences that Jeongin had never been able to have when he lived so alone with the rest of them. He hoped Jeongin had had fun tonight.
Minho didn’t look like he was particularly having fun but that wasn’t really new. “Hello,” Chan said to him, as he slid into the seats on the opposite side of the table and set his bottle and glass down. The table had obviously been cleared off a couple of times but there were still a few empty glasses laying there, shot glasses and a couple of cocktail glasses with the dregs of something red inside them.
“Hello,” said Minho, something bone-dry in his voice. “Glad you could join us.”
Chan rolled his eyes at him. He opened the bottle of whiskey and poured a generous amount into the glass. He really did feel looser in the shoulders, content to be here with his family, even with the loud music. He had so few opportunities to actually relax that he was willing to take advantage of every single one.
He took a mouthful of the alcohol, held it in his mouth for a long second, and then swallowed it, feeling the warmth of it already spread through him. “Where’s Hyunjin and Felix?” he asked Minho.
Minho pointed wordlessly. Chan turned his head, craning a little and saw— Hyunjin’s head first, unsurprisingly, that shock of red visible even in the shifting lights overhead. He was on the dance floor with Felix, whose blond head was also very visible now Chan was looking in the right direction. He and Hyunjin were dancing, in a manner of speaking — it was dancing in the loosest sense of the word, Hyunjin’s arm slung around Felix’s waist, mostly facing Chan, his hips moving to the music, Felix held close as they grinded against each other.
Chan almost dropped the glass still in his hand. He put it down so carefully there wasn’t even a slight clink against the table. Hyunjin had clearly had a hand in dressing Felix up too, because Felix was wearing tight black jeans and a shirt made out of a mesh material, so that as he moved, Chan could see the way his muscles shifted under the skin of his back. There were black patterns on the mesh, too far away to make out what they were, but it was a nod to modesty at best — Felix might as well have not been wearing anything at all. His arms were slung around Hyunjin’s neck, and although Chan could only see part of his face from this angle, he could tell Felix was laughing, face tilted in Hyunjin’s direction.
Chan picked his glass back up and knocked the rest of it back in one quick movement. This time it wasn’t warmth, it went down like burning. He felt— mezmerised, watching the two of them together, Hyunjin beautiful but Felix something else entirely, something that set the blood inside Chan alight all the way through him. What kind of magic was it, he thought, watching Felix move his hips in a slow roll against Hyunjin, practically straddling Hyunjin’s thigh, that made it so that Chan was unable to look away, his eyes fixated on the curve of Felix’s jaw peeking through the blond hair sticking slightly to his skin.
He should look away, he knew, even if just for the sake of his own sanity, but he genuinely could not. Had he ever wanted another person like this before in his life? No, he hadn’t. He’d never felt anything like this. It wasn’t even the urge to get up and pull Felix to him, to hold him close like Hyunjin was doing, because that urge was there but oddly detached. He didn’t want to interrupt the obvious fun they were having together, he just wanted to keep watching Felix, that smile on his face, the way his body moved. He could not touch anyway, no matter how badly he wanted to, so watching would keep him satiated.
Hyunjin glanced over at the table, and their eyes met before Chan could hastily look away. He was caught in his staring, and he watched as Hyunjin realised it, realised exactly what Chan was looking at. A smirk spread, slow and smug, across Hyunjin’s face. Chan felt the smallest drop of dread trickle into his stomach, cutting a little through the arousal currently filling his lungs like oxygen.
Hyunjin hitched Felix closer to him, used the hand not slung around Felix’s waist to cup the back of Felix’s neck. Felix looked up at him and the next second Hyunjin dipped his head and kissed Felix, a kiss that caught Felix’s mouth somewhat open. Chan sucked in a breath of air so sharply it was nearly a gasp.
If he’d been unable to tear his eyes away before, he certainly couldn’t do so now. He could only watch, helpless, as Felix— melted instantly against Hyunjin, going slack in his hold as he opened his mouth to the kiss. Hyunjin bent further into him, kissing him harder, his thigh still pushed between Felix’s legs.
Was that what it would be like, to kiss Felix, Chan wondered, thoughts thick like molasses, as Felix tipped his head into it, the pink of his tongue visible as Hyunjin licked into his mouth. He looked— pliant, like he was willing to be moved any way Hyunjin wanted him, kissed and touched any way that Hyunjin chose to do so. Was he like that with everyone, or was it just Hyunjin? Would he be like that with Chan, so easy in his arms?
Stop, he told himself, because he could not know what it would be like. He could not put that on Felix at all. And he really should turn away, he needed to stop looking. But for a long, long few moments, he couldn’t. For a long few moments, he just let himself look. It was a torture, but he could stand it. For tonight, he would let himself have this, at the very least, where he could have nothing more.
——
Hyunjin, Minho was fairly certain, deserved some sort of award for reaching levels of obnoxious previously unknown to man.
He didn’t look at where Hyunjin was currently kissing Felix; he’d seen one quick glance of the way Hyunjin had Felix’s head tipped up to his mouth and decided that was more than enough of that. It was not, however, better to look at Chan, sitting with his bottle of whiskey open in front of him, because his attention was focused entirely on that nonsense happening on the dance floor, and Minho— there could be no doubt, Minho thought, of Chan’s feelings for Felix. Minho had never seen that look on Chan’s face before.
So instead of looking at Chan, Minho looked at the table, where Jeongin’s last drink lay empty and drained. He was a warm, solid weight against Minho’s side, slumped there. Already tipsy, that last drink appeared to have knocked him completely into drunk. Minho had thought about nudging him back upright but could not quite bring himself to do it. A selfish impulse, one he was decidedly not proud of, but one he had indulged anyway. This entire night had been difficult enough.
Honestly, Minho kind of wanted to slug back some of that whiskey.
But there was a reason Minho did not drink. He had done, a couple of times, when he was in high school, those brief times that he had spent attending that school for boys like him, who were destined to just end back up in juvie at some point. Finding a little back alley with some of the other boys, pouring cheap soju down their necks until the world had gone fuzzy and not real. In a way, that had been nice. But with the sense of reality had gone his hold over himself, and he had not always been able to remember what he had done the morning after. One of those nights, he had beaten one of those other boys for an offensive remark or action that he could not remember. He’d woken in a holding cell with his face shredded from the broken end of a bottle, and the other boy had been even worse off, he’d been informed. They locked him back up for that, and it had been the last time he drank.
Jeongin, unsurprisingly, was not a violent drunk, nor an angry drunk. He was too good for that. He was a sleepy drunk, sweet against Minho’s side. He had, at some point, picked up Minho’s hand from where it had been resting against the table and started to play with Minho’s fingers. Minho had not entirely been certain what he wanted with it, but apparently all he desired was to keep spreading Minho’s fingers apart from each other in slow, careful movements, turning Minho’s hand over and then flipping it back. At one point he had put his thumb to the centre of Minho’s palm, pressing it into Minho’s flesh. Minho had had to fight hard to repress the shiver that had almost sent through him.
Touch had always meant— pain, for him. Nobody touched him in prison unless it was to hurt him, the guards or fellow prisoners alike. He’d learned from an early age to not let people get close enough to touch him, and everyone on this team had learned quickly to not attempt it. Even Jeongin, who would do things like sit on Minho’s feet if he was taking up too much of the couch, or nudge his shoulder every so often, usually took care to avoid skin-to-skin contact.
Usually. He’d touched Minho more and more of late, brief, fleeting things, like a butterfly brushing past. Minho wished he wouldn’t. Each time it happened, instead of wanting to flinch away, a dark and visceral craving surged up inside him. It was shocking in its potency. He’d never wanted someone’s touch, like he wanted Jeongin’s. Even when he’d come here, or gone to other clubs, to pick someone up and go home with, he’d preferred to pin wrists to a mattress than let them touch him.
Minho grit his teeth. It was fucked up of him, to enjoy Jeongin’s hands on him, when Jeongin did not know, could not know, the ways in which Minho wanted him. And that was why it was all the more important for Minho to continue flinching away.
But he hadn’t flinched away when Jeongin had plucked his hand off the table tonight. He told himself it was because Jeongin was drunk, which meant if he got short with him, Jeongin was all the more likely to be hurt by it. May as well let him have his way. To a point.
Jeongin was still playing with Minho’s hand now, moving it up and down by the wrist. “Minho-hyung,” he mumbled, right before he threaded his fingers through Minho’s and almost squeezed.
This, Minho could not allow to stand. He extracted his fingers, carefully separated them, and almost took his hand away completely except Jeongin grabbed for it and went back to making Minho’s hand wave gently. Minho sighed. “Baby boy,” he said quietly. “Are you having fun?”
“Yes,” said Jeongin. There was something almost mullish about his tone.
Minho hid his smile, which was lucky, because when he looked up, Chan was looking at Jeongin with a slight frown on his face. “Wow, he’s really drunk,” he said, like he had only just fucking noticed. The power of a handsome face over a man, Minho thought, with no small amount of scorn at himself. “Why did you let him get so drunk?”
“I did not,” Minho snapped, thinking about all the glasses of water he’d made Jeongin drink over the course of the night. “Maybe tell your bar staff to not making his drinks so fucking strong next time.”
“How much did he have?”
“Not a lot,” Minho said, a little more dry now. “He’s a lightweight, I don’t really know what you expect me to do about that.”
Chan sighed, and then leaned over the table in the booth to wave a little in Jeongin’s face. Jeongin looked up and then smiled, bright and true, like he was really so happy to see Chan. Chan smiled back, and then let Jeongin snag his hand too with the one that was not still holding Minho’s. “Hyung,” Jeongin said.
“Hello,” Chan said, still smiling, as his arm was shaken up and down gently. “Jeongin-ah, you want to go home? You ready to go home? You look sleepy.”
“Mm,” Jeongin said, slumping further into Minho’s side. He was so warm. The bare skin of his arm kept pressing into Minho’s, a little sweaty but the furthest thing from unpleasant he could imagine. He wished he’d worn something with long sleeves, even though that would be hell in the stifling atmosphere of the club. But at least then he couldn’t know how it felt when the smoothness of Jeongin’s arm touched his. “I want to go home, yeah.”
“Okay,” said Chan, looking hopelessly fond.
“But can Minho-hyung take me?” Jeongin asked, straightening up just a little, head tipping in Minho’s direction to look at him with a pleading expression, eyes wide.
Minho didn’t need that look, he didn’t even need the way Chan was looking at him like he thought it was an imposition to ask him to ferry Jeongin’s drunken ass home. If Jeongin wanted to leave, then there was no reason for Minho to be in this stupid club anymore, and he was so fucking ready to be home too, to lock himself away in his bedroom where there was no loud music, no pulsing rhythm beneath his feet. He didn’t hate this place, as far as clubs went, but he was far, far past his limit.
“I’ll take him,” he said, before Chan could ask. “I’ve had enough of being here.”
Chan gave him a grateful look. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be here. Jeongin, you go with Minho, okay? Drink some more water when you get home.”
“I have drunk,” Jeongin said with great solemnity, as Minho steadied him and then slid out of the booth, picking up his jacket as he stood, “so much fucking water.”
“And you’ll be glad of it in the morning,” Chan told him. It was easy enough to tell that Jeongin was drunk because that tone of voice directed at him from Chan would usually elicit a particularly strong eye roll. Jeongin, this time, just beamed at Chan and said okay, hyung!
He was really too good, Minho thought, hauling him up to his feet. How pure he was, to be this kind of drunk, happy and sweet and smiling, wanting nothing more than to just play with someone’s hand as he sat. What a contrast to Minho, violent and mean with it. He’d heard multiple times before that alcohol brought out a person’s truest nature and this, to him, just about proved that.
“Bye, hyung!” Jeongin said, waving at Chan, as Minho steered him away from the table. Chan waved back, looking like he was on the verge of laughter. Minho hoped he really did go and tell the bar staff to never make Jeongin’s drinks that strong again, or Minho would have to do it himself next time and they might not like that coming from him.
The club was busy now, too busy for comfort. It took a long few minutes to work their way to the front doors, Minho pushing past hordes of drunk dancers to the elevators. He tried his best not to actually shove people aside, to keep his strength to himself, and he must have just about managed it, because nobody got annoyed along the way and soon they were in the entrance hallway, where it was much emptier, just a few people huddled inside waiting to leave or for their friends to be let in. The music was muffled too, and it was— a relief. It would be even better, outside the doors.
“Ah,” Jeongin said, suddenly coming to a stop, looking back over his shoulder at the door they’d just come through. “I didn’t say goodbye to the others.”
Minho growled a little. It was quiet but apparently loud enough because Jeongin’s head immediately snapped in his direction again, eyes widened a little. “Jeongin,” Minho said, as patiently as he could. “It does not matter that you didn’t say goodbye. Let’s go before I put you over my shoulder.”
That made Jeongin giggle. “That would be fun,” he said, which was completely fucking ridiculous, but he started walking again, letting Minho take him to the door, where the bouncer glanced at them both with a wary little look, clearly recognising them, before they stepped out onto the street outside.
There were more people out here, spilling into the street from the various bars and nightclubs that stretched along it. The air was noisy with the sound of talking, yelling, laughing, but all of that Minho could simply relegate to the back of his mind, fading into the general noise that came from being in a city. It was not any louder than prison had been, especially at night. There was still the faint sound of music, overlapping as it drifted out of buildings, all of it indistinct now.
The air was much colder than it had been when they first walked over. He saw it hit Jeongin like a slap; he said, “Ohhhh,” and then almost tripped over his own feet. Minho caught him, steadied him with an arm around his back, just under his ribcage. Not low enough to count as being around his waist. One of the straps of that awful harness pressed into him.
He guided Jeongin in the direction they needed to walk and then let go of him, but the cold, fresh air seemed to have somehow made Jeongin even drunker. He’d seen this happen in the past with Hyunjin: steady on his feet inside, only to somehow turn exponentially drunker once outside, to the point that on that night Chan had had to carry him home on his back. Minho didn’t want to have to do that with Jeongin.
Jeongin though, other than a few slight stumbles, seemed to be keeping upright. They made it to the end of the street, all of the nightlife sounds starting to finally fade off, before he grabbed Minho’s arm, holding it to his chest, pressing hard enough to Minho’s side that Minho was— shocked, somehow. It was one thing to have had Jeongin warm and solid against him sitting in that booth, quite another to have him clinging. He almost threw Jeongin off in his surprise.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, the pout audible in his voice, “it’s cold.”
“Yes,” Minho said, trying desperately not to think about how it felt, Jeongin’s hands holding his arm, Jeongin’s head resting against his shoulder. “That’s what you get for coming out dressed like that.”
“Ahh, but it looks good,” Jeongin said, walking almost as if he were on autopilot, or perhaps just trusting that Minho would get them to where they needed to be. How easy it would be, for someone to take advantage of him, so trusting of other people. How had Chan raised a boy like this, in a world like this? “Don’t I look good? Hyung?”
Minho did not answer that. After a brief silence, Jeongin sighed.
“I just wanted to look good, like Hyunjin-hyung always looks good,” he said, softer. “But I didn’t realise it would mean being cold.”
Minho stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, gently pulled Jeongin to a stop too. He had many thoughts on the former statement — good, like Hyunjin looked? That was unnecessary, this outfit was bad enough. Minho had almost sent him back to change when he’d seen it, and only the knowledge that that was grossly overstepping his bounds had stopped him. Jeongin could wear what he wanted, look how he wanted, and Minho would have no say in it but— he’d known, when he’d seen Jeongin in the living room, that something like what had happened earlier would happen. Some knucklehead trying to flirt with him, trying to pick him up. He’d been irritated about it before they’d even left the damn house.
He tugged his jacket off and then grabbed Jeongin’s arm and stuffed it into one of the sleeves. It took Jeongin a moment to realise what was happening; by the time he did, his arm was in and Minho was holding the jacket out around him to get at his other arm. “Hyung!” he said.
“You said you were cold,” Minho said, as Jeongin tried to escape and Minho yanked him back, as gently as he could. “What, that wasn’t a demand for my coat?”
“But hyung,” Jeongin protested, as Minho forced his arm into the second sleeve, “you’ll be cold.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Minho said dryly. He stepped back and found that Jeongin was— almost pouting at him, looking obviously and genuinely upset. Minho felt a brief spark of panic, wondering if he’d been a little too rough in his attempts at getting Jeongin into the jacket. “What?” he asked. “Did I hurt you?”
Jeongin shook his head, still looking tearful, and then he plastered himself to Minho’s arm again. Minho sighed, resisted the urge to put his hand through Jeongin’s hair. He turned them in the direction of the house and kept them walking, Jeongin still stumbling a little, but, at least, not shivering so much.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, after a long minute of nothing but silence and walking, “I really hate that you went to prison.”
Minho didn’t react to that. He kept his attention focused on making sure Jeongin put one foot in front of the other, in the sensation of the cold night air in his lungs, a little burning after the warmth of the club air. It wasn’t unusual, he knew, for people in other gangs to have spent time inside, to have a record, even if it made them a slight liability. But he was the only one on their team, the only one— dangerous enough to have warranted it. Of course Jeongin hated it.
“I’m not exactly happy about it either, baby boy,” he muttered as they turned a street corner.
“It’s just not fair,” Jeongin said, actually sniffling a little like he was about to cry. “You had to go to prison, where you were cold, and I bet the food sucked, and everyone was probably mean to you. That’s not fair. I don’t like that.”
Minho almost tripped over his own feet this time. What a naive little fool Jeongin was, he thought desperately, as he practically hauled him home. Such a sweet thing, this boy who had buried himself under Minho’s skin until Minho’s love for him could no longer be cut out without killing the host. He was upset that Minho had gone to prison not because it was a sign that Minho was nasty thing of danger and violence, but because he knew that Minho had been cold there.
He couldn’t think of what to say. The food had sucked, and he’d been fairly certain the entire way through that someone, the kitchen staff or the guards who brought it to him during his long stretches in solitary, were spitting in it or otherwise tampering with it. It had been cold in winter and hot in summer and time had stretched in uncertain, slow ways. And mean did not quite cover how he had been treated inside.
When he didn’t reply, Jeongin said, sounding completely distressed, “Did the prison guards ever hit you?”
Of course they had. More than once they’d broken a rib. He thought about saying that, of telling Jeongin the unvarnished truth, and almost blanched. Even a varnished truth would be too much, would make Jeongin upset. He was looking up at Minho with huge, watery eyes, looking remarkably pathetic. There was a wealth of empathy in him that Minho would never quite wrap his head around; he didn’t think he had any empathy to give sometimes.
“No,” Minho said. “Everyone was very well behaved.”
That did not seem to be the correct answer. “You’re lying to me!” Jeongin said, pitched just slightly below a screech. Minho thought about shushing him, but honestly it was— endearing. Everything Jeongin did was endearing. Minho was perfectly aware that on another person he’d find it unbearable but on Jeongin— well. It probably had more to do with him than anything else.
“You,” he said to Jeongin, “are so fucking drunk, baby boy.”
“Yes!” Jeongin said, almost that screech again, and then, much more quietly, “No? Maybe yes. Oh,” he added, as he put the collar of Minho’s jacket up to his nose with the hand not still clutching at Minho’s arm. “Oh, this jacket smells like you.”
He hunched into the jacket, sniffing at it. “Is that a good or a bad thing?” Minho asked, looking at him.
“Yeaahh,” said Jeongin. He had the collar pulled up so high that his face was almost hidden in it, just his eyes showing clearly, bright in the light of the street lamps along the way. Even with Jeongin, Minho was not in the habit of finding people cute, but he felt it now, that cuteness. A rabbit not aware it was walking with a wolf.
“That’s really not an answer, baby boy,” Minho said. Jeongin didn’t reply. He just hunched into Minho’s side, kept his feet moving forward, one step after another. Despite all the time spent making this same trip back and forth, Jeongin did not seem to remember how it went, because he kept trying to turn down wrong streets, or taking a left when it should have been a right. If it were anyone else, Minho would have been thoroughly out of patience with him, might even have just left him to it. As it was Jeongin, he just kept steering him in the right direction, until they were finally home.
Minho punched the door code in, held it open as Jeongin went inside. The hallway was dark and colder than outside. Minho was feeling it now, too, his arms raised with goosebumps. Jeongin stumbled to the stairs, making enough noise that Minho was surprised Seungmin didn’t come out to see if Minho had brought a herd of rampaging elephants with him. Seungmin didn’t make a peep though, and Jeongin paused at the bottom of the stairs and said, “Hmm.”
“Hmm?” Minho asked, as he took Jeongin by the elbow and guided him up the first step.
“They don’t usually wobble,” Jeongin said, as he very cautiously started to climb the stairs, still so close to Minho’s side that it was a little difficult for Minho, too. “Do they? I feel like I don’t remember the stairs wobbling.”
“That’s because they are not wobbling,” Minho said. “You’re just drunk.”
The stairs were not any easier to navigate than the streets outside had been, despite the fact that there were very few places for Jeongin to go. The alcohol seemed to have shot his depth perception in the foot, so he kept lifting his foot and then putting it down on the same step, so that he didn’t move any further forward. Minho kept him upright, torn between a tired frustration and an amused affection that seemed at odds with one another and yet blended perfectly inside him. He was tired. It was considerably later than he usually slept.
“This sucks,” Jeongin grumbled at one point. “I hate stairs.”
I love you, Minho thought, and almost flung himself headfirst back down said stairs.
It took them ten minutes to reach the second floor, at which point Jeongin noticed where they were and that they were outside Minho’s bedroom. “Oh!” he said, very brightly, as he lurched to the side and Minho yanked him back. “Never mind, hyung, I can just sleep in your room for tonight.”
“Absolutely fucking not,” said Minho, who, beyond all the other reasons that was a terrible idea, did not want to have to explain that decision to Chan in the morning. “Come here, you little menace.”
He pulled the arm he was holding up over his shoulder, then grabbed the other one to do the same. As Jeongin made a little noise of delayed surprise, Minho hoisted him up onto his back, arms under Jeongin’s knees. This, he knew, was unlikely to be easier on him, since Jeongin, although skinny, was lanky and not especially light, but it was sure to go a whole lot faster.
“Hyung!” said Jeongin in the same way he had screeched on the street earlier, and then immediately melted against Minho’s back like a puppet with the strings cut. This increased his weight considerably, and Minho had to grit his teeth as he continued to climb the stairs. First past the third floor, where Jeongin tried to tell Minho they should go play video games together, and then up to the apartment, where Minho set Jeongin down again to enter the door code.
“Okay,” he said, as they stepped into the silent apartment, not bothering to lower his voice. If he woke Changbin up, maybe Changbin would come and take this mess off his hands. “Bed time.”
“I have to pee,” Jeongin said sadly.
“Then go,” Minho said, “fucking pee. And brush your teeth, for Christ’s sake.”
Jeongin giggled at him, and then traipsed down the hallway to the bathroom. Minho didn’t move until he heard the click of the door shutting and then he went to the kitchen and stood for a long, indeterminable amount of time, with his hands braced against the sink, staring at his garbled reflection in the bottom of it. He focused on his breathing, steady in and out, until the feeling of Jeongin’s lingering warmth along his back had faded somewhat.
He didn’t move until he heard the toilet flush. Then he found a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water, and took it along to Jeongin’s room.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been in here, although he didn’t come here often. Truthfully, he tried to stay out of the apartment unless actively cooking or eating, because he often got the sense that he was making the others uncomfortable in some way. If he’d ever had the knack of conversation, it had been knocked out of him in prison, and he could see, sometimes, the way that other people never seemed to know if he was joking or not when he said things. It seemed too exhausting to have to explain it every time.
Jeongin’s room was painted a pale grey, with light wood furnishings that gave the impression of— airiness, open space. His comforter was slate grey, his desk chair black, and there was a black rug on the floor, made from a fluffy sort of material that seemed to suit Jeongin somehow. Most of the room was a mess, the kind of mess that would have earned Minho a beating from his father when he was a child: clothes on the floor, a couple of empty glasses on the desk next to his ancient laptop, another one on his bedside table.
“Are you hoarding the damn things,” Minho muttered to himself, as he replaced the one on the bedside table with the glass he had brought in, and moved the old one to join the graveyard on the desk. Jeongin’s gameboy was plugged in charging there, a little light on the bottom glowing green.
“Hyung,” he heard from behind him, a perfectly miserable tone, “help me with this?”
He turned to find Jeongin standing just inside the doorway struggling with that fucking harness. When he saw that Minho was looking at him, he dropped his hands to his sides and gave him a hangdog expression. Minho sighed. “Come here, baby boy,” he said, and Jeongin came to him, tripping a little on his feet again.
The saving grace was that for once, Jeongin stood moderately still as Minho went at the buckles of the harness, though as Minho pulled him this way and that he kept giggling, which was maddening in its own way. Once Minho had it undone he slipped the straps over Jeongin's shoulders and promptly tossed the entire contraption into Jeongin's little trash can.
“That belongs to Hyunjin-hyung,” Jeongin protested, a slight frown wrinkling his brow.
Minho placed his hand on Jeongin’s sternum and gave him a firm push. Jeongin went tumbling backwards onto the bed, his knees bent and feet still on the floor. He started giggling again as soon as he hit the mattress, the stupid harness forgotten. Minho was going to have words with Hyunjin, he thought darkly.
Like a turtle on its back, Jeongin flailed a little and then sat up unsteadily. “Hyung!” he cried. “I’m not tired.”
Minho snatched the water off the desk and handed it to Jeongin. “Shut up,” he said. “Drink this.” Jeongin stared at the glass in his hands like it was a strange, unknown object, blinking slowly. Minho rolled his eyes and sank to his knees at Jeongin’s feet, immediately working at the laces of one of Jeongin’s combat boots. He heard Jeongin sipping at the water above him, though Minho wasn’t about to look up at him to check. Not from this position.
He slipped the first boot off Jeongin’s foot, and as soon as it was free Jeongin rolled his ankle in a stretch, flexing his toes from within his sock. It was cute, and Minho was annoyed over the fact that he found it so. Jeongin had been an absolute menace tonight, to the point that Minho might have wondered if he hadn’t been doing it on purpose. But that, he knew, was just himself projecting.
Once he got Jeongin’s second boot off he neatly set the pair of them aside and stood. Jeongin held up the glass for him to see, empty but for a few drops. “I’m gonna have to pee again in a couple hours,” Jeongin whined.
“You’ll thank me when you don’t have a hangover tomorrow,” Minho said simply, taking the glass and replacing it on the desk. He bent, grabbing Jeongin around the backs of his knees, lifting and pushing, so Jeongin was shoved properly onto the bed. Jeongin made a sort of laughing squeal, face flushed with alcohol. Minho grit his teeth. “Go to sleep, you absolute terror of my existence.”
“I’m not tired,” Jeongin repeated, jutting his bottom lip out. He didn’t move to sit up again though, sinking back into his mattress.
Minho did not give a fuck if Jeongin was tired or not. He was ready to be off babysitting duty. Tonight had been awful. Jeongin smelled like cherries. His hair was fanned out around him, eyes half lidded in spite of his protests that he wasn’t sleepy. The inside of his lips were stained red. Minho wanted to run his tongue along that seam, taste the sweetness. He hated himself.
Jeongin’s hand smacked onto his own waistband, pawing at the button of his jeans. “They’re tight,” he mumbled, thumbing the zipper down.
Minho bit back a snarl, grabbing the waistband of Jeongin’s jeans and tugging them down. They weren’t denim, were some kind of stretchy blended fabric made to look like denim, and Minho had to peel them off and firmly yank them free of Jeongin’s ankles. Underneath, Jeongin was wearing a very safe pair of plaid boxers, which was the only moment of mercy the universe had given Minho tonight.
He flung the pants into Jeongin’s hamper, which was just a section of his floor, while Jeongin wiggled against the blankets, seemingly happy to be freed. Minho found the edge of the blanket and managed to wrestle it out from under Jeongin’s body, so he could settle the blanket over top of his slender legs.
“Hyung,” Jeongin murmured while Minho tucked the blanket firmly around him. Minho thought Jeongin was going to protest again, but if that was his intent, he was interrupted by a wide yawn. “Oh,” Jeongin said as his teeth were clicking back together. “Laying down is nice.”
Minho, already leaning over Jeongin because he’d been situating the blanket properly, put a hand down beside Jeongin’s head, one knee braced on the bed. He allowed himself a still moment to admire Jeongin’s alcohol-glazed face. The bridge of his nose was pinked, his eyeliner a bit smudged over his lower eyelids. He was cute, he was— beautiful. And he was happy, and safe. Minho smiled, just a little, the faintest ghost of happiness showing on his own face.
Jeongin hummed, blinking up at him slowly. “Thank you for taking care of me tonight, hyung,” he said softly.
Minho raised an eyebrow at him. “Did I have a choice?” he asked with gentle scorn. He made to pull away but Jeongin lifted his hand, and suddenly there was a gentle touch on Minho’s cheek. He froze.
It was just a fingertip, tracing the sharp line of Minho’s cheekbone, dipping into the indents of his scars, then up around his eye and over his eyebrow. Down his nose. An exploratory touch, like in doing so Jeongin was discovering something, reading the way Minho’s nerves came alight.
Minho couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched his face. Not like this. Gently. He’d been hit a lot, fists connecting with his cheekbones, his nose. Cutting his lips on his own teeth. His flesh giving under the sharpness of broken glass. He thought it must have been in childhood, the last time he’d been touched on his face so tenderly. Perhaps it had been his mother, all those years ago.
Jeongin slid his hand across the side of Minho’s face, cradling Minho’s entire mauled cheek in his palm. His skin was so warm. “I wish you’d let the others see how good you are,” Jeongin whispered. All traces of laughter were gone from his face.
Good. No one had ever called him that. He was hopeless, more often than not. A hopeless case. They’d said that when they threw him in juvie the first time, with the sort of resignation that implied they’d never believed it could have gone any other way. And it was all he’d been ever since. Hopeless. Worthless. Violent.
In this place, he’d found a niche, a little corner of the world where some parts of him were found valuable. As compared to out there, where society normally shunned them. But that didn’t mean Minho wasn’t hopeless, or violent. It didn’t mean he was anything worth loving. And he certainly was not worth the way Jeongin was looking up at him right now.
Minho was panting, a little. He grabbed Jeongin’s wrist, maybe a bit too hard, feeling Jeongin’s tendons flex under his fingers. He laid Jeongin’s hand down on the bed, letting go as soon as he could. “Baby boy,” he rasped, “I’m a fucking bastard, now go to sleep.”
He pulled back, standing, and Jeongin watched him go with eyes that weren’t nearly as hazy as Minho wished they were.
——
When Felix pulled away from Hyunjin’s mouth, he was laughing a little as he did so. Hyunjin’s arm was still around his waist, much too warm even without his blazer, but surprisingly comforting too. Hyunjin was smiling at him, the corners of his eyes scrunched up with the way it pulled wide across his face. His mouth was a little red, a little swollen which even Felix thought looked obscene on Hyunjin. Felix smiled back at him, the alcohol bright and fizzing in his veins.
“This is fun,” he said, his arms still hanging loosely over Hyunjin’s shoulders. He wondered what his own mouth looked like. He’d never kissed anyone for as long as this; truthfully, he’d barely kissed anyone. His experience had tended towards other avenues of exploration.
“I’m glad I can show you a good time, baby,” Hyunjin said, voice teasing, more playful than usual. He had drunk a lot more than Felix had over the course of the night and it had rendered him— looser, maybe, at least now, after he’d spent the last indeterminate amount of time kissing Felix. Felix was genuinely not sure how long they had spent doing it — there had been something completely non-urgent about it, no need to escalate, no need to do anything other than kiss.
Was this something Hyunjin often did, he wondered, come to the club and find someone, a pretty boy, to kiss? But Felix had barely had the question in his mind before he dismissed it. He knew without having to be told that wasn’t the case. Even here, surrounded by people, Hyunjin exuded an energy that kept people from getting too close. Anyone who did approach him, Felix thought, would have to be particularly brave. Brave, or maybe just stupid. Felix had seen what Hyunjin could do with words if he was approached the wrong way.
Felix, for his part, had never done anything like this. He had never had someone to do it with — he’d never had friends. Because that was what this was, at the heart of it. Fun, between friends, with no expectations of anything beyond this moment right now. Whenever he’d risked coming to clubs, he’d been so careful about it, finding someone quickly, scratching the itch inside him as fast as possible. He’d never come to these places for fun, never had someone to have fun with. He was so happy to have Hyunjin here with him now.
“I need a break,” he said, sliding his arms a little off Hyunjin’s shoulders but not quite letting go. “A drink, maybe.”
“Ah, yeah,” Hyunjin said, but he didn’t let go. There was something in his eyes that made Felix tense in anticipation. “Chan-hyung’s been down here for a while now.”
Felix looked at him in horror, struck speechless for a long moment. “Hyunjin!” he said, almost a shriek but hopefully not audible over the music to anyone other than Hyunjin. He twisted in Hyunjin’s hold, almost squirming to look behind him at the booth. Minho and Jeongin weren’t there anymore, but Chan was there, sitting just inside the booth, his chin resting on a hand, propped up on the table on his elbow, his eyes on the two of them. Their eyes met for a second. The heat that spiked through Felix was not, he knew, all to do with him. That heat had been apparent in Chan’s eyes even from this distance.
He shuddered and had to look away, flustered beyond belief by that look. He was red, he knew, blushing furiously to have been caught like that. In his mind he was replaying the way he had melted against Hyunjin’s body, and the embarrassment that rocketed through him every time made him want to scream into a pillow if he could find one. If not, perhaps Hyunjin’s shoulder would do. Felix wanted to bite him.
Now, though, that he had seen the way Chan was watching them, watching him, he couldn’t ignore it anymore. The weight of that gaze felt like a physical thing, prickling between his shoulder blades. Suddenly the mesh of the shirt, previously not a problem, felt perhaps just a little bit too revealing. Despite the scars on his back, he’d never felt the need to hide his body, but it was— exposing, to be dressed like this and to know that Chan was looking at him in this way.
“He’s watching you,” Hyunjin said. He sounded so pleased with himself. “I knew this outfit was a good idea.”
For lack of a better idea, Felix pinched him in the side. Hyunjin yelped, so loudly that a couple of people looked over at them, and then let go of Felix, sliding his arm from around his waist and stepping back. “Go get your drink,” he said. “Maybe you should ask hyung if he wants to dance.”
“Eat dirt,” Felix told him, and walked off while Hyunjin cackled at him. He was still blushing, he knew, Hyunjin’s words bouncing around his stupid skull — he wanted to, was the problem, he wanted to ask Chan if he would dance, dance with him the way Hyunjin had danced with him, close enough to feel the stickiness of Chan’s sweat. He wanted it to be Chan’s arm around his waist, Chan’s hand between his shoulder blades, Chan’s mouth—
No, he told himself, clawing at every inch of self composure he possessed. You can’t.
But Chan was still watching him as he approached the table, although he’d straightened up a little, no longer resting his head against his hand. He was wearing the same white shirt he’d had on earlier in the day but the sleeves were rolled up to just below his elbows now, the tattoos on his hands and arm exposed. In the varying light of the club, pulsing and dim, those tattoos looked almost alive, like they were something laying against his skin rather than painted into it. The top button of the shirt had been unbuttoned too, showing the shallow hollow of his throat, a little shiny with sweat from the temperature in the club. His hair, which had been styled straight that morning, was starting to curl.
Felix forced himself to walk normally to the table, but he allowed himself— a smile, as he got nearer, striving for normalcy. “Hello,” he said.
Chan smiled back at him but it didn’t break the intense expression on his face. It seemed to make it worse. Felix wished that he would stop looking at Felix like that, because Felix was liable to do something he could not possibly take back if he didn’t. It was probably considered indecent exposure if he crawled under the table of the booth to do what his instincts were screaming at him to do.
“Hello,” Chan said. His voice was— a little lower than normal, maybe a little huskier. Maybe Felix was imagining it. Maybe it was wishful thinking, except he didn’t want it. He couldn’t want it. “You two look like you’re having fun.”
“I am having fun,” Felix said. Shocking, to say something like that and have it be completely true. “This place is really nice, hyung. You should be proud of it.”
Something about the earnestness in his voice seemed to strike Chan, and he blinked, a flush coming to his face. “Ah,” Chan said, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. “Yeah, I am. Though it’s always nice to hear a compliment.”
“Of course, it’s— I can tell you put a lot of work in. It shows,” Felix said. The places he’d been in before had been fine, they’d served their purpose, but there was a level of upkeep here that had simply been absent in them. “Thank you for letting me come.” He laughed, a sudden burst of sound. “And letting me drink for free.”
“I think the free drinks are probably why you like this place so much,” Chan said, a little wry, and Felix laughed again.
“I mean, the company isn’t bad either,” Felix said, and then caught himself. If pressed he could say he’d meant Hyunjin, and in some capacity he had— but he’d been looking at Chan’s face as he’d said it, at those dark eyes reflecting the lights. And it should have come out playful, but it sort of came out— a little too gentle, a little too real.
Chan’s smile widened, the warmth in his eyes simmering. “I’m glad you’re having fun, Lix,” he said.
Felix had to look away, the intensity of Chan’s gaze too much. He glanced at the other side of the booth and realised that Minho’s jacket was gone, not just Minho himself. He’d wondered if maybe they’d both just gone to the bathroom but apparently not. “Jeongin and Minho-hyung went home?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Chan. “Although I suspect Minho is half-carrying Jeongin home. He had a little bit too much.”
“Ah, that’s a rite of passage though, surely,” Felix said, his smile relaxing into something easy now. He’d certainly done that before, the first couple of times he’d come to these places, before he’d learned that his own alcohol tolerance tended towards decidedly lightweight. He’d woken up hungover beyond belief, with nothing but blurry memories of the night before, nothing but bruised knees and the sure conviction that whatever he had done, it had been a terrible idea. At least Jeongin wouldn’t have that problem, with Minho looking after him.
There was a half-finished bottle of whiskey on the table, something that hadn’t been there before, and he touched it with the tips of his fingers. “Did you bring this? Can I have some?”
“Of course,” Chan said. “Here, you can use my glass.”
He slid an empty glass across to Felix, who took it and poured a measure into it. The lighting was too dim for him to work out where Chan had drank from, no visible mark left on the glass. It was so childish to care about it, one way or another, but he knew he would leave a mark on the surface, the lip gloss still tacky on his mouth despite all the kissing earlier. He was probably wearing Hyunjin’s, at this point. Chan would be able to fit his mouth to that mark, if he wanted to.
He fastened the lid back on the bottle. He’d drunk this before, a shot of it in some other club, and he couldn’t say that he particularly cared for it, but he needed something. Something to wet his dry throat, something to dull the arousal in his blood. It didn’t quite work, because as he raised the drink to his mouth, Chan was still watching him. Their eyes met, and Felix could not look away.
He put the glass against his lips, opened his mouth to let the alcohol flow over his tongue. There was a flash of something on Chan’s face — desire, probably, a more intent version of a look that Chan had given him a few times now. He had looked like that when Felix was demonstrating his terrible shooting skills, and when Felix had been in his bedroom, sitting on his bed, Chan’s hands warm and large around his own. Felix knew that look.
He couldn’t deny Chan’s interest in him, not like this. It didn’t seem that Chan was trying to hide it, either, like he had seemingly been trying to for the past couple of weeks. His eyes, so dark and beautiful, made Felix feel like every part of his body was standing to attention; he had goosebumps up his arms, despite the sweat still damp against his forehead, down his spine. Even so, the look in Chan’s eyes felt a little bit like kissing Hyunjin had felt — there was no obligation, in the way Chan was looking at him, for Felix to reciprocate. Chan was just looking at him, warm and admiring, and Felix could do with it what he wished.
What he wished was— not possible. What he wished would be a disaster. So instead of doing that, he put the glass down again, a little too hard, hard enough that the clink of it against the table was audible over the music. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, almost blurting it out.
“Of course,” Chan said, like nothing had happened. “It’s over there.” He pointed in a direction somewhere behind Felix, to his left. Felix looked at where his finger was pointing, saw no signs that indicated the bathroom was over there, but he couldn’t stand here any longer, not with Chan’s arms and eyes and his curling hair. He needed cold water on his face.
He turned and practically fled.
——
Hyunjin watched as Felix drank from the glass that Chan had slid across the table to him, the two of them watching each other so closely that he was a little surprised he couldn’t physically see the sparks between them. There was so much smug satisfaction inside him, even as Felix ran off to god knows where like he thought that if he just ran fast enough, his feelings couldn’t catch up to him. But Hyunjin knew. Hyunjin had been watching them this entire time.
Chan, who previously Hyunjin thought had a decent poker face, was being shockingly transparent. It was very apparent that he’d simply never had any experience keeping this particular emotion off his face. Or maybe his attraction to Felix was so profound he simply could not conceal it.
Truthfully, for a long time, Hyunjin had wondered if Chan simply didn’t have any interest in anything like that. It was always fairly obvious when the others went out to pick someone up, but Hyunjin had never noticed Chan doing it — at least, not in the five years he’d been living with them. Perhaps Chan had done it more before Hyunjin arrived, before Chan had needed to feed another hungry mouth.
Perhaps Chan just did it when Hyunjin wasn’t really paying attention. He wished Jisung had that discretion. Hyunjin was good at ignoring things he didn’t see, after all.
He sauntered over to the table, where Chan was holding the glass that Felix had put down, turning it around and around in his hands. There was a smear of lip tint where Felix’s mouth had been, but Chan wasn’t focused on that at all. He was just turning it in circles, staring at it, his gaze unfocused.
“Hyung,” Hyunjin said. Chan startled a little bit, almost dropping the glass before safely setting it down. “Where did Felix go?”
“Bathroom,” said Chan. He still sounded a little absent. Then he looked up at Hyunjin and his gaze focused suddenly into mild sharpness. “Is that one of your shirts you’ve dressed him up in?”
Hyunjin fought down the urge to cackle again. “Yes,” he said. “Do you like it? He looks really good in it.”
“It’s certainly provocative,” Chan said. He was clearly trying to be dry with it but he hadn’t quite managed it. There was something husky about his voice, something just slightly deeper than how he usually sounded. Hyunjin recognised that sound, but it luckily didn’t make him too uncomfortable hearing it from Chan.
Hyunjin leaned into him, bracing himself on a clean spot on the table, his knee up against the seat of the booth, pressed against Chan’s thigh. Like this, he was close enough to Chan that when he spoke, he didn’t have to speak loudly over the music. Instead, he could whisper, breathing it into Chan’s ear, “Hyung, he tastes like candy.”
Chan jerked, his elbow coming up and shoving Hyunjin away. Hyunjin wasn’t prepared for it — he wasn’t sure Chan had ever pushed him like that, wasn’t sure he’d seen Chan ever push any of them like that, instinctive and solid — and he had a moment of thinking oh fuck I’m drunk as he felt the world slip a little off-balance and he almost toppled off the seat again. Before he could, though, Chan grabbed him by the arm, hauling him back into place. Hyunjin’s head swam for a moment.
“You are being such a little shit,” Chan told him. He didn’t look mad, exactly, but he certainly didn’t look impressed.
“I’m always a little shit,” Hyunjin said. “Ask Minho-hyung, he’ll tell you.”
“Well, you’re not usually a little shit like this,” Chan said. He let Hyunjin go, now that Hyunjin had regained his balance. “Hyunjin. I know what you’re doing. I know what you’re trying to do here, and it needs to stop. Felix is under my care and if I were to— it would be taking advantage. And he doesn’t even look at me like that anyway, Hyunjin. He isn’t interested. It’s simply not going to happen.”
Hyunjin stared at him. For a long few seconds his mind was filled with nothing but the pulsing music and the flashing lights and then he thought oh, hyung is a fucking idiot. Strange, how that had never come up before in the past five years. He could see, too, that it wasn’t just Chan saying these things in an attempt at fooling himself, like Hyunjin constantly did. He really, genuinely didn’t think that Felix was into him the way Chan was into Felix.
“Hyung,” he said. “You’re a fucking idiot.”
“Maybe so,” Chan said, sounding tired. He rubbed his hand over his face. “Probably. But you need to drop this, Hyunjin, I’m really serious.”
He was serious, but so was Hyunjin, and of the two of them, Hyunjin knew he was the most stubborn. But right now, Chan looked like he wasn’t willing to listen to reason, and besides which, Hyunjin hadn’t even spoken to Felix about his feelings for Chan. It wouldn’t be fair, to tell Chan something that Hyunjin hadn’t even confirmed with Felix himself.
What a fucking waste, to have dressed Felix up like this, only for Chan to be a dumbass about it.
He glanced at the bottle of whiskey, but he couldn’t stomach the stuff, and so he just muttered, “I’m going to get something to drink,” and turned to the direction of the bar.
Chan let him go, which Hyunjin knew he would. Chan never tried to stop Hyunjin when Hyunjin wanted to go somewhere or do something. Hyunjin could count on one hand the times that Chan or Changbin had tried to physically restrain him. So he made his way unimpeded through the club — unimpeded other than the crowds of people, none of whom spoke to him, although more than a few gave him admiring looks. The regulars though, a handful of people even he recognised, knew to stay away, to give him a wide berth. Even if none of them had been there the time Minho had broken someone’s hand for trying to touch Hyunjin, the story seemed to have made the rounds.
When he got close to the bar though, he stuttered to a stop. Jisung was— still here. He was still sitting at the bar, sitting with his head resting against the palm of a hand, his shoulders slumped like he was minutes away from simply laying down across it. There was an empty shot glass in front of him, but nothing else, and the bar staff seemed to be mostly ignoring him.
Hyunjin hadn’t seen him since he’d pulled Felix up to dance. He’d been certain that Jisung had left with that girl. He took the few more steps forward so that he could lean up against the bar next to him, into Jisung’s line of sight. He wondered for a moment if Jisung was asleep but no, he was awake, pupils shot wide. He looked at Hyunjin in complete silence, and the look in his eyes felt a bit like being doused in paint stripper. Hyunjin had never seen that expression on Jisung’s face before. He’d certainly never looked at him like that.
It was not until that moment that he realised that Jisung, when he saw Hyunjin, always smiled. Ironic that he missed that, in this moment, when in the past he’d often wanted nothing less than Jisung’s attention in that way.
“You’re drunk,” he said, a little snotty with it. Usually Jisung would smile, or nod, or make a joke but he didn’t this time. He just kept looking at Hyunjin in that same horrible way, and Hyunjin realised that he had seen something at least similar on Jisung’s face before. He recognised some of this look from the first time he had met Felix, the way Jisung had looked at him then, unreadable and blank. He didn’t like it in a way that felt visceral, a way that made him want to lash out with every single weapon at his disposal, to make Jisung stop looking at him like that.
Jisung shifted in his seat, lifting his head from his hand and folding his arms against the top of the bar, heedless of the fact that at this point of the night, it was probably a little sticky. His muscles in his arms, in that sleeveless shirt, stood out in awful outline, and in Hyunjin’s head all he could think of again was that girl, so pretty and small, laughing as she touched Jisung’s bare skin. Hyunjin could never, would never, know what that felt like.
“I’m surprised you’re still here,” he said. “Don’t you have something better to do?”
His voice came out so nasty that it surprised even him. He had not meant to let that out, had not meant to unleash any of his weapons even though he wanted to. But those arms, the sweat-damp hair against Jisung’s forehead, those glittering, unreadable eyes— Hyunjin felt a little manic with it.
But all the same, the question was valid. Jisung did not have to be here, sitting alone at this bar. Hyunjin had not expected him to be here. He’d expected him to be in some anonymous hotel room, or maybe back at that girl’s apartment, fucking her the way he fucked all the other girls Hyunjin had watched him pick up over the past couple of years since he came to work with them. Hyunjin had wondered, sometimes, how Jisung— did it, what he looked like when he fucked someone, but it had sent him into such a state of panic that now he simply refused to think about it.
Jisung closed his eyes and sighed a little. When he opened his eyes again, that unreadable expression was gone. Now he just looked— tired, more tired than Hyunjin had probably ever seen him. “You’re right,” he said, voice barely audible over the music. “I’m surprised I’m still here too.”
Jisung slid off the bar stool and got to his feet. He really was drunk — he wobbled a little before he regained his balance and then he brushed past Hyunjin. The bare skin of his shoulder touched, for a brief second, Hyunjin’s arm through the material of his jacket. Hyunjin felt it like an electrical shock; he jerked away, an obvious flinch. “Sorry,” Jisung said, sounding genuinely like he regretted the touch, and then he was gone, disappeared into the crowd of dancers.
Hyunjin stood for a long time, long enough that one of the bartenders actually appeared, smiling at him. “Can I get you something?” he asked.
“No,” said Hyunjin shortly, and then turned and walked back to the booth with a feeling inside of him that felt just a touch too close to violence. Maybe this was how Minho felt, when he was in a rage. Maybe the people around him saw it, because the crowd parted around him more completely than it had before.
The anger was overwhelming. The anger, the desperate choking fear. He could still feel the echo of Jisung’s arm against his — which was stupid, because it had barely been a touch, and he could not possibly still feel it. He had not even been able to feel if Jisung’s skin was warm or not. And yet still, his brain insisted on it.
What a stupid little fool he was, he thought, furious with himself, and with Jisung, and the entire world for what it had done to him. What a fucking cautionary tale he was, to feel this way about a straight man.
Chan was still at the table, still just staring at the cup that Felix had drunk out of. He did not seem to have drunk anymore himself. The sight of that made Hyunjin even more irritated, like he had stumbled into a loop of anger that just kept doubling back on itself. He got like this sometimes, unable to let go of anything, every new little thing building on the one before. Things that would not even usually affect him at all driving his rage to new levels.
“I want to go home,” he said, slapping his hands down against the table of the booth and leaning forward on them. “I don’t care if you drive me or not, I’ll walk, but I’m going home.”
Chan looked a little alarmed at that. “No, no,” he said. “Hyunjin, you’re not walking home, it’s almost two in the morning. I’ll drive us home. What’s wrong, is everything okay? Did someone upset you?”
Yes, Hyunjin thought, but it wasn’t like Chan was thinking. It wasn’t some patron getting a little too flirty, or one of the bartenders trying to argue about if he had to pay or not. It was him. It wasn’t even really Jisung, because Jisung was just being himself. It wasn’t Jisung’s fault that he did not want Hyunjin, or, if he did, if he could, he would not want him in a way that Hyunjin could properly handle.
“No,” he said. “Nobody upset me. I’m tired. I want to go home.”
“Okay,” said Chan, soothingly, like he was talking to a wild animal. “Here’s Felix coming back now, okay? Both of you get your stuff and we’ll head out. Let me text Jisung and find out where he is.”
“Urgh,” said Hyunjin, but Felix was coming back so Hyunjin held his arms out open and Felix brightened at the sight of it and stepped into the hug. His hair was damp, like he’d splashed water on his face, and apparently it had gotten on his shirt too because Hyunjin could feel it against his front a little.
“Hello,” said Felix into his shoulder. “This is nice.”
“We’re going home,” Hyunjin informed him. He put his face against the side of Felix’s head, the not-softness of his hair. “Hyung is going to drive us home.”
“Okay,” said Felix easily. “Are you upset about something? You’re shaking a little bit.”
Hyunjin hadn’t even realised he was doing that. He would have tried to stop but it was pointless when Felix had already noticed. “I’m fine,” he said instead. “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“Right,” said Chan. Even though he must have known Chan was there, hearing his voice made Felix startle and he almost jumped away out of Hyunjin’s hold. He took a step back at the very least, and Hyunjin let him go. “Jisung is going to meet us at the door. Felix, did you have a— uh, jacket, or something? It’ll be cold outside.”
Hyunjin wished, for a moment, that he had thought to foresee this. He should have brought Felix here without the jacket, so that Chan would have had to offer his own — not that Chan was currently wearing one, but he probably had one upstairs in the office. The thought of that, of Felix wrapped in one of Chan’s jackets, almost brought him out of his funk, until he remembered Chan saying Felix doesn’t look at me like that, and he shot Chan a little glare that went completely unnoticed by him, because Felix had picked up the velvet jacket that Hyunjin had actually dressed him in and slipped it on and Chan looked like he was having a revelation all over again.
Hyunjin could not stand this.
Felix came back over, slipped his arm into the crook of Hyunjin’s elbow and stood leaning against him. Chan nodded and then started to lead them through the club to the back office area, where the employee break room was, and the back entrance. It was— remarkably nice, to step through that door into the cooler, quieter back area, where the music wasn’t so loud. Some of Hyunjin’s irritation simply melted away at that. He hadn’t realised how badly it was affecting him.
Outside, in the employee parking lot, the air really was cold. Not cold enough to need more than the light jackets they were wearing, but cold enough. Felix was still leaning against him and Hyunjin had a sudden realisation that if Felix had not come to them, he would be out somewhere in this cold night, with only that awful threadbare hoodie as warmth. It was only fall, now — the winter would be harsher, it always was, so cold that it made the air in Hyunjin’s lungs burn. There would be snow, and ice; sometimes the river froze. Felix would have died, he thought, a little numbly. He would have frozen to death, if he hadn’t come to them.
He tugged Felix a little closer, trying to not trip him with the proximity. Neither of them had drunk enough to be unsteady, but the cold air was still a little jolt to the system. He didn’t want Felix to be cold. Maybe he could convince Chan to buy him a proper coat, before the weather kept getting colder.
Chan led them to the car, parked near the low outer wall surrounding the small lot. Jisung was sitting on the wall, hands braced against the bricks. He was visibly shivering, his arms exposed to the air. That fucking arm hole, Hyunjin remembered, recalling the shock of seeing Jisung’s ribcage every time he moved. The sight of the goosebumps on Jisung’s arms filled him again with that frightened anger.
“You idiot,” he snapped. “Why didn’t you bring a fucking jacket?”
He felt Felix tense a little. Jisung just gave him that same tired look he’d given him inside and said, “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” Hyunjin said. He was trying to soften his tone, trying to get it across — the concern inside him, the way he remembered shivering because of the cold in a doorway and how awful it had felt. But his voice seemed out of his control, in a way that made him feel close to tears. “You’re so stupid.”
“Okay, okay,” Chan interrupted, giving him a little look of warning. “It’s fine, I can turn the heating on in the car. Why don’t we just get in?”
Jisung hopped off the wall, yanked open the front passenger door nearest him, and slid inside without looking at any of them. In the darkness of the parking lot, it was impossible to see through the windows to make out what Jisung’s expression was like. Felix looked up at Hyunjin, an uncertain expression on his face. He looked like he wasn’t sure what to make of Hyunjin’s mood, but Hyunjin just lifted a hand and ran it through Felix’s hair and said, “I guess we’ll share the backseat.”
Chan kept glancing at them in the rear view mirror on the drive home, at where Felix was laying with his head against Hyunjin’s shoulder, asleep. For a while, he’d held Hyunjin’s hand and mumbled a bit about how much fun he’d had, how nice the club had been, how much he wanted to do it again. That had been nice, really nice, to hear — Hyunjin had had fun, too, for the most part, and he was glad that Felix had enjoyed his time. It made it feel like the night had been worth something, at least.
Eventually, though, the late hour and the alcohol and the movement of the car had caught up to Felix and he’d drifted off to sleep. After that, the car was quiet, with only the sound of it moving through the streets. Jisung, in the front, had his head pillowed against his arm against the window, completely silent, but sometimes, if Hyunjin looked at the right angle, he could see in the window reflection that Jisung had his eyes open and still was not asleep. Hyunjin had nothing to say. He was almost afraid to open his mouth again.
When they pulled up in the parking lot around the back of the house, something about the sound of the engine cutting off made Felix wake up. He sat up a little, looking around, like he didn’t really know where he was, but he didn’t seem particularly bothered about it. He still had his hand in Hyunjin’s. “What?” he said, eyes half-squinted open.
“Ah, angel,” said Hyunjin, the affection he felt at the sight almost drowning out the buzzing awful energy inside him. “You are so cute.”
He dipped his head and rubbed his nose against Felix’s, a gentle touch. Felix made a sleepy amused noise at it. Jisung, in the front, undid his seatbelt, shoved open the door and got out. The slam of the door after him brought Felix awake suddenly, sitting upright and blinking at the front of the car. He looked, for the first time, a little alarmed, a little unsure, like it had just hit him that he was in a car and didn’t really know where he had been brought.
“It’s nothing,” Hyunjin said, and Felix nodded and then slumped against him. That easy trust, when the fear had been bright on Felix’s face not a second ago, almost undid Hyunjin.
Chan had not gotten out yet either, and he twisted in his seat to look at Hyunjin. “Did you argue with Jisung again?” he asked. His voice was perfectly free of judgement but they both knew the real question — any argument that he and Jisung had was always at his instigation.
“No,” said Hyunjin. They hadn’t argued. It could not be considered an argument, if he had been nasty and Jisung had just taken it with weary grace. It was Hyunjin who was the problem. He was always the problem.
Chan nodded, not looking like he believed him. Then he looked at Felix, who was already most of the way back to being asleep. “Do you want help with him?” he asked.
“Only if you’re offering to princess-carry him up four flights of stairs,” Hyunjin said. “I think he’d like that.”
“Hyunjin,” said Chan with a sigh. Hyunjin would take that as a no, then.
“No, hyung,” he said, tired himself, so fucking tired. “I’ve got it.”
Notes:
the seungbin porn from this chapter will be posted as an extra side fic next week~ it was originally going to go IN this chapter but.... it's so.... long....... already........ so you get it posted separate instead ♥
EDIT 22/08/05: The seungbin smut has been posted and can be found here.
Chapter 5
Notes:
in case you missed it, the seungbin porn from last chapter got posted here so please check that out if you haven't already~ it's 8k of filth what's not to like!!!!
also since it's my fic and i'll retcon what i LIKE, we've changed things so that minho has some facial scarring, because we think that would be Very Hot Of Him. previous chapters have been edited to include stuff about this, so if you reread, you might notice that. if you DON'T want to play scavenger hunt (and i don't blame you) to find where we describe the scars in prev chapters all you rly have to know is that minho's got long slashes down the left side of his face from the business end of a broken bottle.
with that, enjoy~
Chapter Text
Chan was overwarm, the heat like a physical pressure against him. In conjunction with the booming music pulsing under his skin, it edged him into overstimulation, every part of him feeling— so much. Maniac was dark, more indistinct than usual, the flashing streaks of light around them illuminating people only in short blinks.
He saw Felix, strange and beautiful under the neon green lights. His slim frame bared in a thin mesh shirt, just out of Chan’s reach— no, he was in Chan’s arms, their fronts pressed together. Chan’s hands slid greedily around that narrow waist, feeling the heat of Felix’s skin against his palms.
Hyung, Felix murmured against Chan’s mouth, his deep voice shockingly audible despite the overpowering music, the thrumming of Chan’s blood in his ears.
Chan kissed him, sweeping his tongue into Felix’s open, waiting mouth. Felix moaned, and Chan felt a groan humming in his own chest, his hands holding Felix harder, closer. He couldn’t get him near enough, Felix’s body moving against his in slow, rhythmic undulations. Chan was hard in his jeans, Felix’s hips notched against his.
“Felix,” Chan mumbled, sweat prickling against his skin, heat skittering along his very bones. He’d never felt something as good as this, as Felix’s plush mouth under his, his slim frame in Chan’s arms.
Hyung, please, Felix whispered, and Chan rolled his hips forward, a little desperate, wanting him so very badly. The pleasure was sharp, solid— Felix diminished as the feeling grew, slipping away like sugar dissolved in warm water, until Chan was aware of himself enough to realise the music was gone, and his hands were empty. The only sound in his ears now was his own breathing, rough and rasping, and his hands lay palm-down on his sheet, his hips squirming against his mattress.
Abruptly, he shoved himself onto his back, kicking his blankets off himself as he went. The rush of cool air across his front was so fucking welcome.
“What the fuck, Chan,” he said to himself, panting around the words. In his boxers his cock was hard, straining against the fabric. The urge to slip his hand under the waistband and bring himself the rest of the way off was difficult to deny. But he did deny it.
It had been a while, maybe even years, since he’d last had a wet dream. And they’d always been more vague than this, just a little nudge from his brain that said, hey, maybe you should go find someone to fuck. He’d never had one about someone specific, before.
Chan was going to throttle Hyunjin.
He lay for a long few moments, breathing steadily, trying to will his body under control. His brain kept trying to slip sideways into remembering the dream, how it had felt to hold Felix like that. How embarrassing, to be this worked up about a dream about kissing. When the seconds passed and his body remained just as worked up as ever, he sat up and then climbed out of bed, wincing at the way even the small wet patch at the front of his boxers stuck to his skin.
In the shower, he turned the water down as cold as he could stand it. This was not his usual thing; usually he took his showers so hot that the steam lingered for long minutes afterwards. But he needed the cold, today, needed the iciness of it. He shivered his way through it but it helped to bring his body back under control.
He could not allow this to be a thing, he told himself firmly, as he shut the shower off, dripping cold water onto the shower floor. His self control had always been something he’d prided himself on, something that had allowed him to know, from a very young age, exactly what he was going to achieve with his life and then he had set out and done just that. So it was with this: he could not allow himself to have these kinds of thoughts about Felix.
He towelled off as roughly as possible, almost scrubbing at his skin with it, to keep that sense of discomfort for a little bit longer. Then he dressed, grabbing the first things in his wardrobe that he saw — a pair of black narrow-legged sweatpants and a black sweater, which he pulled on before he was even fully dry.
He ran a comb through his hair, didn’t bother drying it. He did, most days. Most days he dried it and then styled it flat using a pair of hair straighteners. He’d bought his first pair not long after he’d run away with Jeongin, when the natural curl of his hair had started to be remarked upon by the men he was working with. There had been nothing negative about the comments, not at that stage, but it had been enough to make him stand out in a way that he hadn’t been comfortable with, and so he had spent money on the cheapest pair he could find. He’d upgraded, over the years, but he continued doing it.
Not today, though. Today he was willing to let his hair dry naturally, even if it was likely to become a frizzy mess as a result. He didn’t have the capacity for it, felt the need to get out of this room and work on something like it was an itch under his skin.
Outside his bedroom, the apartment was quiet. He had no doubt that he was the first one awake, of those who had stayed out last night. It wasn’t quite early but it was early enough that even he, who had not drunk anything, felt the lack of sleep inside him. He was used to that, though, and after all these years it was very easy to simply shake it off as he went to Changbin’s room and knocked on the door.
There was no answer. Even though Changbin had left much earlier than the rest of them, Chan hadn’t really expected him to be awake, not when there hadn’t actually been anything Changbin needed to do this morning. He rapped his knuckles against the wood again, wondering if Changbin was deeply asleep, but when a minute or so passed without even the sound of anything moving on the other side, Chan sighed, ran a hand through his damp hair, and went to go find him.
But Changbin wasn’t in the PC room, or anywhere on the third floor. His office door was still locked, even. Frowning, Chan climbed the stairs down to Seungmin’s workroom, trying to be careful as he went past Minho and Jisung’s rooms to not make much noise, although he had no doubt that even just his quiet footsteps would have woken Minho up anyway.
“Changbin,” he said, as he opened the door to the workshop, expecting to see Changbin sitting at the table with something in front of him, but the workshop was as empty as the rest of the building had been. There was nothing in there except a half-empty bottle of soju on the worktable, probably from the upstairs bar area that Seungmin mostly used. “Huh,” he said, and then sighed again. Basement it was, he guessed.
At least all these stairs were something to work his energy out on, he thought, as he trailed down to the basement, the lights flickering above his head. He still felt— jittery, a little like there was still a slowly smouldering heat under his skin. He was somewhat concerned about his capacity to look Felix in the eye later, whenever he saw him.
The basement was empty too. This, for some reason, annoyed him. Maybe it was just that he was unused to not being able to find Changbin when he needed him, but it was probably just the irritation of the wet dream filling him up, the unsated desire. Still, if Changbin had gone out without letting him know, he had a right to be annoyed. They all knew better than to do that, even if they were just running out to get coffee or snacks or something.
Back up the stairs to the hallway, where suddenly there was noise from Seungmin’s workshop. Seungmin, probably, getting up; Chan hoped it hadn’t been him who had woken him, although he knew Seungmin tended to sleep through most low level noise happening outside his door. Still, it was likely that Seungmin could either find Changbin for him, or had footage of him leaving the house, so he poked his head back into the room.
He blinked. “Changbin,” he said.
Changbin was standing in the workroom, leaning with one hand against the table, the other doing something to his shoe that Chan couldn’t see. “Oh, hey, hyung,” he said, sounding a little flustered. His hair was sticking up wildly, like he too hadn’t brushed it, and the shirt he was wearing had not been buttoned up properly, the top two out of order.
“Hello,” said Chan slowly. “Where the hell were you just now?”
“Oh,” said Changbin, still fiddling with his shoe. “Outside. Getting something from the car.”
“Is it windy out there?” Chan asked him, smiling a little. When Changbin gave him a confused look, Chan clarified, “Your hair is a mess.”
This, for some reason, seemed to fluster Changbin even more. “Hyung, take a look in the mirror,” he said, as he ran a hand through his hair and tried to flatten it. It worked marginally better than the same thing would have worked with Chan’s hair. “What? Did you need me or something?”
Oh, right. “Yeah, come up to the office with me? I need to talk to you about some stuff,” Chan said.
“Now?” Changbin asked. Chan nodded. “Lead the way.”
It wasn’t until they actually were in Chan’s office, with Chan behind his desk and Changbin sitting on one of the wooden chairs, positioned backwards, that Chan realised he didn’t really have much to actually talk to Changbin about. He’d been too focused on the concept as a distraction from the feelings pulsing inside him that he hadn’t planned it at all. Changbin looked at him expectantly. He, too, looked a little tired, despite presumably having slept earlier than any of them.
“Right,” said Chan, when a few seconds of silence had ticked by. “The circus job. You saw the new plan that Minho put together for it?”
“Yeah,” said Changbin. He shrugged. “Seemed solid enough to me, but I know he wasn’t happy about the numbers.”
Minho had not been happy about having to increase the numbers, but he had done it and that was good enough for Chan. “And how are we getting on for the Lee Jaerim job? Any update on that timeline.”
“Seungmin is still fitting out the van,” Changbin said. “It’s taking a little longer than I think he expected, just around the other stuff he has to get done, but it’s chugging along and I’ve been helping where I can. I’ve got some parts on order for him. Something about the computers, I didn’t follow what he was saying at all, I just bought them.”
“Isn’t that always the case with Seungmin’s stuff?” Chan asked. He’d lost count of the number of times Seungmin had asked for something for his work and it had sounded like genuine gibberish. Chan mostly just relied on Seungmin knowing what the hell he was talking about.
“It sure is,” Changbin agreed. “I’ll let you know if anything does come up, or if the timeline needs to be extended any.”
Chan nodded. He reached out and turned his monitor on and watched it flicker to life, showing what he’d last been looking at: a spreadsheet of their different credit card statements from last month. He minimised the window and turned back to Changbin, hoping to have something else to say, but there was nothing.
This was the problem with having a team that was so efficient, he thought grumpily. There wasn’t enough to distract him when he really needed it.
“Was everything okay last night?” Changbin asked suddenly. “Did something happen?”
Chan cocked his head. “What makes you ask that?” he asked, genuinely surprised by the question.
“You seem preoccupied,” Changbin said.
Ah, thought Chan. He supposed that was one way to put it. He honestly felt a little bit like he’d broken, somewhere along the way, like seeing Felix in that mesh shirt, or seeing the way he’d arched into Hyunjin, had broken him. If Changbin was noticing it, that meant Chan needed to do something about this.
“Nothing happened,” he said. It was true. Nothing had happened, and nothing would happen. “Well, except that Hyunjin and Jisung appear to have fallen out again, but that isn’t anything new.”
Changbin sighed. It wasn’t anything new, but Chan knew that Changbin never liked it when it happened. His ingrained need to smooth over the edges of arguments and conflicts ran too deeply inside him, but when it came to Hyunjin, especially when it involved Jisung, it was a terrible idea to get involved. He was too likely to turn his spikes on the person trying to help.
“They’ll get over it,” Chan told him. “They always do.” Somehow, they always did. Chan had been convinced, in the early days, that one day Hyunjin would come to him and tell him that he wanted Jisung gone. It hadn’t happened, and he didn’t think it ever would, now.
Hyunjin, he thought. Hyunjin really was the one he needed to talk to, even if he couldn’t throttle him like he wanted to. It was Hyunjin who had decided to meddle in this mess, and it was Hyunjin who he would need to convince to leave it well enough alone. Perhaps if he did that, if Hyunjin stopped pushing the boundaries, things could settle back into something he didn’t have to fight so hard against.
He was starting to think he’d really made something of a mess of all this.
Changbin was peering at him, frowning. “Hyung,” he said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Chan smiled at him. Even he could tell it was weak. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just very tired. You can go, if you want, Changbin. Sorry to drag you up here for basically nothing.”
Changbin raised an eyebrow. “You drag me up here for basically nothing all the fucking time,” he said, and then surged to his feet, almost knocking the chair over, as Chan picked up the framed photo of Hyunjin and Jeongin he had on his desk and made to throw it at Changbin’s head. They knew from (somewhat different) experiences just how good Chan’s aim was. “Okay, okay, I’ll go, I’m leaving. Go back to bed, hyung, you look terrible.”
“Take a look in a mirror,” Chan said, mimicking his voice from earlier, which just made Changbin laugh. He left the room, closing the door after him in something of a slam.
Chan, as soon as the door shut, lay his forehead down on his desk, just short of a slam too. It hurt, but perhaps not enough, because it didn’t rattle any of his thoughts loose from his ears. Financial records, he thought to himself. Bank statements. Anything boring enough that he could lose a few hours in them before he could go and talk to Hyunjin.
He sighed and sat up and opened up the excel spreadsheet again. His work had always been his saviour in the past; he hoped to god it could help him now.
——
Jeongin couldn’t remember how he’d gotten home.
He sat up, fast at first and then slower when he got a little dizzy, his head and vision swimming with it. Then he blinked around himself, taking stock of things.
He was in bed, his own bed, his room as he’d left it. The clothes he was wearing, he recognised — the shirt from his jaunt to the club, his boxers, though he couldn’t remember taking off his pants. His mouth tasted foul, and his eyes felt a little grittier than usual. But there was none of the famed head pain nor nausea he’d heard so much about. So he moved to the edge of his bed and rubbed his eyes, reached for the glass on his nightstand to try and wash out some of that taste.
All that water Minho made him drink last night must have done the trick, but man he had to pee. Again.
Well, Jeongin amended as he put the glass back on his nightstand. The water might have mitigated the hangover but it certainly hadn’t made him any less drunk. Jeongin was prone to spaciness a little, perhaps was a nice way to put it, and he wasn’t in the habit of remembering every moment of every day. But having huge chunks of an evening simply missing from his memory was a new experience, and one he did not particularly like. Especially when it was time spent with Minho. He liked cataloguing every moment with Minho away for later anyway, but— it felt a little dangerous, to be drunk around Minho at all, when he felt the way he did. He hadn’t counted on not remembering.
Chan’s fond face, illuminated in short flashes, was hazily present in Jeongin’s memory. He remembered that, and the scent of Minho— Minho’s jacket, around his shoulders, the coldness of the air. He, vaguely, thought he remembered Minho laughing at him, remembered it in conjunction with the cold air of outside. So he supposed that must have happened when they were coming home.
Of all the stupid things for Jeongin to remember with great clarity, it was the fucking stairs up to the apartment. Probably because he’d had to concentrate so hard on them so he wouldn’t go tumbling backwards, struggling the entire time with it. What a useless thing to recall.
He also remembered how, when they’d hit the second floor landing, he'd suggested that he just sleep in Minho’s room, which, at the time, in his drunken brain, had been an absolutely brilliant move. Smooth and cunning. He’d truly thought he’d been on to something.
Jeongin groaned, burying his face in his hands. He couldn’t remember Minho’s response, other than that it must have been negative, had to have been negative. Jeongin wasn’t in Minho’s bed now, and even without that clue, there was no way Minho would have ever allowed it anyway.
How humiliating. Any smugness Jeongin might have felt over Minho getting possessive when that other man had hit on him was not enough to squash the embarrassment of Minho having to herd him home like an inept child.
Jeongin sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, slowly collecting flashes of the previous night and piecing them together, like a fuzzy jigsaw puzzle. It was remarkably difficult, when there were chunks missing, memories skipping in places, cloudy and unreal in others. The alcohol might not have given him a headache but he was thinking so hard now he was getting one.
He put his hand down on the bed. Minho had been in here, in Jeongin’s room. He could see it in his mind’s eye, Minho haloed by his overhead light, leaning over him.
Jeongin had touched him. Or maybe he hadn’t. He couldn’t tell if that was a memory or a dream.
He couldn’t tell if Minho’s eyes going shuttered and sad as he’d leaned away was a memory or a dream, either.
Eventually he groaned and got to his feet. He’d have to ask, if he wanted to know. And he did want to know. He needed to know, exactly what had happened, if he’d said something he shouldn’t have. This was going to be excruciating.
Even before he opened his bedroom door he could hear the sounds of cooking, and upon entering the hallway he was hit with the smell of food, and his stomach gave a mighty rumble. But he forced himself to go into the bathroom though, because he needed to brush his teeth and to try and power wash this eyeliner off: when he looked in the mirror he resembled a raccoon, perhaps, but far less cute.
After showering, there were still remnants of eyeliner around his lashline, and now his eyes were red from scrubbing at them with his face wash. He’d have to ask Hyunjin, later, for a product to get the rest of it off. Jeongin knew Hyunjin had that sort of thing, but he’d never had any cause to use it himself. In the meanwhile he combed his damp hair and wiggled into a soft oversized shirt and a pair of basketball shorts.
Able to put it off no longer, Jeongin went into the kitchen, where he found Minho at the stove, stirring a large pot. He was wearing his black cooking apron, tied snugly around his waist, and Jeongin was way too on edge for the visible play of muscles under Minho’s thin shirt. On the counter, there was a roll of soondae sliced up on a cutting board, and on another was the bright assorted green and red of peppers and chives. Tupperware containers sat open and scattered all over. Even if Jeongin hadn’t recognized the ingredients, he recognised the scent of the broth in the pot.
“Good morning, hyung,” Jeongin said tentatively. He wasn’t used to feeling so timid around Minho. He didn’t like it.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, glancing over his shoulder. His gaze swept over Jeongin’s body, a clinical sort of assessment. “How are you feeling?”
Jeongin slid into his usual seat at the table, watching as Minho tracked his movements. “I’m alright,” he said softly. “I don’t think I’m hungover.”
Minho gave a short nod of acknowledgement, turning away and giving his attention back to the pot. He tasted the broth, hummed, and then asked, “Are you hungry?”
Jeongin was. Shockingly so. He was ready to eat anything put in front of him. Even his nerves couldn’t quell the hunger. He wondered if that was also an alcohol thing: voracious hunger the next day. “Yeah,” he said, still quiet.
Minho grunted, and snagged one of the medium-sized stone bowls from the cabinet and set it on the stovetop. He began the work of heating it up, placing some soondae slices in and ladling the soup broth in with it, waiting for it to come to a boil. Jeongin watched him work for a long few moments, with a quiet sort of appreciation, before he could bear the silence no longer.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, nerves twisting like snakes in his stomach. Minho made a little noise to show he was listening without turning around. “I don’t remember last night.”
Minho glanced back at him again, his scarred eyebrow cocked in a way that should not be as devastatingly handsome as it was. “Any of it?” he asked, slightly incredulous.
“Bits and pieces,” Jeongin amended, and Minho turned back to the stove. He set about shutting the burner off and then added some of the vegetables and a sprinkle of sesame seeds to the bowl. “Did I—” Jeongin stuttered, and then decided he just needed to press forward. “I remember we talked, but I don’t remember what I said.”
Minho tugged on a pair of oven mitts and moved the stone bowl onto its corresponding plastic platter, and then he brought the whole bundle, still boiling, to the table and placed it in front of Jeongin. It smelled wonderful, and Jeongin’s stomach rumbled again, something that he really hoped Minho hadn’t heard.
“You almost started crying on the walk home,” Minho said archly, yanking off the mitts and tossing them onto the table, “because you realised I had probably been cold in prison.”
Jeongin had absolutely no memory of that. It definitely sounded in character, though. Sometimes, even when he was sober, if he thought too hard about Minho in prison, he got teary. Minho never talked to them about what he’d gone through, but the mental wounds left behind showed through at times, and Jeongin felt wounded in turn. Still, how fucking mortifying. Jeongin could feel his face turning red, and it had nothing to do with the steam coming off of the bowl in front of him. “Oh,” he said, voice small.
Minho— didn’t smirk, nothing about his face moved, but the essence of it was there all the same before he turned and grabbed Jeongin a spoon and chopsticks, and then a few small dishes with kimchi and ssamjang, some extra minced garlic and perilla powder. Jeongin felt himself turning redder. Minho had really— gone all out, worried about him, them. Fussy in one of the only ways he allowed himself to be. It shouldn’t please Jeongin the way it did, but— he liked having this part of Minho. This care, this— this love. He coveted it, every small, precious piece Minho gave him.
“You also,” Minho said into the quiet as he served Jeongin up a small bowl of rice, “tried to help yourself to my bed.”
Jeongin fought not to wince, picking up his spoon and digging it into the rice, fluffy and fresh. He wanted to pretend he didn’t remember that, because— oh, he’d had ulterior motives. And while he did want Minho to know, in some ways, about how he felt, he did not want him to discover it like this, through Jeongin being drunk, stupid and silly with it— the thought was nearly unbearable.
Minho, finally done laying out sustenance for Jeongin, stood by the side of the table and put a hand on his hip, watching Jeongin begin to eat like a tentative rabbit under the watchful eyes of a hawk. Jeongin glanced up at him, sipping at the soup, making his eyes wide and hopefully as innocent looking as possible.
“Do you remember me carrying you up two flights of stairs?” Minho asked, his tone sharp but a wickedly amused glint in his eyes. Jeongin hated how much he enjoyed this, Minho teasing him. Even as it made embarrassment streak hot through him, it made him warm in other ways too.
Jeongin hadn’t, exactly, remembered that, not until Minho had said it. Now it came back a little, Minho’s back firm against his chest, the prickling down of the hair at Minho’s nape against Jeongin’s lips as he’d tucked his face down.
That had been real, the sensation of skin against Jeongin’s mouth. Jeongin hadn’t been sure.
He could not answer truthfully, and he did not want to risk lying when he was so visibly flustered, so he opted to not answer at all. “I’m sorry,” he said instead, blinking and hunching down a little, so he was looking at Minho through his lashes.
Minho huffed out a little laugh through his nose, the corner of his mouth lifting up just slightly as he shook his head. “You’re a better drunk than I am, baby boy,” he said, self-deprecation thick in the words, the way his smile turned wry. He picked up the mitts and moved to put them back on the counter. Quietly, seemingly more for himself, he added, “Sweeter than a fucking dessert.”
Jeongin’s grip on his spoon turned desperate, for an unsteady moment there, the metal digging into his fingertips. He was probably lucky Minho wasn’t looking at him, had instead begun to busy himself chopping some more green onions, and had completely missed it.
I could be so fucking sweet for you, if you’d let me, Jeongin thought mutinously as he glared at Minho’s stupid muscular back, the delicate nape of his neck that he’d pressed his lips to, however lightly. He shovelled rice and soondae into his mouth, nearly burning his tongue in the process.
Jeongin thought about leaving the conversation there. Minho wasn’t acting off, not really, so whatever Jeongin said hadn’t been— something monumentous enough to shake the foundations of this relationship Jeongin had so carefully built. He really could just let it go, move past it and in the future not get fucking drunk with Minho around.
But he remembered thinking— that he needed to remember, whatever it was. And how stupid was that. He could remember Minho’s intensity, and his own brain telling itself, we have to remember this. And then that was the only thing that had stuck. Not the words, just that urgency. Alcohol was terrible, Jeongin decided.
For a long few minutes Jeongin just quietly ate, while Minho prepared more ingredients, presumably for the others when they awoke. Hyunjin was probably going to be hungover as hell, and maybe Jisung and Felix too, which explained the large pot. It should have been nice; normally Jeongin enjoyed eating while Minho puttered around the kitchen, so clearly in his element. He liked seeing Minho content. But he was too busy thinking himself in circles, digging a veritable groove in his brain, to find much pleasure in it now.
“I remember,” he finally said once his soup was nearly gone, “you put me to bed.” A tentative exploration, not quite a question. Leading, hoping Minho might take the hint.
“Yeah, because you couldn’t get out of that stupid harness,” Minho said dryly. “Or your own pants.”
Jeongin tried to fight the renewed blush and failed. God, how miserably embarrassing. “We spoke, when I was in bed,” he said stoutly, trying to keep them on track. “I said— something.” Helpful, truly helpful. Minho was going to think he was still a little drunk, at this rate. With a hint of desperation, he finished, “What was it that I said?”
Minho— slowed in his vegetable chopping, which felt a little ominous. More ominous still was the long pause that followed. “Is there something I should know about, baby boy?” he asked eventually, a sort of forced lightness in his voice that was very telling. “Some secret you're afraid you spilled?”
Fuck, Jeongin had said something. “Hyung,” he mumbled, “please.”
“You’re the one who ate Chan-hyung’s grapes, huh?” Minho said, maybe a little sarcastic.
Jeongin— stupidly, was a bit hurt by how flippant Minho was being. It wasn’t something that was common, with Minho, not like it was with the others. They tended to patronise or playfully condescend to him, often unintentionally, because he was the youngest, the baby. He didn’t particularly like it when they did it either, wished they’d take him a little more seriously, see him as the person he’d grown into and not the child he had been. But he was able to brush it off as just— the way of things.
Minho, though, had always seemed to make a point of taking Jeongin seriously, of listening. He knew Minho was likely deflecting, but this didn’t feel like his usual teasing— it felt belittling. Like Jeongin was still such a kid, the only thing he could possibly feel guilty about was stealing a belt from Jisung, or a snack from Chan. It just made him feel terribly small. He didn’t want Minho to think he was such— such a baby. Not Minho. Never Minho.
Jeongin stared down into his bowl determinedly, blinking away the sting in his eyes. He put all his attention into finishing the last of his food, going silent. He heard Minho’s chopping stop, and sensed rather than saw Minho turn around to look at him. And then Minho sighed. “Baby boy,” he said, and came over to stand beside the table once more. Jeongin saw him out of the corner of his eyes, saw as Minho set his hands atop the back of Chan’s usual chair. “You didn't say anything out of the ordinary, okay?” There was— a definite note of apology in his voice, and it made all sorts of emotions squirm inside Jeongin.
In no world would Jeongin ever be able to stay mad at him.
“That’s not really an answer,” Jeongin muttered, but he looked up at Minho to let him know he wasn’t angry, setting his spoon down. “I said something that— that upset you,” he said, trying to impress upon Minho how very earnest he was about this. “I said— something—”
Jeongin let his gaze drift a little to the left, because he couldn’t think when Minho was meeting his eyes so seriously. So instead he looked just over Minho’s shoulder, at the wall beyond him, and tried to focus on the night before, what he’d seen, what he’d felt. He remembered the softness of his own bed, the vague, blurry movement of Minho tucking the blankets around him. And Minho’s face above his, indistinct, like a watercolour painting, but he could recall the softness of Minho’s expression even so.
And then Jeongin had spoken— he’d pointed out that softness, maybe, and Minho had shuttered and pulled away.
“You didn’t upset me,” said Minho, and Jeongin’s eyes snapped back to his face. His tone was a little clipped, a little— robotic. An automatic dissent. As he returned Jeongin’s gaze, his eyes had that same shuttered quality they'd had the previous night.
“Hyung, what did I say?” Jeongin asked, his distress coming through in his voice, in the way he leaned forward.
Minho said nothing for a long moment, merely stared down at Jeongin intently, and then he— bit his bottom lip, a shockingly obvious nervous gesture from him. And then he sighed again, breaking eye contact and dropping his gaze. "You said you wished I'd let the others see how good I am," he said, very quietly. Then he glanced up again and there was— too much there, in the darkness of his irises, for Jeongin to parse through.
"Oh." Jeongin looked down at his empty bowl, terribly flustered. "Well." He picked up his spoon, as if he was going to resume eating, and then remembered all over again he'd finished. He set the spoon down again. His face felt warm anew. "That’s true," he muttered. "You should, you are."
"I’m really not, baby boy." The words were said on a sigh, and then Minho's hands were in his field of vision, picking the bowl up to put it in the sink. Jeongin's head snapped up, and he made a small noise of protest— less to the commandeering of his bowl and more to what Minho had said. Minho shook his head in response, and said, very seriously, "You see goodness in others because there’s so much in you."
He was staring into Jeongin's eyes as he said it, and Jeongin could never get used to that intensity, when Minho chose to level it at him. It always made his breath catch, his heart pound, and this was no exception.
Minho loved him. This wasn't the first time Jeongin had noticed— not by far, not at all, and Jeongin basked in every moment he had the privilege of being reminded. But moments like this really felt less like a pleasurable caress and more like the sharpness of a knife. Longing sat so heavily in his chest it was almost a physical hurt.
Because it wasn't enough that Minho loved him, if Minho refused to see that Jeongin could, that he did, love him back. If Minho simply could not see himself as a creature deserving of any of it.
"Hyung," Jeongin whispered, watching as something flickered over Minho's face—
And then the keypad to the door beeped, and Minho jerked, the spoon in the bowl clattering. Jeongin startled too, heart hammering, and then he whipped around just as the door swung open and Jisung toddled unsteadily in.
"Oh, man, is that soondaeguk?" Jisung asked, voice scratchy. His eyes were red-rimmed, face pale, and he positively thumped into his chair at the table. “I have never been so hungover in my life.”
Jeongin, despairingly, looked at where Minho had been only moments before, and found he had moved away, to the counter again, and was already in the process of fixing Jisung his portion of the soup. The moment had passed, as if it had never been.
“You look way too perky,” Jisung said, and it took Jeongin a beat to realise this was directed at him. “All bright-eyed like usual. The perks of youth.”
“Minho-hyung made sure I drank lots of water last night,” Jeongin said sweetly, his smile feeling brittle. He shoved the small side dishes towards Jisung and then got up, glancing at Minho as he went, but Minho did not turn around. It felt— almost stubborn, like he was refusing to look. Quietly, Jeongin said, “Thank you, hyung, for the food. And for last night.”
“Of course, baby boy,” Minho said with a very stilted kind of forced lightness. It might have been disheartening, but the tips of his ears were red, and Jeongin knew that the moment might have passed, but Minho would remember.
He might not believe Jeongin yet, but remembering could be enough for now.
——
Felix woke snuggled low in Hyunjin’s bed, his face pressed into Hyunjin’s side. The blankets were on top of him, warm and suffocating, and he wriggled upwards, breaking free and taking a deep breath of welcome air. Then he went limp again, yawning.
His head hurt. Not too badly, he’d definitely had worse hangovers, but it was still unpleasant. There was a taste in his mouth that really needed to be washed out, as soon as he possibly could, and his head would feel better if he ate something, he knew from experience. So he made himself sit up on his elbow, blinking around the room.
A thin beam of sunlight, white and bright, was making its way into the room through a gap in Hyunjin’s blackout curtains. So it was at least morning, but Felix didn’t know the exact time — Hyunjin didn’t keep a clock in his room and his phone was laying facedown on the other side of his body, out of Felix’s reach. He thought he could hear faint kitchen sounds coming through the door, cutlery clinking and a faucet running. It was possibly late morning by now. He certainly felt like he’d slept for ages, drowsiness still clinging, sticky, to his mind.
Hyunjin, feeling the movement beside him, groaned loudly. “Angel,” he croaked, “go back to sleep.”
Felix looked down at him, his face and eyes puffier than usual. His mouth was so full it nearly looked like he’d been punched in it. Cute, Felix thought, and poked his cheek lightly, watching his fingertip make a dimple.
Halfheartedly, Hyunjin turned his face and bit at Felix’s finger. Felix, now knowing Hyunjin better, let him, and watched as Hyunjin was confused to suddenly find he had Felix’s finger between his teeth. It took him a moment, but then his eyes squinted open, and he said, “Eugh.” He opened his mouth and let Felix take his hand back.
Felix was smiling now, and he wiped his damp finger on the blanket. “You’re adorable, you know,” Felix murmured, his voice shockingly raspy in his throat.
“I could kill you,” Hyunjin said, his eyes still open only in the barest of slits. “I could gut you like a fish.”
“Aw,” Felix said, smiling wider when Hyunjin scowled at him. He was— happy. The hangover wasn’t fun, but Felix found he minded it less right now. Waking up alone and barely remembering the bad decisions he’d made the night before had always been somewhat miserable. But it was nice to wake up next to Hyunjin, to remember the previous night in all its fun floatiness. He’d been safe, looked after. It was— strange and wonderful, to have friends.
He touched Hyunjin’s hairline lightly, then smoothed his hand over Hyunjin’s hair when he didn’t protest, petting him, like he was an oversized cat. Felix felt he was owed this, a little. He was allowed to coo over Hyunjin, after Hyunin’s antics the night before. Some gentle revenge to soothe his minor mortification.
Hyunjin blinked slowly as Felix touched him lightly, each time his eyes coming open just a bit more until he was peering up at Felix properly. “You’re in a good mood,” Hyunjin observed quietly.
“I am,” Felix confirmed. His thumb rubbed over Hyunjin’s temple, pressing carefully. “I’m glad you had the idea for us to go to the club, even though now I realise you had ulterior motives.”
It took a long moment but then the corners of Hyunjin’s lips curled slightly. It was not a gentle smile — rather, it was quietly smug. “It was an excellent plan,” he said, then he sighed, his smile turning into a pursing of lips. “Shame Chan-hyung has so much self-control and noble tendencies.”
“Noble tendencies,” Felix echoed blankly.
Hyunjin’s mouth turned down in affectation, his chin receding into his neck a little. “I can’t, Hyunjin,” he said in a droning voice that Felix supposed was meant to be an imitation of Chan. “It would be taking advantage, Hyunjin. He’s under my care, Hyunjin.” He dropped the act, his face returning to normal just for him to emphatically roll his eyes. “Terrible, truly terrible.” His gaze landed on Felix, sharp and alert. “But he does like you, I can tell.”
Felix pulled his hand back, placing it on the pillow between them and looking at it instead of Hyunjin’s face. There was too much he could give away. The warmth in him that had bloomed at Hyunjin’s words, even so mockingly delivered— Chan truly was a good man, and it would ruin Felix if he wasn’t careful. “Hyunjin,” he murmured. “It’s good that he’s set against it. We need to keep things professional.” Even softer, he added, “This job is important, to me.”
Hyunjin hummed, an acknowledgement. Felix glanced at his face again, found Hyunjin thoughtful. “Well,” he mused slowly, “fucking Chan-hyung isn’t going to disturb things any more than having him persistently mooning after you will. You should have seen the way he was looking at you last night—”
He cut off when he saw the way Felix had suddenly blushed, feeling the prickle of warmth spread quickly over his face. Something about the crudeness of the words had hit Felix. Fucking Chan-hyung. His common sense was prevailing for now but there was a creature of instinct in Felix that, sometimes, took the wheel, and not always for the better.
He squeezed his legs together firmly at the phantom sensation of having Chan between them.
Hyunjin sat up suddenly, swaying a little and then blinking to steady himself. “Wait,” Hyunjin said, a frown wrinkling his brow. He’d read something into Felix’s reaction, and Felix wasn’t sure he’d like having to deal with whatever it was. “Are you— you’re not a virgin, are you?”
Felix, if possible, turned even redder. “Hyunjin.”
“Oh god,” said Hyunjin, a horror dawning over his features. “I didn’t steal your first kiss last night, did I?”
The shock of the question caused Felix to let out a bark of laughter — Hyunjin’s face, and the ridiculousness of the notion. The sound made both of them wince, loud in the quiet of the room. He cut the laugh off, but his smile and amusement remained. “No,” he said, “you didn’t, though I haven’t done it much, to be honest. Usually, I just— I’ve given, uhm, a handful of blowjobs. But I haven’t done more than that.” Something about that answer caused Hyunjin’s mouth to twist, just a little. He seemed discomfited. “What is it?” Felix asked.
“I just wouldn’t want you to have to do something that would make you— uncomfortable,” Hyunjin said, and Felix wasn’t entirely following. Hyunjin’s gaze turned a little inwards, and he added more quietly, almost to himself, “But Chan-hyung is a good guy, so I think he’d make it good for you.”
Felix realised then that Hyunjin, in his own head, was hashing out the physical logistics of Felix getting fucked by Chan: if Felix had never slept with anyone before, that could be a difficult thing. Felix might have been touched by the concern if he didn’t feel absolute exasperation in his every pore. “Hyunjin,” he said, in a tone of great patience. “Nothing is going to happen, especially nothing like that.” I am going to make sure of it, he thought. He had to.
It would not be easy — it had not been easy thus far and was only going to get harder. His brain was trying to slip sideways, flickering images of Chan on top of him, Chan’s tattooed hands between his thighs— and he yanked himself back from it, focusing hard on Hyunjin.
Hyunjin, who was squinting at Felix with a daunting new conviction.
But Hyunjin just said, “Mmm.” He managed to make it ominous. Then he climbed out of bed, dramatically flinging the blanket off the both of them as he went. Felix slowly sat up the rest of the way, his head a bit tender at the movement, and settled himself at the edge of the bed. Hyunjin had slouched over to his dresser and was pawing through it, looking for something to slip on.
Felix watched him, decided to turn the tables a little. “If we’re talking about this— what about you?” he asked.
“Huh?” Hyunjin asked absently, pulling on a light grey shirt, not looking at him.
Some things had clicked into place last night for Felix. He hadn’t been able to piece together why Hyunjin, who was brash and sharp, yes, but not unkind, was so often outright scathing and mean to Jisung. Felix didn’t know Jisung well yet, but he seemed easy going, ceding to Hyunjin whatever he asked. Perhaps, he’d thought, they’d had a fight, and Hyunjin was holding a grudge. Perhaps Jisung simply rubbed Hyunjin the wrong way.
And then last night— Hyunjin’s gaze, somehow both lingering on and skittering away from Jisung in that shirt, his arms smooth muscle and waist small. Hyunjin’s hand, a little too tight on Felix’s wrist as he’d dragged Felix to the dance floor after seeing Jisung get approached by that girl. Hyunjin cutting with his concern upon seeing Jisung standing in the cold.
Ah, Felix had thought. Ah.
“Instead of matchmaking me and Chan-hyung, you could take care of your own love life,” Felix said with faux idleness. There was a smile curling the corners of his mouth, though Hyunjin could not see it.
Hyunjin made a noise just shy of a snort, flinging a pair of sweatpants aside as he looked for a specific set. “I don’t have one,” he said. A little more wryly, he added, “I’m not the dating type.”
Felix made his voice light and almost singsong as he asked, “What about Jisung?”
Hyunjin’s head snapped around so fast Felix was surprised he didn’t give himself whiplash. He’d expected flustered embarrassment, maybe, but there was a shocking animal fear in Hyunjin that set Felix off balance, his own smile slipping away.
Hyunjin opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again. “Don’t,” he said, a bare rasp.
“Don’t?” Felix said, head tilting a little.
He could see Hyunjin swallow thickly, and he looked away again. With careful movements, Hyunjin shut the drawer, not making a sound with it. “Don’t talk about Jisung,” he said stiffly.
Were this the situation of a few minutes ago Felix would have teased him — you can meddle with me and Chan-hyung but I can't meddle with you? — but everything playful and sweet about Hyunjin was gone now, his usual indulgence towards Felix vanished. He was dangerously serious, and also still, that fear. Felix would never feel unsafe with Hyunjin but he knew a cornered fox would bite.
He had, perhaps, stumbled upon something he hadn't known to watch out for. Something that had happened in the past he hadn't yet been told about, maybe.
"Did you two—" He cut off, nervously wetting his lips, and then decided to just ask it. "Did you two date and then break up?"
Now it was Hyunjin's turn to let out a startled laugh, but his was a lot more hollow, bleak. “No. We never dated. I told you, I’m not the type,” he said, voice wiped of any emotion. Felix could see nothing of him but the set of his shoulders, his vibrant hair.
There was a long silence, where Felix wasn’t sure what to say. This was the first time the atmosphere between them had turned like this — awkward, tense. It was so strange to feel like this with Hyunjin, unpleasant in a way Felix did not like at all.
Then Hyunjin turned around, and he wasn’t smiling, but his face, somehow, was back to something Felix recognised. “I don’t like him, anyway,” Hyunjin said, pitched perfectly into his usual flippant cadence. He came over and held his hand out for Felix to take. “Come on, let’s get some food.”
The change of subject was clunky and obvious, but Felix was just glad Hyunjin wasn’t going to be angry with him, so he wasn’t going to pursue the subject. He didn’t need to, anyway— he’d begun to have an inkling into what was going on here, the way Hyunjin had said, I’m not the type. But if Hyunjin was set against being in a relationship because he thought he would fail at it, well, what could Felix do.
Talk to him, Felix thought with no small amount of wryness. Figure out why, exactly, he thinks Jisung wouldn’t want him.
But that was a conversation for another day. Wordlessly, Felix took Hyunjin’s hand, squeezing lightly, and let Hyunjin lead him from the room.
——
Even Minho’s home cooking hadn’t been enough to fix Jisung’s hangover. He hadn’t been joking about the extent of the damage; he had eaten, then gone back to bed for a couple of hours, and then woken up with the pounding in his head somehow worse than before. It was possible that he had still been mostly drunk when he’d gone upstairs to eat, and it was only now that the true hangover was settling in.
The bell over the coffee shop door kept going right through him as the door opened and closed while he waited for his coffee to be made. He had somehow managed to take a shower without curling up on the floor of his little bathroom, and pulled on actual clothes, and with the help of a pair of sunglasses had defeated the evil that was sunlight in order to come get the largest, strongest black coffee money could buy.
He had, once again, nobody to blame but himself — he’d known at the time he was downing the shots that the amount of tequila he was drinking would bite him the next day. It had been more important at the time to make everything go as fuzzy and not-real as possible, to drown out the sadness inside him.
He hadn’t even managed it, was the saddest thing about it. The alcohol had rendered everything even closer to the surface, bubbling under his skin. The only thing he had done was drink enough that he couldn’t quite remember getting home, the car ride coming back to him in fits and starts. He remembered, though, Hyunjin rubbing his nose against a sleepy Felix’s nose, so sweet and indulgent that it had made him worry he would throw up. His reaction, in the cold light of day and after a lot of sleep, felt dramatic.
The barista set his coffees down on the table in front of him: the coffee for him, and another one as a bribe for Seungmin. Jisung thanked him, collected his drinks, and then got out of the place, leaving the chatter and low-volume instrumental music behind. Outside, it was cold enough that he was grateful for his leather jacket, but at least much warmer than it had been sitting on that wall waiting for Chan to come out of the club.
He’d realised, that morning, laying in bed the first time, that it had been concern that had made Hyunjin snap at him so viciously about him being cold. Jisung had not been able to understand it, at the time, because the anger had seemed to come completely out of nowhere — Hyunjin had not even seemed that angry in the club, when he’d asked why Jisung was still hanging around. Jisung was fairly used to Hyunjin’s mood swings, but not even alcohol usually made them that extreme.
But it had been concern, he’d thought, the realisation warming him enough that he’d felt up to going to find food, which had been a mistake in the end. Concern, that Jisung would be cold. Even when Hyunjin didn’t like someone, he was too good to not care about them.
It was a short walk back to the house, but when he got back and stepped into the cool, dimly lit first floor hallway, it was a relief to be out of the sun completely. He made his way to Seungmin’s workshop and went inside without bothering to knock, because nobody tended to knock when Seungmin definitely saw everyone coming anyway.
“I have a gift for you,” he said grandly, brandishing one of the coffees.
Seungmin was at his computers, and he turned in his desk chair to give Jisung an irritated little look, which Jisung didn’t take personally. Seungmin looked at everyone who came uninvited into his domain like that. “Coffee?” he asked.
“Yes.” Jisung wiggled it in the air, as much as he could without spilling it. “Especially for you.”
Seungmin just kept looking at him, so Jisung crossed the room and held it out to him. Seungmin took it slowly, looked down at it, and then said, “What do you want?”
Jisung laughed. He wasn’t going to deny it, but it was funny that Seungmin assumed people were doing something nice for him for a reason. Well, no, it wasn’t funny really, but Seungmin made it funny — because he wasn’t serious, when he said it. Seungmin was the only person Jisung knew who could be funny whilst also acting like it was a burden to have a family.
“Nothing much,” Jisung said. “Just let me hang out here, maybe? I’m so hungover I can’t even think, Seungmin.”
“Excessive consumption of alcohol will do that to you,” said Seungmin, sounding like one of the videos Jisung had been made to watch in high school health class.
Jisung waved a hand at him and then slid onto a stool at the workbench, hoisting himself up and tucking his booted feet into the footrest. He sipped his coffee for the first time, almost groaning at the taste. It was stronger than he’d usually go for but he needed it. Only after he’d drunk some of his own, and didn’t immediately drop down dead from poison, did Seungmin start to drink his.
“Put me to work,” Jisung said, setting his coffee back down on the table after he’d drunk a quarter of it in one go. “Anything you have that I don’t need my brain for. Use me, Seungmin!”
Seungmin sighed. He did that a lot, too, so Jisung just kept smiling at him, his most winning smile, and waited him out. Eventually Seungmin said, “You can drill something for me, let me grab the stuff.”
He got up and went to the van, against the long back wall with the back doors opened up. Jisung was tickled by that van every time he remembered it, just chilling in this room with Seungmin. It was so over the top, to haul the thing in here. Seungmin came back out holding three long planks of pale wood, which he set on the table in front of Jisung, and then he fetched a small drill too, which Jisung could plug into one of the extension cords they’d installed into the surface of the workbench.
“I’ve already marked where I need the holes,” Seungmin said, pointing to the faint pencil X marks at equally spaced intervals along the wood. “Just drill where the pencil marks are.”
Jisung nodded, turning the wood over in his hands for a second. “What are these for?”
“They’re supports, for where we’ll install the keyboards and stuff for the job,” Seungmin said. “Try to keep your hand steady, I don’t want to have to measure the whole thing out again.”
Jisung nodded. It seemed like an easy enough task, one that required merely a careful eye and hand and nothing else whatsoever. He bent over the table, hearing Seungmin return to his desk, the chair squeaking a little as Seungmin settled into it, and then the clacking of his hands over the keyboard. Jisung didn’t understand most of what Seungmin did, save for the fact that he seemed to be constantly doing it. He and Jisung were opposites, in that regard; Jisung took whatever downtime he could get whenever he had the chance.
He’d been working for about ten minutes, the headache starting to fade with the application of coffee, when there was a knock on the door. This was so unusual that it almost startled him. He lifted his head and blinked at the door, while Seungmin called out, “Felix, you can come in.”
It was Felix, in his usual uniform of pants that Jisung recognised as belonging to Hyunjin and a t-shirt that hung off his skinny frame. He looked a little tired, his hair loose around his face, but he smiled when he saw who was in the room. “Hello!” he said, in that deep voice that managed to surprise Jisung every time. “I didn’t realise you were here too, Jisung.”
Jisung waved the drill in the air. “I’m helping out,” he said.
“That’s why I’m here,” Felix said, coming into the room and slipping onto a stool too, against the end of the table perpendicular to the one Jisung was sitting at. “Can I have the detonators I was working on a couple of days ago, Seungmin? I wanted to make some adjustments.”
God, Jisung had almost forgotten that Felix’s strength lay in bomb building. It was like his voice — incongruous, totally out of place with everything Jisung knew about him. Which, admittedly, wasn’t a whole lot, but it was enough to know that the niceness in Felix seemed to run true and strong through him. It was an odd thing, to think of the boy that Jisung had wiped the floor with in the basement, being so good at building things that would cause potential mass destruction.
“Oh, sure,” said Seungmin, getting up off his chair. “Let me get them for you.”
He went to one of the shelving units and fetched whatever it was that Felix was working on, which looked considerably more complicated than when Jisung was doing. Jisung eyed them, a little nervously. Seungmin set them down in front of Felix, who was looking at Seungmin with a little frown between his eyebrows.
“Are you okay?” he asked, touching Seungmin’s hand gently. “You winced just now.”
Seungmin blinked at him for a moment and then said, “Oh, yeah, I slept weird last night, pulled something in my neck. Don’t worry about it.”
Felix nodded and let Seungmin go back to his computers. Jisung looked at the complicated mess of wires and circuit boards and little fuses that Felix had assembled in front of him and asked, “Is there a reason you’re working on those?” It surprised him that Seungmin was just letting him come down here and build actual bombs right in his workshop.
“He’s going on the art gallery job,” Seungmin said.
“The Plaza Hotel job?” Jisung asked, confused. “I thought Hyunjin was going on that job.”
“He is,” said Felix. He’d plugged one of the soldering irons in, the littlest one that Seungmin owned. It did not look all that small in his hands. “I’m going too, or at least Chan-hyung wants me to. So I can use these.” He motioned to the circuit boards he was assembling. “Chan-hyung is going too.”
This was all news to Jisung. Chan hadn't gone into the field in years. Jisung nodded slowly. He picked up his drill, turned it on, did not let any of his apprehension show on his face. In theory, he had also been going on that job, although nobody had really confirmed that with him. It was just that he was usually the person who went with Hyunjin, to provide the muscle that Hyunjin did not have. It was possible he was still going, as the driver if nothing else, but it was not— the same.
Stupid, to think of jobs as some kind of special time with Hyunjin. But he’d never been anything but stupid when it came to Hyunjin.
The silence settled back down around them. Jisung wished that he had brought his headphones down so that he could at least listen to music, because now that his hangover was fading, the silence was a little too much for him. Even when he was alone, as he so often was, he never let it be this quiet. He always had a video playing, or music, something to keep his brain from— settling too much. Like this, his ears strained too hard for noises that, even years removed, he remained somehow scared to hear.
But he didn’t feel like talking, either. Not to Seungmin, who would not appreciate it now that he was also back to working, and not to Felix, who seemed like he was concentrating. Maybe especially not to Felix, who, Jisung remembered, had kissed Hyunjin last night. Or perhaps Hyunjin had kissed him — Jisung didn’t know, all he knew was that he had looked over at one point, hoping to see that they were no longer dancing together, and instead had found Hyunjin bent over Felix in a way that, even at a distance, could not be denied.
Jisung hadn’t looked for more than a brief second. He was not the type to torture himself like that. But now, sitting at this table with Felix right there, he wanted to ask— what did you do, last night, after you and Hyunjin went back to his bedroom, where you’ve been sharing his bed? Do you know, to be careful with him, do you know how lucky you are, to be trusted with this, from him? But it wasn’t his place to ask those questions of Felix.
In the cold light of day, he knew he simply had to let this all play out. The chips would fall where they may.
“If I had known you would be joining us too,” he made himself say to Felix, as he neared the last of the holes to be drilled into his wood, “I would have gotten you a coffee too.”
Felix lifted his head, looking surprised, although Jisung wasn’t sure if he just hadn’t expected to addressed or not. “Oh, it’s okay,” he said, brightly. “I don’t drink coffee, it’s too bitter.”
“Oh, huh,” Jisung said. “What did you do about your hangover? I assume you had a hangover. All those shots Hyunjin made us do.”
Felix laughed. “I had a hangover,” he said. “Jeongin showed us the soup that Minho-hyung made and then Hyunjin gave me some ibuprofen and now I’m all better.”
“Where is Hyunjin?” Jisung asked, unable to help himself.
“He went to take a shower,” Felix said. “He’s probably—”
The door swung open, so suddenly that Felix squeaked and jumped in his seat, before twisting to see who it was. But it was just Hyunjin, standing in the doorway, wearing sweatpants and a dark t-shirt and his hair hanging slightly damp around his face. Jisung watched all the tension drain back out of Felix’s body, as Hyunjin looked at them all sitting together in the room with an eyebrow raised. “There you are, angel,” he said. “I didn’t realise you had come down here.”
Felix waved the hand not holding the soldering iron at him. “I’m here!” he said. “I’m working.”
“Yes, I see that,” Hyunjin said. He came into the room and ruffled Felix’s hair. Felix slumped a little against him, his head resting briefly against Hyunjin’s stomach. Their physical closeness was astonishing to see. The only other person who could get away with touching Hyunjin like that was Jeongin. “Look at you all, working. It’s disgusting.”
Seungmin snorted. Hyunjin’s eyes flicked across to Jisung, who smiled at him, the same as he always did, because how could he not. It was amazing how different Hyunjin looked now, like this, soft and casual and bare-faced, compared to how he had looked the night before at Maniac. The effect on Jisung was still the same, like the air was stuck inside his lungs.
Hyunjin stepped away from Felix, who let him go easily, and came around the table so he was standing in front of Jisung, who turned on his stool to look up at him. Hyunjin touched the ends of his hair and then dropped his hand to his side and said, “I wanted to say that I’m sorry.” He did not sound like he wanted to say anything of the sort — he sounded like he was giving this apology with great reluctance. “I was a bitch to you last night. Usually you don’t seem to mind it, but I guess I upset you yesterday.”
His tone was so haughty that Jisung, despite himself, felt some of his upset from last night try to rise up again. But then Hyunjin bit at his bottom lip, and the action turned everything about his body language from snotty to obviously nervous.
Jisung thought two things almost simultaneously. The first was: Christ, he’s so sweet. He knew Hyunjin well enough to know how much he hated saying sorry for anything, how rarely he ever did so. Hyunjin was the type to simply pretend like an incident had never occured, like everyone would just get over it. To be fair, most of the people in this group did just do that, when it came to Hyunjin.
The second thing he thought was: oh, his fucking mouth. This thought made him feel— bad, the same way he always felt when his brain decided to notice something physically attractive about Hyunjin. If it were anyone else, he’d let himself think it, but never Hyunjin. It was only in his weakest moments, his very low points, that he let himself wonder if Hyunjin’s mouth, beautiful and plush, was as soft as it looked.
Felix knew, he realised now. Felix knew how soft Hyunjin’s mouth was to kiss. At least somebody knew, he told himself. At least somebody who didn’t deserve death for knowing it knew.
“Ah, Hyunjin,” he said, voice very light, still smiling at him. “I was just drunk, and kind of tender with it. It’s fine, you don’t have to worry about me.”
Hyunjin shifted on his feet, his sneakers squeaking a little on the concrete floor. “Well, next time you can just tell me to fuck off, you know.”
God. Jisung felt his smile grow wider, as helpless with affection for him as he had ever been in his life. Any anger he felt at Hyunjin had vanished completely with that, at Hyunjin’s fumbling attempts to say sorry. Because he did not need an apology, he never would have thought to expect one. Hyunjin could choose to never talk to Jisung again, and that would be fine. That would be well within Hyunjin’s rights.
He’d known, almost as soon as he had joined this group, that Hyunjin was, beyond any doubt, the prince of this building. It was not Jeongin who decided what was allowed, it was Hyunjin, because his comfort in all things was paramount. None of them would make Hyunjin do anything he didn’t want to do, nobody would force him into anything. And Jisung, without question, would defend to the very death Hyunjin’s right to not owe anything to anybody.
But Hyunjin was choosing to do this, to apologise to Jisung, when they both knew it was not necessary. That meant a lot, to Jisung.
“I would never do that,” he said. “I’d miss looking at you too much.”
Hyunjin rolled his eyes at him. He did not look nervous at all now, he just looked vaguely irritated, the way he always did when he was dealing with Jisung. He kept looking at Jisung though, as if he expected something else, something more from him. Eventually he said, “You are too fucking nice for your own good sometimes, do you know that, Han Jisung?”
“You are literally the first person to ever tell me that,” Jisung told him, grinning.
Hyunjin huffed an annoyed breath at him and then turned around and flounced back to Felix. Felix had been watching them this entire time and when Jisung glanced at him, their eyes met for a second before Felix looked away, back down at the table, but there had been something assessing in Felix’s eyes when he’d looked at Jisung, something almost confused, that had seemed odd on Felix’s face. Jisung wanted to ask him what he’d been looking at, but couldn’t work out how to word it in a way that wasn’t rude, which was not what he wanted.
Hyunjin patted Felix on the head and said, “Let’s go watch a movie, Lix, you can’t do work with a hangover.”
“I’m not hungover anymore,” Felix said, even as he turned off his soldering iron and started clearing up.
Hyunjin made a whining little noise and said, “I am, so come and watch Howl’s Moving Castle with me.”
“I’ve never even heard of that movie,” Felix said. Hyunjin whined again.
“Christ,” said Seungmin, whirling around on his chair to look at them. “Felix, I will clean that up, just take him out of my goddamn workroom before I start throwing things at him.”
Felix started laughing, even as Hyunjin somehow got an arm under his shoulder and almost yanked him bodily off his stool, giving him only enough time to get his feet solidly underneath him before he grabbed his hand and started tugging him to the door.
Jisung looked at those joined hands and thought, this changes nothing, this changes nothing, this changes—
“Bye, Jisung, Seungmin!” Felix called right before the workroom door swung shut behind him with a bang.
Jisung looked up and found Seungmin looking at him. There was no sympathy in that gaze, no pity for Jisung, and yet there was some kind of feeling in there that made Jisung feel like he was— seen, maybe, and understood. It was not humiliating, not now, not like it had been in the early days, when Jisung had felt so much and Hyunjin had barely said more than a single, cutting word to him. Now they all just, by silent agreement, ignored Jisung’s feelings, and Jisung was horribly grateful for it.
“Are you finished?” Seungmin asked quietly, after a brief stretch of quiet.
Jisung sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m finished.”
——
Hyunjin wouldn’t have said he expected it, but he wasn’t overly surprised that Felix had cried at the movie. “Ah, baby,” he said, ruffling Felix’s hair as they left the television room, Felix still sniffling a little bit. “You’re so cute.”
“Don’t be condescending,” Felix said, the effect somewhat undercut by the way he was wiping at his face.
Hyunjin smiled at him, letting it be as full of soft affection as it wanted to be, since Felix wasn’t really looking at him. He was cute, especially now, soft in his borrowed clothing, his hair loose around his face. Hyunjin had enjoyed dressing him up the night before, and looked forward to doing it again in the future, but this more comfortable Felix was appealing in his own way; perhaps it was to do with the way this seemed to be a more real version of him.
Although he wished he could do something about the holes in the t-shirt he was wearing.
He’d just pulled open the door at the end of the hallway, holding it open for Felix, when there was the sound of a different door opening: Chan, sticking his head out of his office. Hyunjin watched as his eyes went first to Felix, who had gone very still and was looking back over his shoulder at him, blinking. Hyunjin, watching the two of them look at each other, felt like saying, Hello, I am here too.
“Lix,” said Chan, stepped out of the office properly, looking concerned. “Are you okay?”
“What?” asked Felix, and then touched his face, where the tear marks were still visible. “Oh! Yes, I’m fine, it was a sad movie.”
“It wasn’t that sad,” Hyunjin said. “He’s just a crybaby.”
Chan’s face softened. Hyunjin had thought, before this, that he knew all the ways that Chan’s face could do that, the different ways his eyes could be soft and caring. He hadn’t known shit, because the way Chan looked at Felix was beyond belief sometimes. He looked like he thought Felix being a crybaby was the most endearing precious thing he’d ever heard — which like, sure, Hyunjin got that, he felt pretty much the same way, but he didn’t need to see it quite so obviously.
Then Chan looked at Hyunjin, and a lot of that softness seemed to slide away. Hyunjin raised an eyebrow at him. Chan said, “Hyunjin, I need to talk to you. Felix, can I borrow him for a bit?”
Felix glanced at Hyunjin, who smiled and nodded at him, and said, “Sure? I’ll go see what we could have for dinner, Hyunjin.”
“Okay, angel,” said Hyunjin. He ruffled his hair again, just for the twin pleasure of Felix lifting a hand to stop him and then obviously melting at the touch, and then waved him goodbye as Felix went through the door Hyunjin was still holding open and then through the PC room. Hyunjin waited until Felix had disappeared into the stairwell before he let the door he was holding close and he turned back to Chan.
Chan thumbed over his shoulder at his office. “Get in here,” he said.
“Ooo,” said Hyunjin, sing-song as he loped down the hallway to the office. “Am I in trouble?”
Chan rolled his eyes at him, which was, oddly, a good sign, before he stepped back to let Hyunjin come into the office. He headed back to his chair behind his desk, while Hyunjin folded himself down onto the couch, pulling the blanket folded over the arm into his lap so he could fiddle with the edge of it. Hyunjin never sat in the hard-backed chairs that Chan kept in here. Jisung had once said that those chairs felt a little bit like being hauled in to speak to the principal, which was not an experience Hyunjin had ever had. It wasn’t that, for him. They just made him viscerally uncomfortable — like the longer he sat in those chairs, the less Chan was his family and the more he was his boss.
Chan leaned back in his desk chair, looking at Hyunjin for a long moment in silence. Hyunjin looked back at him, not saying anything, not smiling either. “You were drunk last night,” Chan said eventually. “I need to know if you remember what I told you.”
Hyunjin did smile, then, a little thing that was more baring his teeth than anything else. “Refresh me.”
The look Chan gave him then was remarkably similar to the one he had given Hyunjin the night before, right after he’d shoved Hyunjin away. “We both know you remember.”
“Hmm, I don’t remember anything,” Hyunjin said, a finger tracing the weave in the couch cushion beneath him. “I’m going to forget it every time you say it, too.”
“Hyunjin,” said Chan. He sounded like he meant it, too. Hyunjin thought that if Chan had ever used that tone of voice on him when he was— younger, in those first few years of Hyunjin being here, it might have devastated him. Chan never had though, even when Hyunjin had been at his most difficult — the long saga of finding a dentist that Hyunjin could bear to put up with, for example — Chan had been gentle and soft with it. So it probably meant something that he was using that kind of tone now.
But Hyunjin wasn’t sixteen and scared of his shadow. He was twenty-one, and hearing that voice just made him want to roll his eyes.
“But he likes you, hyung,” he said.
“Has he told you that?” Chan asked, sounding very much like he knew the answer.
“Well,” Hyunjin said, evasively. “Not exactly. But I can tell.”
He could tell, too, and honestly he was probably not the only one who could tell. There was something about the way Jeongin looked between the two of them that suggested he, too, was not just seeing Chan’s feelings but also reading something into Felix’s. And Felix had not said, to Hyunjin, in so many words, that he liked Chan — but he had not denied it, whenever Hyunjin suggested it. This morning, his rejection of the idea had been remarkably similar to Chan’s: we need to keep it professional.
Chan, for his part, scrubbed his hands over his face. He looked tired — he always looked tired, in some way, but this looked more mental than physical. “Felix has not shown any interest in me like that,” he said. This was such an obvious falsehood that Hyunjin opened his mouth to protest. Chan held up a hand to stop him, and Hyunjin did, because Chan looked very serious about it. “No, he hasn’t.”
“He blushes when you look at him,” Hyunjin said, exasperated.
“That’s because I intimidate him, Hyunjin,” said Chan.
Hyunjin’s first instinct was to inform Chan that he was about as intimidating as wet spinach, but he— faltered. He, too, had been intimidated by Chan, at first. Scared, too. But that was less to do with Chan, and far more to do with Hyunjin — he’d been intimidated by Changbin, too, after all, and he’d never met a person who was clearly more part-teddy bear than Changbin.
“Do you really think that?” he asked, instead. He matched Chan’s serious tone, wanting a proper answer to this. He didn’t like the idea that Chan thought he was scaring Felix. “All you’ve done so far is be kind to him, hyung. And I mean, you’re— handsome.”
Chan, very kindly, didn’t comment on the expression on Hyunjin’s face. He didn’t need to look in a mirror to know he looked like he’d just bitten into a lemon; it was almost physically painful, to have given that compliment. “Yes, I do think that,” Chan said. “He’s skittish and shy at best. I also think— Felix has never known safety in his life like the kind we have given him and he has a lot of reasons to be grateful to me, to feel he owes me, and I dislike thinking how that might manifest, if he thought I wanted him.”
“He knows,” Hyunjin said. “I don’t think anyone on this team doesn’t know, hyung.” Chan looked actually distressed by this news, his serious expression crumpling a little. Hyunjin sighed at him. “You really are just so nice. It’s kind of gross to see.”
In that sense, he thought, Felix and Chan probably deserved each other. Two overly nice people together, so good that it pissed the rest of them off. People like Hyunjin didn’t stand a chance against goodness like that. Chan looked so upset at the idea that Felix might have some idea of how Chan felt — like Chan hadn’t been fucking him with his eyes last night in the nightclub? — that Hyunjin said, “Look, Lix is sweet as sugar, he really is, but what you’re saying— he isn’t the type, hyung.” He softened his voice further. “And he knows you wouldn’t expect that of him, either.”
Chan did not look at him. He was staring behind Hyunjin, at the wall, his eyes unfocused. For a moment, Hyunjin thought maybe Chan was hearing what he was saying, but then Chan shook his head, his eyes sharpening again. “No,” he said. “I can’t. I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair of me. I’m not going to pursue him, Hyunjin. Regardless of what you think, regardless of it he does like me — while this job is happening, while Felix is living with us, I can’t be sure if he knows he can say no. I can’t— I just can’t. So please, stop.”
Hyunjin had to bite back a groan. He couldn’t even complain, was the worst thing, the truly galling thing, because this was one of Chan’s better qualities, perhaps his best quality: he was just so good. Hyunjin was not really used to Chan’s goodness actually feeling this level of obnoxious before, probably because it was the first time it had kept Hyunjin from getting his way. But never let it be said that Hyunjin couldn’t face up to a challenge.
“Fine,” he said, throwing his hands up a little. “Fine! You’re just too good of a guy, I get it. I won’t bother you with it anymore.”
Chan looked obviously relieved. Hyunjin almost felt a little bad about it. Almost. “Thank you,” Chan said.
“Whatever,” said Hyunjin. He got to his feet, stretching his arms out. “Am I dismissed?”
Chan sighed, so heavily it was obviously playful. “Yes, you can go.”
Hyunjin did his best flounce out of the room, knowing that Chan was watching him, knowing that Chan would get a kick out of it. He really did usually like it when Hyunjin was being a brat about things, which made this instance of him not liking it all the more significant. So yes, he thought, as he closed the office door behind him, and started down the hallway. Yes, Hyunjin would leave him alone.
All it really meant, in the end, was that he would have to get Felix to make the first move. A feat which, he was beginning to suspect, was not going to be as difficult as he’d first thought.
Chapter 6
Notes:
what's the point of writing fic if not to project your body/gender dysphoria onto your characters?
ok but on a more serious note, there are a fair number of content warnings on this chapter, so please read the following:
chapter specific warnings: attempted kidnapping, guns, referenced/implied child sex abuse, refenced/implied human trafficking, mentions of suicidal ideation in the past. this chapter, among a lot of other things, deals with Hyunjin's backstory, specifically in his pov section, and delves more heavily into these themes. please take care of yourselves whilst reading ♥
Chapter Text
There was something, Minho thought, to be said for being the kind of stubborn brat that refused to bend for other people that Seungmin was. As much as Seungmin didn’t usually seem it now, there were rare moments where it was very easy to see that he had been a rich kid, had been brought up in such a way that he thought he could simply put his foot down and refuse to move and everyone had to come to him. Minho, as much as it annoyed him sometimes, often thought: yeah, if I had my own workshop and workspace like this, I might insist most meetings took place here.
Seungmin’s argument that the workbench had the most space and that his computers couldn’t be moved was, Minho thought, simply a convenient excuse.
The workbench was currently covered in the blueprints of the Plaza Hotel, the one close to city hall. Seungmin pointed at one of the rooms on the first floor, the blueprint turned a little so it was more facing towards where Chan was perched on one of the stools around the table. “This is where the security room is,” he said. “It’s not particularly close to the gallery, but it’s probably close enough to hear the charges.”
Chan nodded. It wasn’t unusual to have Chan in on these meetings, he sat in on nearly every job planning meeting. It was unusual that Chan was the one being briefed about the job in question, because he was going on it. The last time Chan had come on a job with them had been almost a year ago now, and it had been as low stakes as a job could be, possibly even more low stakes than this one was likely to be. Chan had, as much as he could, stepped completely out of field work.
“How long do you think it’ll take them to get from the security room to the gallery?” Chan asked.
“Depends on how good they are at their job,” said Seungmin dryly. “If they’re good, perhaps five minutes.”
“They’ll probably split up,” Minho said. “They always do, so you’ll only have to deal with one at a time. These,” he said, fishing two brown paper files out of the mass of paperwork dumped on the workbench, “are the guards scheduled for that night. Their credentials are— let’s just say they leave something to be desired.”
Chan nodded again. He looked serious, opening the files and looking at them, but his eyes kept flicking up, looking at something past Seungmin. Minho shifted, turned to look too, to see what was distracting him, and realised that Chan was looking at Seungmin’s computers, where the security feeds had been left up on two of the monitors. There was nothing out of the ordinary outside, just the usual small number of cars and people going past, but one of the feeds was of the kitchen, where a grainy Felix sat at the table, eating what looked like cereal.
For fuck’s sake, Minho thought, and then said, “Hyung.”
Chan’s eyes darted to him, a stuttering movement. It was only out of sheer respect for Chan that Minho didn’t call him out on his obvious distraction. “Hyung,” he said. “Can you walk through the route again for me?”
Chan didn’t sigh about it, like maybe Jisung would have done. This was probably the fourth time Minho had gone over it with him, trying to drill it into Chan’s head exactly where he would have to go on the job. He knew that Chan thought this was overkill, probably even Seungmin thought this was overkill, at this point, but Minho didn’t care. He was going over this again and again for the exact same reason that Chan, even as he was talking through the route through the hotel to Minho, kept glancing at the security feed: Felix.
It had not been Minho’s idea, to change their original plan and send Felix on the job. If it were up to him, Felix would be kept at home until they ran his job, and then maybe Minho would think about trusting him after that. It had been Changbin who suggested that they change the job around, use it as a testing ground for Felix, to see what his skills were actually like.
It’d be a shame, he’d said, hunched over take-out jjajangmyeon in Chan’s office as they discussed it, to not test out those bombs of his.
And so Minho had been asked to come up with an entirely new plan, one in which Chan was the muscle, and Hyunjin was there to actually do what they had been hired to do: steal a painting, without damaging it. And then Felix, too, an unknown, unable to fight, unable to shoot, and his bombs homemade and untested.
Minho hadn’t liked it. He still did not like it. But unlike Seungmin, he could do as he was told. He just wished that Chan could fucking pay more attention.
“It’s not going to be that difficult,” Chan said, after he’d dutifully mapped out his route through the hotel to the gallery, all the little rooms that made it up. “We have been through this.” And then he looked, once again, past Seungmin, where Felix was washing his bowl at the sink.
He’s not even that pretty, Minho wanted to tell him. He wasn’t sure if Chan would argue with him or try to pretend like he didn’t know what Minho was talking about. He seemed determined to keep to that line of denial.
“I just want to make sure,” Minho said. “Hyung, it’s low stakes, it’s not no stakes.”
“And I’m not a newbie, and neither is Hyunjin,” Chan said.
“You might not be newbies, but Felix is,” said Minho. “And for one of the Magpie’s ex-men, he’s disgustingly green.”
At the mention of Felix’s name, Chan’s attention had been lost again. When Minho glanced around at the computers, he caught Seungmin’s eye, who gave him a look of suffering, like he too had noticed how little attention Chan had been paying. Minho, who did not want to have some kind of shared moment with Seungmin at any point in time, looked past him, and found that on the feed, now, Felix in the kitchen had been joined by Jeongin, wearing a pair of shorts and a sweater, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
He looked like he had just woken up, but this was unlikely to be the case, not at this time in the morning. He had socks on that went up to mid-calf, and even in the somewhat blurry footage Minho was charmed by his skinny legs. He was talking to Felix, one of his hands gesturing in the air, and Minho wished that the camera quality was better, so he could see if Jeongin was smiling, wished that there was an audio feed so he could know what they were talking about. Jeongin’s head moved as though he was laughing, and Minho watched that movement, thinking— he wanted to hear Jeongin’s laugh, the slightly awkward rasp of it, so lovely and cute.
Fuck, he thought, with a sinking sense of realisation, as he reluctantly dragged his eyes away from the video feed. I’m as bad as he is.
There was a horror, there, at the thought of being caught staring. A real, true horror, because Chan could be allowed to look at Felix, but Minho was not allowed to look at Jeongin, not in this way. If anyone had seen that, he would be— but when he looked back at the table, nobody seemed to have noticed that his attention had been snagged at all. Seungmin was showing Chan the earpieces that he had modified for the job, explaining what he had done to them, how these new things worked. Chan was still clearly only half paying attention.
Minho turned fully away from the monitors, looking at the others. The knowledge that Jeongin was on those screens was potent, like an itch under his skin. He wanted to look, so badly, so badly that it would have been shocking if he weren’t so used to the way Jeongin drew every part of his attention. But it was always like this, it had been like this for years now.
He understood Chan, understood that need to look probably better than Chan realised. But Christ, he thought, as he watched Chan’s eyes drift once again to the side. Surely it wasn’t too much to expect Chan to pay attention all the same?
He sighed, listening to Seungmin explain technical stuff that Minho didn’t really understand. Once Seungmin finished with his nonsense, Minho would get Chan to go through everything one more time. He wasn’t going to let a supposedly pretty face get in the way of a job going off without a hitch. He could not, would not, risk Chan like that.
——
Chan rapped his knuckles on Hyunjin’s bedroom door and waited until he heard Hyunjin’s absent voice say, “What?” before he opened the door. He wasn’t overly surprised to see him painting, although he only caught a brief glance of whatever it was he was working on, because when Hyunjin saw it was him sticking his head through the door, he shrieked, “Hyung, get out!”
Chan ducked back out immediately. Even knowing that it was just that Hyunjin didn’t want him to see what was on the canvas — his birthday present, most likely — he didn’t try to argue or protest. He simply got out of Hyunjin’s space and stepped back into the hallway to wait for him.
Hyunjin, when he appeared, looked more flustered than angry. “Hyung,” he said, “you really need to announce yourself.”
“I’ll do that,” Chan said, smiling at him. Hyunjin was wearing an old t-shirt, so old that Chan thought it might have been given to him by Changbin around the time he first came to live with them. It was paint-stained at this point, as were Hyunjin’s neck and fingers. His hair was pulled back into a tufty ponytail, out of the way of his work. It was not that Chan liked to interrupt Hyunjin when he was working on his art, but he did like to see artist Hyunjin, this messy, focused creature. How lovely, to have watched Hyunjin settle into this person at close contact.
“Where’s Felix?” he asked, surprised that Felix hadn’t been in the room. It was starting to amuse him, a little, how much the two of them seemed joined at the hip at this point.
Hyunjin shrugged. “He was going to go watch something with Jeongin. I didn’t ask for details, I’ve been working on something. What do you want?” he added, a little huffy, but in a playful way. Chan knew, by now, the way Hyunjin sounded when he was being grumpy because he was grumpy, and when he was being grumpy because he wanted to be a brat.
“Are you really busy?” Chan asked, just in case. Even if Hyunjin was being playful about it, Chan didn’t want to assume that meant it was okay. “If you’re really busy, it doesn’t matter.”
Hyunjin sighed. “No, hyung, I’m not busy. Do you need me for something?”
Chan reached into his back pocket and pulled out the credit card that he’d stashed there. He held it out to Hyunjin, who looked at it in confusion for a few seconds before he took it. “Can you take that,” Chan said to him, “and take Felix out and get him some new clothes, please?”
Hyunjin blinked. Then his face lit up with absolute glee, the way Chan knew it would. “You want me to take Felix out shopping?”
Chan nodded. He did, very much. He’d spent the last three weeks watching Felix rotate between the same set of clothes, most of them old or damaged, and Hyunjin’s hand-me-downs, and he simply couldn’t bear it any longer. He’d thought about buying the clothes for Felix and giving them as a gift, but that had felt both like a gross overstep and slightly— icky. Just another way to blur the boundaries between them, when Felix would not feel comfortable refusing the clothes.
The bigger problem was just that Chan didn’t know what Felix liked in terms of clothing. He could guess, based on the little clothing that Felix owned, but he wasn’t sure if Felix had bought that stuff because he liked it or because it had been the only thing available. Anything he bought Felix was likely to be accepted under obligation and then worn even if Felix didn’t like it, just because Chan had given it to him. That was its own brand of awful.
Hyunjin looked like Chan had just handed him a Christmas present early. “Hyung!” he said. Then his eyes got shrewd. “What budget are we talking here? Am I taking him down to the street markets or can I take him to the Lotte?”
“Oh, no, take him to the Lotte,” Chan said hastily. “Get him some good stuff. But maybe,” he added, as the thought came from him, “maybe not the designer floors? He can probably live without Gucci shirts, wouldn’t you say?”
“It would look ostentatious on him anyway,” Hyunjin said, waving the hand not holding the card in the air. “No, hyung, I’ll get him a great wardrobe, he’s going to look so good, you’ll see.”
Chan suspected that he really would. He trusted Hyunjin’s sense of style, at least more than he trusted his own, and he trusted that Hyunjin would be able to convince Felix to actually accept the clothing in the first place. Felix was still very obviously not happy about the amount of money that was being spent on him, although he seemed to have finally started to eat properly after Hyunjin had scolded him a week or so ago about it. Chan was still arranging Felix’s own credit card but he suspected there’d be another fight about that when it arrived.
Hyunjin looked at him, that sharp, knowing little look in his eyes again. He’d been looking at Chan like that ever since their night out at the club, whenever he caught Chan looking a little too long at Felix without meaning to, whenever Chan said something that made Felix stumble over his words. Chan was growing to severely dislike that look.
“Hyung,” he said, voice alight with mischief. “This really is like you’re his sugar daddy or something.”
“Wouldn’t it make me your sugar daddy too?” Chan asked dryly, and watched Hyunjin’s entire body recoil with horror. “Get him stuff he likes, okay, Hyunjin? And not just stuff you like.”
“Mm,” said Hyunjin. He was already backing into his bedroom again, probably to wash up and change, all thought of his art apparently abandoned in favour of this project now. “I’ll get him stuff he likes and I like and you like, how about that?”
Chan lifted his fist into the air and Hyunjin laughed and slammed the door shut in his face. Chan stood looking at the white-painted wood of it and thought, what a spoiled little brat I have raised. Then he sighed, so fondly it made him smile. Ah well. He wouldn’t have done it any other way, in the end.
He just had to hope Hyunjin had some mercy on him.
——
It was not that Felix had never been to department stores such as these, huge and bustling. It was that, whenever he had come here in the past, it had been with his sisters, who’d usually had a very specific thing in mind. They had known how to be efficient with their time, because the time that Felix had been able to spare to go with them had always been extremely limited.
Felix had not shopped in places like this. Felix had not shopped at all, before he had run off and he’d been buying cheap clothes second-hand. From the age of twelve, after his mother died, Felix had worn whatever clothing his father had given him, without question, without complaint. He had known even from that young age to never argue against what his father told him to do.
It did mean that this was a particularly hard task for him.
“Okay,” said Hyunjin. Considering he knew that Hyunjin wasn’t a particularly patient sort of person, his restraint right now was kind of impressive to Felix. “Lix, do you like this?”
He was holding up a dark blue sweater, with long sleeves and a little logo that Felix didn’t recognise stitched in gold on the left side of the chest. It looked soft, and when Felix reached out to touch the sleeve, he found that it was soft. But did he like it? The question was as confusing as it had been all the other times Hyunjin had asked him on this trip.
“It’s nice,” he said. “I like how soft it is? I don’t know.”
Hyunjin sighed and put the sweater back on the rack. They had been doing this for a solid hour now, wandering through the menswear section and coming up with nothing, because Hyunjin kept asking do you like this, and Felix simply didn’t know.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Ah, angel,” Hyunjin said. “You don’t need to be sorry. I just don’t get why you don’t know what you want to look for. What did you used to wear before?”
Felix wasn’t sure what to say to that. He’d never, in his life that he could remember, had to think about what clothes he liked. He knew what clothes he didn’t like — they’d bypassed that section of the store easily enough, all the button-down shirts in starchy fabrics, the slacks in neutral colours. He’d worn those any time not spent in a school uniform, and after graduation, he’d worn nothing but those when he left his house. Every moment had been a strange sort of torture, an agony that he had not been able to put into words.
He could not bear to wear those again. Hyunjin had picked up one white, collared shirt, seen the look on his face, and said, “Oh, definitely not this, huh?” And put it back down again.
“Shirts,” he said eventually. “Slacks. Those awful shoes with the pointed toes. That’s what I had to wear to— work. When I was at home I just wore the stuff I wear now. I didn’t really have anything in between that.”
“Why did you buy the things you bought when you were on the run?” Jeongin asked, in his forthright kind of way, as he picked through a display of v-neck t-shirts for the size he wanted.
“Because they were cheap,” Felix admitted. “And because they seemed comfortable.”
“That’s it?” Jeongin asked, straightening up, without one of the t-shirts in his hands. “Nothing more, like the colours or styles or whatever?”
Felix shrugged helplessly. He hadn’t had that luxury. He had found the cheapest things possible in a size that didn’t— constrict him, the way the shirts always had, their collars so close around his throat. His first items of clothing had been a little more expensive, because he hadn’t known to conserve his money, and he’d been desperate to change out of the last thing his dad had seen him in. Those things had been thrown in a trash can and he’d been left with— sweatpants, t-shirts, his threadbare jeans, his worn sneakers.
“Okay,” said Hyunjin, flicking his hair back over his shoulder before putting an arm around Felix’s shoulders. “Let’s try a different area.”
Felix let himself be steered out of that particular section of the store, feeling small under Hyunjin’s arm and not in a good way. It was pathetic, he knew, to have no idea about clothing, no idea of himself — and more than pathetic, he knew it seemed suspicious. There was no reason for him to have such little idea of who he was.
This fear of seeming too out of touch prompted him to accept, over the next fifteen minutes, a pair of dark jeans and a black sweater, oversized and thin, both of which he thought he’d be happy to wear. Hyunjin, carrying both things to the register in that area of the store said, “I’ll get these but you’d better not be like Chan-hyung.”
“What’s wrong with Chan-hyung’s clothes?” Felix asked. He kept his voice very neutral, because he wasn’t going to let on that he kind of had a thing for the way Chan dressed, even though he definitely had a thing for how Chan dressed.
“Black,” said Jeongin and Hyunjin at the same time, exchanging a joint weary look. This had such an air of longstanding complaint about it that Felix, despite the anxious feeling still inside him, couldn’t help but laugh.
“Alright,” said Hyunjin, handing the bags to Jeongin, who was already carrying the bags of underwear and socks that Felix had managed to pick out without much issue earlier in the trip. “Should we try upstairs?”
Felix blinked at him. “But we already bought stuff,” he said.
“Ah, angel baby, you’re so cute,” said Hyunjin, in his most condescending voice. He reached up to pat Felix on the head, and Felix ducked away before he could, scrunching his face at him. “Don’t look at me like that, it’s even cuter. We didn’t come here to get you a singular pair of jeans and one sweater, Lix. You need a full wardrobe.”
“But Hyunjin, that’s going to be expensive,” Felix said.
“Yes?” said Hyunjin, before grabbing his hand and yanking him onto the escalator.
Felix trailed after him, feeling the anxiety build a little more inside him, as Hyunjin took them on a tour of what seemed to be a floor of younger fashion styles. Some of this appealed more, more casual than what they’d looked at so far, but the buzzing feeling inside him kept him from being able to make a decision, to simply choose something and be done with it.
“I don’t know,” he kept saying, until he thought, at one point, that he might cry with it.
It was Hyunjin who noticed the way his eyes kept sliding, without his active permission, away from all the polo shirts and dark branded leisure wear, to the display on the other side of the walkway. There was a lilac sweater there, a soft looking thing that his gaze kept being drawn to, and he watched as Hyunjin looked over at it and then back at Felix and said, “You like that?”
Felix smiled at him. “It’s in the women’s section,” he said.
Hyunjin, instead of nodding, said, “So what?”
He put the shirt that he had in his hands down and then strode across the walkway to where the lilac sweater was, Felix scrambling after him, Jeongin following more sedately, perhaps more used to the sudden, purposeful way Hyunjin moved sometimes. Hyunjin rifled through the hangers until he found the sweater in the largest size and then held it up against Felix in a considering way. “Oh man,” he said. “This will look so cute on you.”
Felix thought about protesting again, saying it’s for women, but the voice in his head was his father’s, and Jeongin had joined them too, and was touching the sleeve of the sweater with two fingers and saying, “Oh it’s so soft, it’ll be nice.”
“Do you like it?” Hyunjin asked Felix. His tone left no room for dissemination; it was a yes or no answer. Felix, after a moment, just nodded. Hyunjin nodded back and said, “You’ll try it on. But first, let’s see if we can find more stuff like this, okay?”
Felix looked at him, the expectant way he was holding the sweater out for Felix to take, and then at Jeongin, who was smiling at him. “Okay,” he said, taking the sweater gingerly. It felt a little bit like his dad might pop up out of nowhere to scream at him. But nothing happened, except for Jeongin linking their free arms together, and gently leading him to where Hyunjin was heading back out into the fray.
It was easier, after that. He still didn’t really have a good idea of what he wanted, but it seemed that Hyunjin, given an example of something that he had expressed a positive opinion on, knew what sort of thing to look for. He wandered through the different areas, plucking things out, looking at Felix’s face to check his reaction, and then either handing it to him or putting it back.
“Hyunjin,” Felix said eventually, as Hyunjin tried to hand him a pale blue cardigan. “This costs seventy thousand won.”
“Yeah, and it’s cute,” Hyunjin said, waving it until Felix took it. “Sometimes you have to pay money for things, Lix.”
“I know that,” said Felix.
Hyunjin smiled at him and turned to put the other sizes he had in his hand back. There’d been a smoothness to his movements before, that quick precision, but suddenly he slowed a little, fingers more careful as he slid the hangers back onto the rack. When he turned to Felix again, he reached out to tuck some hair behind Felix’s ear; this time, Felix didn’t duck away from it. “I’ll be right back,” Hyunjin said, and Felix blinked at him. “You and Jeongin can keep looking for stuff, I’ll catch up with you, okay?”
Felix nodded, a little surprised. “Okay!” trilled Jeongin, from where he was rummaging through a display of colourful socks.
Before Felix could ask if everything was okay, Hyunjin had already walked off, seemingly in the direction of the escalators. Felix drew a little closer to Jeongin, who looked up, smiled at him, and said, “Can we look for something for me, maybe?”
That was a far more appealing prospect to Felix, who thought there was more than enough for him between all the clothes they were holding. He was curious, too, about what kind of clothing Jeongin was interested in, because today was maybe the first time that Felix had seen Jeongin in something casual other than sweatpants or pyjamas. He, like Felix had been doing these past few weeks, did not seem to go out much, and as such seemed to live in comfortable things. Today, though, he was wearing jeans and a dark grey sweatshirt, both of them a little baggy. Comfortable, still, but in a more stylish way.
Hyunjin had come out dressed in skinny jeans and a plaid, flannel shirt and had not seemed to care at all that his hair colour was getting him side-eyed by the sales assistants everywhere they went. Next to the two of them, in his ill-fitting jeans and second-hand hoodie, Felix felt positively shabby.
Jeongin led him back through some of the areas they’d already visited, not venturing too far from where Hyunjin had left them. He seemed genuinely interested in Felix’s opinions on the things he picked up; Felix wondered if he’d learned that skill from his brother. He, too, seemed to be looking at— paler things, nothing like the clothes he was wearing. Nothing like Felix had seen him in at all, so far.
Felix gave his opinions, as Jeongin rejected most of it, and tried not to worry as the minutes ticked over and Hyunjin didn’t return. Jeongin, for his part, seemed completely unbothered by it. It was possible he was used to this kind of thing, with Hyunjin — Felix was still very new to knowing him. It had only been just over three weeks, for him. Jeongin, Felix knew, had known Hyunjin for years.
Eventually Jeongin picked up a light purple v-neck sweater, a soft knit. It was not quite like the pastels that Hyunjin had been picking out for Felix, a slightly dustier shade than that, but it was a warm colour, one which would look lovely with Jeongin’s cheekbones. He held it up against himself, looking at the full length mirror against the wall, and said, “What do you think, hyung?”
“I think it’ll look great on you,” Felix said, truthfully. He reached out and snagged the price tag to check how much it was and then carefully let go. He made himself say, “I think you should get it.”
Jeongin turned to look at him and then his face brightened. He lifted the hanger and waved the sweater so it swayed gently in the air. “Hyung!” he said. “I’m going to get this!”
Felix looked behind himself too and saw that Hyunjin had returned, coming towards them with a smile on his face as he took in Jeongin’s enthusiasm. “Yeah?” he said. “Aw, Jeongin, you’ll look so cute!”
He tried to pinch Jeongin’s cheek. Jeongin smacked his hand away, playful but still hard enough for the slap of it to be audible. Hyunjin pouted at him, rubbing his hand, and then turned to Felix. “Are you ready to try these clothes on?”
Felix shrugged at him. He was as ready as he’d ever be, he supposed.
If he was unused to shopping for clothes, he was even more unused to trying things on. He half-expected the employee in the men’s fitting rooms to protest at the amount they were taking in, but he seemed a little intimidated by Hyunjin and just let them past without a word. Hyunjin picked a handful of things from their piles and gave them to Felix. “Here,” he said. “Try these on first.”
Felix did so: some pale blue jeans, slim fit without being too tight, and a pale pink sweater, something that Hyunjin had grabbed for him and which Felix still wasn’t sure about. He pulled them on and only let himself look in the mirror after he was done, a little— afraid, maybe, of what he would see.
Oh, he thought, looking at himself. Hmm.
He looked— younger. That was his first thought, simply that he looked younger, more his age maybe. His old clothes had always been about projecting an older, more masculine persona; these clothes did not even try for that. The colours suited his blond hair, didn’t wash him out like he’d been afraid they might. Looking at himself in the mirror, he couldn’t help but think: oh, this really was what I was looking for this entire time.
He stepped out of the fitting room, where Hyunjin and Jeongin were sitting together on one of the couches there, Jeongin looking at his phone. Hyunjin saw him first, before he made a noise that was just short of a cackle and said, “I continue to out-do myself.”
Jeongin looked up from his phone. He actually gasped out loud, which made Felix smile, despite the slightly self-conscious way he was feeling, standing like this in front of them. “Hyung, it suits you so much,” Jeongin said. “You look so cute!”
Cute. Felix turned the word over and over in his mind. He’d been called cute before, although after the age of ten it had been more likely to come from old women on the street than from anyone else. He’d been called cute by men in bars too, usually as a prelude to getting him on his knees, but that had felt very different to this. Cute. Not manly, not masculine, not what his father had always insisted on — just him.
“Do you like it?” Hyunjin asked. He was looking carefully at Felix’s face, reading him. Felix could only nod. Hyunjin smiled at him, one of his real smiles, without anything behind it other than kind happiness. How boyish and beautiful he looked when he smiled like that. “Good. You look it, you look like you like it. Here,” he added, pulling another set of clothing items out of everything piled up between him and Jeongin on the couch. “Try this on next.”
Felix did as he was told, and they worked their way through everything they had collected. Some of it, Felix rejected, but most of it he put in a personal yes pile. He even kept the black sweater, surprised, when he tried it on, by how good he felt in it too. It was a shame to get dressed back in his normal clothes.
When he stepped out of the fitting room for the final time, he was surprised to see that Hyunjin and Jeongin had not left the clothing for him to sort through and instead had it all piled in their arms. “Come on,” Hyunjin said, jerking his head in the direction of the entrance. “Let’s pay for this stuff and then we can go look at shoes.”
Felix stared at him, horrified, but Hyunjin had already walked away, that purposeful stalk again, and Jeongin was following after. “Hyunjin!” Felix cried, hurrying after him. “Hyunjin, we can’t buy all of it!”
Hyunjin gave him a bewildered look over his shoulder. “Yes, we can,” he said.
“That’s going to be so much money,” Felix said. He wanted to grab all the clothing out of Hyunjin’s arms and pass them to a nearby sales assistant and beg them to put it all back.
“Haven’t we been through this?” Hyunjin asked. He had not slowed down, using those long legs decidedly to his advantage, and Felix watched as he walked up to a cash register and disgorged the contents of his arms onto it. The eyes of the cashier there lit up. Jeongin gave Felix a gleeful sort of look before he too dropped his pile of clothing down.
“It’s too much,” Felix said helplessly, as the cashier started scanning everything, quickly like she thought they would change their minds if she took too long. “Hyunjin, it’s really too much. You can’t buy all this for me.”
“It’s not all for you,” Hyunjin said airily. He dug through and pulled out a pale blue, long-sleeved shirt that had faint white stripes down it, a matching one to something Felix had picked out in pale yellow. “Remember? This is for me.”
“Hyunjin, you know what I mean,” Felix said, embarrassingly close to stomping his foot in frustration.
“Oh, sweetheart,” said Hyunjin. He reached out and squeezed Felix’s shoulder. “We haven’t even looked at shoes yet.”
And so it went. As soon as they’d paid for the clothes, Hyunjin flashing his slim red credit card like someone out of a drama, he dragged a morose Felix to the shoes department, where he bought Felix a pair of sneakers and a pair of black boots, saying they were to replace the ones that Felix had given back to Jisung. Then he had sent Felix to the bathroom to change into some of the new clothes, tugging the tags off them with his hands.
“Okay,” he said, when Felix emerged in the pale jeans and a white sweater, a mint suede jacket over the top. He held out the new sneakers, already laced up. “Now put these on.”
Felix did so, sighing the entire time, and once he’d finished, Hyunjin had snatched the old ones up, stalked to the nearest trash can, and thrown them inside with a vehemence that felt entirely heartfelt. Felix had not even protested.
Then there had been the mortifying ordeal of carrying all those bags on the subway, so many that even between the three of them, they’d seemed to be weighed down with it. Now, in Hyunjin’s rooms, with all the bags in a heap on Hyunjin’s bed, Felix just felt—
“This is terrible,” he said, sinking to the floor a little bit in a hunch. “Hyunjin, you just spent so much money.”
“I don’t know why you’re so bothered,” Hyunjin said, already pulling things out of bags in order to snip the labels off. He was making neat little stacks of things as he went: shirts and sweaters and pants, a special pile of rolled up pairs of socks. “It’s not like it’s my money, it’s all Chan-hyung’s money.”
“That makes it worse!” Felix almost shrieked. “Like, you get how that makes it worse, right?”
He’d been trying desperately to not think about it the entire day. How much had Chan done for him, from the very beginning? He’d opened his home to Felix, given him a place to stay, given him warmth and food and comfort. Given him friends, however accidentally it had been done. But an entire gifted wardrobe was entirely too much, a complete step too far. Felix had no way to thank him for this, no way that was available to him.
Hyunjin was laughing at him. He just kept making his piles, each one getting a little higher with every new item of clothing that was added to it. “Maybe,” he said, voice a little sly in that way that never failed to make Felix tense, “you should give him a little fashion show.”
Felix felt himself blush. He hated how easily it happened. It seemed to be happening more, especially around Hyunjin, whenever he brought up Chan in that insinuating way he had. But he couldn’t help it. Every time he heard that tone of voice, he remembered Hyunjin saying, fucking Chan-hyung, remembered the heat of Chan’s eyes on him at Maniac.
He straightened up again suddenly, resisting the urge to fan his face with his hands. “I’m going to go get stuff to make cookies,” he said. They’d finished eating his batch of double chocolate days ago. “I need to— repay him, someway.”
“Oh, I know one way you could repay him,” Hyunjin said. Felix bared his teeth at him; Hyunjin laughed again. Even though he was laughing at Felix, it was still nice to hear. That playful comfort between them was not something Felix could simply take for granted, not when he’d never had it before. “But if it’ll make you feel better, then sure, you can go get supplies. I’ll figure out where I’ll put all this while you’re gone.”
Felix, already backing his way to the door, away from all that clothing, said, “Make sure you keep the receipts.”
“Too late, angel,” Hyunjin said. “I already took all the tags out.”
Felix said, “I hate you.” And left with Hyunjin’s laughter loud behind him.
——
It was earlier than Chan expected when he finished his phone call with their weapons dealer. He was used to these things taking a while: even in a business relationship that was fairly good, it would not do to seem too eager to rush through and get down to business, for fear that the eagerness might translate to desperation. And so it meant pleasantries, Chan asking about friends and acquisitions and whatever else he’d noted about his business contacts, all kept in a spreadsheet that he consulted before every call.
But the call today had gone well, both of their purposes aligned where it mattered, and so Chan had finished with ten minutes spare before he was supposed to go and meet Changbin to head to the club. On a day such as this, one where his calendar was full of meetings and phone calls and no real time for lunch, these ten minutes were something of a luxury.
He turned his computer off, stood up and stretched. About three different joints in his back crunched, making him groan. Jeongin had gone through a phase, when he was younger, before Hyunjin had even arrived, of giving massages, to the extent of looking up videos of how to do it when Changbin used to take him to the library every so often. Chan would have bullied Jeongin into helping his poor older brother out, but he remembered volunteering to be Jeongin’s practise partner and even the memory of that pain made him wince. Maybe he’d just try to book somewhere else if he could.
He left the office and locked the door behind him, careful to remember to do so. The door to Jeongin’s television room was hanging open, the faint sounds of talking drifting through. When Chan looked in, Jeongin was curled up on his side on the couch, the lights off, watching a movie that Chan half-recognised, which probably meant it was very old indeed, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d watched a movie.
“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t know you guys were back.”
“Mmm,” said Jeongin. He didn’t bother sitting up, didn’t even really look over at Chan. “We haven’t been back for long. Hyunjin-hyung spent a lot of money, hyung.”
“I’m sure he did,” Chan said dryly. He hadn’t expected anything less. He was just hoping that it was an expense that could be easily absorbed and not one which required shifting his budget around. He didn’t care; it was worth it, in the end. “I’m heading to Maniac, Jeongin, with Changbin. Text me if you need anything, okay?”
Jeongin did something with his head that would possibly have been a nod if he’d been sitting upright. He seemed totally absorbed in his movie, but his eyes were— half-open, like he was halfway to sleep. It made sense, to Chan, knowing that Jeongin had gone on the shopping trip with Hyunjin and Felix. Jeongin went out so rarely, interacted with so few people normally, that extended time spent in public like that often did drain him much faster than it might other people.
Chan smiled at him, unable to keep it off his face and not wanting to besides. Of all the things in his life, he regretted Jeongin the least. He left the door open, knowing that Jeongin had probably left it that way for a reason, and turned and headed out to the stairwell.
He sent a text message to Changbin as he did so, letting him know that Chan would meet him outside, around the front of the building, instead of in his office like they’d originally planned. Then he put his phone in his pocket, his footsteps down the stairs echoing slightly, the click-clack of his somewhat nicer dress shoes, rather than his sneakers.
Once he reached the ground floor he stuttered, a little, having forgotten the new chain and padlock on the front doors, the heavy metal cabinet Minho had shoved here to keep it closed. So he swerved to go out the back door, exiting into the narrow side alley that opened, to his right, on the small parking lot where they kept their car. He turned left instead so he could walk out onto the main street, stepping out into the sunlight that didn’t reach the side street.
It was a slightly chilly day, one of those days that really heralded the arrival of autumn, but the sun was strong, warming him just a little. He hadn’t bothered with a jacket, and it was the right choice — his sweater was enough to keep him warm, when the weather was like this. He felt like he had so rarely been able to step outside recently, during the daytime, before the sun had gone down and the lights of the city came on. It was nice. It made him feel a lot less like a cave monster just taking up space in his office.
Cars drove past, most of them going too fast, the sound of their rumbling washing over Chan as they went. There weren’t many people out on the street at this time though, late-afternoon, after the lunch time rush had been and gone for the handful of scattered restaurants still in business around here. He turned his face up to the sky, caught a flash of something pale in his peripheral, and felt his eyes dragged towards it like a compass needle to true north.
It was Felix. Of course it was Felix — nobody else could have drawn his eye as easily as that. He felt himself smile, unable to help himself when there was nobody around to see it, nobody around to notice. Felix was, he realised with a thrill that he tried to repress as best as he could, wearing some of the new clothes that Hyunjin had helped him buy, that Chan had paid for. Pale jeans, a crisp white sweater that complimented his complexion. He was wearing a mint green jacket over the top, which pleased Chan, because it meant that Hyunjin had remembered to get practical things, and also that Felix couldn’t possibly be cold. Every time Chan had thought about Felix trying to get through the winter in that threadbare hoodie he’d worn the first time he arrived, he’d felt a little bit sick about the entire thing.
He wondered what else Hyunjin and Felix had bought. It’d be overkill, to ask to see it, like someone perusing their wares, perhaps. He’d have to simply wait and see what Felix chose to wear, he supposed.
Felix was holding plastic bags, Chan realised, probably full of groceries, though he couldn’t see what label was on them at this distance. There didn’t seem to be anyone else with him, which struck Chan as odd, for Felix — it had become so obvious that Felix didn’t like to go anywhere on his own that everyone else had bypassed making fun of him for it and went straight into simply offering to accompany him places if he expressed a desire to go there.
He thought about raising his hand to wave, but the lowering sun was behind him and he didn’t think Felix would be able to see him anyway. He watched though, as Felix came closer, the bags swinging in his hands. His head was moving like he was bopping it to music, although Chan couldn’t see if he was wearing headphones or not. It was cute, that unselfconscious movement, almost like a dance. To be fair, Chan had to admit, most everything about Felix was cute.
A breeze kicked up, knocking loose a flurry of yellow ginko tree leaves which swirled around Felix. The cars kept zipping past, the sun glinting bright off their windshields. It was like a scene from a drama, Chan thought, momentarily considering pulling his phone out to snap a picture.
He was still paused in indecision when a car pulled out of the main line of traffic, a black SUV, and rolled up onto the curb towards one of the restaurants. Felix skirted away from it, his movements jerky like he’d sort of lost track of himself, but the car had already stopped.
Chan, mostly worried Felix was about to be bumped, realised a bit belatedly that the Chinese restaurant the car had lopsidedly settled in front of had been closed for three months now. He’d barely begun to feel the faintest stirrings of unease when the back door of the SUV slid open and a man jumped out, crossed the couple of steps to where Felix now had his back to him, and seized Felix around the waist.
The grocery bags went flying. Felix screamed, a noise of such pure terror that Chan’s heart stuttered at the sound. He was in motion before he was even aware of it, going from standing to a dead sprint, faster than he thought he had ever moved in his life. His chest burned, the cool air shuddering through him, but he did not, could not, slow down.
Felix was struggling, writhing like a feral animal, still screaming, but he was easily overpowered, his attacker practically twice his size. Chan ran, and watched with an increasing sense of raw panic as Felix was dragged backwards, his feet scrambling across the ground, and was yanked into the SUV.
The only thing that saved them, their one saving grace, was that Felix was fighting so hard that although they got most of his body into the vehicle, the bottom half of his legs were still flailing outside. They couldn’t shut the door, and Chan had just about reached them as they seemed to decide to make a run for it anyway. As the car started to roll slowly away, lurching off the curb, Felix’s screaming took on a hysterical note that made Chan’s entire body flush with a corresponding horror.
Chan hit the side of the car hard, grabbing at the edge of the door, the car’s roll forward helping him to heave it back, further open. He flung himself into the mess of thrashing bodies, managing to grab onto one of Felix’s arms. And then threw himself backwards again, trying to take Felix with him.
It worked, mostly, the bulk of Felix sliding back out of the van, but bringing the man holding him along with him. There was shouting from the men inside — a few of them, not many, Chan barely spared them the attention it took to register their presence, as he continued to pull. Felix had both hands clamped around his arm now, clinging to him, almost clawing in his desperation to escape. The car stuttered to a stop as the man still holding Felix was dragged across the seats inside until it was his legs now that were hanging out, Felix a struggling dead weight between them, now screaming hyung, hyung, please— as Chan fought to get him out, inch by agonising inch.
The man shouted something — Chan unable to work out what over the rushing blood in his ears — and slid further out of the SUV to put one foot on the asphalt. Chan didn’t know what he planned to do, whether he wanted to rush at Chan or strengthen his ability to pull Felix back, but that sudden sag in their tug of war over Felix gave Chan the space to grab for his gun. He pulled it out, flipped off the safety, and reached around Felix until he had hit the body of this stranger. Then he pulled the trigger, twice.
The man let go of Felix and collapsed back into the SUV. Felix fell forward, into Chan’s arms, his feet barely on the ground as Chan staggered backwards, trying to get them both as far away from that open door as possible. He could hear Changbin’s voice shouting but he still couldn’t quite make anything out. He had his gun still pointed at the car, thought about shooting again, but the door suddenly slammed shut and the vehicle peeled away in a screech of tires.
Once it had swerved wildly around the corner and out of sight, Chan flipped the safety back on, tried to shove the gun blindly back into its holster but he was shaking and missed, the gun falling to the ground with a clatter. He didn’t even try to pick it up. Felix was clinging to him, both arms wrapped around Chan’s waist, almost too hard, pressed to Chan’s front so tightly that it felt like he was trying to press himself into Chan’s skin. He was crying, huge shuddering sobs that left him shaking so hard it felt like he was going to shake apart. Chan put both arms around him, around his narrow shoulders, holding him almost as tightly back.
“They’re gone,” he said, as quietly as he could while still being heard over the sound of Felix’s crying. “You’re safe, they’re gone.”
“Hyung,” gasped Felix, lifting his head and looking at him, his face blotchy with tears. He was patting at Chan’s sides with his hands, an oddly frantic motion on someone who wasn’t pulling back at all. “Hyung, they— shot you? Did they shoot you?”
Oh, thought Chan, a little numbly. Of course Felix hadn’t seen who had been shot, in his state of blind panic. The fact that he was worrying about Chan at all in his situation filled Chan with an emotion he could not quite put a name to. “No, Felix, I shot them, I’m not hurt, I’m okay.”
Felix’s face crumpled anew. He’d been crying anyway, but this was— a state of almost instant hysterics, like now that he knew Chan was unharmed, the tears really had a grip on him. He put his face against Chan’s neck and cried into Chan’s shirt, as Chan pulled him in close again, held Felix so close he was a little worried that he might be hurting him, but Felix didn’t say anything.
“It’s okay,” Chan murmured, over and over, his shirt turning damp with Felix’s tears. “It’s okay, I have you, you’re okay, we’re okay.”
Changbin had reached them now. He scooped up Chan’s gun from the ground and said, “What the fuck just happened?”
Chan didn’t answer, just kept murmuring almost nonsensical reassurances into Felix’s ear. The rush of panicked adrenaline that had sent him flying down the street was washing out of his body leaving only a sickening, jittery anxiety. He had, he knew, been almost too late. If he had not moved so fast, if Felix had not struggled quite so hard, if he had not had his gun— he would not be holding Felix like this, safe and close. He would be standing on this street while that SUV disappeared and Felix would have been gone. He would have never seen him again.
Changbin looked at the ground, the flung bags of groceries. A container of eggs had smashed everywhere, a carton of milk slowly leaking across the pavement. “Hyung, we should get him inside,” he said. “We don’t know if those guys will come back.”
Chan nodded, and held out his hand for the gun Changbin was holding. As he put it back in his holster, more careful this time, Changbin started to pick up the grocery bags and whatever could be salvaged from them. Chan put a hand against the back of Felix’s neck, as gentle as he could possibly be, feeling the dampness of his collar now, and said, “Felix, shh, shh, you’re okay. They’ve gone, you’re safe. We’re going to go back inside, okay, can you walk with me?”
It took Felix a moment to answer, but eventually Chan felt his head move in a shallow nod against his skin. Felix didn’t pull away though, and Chan had to gently move him until he had one arm around Felix’s shoulders, Felix’s body curled into his. Felix clung to his other hand, the same way he had done when Chan had dragged him out of the car. He was still crying, the sound breaking Chan’s heart into further pieces with every passing moment. There was still a hysterical note to it that Chan was growing increasingly concerned about.
“Lix,” he said quietly, as they did a slow shuffle back down the street, Changbin following behind them with the bags in one hand and his gun in the other. “Lix, hyung has you, don’t be so scared anymore, you don’t need to cry. Look, there’s our building, there’s home, you’re so close.”
Changbin darted ahead to hold the door for him, and eventually they got Felix inside the cool, dark interior of the stairwell. Once the door shut behind them, Felix seemed to calm down a little, though he was still crying, still clinging to Chan like he couldn’t stop. Chan helped him to the stairs, thinking for a moment that he might have to simply carry Felix up all four floors, but Felix started to climb with him.
They had just passed the door to the PC room when Chan realised that Felix was saying something, mumbling almost to himself underneath his tears. Chan leaned in and found that Felix was saying, “They were trying to take me alive,” over and over again, the words almost slurring with the way he was half-chanting them.
Chan had no idea what to do or what to say. There was a feeling in him that took him back to waiting in the ER with Jeongin after that man broke in and attacked him — sitting there with his arm around his little brother, whose arm was broken and whose nose was broken and who had been unable to stop crying, and who should have been safe and had not been. There were no guarantees in this life, especially not that of safety, which had been a hard lesson to learn but he had done what he could to bring it to his family. It hurt, seeing it fail once again.
Changbin stopped halfway up the stairs and turned back to look at him. Chan looked up at him and then said to Felix, “Come on, come on.” Then he continued to lead him up the stairs.
Hyunjin was curled up on the couch in the apartment, drawing on his tablet. He looked up when they came through the door and then jumped up so fast that the tablet almost went crashing to the floor. “Oh my god, baby,” he said, as Chan ushered Felix further inside and the door was finally shut behind him. “What on earth happened?”
Changbin put the remnants of the groceries on the counter with a sigh. Hyunjin had come over, was already fussing over Felix, wiping away his tears. Felix was no longer speaking, just crying in a way that was hitching, slightly less hysterical now he was in the apartment. He was still clinging to Chan’s arm, but with his face turned more towards Hyunjin.
“What happened?” Hyunjin asked Chan, looking confused, and more concerned than Chan thought he’d seen in years. “Why is he crying like this, is he hurt?”
“No,” said Chan. “He’s not hurt. Can you take him to the couch? I’ll explain but— he needs to sit down.”
He needed to sit down and now, in the apartment, with other eyes on him, he was feeling how close Felix was to him, the way Chan had wrapped around him all the way up. Felix had needed that comfort but Chan could feel it in himself, the urge to do more, give more. A large part of him wanted to simply march Felix to his bedroom, put him in his bed, wrap him in blankets. Wanted to keep him there, safe and secure, where Chan could just— look at him. He wanted to know that Felix was safe, and the urge to keep him was so strong that it was frightening him a little bit.
Instead of doing any of that, he took his arm from around Felix’s shoulders and, with a light touch to the top of Felix’s spine, nudged him in Hyunjin’s direction, who immediately put his arm around him. “Go with Hyunjin, okay, Lix?” Chan murmured to him, as for a moment it seemed that Felix wasn’t going to let go of his arm. “I’ll be here, I won’t leave the room for now, but you go with Hyunjin, okay?”
It took another moment, but Felix did let go of his arm, sinking into the circle of Hyunjin’s. Chan took a step back, putting another bit of distance between them, because now that he was no longer holding Felix, he had no excuse for it. Instead of looking at Felix, he looked across at Changbin. “Go get Seungmin,” he said. “And Minho.”
Changbin nodded and left the apartment. Hyunjin, murmuring soft words of comfort to Felix, had led him slowly to the couch, where he sat and pulled Felix down with him. Felix went with the movement, let Hyunjin pull him right down into his lap, Felix’s legs slung across the couch cushions. Hyunjin put both arms around him, holding him tight, and Chan watched as all the energy seemed to drain out of Felix and he slumped with a soft noise of exhaustion, head against Hyunjin’s shoulder.
Hyunjin ran a hand over his hair, looking at Chan. “What happened?” he asked.
“Some men in a van tried to take him outside,” Chan said, softly, as if speaking that way wouldn’t hurt Felix too much. Hyunjin’s eyes went wide with horror, clutching Felix even closer. “I was able to stop them, but he’s understandably shaken. But you’re okay, Felix, you’re okay now.”
Felix said nothing. He didn’t look like he was okay. He was looking at Chan with swollen eyes, face set in a tired, almost empty expression, like there was nothing left inside of him now that the fear had left.
“What the fuck,” Hyunjin said, as Chan went and got one of the chairs from the table to bring over to where they were sitting on the couch. “Someone really just— in broad daylight?”
Chan nodded, and then watched as Hyunjin’s own words caught up with him, his face grimacing a little. He, too, had been taken in the middle of the day, on his way home from school. But the surprise was still valid; it was a lot easier to snatch a child than it was to snatch a full-grown man, however small Felix may be.
The keypad beeped but when the door swung open it was Jisung who tripped inside. “Hyung,” he said, as soon as he saw Chan. “I was looking for you, there were gunshots outside, I don’t know—”
He stopped, taking in the room: Felix in Hyunjin’s lap, held close, and Chan sitting next to them, the quiet, tense atmosphere. He looked, for a moment, like he wasn’t sure what to say, which was unusual with Jisung, and then his face turned serious. That serious look had surprised Chan, the first time he saw it, because Jisung’s face seemed to be one made for humour, but Jisung’s sense of time and place seemed— finely tuned to an art. He said, “What’s going on?”
“Someone tried to kidnap Felix,” Hyunjin said. Felix turned his face a little so that it was pressed a little more into Hyunjin’s neck. Hyunjin touched his hair again, a sweep of his fingers through it.
“They tried to what?” Jisung asked.
“Come in and sit down,” Chan told him, motioning to the couch opposite where Hyunjin and Felix were sitting. “The gunshots were me.”
“It was you?” Jisung asked, at the same time Hyunjin said, “You shot them?”
“One of them,” said Chan. Jisung sat down, watching Hyunjin and Felix closely, his expression one of concern. Chan was pleased to see that Felix didn’t seem bothered by his presence, and hadn’t really twitched when the door had opened. That seemed like an okay, if not great sign to Chan.
He leaned forward on his seat. “Felix,” he said, very softly. Felix lifted his head a bit to look at him, and then sat up a little, as if to demonstrate that he was, against all odds, there and listening to him. There were still visible tear tracks on his face. “You said when you first came here that Lee Jaerim had put a hit on you. Have you been attacked before?”
Felix nodded, the movement a little slow, his hair brushing Hyunjin’s neck. “That was—” He broke off, clearing his throat. Even if the evidence of his tears wasn’t stark on his face, it would be there in his voice. “I noticed a man following me,” he said. “Kind of just— staring at me? Like he was trying to decide if he recognised me or not. He made a call to someone, I couldn’t overhear it, and then he started— closing the distance between us. I took off running, and he followed me still. I ended up losing him in an active train yard. I hid in one of the open cars.”
His voice, when he finished, was barely more than a whisper. Chan wasn’t sure if the fear colouring it was still from what had just happened or if it was a remnant of the fear that he had felt back then, too. How scared would he have been, hiding like that, alone and unarmed. No Chan — no one at all — to help him.
“That man,” Chan said, keeping his voice as gentle as he possibly could, “he didn’t try to shoot you?”
“He had a gun,” Felix said sluggishly after mulling it over for a moment. “But no, he didn’t.”
Chan nodded slowly. Hyunjin, looking at him with his hand still carefully touching Felix’s hair, said, “What are you thinking, hyung?”
Chan glanced at Felix. He desperately didn’t want to upset him further, but there was very little choice in the matter for him. “I think whatever reward Lee Jaerim has offered for Felix is contingent on Felix being brought in alive,” he said. “They didn’t try to kill him, today, they just tried to take him in.”
He met Hyunjin’s eyes. Hyunjin looked— grim, a sentiment Chan shared. Felix shifted on Hyunjin’s lap and said, “He needs me to rework his system. And he probably— wants to hurt me, after.”
Of all things, Chan did not want to dwell on that. He had a decent idea of the kind of thing Lee Jaerim was capable of, and he knew that Felix did too; there was no need for Felix to dwell on it either. “Did you recognise the man from the first attack?” Chan pressed instead. “Was he someone who worked for Lee Jaerim?”
“I didn’t recognise him, no,” Felix said. “But I didn’t meet a lot of the men usually on the ground.”
“And the one today?” Chan asked.
This time Felix shook his head. As the conversation wore on, he was slumping back against Hyunjin, a slow collapse. “I don’t think so,” he said. “But I didn’t get the best look.”
Chan felt like he could feel the gears inside his brain moving, the whirring mechanics of it all. He had his own fear, too, a long-standing one that was very close to the surface now: the fear that his family was in danger. He couldn’t work out if they were or not, the situation so confusing that he couldn’t quite grasp at it.
The apartment door opened again and Changbin came in. Minho was behind him, and then Seungmin, and Chan wasn’t sure what Changbin had told them, but they too looked serious. Chan didn’t bother beating around the bush, and he didn’t invite them to sit down, like he had with Jisung. He knew both of them too well to think they would want to.
“Seungmin,” he said. “Some people in a black SUV just tried to nab Felix while he was walking.” Seungmin’s eyes widened, just like Hyunjin’s had earlier, and he looked at Felix in shock. Minho, standing just next to him, went still, his body language that of someone poised on the verge of sudden movement. What he was going to do, Chan didn’t know, and Minho didn’t move anyway.
“When the car sped away,” he continued, “it passed by our building. I need you to go over the footage from the cameras out front, see if you can’t get a licence plate number. I want to know if that car circled back, and I want to know who it belongs to. I also want you to go over the footage from the last couple of weeks to see if that same SUV has been around here before.”
Voice and eyes both sharp, Minho asked, “You think they knew he was here and were lying in wait?”
“I don’t think they know he is here here,” Chan said, “but it’s possible they knew he was in the area. And I really don’t like the idea that Lee Jaerim has an inkling to our location. So.”
Seungmin turned with another word and disappeared out of the apartment again. Chan wasn’t surprised by that abrupt movement, because he had seen the pinched, horrible look on Seungmin’s face at the thought that someone might know where they were. He looked at Changbin and then jerked his head towards the door. “Go help him,” he said tersely, and Changbin nodded and went after Seungmin.
“If the Magpie didn’t know he was in the area before, he’ll definitely know now,” said Minho. He didn’t look any better than Seungmin had looked.
“Maybe not,” said Felix. His voice was very small, and his face was somewhat turned back into Hyunjin’s neck. Hyunjin’s hand had moved down to his back now, pressed flat against his spine. “I don’t think they worked for the Magpie. It’s more likely that they worked for one of his lesser ally groups.”
Chan tried to see his face but it was hard like this. “What makes you say that?” he asked.
“Well, they weren’t very efficient,” Felix said. His voice was even smaller saying this. “If they worked for him directly, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
The words made something cold drop in Chan’s stomach. He didn’t say what he thought, which was: they had almost been efficient enough. If Chan hadn’t been there watching him, Felix wouldn’t be here.
“He might be right,” Hyunjin said, his own voice pitched soft, more gentle than Chan thought he had heard in years, possibly since Jeongin had been attacked. “If they were only in it for the reward, it might explain why they tried it in the middle of the day, and why they were so quick to give up when one dude with a gun started shooting at them.”
It did make sense to Chan. A lesser gang, trying to make some money and gain a little street cred. It was definitely true that anyone employed by Lee Jaerim would have been much more ruthless, and far less easily dissuaded by the hurdle that Chan had presented. The fact that none of them had even thought to shoot back at him seemed to point at a minor player in the game.
If that were the case, then chances were they weren’t likely to run and report their failure to Lee Jaerim. He was the kind of man to punish a failure like that far more generously than he would reward the information. They’d have to still look out for danger, stay on their guard, but it was less likely that Lee Jaerim was about to close in on them and raid the building.
Jisung spoke for the first time since he had first come in, leaned forward with his folded arms resting on his knees. “If there’s been a reward offered for Felix,” he said, “why haven’t we heard about it?”
Chan looked at him approvingly. It was a question that had been forming in the back of Chan’s mind ever since Felix had brought it up at their very first meeting: why had Chan not heard about a hit out on him? Lee Jaerim was too high profile for one of his offered rewards to remain that secret. That it was Jisung who brought it up was not all too surprising to him. Jisung’s mind moved quickly, and he had a remarkable ability to think outside the box, to notice the things other people sometimes missed.
“Because there are just as many people who would want to use me against him as there are people who would return me to him,” Felix said. “Whether I want to be used or not.”
His voice was very flat, very dead. Hyunjin turned his head so that his mouth was against Felix’s hair, not a kiss but just resting there. It was something Chan had seen Changbin do to Hyunjin before, not often but enough that Hyunjin had apparently picked it up as a comfort thing.
It was a terrible thought, but at least that was something going for them — it wasn’t just total open season. If only a select handful of people and gangs in the city knew to even have an eye out for Felix, then that greatly lowered the risk to them all.
Chan wanted to— pluck Felix from Hyunjin’s arms, pull him into his own. Wipe his drying tears. Touch him, in some way. But he held himself back, the way he had done all this time. “We’ll see what Seungmin turns up,” he said. “In the meanwhile, I think you shouldn’t be going for any more walks around the neighbourhood.”
It wasn’t a joke, not by a long shot, but it was such an obvious suggestion that he thought Felix might— throw something back at him. He hoped Felix might do that. But Felix just somehow shrank even further into Hyunjin and nodded wearily.
Hyunjin lifted his head. “I’m going to take him to our room,” he said. “I think he needs some quiet.”
He helped Felix to his feet, supporting him when it seemed like Felix’s legs might give out under him. But after a moment or two Felix held himself up and Hyunjin took his hand to lead him around the couch and down the hallway. Even from the back, Felix looked tired, and small, with his narrow shoulders slumped. The strength of the ache inside Chan at the sight should have surprised him but he was starting to— get used to it, maybe. It was what it was, there inside him.
After the click of Hyunjin’s bedroom door closing, Jisung moved to the couch closest to Chan, his face still solemn, mixed with something that Chan couldn’t quite read. Minho took a few steps forward to rest a hand against the couch that Jisung had just moved from. “One man shooting at them,” he said, voice so terse it sounded like he could barely form the words. “You?”
Chan nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I saw the SUV pull up and I— I had to do something.”
“They could have taken you,” Minho said. “Or killed you.”
“To be honest, I wasn’t thinking,” Chan said. “I reacted on instinct.”
He didn’t need to see the look on Minho’s face to know how bad that was. He was not a disposable body, not in the slightest. To him, none of them were — they were his family, through and through. But there was also a reason that it was usually Minho or Changbin, or even Jisung, in the first line of fire when they ran risky jobs. It would be awful to lose any of them, devastating, but he was the head of this family, the beating heart of it. They needed him more than anyone else.
“I couldn’t have stood aside and watched them take him though,” he added. “Not knowing the kind of hell he’d have to endure before they finally killed him.” It would have killed Chan, in turn, to have done something like that.
Jisung reached out and put his hand on his knee, a comforting touch. “Felix is okay,” he said. He glanced at Minho, his eyes dark, serious. “And so is Chan-hyung.”
The words did not appear to calm Minho down. He looked like his nerve endings had all been replaced with bees, the anxiety obviously buzzing through him. Minho, perhaps even more than Seungmin, took their safety seriously, personally, and this had just given him so much to be concerned about. No doubt the realisation of how easily Chan may have been hurt was not helping matters in the slightest.
“You look ready to jitter out of your skin,” Chan said to him, voice soft with sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
Minho shook his head. Even that movement was jerky. “Felix is probably right,” he said. “They probably weren’t under the Magpie’s employ, not directly.” This clearly was of no comfort to him. Minho’s brain was a logical thing, rational enough to accept the reasoning, but his paranoia was unlikely to let it go. The truth of the situation didn’t matter, he would feel the way he felt about it anyway. Chan wished he could do something more than simply— redirect the energy.
“I’d like for you and Jisung to go patrol around the neighbourhood,” he said. It would give Minho something to do, something he could focus his attention on. “Take note of the plate numbers on any dark SUVs you see around. We’ll cross-reference them with whatever Seungmin finds. And— be careful,” he added, as Jisung got to his feet. “Do not split up.”
“We won’t,” Jisung said. Minho had already reached the door, his shoulders tense enough that Chan felt a phantom ache in his own. Or maybe it wasn’t a phantom one, maybe it was really there, the stress of it all getting to him. “Hyung,” he said to Minho, before the door could shut after them, “let me grab my phone, please?”
Chan was left alone in the living room. He sat there for a long few moments, feeling nothing but the hardness of the chair underneath him, the silence of the room. He could not even hear any voices coming from Hyunjin’s room. He took a few deep breaths and then— sighed. He was tired, always so tired.
He got to his feet, testing the strain in his back and shoulders. His arm hurt a little, from the way he’d yanked at Felix. It was manageable, though, and he was lucky nothing worse had happened. He rubbed at the muscle and then went to go and find Jeongin, who was probably napping, ignorant of everything that had happened, to tell him that he’d need to stay inside for the next week or so. Jeongin was unlikely to be happy about it, but Chan didn’t care. He needed Jeongin safe.
——
Once he got Felix into his room, Hyunjin felt a little bit at a loss as to what to do. He was not, strictly speaking, the nurturing type; with Jeongin, it had often been something of a joke. He knew that it surprised the others how much he had become that type when it came to Felix, but in moments like this, when it actually really mattered, he was not entirely sure what to do.
Felix, however, looked like the walk from the living room to Hyunjin’s bedroom, as short as it had been, had exhausted him thoroughly, so Hyunjin said, “Come on, let’s sit down again, okay?”
Felix nodded and let himself be ushered onto the bed. He sat nearest the headboard, his legs crossed beneath him, and Hyunjin sat opposite him, mimicking his position. After a moment, he reached over and took one of his pillows and then put it in Felix’s lap, not sure if it was actually going to be a comfort but thinking it could not hurt. Felix took it, and clutched at it, holding it tight to his lower stomach. So maybe it was doing something.
“Ah, Lix,” Hyunjin said, and then faltered. There were still piles of Felix’s clothing on the bed with them: some jeans, a couple of darker sweaters, a little hill of rolled up socks that hadn’t fit into the space that Hyunjin had cleared in his drawer. Looking at the clothes felt like looking at alien objects, now; had it really only been a couple of hours since he and Felix and Jeongin had been in that department store, fighting over whether the green or purple sweater was better?
Felix shifted a little and then sighed. “I dropped the groceries,” he said. His voice was still tear-thick, a little hoarse with it.
“That doesn’t matter,” Hyunjin said. The fact that Felix was even bringing them up confused him.
“It’s a waste of money,” Felix said. He was not looking at Hyunjin, but instead away at the floor, where his new boots lay half-unpacked from their box. Hyunjin had meant to finish everything off but he’d been struck with inspiration and had gone out to draw, so the boots just were there. “After the clothes, too— I need to—”
Hyunjin took his hand, pulling it away from where it was almost clenching the pillow. “Felix,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about it. Nobody cares about the money, they just care that you’re okay.”
Felix still wasn’t looking at him. Hyunjin really was not sure where this desire in Felix came from, to never take more than he could afford or was owed, to never be anything even close to a burden. It came from somewhere, that much was obvious, but Hyunjin didn’t know how to ask about it.
Hyunjin closed his eyes for a moment, feeling— close to an emotion that he tried, so very much, to not feel. No, he thought, Chan would not care about the groceries, or the lost money. He would only care that Felix was safe, the same way he had never cared about having another mouth to feed in the form of Hyunjin, only that Hyunjin had a home here, with them.
Maybe Hyunjin would have been like this, if he’d been more— human, when he’d first started living with Chan and Changbin. Maybe he would have cared more if he’d any concept of what money really was, back then. But he hadn’t; he had cared only that there was food in the first place.
Felix didn’t know. Of them all, only Felix didn’t know, the reality of Hyunjin, the extent to which he was still half-formed, still forming. He was still learning to be human and sometimes he saw that same sense in Felix — he had seen it today, when they were shopping, that bone-deep uncertainty about who he was. Maybe he should tell him— maybe he could tell him. Maybe he had some of the words for it, after all these years. Especially after what had just happened, after Felix had almost been—
It’s Felix, he told himself. It’s only Felix.
He stroked his thumb over the back of Felix’s hand, trying to be soothing, not sure if he was trying to soothe Felix or soothe himself, to be honest. “I never told you,” he said quietly, voice pitched very low. “How I came to be here.”
Felix shook his head. He still didn’t ask, although it was obvious that Hyunjin was leading him to it. Hyunjin was never sure if Felix simply didn’t have any curiosity or if he just didn’t want people prying into his own life. There were secrets there, too, Hyunjin knew, secrets that Felix should probably be allowed to keep. But most people would pry, most people would have come into this group of jagged-edged misfits and tried to figure them out. Felix never had. He had always just accepted them all as they were.
“You know—” He had to swallow, force the words out. “Did you ever hear about the Macaque Syndicate?”
Felix’s eyes snapped to his. He looked— shocked, then Hyunjin watched the usual sympathy and pity come across his face. It annoyed him less, coming from Felix, because there was such a deep well of empathy inside him that it was no surprise he would feel like that. But Hyunjin hated the pity, always had done. He didn’t want people to look at him and see something pitiful.
Because of course Felix had heard about the Macaque Syndicate. It was impossible to work in this city, in this industry, and to not have at least some passing knowledge of them. To not know what they were. To not know what it meant, to be a victim of them.
“How old were you,” Felix asked softly.
“Eight,” Hyunjin said. “But I don’t want to talk about that.” He didn’t, never again, not if he could help it. He’d talked about it enough, with Chan, spilling it all out in a deluge of filth and misery, and it had been— cleansing, although he hadn’t really known it at the time. At the time he had just needed to talk about it. To explain it.
He knew, now, how much it must have shocked Chan, pained him to hear it all. But Chan had never told him to stop, had never asked Hyunjin to hold it inside him, he had just listened. To this day, it was only Chan who knew the extent of it all.
“Did you come here because he rescued you?” Felix asked. His voice was still soft, but careful, too, like Hyunjin’s assertion that he didn’t want to talk about one part of it meant he didn’t know where the other boundaries were. “Like he rescued me, today?”
“No,” said Hyunjin. “Well, yes. But I rescued myself.”
Felix didn’t say anything further. He was watching Hyunjin now, expectant but not pushy, like if Hyunjin wanted to say something, Felix wanted to hear it, but if not, that was okay too. Hyunjin wondered sometimes at the connection between them, because Felix was so good, and Hyunjin was— a bitch, most of the time.
“I was there for nearly eight years,” he said. Not that he’d known that for a good long while afterwards, he’d long since lost track of the passage of time. And he’d been so little when he was taken that he’d forgotten— what year it had been. Chan and Changbin had ended up figuring it out based on what Hyunjin remembered of his childhood, any notable events. At the time, he hadn’t understood why they seemed so fussed about it, but now he knew they’d simply— wanted to know how old he was, because it had been impossible to tell from looking at him. “So I was— I was sixteen, and it— I think,” he said, a little impulsively, “people think that it must have been an everyday hell, and it was, but most of the time it was just— nothing.” His gaze drifted a little, off Felix’s face and to the wall just behind his head, remembering the blank walls of his little room, painted a middling grey. “Just nothing. Waiting around in a locked room for something— someone bad to open the door. And by that point, I was really sick of it.”
He really had been. Eight years of a body that didn’t belong to him. Eight years of sinking himself down so that nothing physical ever mattered. Half of his lifetime spent in a series of rooms that he couldn’t escape from.
Truthfully, he’d wanted to die, though the concept of death, like so many other things, had been nebulous to him. Mostly he’d just wanted to stop existing, to not— be in this place anymore. He didn’t know what shape that kind of thing might take, had no idea of the outside world anymore, but he’d been so tired of being numb, or in pain. Every day it felt like it should be over, and then he awoke, and it, impossibly, went on.
Retrospectively, he’d been very close to losing his mind. He was somewhat surprised he hadn’t.
Hyunjin sucked his bottom lip between his teeth, biting down hard enough to feel the ache of it. It was grounding, helped him pull himself away from those memories. Sometimes he could get a little— lost, if he let himself drift too far.
“One of my— regulars came to see me,” he said. He did not like calling them that, although he didn’t have a better word for it. He’d never been able to work out what to call them, other than by stringing a series of curse words together. “Not a big man, shorter than me, in fact, although he actually had some muscle mass. But he had some kind of complex about it, about me being taller than him, because I hadn’t been, those first times, and he hit me and I— snapped.”
He could still remember it, crystal in his mind. The hand slapping him across the face and then the clear, sharp flare of anger. It had been the clearest thing he had felt in years. It had cut through everything else and he had thrown himself at this man who had come to hurt him and taken him down to the floor and in the shock of it all, had managed to get his fingers around the man’s throat.
He realised that Felix now was the one stroking his hand, holding Hyunjin’s left between both of his. Hyunjin almost wanted to shake him off but he didn’t. The touch was soothing, in a way. “You killed him,” Felix said.
“I did,” said Hyunjin. “I strangled him. It’s— the image of it is still crisp in my mind, but I wasn’t thinking, there was just this urgency in me.” His fingers digging into the man’s neck, until his face had turned blue, the veins in his eyes spilling open. Hyunjin hadn’t even felt the way the man had clawed at him, but afterwards his hands and arms had stung, blood oozing sluggishly from the marks. “I had to do it.”
“Yeah,” Felix said softly, voice rasping with it. He said it like he understood. “Yeah.”
Hyunjin squeezed his hand briefly. “I don’t know how I managed it,” he whispered. Adrenaline, probably. Almost a decade of mediocre food had left him underweight and not particularly imposing. But he’d done it. His hands had ached as he’d let go of the man; he’d nearly had to pry them off, they were so stiff with the tension.
The man was dead, and all Hyunjin knew of that, was it meant he would not be getting up again.
He had not felt anything, in that moment: not happiness nor sadness, not regret nor triumph. Nothing whatsoever. Instead, he had moved as though he had planned the whole thing. He had stripped enough clothing off the man to dress himself in a manner of speaking, the first time he had been allowed clothes since he had been moved to this particular room. Then he had wrapped the man’s jacket around his hand and punched through the window.
He’d thought about doing that before — the window was locked, it couldn’t open, but he knew he could probably punch through it. But— he’d been afraid. Afraid of being caught and punished, mostly. He’d been beaten enough for small infractions when he was little that he’d simply lost all his— spirit, he supposed. Which, in retrospect, was likely the point.
But this man was dead. And he knew— he knew this was going to be terrible. What they would do to him for it. So he broke the window, slicing the jacket to tatters as he cleared the glass pieces from the frame.
“Afterwards, I let myself out of the window,” he told Felix. “We were on the third floor, so it wasn’t the best decision, but I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t someone guarding the door. Sometimes there was. So I just dangled and dropped and of course, I sprained my ankle.”
Felix winced. “You were lucky to not do worse.”
Hyunjin smiled a little, although he didn’t especially want to. “That’s what Chan-hyung said later.”
An image came to him of his ankle, mottled black and purple, resting on threadbare couch cushions, Chan’s hands, unmarked as of yet by ink, wrapping a bandage around it firmly. A snapshot of a memory. So much from the immediate aftermath of his escape was a smudged haze, like he’d left a painting out in a storm.
“It was Jeongin who found me,” Hyunjin said, his voice dropped to a whisper. “I can’t— I can’t express what my mental state was like. I wasn’t human, Felix, not really.”
Felix was looking at him again, although not with pity. With understanding, an understanding that was almost worse. “Hyunjin,” he said, his own voice barely any louder.
He hadn’t been human, not recognisably human anyway. The pain in his ankle had confused him, frustrated him too, as it hindered his hobble away from the building he’d been kept in. He didn’t understand what he’d done to it. The ground had been rough and scraped at the soles of his feet even through the oversized socks. It had been cold too, wet, because of course it had been raining.
As he’d moved, wandering listlessly under the grey sky, around towering buildings, he’d been steadily overcome with despair, unable to make sense of— anything. Not the signs nor the streets. His clothes had quickly gotten soaked, the shivering rattling his bones, and he’d had the capacity to realise, at least, that he had no idea where he was or where to even try to go. The world was so big and he was so small and he didn’t understand any of it.
He’d been frightened. And then he’d just been tired. Any hope he’d felt as he’d crawled through that window had been quickly extinguished. It all, suddenly and overwhelmingly, felt pointless.
“I wanted to die,” Hyunjin said softly, watched the way Felix’s eyes flickered, and then he shook himself, clearing his throat. Brisker, trying to throw off how it had felt wandering those streets, soaked through and shivering with the rain, he continued, “Jeongin found me in the doorway of a rundown noraebang. I’d been in a shit part of town, and dragged myself into an even shittier part of town — not that I’d known that at the time — and then curled up there to try and shelter from the rain.”
Jeongin, his dirty greyish sneakers splashing into Hyunjin’s vision, a clear umbrella with purple polka dots gripped in his hand as he’d peered down at Hyunjin. He’d said, afterwards, that he’d noticed how weird the clothes Hyunjin was wearing were, because they were so oversized. Some skinny kid laying in a doorway wearing business clothes two times too big for him.
“He came over and asked me my name and asked if I wanted to go home with him,” Hyunjin said softly, “and it had been— the kindest anyone had spoken to me in years.”
It was probably why Hyunjin had gone with him. That kindness, earnest and true. And the fact that Jeongin was just a kid then too. Fourteen and tiny with it, and he’d only just gotten his braces so he was lisping when he spoke. He held out his free hand and said that he could help and Hyunjin had thought about how he had nothing, and maybe, maybe this could be something. Anything could, surely, be better than this.
“I took his hand,” Hyunjin said, “and he took me to Chan.”
At the time Chan and Jeongin had been living in a tiny little apartment with Changbin, a one bedroom thing where Chan and Jeongin shared the bedroom and Changbin slept on the couch in the living room. Later Hyunjin found out that they could have afforded something better but they were saving all their money for their own base. Chan had been working at the kitchen table when Jeongin brought Hyunjin, dripping wet and limping, through the front door. Hyunjin had seen an older, handsome boy and been resigned to it.
He’d truly known nothing of the world, back then. Sometimes Jeongin would say things to him like wow, I can’t believe you don’t know what a smartphone is, or hyung, you need to pay for that before we leave, but how could Hyunjin have known any of it? He had been removed from the world as a child and thrust back into it as someone who looked like a teenager, but had not been, not inside himself. But he had known this, when he had walked into the apartment and seen Chan sitting there — he had known what older men wanted with him.
And then Chan had not.
“He never touched me,” Hyunjin said, his voice back down to a whisper. “I know I shouldn’t be grateful for something like that, but I am. That first night, he got me clean, warm clothes and he showed me how to use the shower and he made me hot chocolate. I had never had that before. It was better than anything I could remember. He didn’t ask me any questions, although I heard him quizzing Jeongin about it when I was in the bathroom. The whole time I was— waiting. And he never touched me.”
He’d asked Chan, once. Hyunjin sitting in what had quickly become his spot on one end of the couch, Jeongin curled up sleeping on the other end. And Chan, under the sharp yellow lights, working bent over the kitchen table, his pen scratch, scratch, scratching away.
Hyunjin had been such a creature of fear back then. The numbness had receded and left emotions he did not know how to parse through, after years of not having them. It all felt like so much. Like he’d choke on them, the same way he’d choked that man, and his anxiety would leave him blue-lipped and still.
It would happen, he’d known— thought he’d known. Eventually. The knowledge of it was a weight on his chest, and he’d been tired of waiting for it to come to fruition. Better to get it over with, so he would know what to expect of it, how bad it would be. It couldn’t be worse, he’d thought. Even if Chan and Changbin had both decided to— it couldn’t be worse than the other place. But this waiting, he just couldn’t do it any more.
“You haven’t used me yet,” he’d said quietly into the empty space between them, careful not to wake Jeongin. Chan’s pen had stopped its scratching. “Aren’t you going to?”
Chan had, very deliberately, put his pen down and then looked at Hyunjin with a blank expression that, at the time, hadn’t meant anything to Hyunjin. It wasn’t until years later, that Hyunjin could look back and understand the forced neutrality of that expression, everything Chan must have been tamping down.
“No,” Chan had said, and his voice had barely trembled.
Hyunjin had, mostly, been confused by this. He believed Chan’s answer, but, in his experience, there’d been a very clear way in which the world worked.
He’d looked at Jeongin, small and mop-headed and drooling on the arm of the couch, and made other assumptions. “Is it because I’m too old?” he’d asked. He didn’t think— Jeongin didn’t seem like he was being— but then, Jeongin at the time had shared the bedroom with Chan. So perhaps Chan didn’t want Hyunjin because he’d already had what he needed, and Hyunjin had outgrown such uses.
The way Chan had stared at him, after that, had made Hyunjin shrink back against the couch cushions. He’d worried he’d overstepped, asked too many questions — where he’d come from, that would be enough to get him slapped around.
“You're not too old, Hyunjin,” Chan had finally said. “You're actually so young that, were the world fair, you'd barely be old enough to even be thinking about this subject.”
How horrified Chan must have been, Hyunjin thought now, at the implication. Lesser men might have blustered or even gotten angry, but Chan had understood Hyunjin wasn’t trying to disparage him, or accuse him of anything. Retrospectively, his patience, his composure, were nothing short of astounding. Chan had been, for lack of a better phrase, too young to be dealing with Hyunjin. Nineteen, the same age Jeongin was now, which, when Hyunjin thought it, made his head spin every time. Chan had been so young too.
Chan had gotten up from his place at the kitchen table and came to kneel beside Hyunjin, who’d cringed away a little. “Hyunjin,” he’d murmured, “You’re never going to be hurt like that again. I promise. We’ll keep you safe.”
Hurt. It was the first time someone else had acknowledged that was what it was — a hurt. He’d been made to endure it as if it were nothing, as if he was nothing. But it was a hurt. It was.
Hyunjin had cried. For a long time, months, he’d hardly been able to stop.
He looked at Felix now, his pale face and the stark freckles, his lovely, liquid brown eyes. “All Chan-hyung ever did was take care of me,” Hyunjin rasped. “This boy he didn’t even know. He took me in and protected me and he never, ever asked me for anything.”
“He’s a good man,” Felix said. He sounded— wondering, as if he too couldn’t quite believe it. As if he, too, wasn’t quite sure what to do with a man as good as Chan was. He, too, Hyunjin thought, had probably never experienced a man as good as Chan so consistently was.
“He is a good man,” Hyunjin said. “That’s not all that makes him good, but it’s part of it. It’s the way he just— accepts us all. Someone else might want something back, but never Chan-hyung. He’s good and generous and—” He paused, not sure if he should say it. Not sure if it would be too much. But he wanted to, he didn’t want to keep stepping around the elephant in the room. “I know it isn't just physical for you. I know you— like him.”
“Hyunjin,” Felix protested. He drew his hands away, put them in his lap. He looked tired again, a little upset.
“You do,” insisted Hyunjin. “You have feelings for him. Felix, I’m not saying this to embarrass you, or to make you do anything about them. I’m saying it because I think you— he’s just a good person. He’s worthy of that, if it’s you. And I know what it is, for him to make you feel safe. Because he makes me feel safe, too. He’s been making me feel safe ever since the night that Jeongin brought me home.”
Of them all, Hyunjin understood the importance of that safety the most. He craved it like nothing else. For a while he had been unable to leave that tiny apartment even though being within the same walls was just as terrifying. Jeongin helped, that sweet presence keeping Hyunjin company, talking him through all of his shows that he watched, teaching Hyunjin his school work as he learned it himself. They had been companions; Jeongin had become a brother that Hyunjin had never thought to look for.
Chan was something different. Chan was— something more. “It was never romantic, for me,” he told Felix now. “Not even once. He’s my protector, you see? I mean, he’s a protector to all of us, but— you get it, I think? You get it like I do, after today.”
Felix, after a long moment, nodded his head slowly. Hyunjin remembered the way Felix had clung to Chan in the living room, the way he had not wanted to let go, visibly reluctant to leave the circle of Chan’s arms. Hyunjin only wished that Chan had not made him do so, wished that Chan had kept holding Felix, because he thought it might be easier for Felix, right now, if that had been the case.
“Hyunjin,” he said, after a long stretch of silence. “Thank you. Thank you, for telling me this.”
It was Hyunjin’s turn to shift, now, deeply uncomfortable. He felt like he hadn’t really told Felix much of anything. There was so much there, too much for even him to untangle. Sometimes he thought he had and then there was something else upon which to trip. It felt— never ending, this process, and it was so scary to think about that that he tended to simply not think about it at all.
But this had to be enough, what he had managed to tell Felix, because he could not talk about it any more than he had. He’d never had to, not since he’d first arrived; he was not sure who had told Minho or Seungmin, but they had been informed, and neither of them had spoken to him about it, but he had known that they knew. Minho had treated him with a sort of respect that had been completely missing with Jeongin in those early days, and Seungmin had looked at him, for a thankfully short amount of time, with that mix of horror and pity that Hyunjin had so hated.
He knew that Chan had told Jisung. He knew that because Jisung had come to find him, after that first meeting, and said, “I wanted to apologise, for what I said earlier, Chan-hyung told me about—” And then Hyunjin had shut the door in his face.
“Don’t thank me,” he said eventually. “That’s not— everyone else knows, I thought you should know too. I imagine it explains some things.”
It was trying to be a joke, and it fell so far from that mark that he shouldn’t have even tried. Even if he had managed to make it a joke, he didn’t think Felix would have treated it as such; he was too sweet, too good for that. As it was, Felix just nodded, looking so exhausted that it put Hyunjin in mind of when he had first arrived. Hyunjin had not ever wanted to see Felix looking that tired again, and this, more than it had before, looked like a mental tiredness rather than physical.
It was awful, that Felix had to go through this. He deserved the kind of rest that Hyunjin had been afforded, all those years ago.
“I think you should sleep,” he said, quietly. “It’s a little early but I think you could use it?”
Even after these weeks, sometimes it still surprised Hyunjin how easily Felix let himself be bossed around. It was always worse, Hyunjin had noticed, when Felix was tired, or when he was hungry, these times when he simply wanted someone else to make the decisions and tell him what to do. Hyunjin had been like that, back then, happy to just go with what he was being told. He’d snapped out of it pretty quickly though, become someone like who he was now, someone determined to get his own way. Jeongin, for his part, got much, much more stubborn about things when he was tired.
Felix, though— Hyunjin knew that this was just how he was. Tiredness made him pliant. It made it so that Hyunjin was able to help him change out of his new clothes and into some softer things that he had been wearing all this time, and then Hyunjin tucked Felix up into bed, like with a literal child. He expected here for Felix to protest, but he didn’t. He looked at Hyunjin, his eyes still red from his tears, but so serious.
“Goodnight, angel,” Hyunjin said.
Felix didn’t say anything still. Instead, he turned onto his side, covered in Hyunjin’s blankets, pulled up so that only his hair seemed to show. Hyunjin watched him for a long few moments, wondering whether to stroke that hair, whether Felix would welcome it or not. In the end, he didn’t. In the end, he got up, and went to work on his art.
——
Changbin stroked his thumb gently against the back of Seungmin’s neck as grainy footage flickered in front of them, the camera feed from outside the front of the building played at quadruple speed. He was a little surprised that Seungmin was letting him touch him at all, never mind this soft, soothing touch. But when Changbin had first touched him, a very tentative touch after they had sat down together, him on a stool and Seungmin in his desk chair, Seungmin had not looked at him and had simply leaned a little back into it.
On the computer screen, the footage was starting to darken again, as they rewound through yesterday's dawn and into the night. Seungmin sighed, lifting a hand to scrub at his face and then slow the footage just a bit, because it was harder to parse through when it was dim. "I hate this,” he said softly.
Changbin nodded with a sigh of his own, although Seungmin wasn’t looking at him. Seungmin had found the footage of the attempted kidnapping, noting down the make and colour of the SUV, along with the licence plate, which they’d been lucky enough to get a clean enough shot of as it passed in front of the building. Changbin had missed the beginning of it, had pulled the car around to the side of the house just in time to see Chan pulling out his gun, to hear the gunshots. Seeing the full event, the way Felix had been so easily lifted and dragged, his terror obvious even through the somewhat grainy video feed, had been chilling.
So far there had been nothing else though. A few other dark SUVs, but the make was different, with different licence plate numbers. But that exact SUV hadn't been hanging around today, nor yesterday, it seemed. Seungmin, undeterred, was likely going to continue to backtrack through the footage until he got to Felix's first entrance to the building all those weeks ago. But that was many, many hours of footage to track through, and even at quadruple speed, it would take time. A lot of time.
Changbin’s eyes felt gritty and dry. He had no idea how Seungmin managed to stare at a computer screen like this for most of his day; Changbin felt like his brain was going to melt out of his skull if he had to keep staring at this monitor any longer. It was late, too, late enough that the street outside, showing on the live feed that Seungmin had kept open all this time, was dark and empty, not many cars driving on it.
“It's good that there's been no sign of that car again, though?” he said, very softly, hoping to give Seungmin even a little comfort.
Seungmin didn’t reply. He didn’t seem like he found it reassuring, not like Changbin did — unsurprising, really, because it meant that there was a mystery involved here, and if there was one thing Seungmin hated, it was a mystery. He liked to know everything, to have figured out everything. Changbin was more one to put things up to the vagaries of the universe.
He kept his thumb moving on the back of Seungmin’s neck, feeling the tension in the muscles there. The palm of his hand rested against Seungmin’s upper back and he could feel there, too, the way Seungmin was holding himself stiffly. With other people, Changbin often felt an— urge to help them, to fix whatever was broken. With Seungmin here, right now, he knew that he could do nothing but be present, until the tension left, whenever that was, and Seungmin could rest.
“Hyung,” Seungmin said eventually. He nodded to the front camera feed, which now showed Minho and Jisung returning. Minho was a little ahead, his movements full of purpose, while Jisung clearly trailed behind him. Changbin didn’t lift his hand, though, and he kept his gentle ministrations as they watched, on the various feeds covered, as Minho and Jisung came down the side alley and then let themselves in the back door.
Changbin let go. Seungmin’s shoulders hunched a little, like Changbin’s touch had been more soothing than he had let on, and then moved his chair so that it was further away from Changbin than he had been sitting. When Minho stepped into the room, it looked like they had never been sitting close at all.
Minho didn’t greet them, didn’t explain himself at all. He just asked, very tersely, “Are you finished?”
“It's weeks of footage, hyung,” Changbin said, more tired than biting. "We've gotten through about a day and a half. Nothing."
The corners of Minho's mouth tightened, and he nodded, very jerky for him. “We need to report to Chan,” he said. "Come on."
Seungmin flicked an annoyed glance over his shoulder, looking like he wanted to say something particularly cutting about being ordered around like that, but Minho had already gone, disappeared out of the room. Changbin stood up, stretching as he did so, feeling and hearing the crunches up and down his spine as his body protested his sitting in that same semi-hunched position for so long. Seungmin stabbed the space bar with his finger, pausing the rewinding video feed, and then got to his feet too, looking like he wasn’t in the slightest bit affected by how long they had been sitting. But of course, he wouldn’t be; he did this all day, every day.
They climbed to the third floor in silence, Seungmin with his hands tucked up inside the sleeves of his hoodie. In the office, Chan was speaking quietly to Jisung, who was sitting on the couch, curled up against the arm in a way that he usually wouldn’t sit. Jisung tended to sit straight, feet firm on the ground. Minho, planted in the middle of the room, looked stressed to hell. There was nothing surprising there.
Changbin skirted around him to his usual position against the back wall, behind where Chan was sitting at his desk. Seungmin sat on one of the wooden chairs and immediately brought a hand up to his mouth, where he held it in such a way that it wasn’t clear if he was chewing on his sleeve or on his nails.
“I’m okay,” Jisung said, in response to whatever Chan had been asking him when Changbin had come into the room. “Just tired.”
Chan nodded, before looking at Minho. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” said Minho. “Not really. A couple of SUVs, but they were older makes. We wrote down the plates anyway. I’ll give them to Seungmin. But there was nothing else.”
His sentences were short, sharp. They sounded like they were being punched out of him. Changbin had seen him like this before, but rarely; he’d been like this during the clean-up after Jeongin was attacked, and once after a job that had almost gone horribly wrong. Chan didn’t say anything about it, he just nodded and turned to Seungmin. “How about you guys?”
Seungmin shook his head. He took his hand away from his mouth and said, “There's been nothing on the tapes so far, though we've only gotten through maybe thirty-two hours of footage. In that time though that van hasn't passed by, and there haven’t been any cars hanging around or seeming suspicious. I also didn’t notice that there have been any people hanging around either.”
Changbin blinked at him, surprised. He hadn’t even been looking for that, and he hadn’t realised Seungmin had been watching for it. Jisung, his head leaning against the wall, said, “That’s good, right?”
“It is,” said Chan. The news seemed like it had lifted a small amount of weight from his shoulders too; he seemed to be sitting a little straighter in his chair, even as the lines of his back seemed to relax. “It means it was probably just a fluke. It’s likely that they just were passing through the area, recognised him on the street, and decided to take their chance.”
“I’m going to keep backtracking through the footage,” Seungmin said, confirming Changbin's suspicions. “And I'm also going to keep watch on the main feeds, over the next few days. In case they come back around.”
Chan nodded. “If they do, let me know, but I get the feeling that Felix won’t be going outside any time soon, so it’s unlikely they’ll figure out exactly where we are.”
“It’s bad enough,” Minho said. “That they know generally where we are.”
“I know,” Chan said. With anyone else, Chan probably would have been gentle with it, but with Minho he was just— firm. Understanding, but solid. “But if they don’t know exactly where, and they don’t come back, and it’s unlikely that they’ll tell Lee Jaerim in the first place, then that’s the best we could have hoped for.”
Changbin was inclined to agree, although he could see that Minho did not, and Seungmin also did not look remotely happy about it. Changbin looked at Chan, though, the way he so often looked at him, standing here like this behind him, seeing the side of Chan’s face, the broadness of his shoulders, the invisible tension that seemed to constantly run through him.
They could have lost him today, Changbin knew. He was not one to question Chan’s decisions after the fact, not like the others often did; he didn’t see the point of that, when what was done was done. But they had been lucky, so lucky that none of the men in that van had decided to shoot back, when Changbin had been too far away to do anything. But he didn’t blame Chan for it, none of it. He couldn’t, not when he’d seen the way Chan had held Felix just as hard as Felix had clung to him, the way Chan had curved around him all the way back to the house and up to the apartment, a protector through and through.
If it had been Seungmin getting dragged away to a painful death, Changbin would have been just as stupid about it.
“I’m going to go patrol again,” Minho said, his voice brittle enough to break. He’d already turned and taken a step to the door before Chan said, “Wait.”
Minho paused. He didn’t turn back. “Hyung,” he said.
“You can’t go alone,” Chan said. Again that firm tone, something that Minho would not be able to throw himself against in an attempt at breaking through. “Not tonight, not after what happened.”
Minho tilted his head in Jisung’s direction. Jisung whined at him, his eyes already only half-open. “Hyung,” he said. “I can’t.”
“You can’t,” Chan agreed. “In fact, Jisung, just go to bed right now, okay? You’ve worked hard, you’ve done well, go to sleep.”
Jisung didn’t appear to need telling twice. He got to his feet, almost swaying with tiredness, and left the room, without looking at any of them, and especially without looking at Minho, who was glaring a hole into the side of his head but did not say anything. Changbin wondered how far they had walked, over these long hours as the day gave way to evening and then to night, how much Minho had pushed Jisung. Minho looked tired too, but not in a way that seemed it was going to mean anything.
Now Minho looked at Changbin, who just said, “No.” He would not go out, not this late at night, not when Seungmin looked so freaked out still. Besides which, he knew what Chan was trying to do — he was trying to stop Minho from going out in the first place, from spending all night trailing the streets, none of them knowing where he was or what he was up to. None of them were, at heart, afraid of what Minho would do, out there, but that didn’t mean they liked the idea of it. He would not go looking for trouble, but trouble may find him.
Minho, for his part, didn’t protest. Perhaps he saw the resolution on Changbin’s face. Perhaps he recognised how late it was. In any case, that glare turned on Changbin was particularly potent. “Hyung,” he said, eyes flicking back to Chan. “Let me go patrol.”
“Not if nobody will go with you,” Chan said patiently.
This, Changbin sensed, was possibly going to become an argument. Minho was getting more and more wound up before their very eyes. It would do none of them, not Chan nor Minho nor Changbin himself, good to see the discussion, and so he pushed off from the wall and said, “I’m going to bed, hyung. Seungmin, do you want to leave too?”
Seungmin nodded. When he stood, he didn’t look at any of them either, just rose with his hand back to his mouth and left the room in the same way Jisung had. Changbin nodded at Chan and fought the urge to clap Minho on the shoulder, like he sometimes would have done; Minho had the look of someone who might try to swing at him for it.
He’d expected Seungmin to have simply left, but when he let himself out in the hallway, Seungmin was standing a little further along, apparently waiting for him. He looked— bad, as on edge as Changbin had ever seen him, and remarkably like he was close to tears. Changbin didn’t know what he’d do if Seungmin cried. It seemed outside the realm of reality. He hadn’t even cried when he had been hurt a couple of weeks ago.
Changbin went to him, feeling tentative with it, not sure of the approach here. Seungmin watched him come, and when Changbin put his arms slowly around him in a hug, Seungmin did not protest, or tell him no, to step away. He leaned into Changbin’s hold, enough that Changbin felt it. It was Changbin who looked back at Chan’s closed office door, where he could hear Chan’s voice now, a little raised, but not shouting.
He turned his face back to Seungmin, who had done something awkward with his spine to contort in a way that let him have his face pressed to Changbin’s neck. “Seungmin,” he said. “Baby. Let me stay with you tonight, again. Let me help you tonight, too.”
There was no argument, not this time. Seungmin simply whispered, “Please.”
——
Jeongin spun the desk chair he was sitting on slowly left and right, for no reason other than the movement was something like a distraction. He was waiting. He had been waiting, as first Jisung left, and then Seungmin and Changbin. Seungmin had said nothing to him, Changbin only a soft entreaty for Jeongin to go to bed soon. Jisung, stumbling a little over his own feet, had said how the fuck are you still awake.
That was a question. The answer was: he was waiting. The PC room was silent, not even the whirring of the computer to fill it, because he hadn’t bothered to turn it on. He didn’t want to play games, not right now.
He’d been sleeping when Chan came to tell him about what had happened to Felix. He’d missed the whole thing, somehow, even missed the gunshots outside thanks to the closed window and his ability to mostly sleep through any noise whatsoever. Any annoyance he’d felt at being told, once again, that he would need to stay inside for a while had been wiped away by the awful, sickening fear of what might have happened if Chan hadn’t been standing on that street while Felix was grabbed.
It felt like a lot to even think it, but Jeongin knew how terribly it would have affected his brother, if Felix had been taken, if Felix had vanished without a single trace. He was pretending, still, that he didn’t feel more for Felix than he should, but at this point Jeongin wasn’t sure anyone at all still believed that. To tell the truth, it would have grieved Jeongin too; he felt close to Felix, especially after all the time they’d spent together. He liked him, a lot. He was so glad he was okay.
He’d gone to try to see him, to check with his own eyes that he was fine. But Hyunjin had said, “He’s sleeping,” and only let Jeongin stick his head into the room far enough to see Felix’s blond hair sticking out from above the duvet as he slept. For lack of anything really better to do, Jeongin had come down here, and he had sat down, and he had waited.
The door to the back rooms opened and Minho stepped out. Jeongin had expected him to look bad, but it was worse than he’d thought. Minho looked— awful, like the anxiety inside of him had rooted itself down into his bone marrow. Even at this distance, his hands were obviously shaking, his chest rising and falling in short, staccato movements as his lungs struggled to fill themselves. Jeongin, looking at him, felt something break a little inside of him. A person should not have to look like that, he thought, filled with an odd urge to simply cry, because it looked like Minho was not capable of it. A person shouldn’t have to be like that.
Minho knew he was there, but for a moment it seemed like he might not even acknowledge Jeongin, like he might just silently walk past and— go somewhere. To his room, maybe, to be alone like this. If both Changbin and Jisung were gone, that probably meant that Chan had told them all to stay inside for the night, to not go out to patrol anymore, since there was no way he would let them go alone.
Minho looked like he might be willing to ignore that order. The thought of him going out into the dark night alone made Jeongin want to shake, too.
“Hyung,” he said.
Minho’s eyes snapped to his face. He did that a lot, even when he wasn’t so completely on edge, even when he was loose and as comfortable as he ever seemed to get. Jeongin would say his name, address him in some way, and Minho’s attention would be on him immediately. Jeongin usually liked that; he felt a little ashamed that he liked it still, even in this moment.
Minho didn’t say anything though. He just looked at Jeongin, the seconds ticking over. He was standing still but he was not— still. Even with his feet planted on the ground, there was a twitching to his limbs. This was not the Minho that could make himself indistinguishable to a statue. He looked like a cornered animal. Jeongin was not afraid of him, had never been afraid of him, not even in the early days, the times when Minho had snapped at him, shouted at him more than once. He’d never had any fear that Minho would hurt him, and he didn’t have any fear of that right now.
“Hyung,” he said again. “Will you come and spar with me downstairs?”
There was another little silence. Minho kept looking at him, as Jeongin waited him out, and then Minho just nodded. When he spoke, his voice sounded like it was being scraped out of him. “Okay, baby boy,” he said.
Jeongin didn’t slump with relief at that, although he desperately wanted to. Instead he just pushed up to his feet and led the way out of the door, knowing without needing to look that Minho was following after him.
It was cold in the hallway, colder still in the stairwell down to the basement. They had no way of keeping the basement heated, which meant it was awful in the winter, and Jeongin avoided it where he could. It worked now, though, to wake him up a little, the cold air against his skin remarkably bracing.
Truthfully, he was tired. It was well past the time he usually slept, and well past the time that Minho usually slept, too, and today had been busy for Jeongin before he’d heard about what had happened with Felix. He hid a yawn as he made his way to the training mat, and slipped his shoes off before he stepped onto it.
He turned to find Minho doing the same. He wasn’t really dressed for it, in his jeans and sweater, not like Jeongin in the sweatpants he’d changed into once he’d gotten home from the shopping trip, but he’d seen Minho train and spar in button down shirts before, so it probably wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t as though his more comfortable clothing would give Jeongin some kind of advantage.
Under the buzzing overhead lights, Minho looked even worse. The bright fluorescence of it cast weird shadows over his bone structure, and he looked drawn, the stiff tension obvious across every part of his face. He was still shaking, as he joined Jeongin on the mat, his hands flexing now. Even when he turned to face Jeongin, he didn’t speak. He looked a little bit like he’d used up all his currently available words upstairs.
Jeongin didn’t need him to speak, not right now. They’d done this enough over the years that the basic rules were well understood. As he settled into one of the starting stances that Minho had shown him years ago, he watched Minho mimic him, a tightness to the way he positioned his limbs that usually wasn’t there. Minho, in an actual fight, was fully poised for violence, but in these sparring sessions with Jeongin, he often looked like he was simply— having fun. He didn’t look like he was going to have fun tonight.
They stood for a couple of seconds, watching each other. Minho’s hands were still flexing, his fingers opening and closing into fists, the movement like he wasn’t quite aware that he was doing it. Jeongin waited to see if he would move first, but he wasn’t surprised when Minho just continued to stand there. So Jeongin moved, darting forward, trying to be fast with his jab at Minho’s kidney.
Minho knocked his arm away like it was nothing, with a small, efficient move, the kind of thing that Jeongin had never quite been able to imitate. He’d never seen anyone move the way Minho moved: so clean, so carefully measured, and yet, with those same movements, such wild destruction could be caused too.
Minho was never like that here, with him, though. He knocked the arm away, hit Jeongin in the solar plexus with a fist that did not quite wind him, and then hooked a foot behind Jeongin’s legs to try to send him toppling down to the floor. Jeongin almost managed to sidestep it, but then Minho had an arm across his shoulders, hand gripping his upper arm, and he tipped him down to the ground.
This was not the fastest he had ever defeated Jeongin, so Jeongin wouldn’t say he was overly embarrassed by it. Minho let go of him as soon as Jeongin’s back hit the mat, his fingers leaving Jeongin, and he stepped back, a sharp movement. He’d already settled back into a starting stance.
Jeongin took a careful breath in, and then rolled over and got to his feet. That had been the very first thing Minho had taught him, the importance of simply getting back up, getting ready for another hit, another blow. Or maybe he’d learned that when he was attacked — he had gone to the floor then, a scrawny pile of teenage limbs, and his attacker had not stopped. Neither had he given Jeongin time to get back up. Jeongin had learned to do that as quickly as possible.
Minho always gave him time to get back up. This, Jeongin knew, was not how Minho worked in a real fight. Minho in a real fight didn’t give anyone time to do anything.
He settled his feet on the mat, flexing his own hands once, twice. “Again,” he said, and once again Minho waited until Jeongin came to him.
It went like that, the long minutes of Jeongin barely able to land a blow, trying his best the entire time, despite the tiredness weighing down his body. He owed it to himself, to try as best as he could, and he didn’t want Minho to realise that he wasn’t even trying. He’d never done that before, never come into these sessions half-hearted about it. If nothing else, he didn’t want Minho to look at him like he’d looked at Jeongin all the time, those years ago — like Jeongin wasn’t worth his time.
Still, in the three years they’d been training together, Jeongin had never once managed to win a bout with Minho. He’d never even really come close. There was value in defeat, things he learned far more easily by virtue of having his ass handed to him on a regular basis than he would have done if he’d found an easy win here. It didn’t even really sting, to be so easily laid flat out on the training mat, over and over again. It never usually did anyway, but it especially didn’t hurt tonight, when the point of it all was not for Jeongin to win, but for Minho to use up some of his energy.
Jeongin wasn’t sure if it was working, really. He wouldn’t say that Minho looked any better than he had at the start. There probably wasn’t much challenge in it for him, not when it was Jeongin he was fighting — maybe Chan would give him more of a run for his money, or even Changbin, although Jeongin knew that Minho never sparred with them. With Jeongin, it was always for Jeongin’s benefit, for his training. Minho didn’t seem to train in this way for himself.
He wouldn’t say this was nice — none of it was nice, or good, not the irritating drone of the lights nor the pinched look of Minho’s mouth nor the way the sweat dripped down Jeongin’s back, his body overheated in spite of how cold it was. But — and he felt guilty about this, even as he acknowledged it — there was a pleasure, in having Minho’s hands on him, holding his forearms, hooking around his elbows, warm and very firm, as he easily defeated Jeongin time after time. It was so difficult to get Minho to touch him most of the time; he would take what he could get.
Although this was— good, if he was being honest. He was not opposed to Minho’s strength being used on him in this way.
Minho was careful, though. He was always careful, had always been as gentle as possible with Jeongin, from the very first time they’d tried this. Jeongin had seen, those first few times, how much it had surprised even Minho, that even when he beat Jeongin, he did not hurt him, did not lose control the way he always seemed— afraid of. Chan had even watched, the first couple of times, standing by the side of the mat as if he too was worried that Minho would hurt Jeongin in some way. Jeongin had come out of it with screaming, aching muscles, and bruises all the way up his arms and legs, but he had not been hurt in a true sense.
Jeongin, who had never even once been scared of that violence being used against him, had wanted to say to them, why did you agree, if you were so afraid? But he wasn’t sure Minho knew the answer to that, really.
He let out an oof as he landed on his back again. He’d lost count, at this point, of how many times it had happened. Enough times for his tiredness to be very, very real now, so real that it had almost rendered time unreal. He had no idea how long they had been down here, but he suspected they’d slipped past late and into something more along the lines of early.
“Urgh,” he said, taking a moment to just look up at the ceiling so far above his head. The silence between them had eased, a little, and felt like it needed to be filled now, maybe. Jeongin studied Minho from his position on the floor, found his expression still tense as he watched Jeongin back, and tried, “I guess I won’t be winning any hand-to-hand competitions in the near future.”
Minho's expression shifted into something a little thoughtful now. When he spoke, it almost surprised Jeongin, because Minho had not said a single thing this entire time, not even to tell Jeongin to get up, or to tell him when he did a good or bad job.
“Not in a clean fight,” Minho said, gruff. “You can always just bite the other guy.”
Jeongin was smiling before he could stop himself, tickled as always by Minho's flat humour. He made his upper lip curl into a snarl, more playful than intimidating on him. The expression worked on Minho’s face, did not quite work on his own, but it did make Minho smile, a small uptick at the corner of his mouth. It was tired, he looked exhausted, but it was a smile, and the sight of it filled Jeongin with a relief so potent he almost cried.
Instead of doing that, he tested his luck and held out a hand. “Hyung,” he said. “Help me up?”
Minho hesitated. Jeongin thought he might not, but after that brief moment, Minho did step forward again and reached out to clasp Jeongin’s wrist. He didn’t take his hand, which wasn’t a surprise, no matter how badly Jeongin might wish for it; he never did, when it was Jeongin to reach out first. He helped to haul Jeongin back to his feet and then as soon as Jeongin was steady again, he let go and stepped back. Always that distance, except for when they were fighting.
Another round — Minho’s arm hooked around his waist, his leg doing something complicated so that Jeongin fell on his side this time, right on his hip. He’d be bruised there, the next day, no matter how gently Minho had done it. He rolled over, got back up, found his stance again.
The dull slap of their strikes hitting flesh was the only sound between them, that and Jeongin’s breathing, heavy and a little ragged, at this point. He was a little proud to see that Minho had broken a sweat too; not only did that mean that Minho was wearing himself out too, it meant that Jeongin was giving him something like a run for his money. Never enough to beat him, of course, but enough that Minho had to put some effort into it, after all these years.
He hit the floor again. This time, he was not sure he was capable of getting up at all. Every single part of him felt empty, all of his energy poured out until there wasn’t a drop inside him. He breathed, trying to work up to it, but before he could attempt rolling over and onto his knees, Minho said, “Baby boy, you should try to sleep.”
Jeongin rolled his head to the side to look at him. Minho had not stepped back quite so far this time, and he was a lot closer than Jeongin expected. “Hyung,” he said, his voice coming out somewhat unsteady due to the way he was heaving for breath. “What about you? Will you sleep?”
Minho just kept looking down at him. There was a shiver of something across his face at the question; surprise, probably, that Jeongin would even care about whether Minho slept or not. He was a fool, sometimes — so smart, so quick, but a fool. Jeongin had no doubt that Minho had only agreed to come and spar because he thought Jeongin needed it to sleep. It was why Jeongin had worded his request so carefully. Minho would have refused if he’d thought it was for his own benefit.
When Minho kept just saying nothing, Jeongin said, “I’ll sleep, but you have to promise me that you won’t go out into the night by yourself.”
This time Minho’s face really did move. It twisted, an expression that did not seem to suggest he was going to do what Jeongin was asking of him. He kept silent, though, so Jeongin pouted at him, just enough to know Minho would see it, and said, “Hyung, if you go out, I’ll be too worried about you to sleep. Please,” he added, when Minho still didn’t respond. He let his head tip back to the mat, too tired to keep it held up like that. “Please, promise.”
It took another few seconds before Minho nodded. He looked tired too, properly now, and he was no longer twitching like he had been. He stood perfectly still now. “Okay, baby boy,” he said. “I promise.”
Jeongin let his eyes slide shut, just a brief few seconds of darkness, but he could feel how close he was to simply falling asleep where he lay. The urge to just roll over and pass out on this uncomfortable mat was almost stronger than his urge to sleep in his warm, comfortable bed. When he opened his eyes again though, Minho was standing over him again, a hand outstretched. “Come on,” he said. “You need to sleep.”
Jeongin grasped Minho’s hand, taking the opportunity to do so. Together they somehow got Jeongin to his feet, and he slipped back into his shoes. The stairs out of the basement were almost too much, and the thought of the four more flights up to the apartment was agonising. But he had no choice, however much he wanted to suggest, once again, that he simply sleep in Minho’s room. It had not gone well when he was drunk and Minho was loose and fond; it would go terribly if he tried to ask him now.
“Hyung,” he said, before Minho could disappear into his bedroom, into that unknown space that Jeongin had never even seen the inside of. “Please, really, try to get some sleep.”
Minho looked at him, the shadows under his eyes still so obvious in the hallway lights. Then he nodded, and went into his bedroom. The door shut after him in a remarkably gentle way, like Minho had been careful about not letting it slam. Possibly a concession for Jisung, asleep next door.
Jeongin watched that closed door for another few seconds, wishing he could just— walk through it. He wanted to pull Minho down onto his bed and wrap around him and just hold him, until he felt Minho’s breathing even out, until the minute shakes up and down his body lessened. He wanted to help Minho, the way Minho always helped him, but he could not, because Minho would never allow it.
Sometimes this love hurt him, a little. It was always surprising, when that happened. It didn’t seem right to be happy and yet hurting at the same time.
He dragged himself up the rest of the stairs, and by the time he had let himself into the apartment, he felt dead on his feet. Everything was very still, very quiet. Perhaps some of the others were awake in their rooms but it didn’t seem likely, not when he couldn’t hear even the slightest rustling. Someone might have come out to see him, if they had been awake, Chan to check he was okay, or Hyunjin to see who it was.
He didn’t bother with the bathroom. He didn’t have the energy for washing his face or brushing his teeth. Inside his room, he didn’t even have the energy for changing out of his sweatpants and t-shirt. He simply let himself fall onto his side on his bed, wriggling a little to avoid pressing on the sore parts inside him, and then, after one, slow breath, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
——
After the others had all gone, Chan had let himself stand with his hand against the smooth surface of the wood, head bowed a little so he was looking down at the floor, the faded beige carpet. If there was one thing he did not enjoy, it was arguing with Minho. He could trust, he knew, that Minho respected him, was loyal to him in his way, and would never betray this team. What he could not know, however, was where the limit was between what he ordered Minho to do, and what Minho’s paranoid streak wanted him to do. One day, he feared that he would tell Minho to do something, and Minho would simply— refuse. And Chan didn’t know what he would do, in that situation.
But tonight, at least, it appeared that Minho would do as he was asked. At least he had that, at least he would not have to worry about Minho wandering the streets alone. If something happened to him, out there, by himself, would they ever find out about it? Sometimes Chan thought about all the bodies they, themselves, had quietly taken to the river to be dumped and had to fight down the urge to shudder at the thought of it happening to any of his family.
Fuck, he thought, the realisation hitting him hard enough that he almost swayed. That had been what almost happened to Felix today — he, too, could have simply vanished without a trace, and what would Chan have, after he was gone? A credit card bill for clothes that would go unworn, baking supplies in the kitchen that would go unused. An empty, gaping hole in his life, one which he hadn’t realised would be quite so large. He felt— nauseated.
He turned, but he wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was planning to do. There was only his empty office in front of him, the quiet broken only by the low hum of his computer running. It’s okay, he told himself, trying to focus through the fuzziness of his brain. It’s okay. You saved him.
But that didn’t make it better, it just made it terrible in a new way, because the moment he had the thought, everything but the knowledge of how it felt to hold Felix in his arms was swept away. He had done that, he had gripped Felix tight and felt Felix hold him back, warm and narrow-shouldered and Chan could never unknow it. Chan would live with that knowledge for the rest of his life, and whenever he looked at Felix he would know — he would know, how he felt in Chan’s arms.
Even in that awful moment, even when Felix had been crying and scared, there had been the thought of: he fits so perfectly like this.
The others, he knew, thought of him as some kind of good guy; he had tried to be one, his entire life. As such, he was not proud of that thought, and he was not especially proud of himself right now, to be thinking about it, his entire mind filled with it. This was not like at the club, where he had let himself indulge in looking at Felix. If he indulged in this, he would, he knew, go simply fucking insane.
There was probably work that he could do, something he could use to distract himself from it all, but for one of the first times in his life he simply could not face it. He did not want to lose himself in his work. Not in this room, alone like this. Maybe he should go to bed, he thought. He should probably go to bed.
But instead he stood there, staring at nothing, and thought, Felix, Felix, Felix.
Chapter 7
Notes:
me fretting that this chapter would be too short and then we added 6k to it in like a week kind of out of nowhere. life sure does find a way.
chapter specific warnings: minor character death, referenced past sexual assault, referenced child sex abuse. Neither of the latter two are detailed in any way, just referenced. This chapter delves a bit more into Hyunjin's situation and backstory, so all of those general warnings apply and should be taken into consideration while reading~
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Seungmin felt his eyes drift shut for just a beat too long and knew, then, that he would have to admit defeat. The realisation of it drove his already potent annoyance to a whole new level. He did not want to have to stop. He did not want to have to sleep.
I’m getting fucking old, he thought, very grumpily, as he paused the video he’d been rewinding through, the screen freezing on a daytime shot of the street outside, a blue sedan driving past in a blur of motion. Once upon a time, not even that long ago, in fact, he’d have been able to stay up for two or three days to get this work done, keeping himself awake with a concoction of coffee and energy drinks. Now the mere thought of that made him kind of want to die, a little, but was that not just a sign of weakness, in him?
He sighed. The workroom was perfectly silent. He had, in fact, gone to bed, let Changbin coax him there with promises to hold him, a concept that Seungmin, his brain nasty with anxiety, had wanted desperately. But Changbin had fallen asleep, more easily than Seungmin would have expected, and Seungmin had managed perhaps one hour of laying in the darkness with his eyes closed before he’d fallen into a thin nightmare of the Magpie’s men storming through their front door. He’d gotten up, after that, pulling himself from Changbin’s arms, and came out here and had resumed backtracking.
Changbin had woken up with his alarm at four, and come out into the workroom to find Seungmin curled up in his chair. Seungmin had expected Changbin to— scold him, perhaps, or tell him to go back to sleep. Changbin had not. Instead, he had brushed Seungmin’s hair away from his face and kissed his forehead, his cheek, and then his mouth, very gently. “I’ll come back down later,” he had said quietly. “I’ll bring food for you.”
And he had, leaving a plate of pajeon on the workbench and then leaving again to go do something that Seungmin hadn’t asked about. Seungmin hadn’t looked away from his screen, and the food still lay on the table, because he couldn’t face eating anything. But finally, finally, he was too tired to stay awake, and so he would need to sleep.
He picked up his phone and thumbed open his texts. The last one had been from Chan, yesterday before the incident, asking Seungmin for a meeting to discuss the Plaza job. I have a list of licence plates, he sent. Come and get them whenever you’re free.
The second text he sent to Hyunjin. Come downstairs now.
He glanced at the time. Both earlier and later than he’d expected, his computer informing him that it was 10:26am. Time was a bitch of a thing. He had only managed to get through another day and a half of footage, because even at quadruple speed he was limited by the physics of time, which in his current mood didn’t really seem like a good enough excuse. But he couldn’t track what he was seeing on the screen if he went faster than this, and so he was subject to the fact that twenty-four hours of footage would take at least six hours to go through.
He was going to be here for more than a week doing this, if he followed his plan, which was to backtrack until the point that Felix arrived.
Had the Magpie’s men known where Felix was this entire time? That was the fear that was gripping Seungmin tight by the throat, the fear that had driven him out of Changbin’s arms and into the cool, stale air of his workroom. He didn’t think Felix had lured the men here, or had been the one to tip off his location in the first place, but he had no evidence of such a thing, nothing more than his trust in Felix. Nothing more than that gut instinct. It was barely good enough for him, so it was unlikely to be good enough for anyone else, if it ever came out.
All he could do, all he had at his disposal, was the footage. And if he could look through it all and make sure that no suspicious cars had been outside the house in the past several weeks, then that would have to be enough for him.
He saw Hyunjin on the monitors, picked up by the cameras in the stairwell. When he came in through the workshop door, he was dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, with the hood pulled up all the way like he usually wore it when he had just woken up. Every inch of his skin covered in some way, his feet stuffed into a pair of sneakers, his hands pulled up into his sleeves. In the coolness of mid fall, this seemed fine, but Seungmin had seen him dressed like this at the height of summer, too, and those times he always felt a wash of sympathy that he tried to not let Hyunjin see.
Hyunjin did not look fully awake. He made a noise that could, by some manner of speaking, be considered a greeting. It was fine; Seungmin did not need small talk. He fished a specific little slip of paper out of the mess of other papers covering his desk and held it out between his fingers. On one side, a licence plate and car make, in Hyunjin’s scrawl. On the other, an address, in Seungmin’s. “Here,” he said. “This is the information you wanted.”
Hyunjin blinked at him, a slow, tired thing. Then he sloped forward and took the paper from Seungmin and slipped it into his pocket without even looking at it. “Thank you,” he said, voice rough, like it was the first actual thing he had said that morning. Probably it was.
Seungmin had long since stopped trying to dissect how he felt about doing this particular brand of favour for Hyunjin. It didn’t really matter, since it wasn’t like he was ever going to turn Hyunjin away. Seungmin wasn’t prone to incessantly giving Hyunjin his way like so many of the others, but in this, he thought, Hyunjin could do whatever he liked, however he liked.
Even anxious and sleep deprived and frantically backtracking through footage, Seungmin had taken a few minutes to look up what Hyunjin had asked of him yesterday, after he’d gotten back from that shopping trip. Handing Seungmin a slip of paper, in an increasingly longer line of small slips of paper. And in spite of everything, Seungmin had never even so much as considered ignoring the requests, even when it meant a little more work for him.
He did not want to dissect what this said about himself, either. He who tried so hard to not— feel. This team made him feel so much.
“Whatever,” Seungmin said, his own voice a little rough too. “I’m going to fucking sleep. Tell everybody to not bother me for the next twelve hours. Nobody open any fucking windows.”
“Tell them yourself,” Hyunjin said. He’d already turned and headed back to the door, not looking back at Seungmin. “I’m not your messenger boy.”
Seungmin just resisted the urge to snatch something up from the workbench and throw it at his back. He’d never reach, anyway, and in the moments he took wrestling with the urge, Hyunjin had already slipped out of the room, the door shutting behind him with a remarkably quiet click. Seungmin had expected him to let it slam.
He groaned. Now that that task was done, the tiredness was pressing on him far more urgently. It felt like the gravity in the room had increased tenfold. He turned off a few of his monitors, kept the live feeds up just in case — he’d trained his body to wake if an alarm sounded but nothing else would disturb him, not when he was this tired — and got to his feet. For a moment, he swayed.
He wanted— Changbin to come back, to come and lay with him again. To feel the warmth of him. His bed was so narrow that they always had to sleep with Changbin on his back, Seungmin across his front, their legs tangled together. He wanted that viscerally and was now mad at the him who had given it up the night before. But he couldn’t have that, not now it was the light of day, and so he took himself off to bed by himself, hoping beyond hope that he’d sleep dreamlessly. Or, at the very least, he amended, sleep without the nightmares. He just did not want nightmares.
——
Felix picked tiredly through the wires he’d collected from the tubs on the cooler shelves, trying to find the piece he’d cut earlier. On the workbench in front of him lay the gutted out charges he’d been working on for the past week or so. He’d made them once, then dismantled them to make changes, and now he was putting them back together, hoping they were better.
It was hard to know, without an easy way to test them. It was hard, too, when he’d never built anything like this for an actual purpose before. It had always just been for his own interest, the joy of putting it together like a puzzle, the same way that computer programs had always spoken to him. There was a pressure, here, to make these work the way they were meant to work, to prove that he could be useful. Hence, the endless fiddling.
Hyunjin had been down with him, earlier. He had stuck close after Felix had woken up, making them both a breakfast that was more like a lunch by the time they ate it, encouraging Felix to eat even though Felix had not really felt like it. He had woken up more times that he could count through the night, shocked awake from nightmares — nightmares of being grabbed by unknown hands, of his father’s face purple with rage, of Chan being shot instead of shooting. Some of these had woken Hyunjin, which Felix felt awful about, but Hyunjin had said nothing, just let Felix cling close, a hand running soothingly through his hair.
Felix had been surprised at how long Hyunjin had sat with him, while Felix worked on the charges. He had brought a sketchbook down with him, perched on one of the stools, sketching something that he didn’t let Felix see. Felix had thought about talking to him, about asking him— more, maybe, about what he had revealed the night before. So much made sense now, and yet it had thrown other things into confusion — Hyunjin’s easy, affectionate physicality around him seemed nothing short of a miracle, now he knew everything more clearly. But he had not wanted to ask, did not need to know. Hyunjin had clearly not wanted to talk more on it, and Felix understood that — he, too, had things he did not want to talk about.
Eventually though, Hyunjin had grown bored, a little restless, which hadn’t surprised Felix, because he already knew that Hyunjin preferred to work with paint more than other mediums.
“Hyunjin,” he had said, when Hyunjin had spent a full two minutes staring into space spinning his pencil around in his fingers. “I’m okay, you can go back upstairs if you want.”
Hyunjin had looked at him for a long few seconds. Felix had expected him to refuse, to fuss a little over him, but Hyunjin hadn’t. He’d just looked serious, as serious as he had the night before, telling Felix about his past. Whatever he had seen on Felix’s face had made him nod, and say, “Come and get me, if you need me, okay?”
Felix had nodded, and Hyunjin had left him alone in the workshop, in the absolute silence of it. Usually he liked to work with music, but he had no way of playing any, and besides something about the quiet appealed today, where usually it didn’t.
Seungmin, asleep in his side room, might not be too happy to find him alone in here. Felix had noticed how Seungmin never left him alone while he worked, but maybe he might make an exception today, after yesterday. Felix needed to be useful, needed to do something with his hands. This was the only option available to him, after his baking supplies had been mostly destroyed.
He was melting metal onto a circuit board when the door to the workroom opened. It— scared him, somewhat embarrassingly, so that his hand twitched a little in the direction of where the alarm Seungmin had shown him was located. A nervous flinch of moment, which was pointless, because it was Chan who came into the room, and he stopped dead when he saw Felix sitting there.
“Lix,” he said, a somewhat blank expression on his face. Then his expression softened, into something that Felix could barely handle, truthfully. Not after yesterday. “I didn’t expect you to be down here. Are you okay?”
Felix nodded, sliding the goggles he was wearing off his face. It was not quite a lie. He would be fine, in the end, even if he was not quite there yet. He didn’t have the words to explain it, though, so he just said, “If you wanted Seungmin, I think he’s sleeping.”
“Ah, no, I was just coming to collect something he left out for me,” Chan said. But instead of going to Seungmin’s desk to get whatever that was, he came to the workbench and took a seat along the side perpendicular to Felix. He was looking at Felix with that gentle expression still, and Felix could not look away. His face was so handsome when he was serious like this, and Felix liked it, too much, when all of his attention was focused on Felix: his dark eyes, his lush mouth.
“How did you sleep?” Chan asked, after a moment.
Felix shrugged. “I’ve had worse,” he said, which was the actual truth, because nothing could compare to the sleeplessness of the nights he’d spent on exposed park benches, or the two days he’d spent awake after that man had tried to grab him the first time. This, however, clearly was not reassuring to Chan, whose hand, resting against the table, twitched like he was going to touch Felix’s hand also resting against the surface. Felix did not move, but Chan didn’t do it anyway. Felix tried to not feel disappointed about it, and did not succeed.
“I’m sorry,” Chan said softly.
Felix shook his head. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he said, very earnestly, trying to infuse all the gratitude he felt into his voice. “Hyung. I didn’t get to say it yesterday, but thank you, for helping me. For— saving me.”
“God, Felix,” Chan said. He looked vaguely horrified. “You don’t have to thank me for that, of course I helped you. How could I stand there and just watch that happen? I’m just so glad that I was there.”
Felix was, too, so grateful, so grateful that he was not sure he’d ever be able to repay Chan for what he had done. The memory of his panic when he’d first felt those arms go around his waist and start to drag him backwards sent a shudder through him. He had known he was going to die, in that moment, but not right away — he had known that he would suffer before he died, suffer in ways he both could and could not fathom. He had not wanted to be in pain like that.
The relief he had felt to see that arm come through the door, to realise that it belonged to Chan, who had come for him— even now, it took his breath away.
They looked at each other for a long minute, Felix not sure what to say because there weren’t words for it, Chan looking back at him, his ears flushed red. Felix could not wrap his head around how good Chan was. How could a man this good exist in this awful, awful city, how could he inhabit the same world as Felix?
It was not just with Felix that he was like this, Felix knew that now. He had done something for Jeongin that Felix still did not know the full shape of, and he had helped Hyunjin too — he thought about the way Hyunjin had sounded when he had said, he makes me feel safe. Safety, Felix knew, was a precious thing. Did Chan even know, the value of what he had created for them?
The silence stretched, too long between them. Felix knew he should say something, should look away, but he once again felt like he couldn’t. In the end, it was Chan who cleared his throat a little and broke the eye contact. It always was Chan, Felix thought. Yesterday, too, it had been Chan who had pulled away, handed him to Hyunjin and then had not touched him again.
“You’re working on the charges?” Chan asked, voice still so quiet, the tone of it curling around Felix’s stupid heart.
“Yes,” said Felix, his own voice a little quieter than it had been. He looked down at the bombs on the desk, touching some of the unfinished parts, and then back at Chan. “I wanted to make sure they’re ready.”
Chan did not quite frown but there was surprise on his face all the same. “I didn’t think you’d want to come anymore,” he said. “I thought— to be honest, I was going to ask Minho to give me the original plan again.”
“I don’t,” Felix said. “Want to go.” It was probably a little too truthful but where he could, he wanted to be that: truthful, to give Chan the real truth.
“Then why—”
“But I should,” Felix said, interrupting before Chan could ask the question. “I should still go.” He stopped, trying to figure out how to put it. Chan was frowning now, but he sat and waited, and did not interrupt Felix in turn. “Hyung, I don’t want to be scared. I mean, I am scared, I’m scared, but I can’t just be scared and do nothing.”
“You could,” said Chan, when it seemed like Felix was done. “Felix, if you wanted to simply stay inside until we do your job, then I don’t think anyone would blame you for that.”
“I would,” Felix said. Hadn’t he done enough of that? Hadn’t he spent the first twenty years of his life scared in some way, hiding from it, running from it? There were things he could not do in this life, things like fight, or save his sister, but there were things he could do, things he was capable of, and going on this job, proving himself to this team, was one of them.
Didn’t he owe it, to himself if no one else, to do it, then?
“I would,” he repeated. “I want to go with you and Hyunjin and I want to do this. I know that I can do it, and anyway,” he added, in a burst, knowing even as he said it that it was ill-advised, that it might reveal too much of himself, but saying it anyway, “you’ll be there, you’ll keep me safe, like you did yesterday.”
It was not just Chan’s ears that were red now. This time, he did reach across and touch the back of Felix’s hand, very briefly. Even just that slight touch sent something through Felix’s body, the sight of the dark tattoos on Chan’s hands against his skin. “I will,” he said, his voice intent now, as he took his hand back. “I will keep you safe, Felix.”
Felix believed him, believed him more than he’d ever believed in a person before. There was no doubt in him, that he could place himself in Chan’s hands and be — protected, safe, in a way that he had never experienced before.
Was it better, or worse, to know now how it felt to have been held in Chan’s arms? It went beyond safety, that feeling — it went beyond anything Felix had experienced before. He wanted Chan to hold him again, and not because Felix was crying, or upset, but because— because Felix wanted it, or maybe because Chan wanted to hold him. There was a part of Felix that despaired at never feeling the solidity of Chan’s arms around him again, and yet that was simply the reality he would have to live with.
“For the record,” Chan said, “I think you’re being incredibly brave, coming with us.”
Brave? Perhaps. Felix didn’t feel brave about it, not when it filled him with a sick sort of anxiety, but he supposed that might be bravery, to be scared of something and to do it anyway. But no, Felix wasn’t a brave person, he knew that in his heart. It was Chan who was brave. Chan who had seen something awful happening and acted to fix it. Most people wouldn’t do the same. Felix, when it had been his time to prove himself, had not done the same.
“I’ll let you finish your work,” Chan said, when Felix didn’t respond. He stood up, and although it would have been easier to come around the back of Felix on his way to Seungmin’s desk, instead he went the other way, so that Felix watched him walk between the table and the couch against the wall, as far away as he could be. The thing that Seungmin had left on his desk for him was apparently a stack of papers, print-outs by the look of it, which Chan picked up, flicked through, and then sighed.
“What’s that?” Felix asked, toying with his goggles.
“Ah, just a list of licence plate numbers,” Chan said, a little absently, before he looked back at Felix and smiled. “You don’t need to worry about it.”
Somehow Felix doubted that, but if Chan told him that he didn’t need to worry, then Felix simply was not going to. He had too much else to think about, and not enough energy for it. “Okay, hyung,” he said.
When Chan left the room again, closing the door very quietly behind him, Felix sat in the silence for a long time, letting it settle back over him. How could a person want so much, and yet be allowed so little of it? He would be angry about how unfair it all was, but he’d learned that lesson long ago — there was very little, if anything at all, that was fair in this world.
——
In a manner of speaking, Minho had slept. He had gone to bed, like Jeongin had asked, and he had laid down in his bed, and shut his eyes, and he supposed that he must have, at various points in those hours he spent laying in the dark, actually fallen asleep, because the time had passed much faster than it should have if he hadn’t slept. But he could not remember sleeping.
It was always a surprise to other people, he knew, that Minho didn’t function well on little sleep. He could do it, if he needed to, could force himself into alert awakeness if the situation required. Had he been allowed, this morning, to go out on patrol, like he’d requested from Chan, he would feel much better than he currently did. But Chan had refused him this.
“Minho,” he had said, patiently and calmly, in a way that made irritation pluck at Minho’s nerves. “You look like garbage, you can’t go out and patrol like this.”
“Someone needs to patrol,” Minho had argued, knowing he was right, knowing that Chan knew he was right.
“Yes, which is why I’ve sent Changbin and Jisung out together,” Chan said, maddeningly implacable. “Either go get some more sleep, or find something to occupy yourself, but you’re not going out to patrol alone.”
Minho had tried to protest, but it was almost always useless to argue with Chan when he had made up his mind about something. It had not worked last night, which meant it was even less likely to work today. Jeongin, Minho knew, had come by his stubbornness naturally, but it had almost certainly been bolstered by Chan’s own stubbornness, the two of them butting heads through the years they had spent just the two of them together. Minho, who had his own bullheadedness when he wanted it, had not bothered arguing this time.
It was true: he was tired.
He sat at the kitchen table now, the plans for the Plaza Hotel job spread out in front of him. He had come up here because when he’d first tried to look it all over in his bedroom, the lure of his bed had been almost too much to deny. But Minho was not sure he had ever napped in his entire life. His father would never have allowed such a thing, even as a child, and prison certainly was not the kind of place for laziness like that. Instead, he’d had a routine instilled into him: go to bed early, wake up early, and struggle through the day as best as he could.
Perhaps he had napped in solitary. But he thought that was different, maybe. It was hard to call something a nap, when he had never been sure when it was daytime or when it was nighttime.
The kitchen was silent. It had been very quiet for a long time, the only sound that of Minho’s breathing and the scratch of his pen on the papers as he made notes to himself. In some ways, the tiredness helped, because his brain was too exhausted to keep up that same awful buzzing anxiety that he had felt yesterday, but in others, it made it worse, because there still was anxiety, more than was comfortable and it felt like it was draining anything he had out of him in slow drips. His thoughts too sluggish, yet his hands still shaking too much, his writing— messy. So messy that sometimes he looked back at notes he’d made and had no idea what he’d written.
He was squinting at something that he thought might have been if bombs too big then what? when a door opened down the hallway. He glanced up, and then back down at his paper, as the bathroom door opened and shut. The usual state of things, he thought, but his attention was somewhat shot even further than it had been, by the realisation that he was not actually alone up here.
He hadn’t really thought he was, truthfully. He hadn’t seen any of the people who actually lived in the apartment, which meant it stood to reason that they were likely in their rooms doing something. But he hadn’t been able to hear them, and he’d thought that was— fitting, maybe, for him to be alone. He wasn’t sure if he had wanted it so much as simply accepted it.
The flush of the toilet, the bathroom door opening again. Minho watched the entrance to that hallway and was both surprised and not when it was Jeongin who shuffled into the room, sleep-rumpled and clearly barely awake. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night when they had sparred, the dark sweatpants, the green sweatshirt that had appeared in Jeongin’s wardrobe at some point in the past year.
He should stop noticing these things, he knew. Stop paying attention to every single detail of Jeongin. But he couldn’t do that anymore than he could switch off the anxiety inside of him.
“Baby boy,” he said, when he saw it was Jeongin, rubbing at his face with the side of his hand. He got to his feet in a jerky motion that made the chair legs squeak on the floor. He wasn’t sure he’d ever done that before, not where the others could hear, and Jeongin jumped a little at the sound before looking at him with a more awake expression.
“Hyung,” he said.
“Sit down,” Minho said, motioning to the table. His voice sounded a little like it didn’t quite belong to him, he was not sure why. “Do you want pancakes, I’ll make you some pancakes.”
Jeongin— looked at him, a long moment, like he was processing the words. It didn't matter, because Minho was already moving to the kitchen, mentally running through everything he would need to make pancakes. They had the mix, he knew, and as he reached into one of the upper cupboards, Jeongin eventually said, "Hyung, it's okay, aren't you tired?"
Minho didn't answer that. Instead, he just silently fetched all the things he needed to make the pancakes: the mix, eggs, milk from the fridge. When he glanced back over, Jeongin was still standing watching him, his hair sticking up at the back from sleep. Looking at him like that was almost painful. “Sit down, baby boy,” he said.
Jeongin nodded slowly. He took his place at the table, facing Minho in the kitchen. He touched a hand questioningly to the papers Minho had spread out and when Minho didn’t react, started collecting them up into a semi-neat pile at the side of the table, away from where he’d eat. There was something— relieving, about seeing those papers be set aside. Like Minho no longer had an obligation to work on them.
As Minho worked, mixing everything into a bowl, waiting for the pan he had set on the stove to heat up, he could feel Jeongin’s eyes on him. When he glanced back over his shoulder, though, Jeongin was only watching him work, his head propped up by a hand against his cheek, his eyes blinking open and closed slowly.
He looked— so tired. He had been moving, too, in a slightly stiff way that suggested he was feeling the aftermath of their sparring session. He had been scared, last night, Minho knew. Upset by what had happened, that brush with danger so close to their doorstep. His safe haven, so carefully built by Chan for him, encroached upon once more.
Minho made the pancakes carefully. It was so much easier to concentrate on this, on cooking, than it had been to focus on the job plans, probably because it occupied his body in some way. It was nice to move, to keep his hands busy. Still, he took his time with them, making sure they didn’t burn, making sure to cook them perfectly. Once he had a small stack, he fished out the tub of blueberries that belonged to Hyunjin and put some of them in a side bowl for Jeongin to add as he wanted, and fetched the syrup they had in a cupboard. Only then did he set everything down on the table.
Jeongin looked at the stack of pancakes in front of him, and then at Minho, and then said, “Hyung, come and eat with me?”
“I made them for you,” Minho told him, as he got Jeongin a fork from the cutlery drawer.
“Even I can’t eat—” Jeongin counted them quickly — “eight pancakes by myself, hyung. Come and eat with me.”
Minho looked at the pancakes and then at Jeongin’s face, which was set in that wide-eyed pleading expression that Minho knew was put on but coupled with the way his hair was still sticking up, and the faint lines still on his face from where he had lay on his pillow, Minho couldn’t do anything else. He got a fork for himself.
Jeongin smiled at him as Minho sat down, at his usual seat opposite where Jeongin was. This was where they sat in team meetings, usually, although not at team dinners, which were always casual enough to use the couches. But at team meetings, it was like this: Jeongin on one side of Chan at the head of the table, Minho on the other. This had not been done on purpose, all those years ago, and now Minho often wished he hadn’t taken this seat, because it was hard to concentrate when Jeongin’s face was right across from him, when Jeongin’s knee sometimes bumped his under the table.
Their knees bumped a little now, as Jeongin poured syrup over the pancakes and started eating. Minho studied him, feeling— he was not sure. There were so many emotions inside of him and truthfully he wasn’t used to feeling them, wasn’t used to putting names to them. He worked so hard at keeping them all pushed deep down, where they could not rise up and drown him, but he was too tired right now to do it.
There was a pleasure in him that felt wrong to be feeling, at watching Jeongin eat the food that he had made. A pleasure that didn’t feel like it should belong to him. But he liked— taking care of Jeongin. Looking after him. The softness of him, in this moment, only added to it. His tousled hair, the pink indents on his face, slowly fading. Moments like this always crept back up on Minho later, when he lay awake in his bed, or awoke in the morning. He could envision, so clearly, what Jeongin would look like laying beside him.
He would look like this.
Jeongin glanced up at him and frowned. He’d eaten through most of two pancakes while Minho watched him, and now he cut the third one in half with his fork and pushed it closer to Minho on the plate. “Eat,” he said.
Minho did as he was told, cutting off a small amount and putting it in his mouth. He wasn’t hungry, to be honest, although he had not been able to stomach more than a few bites of breakfast, too tired to feel the need to eat more than that. The pancakes were sweet, almost overly so when paired with the syrup, and Minho ate his half slowly, chewing carefully before swallowing. Once he’d finished, Jeongin cut off a half of his next pancake, and slid that over too.
That care felt like it might unravel Minho at the seams. He hated when Jeongin did this. His goodness bleeding out of him, the care he held for them all extending even to Minho, who did not deserve to be treated in this way. Of all things, Minho didn’t deserve Jeongin’s sweetness, not when Jeongin did not know the ways in which Minho wanted that sweetness for himself.
His hands were shaking a little. His fork scraped against the plate and he set it down again.
“Baby boy,” he said, “did you have nightmares, last night?”
Jeongin looked up at him, obviously surprised to be asked. “Nightmares?” he asked, setting his own fork down. “No, hyung, I was okay, I didn’t have any nightmares.”
He said it like it should have been obvious, although Minho— knew, how easily Jeongin had nightmares about these things. He still wasn’t sure he believed that the nightmares he had didn’t involve Minho, weren’t about watching Minho batter a man to death in front of him. Jeongin would, Minho thought, say whatever he thought he needed to say to not cause Minho distress in this way.
“I thought you might,” Minho said, watching Jeongin’s face again, for signs that Jeongin was— bending the truth, perhaps. “Last night, you were— upset, that’s why we sparred for so long. So you could sleep.”
Jeongin looked back at him. His expression was oddly serious, something Minho felt like he rarely saw on Jeongin. With his face still like this, his smile dropped away, it was startling just how old he looked, at this clear sign that Jeongin really was grown up now. Minho had had no way of knowing, when he’d first looked at that fifteen year old Jeongin with the braces and the naive demeanour, just how handsome Jeongin would end up becoming.
“No, hyung,” Jeongin said, tone of voice oddly like he was steeling himself. “We sparred for so long last night because you looked like you were going to jitter out of your skin and I wanted to help you sleep.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, so simply, like it was the truth. Minho— flinched, unable to help himself. Was that true, was that why Jeongin had asked him to spar last night after all? He turned the night over again in his head and realised— it probably was true. The way Jeongin had worded his request, the way he had kept going long after Minho had known that he was exhausted, getting to his feet again and again.
God, Minho thought, not sure if he was impressed or mad or just tired. He fucking manipulated me. And it had worked so well, too well, because Minho wanted, so badly, to do what he could for Jeongin, and instead of doing that, it had been Jeongin trying to help him, trying to do what he could for Minho instead.
He didn’t deserve this. He did not deserve this.
“How about you?” Jeongin asked, voice strangely intent. “Did you have nightmares?”
Minho shook his head. He’d have needed to sleep in order to have nightmares, after all. At least there was that, at least he had not suffered through his own nightmares last night, the silver lining to the tired way he was shaking now. He was not sure he could sit here like this with Jeongin, as normal as he could be, if he’d seen again last night that awful vision of Jeongin’s blood-covered face, his eyes glassy and empty—
“Hyung?” he heard, and a moment later there was a brush of fingers against his scarred cheek. He jerked back out of the way, his heart thumping in his chest, and saw Jeongin leaned across the table, his hand curved as if he had been trying to cup Minho’s cheek. Minho stared at him, feeling the urge to scream, looking at Jeongin’s face so much closer to him, the way his hand hovered in the air for a long few seconds.
“I’m sorry,” Jeongin said quietly, after those seconds had gone on too long, sitting back in his seat and letting his hand drop back to the table. He was nervous, looking at Minho with wide eyes, almost pleading somehow. “I just— you looked like you needed— soothing.”
Soothing. No, that was not what Minho needed.
What would he have done, if Jeongin had touched him like he had been meaning to? He could barely comprehend it, although he still remembered, in agonising detail, how it had felt to have Jeongin’s finger tracing across his skin that night that he had been drunk, the rasp of his dry palm against Minho’s cheek. It was branded into his brain, a memory that he could not rid himself off no matter how much he wished that he could.
It would have hurt, if Jeongin had touched him. It hurt even more to not have it. Which was the lesser of two evils, here? Would there ever be an answer to that question?
“I’m sorry,” Jeongin said again. There was a frantic little note in his voice now, like he thought Minho was angry, perhaps. Minho was not angry. Minho was simply— tired.
“Baby boy,” Minho said. “Don’t be sorry.” It was Minho who should be sorry. Sorry that Jeongin had needed to do that, sorry that he had imposed on Jeongin like that. It was not Jeongin’s job, to help Minho, not something he should ever need to worry about, and yet he had, all the same.
It was not Jeongin’s fault that Minho, fractured and weak where it was most important, had to keep reminding himself that Jeongin meant nothing by it. That Jeongin would have done it for anyone, would have helped any member of his small family in such a way. It was not Jeongin’s fault, that Minho loved him.
He stood, taking the care this time to make sure his chair didn’t screech against the floor. Jeongin made an aborted little move, as if to take Minho’s hand or wrist, but then he fell still, blinking up at him. “Hyung,” he said, “you don’t have to go, finish eating with me at least?”
“No,” said Minho. If he stayed here, he would do something— unforgivable. He would not be able to explain it, if he cried here like this. He picked the papers up, gathered haphazardly into his arms. “I have to go talk to your hyung about something, that’s all.”
He was almost to the door when Jeongin said, voice small, “Hyung, wait.”
Minho did so, coming to a juddery stop, before turning to look at Jeongin. How could he not? It was embarrassing, even if only in his own head, how so completely he was unable to deny Jeongin anything. Jeongin was twisted in his chair, looking at him, still with that same upset expression on his face, his mouth almost in a subconscious pout. “You’re really not angry, are you?” he asked.
Minho felt it, the slow fraying of his composure. “I’m not angry,” he said, giving Jeongin that, at least, that bit of truth inside him. There was a part of him, deep down, that did not want to scare Jeongin off those tender little touches in the future. Even though that would be the best course of action, he simply could not bring himself to do it. The idea of being deprived the soft brush of Jeongin’s fingers, healing and light as a butterfly’s wings, made a different sort of anxiety claw up Minho’s throat. “I’m not,” he reiterated, when Jeongin still looked unsure. “Don’t worry about that, baby boy. Don’t let Hyunjin steal your pancakes, okay? I made them for you.”
After a moment, Jeongin smiled, a small, tentative thing. “I really can’t eat this many pancakes, hyung,” he said. “Can I share them with Felix-hyung, then?”
“No,” said Minho shortly.
Jeongin laughed, which— Minho had wanted. Jeongin knew, he always knew, when Minho was joking, when his blunt tone was a cover for a piece of humour, and Minho didn’t know how Jeongin did it, when other people seemed to so often misunderstand him. He knew when Minho was serious, and he knew when Minho was not, and it felt like being seen somehow, an excruciating sensation.
I love you, he thought, the ferocity of it both shocking and not, because it was not new, this bone-deep love, but it somehow got stronger every time he thought it, and that, at least, surprised him. Who knew that it could be deeper? I fucking love you so much.
Words he could not say, words he could not ever say. So instead of saying them, he let himself out of the apartment, the door clicking shut behind him, and did not let himself think any longer about Jeongin.
——
It was late when the knock came on Jisung’s door.
His head snapped up, glancing at the clock on his nightstand as he had the thought, Chan-hyung? But it was after midnight, and having made Jisung patrol with Changbin for the bulk of the day, Chan had sent Jisung off to rest for the remainder of the night. He wouldn’t bother Jisung now.
At this time of night, there was only one other person who ever came knocking on Jisung’s door. Which meant—
Jisung rolled his desk chair back and stood, his overlong pyjama bottoms tangling around his feet a little as he moved to the door. Sure enough, when he opened it, Hyunjin was there looking back at him. Unlike the last time he had stood here, Hyunjin did not look nervous, or unsure of himself. He just looked— a little blank, dressed in his black clothes: black jeans, black hoodie, a black bag tight across his body, black sneakers that Jisung knew from experience Hyunjin could move silently in.
Jisung looked at him, feeling his heart sink and stomach clench. He did not ask what Hyunjin wanted. He did not need to. It had been so long since the last time Hyunjin had come to him for this — six months, perhaps, maybe even longer. Jisung had hoped, deep inside of him, that it was over. Not for him, not for his sake, but for Hyunjin’s. It had been naive but Jisung had thought, at one point, how many more could there be, and when it had stopped, when Hyunjin had not come to him late in the night with that look in his eyes, Jisung had hoped, maybe that was it.
Of course, it had not been. Again, the thought of, how many more could there be? Jisung sometimes felt like he couldn’t bear to comprehend it, but Hyunjin didn’t have a choice in the matter. So Jisung forced himself to bear it too.
He did not voice how tired he was, physically and emotionally. Did not tell Hyunjin this should maybe wait until tomorrow. Instead, he just softly said, “Let me get changed.”
Hyunjin nodded. He was patient, when it came to times like this, but Jisung tried to be as fast as possible. He closed his door without latching it, not wanting to subject Hyunjin to his nudity again, and quickly pulled on a pair of jeans and a dark blue hoodie over his sleep shirt. Then his oldest boots, the kind that zipped up the side and didn’t need lacing. He grabbed the set of car keys Chan had given him, newer than the ones Chan and Changbin had. Hyunjin stepped back once he opened the door again to let him out, far enough away that there wasn’t the hint of his body warmth as Jisung locked his bedroom door for once.
The stairwell was empty, their footsteps echoing. Hyunjin still said nothing to him, but then he never did, on nights like this. He led the way, Jisung following him, looking at that head of red hair, still uncovered for now. Jisung thought about asking where they were going, but he didn’t need to know. He would take Hyunjin wherever he wanted to go.
Outside, in the parking lot out back, the light over the back door switched on as they exited, flooding the lot with light. Jisung glanced behind himself at the camera set up over the door, and then up to the window of Chan’s office, where there was a light showing, but Hyunjin ignored it all and just headed to the car. He stood, looking at Jisung expectantly, until Jisung unlocked the doors, and then he climbed into the front passenger seat.
Jisung got into the driver’s seat. The closed car doors seemed to create a vacuum of sound around them, the silence so much more present like this. He started the engine as quickly as possible, grateful for the hum of it, something for his brain to focus on. He was expecting someone to appear at the back door and ask what they were doing, where they were going, but nobody did. Nobody ever did. So he pulled the car smoothly out of the parking lot into the side alley and asked, “Which way?”
“Left,” said Hyunjin.
Usually, in cars, Hyunjin slumped. Or at least, that’s what Jisung had observed, the times he had been in a car with Hyunjin for purposes other than this. He never slumped on these rides. No, in the passenger’s seat Hyunjin sat bolt upright, like a length of metal had been fused to his spine. His voice was very soft as he gave Jisung directions, consulting a little slip of paper he had in his hands, but his eyes, when they looked out of the windscreen, were focused, intent. Jisung kept glancing at him, whenever he could spare a moment to take his eyes off the road in front of him, and found that look in Hyunjin’s eyes, the one that was familiar to him now. Something like bloodlust, but not the kind that seemed to consume Minho when he was in that mood — this was much emptier than that.
Jisung wished he could help — he supposed he was. Helping. Doing what he was doing, driving Hyunjin, acting as backup if necessary. But he wished he could help with what was inside. The storm behind Hyunjin’s eyes, the weight he bore.
But he could not. So he drove.
Hyunjin’s directions led them to almost the other side of the city, an area where the built up apartment complexes gave way to smaller buildings. Older, but not less expensive, judging by the number of traditional houses they passed as they drove through a series of smaller, more winding streets. In Jisung’s experience, the men that Hyunjin hunted tended to live in two types of places: either they lived in houses such as this, older or newer but private and isolated, or they lived in towering apartment buildings on the higher floors. Those jobs were always slightly more difficult.
“Stop here,” Hyunjin said suddenly. Jisung did, pulling off to the side, hoping they were as out of sight of any cameras as possible. It didn’t really matter, since the licence plate on their car was fake anyway, but he preferred to leave as little of a trace as possible.
Beside him, Hyunjin undid his seat belt and lifted his hood over his head, checking in the side mirror that all of his bright redness was covered up. Jisung cut the engine, and the space between them was once again plunged into absolute silence. “Do you need me to come with you?” he asked.
He always asked this, no matter what job it was. Sometimes he asked it when Hyunjin was doing nothing more than running into a convenience store for popcorn. Those times, especially, Hyunjin’s response was scathing; Hyunjin had long ago learned the knack of slicing slivers of skin off with his words. But on jobs like this, what Jisung called the revenge trips, Hyunjin was never like that. He took the question seriously. He was taking it seriously now.
“No,” he said. “He lives alone.”
Jisung nodded. He watched as Hyunjin opened the door, slipped out into the night. There were streetlights here and there but their light was weak, old things to match the environment, and Hyunjin soon disappeared into the spaces between the lights. Jisung even now did not quite understand how he did it, how he managed to make himself invisible like that. Not when he was so tall, so handsome.
Jisung rolled his window down halfway, letting in the cool night air. Even just over a week since they’d visited the club, the weather was colder at night, fall properly starting to settle in. This changing of the seasons always felt-- shocking, somehow, and he was glad of his sweater, although he thought briefly of wriggling back out of his jacket. He couldn’t though; he couldn’t risk being tangled in the sleeves if Hyunjin needed him.
He was glad, all the same, that it was not the depths of winter. He always rolled the window down, to listen for if Hyunjin called for him. Sometimes he did, a quiet call of Jisung’s name into the silent night, and Jisung would go and help him with the body, taking it from the house to dispose of. It was rare, that that happened. Usually Jisung just waited in the silence.
No, Hyunjin usually left the bodies in the houses to rot, to be found at some point by some unfortunate soul. The times he said yes to Jisung’s question of if he needed Jisung with him were the times when it was most impossible to cut a throat and leave, the times when it would be found too quickly. Those were usually the times that his target lived in the upper floor apartments. It was too difficult, to get into those kinds of places.
Jisung never— it had never been explained to him, the purpose of these little trips Hyunjin asked him to take him on. But from the beginning he’d suspected, in a way that felt much more like knowing. As sure about something as he could be, without having it explicitly confirmed.
The first time had been pure confusion, but he’d been so— pleased, for lack of a better word, that Hyunjin was talking to him, even if it was just to ask him for a favour. And then they’d gotten in that car and Hyunjin had been quiet and sombre, in a way that wasn’t like his usual annoyance at Jisung. He’d told Jisung to park, and then to stay put, and then pulled his hood up and got out of the car. Jisung had had the distinct urge to make some quip, about Hyunjin doing something illegal and getting him into trouble, but he’d held himself back. It wasn’t like he was going to make Hyunjin laugh, and something about that night, the air— it had been like a blanket smothering a fire. Suffocated, Jisung had felt suffocated and unsure and a little scared.
Afterwards, when Hyunjin came back again, asking softly for Jisung to take him home, there’d been something about him, his eyes, the way he’d held himself, and Jisung had understood in an awful rush what this was. He’d pulled off from the curb and turned the car around, looking at the low house in his rearview mirror, and had the shocking, visceral thought of, one of the men who touched Hyunjin lived in that house. It had been a very— normal looking house. This, Jisung would find, would be the case, over and over. And over and over, he would ask if Hyunjin needed him to come with him, and Hyunjin would say no. Until one night, one night he’d said, yes, please.
It had been— autumn then too, but later in the season, colder. Hyunjin had brought Jisung into an alleyway next to a towering apartment complex, and Jisung had asked, “How will we get in?”
“We won’t,” Hyunjin had said, back pressing against the outer wall of the building, his arms crossed. “We have to wait for him to come out.”
And so they had. Jisung wasn’t unused to waiting on jobs, especially when he was working on a hit. But he’d never felt like this before. He’d felt— floaty, but in the worst sense of the word. A disconnect from his body, his palms damp with sweat and heart going rabbit-fast.
He’d never had to look at one of them. Every time, Hyunjin would step out of the car and go into the building to face his monsters alone, leaving Jisung in the car so he wouldn’t have to look. Wouldn’t have to know. The men, when Jisung thought of them, looked like no one, a smudged amalgamation of faces and bodies, uncorporeal and faint. But he was going to see one now.
He was going to have to touch one of them, and the thought made bile burn at the back of his throat.
Time had ticked on. People had passed by their alley, going to the nearby bank, or the convenience store, and they’d kept slunk back in the shadows, just out of view of the building’s CCTVs. The sun had set, leaving them in early darkness, and still they’d waited.
Jisung had wondered what they’d do, if the man simply never came out. And as if sensing his uneasiness, Hyunjin had softly said, “He smokes.” His eyes had slid pointedly towards a group of people a little further up the block, where there were benches grouped under a tree. Jisung didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that their target might not care about the building’s no smoking rules. Because it didn’t matter if he didn’t come out— they’d just wait here, come back if they had to.
Hyunjin did not speak again, not until he’d said, “There.” It was even softer than he’d spoken before.
Jisung turned. A man in his early forties was coming out of the sliding doors of the apartment complex, heading straight toward them on the sidewalk. There was— nothing about him that could be called remarkable. Jisung would have overlooked him if he’d seen him on the street.
He’d been glad, then, for the lateness of the season, the early darkness, as he’d darted out of the alleyway and wound his arm around the man’s neck. He’d dragged him, choking, into the shadows.
The man had struggled, and might have cried out, but Jisung had spun him and punched him once in the face to silence him, so hard that there’d been the audible crack of a nose breaking. Jisung’s blood had rushed through him, and he’d felt a level of violence rise in him he wasn’t sure he had ever, ever encountered before. As the man had tumbled back onto the concrete, it had been beyond difficult to not climb on top of him and keep punching, over and over, like he had seen Minho do a few times already. Until that nondescript face was unrecognisable as a face. Jisung had wanted to destroy him, wanted to rip him open.
But he hadn’t done any of that. As impossible as it had felt, he’d forced himself to step back. This was not about him. It was not for him.
“I— I’ll— you can have my wallet,” the man had stammered, through the blood dripping from his nose and into his mouth.
Jisung had ignored him. Hyunjin had stepped out of the shadows then, pulling his hood from his face, letting what little light there was illuminate his features. And Jisung had watched, after a long few beats of silence, as this man had recognised Hyunjin. He’d seen it, the dawning realisation of who it was in front of him, and he had seen, too, the fear in his eyes.
Good, Jisung had thought, filled with as much loathing as he thought a person could be. He had not even hated his stepdad as much as he had hated this man laying on the ground in front of him. You deserve to be even more afraid than this.
“You,” the man had whispered, staring up at Hyunjin.
“Yeah,” said Hyunjin, his hand in his pocket. “Me.” And then he had bent down and slit the man’s throat.
The following minutes had been— long, but not in the usual sense of the word. It was like time had stood still. Hyunjin never hit the major arteries, too messy — and maybe, Jisung sometimes wondered, too fast. He punctured the throat, so they died drowning on their own blood.
And so the man slowly died, his body laid out between Hyunjin and Jisung like an offering. Hyunjin had stood across from Jisung, watching that man’s life drain away, with absolutely no expression on his face. He had looked so passively at it, like it had meant nothing to him — but Jisung had known otherwise, Jisung had seen, just before the knife had sunk into the skin and muscle of the man’s neck, the way Hyunjin’s hand had shook a little.
And while Hyunjin’s eyes had watched the blood pool sluggishly out, Jisung— Jisung had not taken his gaze off Hyunjin. The man gurgling on the ground may as well have not been there, but for what he meant for this moment. What this moment was.
After an indeterminable amount of time, Hyunjin, for the barest flicker, had looked at Jisung. Looked at him from across this almost-corpse of a man who had raped him, Hyunjin’s fingers still wrapped around a blade dripping blood. And Jisung had been unable to breathe. He’d felt— exposed, raw, which was probably how Hyunjin had felt too. Because Hyunjin knew what Jisung was thinking, knew — even though he’d never explained — that Jisung was aware of what this man had done to him. Hyunjin was so intensely private anyway, but this— how could anyone be expected to show this to someone else, to let another person stand beside you and together look at a man and know what he’d done to you? And yet, Hyunjin had done it, was doing it. He’d looked into Jisung’s eyes, met them, in spite of everything Jisung had known in that moment, everything Hyunjin must have known he was thinking.
Jisung had been— given something, as they stared across at one another and time had stood still, that he still couldn’t fully quantify.
And then Hyunjin had lowered his eyes again, the sweep of his lashes heavy, somehow. And the moment had drawn to a close.
Even now, he had no real idea as to why Hyunjin had asked him along, or why he was including Jisung in this. Back then he hadn’t wanted to ask, was afraid questioning it might cause Hyunjin to— withdraw it. And some part of him was deeply afraid of the answer, that it might be something along the lines of you don’t matter enough for me to bother to hide it.
But that look, that look— Jisung wasn’t sure why Hyunjin had chosen him, but it was— something. Something other than Jisung not mattering enough for Hyunjin to care.
Because Hyunjin had chosen him. Jisung has assumed, the first few times, that this was a long standing tradition. It wasn’t until Chan had quizzed him about it, serious and sober, that Jisung had realised the revenge trips were new. That Hyunjin had only started them after Jisung had joined, and that it was only Jisung who was asked to go along on them. There was trust, in these moments — in that moment, there had been trust. But it felt like a piece of a puzzle that Jisung couldn’t see clearly enough to put together.
Jisung had helped to get rid of that body, the first time he had taken someone to the river for Hyunjin. He had driven Hyunjin home in silence, made sure that he had gotten up to the apartment okay, and then he had gone to his bedroom, through to his bathroom, and thrown up. He had sat in front of his toilet, the cold tile bleeding through his jeans, the smell of his vomit filling the tiny space, and shook with it. He could not get the man’s face out of his head, and every time he had thought, neither could Hyunjin, that’s how he knew him, he had retched into the toilet again.
It had not been the first time. He suspected, now, sitting in this car waiting for Hyunjin to return, that it would not be the last.
——
Chan wearily entered the keycode into the apartment door, yawning widely and not even bothering to hide it behind a hand. The only person who could see him was Seungmin on the cameras, and if he wanted to watch Chan yawning at well past midnight, good luck to him.
He hadn’t meant to let it get this late, but he’d been working and as was his habit, he’d completely lost track of time. It was something he’d tried to break himself of many times over the years, but it seemed doomed to failure. It was late enough that he was expecting a quiet apartment, for the only light to come from under Hyunjin’s door, so he was surprised to come in and find the living room light on, with Felix standing in the middle of the room.
Felix looked at him as he came through the door and then slumped a little. He had on a pair of shorts and the t-shirt he’d been wearing the day Hyunjin had done his little exhibition of Felix’s waist. His hair was sticking up a little bit on the side, like he’d just rolled out of bed and come into the living room, and there was an air of tired confusion about him. Truthfully, he didn’t look fully awake, and Chan would be distracted by how cute he was if he wasn’t concerned.
“Felix,” Chan said, gently, as he came further into the room. “Are you okay, is something wrong?”
“Hyung,” Felix said. Did he always sound like this when he’d just woken up, voice so deep and slow? “I can’t find Hyunjin? I woke up and he wasn’t in the apartment?”
Chan almost opened his mouth to say something in surprise but then he thought, ah. Instead, he smiled at Felix, as reassuring as he could make it. “Don’t worry,” he said. He came closer, patted Felix on the shoulder, an immediate mistake. Even through the t-shirt, Felix felt sleep-warm. “He’s fine. Why don’t you go back to bed? He’ll be back soon.”
Felix gave him a confused, squinty-eyed look. Chan’s smile got a little more genuine at that. “He went out?” he asked.
“Mm,” said Chan. He was assuming so, at least, because he hadn’t been on the third floor and he was unlikely to be in Seungmin’s workshop. No, Chan knew exactly where he was — or at least, he knew what he was doing, even if he didn’t know where he was doing it. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon, there’s nothing to worry about.”
He braced himself and put his hand back on Felix’s shoulder and used it to gently turn him around. Felix went with the movement, letting Chan guide him back down the hallway. Chan wanted desperately to put his arm around his shoulders, and knew that he could not, and the urge irritated him enough to almost distract him from the narrow bones of Felix’s shoulder under his hand.
When they stepped through the open door of Hyunjin’s bedroom, Chan kept his eyes away from the corner of the room where the easels were set up and instead focused on Felix, who had turned to look at him. Their faces were a little too close, and Chan expected Felix to step away, but Felix just blinked tiredly at him. “He’s really okay?” he asked.
Chan felt something inside him melt. He was tucking the hair that was sticking up back behind Felix’s ear before he was even aware of his hand moving, and it was only that he did not want to startle Felix with it that kept him from snatching it back. Instead he lowered it carefully, cursing himself internally. Felix was just looking at him with those dark, beautiful eyes, and Chan couldn’t tell if they’d gotten wider or not.
“He’s fine,” Chan murmured. “Why don’t you go back to sleep, Lix? I’ll scold him in the morning for worrying you, how about that?”
Felix smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “That’s okay, hyung,” he said. “I can scold him on my own.”
Chan laughed, and he was the one who stepped back, taking his hand away from Felix’s shoulder. He hadn’t been quite aware that he was still holding onto him. He used that hand to motion to the unmade bed. “I’m sure you can,” he said.
He watched for a minute as Felix climbed back into bed, gathering the blankets around him, sitting upright with his hair falling into his face. The sight of him sitting like that in Hyunjin’s bed somehow didn’t cause his brain to go as sideways as he would have expected, possibly because it was Hyunjin’s bed and not his own.
“Felix,” he said gently. “Will you be okay on your own?”
Felix looked at him, head jerking up from where he’d been gathering the duvet close. For a moment he didn’t speak, just looked at Chan, and then he smiled and said, “Yeah, I’ll be okay, hyung.”
“Okay,” said Chan. “Goodnight, Felix.”
It was not until he was halfway down to Seungmin’s workshop that he realised what he had asked, how Felix had probably taken it — not a question of concern, after what had happened to Felix the night before, but an offer, perhaps, for Chan to stay with him. He wanted to bang his head against the concrete wall until he gave himself a concussion. Every time he tried to stick to his boundaries, tried to pull back from making how he felt obvious, he somehow stumbled at the fucking starting block.
He hated the idea that Felix knew. Hated the idea that he might be putting this pressure on him, as much as he didn’t want to be. He needed to do better than this. That, however, was something for another day.
He took a moment, on the second floor, to tap against Jisung’s bedroom door. He was probably waking Minho up by doing it, so he took a couple of steps back and forth as he waited, so if Minho was awake, he’d realise it was just Chan outside. There was no reply, and when he tried the handle, it was locked, which meant Jisung was either sleeping, or he wasn’t in the house at all. Chan knew which one it was.
When Chan let himself into Seungmin’s workshop, by contrast, all the lights were on, and there was music playing, quiet enough to not be heard outside the door from the hallway, but a little louder than Chan would have expected at this time in the morning, Seungmin didn’t even bother turning from his computer screens, he just said, “Hello, hyung, you’re up late.”
Chan didn’t bother to beat around the bush. “Do you know where Hyunjin is?” he asked.
Seungmin did turn to look at him then. It was very hard to read Seungmin when he didn’t want to be read, and this far across the room from him, it was impossible. “He’s not in his room?” he asked. Chan shook his head; a stupid question, since he wouldn’t be asking if Hyunjin was. “Then no,” said Seungmin. “I don’t know. I just woke up.”
There was a ring of truth in that, which was convenient for him, Chan thought. Unlike Changbin, or Jisung, or a lot of the others, to be honest, he knew that Seungmin had absolutely no moral quandaries about lying, he simply preferred not to if he could get away with it. But he would do it, if he felt like he should, and this probably would be something he’d lie about.
“Hmm,” Chan said. He could ask more questions, he knew. No ideas? or you weren’t the one who supplied him with the address? because of course, wherever Hyunjin was right now, Seungmin would have given him the address. Nobody else would know how to get it. But honestly, Chan couldn’t be mad about it. He didn’t want to be mad about it. He just didn’t like being cut out of the loop like this.
“Goodnight then,” he said to Seungmin, who nodded at him. Chan didn’t think he was imagining the relieved slump to his shoulders now that Chan was clearly not going to question him more about it. But Chan took mercy on him, and instead he just shut the door quietly behind him, and started back up the stairs to the apartment, where he would sit at the kitchen table and wait for Hyunjin to come back, the way he always did when Hyunjin disappeared somewhere with Jisung in the middle of the night.
It had been a while, that was all, since one of these nights.
——
Hyunjin dropped from the second floor window and landed silently on the grass underneath. It was only then that he peeled his gloves, sticky with blood, from his fingers and stowed them in the lined pocket of his bag. He’d managed to keep the blood off his clothing but it was impossible to keep it from his hands; an unfortunate consequence of slitting someone’s throat. In the early days he hadn’t bothered with the gloves, and even now he didn’t care if his fingerprints turned up anywhere. It was pure fastidiousness.
The night was silent, still. In his head he could still hear the gasps, the choking as blood had filled the throat of his victim. He’d watched until the chest had stopped moving, the eyes had gone dull and lifeless. How much older they always looked, once the life had passed out of them and their bodies had gone slack and empty. Seungmin had not bothered to write the name down with the address. He’d done that once, and read from Hyunjin’s expression that he was not to do it again. How strange, to not know the name of a man who had—
How fitting, he amended, to not know the name of someone he had just killed.
The car was still idling on the curb, Jisung sitting in the driver’s seat with the window rolled down. He didn’t notice Hyunjin in the shadows cast by the buildings, although Hyunjin knew without a doubt that if it were someone else, Jisung would clock them. It was only Hyunjin that he seemed— accustomed to. It gave Hyunjin a moment to look at him, the way he was sitting alert, his arm resting in the window frame.
Then he stepped out of the shadows and up to the car. Jisung looked at him, and then smiled, obvious even in the relatively bad lighting in this area. Hyunjin slipped into the passenger seat, which made Jisung stare at him an extra beat, but Hyunjin ignored that and shut the door behind him as silently as possible. Jisung in the end opted to make no comment, simply pulled off the curb and then out of the street entirely.
Only then did Hyunjin push his hood back from his hair. Jisung looked at him again and said, voice quiet, “No problems?”
Hyunjin shook his head. No problems; nothing Jisung needed to handle, at least. Living alone meant that nobody would miss the man until his absence from work was noticed, which wouldn’t necessarily happen tomorrow. Nobody had even seen Hyunjin. It was as clean a job as any could be.
Jisung nodded and turned his attention back to the road. It was even later now, the streets almost empty in this part of the city. “Good,” Jisung said. “You were faster than I thought you might be.”
Hyunjin cleared his throat, words always a little slow to come after a kill. “I’m a professional,” he said.
Jisung laughed, very quietly, very soft, nothing at all like his usual laugh. He was like this, when he took Hyunjin on these trips: willing to talk if Hyunjin wanted, willing to be quiet if Hyunjin couldn’t stand that. Sometimes he couldn’t. Sometimes the memories were too much, so much that even seeing the blood leave the body wasn’t enough to soothe the crying child inside of him.
Hyunjin pulled his leg up, hugging his own knee and leaning back against the closed door, studying Jisung’s profile in the passing streetlights. If Jisung noticed that Hyunjin was studying him, he didn’t let on. His face was still, eyes focused as he drove. He was so handsome like this, when he looked serious, when he concentrated. When he looked like this, there was an air of competency around him that made Hyunjin want to place his whole being into his hands for safekeeping, but even that held a level of terror for Hyunjin.
Softly, into the humming quiet, Jisung said, “You should put your seatbelt on.”
Hyunjin slumped back further into his corner instead of doing so. “Are you going to crash the car?” he asked, scrounging up some of his usual bite for it.
Jisung simply smiled again, a single puff of amusement leaving him. “Hope not,” he said, glancing very quickly at Hyunjin, and Hyunjin’s breath caught in his chest at the way his eyes glinted in the dark, the blunt line of his teeth. “Chan-hyung would be pissed.”
The car vibrated underneath him. Hyunjin felt something akin to despair inside him. Jisung was so nice, so kind, and Hyunjin loved him for it. He loved Jisung so much that it was terrifying; it filled him with a panicked fear that he could not repress no matter how hard he tried. He didn’t know how to handle it, how to survive it. It felt like— like a physical presence, taking up too much space inside him, like it was shouldering aside his organs, crushing them to the walls of his body. How was someone supposed to live beside an emotion like this?
How was he supposed to live like this? It had taken him so long to even realise what it was.
“Jisung,” he said, very quietly, so quietly that he was a little surprised that Jisung heard, giving Hyunjin another quick, flickering glance to show he was listening. “Thank you.”
Jisung’s eyes, back to staring ahead, widened, and then Hyunjin watched his whole face soften. “Of course, Hyunjin,” he said, his voice oddly— intent, despite the soft expression still on his face. Again, he took his eyes off the road to look at Hyunjin, and Hyunjin could see that same intentness was there in the darkness of his irises too. He did not know what Jisung had read, in the depths of his own eyes. He was afraid— there was too much to be seen, right now.
They approached a red light, and Jisung could have rolled right through it, the streets were empty, but instead he stopped. Now that he could do so, he turned towards Hyunjin a bit, looking at Hyunjin properly, and Hyunjin fought not to shrink away.
“Hyunjin, you know—” Jisung stopped, wet his lips, and even more quietly, continued, “I’m always here for you. For anything.” In his peripheral, Hyunjin saw Jisung’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel, but he couldn’t take his gaze away from Jisung’s face, from his eyes, so potent with meaning. “For anything, Hyunjin.”
Something about the words, the expression, the absolute sincerity in his tone, hit Hyunjin like a bolt of lightning. Pinned against the car door by Jisung’s eyes, like a butterfly in a shadowbox, Hyunjin could not escape. He was encased, for a long moment, in this tableau, where everything was outwardly still but inside him, there was a storm. Very suddenly, everything aligned, all these scattered pieces of memory coming together in strange clarity. It left him breathless: wonderfully, horribly.
He loves me, Hyunjin thought, and it was— too much, to have that revelation, while holding Jisung’s gaze. Far too much. If Hyunjin was capable of dissolving, like sugar in warm water, he would have.
The traffic light turned green, illuminating the side of Jisung’s face, and Jisung turned from him and set to driving them home again, like nothing had happened. Like Hyunjin’s everything hadn’t just been completely rewired.
Freed from the sharp, immobilising power of Jisung’s eyes, Hyunjin brought his other leg up, slumping down until he could drop his forehead down onto his knees, curled up small on the front seat.
He was not stupid, and he was not blind. He’d known already that Jisung, on some level, was— attracted to him, wanted him. Most people did, he knew, and he took absolutely no pleasure in the thought of it. Jeongin might tease him for having an ego the size of Spain, but there was a world of difference in knowing he was hot and knowing that people— wanted him like this. That when people looked at him, they were imagining him in a particular way, a particular position, and he could do nothing about the way they thought about him in their heads.
Jisung had never looked at him like that — or not in a way that Hyunjin recognised. Sometimes, though, sometimes he thought he saw it, a certain weight in Jisung’s gaze, the times when the particular smile he reserved for Hyunjin seemed to flicker a little, and in those moments, Hyunjin always thought, right now, if I asked him, he’d agree to fuck me.
Because Jisung would say yes. Jisung might be straight but boys liked to get off, or so Hyunjin understood it. It would be— an experiment for Jisung, fucking a pretty boy, trying something new out, and then they’d probably have to never speak of it again. And Hyunjin hadn’t wanted that, for so many reasons. He did not want to be some kind of taboo diversion, an exotic little side fuck. He would not have wanted it even if he was not— in love, he knew now, with Jisung. But the fact that he was made it all the more untenable. Sleeping with Jisung and then having to tuck the bleeding edges of his heart right back down into the cold empty void that seemed to exist inside him.
But Jisung loving him back—
It didn’t change anything, Hyunjin thought at himself, a little viciously. It sure didn’t change Hyunjin, his brokenness, the fact that he was not sure he could ever give his body to someone again. And certainly not to a straight boy, one who would expect a very specific thing from him in bed. No, Jisung loving him didn’t change anything about the— situation. The reality of it all.
All it meant was— Jisung had fallen for him, even though he didn’t like boys. Jisung had— had liked him so much, somehow, for some reason, that his heart had bypassed what his body actually desired. Hyunjin knew, without hubris, that a lot of this was likely because he was pretty. Beautiful in a feminine way, a way that a boy who usually liked women would still find appealing. So maybe he shouldn’t be so surprised, really, that Jisung could want him for more than just a night of fun. Everyone had their exceptions. Hyunjin just never really believed it could happen. He’d never— wanted to even entertain a hope of it.
He lifted his head, the car bumping gently along the worn tarmac, and stared at Jisung over his own knees. The softness of his profile, the rounded shape of his muscular arms beneath his hoodie. The way the gold light of the street lamps made a messy halo of his hair.
Always. For anything, Jisung had said, and Hyunjin abruptly felt terrible.
“I don’t hate you,” Hyunjin rasped, and then promptly blushed scarlet. He immediately wanted to take the words back, eat them in all their raw unpleasantness, but he could not. He’d wanted to say something— nice, something to match the genuine way Jisung had spoken to him. For once in his fucking life, he’d wanted to be sweet to Jisung, to give him something back, in apology if nothing else.
Because poor Jisung. Fuck, poor, poor Jisung. Loving Hyunjin, of all people. Who could do nothing but cut.
Jisung’s eyes had widened again. He did not try to hide his shock. “Ah?” he said, a questioning noise, like he wasn’t quite following.
Hyunjin wanted to roll the window of the car down and slither out of it, moving vehicle or not. Alternately, he could tell Jisung to drop it, and he knew Jisung would. But Hyunjin had opened his fucking mouth and should maybe stop running from every single difficult conversation, especially when he’d been the one to start it.
“I know I act awful sometimes,” Hyunjin said carefully. This was an understatement. He acted awful almost all the time. “And you might think I hate you, but I don’t.” He hunched down a bit, shoulders rounding. “I’m sorry.”
He was, too. So sorry. He’d always known Jisung didn’t deserve his sharp edges, but if Jisung had been in love with him, even if only for a couple months— that just made it all the worse.
A pathetic, tiny part of Hyunjin was proud of himself for managing to say it. He shouldn’t be, he knew, but he was. Even if it was too little, too late.
Jisung had, alarmingly, turned his head to gawp at Hyunjin, before he seemed to catch himself and turned back to look at the road. Hyunjin hoped that in the low lighting, Jisung couldn’t see his blush.
“You—” Jisung started, then stopped to swallow thickly. “You have nothing to apologise to me for, Hyunjin,” he said, his voice just as intent as it had been earlier. More so, maybe. Hyunjin was not sure he’d ever heard Jisung sound quite this serious.
“I don’t like being mean to you,” Hyunjin said, feeling, remarkably, the prickle of tears in his eyes. Not enough to fall, but enough to feel. He did hate it, he hated it so much, hated himself for it. “It just happens.”
Jisung shook his head. “I know,” he said. “I know that, Hyunjin, I get it. Like when we were outside the club, right? You were worried for me.”
Hyunjin sank a little back into the leather of the seats. He had not realised that Jisung had understood that, and it was such a relief to know. “Yeah,” he whispered.
Jisung— smiled. His face was no longer that serious concentration and as good as that looked on him, Hyunjin preferred him like this, animated and smiling, a true Jisung. This was how Jisung was supposed to be, and Hyunjin so rarely gave him cause to look like this. Even better was when he laughed, softly. “Yeah,” he said, voice low, still so sincere. “Yeah. I get it, Hyunjin. You're just— you. I wouldn't change anything about you.” His face did a thing, a twist of his mouth, a lowering of his eyelids, and something about it reminded Hyunjin of biting into one of Felix’s fresh brownies, soft and warm and molten. “Not a thing.”
Fuck, Hyunjin thought. He does love me. He does.
But his words caught at Hyunjin, like a burl on a sweater. Hyunjin would, if he could, change so much about himself. This snarl in his head, his tangled thoughts, if he could wave them away like leaves in the breeze, he would do so. He wondered if Jisung knew, what it was like inside Hyunjin’s head. Probably not. No, he amended, staring at the gentle slope of Jisung’s nose once more, definitely not.
Could Hyunjin— try this? He hadn’t wanted to confess to Jisung before, not knowing Jisung was straight, would not want more than a fun little fuck, if even that. But knowing Jisung loved him, that they could maybe— have something. Be a couple. The thought made Hyunjin dizzy, made him want to cry, he ached for it so hard.
He could say nothing of it tonight, though. And not tomorrow. Not soon, really. Before Hyunjin opened that door he needed to be ready for everything that lay on the other side of it. The emotional aspect was difficult enough to face, this tangled mess — the physical was, right now, impossible. If they got together Jisung would want— things, from Hyunjin. Things Hyunjin could not give him without fracturing himself. And Jisung, good and kind, would be patient, for a time. But everyone’s patience had its limits. And the thought of finally telling Jisung how he felt, and having Jisung say he reciprocated, just to lose him in the end because Hyunjin could not get through being fucked without sobbing was— unbearable, from every angle.
Hyunjin would have to work at it. He’d have to— read, more, about it, though God knew he’d done so much reading on the subject, trying to make this better. And it was — he was — better. Better than he’d been before, at any rate. But he had so far to go. It felt— impossible. The thought of trying, of letting Jisung between his legs, had his heart pounding in a sickening way. Even knowing it wasn’t happening now, or any time soon, or possibly at all, he couldn’t stop feeling like he was beginning to slowly suffocate, like the air in the car was suddenly too thin.
The engine cut out, and Hyunjin had set himself adrift so far he didn’t even really register that it meant they were home.
“Hyunjin?” Jisung said in a gentle voice, and Hyunjin raised his head from where he’d dropped it to rest again on his knees. The interior of the car was so dark now, Hyunjin could barely make out Jisung’s features. “Were you sleeping?”
Hyunjin unfolded his legs, feeling numbly for the door handle. “No.”
Jisung got out with him, wincing a little when he locked the car and it beeped, like he always did. It wasn’t like they would be scolded for staying out past curfew. Maybe, though, he was trying to be stealthy, for Hyunjin’s sake. Accurately deducing Hyunjin wouldn’t want to explain this to anyone.
It was Jisung who, very carefully, closed the back door to the building behind them, not making a sound with it, while Hyunjin simply swept up the stairs. Despite his clunky boots, Jisung moved very quietly, and Hyunjin was halfway up the flight to the third floor before he realised Jisung was still behind him. He did this, a lot, after these— missions. Walked Hyunjin up to the fourth floor, to make sure he got in okay. That level of— care, Hyunjin supposed it was, just chafed at him right now, when he was already feeling so raw.
He stopped, whirling around, and said, “You don’t need to come up with me.” Again, he’d meant to sound— neutral, if anything, but it came out decidedly snappish. As soon as he’d registered the tone, the harsh bite of it, he turned pink again. He’d just apologised for constantly being a bitch, and here he was, being a bitch all over again.
Jisung, though, smiled. The lighting in the stairwell wasn’t very good, but he could definitely see the colour on Hyunjin’s face. Hyunjin hoped he read it as embarrassment, rather than anything else. “Alright,” Jisung said, still smiling, so wide his eyes crinkled. “Goodnight then, Hyunjin.”
He didn’t wait for a response; normally, Hyunjin would not give one. He wanted to give one tonight. But Jisung was already turning out of sight, and Hyunjin sighed, slowly heaving himself the rest of the way up to the apartment.
And then when he let himself in Chan was there, waiting for him at the kitchen table, lit only by a single yellow light, and for a brief moment, Hyunjin was sixteen again, seeing Chan for the very first time. A shocking sense of unreality, of stepping into the past. But then Chan turned around, and he was older, and the kitchen came into focus, bigger and cleaner, and Hyunjin was here again.
He hated nights like tonight. Where he was— too much of his past. Not enough of the now.
“Hyung,” Hyunjin said on a sigh, toeing his shoes off before coming into the kitchen.
Chan gave a small, wry smile, holding his hands up in a peaceful gesture. “I’m not here to ask questions,” he said, “I was just waiting to make sure you two got home okay.”
“Yeah,” Hyunjin said, shoving his hand through his hair to get his wispy fringe out of his face. “We’re fine, it went— fine.” He wondered how Chan had even noticed he’d left, but Chan answered for him before he could voice it. Like he somehow knew Hyunjin was curious about it from the tilt of his brows.
“Felix noticed you left,” Chan said as he got up from his seat at the table, jerking his chin towards the darkened hallway before stretching. His back cracked audibly, and he made some very elderly noises that normally Hyunjin would tease him for, but tonight he simply did not have it in him.
And then his words registered. “Oh,” Hyunjin said, his own eyes flickering to the hallway. Felix. He must have woken up alone in bed and been worried. Hyunjin— felt a little bad about that. He should have said something, maybe, even just to say he might go out. But he only had the words for so many things, and he didn’t think he had them for this, in particular.
“I didn’t tell him anything, just not to worry,” Chan said gently.
Hyunjin blinked at him, and then understood what he wasn’t saying. “I told Felix,” he said quietly, looking away when Chan’s eyes widened just a little before he could catch himself. “Not about tonight. But about— me.”
“Ah,” Chan said in that infuriatingly neutral way he had.
Hyunjin tugged his hoodie sleeves down over his hands, picking at the fraying hems. “I thought he should know.”
Again, in that same tone, Chan said, “I see.”
Hyunjin squinted at him, but Chan’s face was as blank as his voice. It was Chan’s dealing with Hyunjin’s trauma voice, a carefully crafted thing. He never wanted to react too strongly, he’d explained once, not positive nor negative. When Hyunjin wanted to talk, Chan wanted to simply be a vessel for that. In the earlier days, Hyunjin had appreciated that. Nowadays, he appreciated the complete lack of judgement. But in moments like this, it was fucking annoying.
“You’re no use at all,” Hyunjin groused.
Chan’s face split, dimples appearing to bracket his grin. “I didn’t know you were asking me for anything.”
Hyunjin shook his head, because he hadn’t been, really. Maybe just some guidance, on if telling Felix had been— right. But that wasn’t Chan’s choice to make, and Hyunjin knew Chan would just tell him so if he did explicitly ask.
The thought jiggled something loose in Hyunjin’s mind. He chewed on the inside of his bottom lip, making several attempts to gather his courage and speak, but it took a long few seconds for him to finally say, “Jisung.”
Chan’s grin had faded into a more mild smile, but he encouragingly asked, “Jisung?”
“What did you— tell him?” Hyunjin asked quietly, searching Chan’s face. “Back then.”
And now, Chan’s smile was gone. “I told him you were taken by the Macaque Syndicate when you were eight, and held until you were sixteen,” he said, very seriously. “I let him fill in the rest of the blanks. I’m still sorry I didn’t ask you first, I just—”
“No,” Hyunjin said, a little more sharply than he’d meant to, and he flapped his hand as if to wave away both that harshness and Chan’s apology. It was, at this point, an old apology often reiterated. “I told you back then that it was fine, and it is. Jisung needed to know, and fuck knows I wasn’t going to tell him.”
God, there was no way Hyunjin would have been able to do that. Not after what Jisung had said, and not— so relatively early into Hyunjin’s recovery. The couple years since Jisung had joined them, in some ways, felt like centuries.
“I’ve never—” Hyunjin said, spontaneous, in a way that he normally wasn’t, but he’d begun and now he wanted to finish. “I’ve never talked to him about it at all.” He met Chan’s gaze, always so— kind. Even when Chan was angry, there was a kindness to his eyes. Like Jisung, some part of his mind whispered. Like Jisung. But also not. “He just drives me where I tell him to take me, helps me when I ask him to. He never questions any of it.”
“He loves you,” Chan said, with a firmness that made Hyunjin feel flayed open. Heedless, oblivious, Chan added, “We all do, Hyunjin. You know that, right?”
Jisung loves me? he wanted to ask, like a child seeking reassurance. But those words, like so many others, would have to stay locked up behind Hyunjin’s teeth. Chan hadn’t meant it like that, anyway.
“Yeah,” he said instead, quietly, voice husky with it. “I know, hyung.”
Chan’s gaze on him was so fond. “You should sleep,” he said, and a whisper of a smile came back onto his face. “It’s late, you’re going to be grumpy in the morning.”
Hyunjin was so tired very suddenly. The thought of having to get up tomorrow — today, technically — preemptively exhausted him. He made himself point out, “I’m always grumpy in the morning.”
“You certainly are,” Chan said, like it was just another cute quirk of Hyunjin’s. Maybe it was, to Chan. “Come on, let’s both go to bed, okay?”
Hyunjin nodded. Like Jisung had done up the stairs, Chan walked with him to the door of his bedroom, like he thought Hyunjin might get lost along the way; Hyunjin swallowed the snarky words pointing that out, too tired to be up to it. At the door, Chan paused for a moment. Hyunjin, his mind still a little too far in the past, thought, is he going to kiss my forehead? because that was what Chan had done to Hyunjin sometimes, in the past, on the hardest nights, as Hyunjin had settled down to sleep on that old couch.
But Chan just said, “Goodnight, Hyunjin. Sleep well, okay?”
Hyunjin nodded, and slipped into the darkness of his bedroom. There was not even a sliver of light coming through the window from the streetlights outside, not with the curtains he had bought. He knew his way around in the dark, though, and he took off his clothes, setting them silently into his hamper in the corner of the room, before pulling on new clothes for sleeping in.
Felix didn’t wake throughout it. He didn’t wake when Hyunjin pulled the covers of the bed back and climbed in next to him, laying on his back in that pitch-black darkness, his eyes slowly adjusting. He’d been laying there for a matter of seconds when Felix rolled over in his sleep and settled against him, seeking out the warmth of his body, his head resting against Hyunjin’s shoulder.
His hands were so small fisted in Hyunjin’s t-shirt. Hyunjin worked an arm around his shoulders so he could hold Felix in turn and felt— back, finally. Back in this time, back in this body. In this darkness, so familiar, even after a night like this, it was impossible to stay stuck in that past when Felix was cuddled against him.
He usually had nightmares, on nights like this. He thought maybe that wouldn’t happen, now.
Notes:
once again just want to say that hyunjin has some fucked up thought processes, and the way he thinks about this stuff in no way reflects reality or how we the authors think. he's just struggling through it.
Chapter 8
Notes:
WE GOING (minor) HEIST BAYBEEEEE
chapter specific porn tags: blowjobs, come swallowing, felix is a whoretm
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jeongin brought his feet up onto the couch, tucking them underneath himself as he adjusted how he was sitting. The couch in Seungmin’s workroom really was uncomfortable, and he could only assume that Seungmin kept it because he was trying to discourage people from hanging out here all the time. But if that were the case, Jeongin thought it would probably just be easier to not have the couch in the first place.
It was, he thought, possible that it was all a joke that only Seungmin fully got. That would be like Seungmin.
The room was, put bluntly, chaos. He’d retreated to the couch because the noise level was starting to make his head ring. It wasn’t quieter over here, just because the high ceiling and open space of the room tended to create a literal echo chamber, but at least he wasn’t in the middle of it any longer.
He was used to his family being noisy. Truthfully, it was nice. It was nice to have this collection of people in his life, to have the noise of it on such a regular basis. Earlier in his life, he wouldn’t have been able to handle it. The group home had been noisy, too many kids in a much too small space, loud in a way that he, a shy child reeling from the loss of his parents, had found overwhelming. After, when he had left with Chan, the absolute peace of their quiet together had been so good that when Changbin had joined, sometimes Jeongin had simply burst into tears if Changbin spoke too loud.
But he was used to it, now, and he liked this messy family so much more than when it was just him and Chan struggling alone together, but that did not mean that it didn’t get just a little too much for him sometimes. And so he was sitting over here, out of the way, and mostly unnoticed, because everyone else was busy.
Jeongin preferred people watching, when it was like this, when they were all so distracted that they didn’t really notice his eyes on them. Even Minho was distracted enough, sitting at the workbench with the plans of the hotel spread in front of him, demanding Chan walk through the plan one more time. This was the third time he had done so in the last half hour, and Chan was putting up with it with an almost fond exasperation, likely because they still had time before they had to leave so there wasn’t any rush.
Minho had his back to Jeongin, leaned forward on his seat a little with his elbows resting against the table. This made his shoulders look amazing, from Jeongin’s angle, covered by a dark sweater. Jeongin usually didn’t let his eyes linger like this, not in a room full of people, but nobody was paying attention to him. It used to sting, that he got overlooked like this in these situations. It didn’t right now, not when he could see the pale skin between Minho’s hairline and the collar of his sweater.
Sometimes he thought a little too hard about how he had pressed his mouth to that bit of skin, as Minho carried him up the stairs. It almost shocked him that Minho had never mentioned it, but Minho’s non-reaction even at the time had told Jeongin that Minho hadn’t even realised that Jeongin had done it. Next time, Jeongin thought, he’s going to realise.
The noisiest part of the room was over by the door, where Changbin and Hyunjin were bickering. Jeongin let his eyes be dragged away at the sound of Hyunjin’s voice rising just a little too loud. Changbin had been trying to get Hyunjin to go over the plan with him, the same way Minho was doing with Chan, but Hyunjin was not so easy-going and seemed to find the constant questioning as an insult to his professional skills.
“Hyung!” he said, a little heatedly, over the sound of the other conversations in the room. “You don’t even understand what I’m doing with the painting so I don’t know why you’re grilling me about it.”
“Because repetition helps with memory retention,” Changbin told him.
“Did you read that in a baby rearing book you got to help with Jeongin?” Hyunjin sneered. “Stop bugging me and ask him if he knows where the fuck we’re going.”
This last bit was said with a dramatically flung out finger in Jisung’s direction, who was sitting on a spare stool watching the two of them. At Hyunjin’s words he blinked, and then gave them both a sunny, if decidedly shit-eating grin, and started to recite the exact directions he needed to take to get from their location to the hotel, down to street names and which junctions had stop signs and which had traffic lights. Changbin looked impressed; Hyunjin flipped his hair back and huffed in exasperation.
Jeongin, watching him for a moment, sometimes got the sense that Hyunjin was not quite as put-out with Jisung as he acted, but he also didn’t know what the fuck was happening there, so he’d resolved to not touch it with a ten foot barge pole. He looked, instead, over to where Seungmin was fitting Felix out with his earpiece, making sure that it was working and was adjusted properly in his ear. Felix was listening to him talk very seriously, but it was obvious that he was nervous about the job. He was a little pale, and his hands were pressed over his stomach, fingers twisting together.
Even knowing that Felix was going on this job as a test, an initiation of sorts, and even knowing that Felix didn’t actually want to go, Jeongin couldn’t help his slight jealousy over it. Felix had been with them barely a month, and he was already allowed on jobs, while Jeongin had not only never been allowed, he’d almost been laughed out of the room the couple of times he’d brought it up. Or no, not laughed— been condescended to, that was it, the others looking at him with that indulgence in their eyes, and said things like, I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you.
It did not matter that Hyunjin had started on jobs when he was Jeongin’s age, it did not matter that Jeongin had been trained by Minho and Changbin and Jisung, and declared not only capable but also, in some departments, very good. It did not matter that he was ready and willing, that he could be an asset to the team. He was their baby, and so, he sometimes feared, he would always remain.
It was not a light fear, that. He dreaded the idea of never being taken seriously.
Seungmin said something to Felix, who nodded, a small movement, and then Seungmin said, his voice somehow cutting through the din, “Okay, it’s time to leave.”
Chan, in the middle of a sentence, broke off and said, “Great!” He stood up, ignoring whatever Minho’s face was doing, and said, “Let’s head out then, shall we?”
There was a bustle of movement. Jeongin, curled up in his seat, didn’t move. It was already late for him, and he was tired, and as far as he was concerned, people could come to him if they wanted to say goodbye. Only Chan did, which wasn’t unexpected. He came over to Jeongin and made like he was going to ruffle his hair. When Jeongin didn’t immediately slap him away, he changed the movement to a gentle push of his fingers through the strands, almost soothing.
Jeongin smiled at him. It had been so long since Chan had gone on a job, and there was something about this night that reminded Jeongin so much of earlier days, when he had been left alone in their old apartment, as Changbin and Chan went out to make money. But he wasn’t alone tonight, and the job was such an easy one that Jeongin thought Chan could probably do it in his sleep. There was so little to be scared of that Jeongin said, “Good luck, have fun.”
Chan laughed, and took advantage of Jeongin’s relative good mood to actually scratch his nails behind Jeongin’s ear. Maybe it felt good, Jeongin would never admit or deny it. “I’ll do my best,” Chan said.
Of course he would, he always did. “See you later, hyung,” Jeongin said.
Chan nodded, and then stepped away. “I’ll see you all later,” he said to the others who would be left behind. Hyunjin was tugging Felix out of the door by the hand, Jisung already gone. “Try not to break anything while I’m gone.”
This was probably directed to Seungmin and Minho, and Jeongin wasn’t sure if Chan was talking about breaking objects or breaking each other, because either was possible when the two of them started fighting. But Minho just said, “If that kid’s bombs don’t work, just get the fuck out of there and we’ll try again another time.”
Chan nodded, even though they all knew that they didn’t really have another time. The private exhibit that they were stealing from was not going to be on display at the hotel for much longer, so if the charges did fail, they’d be down to a time crunch. But Chan didn’t say anything about that. He simply waved goodbye to Jeongin one last time, and then vanished out the door.
There was a small silence. Then Changbin took a seat at the workbench and said, “Damn, I should have thought to bring some snacks down.”
Jeongin laughed; the other two did not. Changbin grinned at Jeongin, who smiled back, grateful to have Changbin here, to have the company as he waited for his brother to come back. This, he thought, really was so much better than before.
——
The ride to the hotel was mostly silent, which was not unusual. Things were often quiet before a job, everyone distracted by their own thoughts, going through the plan in their heads. Hyunjin might have spoken, might have tried to draw Felix into a conversation, but Felix looked a little bit like if he opened his mouth, he might throw up, so Hyunjin left him to it.
Jisung slowed as he neared the hotel though, not wanting to turn into the parking lot until Seungmin had confirmed that he had all of the cameras under his control, including those on the outside of the building. It took a few seconds, but then there was the crackle of the headset in Hyunjin’s ear, Seungmin’s voice saying crisply, “Okay, you’re clear.”
“You can go in,” Chan murmured to Jisung, who nodded and swung the car into the parking lot, and then around the side of the building, down the narrow service alley that was mostly hidden from sight from the main street. There was very little back here, just a couple of dumpsters, and the high stretch of the hotel above their heads, all of those windows. Hyunjin craned his head but he couldn’t see much from this angle. At this time of the night, close to tipping into the early hours of the morning, most of the lights were off in the windows anyway.
“I’ll wait here,” Jisung said to Chan. He raised his voice, so Seungmin could hear him over Chan’s headset. “Text me when they’re heading out, Seungmin, I’ll have the engine running.”
Seungmin gave his acknowledgement, which Chan relayed, and then he turned in his seat to look back at Hyunjin and Felix. “Are you ready?” he asked.
Hyunjin nodded. In the past, on his earliest jobs, he’d always been so nervous at the start, full of jittering anxiety. Some of those jobs he felt like he barely remembered, everything tinged with a kind of fog. Now, though, most of those nerves simply did not turn up. Even knowing that things could go wrong, knowing he could be hurt, or worse, he did not feel overly worried about it all. He trusted too much in the plans, now, trusted too much in his own abilities.
It was hard, also, to really worry about it when Chan was on this job with them. It was hard to worry about most anything when he had Chan with him.
Felix didn’t look like he necessarily felt the same way, but he, too, nodded, and said, “Yes,” quietly, his voice remarkably low. Hyunjin took his hand, and squeezed it once, before he let go and opened his car door.
Outside it was quiet, although he could still hear the sounds of cars driving on the main street. He could smell the dumpsters faintly, although it was not enough to be annoying. He pulled his hood up over his hair, the same as he always did. Even with Seungmin making sure none of the cameras were picking them up, he always kept his hair covered on jobs. Eyewitnesses might have nothing important to say about a tall man wearing a hood, but they’d certainly have something to say about someone with hair the colour he had.
Felix got out of the car and shut the door with a noise that was somewhat louder than Hyunjin had managed; Hyunjin saw him wince a little. Chan didn’t say anything about it, though. As Felix passed by Hyunjin, he reached out and snagged Felix’s hood, settling it over Felix’s bright blond hair, for the same reason he covered his own. Felix gave him a darting, grateful look.
Jisung rolled down his window, looking up at Hyunjin. “Good luck,” he said, softly but very seriously. Hyunjin had that same feeling he’d had the day that man had broken in and attacked Seungmin, a feeling of— protection, perhaps. It felt very odd indeed to be going on a job such as this and leaving Jisung behind in the car to wait. Chan might be with him, but the part of Hyunjin that craved Jisung like an addiction wanted it to be Jisung instead — or maybe, too: he wanted Jisung there too.
But these kinds of cravings were things that Hyunjin was well-versed in denying himself, so instead of asking Jisung to come with them too, or touching Jisung’s face with his gloved hand, he just nodded, and slipped around the side of the car to the employee service door they were parked in front of.
He hunched down, unwilling to put his knees against the ground, not knowing what the hell he could be kneeling in. He felt Chan’s hand come down against his back, probably to help keep him upright, but Hyunjin didn’t need it. He’d trained himself carefully, mostly secretly, to have balance like this, and so he was perfectly steady as he got his lockpicking kit out of his bag and opened it up to do the first of his tasks on his job.
It was Changbin who had first taught Hyunjin how to lockpick, back when Hyunjin had first expressed an interest in doing some smaller jobs for them. He’d been a little surprised they’d even allowed it, considering how much they seemed to want to keep Jeongin away from it all as long as possible, but Chan had agreed and Changbin had immediately started Hyunjin’s training.
Lockpicking had been an immediate success, a case of the student far surpassing the teacher. The steady hand and focused mindset came to Hyunjin much easier than it did to Changbin, who had been pretty happy to hand that role off to Hyunjin. Now, squatting in this alley with Chan’s hand against his back and Felix hovering over him, it did not take Hyunjin long to pick the frankly flimsy lock on the door. One would think that a hotel such as this, glittering and expensive, would have invested in something better, but it was to their advantage that they hadn’t.
Hyunjin heard the lock click and stood up to pull the door open. Chan ushered Felix in first, then Hyunjin, and then came inside himself, shutting the door after himself. They were in a relatively wide hallway that had the empty, clinical look that most employee-only sections of businesses that Hyunjin had been in usually had. It wasn’t a long hallway but it had a few doors leading off it, all of them closed.
“Okay,” said Chan in an undertone. “Hyunjin, you remember the way?”
Hyunjin just refrained from rolling his eyes. “Yes,” he said, shortly.
He didn’t wait for Chan to say anything else, just started down the hallway. His footsteps were almost silent on the thin tiled flooring, but he could hear Felix behind him, hardly flat footed with it but decidedly louder. Chan would be behind him, bringing up the rear, on alert for anyone potentially sneaking up behind them. At this time of night, the staff back here would be sparse on the ground. That golden window after the night shift had gone home, but the morning shift was still some hours off. Most of the staff right now would either be up in the hotel itself, or working the front desk.
Eventually the hallway they were in began to branch off, some of these routes leading into the main building of the hotel and the others going to the adjacent, lower building that held the private conference rooms and exhibit halls. Hyunjin counted doors and turned expertly down the hallway that would spit them out nearest to where they needed to be. As they got further away from the hotel section, fewer lights were turned on. This area was completely closed in the evening and nights, Hyunjin knew. It was nice to not have to worry much about encountering anyone, quite different from the original plan.
Finally they reached the door they needed, and when Hyunjin pushed through it he found himself in a much larger hallway, with higher ceilings and carpeted flooring, muted tasteful wallpaper. No lights were on at all here, their surroundings illuminated wholly by the moonlight coming in from the large windows that lined the hall. He looked right, where at the very far end of the hall was a set of doors that Hyunjin knew from the plans that Seungmin had found for them connected this building to the main hotel. If they went through those doors, the hallway would open up eventually onto the lobby, where the night clerks were probably dozing or reading or whatever it was that people with actual jobs did to fill up their time.
Hyunjin turned left instead, led them further into the exhibit building. There were doorways here, too, labelled with the names of flowers: carnation and jasmine and rose. Conference rooms. Hyunjin ignored them, ignored the cameras at every corner, and paid attention only to where his feet were leading him, and to the possibility of sound heralding someone arriving. He knew that Seungmin would warn them if anyone did turn up — it didn’t even have to be a guard, it was perfectly possible to run into some wayward janitorial staff, but Hyunjin kept his ears open just in case.
But there was nothing. The building felt almost dead around them, although Hyunjin knew that was not the case in the slightest. It would be foolish, to let himself believe something like that.
He glanced back over his shoulder, once or twice, to keep track of the others. Chan looked as focused as Hyunjin felt, and between them there was Felix, following Hyunjin obediently, but clearly a little lost. He’d been there for some of the planning meetings but he’d not been briefed quite so much on the plan as he could have been. Hyunjin had protested this, but Minho had insisted on it. A failsafe, he had said.
Felix didn’t need to know where they were going, though. Hyunjin led them there, until they arrived at the doors to the hotel’s private art gallery. It was an impressive entrance, the doors a little taller than the others had been. Even knowing they were reinforced metal doors with wood panelling over the top, it was hard to tell; they really just looked like normal wooden doors. Hyunjin wondered if anyone had ever been tripped up by that before. If they’d hadn’t known, it sure would have tripped them up. There were no locks to pick either; the doors could only be opened from the inside, and the only way to get in from that way would have taken them past the security office. Originally, that had been the plan: break in through the security area, come through into the gallery itself . That would have been— trickier. Felix’s explosives had opened up this other avenue.
“Okay, Lix,” he said softly, stepping to the side and looking at Felix. “You’re up.”
Even in the darkness of the unlit hallway, Felix’s face was obviously pale, but he nodded and stepped forward. He had a small duffel bag slung across his back, similar to the one Hyunjin wore across his front, and he shrugged it off and then set it down on the ground. He seemed to have no qualms about kneeling, although there was a good chance the carpet was as clean as a floor could be, and he pulled out the charges he had built over the last few days.
There were four of them, smaller than Hyunjin would have expected, but then he’d only ever seen bombs on television or in movies, never in real life before he’d watched them come together at Felix’s hands. If watching Seungmin on a computer felt like witchcraft, watching Felix make these charges had felt like someone communicating with a demon. Felix had tried, once, to explain what he was doing. Hyunjin had told him that he was too stupid to understand it.
He’d attached something to the underside of each breach charge so that when he placed them carefully against the edge of the doors, they stuck to the surface. If Hyunjin had been given the layout of the hotel and gallery to study, Felix had been given screenshots that Seungmin had taken of the inside of the doors, so that he could know where the hinges would lay. He did that now, putting them on the wall instead of the doors themselves — the doors are metal, the walls aren’t, he’d explained when going over his part of the plan — and then pressed something on each of the charges carefully. Each time, a little pulsing red light came on, small bright spots in the dimness.
“Alright,” Felix said. His voice was barely more than a whisper, like he was scared to talk any louder. “We should go around the corner, just in case.”
Hyunjin raised an eyebrow but did as he was told. He did not particularly like the note of doubt in Felix’s voice. He was not sure if it was Felix needlessly doubting himself, or if there was actual cause for concern, but either way, if the man in charge of the literal bombs told him to go around the corner, he would. He leaned against the wall, and after a moment, covered up his ears. Chan, standing upright next to him, did the same.
Felix stood with a little device in his hands, which he opened up to reveal a switch. He said something to himself; Hyunjin, unable to hear him, read his lips and thought it might have been here goes nothing. Then he flipped the switch.
——
Even over the headsets, the sound of the charges going off was loud. Seungmin winced and adjusted the volume down in his headphones, just in time for the bang of the doors falling onto the floor to come through. His camera feed of the hallway showed a small amount of smoke, already dispersing into the air, and the entrance to the gallery gaping open now.
Nobody moved for a beat, and then he watched Chan stick his head around the corner and look at where the doors used to be. “Wow, Felix,” Seungmin heard him say, voice just that touch too warm, the way he always seemed to speak to Felix. “They worked so well, you did such a good job.”
Felix ducked his head; Seungmin couldn’t see on these camera feeds but he didn’t need to in order to know that he was blushing. For fuck’s sake, focus, he thought, and then felt his chair rock a little. He glared over his shoulder at where Minho, sitting much, much too close on one of the stools, was practically clawing at Seungmin’s headrest. He was close enough, it seemed, to have heard what Chan was saying.
“Tell them to focus,” he hissed.
Seungmin ignored him. He was doing his very best to pretend that Minho was not in the building, never mind breathing down his neck. He didn’t need to say anything, though, because Chan was already herding Hyunjin and Felix through the doorway and into the gallery. “Seungmin, how are we with the guards?” he asked.
On his screens, the guards in the security room were looking at their monitors and each other in such obvious confusion that it was clear to see even on the slightly fuzzy connection. Their screens would be showing them nothing out of the ordinary, just the same footage of empty, clear hallways that Seungmin had been looping for the past thirty minutes. Their ears were telling them a very different story.
“Well, they certainly heard it,” Seungmin said. “They haven’t left their room yet, so I would suggest you hurry.”
Chan didn’t reply. Seungmin muted his mic, and watched Hyunjin take the lead again, leading them through all the little rooms that made up the gallery. Most of the rooms hosted a more permanent collection, things that the hotel had bought itself, or gained through donations. It was the innermost rooms that held the private collection that their target belonged to. It was a space for rich people to show off in, hanging all their artwork for people to gawk at, their sculptures held on pedestals ringed off by red cordons.
Seungmin’s family had owned paintings like this. Not enough to be called a collection, but enough that thinking back on it, it was impressive. They’d all been sold, in the end, trying to make a dent in all the money that his family had owed thanks to his father. Seungmin had never worked out if his father had killed himself in the belief that by doing so, his family would be let off the hook, or if his father, proud and image-focused, simply couldn’t face a life in prison. Either way, it had not let them off the hook at all.
Changbin, sitting at the workbench, said very calmly, “The charges worked?”
Seungmin hummed an acknowledgement. The guards in the security room seemed to have come to a decision and Seungmin watched as they left the room, splitting off from each other almost immediately, just as Minho had said they would. One of them turned to go to where the manager’s office was, with the safe and lock boxes that long term guests used to keep their valuables. The other headed straight for the gallery. They were at least competent enough to know where the likely targets were.
He switched his mic back on. “Hyung,” he said. “The guards are on the move, one of them is heading for the gallery, you’ll want to use the jammer now.”
“Okay,” said Chan. They were almost at the room they needed now, and on the screen Chan took something out of his pocket and fiddled with it, the image not good enough to see. Seungmin didn’t need to see to know what it was, because he’d made it himself. It would stop the guards from using their walkie talkies to communicate with each other. At the very least, that might buy them some extra time down the line.
The gallery wasn’t the largest, and it didn’t take long for their group to arrive at the room where their target painting was held, a portrait of some French general done in oils. Seungmin was of the opinion that the painting was one of the ugliest things he had ever seen but it was apparently worth a lot of money and their client had a seller willing to pay through the roof for it, so Seungmin didn’t think his opinion counted for much here.
Hyunjin pulled out the flashlight he was carrying, a small thing that would give him just enough light to work from. Seungmin watched as he and Chan carefully took the painting and its frame down from the wall, the alarm not going off as they did so because Seungmin had disarmed all of them. While they did this, Felix hung back, looking awkward, his body language very much of someone who was not sure what he was doing. Truthfully, his part was over; all he needed to do now was stay out of the way. And so he was doing, letting Hyunjin and Chan set the painting down on the ground, face first so Hyunjin could remove it from the frame.
Seungmin let them work. It was, he knew, a process that required care and time. Behind him, he could hear Changbin saying something quietly to Jeongin, but Seungmin mostly turned it out, watching the guards on the screen take their individual paths. The one who had headed to the manager’s office had arrived, seen nothing out of the ordinary, and was clearly now trying to communicate with his partner. His frustration at not being able to get through was beginning to turn into obvious alarm.
The one who had headed to the gallery had just come across the blown in doors. He too had his walkie talkie lifted to his mouth, but he would be getting nothing but static. Minho yanked yet again on Seungmin’s headrest.
“Warn them,” he hissed.
Seungmin turned his head just enough that he could glare at Minho right in the eye without taking his gaze fully off his monitors. “I will put you in a time out, I swear to fuck,” he said. “I’ll get Changbin-hyung to drag you out of this room.”
“Ooh, not it,” Changbin said. Seungmin couldn’t twist far enough to look at him, not without properly looking away, but he hoped Changbin felt Seungmin’s annoyance in his heart. He was lucky, Seungmin thought darkly, that he had such nice thighs. Seungmin was willing to overlook most things in the face of those thighs.
“Warn them!” Minho said again.
“I will warn them when they need to be warned,” Seungmin said through gritted teeth. “He’s not even in the gallery yet.”
“Ah, don’t fight,” Jeongin said. Seungmin didn’t need to look at him to hear the obvious tiredness in his voice.
Seungmin was splitting hairs, anyway. He just did not want to do it because Minho had ordered him to, and so he waited until the guard had given up on his walkie talkie and had stepped over the doors and was actually inside the gallery itself before he flicked his mic on and said, “Hyung, one of the guards just came into the gallery. I’ll warn you if he gets close to your location.”
“Okay,” said Chan, very quietly. Hyunjin had removed all the brackets that were holding the painting in the frame, and was now very carefully removing the staples that held the painting to the stretcher. This, more than anything else, had been why Hyunjin had been always going on this job. He was the only one who knew what it was to work with the materials involved, the only one with the hands steady enough, delicate enough, for such a task. Someone else would probably end up damaging the painting in the process.
The guard picked his way slowly through the gallery. It not being large had worked to their advantage in getting to where they needed to be, but it was working to their disadvantage now, because there were not many places for the guard to search before he was on them. Hyunjin was working as fast as he could, Seungmin could see that, but it was not going to be fast enough.
“Hyung,” he said, when the guard’s path was clearly going to lead him right to where they were. “He’s just a few rooms away now, he’ll be with you soon.”
“Got it,” Chan said, and a moment later Hyunjin switched his flashlight off.
——
Felix blinked in the sudden darkness, feeling an urge to reach out, touch Hyunjin, or perhaps Chan, just to prove to himself that they were still there beside him. The thought of that guard coming in on them, seeing what they were doing, made his heart thump rabbit-fast in his chest, and he looked, for a panicked moment, for something to hide behind, like that would help. But he could see nothing for a long few seconds.
“Wait here,” he heard Chan say, his voice barely more than a murmur. There was a brush of his fingers against Felix’s shoulder, light enough that Felix wasn’t sure if he’d imagined them.
His eyes adjusted, faster than he’d have expected but there’d only been the very dim light of the flashlight to begin with. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, and it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, because Hyunjin had not paused in his work, still hunched down on the floor working in that same seemingly-unhurried way he’d had since they’d arrived in the room. Slower, now, that he was doing it in the dark.
He looked to where Chan had been standing, to where he had heard Chan’s voice coming from, and found him— not there. That realisation made the panic spike considerably in Felix’s chest, looking around the room to see where Chan had gone and not seeing any sight of him. He had disappeared, completely. Chan, he knew, would not have left them, would not have simply run out on them, but it didn’t help the fear inside Felix, to be standing exposed like this and to not see Chan at all.
He hadn’t quite realised, until that moment, how much Chan’s presence had been keeping him calm on this mission.
The quick, flickering sweep of a flashlight illuminated the far end of the wall. The guard, Felix realised, who would soon come out of that hallway and find them here, caught in the act. His heart felt stuck in his throat by now, the beat of it almost painful. Where had Chan gone? Felix could not possibly hope to take on a trained security guard on his own.
“Hyunjin,” he hissed, glancing over his shoulder at where Hyunjin was still focused on removing staples. “The guard— what do I do?”
Hyunjin didn’t pause, didn’t look up from his task. “Just stand there and look young and pitiful,” he muttered.
“What?” Felix asked, his hands shaking so hard he wanted to stuff them in his pockets, but he could not. He balled them into small fists but it wouldn’t help, he didn’t have the strength to fight. Even weeks of food would not have helped in that regard. Hyunjin didn’t reply, though, and the guard was already there, coming out from around the corner and sweeping his flashlight over them.
“Hey!” he cried, his flashlight settling directly at Felix’s face, which rendered him unable to see anything at all, the light completely blinding. He cringed, squinting, and raised his hands up by his shoulders, to show he was unarmed. The fact that the guards also didn’t have guns was only some comfort — Felix didn’t relish the idea of being shocked helpless by a taser.
But the guard did not shoot him with the taser. His flashlight quivered and then lowered, landing on Hyunjin, Felix assumed. He was too scared to turn and check, blinking quickly to try and clear the spots from his vision.
“Put that down and raise your hands,” the guard ordered, and then the flashlight clattered to the ground, its light abruptly gone. There was a loud pop, the taser going off and firing wide. The darts missed both Felix and Hyunjin, fizzling out somewhere over Felix’s left shoulder.
Felix flinched at the sudden noise and movement, only just managing to hold in his cry of alarm. There was the shifting, easily recognisable sound of a struggle, but it was shockingly quiet in the large room. Finally his vision cleared enough to make out— Chan, his arm locked around the guard’s neck from behind, his expression very matter-of-fact. The guard struggled against him, his face far more alarmed as he pawed ineffectively at Chan’s forearm, and everytime it seemed he might get his feet under himself and get some leverage, Chan casually used a foot to press against the back of one of the guard’s knees, keeping him off balance.
Steadily the guard’s movements slowed and ultimately stopped, his face a mottled kind of red. Chan carefully let him go, guided the unconscious man down onto the ground, where he laid him out on the floor on his back. Felix could see now the guard was in his late thirties, perhaps, hefty, taller than Chan and by proxy, definitely far too large for Felix to have fought off.
Chan knelt beside the guard, placing his fingers under his jaw, checking for a pulse. Nothing about his movements was strained; he wasn’t even out of breath.
Limp at his sides, Felix’s fingertips were tingling.
“He won’t be out too long,” Chan said in a low murmur, his face swivelling towards them. “You almost done?”
Felix, feeling a little detached from his body, turned to look at Hyunjin, who — as the guard had been slowly losing consciousness — had apparently not paused at all and had detached the canvas from the stretcher at last. It was now laying facedown on what appeared to be a thin piece of white felt, and Hyunjin had begun to slowly roll both layers around a cardboard tube.
“Yes,” Hyunjin answered tersely, his tone conveying great annoyance at being asked.
In Felix’s current state, the movement of Hyunjin’s hands was somewhat hypnotic, round and round, and his eyes went a little unfocused over it, staring blankly at the long lines of Hyunjin’s fingers. He could only think of Chan, the warm solidity of him as he’d held Felix in his arms. Chan, using those same arms and hands for such nonchalant, physical competence. Felix hadn’t even heard him coming, and the guard certainly hadn’t had a chance. Which was a little shocking, to be honest. He’d assumed Chan must know how to fight in some capacity, his body honed into something with compact strength, but he hadn’t expected it to be so— smoothly simple. No blood, no flailing fists. Just straightforward, easy subjugation. There was something attractive, about that casual capability. Something terribly attractive.
A touch, on Felix’s arm, and he startled, stepping sharply away.
“Hey, hey,” Chan said gently, hands held up in a loose way. His eyes were very alert, roving over Felix’s face, but his expression was soft around the mouth. “Hey, it’s me. You okay?”
“Ah, yeah,” Felix said thoughtlessly, his voice embarrassingly breathy. Chan’s hands came to hover over Felix’s shoulders, not touching, just there like he thought Felix might sway. Felix had approximately two active brain cells right now and it took him a moment to figure it out — Chan was worried Felix had been shaken by that little display of violence.
Shaken was not the word Felix would use.
Felix swallowed, tried to put a little more strength in his voice as he reiterated, “Yeah, I’m okay.”
There was a notch between Chan’s brows, but he pulled his hands back. Felix couldn’t look away from his dark eyes, still lingering with concern on Felix’s face. “We’ll be home, soon,” Chan promised him softly, so sincere. “You’re doing really well.”
Felix’s body was now awash with warmth, small panting breaths coming out from between his parted lips. It was happening, that strange dampening of himself, where his thoughts grew quiet and distant. He felt like he was sinking, slowly submerging under thick, viscous water. All that was left was the heat skittering on his skin, the blood pounding in his ears. The desire. Not sharp, not like a blade, but rather a diffused, syrupy trap.
No, Felix thought dimly, trying to claw back to the surface. Not now. He’d been doing so well. He’d been doing so well.
There was the sound of plastic on plastic, a lid screwing into place. “Alright,” Hyunjin said, his voice coming as if from very far away. Felix felt like he could barely even hear him.
Chan nodded. “This way,” he said, turning, and added, “Felix, behind me.”
Felix could not nod, but he managed to fall into step, glad Chan was— proving more focused than he himself was. Glad at least one of them could maintain their head on a job. Felix could barely hear around the rush of his own blood, certainly could not have remembered a complicated building layout, nor listened for the other guard.
Hyunjin’s fingertips were on Felix’s shoulder blade, perhaps as a comfort — perhaps just because he kept looking over his shoulder to check if they were being followed, and didn’t want to accidentally smack into Felix. The touch should have been grounding, but Felix barely felt it.
He didn’t dare touch Chan himself.
“The other guard’s coming at you,” Seungmin suddenly said into their ears, crackly and loud. Even in his strange, floaty state, Felix still jumped, startled first by the suddenness of it — he’d forgotten they were being watched— and then by the words themselves.
There was a flash of light ahead of them, coming from a perpendicular hallway, illuminating the wall, the pale beige wallpaper. The guard, close enough that Felix felt another sharp spike of panic, but Chan did not even pause. He moved like he had the layout of all these small rooms and hallways memorised in his head — which, he probably did. He grabbed Felix by the upper arm, yanking him sharply left, so abrupt the movement caused Felix’s hood to slide right off. Chan pulled Felix down another hallway, and from there turned again, into a small alcove that preceded a locked door. He pressed Felix’s front against the wall of the alcove, Felix’s hands curled up uselessly against his chest, and then— then Chan was there, his front pressed all along Felix’s back.
Felix bit down so hard on his bottom lip he was surprised he didn’t draw blood.
He hadn’t seen where Hyunjin had gone, but he was likely crushed in on Chan’s other side. That’s all this was, he told himself, trying desperately to fight through the fog. Three men pressing themselves into a cramped space. Chan had slotted them in the best way he knew how. It meant nothing. It was nothing—
Chan was breathing on the nape of Felix’s neck, little puffs of air tickling the sensitive area behind Felix’s ear. His hands had come to brace against the wall on either side of Felix’s shoulders, and he was holding himself very still, the subtle movement of his chest shockingly even. Nothing like the way Felix was trembling and panting.
He’d already been so warm and now— Chan was thrumming with heat, so viscerally alive against him. Pressed against the cool wall, Felix let his forehead drop down against it, hoping for some relief, but it was like throwing an ice cube at the sun. There was something about being caged in like this, about feeling Chan all along his body— how could Felix survive this, how was he expected not to lose his mind.
Chan, unaware of Felix’s reaction to his proximity, was listening for the guard, likely watching the hallway to track his movement. Felix on the other hand was trying not to grind his ass back against Chan’s hips, because now was very much not the time. Now could not be a worse time. How mortifying, to be so affected while Chan seemed completely unphased.
There were footsteps, coming closer. Felix tried to muffle the sound of his breathing, tried to stop those panting little breaths as he listened to the sound of the guard walking— past them, somewhere that Felix couldn’t see, wasn’t aware of. He didn’t even know how close the guard had come, but when those footsteps faded away again, the guard going out of range, perhaps, he almost gasped with relief. But there was no relief to be had here, not when Chan was still so close.
“He’s in the first gallery room, but he’s sort of waffling by the hallway,” Seungmin informed them primly. “Give it a second.”
Felix thought his eyes might roll into the back of his head. He wasn’t sure he had seconds to give. He was about to start grinding against Chan and moaning, he needed Chan gone.
And then Chan’s nose was on the shell of Felix’s ear. “Lix,” he murmured, husky, and Felix’s shoulders came up, hard, the back of his neck prickling. “You’re shaking.”
Felix, unable to help himself, let out a thin whimper.
“You’re okay,” Chan said soothingly, so gentle, clearly misreading Felix’s trembling as due to distress of a considerably different kind. “I’ve got you, you’re safe.”
There was a small voice in Felix’s mind, growing louder, and all it was saying was, Oh, well, you tried.
He gave into that urge itching at him, pressed back, felt Chan’s firmness in a shadow of what he really wanted — Chan’s weight, properly pinning him down. It was— electric, the feeling that ignited in him. To finally give in, to finally let himself feel, really feel, what he’d been trying so hard to deny. There could be no stepping back from this, but in this moment Felix was too far gone with want to care.
He would have Chan. He would fucking have him.
Chan, unfortunately, seemed to think Felix rocking back meant he wanted Chan to pull away, so he did. Felix held in his hiss of displeasure: there’d be time, later he would make time. Chan’s hand skimmed across Felix’s shoulder blades as he stepped out of the alcove, and it made goosebumps rise all along Felix’s body.
Chan’s face turned toward the hallway, gaze sharp. “I think he’s gone,” he whispered. “Seungmin?”
“He’s found his unconscious buddy,” Seungmin said. “Now’s your moment.”
Chan looked at Felix and Hyunjin, jerking his head. Hyunjin quickly loped back out into the main hallway, and, when Felix took a beat too long to follow, Chan grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him along. His hand was— so warm, so firm as it held Felix.
Felix’s hands clenched into fists as he let himself be led through darkened corridors and then back out into the crisp, starlit night. His eyes never once left off from tracing the curve of Chan’s jaw in the dimness, the soft roundness of his cheek. The shell of his ear. The swirls of his hair, beginning to curl from the humidity, from exertion.
It took every bit of Felix’s faltering willpower to not put his hands all over Chan, to duck instead into the open backdoor of the waiting car. Chan closed him in there with Hyunjin, who was grinning, sharp with victory.
“Drive,” Chan said once he was settled into the passenger’s seat, and Jisung peeled away into the night.
——
Chan leaned his head back against his seat, letting a slow smile spread across his face.
“Hyung,” Seungmin’s voice, tinny in his ear. “I’m going to let their lines go now. They’ll call the police, but if you turn left on Fifth and go the long way round, you’ll miss the cars.”
“Yeah,” Chan said, running a hand through his hair. His roots were a little damp with sweat, which meant they were likely to start curling soon, if they weren’t already. It had been so long since he’d been out on a job himself, and he was surprised by how much he had missed it, how much he had enjoyed tonight. He knew he could not go back to taking part with the regularity of a few years back, but he could take these chances; he supposed it was good to keep his skills sharp. “Thanks, Seungmin. Jisung, turn left up here.”
“Right-o, bossman,” Jisung said, grinning when Chan slid him a narrow-eyed glare. But he was in too good of a mood to be bothered by Jisung’s irreverence, and he scarcely minded it anyway. “Everything go alright in there?” Jisung asked, his eyes flickering to the rearview mirror.
Chan glanced over his shoulder and watched Hyunjin shake his hair out of his face haughtily. “Yes,” he said. “Who do you think I am?”
Unlike some of their past encounters, there was no bite in Hyunjin’s voice; he was clearly in high spirits too, the plastic storage tube with the painting rolled up inside it sitting upright between his knees.
Jisung laughed, easy as anything. “Of course,” he said. “Our great Hyunjin would have no problem with such a task. Forgive this unworthy one for asking.”
Hyunjin lifted his nose into the air imperiously, and Chan had to bite back a laugh himself. “Ah,” Chan said, reaching back and patting Hyunjin’s bony knee, “our great Hyunjin really did do a good job.”
“I’m gonna roll the window down and chuck this painting out into the night,” Hyunjin said, smacking at Chan’s hand.
Chan withdrew his hand, even though he knew Hyunjin would never disrespect a painting like that. It went against his code of ethics, his appreciation for the craft. Hyunjin, also, liked getting paid as much as the rest of them did.
But Hyunjin’s eyes narrowed on Chan, a little smirk coming to his mouth that had Chan bracing himself. “You should tell angel baby he did a good job too.” Chan felt himself go a little pink as Hyunjin turned toward Felix, and then Hyunjin’s expression went stilted. “Lix?”
Chan leaned further around; Felix was sitting right behind him, so to see his face Chan had to really crane all the way around, the angle slightly awkward.
Felix was sitting stiff and utterly still, his eyes glassy and unfocused. There was a blotchiness to his face that in the darkness was hard to read, but Chan was inclined to think it was a flush. The skin around his temples was damp with sweat.
“Felix?” Hyunjin said, a little louder, lightly touching Felix’s wrist.
Felix shivered, pulling his hand away. He blinked at Hyunjin, mumbling, “Huh?”
“What’s wrong?” Hyunjin asked, real concern, not fake nor mocking, thick in his voice. He placed the back of his hand, gently, against Felix’s cheek. Chan, feeling that same concern, wished he could do the same. “You’re so warm.”
Felix was back to staring at Hyunjin blankly, and now that he was looking for it, Chan could see the faint way Felix was still trembling. “I think he got a little shaken up by the guards,” Chan said quietly, worry and guilt churning in his own gut.
“Ah, baby,” Hyunjin said, and that was, maybe, a little condescending. He pet Felix’s hair, soothing, and Felix’s eyes flickered to Chan, heavy lidded and dark. It was strange to see Felix so blank-faced, so— empty.
Chan turned back around, watching the road go by, letting the faint sounds of Hyunjin’s cooing wash over him.
Maybe they shouldn’t have brought Felix along on this job after all. One of them — maybe even Chan himself — could have been taught how to handle the charges. Or they could have abandoned them altogether and gone back to their original plan, a little more arduous though it would have been. Felix wasn’t a fighter, had never been brought into the field before— he wasn’t ready, Chan thought now, internally kicking himself. He’d always been a techie. Of course this would have been too much for him anyway, even if Chan hadn’t left him to be a form of bait.
It had been the best plan of action, to slip around behind the guard, let him be distracted by Felix and Hyunjin, so Chan could sneak up on him. And he hadn’t had time to explain it to Felix. But maybe that had been cruel, to let Felix face down that guard, not knowing that Chan was going to move in before he had a chance to lay hands on Felix. Maybe it had been too much, too soon.
Maybe, he’d even been scared of Chan. Felix didn’t like violence, he knew, and though he’d been mindful when he’d brought the guard down, not wanting to permanently hurt the man, maybe that had frightened him.
Felix was so small, so physically unimposing. And Chan could hurt him so badly, if he was inclined.
Chan found himself chewing on the inside of his cheek — an old, anxious gesture. But he couldn’t help it. He’d promised to keep Felix safe, and he had, but— if he’d done something to break the trust Felix had in him, what then? How could Felix trust him with the Magpie job, if he wasn’t sure what moves Chan might suddenly make? Yes, he hadn’t let Felix come to bodily harm, but he’d clearly been very scared.
They pulled up round the back of the house, and Chan had to shake himself a little, surprised they were already home. He’d lost himself in the loop of his thoughts.
Changbin came out of the back door, holding it open for them, a grin on his face. “Success!” he said, and Chan worked up a smile for him.
“Did you doubt me?” Hyunjin crowed once he’d climbed out of the car, holding the storage tube above his head and waving it a little.
“Hyunjin,” Chan said, tiredly, “please be careful with that.”
But Hyunjin was already inside, Jisung not far behind. Felix was a little slower. He was moving in a vague, jerky sort of way, like he was only halfway paying attention to his body. Like his mind was elsewhere.
Changbin watched him go by, then shot Chan a questioning look. Chan gave a one-shouldered shrug, his smile turning a little brittle.
Inside, everyone crowded into Seungmin’s workshop, and Seungmin looked about as pleased with that as one might expect. Hyunjin theatrically put the painting in its tube down on the middle of the worktable. “I have done it, please praise me,” he said, and Seungmin flipped him off. Jisung gasped, overdramatic, moving in front of Seungmin and then begging for Hyunjin’s mercy on his behalf.
While they all began to squawk, Minho said in an undertone that managed to cut through the noise, “It looked like everything went alright?” He was leaning against the wall, faux-casual.
“Yeah,” Chan said, a thread of his attention being tugged, insistently, toward Felix, who had come into the room and then just stopped. He stood, blank, like an android whose power had been cut. In the sharp light of the workroom, his flush was very obvious, red and pink across his cheeks. “It went fine,” Chan made himself say.
Wordlessly, Minho raised a sardonic eyebrow at him, his gaze flicking to Felix. It made Chan blush a little, but Minho opted not to say anything about Chan’s obvious distraction.
Jeongin stood from where he’d been sitting on the beat up old sofa, stretching. “I’m glad it went well,” he said, the words cracking around a yawn. “Now that you’re home, I’m going to bed.”
Of course — it was very late, for Jeongin. Chan knew he’d stayed up to make sure they finished the mission safe. He always did. “Night, kiddo,” Chan said, ruffling Jeongin’s hair as he walked past, making Jeongin yelp and skitter away all the faster. Even with the anxiety roiling inside Chan, a wave of fondness cut through at that, warm.
Minho’s sharp eyes tracked Jeongin’s movement, and then he straightened — he didn’t quite stretch, not like Jeongin had done, but he moved his shoulders in a subtle roll, arching his spine a bit. The area under his eyes was smudged lavender. It was late for Minho, too.
“You should sleep,” Chan said quietly.
Minho squinted at him, like an annoyed cat. “Yeah, I’m gonna,” he said. He shot Felix one last, little appraising look, and then followed Jeongin’s path out of the room.
The door slammed behind Minho, and Felix suddenly shivered, an echo of the motion when they’d been in the car. His dazed eyes found Chan. “Can I have a word?” he asked, very soft.
The anxiety in Chan gave an unpleasant kick. “Yes, of course,” he said, the words rushing out. “What is it?”
Felix glanced around, at Jisung still bothering Seungmin, Hyunjin perched on the edge of the worktable watching the spectacle, Changbin laughing at them all. “Um,” he said. “Can we talk in private?”
“Yeah,” said Chan, instantly, because Felix had sounded so on edge just then. “We’ll go to my office, is that okay? Come on then.”
He led the way, slipping out of the workroom with only Hyunjin looking over at them and then saying nothing after a raised eyebrow in Felix’s direction. The stairwell was still and silent, the air a little colder in here than it usually was upstairs. The third floor was still, too, that empty stillness that seemed to settle over the bottom three floors of the building whenever they weren’t in them. Chan didn’t bother turning on the lights for the gaming room, but just picked his way through to the back door. Felix followed behind him, completely quiet, saying nothing.
His office was how he had left it a few hours ago, nothing moved nor changed. He did switch the light on in here, the bulb somewhat glaring after the darkness of the hallway outside. He put his keys on the desk and then turned to face Felix, leaning back against the desk with his palms pressed to the surface. Felix stood more towards the door, looking at Chan with an expression like he wasn’t quite in the room. He was still flushed, despite the coldness of the walk, and he didn’t speak for long enough that Chan’s worry and anxiety tipped right into alarm.
“Are you okay?” he asked. Felix’s eyes snapped to his, that glazed look falling away into something else. Something even more unrecognisable; something warm.
“Yeah,” Felix said. “Yeah, I um. I just.”
He came forward, suddenly, the speed of it surprising but without any hint of violence. Chan straightened up, wondering what the hell was going on, and then— everything, all the concern, the guilt, Chan’s swirling thoughts, screeched to a jarring, sudden stop when Felix simply went to his knees right in front of him and started undoing Chan’s belt buckle.
“Uh!” Chan said, embarrassingly high pitched, snagging at one of Felix’s wrists with a hand. Felix looked up at him. Like this, it was easy to see the way his pupils were blown wide. The lighting made the freckles on his cheeks stand out even more somehow, and Chan had absolutely no idea what the fuck was going on.
“Oh,” said Felix. He was still touching Chan’s belt buckle with his free hand, but gentler now, just grazing it with his fingers. Chan felt that light pressure on his lower stomach like it had suddenly grown thousands of new nerves. “I thought— is this not okay? I thought it would be okay.” There was something to his voice, a slow, dragging quality, that made it sound like he’d just woken up from a deep sleep.
Chan felt— hysterical, in a way he could not recall ever being in his entire life. None of this was what he had expected when Felix had asked to speak with him. He hadn’t really known what to expect — tears, maybe, general upset — but it had not been this: Felix, dark eyes intent, plush mouth slightly parted as he looked up at Chan on his knees, his pulse under Chan’s fingers where he had hold of Felix’s wrist.
Felix hadn’t been in shock in the car, frightened, he’d been turned on. He was turned on now, lids lowered halfway over his lovely eyes. And Chan was having to change gears in his mind so fast he could practically feel the painful grinding of them.
Felix was not about to cry all over him. Felix wanted to suck his cock.
“I thought—” Chan stammered, wanting to convey that he’d thought Felix needed comforting, not this. He’d been ready, to give that. This— fuck, he shouldn’t do this. He really shouldn’t.
His cock was already stiffening in his jeans.
“Hyung?” Felix asked, and suddenly the breathless quality to his voice made so much more sense. Pointedly, he plucked at Chan’s belt buckle a little harder.
Letting this go forward was a cosmically bad idea. Chan had never expected it to happen this way— he’d never much expected it period, except Hyunjin’s pressing insistence that Felix wanted him back had put niggling little thoughts into Chan’s mind. But even then, Chan had anticipated that if Felix did broach the subject he’d be tentative and awkward, and in his mind’s eye he’d been able to turn Felix away. To tell him this was a bad idea.
He had not expected Felix to bypass talking altogether, to just not even give Chan a chance to roll out the speech he’d semi-prepared on the off chance it was necessary. To simply get on his knees and open his mouth for Chan’s cock.
Chan had a lot of self-control, but not enough for this.
“Uh, yeah,” Chan said, stupidly, more stupidly than he’d ever been in his life. He let go of Felix’s wrist. “Fuck, yes, yeah. I mean— wait.”
Felix, who had lowered his head to focus his attention back on undoing Chan’s belt, looked up again. It was unfair, how arousing that look was. Blood was rushing to between his legs, fast enough that it was embarrassing considering Felix hadn’t even undone his belt yet. “What?” Felix asked. His voice had gone husky, in a way that made Chan want to close his eyes and pray a little. He’d never thought he’d be into something like that, before Felix.
“You don’t have to,” Chan said. His own voice was not quite steady. It felt strained. He thought if Felix stopped now he might disintegrate, but he had to say it. He had to. “Just— just so you know, you don’t have to do this if— if you don’t want to.”
A slow smile came across Felix’s face, the kind that had always made Chan feel at his most tongue tied. He certainly felt like that now. “Mm,” Felix said. “I know, I want to.”
Chan had no more objections. He put a hand behind him to brace himself on the desk, feeling like he already needed it. Felix had his belt undone by this point and was sliding it from the hoops in his pants, without flair. He tossed it to the side like a child with a toy it had long grown tired of. Then he started on the buttons.
Chan’s other hand rested lightly on Felix’s narrow shoulder, lightly enough that Felix could shake him off if he didn’t want to be touched. Sometimes people didn’t, like this, he’d found. But Felix didn’t do that, and a couple of seconds later his shoulder shook from light laughter. “Ahh,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do this, I was trying so hard not to do this.”
Chan made a small questioning noise at him, all he could think of to do when Felix was pulling his pants down over his hips and thighs.
“I didn’t want to complicate things,” Felix said. He sounded a little breathless now, and when Chan looked down at him he was even more flushed than before, his cheeks stained prettily red. He was so lovely and Chan had no fucking idea how this was happening. “I didn’t want to make things difficult, but the way you were tonight, I couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t give a fuck anymore.”
He leaned in and pressed his open mouth to Chan’s half-hard cock through his boxer shorts. Chan’s hand clamped tight around Felix’s shoulder without him even meaning to. Truthfully, the fact that this was even happening felt wild, but the idea that Felix had been struggling to not do this exact thing was even stranger. Chan had made his own attraction to Felix so embarrassingly obvious, but Felix had always seemed— tentative, skittish almost, with Chan. Certainly awkward and shy. The only time that had seemed to melt away had been in the aftermath of Felix almost being snatched, and Chan had put that down mostly to Felix being terrified and needing comfort, rather than being in any way representative about how he felt for Chan.
“I didn’t realise,” Chan said, as Felix hooked his fingers under the waistband of his boxers. “I didn’t realise that you—” he trailed off, not sure how to word it without sounding just a little pathetic.
Felix raised an eyebrow at him. “Liked cock?” he asked dryly.
“Liked me,” Chan said softly.
“Ohh,” said Felix. He started tugging the boxers down, slower than he had with Chan’s pants but still without any kind of show to it. He paused when he saw Chan’s cock, still not quite fully hard but certainly getting there under Felix’s gaze. There was always a moment of self-consciousness, to be exposed to a person like this. Chan could feel the warmth of Felix’s breath against him; he almost seemed to be panting.
“I like you,” Felix said. “I really do.”
He leaned forward and took Chan’s cock into his mouth. Much like he had been this entire encounter, he was not shy about it. Chan had to fight to hold himself still. It was not that he wanted to thrust — it was that the shock of it almost made him jerk. Felix sank slowly but steadily down until he had taken half of Chan’s cock into his mouth. Chan was fully hard now, an instant change once he had first felt the wet touch of Felix’s mouth. His hand was gripping Felix’s shoulder so hard that he was a little afraid he might leave bruises, but he couldn’t stop. If it hadn’t been for the hand he had against the desk he might have genuinely lost his balance.
He expected Felix to pull back, to take some gulping breaths, the way Chan had had to the first time he had tried this with a lover in the past. Instead, he wrapped a hand around Chan’s thigh, a couple of his fingers splayed across Chan’s ass, and pulled Chan’s hips closer, taking Chan’s cock into his throat. Chan gasped, head tipped back as he struggled to breathe.
It was very clear, suddenly, that Felix had experience in this area. If you had asked Chan if he thought so before he’d walked into this office with Felix ten minutes ago, he would have said that he didn’t think Felix had. His aura was too— innocent for it. But neither would Chan had been surprised necessarily to know that he did have experience, because this was the kind of world they lived in. Someone who had spent years working for Lee Jaerim was, in no sense of the word, innocent to the world.
Yet this shocked him, deeply. He would never have expected this.
“You,” he said breathlessly, his hand convulsing on Felix’s shoulder. No one had ever taken him like this, nobody had ever even tried before. His hips twitched, just a little, an instinctive involuntary movement that he felt instant guilt over when Felix gagged around him for the first time. But Felix still didn’t pull off; instead he moaned, a fervent sound, and sank down even faster, until Chan felt Felix’s nose brush against the skin above the base of his cock.
What the fuck, Chan thought, what the fuck whatthefuck, his mind a blaze of white light. Felix was still moaning, and when Chan looked back down he had his eyes shut, his lashes brushing against his cheekbones. Both of his hands were holding Chan now, his other against Chan’s hip, fingers under the hem of his shirt. His skin was so warm, his hold so tight. He did not seem to be afraid of leaving bruises.
Slowly Felix did pull back, sucking a little as he did so. Chan groaned, barely able to stand it. It had really been so long, and Felix’s mouth felt so fucking good, that he was a little afraid that he wasn’t going to last long enough — although what was long enough in this situation, he wasn’t too sure of. “I can’t believe you,” he gasped. “What the fuck, Felix.”
Felix hummed around the head of his cock and then opened his eyes to look at him. His eyes were glassy, irises almost pure pupil. Chan’s hand, sweaty now, slid dangerously against the desk. Felix gave a little kitten lick to the slit of his cock, a look of almost pure bliss on his face. It was not that Chan did not enjoy sucking cock himself, but it had never been one of his favourite things to do, and he had not realised that a person could like it as much as Felix clearly liked it. It was, in a word, obscene.
Felix started to move up and down his cock, not taking him quite as deep as he had at the start but far enough that his throat contracted around Chan every time he tried to swallow. It didn’t seem to faze him that every time he did so, he gagged a little, not quite able to stop it. In fact, like it had done the first time, it seemed to spur him on, his head moving faster, his moans coming a little louder. That frantic energy from when he had first started pulling Chan’s belt open had returned.
Chan realised he was moaning too, little half-vocalisations of Felix’s name. “Fuck,” he said, his voice huskier than he thought he had ever heard it, “fuck, Felix, it’s so good, you’re so good, I can’t— ahhh, christ—”
His hips moved again, a full jerk this time, and he watched as a shudder rolled down Felix’s body. A second later Felix groped blindly for the hand on his shoulder and then lifted it and placed it pointedly, firmly, into his own hair. Chan hesitated a moment and then spread his fingers across the back of Felix’s head, just holding him for now, not moving him. But when Felix sunk back down again, clearly trying to take the whole length of him again, Chan pressed gently against his head and pushed him down, gentle but firm, maybe a little faster than Felix would have managed on his own. That shudder went through Felix again.
Although he had pushed him down, Chan did not hold him there. He kept his hand loose and tried to breathe through the tight heat of Felix’s throat around his cock. Felix shifted on his knees as he held himself there, his eyes closed. His moans sounded almost desperate now and every few seconds he seemed to be trying to say something, completely muffled. The vibrations of it were too much. Chan felt out of his mind.
“Felix,” he said, almost reverent with all the feelings inside him, “Felix.”
When Felix pulled back this time, he only went halfway before he sank back down fully, his throat held open by Chan’s cock now. He kept trying to swallow, with a gulping choking sound that should have made Chan concerned but he couldn’t be, not like this. Felix was moving faster now, like he had been before he put Chan’s hand in his hair, like it was natural for him to be here, on his knees like this. Chan’s hand slid against the desk again and he almost went down to his elbow before he caught himself.
A second later Felix yanked at Chan’s hips at the same time he slid down his cock, and this time it was not his nose that Chan felt against the base of his cock but the shocking dampness of Felix’s lips. In a moment of weakness Chan’s hand pulled at Felix’s hair, one short tug before he caught himself and stopped, but Felix tried to say something again, incoherent, and Chan found himself abruptly on the edge.
“Fuck,” he said, letting go of Felix’s hair and pushing gently at his shoulder, “Felix, I’m gonna come, you gotta—”
But Felix refused to move; instead he gripped at Chan’s ass harder, shoving himself impossibly further down Chan’s cock, and with a curse Chan did come, right into the heat of Felix’s throat. His knees almost gave out as he did so. Felix moaned again, and it was only after a couple of seconds that he let go of his hold on Chan and pulled back slightly so that Chan finished up in his mouth.
Despite everything, he expected Felix to turn his head to the side and spit. But Felix kept the head of Chan’s softening cock in his mouth for a long moment and when he let go and sat back on his heels, he swallowed, his eyes still closed in apparent pleasure. Chan felt like he had just run a fucking marathon, his legs weak and shaky like a newborn deer. He stared down at Felix in shock, Felix’s face flushed, his mouth swollen and shiny with spit. There was a smudge of come at the corner of his mouth and as Chan watched, Felix’s tongue flicked out and swiped at it. Only then did he open his eyes and look up at Chan.
Chan felt— like someone had turned him inside out and then shaken him. He’d known that letting Felix do this was a bad idea but now it felt like a monumentally stupid thing, because he did not know how he was supposed to go back. He felt distinctly in danger of looking at Felix and remembering what it felt like to be inside his mouth and never being able to get any work done ever again.
Slowly he tucked himself away, wincing at the feeling of his underwear against his sensitive cock. Then he lowered himself to the ground, sitting in a sprawl of legs. Felix watched him, his eyes still bright. He was visibly hard too, and he kept shifting a little, body moving in jerky little motions.
“Felix,” Chan said, still trying to catch his breath. “What the fuck.”
Felix smiled, an oddly shy thing after what his mouth had just been doing. He shuffled forward on his knees and then, once Chan held his arms out open, came forward and climbed into Chan’s lap. Chan put an arm around his waist, feeling the way Felix was shaking, and then slid the other hand around the back of Felix’s neck to pull him into a kiss. Felix’s mouth was as soft and plush as it had always looked, but he was oddly stilted, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing suddenly. It seemed bizarre that someone could suck cock like that but not know how to kiss.
Chan pulled back, looking at Felix’s face for signs of discomfort, for signs that he did not want to be kissed after all, but Felix just looked back at him with that same blown out pupil look of arousal he had worn since he walked in the room. “Was it good?” he asked. His voice was beyond rough; he sounded like he had been gargling with gravel. Chan didn’t have words to explain what the sound of that voice did to him.
“Good,” Chan repeated, “was it good. Felix, that was the best blow job I’ve ever had in my life.” Felix’s eyes widened and then he smiled properly. Chan was so fucked. He used the arm around Felix’s waist and tugged him closer, until Felix’s weight was warm and heavy on his thighs. Then he started to undo the buttons of Felix’s jeans.
“Ohhh,” said Felix. He almost sounded surprised. Chan slid the jeans down over Felix’s narrow hips, then his boxer briefs, Felix’s hips jerking at every brush of Chan’s fingers against his skin. His cock was considerably smaller than Chan’s, and he was dripping with pre-come, sticky against Chan’s fingers as he took him in hand.
“Mm, you’re even cute here,” he murmured, as he brushed a soft kiss over Felix’s cheekbone. “And so wet.”
Felix laughed, sounding startled. “Don’t be— oh! Don’t be mean,” he said, moving into Chan’s hand with uncoordinated rolls of his hips, like he was too far gone to keep up a rhythm.
“I’m not being mean,” Chan said, keeping his own pace slow and steady, relishing the way it felt to hold him like this. “It’s cute, you’re so fucking cute. You’re so beautiful, Felix, I don’t even know what to do with myself around you.”
Felix shuddered, and then said, with a new kind of desperation, “Kiss me, hyung, kiss me please?”
Chan kissed him immediately, a hand against Felix’s cheek as he pulled Felix’s mouth to his in a stronger, more demanding kiss than before. This time Felix opened up to it, surrendering like he still was not too sure of himself but perfectly happy to let Chan have his way. Felix fucked his hips up into his hand, short, sharp thrusts as he dropped his mouth open and let Chan lick the inside of his teeth. He tasted like Chan’s come, bitter but not unpleasant, not when it was a reminder of the way he had taken Chan apart like he was born to do so all along.
When Felix came it was with a cry of ahh hyung, muffled against Chan’s mouth. Chan felt his come sliding down between his fingers, dripping down onto his pants, onto the floor. Felix broke the kiss to slump and rest his head against Chan’s shoulder, face turned in so that his panting breaths were hot and damp against Chan’s neck. Chan wiped his hand against his own t-shirt, not caring in the slightest that it might get ruined as a result. He pressed a kiss to the curve where Felix’s neck met his shoulder.
There was silence for a long time, until Felix’s breath had evened out and he was just laying, almost sleepily, against Chan’s front. Chan put a hand up the back of his shirt, stroking the skin of his back. He expected it to be smooth but there were a few small bumps, raised skin that had the texture of old scars. Felix tensed, just slightly, as he ran his fingers over them, so he didn’t ask where they had come from. God knew Chan had more than enough of his own scars, picked up throughout the years.
Eventually Felix sat up and they looked at each other. He looked thoroughly debauched, his mouth so swollen it looked like he had been punched. He started to pull his jeans back up and Chan helped him, his own hands somewhat steadier. He was starting to look shy again, so Chan kissed him one more time, soft, heartfelt. He felt Felix smile against his mouth.
“Hmm,” he said, putting a hand to Chan’s shoulder in a sweeping motion that made it clear he was doing nothing more than feeling Chan up. “Fuck. Thank you for that.”
“Why are you thanking me,” Chan said, thoroughly tickled by it. “Surely I should be thanking you.”
Felix let out of a huff of laughter, before he licked at his bottom lip. “No,” he said, in a kind of dreamy murmur. “I definitely should be thanking you.”
Chan had no idea what to do with him. He had no idea what to do with the feelings inside him. He was not sure he’d ever felt like this about another person in his life, and it was scary, scarier than he’d thought it would be. He moved out from under Felix, climbed to his feet, and then held out a hand to help him up. Felix, who had started to look a little unsure after being half-lifted away, smiled again and took his hand and let himself be tugged to his feet. He winced as he straightened, lifting one foot behind him for a moment. “Fuck, my knees,” he said. “They’re going to be bruised for days.” Chan felt a pulse of arousal at that, confusing because it was an image that had never turned him on before. “And Hyunjin is going to be so mad when I go up, I bet he’s already sleeping right now.”
“Stay with me tonight,” Chan said. The thought of Felix going upstairs with him and then leaving him alone was unbearable. “You don’t need to disturb Hyunjin, you can just come and stay with me.”
Felix visibly hesitated, a wary look passing across his face. “Hyung,” he said, “I don’t— I’ve not—”
“Just to sleep,” Chan said. He tucked some of Felix’s hair back behind his ear. The skin across his temple was damp with sweat. “I heard you like cuddling. Come and cuddle with me. Let me hold you, maybe I’m a sap like that.”
Felix looked at him, strangely intent. Then he smiled, a true smile, almost heartbreaking in how beautiful it made his face. Chan would never, could never, get tired of looking at him. “Okay, hyung,” Felix said. “I would like that.”
Chan kept hold of his hand as they climbed the stairs up to the apartment, their fingers tangled warm together. He did not want to let go, to lose how Felix’s hand seemed to fit so perfectly in his, and it seemed that Felix felt the same, because he didn’t pull away. He stuck remarkably close to Chan, in fact, and every time Chan glanced back at where Felix was trailing a little behind, Felix was already looking at him, smiling. He went pink every time he was caught, but he didn’t stop doing it.
Chan still felt a little bit like he was in shock, and the sight of that smile, shy but bright, was compounding that feeling. He was not quite sure that he knew how to deal with a reality in which he had done the one thing he had been telling himself, and other people, for weeks that he would not do — but he was in this reality. He didn’t feel as much regret as he thought he might, although it probably would hit at some point. Right now, though, there was no room for it next to the feeling of Felix’s hand in his.
He was somewhat worried that when he let himself into the apartment, he’d find other people in there. They didn’t even need to be waiting for him, anyone who looked at the two of them right now would be able to know what had gone down a floor below. But the apartment was empty and quiet, the lights off in the kitchen and living room. As Chan led Felix into the hallway, they could see the light coming out from under Hyunjin’s bedroom door. Chan wondered, for a moment, if Felix was going to pull away, go to Hyunjin’s room after all, but he didn’t, and Chan opened his bedroom door and let Felix enter.
Felix was as shy with it as he had been the last time he was in here, coming inside like he thought Chan was joking about it somehow. But he had not let go of Chan’s hand, and he gave him a quick glance, as if to double check. Chan squeezed his fingers and watched Felix relax a little.
The potency of having Felix here, in his space, was certainly not reduced by the knowledge of how it felt to have Felix’s mouth on his cock. Chan had promised nothing else had to happen, and so nothing else would, certainly not when Felix looked, once again, decidedly uncertain of himself. He stood in the room in his dark jeans and hoodie, hair so bright without the hood pulled up to cover it, looking like he wasn’t quite sure where to go from here.
If he’d never slept with anyone before, then it was very likely that he really did not know where to go from here. Chan wanted to kiss him again, and had the thought of, I can now, maybe. But instead of doing that, out of fear of overwhelming Felix right now, he let go of Felix’s hand and said, “I’ll find something for you to change into.”
It didn’t surprise him that Felix, so used to denying anything offered to him, said, “Oh, it’s okay, hyung, I can just—” Then he flushed a little, shifting on his feet, as he realised what Chan had already realised — there would be no sleeping in the underwear he had been wearing. Chan had felt the way Felix had been dripping over his hand, had seen the wet patch on the front of his boxer briefs. It could not be the slightest bit comfortable, even for Felix standing here right now.
Chan smiled at him. He was so cute, standing there avoiding Chan’s eyes a bit, cheeks stained red. Chan went to his drawers and found a pair of boxer shorts, the only thing he could think of in this moment that would probably fit Felix’s narrow hips and waist. He handed them to Felix and said, quietly, “You can change in the bathroom, if you want.”
Felix looked down at the shorts in his hands, just plain black to match the rest of Chan’s underwear, and nodded. He went into the bathroom and as soon as the door clicked shut behind him, Chan found another pair of boxers from the drawer and changed into them himself; things may have been decidedly cleaner for him, but that did not mean that he wanted to be sleeping in the underwear he’d been wearing, either.
It took a while for Felix to come back out. Chan thought about knocking, checking up on him, but almost as soon as he had the thought, the door opened and Felix stepped into the bedroom again, wearing the boxer shorts and the t-shirt he’d been wearing underneath his hoodie. It was not the first time Chan had seen Felix in some kind of shorts, not the first time he had seen his knees and skinny calves, but the silliest part of Chan’s brain was insistently reminding him that the reason he could see them now was because Felix was wearing his clothes. You should have offered him a t-shirt, too, that part of him told him, and Chan had to fight the urge to do it.
Instead, he went to where Felix was holding his jeans and underwear and hoodie in a ball in his hands, still looking uncertain, and took the underwear off him. Felix made a noise of protest but Chan had already deposited it into his laundry hamper, to be washed later with the rest of his stuff. Then he took Felix’s jeans and hoodie, folded them, and put them on top of his dresser.
“Okay?” he asked Felix, who nodded. He looked tired, now, a combination of their late night and the orgasm, no doubt. He was still very obviously not up to full scratch, either, even after almost a month of living with them. He still sometimes went to Hyunjin’s room for naps, Chan knew, because Hyunjin would come out and hiss dramatically at whoever was making noise in the kitchen for interrupting his baby’s naptime. Chan was not sure Felix knew that Hyunjin did this; he suspected Felix did not.
He pulled down the covers and let Felix climb onto the bed too. If he’d seemed uncertain coming into the room, climbing onto the bed seemed to utterly throw him off. He looked very much like he expected Chan to literally pick him up and haul him back out. But Chan did not do that, would not ever. Chan just switched the lights off and climbed in next to him, a little faster than he’d perhaps been meaning to, because seeing Felix like that, sitting in his bed, wearing his boxer shorts, was overwhelming for him.
In the darkness, it was easier than he’d expected to lay down and reach for Felix, to pull him closer. Felix had laid down too, but it had been on his back, a strange distance between them, but Chan thought— maybe he understood, a little bit better now, some of what Hyunjin had tried to tell him before. When he touched Felix, Felix moved instantly, scooting closer to Chan and then turning onto his side so that he could curl up against Chan. His head rested against Chan’s chest, his legs brought up a little so that he was almost curved into a ball, a warm weight against Chan’s body.
Chan pulled the covers up over the two of them, and then put one arm around Felix’s shoulders, the other slung across his waist, holding him as close as Chan could without making either of them uncomfortable. He heard Felix sigh, just once, a sound which seemed— content, Chan thought. Chan had to close his eyes, unable to bear how cute Felix was, how sweet he was in Chan’s arms. It felt perfect, like this — to know that Felix was safe. To know, beyond any kind of doubt, that nothing could hurt him, because Chan had him.
“Lix,” he said. He was not sure what he was going to say after that, to be honest, he had mostly just said it because he wanted to feel Felix’s name in his mouth again. But it didn’t matter, because Felix didn’t answer. He was already asleep, trusting, perhaps, in Chan’s protection as much as Chan wanted him to. Chan pressed his mouth to Felix’s hair, a soft kiss, and then closed his own eyes to sleep.
Notes:
this is what we like to call felix's damp omega mode
Chapter 9
Notes:
welcome to inkin-brushes where we write gratuitously long smut scenes.
chapter specific tags: unprotected anal sex, slight size kink, creampie, lots of praise, *✲ﾟ*｡⋆ lovemaking ⋆｡*ﾟ✲*
Chapter Text
Chan would have thought, when he woke up the next morning, that there’d be some confusion, a slow adjustment period, because he was, at this point, very unused to having someone in his bed. The last person to share a bed with him had been Jeongin almost three years ago, and he was used to the space. But there wasn’t any moment like that. He opened his eyes and thought, instantly, I am holding Felix.
And he was, Felix still curled up against his front, his head still pillowed on Chan’s chest. His breath was very warm through Chan’s t-shirt, his hair tickling Chan’s chin. If Chan craned his head carefully, he could just about make out the slope of Felix’s nose.
He fit perfectly like this. Chan had thought it last night too, but it was much more striking in the morning, when he could see Felix in the light of day. He lay against Chan like this so easily that it felt like he was made to do so, like it was some kind of fate for him to be like this in Chan’s bed. Chan wanted to bask in this emotion: there was a happiness here, a happiness to be had. But it was out of reach in this moment.
Because the emotions inside of him were many, and most of them felt too big on an individual level to be contained inside him; the mix of them all was overwhelming. The most potent of those emotions was — the regret. It was clear to him now that his calmness last night had been nothing more than the afterglow because this morning he felt every single bit of the guilt that he would have expected.
He could not believe, after all these weeks, all the repeated assurances to himself and other people, that he had not stopped Felix in that office. He could not believe that in the heat of the moment, when faced with the reality of Felix apparently wanting him, he had crumbled like a house of cards. He’d barely even put up a protest. An entire speech in his head and he’d not said a word of it.
Was this the type of person he was, he thought, even as he continued to hold Felix, his hand slowly, carefully, stroking Felix’s back through his shirt. He’d let Felix do that without once interrogating why Felix was doing it. Even in his own head, he’d not questioned it — he’d seen that Felix had wanted it, and simply accepted it. But that hadn’t removed Chan’s own responsibility in the situation, a responsibility that should not have been so easy to shake off.
The fact was— he had wanted Felix. He still wanted Felix. Even now, knowing how badly he had fucked up, how horribly he had let this go to shit, he wanted nothing more than to roll Felix over, onto his back, and rut between Felix’s thighs. He wanted to know what sounds Felix would make, if he did that, if he would be as pliant as he felt sleeping like this, as pliant as he had been last night kissing Chan. He wanted to know what it would be like to have Felix beneath him, to have Felix moaning his name. He wanted Felix to wake to the pleasure Chan could bring him.
He wanted—
Gently, he moved Felix off him, as carefully as he could without waking him. He didn’t want Felix to wake, not after he knew how little sleep Felix had been getting the past week or so. He’d had that look about him, the same look he’d had when he first arrived, and Chan wanted him to rest. But he still moved Felix away, and sat up, and got out of the bed before he did something he had cause to really regret. Something that had the potential to be completely unforgivable.
He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, trying to be as quiet about it all as he could. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror for a bit, his pale face, his hair fluffy after a night of sleep. You took advantage, he kept thinking, and he could not shake the thought off. Even if Felix had wanted it, that didn’t absolve him.
He had to fix this, somehow, he knew. But he had no idea how, because it was not something that could simply be taken back, not something easily smoothed over with an apology. He’d never been in this kind of situation before, and the loss of control sickened him. It felt— animalistic, like he had been subject to his base instincts at the expense of his humanity. He could not pretend that it did not happen, but he wanted to, badly.
By the time he’d finished brushing his teeth, he’d decided to do the same thing he always did when his thoughts were too fast, the path ahead of him unclear. He would go and lose himself in his work and maybe, by the time he’d finished it, he’d know what the fuck to do. It seemed unlikely, and he knew, in his heart, that all he was doing was running away, but he needed time to think. He needed time to breathe.
He paused, in his bedroom, to look at Felix sleeping in his bed. He was facing away from Chan now, after Chan had rolled him away from Chan’s warmth, and with the blanket half-covering him, Chan could make out only his narrow back, his head of blond hair. He wanted to crawl back onto the bed, sweep that hair away, suck a bruise to the thin skin at the back of Felix’s neck. The desire was shockingly strong.
Instead of doing that, he let himself out of the bedroom and shut the door carefully, but firmly, behind him.
——
Felix woke to the click of a door and a narrow slat of sunlight coming through a window on the wrong wall. It confused him so much that he had a moment of panic, until he remembered— last night, coming upstairs, going into Chan’s room and not Hyunjin’s room. This was Chan’s room, Chan’s bed. That was why the window was in the wrong place.
He breathed. It smelled differently, too; Hyunjin’s room always smelled like the little bunches of flowers he would gather from who knew where every few days for painting, or like the paint, tickling the inside of Felix’s nose. Chan’s room smelled like Chan, pure and simple, which made Felix think that it was the scent of his body wash, perhaps, or whichever fabric softener he used. He knew what Chan smelled like, now, up close and personal.
He was facing away from the bathroom door, so he rolled over, expecting to see it closed, assuming that was the door he had heard. But the door hung open, showing the grey tiled floor inside, the edge of a white sink. Nobody was in there, and nobody was in the bed with him, either. He was alone in the quiet of Chan’s bedroom.
He rolled onto his back, spreading out a little bit. The room without Chan in it felt too big, and yet he was grateful, in a small way, to be alone with his thoughts, which at that point in time were simply the phrase why did I do that? on repeat. Because he could not believe he had done that, last night. Weeks and weeks of telling himself he could not do it, could not have Chan, could not go to his knees the way he had wanted to all along, and then he had simply done it anyway.
And yet, where he expected regret, bitter and filling him up, instead there was only an odd sense of contentment. Or perhaps it was just relief, a feeling of something being lifted from him, because he had been fighting all this time against something and now he did not have to fight it. It was done; it was irreversible.
He wasn’t sure how long he lay there, warm against the sheets, the sunlight coming through the curtains tracking a slow, slow journey across the foot of the bed towards him. He thought maybe he slept more, just a little, just enough that when he blinked his eyes open again, he felt— far more awake, far more aware. And far more clear-headed about the situation he found himself in.
He sat up. The room was empty, he had known that, but now, when he looked at the bedside table, he saw that the only thing resting on it was a thin paperback and a lamp. He reached out a hand, just to double check, but there really was no note, nothing left there. It seemed Chan had woken up and left without waking Felix, or without saying goodbye.
Something about that cut through the contentment a little bit. He didn’t quite know what to make of it. He’d never been in this position before, had never spent the night at someone’s place before, in someone’s bed. For anything that had happened post-high school, he’d never even really left a nightclub with someone. He’d never had to think about things like this — the morning after etiquette, what it meant to be left so summarily alone in bed.
He climbed off the bed and found the jeans that he had taken off the night before, folded somewhat neatly on Chan’s dresser. He had slept in his t-shirt and a pair of Chan’s boxer shorts, kindly given to replace the underwear he had mostly ruined. Chan had taken it and put it into his hamper like it was nothing, and Felix had let him, because he was tired and wanted mostly to get into Chan’s bed with him, but now, in the cold light of morning, he remembered that and felt himself flushing red. Would it be more embarrassing to leave it or to pick it out to take to the hamper in Hyunjin’s room? He was not sure.
Maybe he should, though. So Chan would not have to return them to him, later.
He pulled his jeans on, wriggling back into them. He couldn’t bring himself to approach the hamper though, a wicker basket thing tucked in the corner of the room. It felt too much like pawing through Chan’s stuff, a little too intimate — which was somewhat stupid, after having had his mouth around Chan’s cock the night before, but he couldn’t help but shy away from it.
Christ, he really had done that last night. The version of him who could do things like that was going to get him into serious trouble one of these days, if it hadn’t already done so.
He let himself out of Chan’s room, trying to close the door as quietly and carefully as possible. It didn’t work. There had been someone talking in the living space, and when the door shut behind him, the murmur of that voice cut off like a veil of silence had been dropped over them all. He winced, and padded softly in his bare feet out to the quiet.
He wasn’t surprised to see Hyunjin there. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his sketchbook, coloured pencils scattered across the surface in front of him. Felix wondered for a moment why he was doing this here and not in his bedroom, but then he realised— Hyunjin had been waiting for him.
If he went much redder, he’d probably burst into flames.
“God, finally,” Hyunjin said. “Did he wear you out that much?”
Felix had been wrong — it was possible for him to turn redder without spontaneously combusting. “Hyunjin,” he hissed.
“Don’t give me that, you little minx,” Hyunjin said. He had abandoned his pencils and sketchbook and was climbing to his feet, his chair screeching on the floor. “Do you even know how long I’ve been waiting out here? I was probably going to come and get you soon.”
That would have been moritifying, but what was more mortifying was the way that Jeongin suddenly sat up on the couch. Felix had not noticed him lying there, and he’d assumed that Hyunjin had been talking to himself, or on the phone, when Felix had come out of Chan’s room. But no, it had been to Jeongin, who was looking at Felix with a grin of sheer delight, a smile which said he knew exactly what Felix had been up to with his older brother in said older brother’s room the night before.
He was so busy staring in utter dismay at having been caught by Jeongin of all people that he didn’t notice Hyunjin nearing until Hyunjin grabbed his hand and started dragging him back down the hallway to his bedroom door. “Come on,” Hyunjin said. “We need to talk where there aren’t impressionable young ears around.”
“Fuck you!” Jeongin shouted after them. “I know all about sex!” But his voice, rather than annoyed or upset, just sounded as delighted as his smile had been.
Felix wanted to throw himself off the roof but instead he just let Hyunjin tow him into his bedroom and close the door after them both. “He does not know all about sex,” Hyunjin said huffily, as he ushered Felix over to the bed. “Or he’d better not, since he’s never out of our company so I don’t know where he’d have learned it. Now sit your cute ass down.”
Felix sat. The whole situation was so completely awful and embarrassing that it was almost circling back around to funny again. But it wasn’t quite getting there because— that empty bed, that empty side table. It kept a small part of Felix’s stomach cold.
Hyunjin dragged his desk chair over so it was in front of Felix and sat in it in a way that seemed anatomically improbable. Felix was not sure where all his leg length had quite gone. Hyunjin raised his eyebrow at him. “Okay,” he said. “You are going to tell me everything.”
Felix thought about asking him, you want to know about how big Chan-hyung’s cock is? but he was not sure what he’d say if Hyunjin did not respond with disgust and actually wanted to know. So instead he just said, “Hyunjin, I’m not telling you everything.”
“Then tell me something,” Hyunjin insisted. “What on earth happened? I mean, I knew you were going to do something the moment we got out of that car, but I didn’t expect you to go up to his office for it.”
Felix hadn’t either, but Chan had invited him to the office and Felix hadn’t known how to ask to go to the bedroom instead in front of all those people, so he’d just gone along with it. “I, uhm.” He was blushing again; probably he hadn’t quite stopped, this entire time. “I sucked his cock.”
Hyunjin inhaled, and then let out a whoop of noise that almost startled Felix. “You— Lix,” he said. He managed to sound scandalised even though Felix knew he was nothing of the sort. He’d been pushing this way too hard to clutch his pearls over it now. “And he just let you? I almost wondered if he’d fight you about it.”
Felix shook his head. “He let me,” he said, quietly. There’d been some resistance to start, but nothing— real, nothing more than Chan’s goodness coming through. “He— ah, Hyunjin,” he said, covering his face with his hands, peeking through his fingers at Hyunjin. “It was good, it was really good.”
“Wait,” Hyunjin said, still in that scandalised voice, obviously put on. “Did he do it back?”
“No,” said Felix. “He—” He made a little movement with his hand, to represent Chan jerking him off. Hyunjin pulled a face. “I didn’t mean that, I meant it was good to— do that. I— like it, I like doing that, and it was good.”
Hyunjin was looking at him like he had no idea who Felix was. “My angel,” he said. “My baby fluffy bunny. Are you really sitting here looking this cute, all blushing and shit, telling me that you have a thing for sucking cock.”
Felix didn’t say anything, because he supposed that that was exactly what he was doing. He didn’t want to get into the details with Hyunjin, and he got the feeling that if he tried to give much more, Hyunjin would very much regret asking in the first place — he did not look uncomfortable yet, but if Felix told him how hot it had been to have Chan’s cock filling his mouth, sliding into his throat, he’d probably find himself smothered under a pillow.
“I can’t believe you,” Hyunjin said. “So how did you end up in his room last night, if that’s all that happened? I didn’t bother waiting for you, by the way, I just went to sleep.”
“I figured,” Felix said, a little dryly. “He— invited me, I guess? He asked me to stay with him. He wanted to— cuddle.”
And he had. He had given Felix his boxers to change into, and then he had climbed into the bed after Felix and he had pulled Felix into his arms again, Felix’s head against his shoulder, Chan’s arm around his waist. It had been so warm, and Felix so tired, that he had almost immediately passed out, hadn’t even really had a chance to bask in how it felt to be held like that before he fell asleep.
“God, this is so cute,” Hyunjin said, looking a little like it made him want to throw up nonetheless.
“And then,” Felix said, in a slight rush, “when I woke up this morning, he was gone and he didn’t leave a note or anything, he just vanished, and what if— Hyunjin, you know he didn’t want to do this, he kept telling you, and I kind of just— threw myself at him, last night, what if he’s mad? I think I upset him.”
By the end of that, Hyunjin was just staring at him again. “Lix, baby, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“He didn’t stay,” Felix said desperately. “He didn’t even say good morning. What if he didn’t like me after all?”
“Wait, slow down, stop,” Hyunjin said. “He let you suck his cock, and then asked you to stay and cuddle, and now you’re worried he doesn’t like you?”
When Hyunjin said it like that, it sounded bonkers, but Hyunjin had not been the one to wake up alone like Felix had. He gave a tiny nod, looking down at the floor.
“You’re being literally ridiculous,” Hyunjin said. Felix wasn’t looking at him, but the eye roll was audible in his voice. “Of course he likes you, Lix, he’s been mooning over you for weeks now and everyone has seen it.”
“So then,” Felix said, looking back up at Hyunjin, “why did he leave?”
“I don’t know, angel,” Hyunjin said. He looked utterly exasperated now, but mostly fond too. “He got hungry? He has a meeting, maybe? It’s like 10am and he’s a workaholic with insomnia? Any of the above?”
He sounded so confident, so sure of himself, that Felix, as usual, felt himself falling for it. He looked at Hyunjin, the expression on his handsome face, the way he still looked a little amused by this whole thing. Felix was glad he was, at least.
Hyunjin tucked some of his hair behind his ear. For the first time, Felix suddenly realised that his hair probably looked a complete mess, between sleeping on it and the way Chan had slid his hands into it the night before. “Felix,” said Hyunjin gently. “Babe. He likes you. It’s not something you have to worry about at all.”
Felix wanted to believe him, tried to take Hyunjin’s words and wrap them all around himself. Hyunjin, after all, knew Chan much better than Felix did, had had five years to get to know Chan and everything about him. What could Felix do other than trust that Hyunjin was telling him the truth.
There was a stretch of silence, not uncomfortable at all. Hyunjin was rubbing at Felix’s temple, so soothing that the tension in his shoulders that he’d felt since he’d woken up started to melt a little bit. He kind of wished that Hyunjin had gotten on the bed with him too, kind of wanted to ask Hyunjin to come and cuddle with him. Instead, though, he just said, “I just don’t know how we go back. Like, how do we go back to normal, after something like this? It’s going to be so weird.”
“We aren’t going to go back, you absolute dweeb,” Hyunjin said. “You’re going to date Chan-hyung and you’re going to be happy.”
Be happy. That was what Felix wanted, more than almost anything, for Hyunjin too — he really wanted it, especially now that he knew all of what Hyunjin had gone through. He wanted it as much as Hyunjin seemed to want Felix’s own happiness. Hyunjin had been so invested in this, in getting Felix and Chan together, in ensuring their happiness, that it felt very much to Felix like it was Hyunjin trying to live vicariously through him. But why should he not have his own happiness too?
“You know,” he said, “if you and Jisung dated—”
“Felix,” said Hyunjin, a clear, hard interruption. His voice was nothing more than a warning, his hand dropping away from Felix’s temple to rest in his own lap.
Felix ignored it. He got the feeling that he needed to push a little if he ever expected Hyunjin to talk about this with him. “No, listen, Hyunjin, I know that you like him, so—”
“Drop it,” said Hyunjin.
“But Hyunjin, I really think you should just talk to him—”
“Stop!” Hyunjin cried, surging to his feet so fast the chair he’d been in nearly toppled over.
Felix flinched instinctively, the way he always did when people raised their voices around him. He hated it, truly and completely, when people yelled, and it was all the more shocking that Hyunjin had never once done it to him before. He didn’t quite know what to do. He shrank back, away. There was silence, so absolute, and Hyunjin was holding himself in hard, tense lines.
“I just want you to be happy, Hyunjin,” he said eventually, his voice extremely small, just louder than a whisper.
Hyunjin— deflated, completely, all the tension leaving him between one breath and the next. He shoved a hand through his hair, roughly, and then said, very quietly, remarkably gently, “Ah, Lix, I am happy. I have everything I need.”
Felix did not say anything. But he knew that was not true. He knew, in a way that he probably shouldn’t, considering how little time they really had known each other, that Hyunjin was simply denying himself this, for one reason or another. Felix got it, though, he got it now. How scary it must be, for Hyunjin, to think about being in a relationship, any relationship, but perhaps more so with Jisung, who he had actual feelings for.
He knew, too, that at the very least, Hyunjin was content with his life. So maybe that could be enough, for now. Maybe they could work on happy later on.
Hyunjin reached out for his hand, very tentatively. He looked like he expected Felix to draw away, to refuse to touch him, but Felix, as soon as he saw the movement, instead reached back for him, catching him halfway, threading their fingers together. He was so relieved that Hyunjin wasn’t staying mad at him, wasn’t angry that Felix had pushed him seemingly too far.
“Besides,” Hyunjin said, very lightly, seemingly not put on this time, “how can I be unhappy when I have this to hold over Chan-hyung’s head for the rest of his life.”
Felix sighed at him, and then smiled, letting it settle onto his face. Inside his stomach, though, deep inside of him, was still that cold little pit, and he didn’t know how to get rid of it. He wasn’t sure he could.
——
Jeongin tried to not run as he went down the stairs to the third floor, Nintendo clutched in his hand, tried to not let his excitement get the better of him, but it was more difficult than he’d expected. The moment he’d seen Felix come out of Chan’s room, looking sleep-rumpled and still dressed in the clothes he’d worn the night before, it had been difficult to bite his tongue and not say anything. He’d almost wanted to squeal. But Felix had looked embarrassed enough, blushing red when he’d realised Jeongin was in the room and not just Hyunjin, and so he’d bit his tongue.
But that was with Felix. He wasn’t going to do that with Chan.
He let himself into the PC room, which was empty, the lights turned off. Truthfully he was the only one who used it on the regular, and he could have just do what Jisung had done and taken the computer he always used upstairs, to replace the beaten old laptop that he’d had for years. But he liked to have the computer down here, for the same reason they’d never moved his television watching set up upstairs: he liked to be close to Chan.
He was a little surprised to find Chan alone in his office when Jeongin let himself in. Chan didn’t bother to look over, because Jeongin was the only one who always just came into the office without bothering to knock. “Jeongin,” he said, a little absently, reading something on his computer screen. “What’s up?”
Jeongin thought about easing Chan into it, but it was probably funnier not to, so he just said, “I just saw Felix-hyung come out of your room.”
Chan’s head whipped around to look at him, anything absent or distracted wiped clean off his face. If Jeongin had had any doubt about what had happened last night, he had it no longer, because Chan was blushing, his ears so red they looked like they should be steaming. “Ah, Jeongin,” he said. “That— uh. Um.”
“Hyung!” said Jeongin, in delighted scandal. He came into the room, letting the door shut behind him, and flung himself onto the couch, where he curled up a little bit, making himself comfortable. The excitement inside him had almost reached a peak, he had to wiggle a little to let some of it out. “Hyung, oh my god.”
Chan buried his face in his hands, which was probably for the best, because the blush had spread across his entire face at this point. “Don’t,” he said, his voice muffled. “Jeongin, don’t, this is— god, this is so bad.”
“What, no?” Jeongin leaned forward in his seat, frowning even though Chan couldn’t see it. “What are you talking about, hyung, this is great.”
Chan let his hands drop away from his face, giving Jeongin a plaintive look. Jeongin was not sure he’d ever seen Chan look so uncertain of himself, so obviously uneasy. “I really shouldn’t have done it,” he said, his face still red. “I shouldn’t have, should I?”
Jeongin blinked at him. The question confused the hell out of him. “I mean,” he said, “did he want it too?”
Chan somehow impossibly went redder. He was looking at Jeongin like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of a younger brother who was able to talk about this stuff, which was unfortunate. If this was how he was about his own love life, Jeongin thought it might blow his mind when Jeongin got around to sorting his own out.
“Yes,” Chan said, after a long pause, as if he were processing the question. “He— I mean, nothing— really happened, not like you’re— thinking— I— yes,” he finished, finally, looking sheepish in a stressed way. “Yes, he wanted it too.”
This was not surprising to Jeongin. Chan’s feelings for Felix had been as obvious as the sun in the midday sky, but it wasn’t as though Felix had been all that subtle either, in Jeongin’s opinion. All that blushing, all that awkward energy whenever Chan spoke to him.
“In that case, hyung,” Jeongin said. “You can do whatever you want.”
Chan shook his head, but it was true. Jeongin knew that Chan so often couldn’t simply do what he wanted, torn between his duty to them all and his responsibilities as a business owner, and his part that he was playing in the shifting power balance in this city. But when it came to this, when it came down to how he felt about Felix, how he and Felix felt about each other, there was no should or should not.
“I feel like I took advantage,” Chan said, quieter now, his voice softer. “He relies on me for so much and I— I don’t want him to think— that this is something I expect in return.”
Sometimes, the sheer goodness in Chan hit Jeongin so hard that it made him want to cry. They took it for granted, maybe, all of them, but especially Jeongin, because he’d been given that goodness from such a young age and had been raised in the full glory of it. It was easy to think that this was just how Chan was, and to not think more of it, but in a world such as this, how could they overlook it?
He had been so young, was the thing that had struck Jeongin more and more often over the years. A fourteen year old, who had been grieving a dead older brother, and yet who had still noticed a small, lost nine year old being hurt and had decided to do something about it. He had not needed to, nobody would have expected him to, and yet he had done it anyway, because it had been the right thing.
What could Chan have had, in his life, if he had not had Jeongin to look after? More money, more opportunities. He would not have spent his teenage years working himself to the bone and going hungry just to make sure Jeongin had enough, would not have given up a chance at a normal life because he always had to watch over Jeongin. Maybe he could have had love, before now.
It was selfish, of course, for Jeongin to be grateful that Chan had done things the way that he had. The sacrifices had been in service to Jeongin, after all. But he was grateful, desperately so, and now that he was older, able to look after himself, he wanted so badly for Chan to finally, finally take something for himself.
“Hyung,” he said gently. “Why don’t you talk to him and find out what he thinks? With everything I know about Felix-hyung, I don’t think he’s that kind of person, but maybe you should just talk to him about it instead of wallowing in your office about it.”
Chan sighed, then gave Jeongin a weak smile. He didn’t look convinced, but he said, “Ah, Jeongin, when did you get so mature, huh? Makes me feel old.”
“It happened when you weren’t looking,” Jeongin said dryly. Chan’s smile got a little stronger, his cheeks dimpling. Jeongin loved him, really and truly, his brother who had adopted him without needing to and who had done everything in his power to give Jeongin this life that he so cherished. “Really, hyung, I don’t think you have anything to worry about here.”
Chan chewed the inside of his mouth. “I hope you’re right,” he said.
Jeongin didn’t hope, not about this — he knew he was right, knew that just as much as Chan liked Felix, Felix liked him back. And if Chan didn’t seize this chance with both hands, Jeongin was going to have to team up with Hyunjin in order to make it happen, something he’d been trying to avoid because he was a little afraid that if he let Hyunjin too close to such matters, he might see through Jeongin a bit too much. But desperate times called for desperate measures.
“Can I stay with you?” he asked. He waved his Nintendo console in the air. “I’ll keep the volume off, but can I stay with you for a bit?”
Chan gave him a look so soft with affection, Jeongin felt it like a warm bath over every part of his body. How privileged he was, to have that kind of unconditional love in his life. “Yeah, Jeongin,” said Chan, his voice just as full of care and love. “I’d like that a lot.”
——
Changbin let himself into the workroom to find Seungmin in his usual curled up position on his desk chair: one foot brought up so he could rest his chin against his knee, the other tucked underneath himself. Who knew what kind of damage was Seungmin doing to his spine like this, Changbin thought fondly, knowing that it would be pointless to remind Seungmin to sit up straight.
“Hyung,” Seungmin said, not looking around from his computer screens. “Is that for me or are you just carrying soda around the place?”
Changbin smiled, even though Seungmin couldn’t see it, and said, “Yeah, it’s for you.” He put the can he’d brought from upstairs down on Seungmin’s desk, and then waited until Seungmin actually looked at him. He was wearing his glasses today, which Changbin refrained from commenting on. One time he had told Seungmin that he looked cute in them, and Seungmin had taken them off and refused to wear them for a month.
It wasn’t Changbin’s fault he looked cute in them. He wasn’t sure when Seungmin had gotten these glasses, only that he’d had them when he first joined the team, and he wore them very rarely despite the eye strain he got from looking at screens all day. Changbin kept his mouth shut.
“Is it a bribe?” Seungmin asked, scrunching his nose a little bit at him. “Trying to buy your way into hanging out here?”
“Since when did I need to do that?” Changbin asked. He went to the workbench, grabbed one of the stools, and dragged it over to Seungmin’s desk. “I just wanted to do something nice for you.”
Seungmin, it seemed, didn’t have a reply to that. His ears were a little red. He turned back to his monitors. As usual, he seemed to be doing four different things at once: one screen showed the feeds for the house and outside, another had a mock-up fake driver’s licence for Jisung under a false name, the third showed a PDF filled with tiny writing, and the last one had some sort of game playing. It took Changbin a moment to realise that Seungmin was not actually playing the game, but was watching someone else play it on silent. Changbin did not fully get the point of this, but he chalked it up to Seungmin’s usual eccentricness.
“Busy, huh,” Changbin said.
Seungmin sighed. “Aren’t I always?” he asked.
No, Changbin wanted to say, because actually, he didn’t think Seungmin was particularly busy right now either. That driver’s licence was for a job a couple of weeks away, and Seungmin could make this kind of thing in his sleep at this point. Now that the Plaza job was done, and now that Seungmin had finished backtracking all that footage after Felix’s almost-kidnapping, he was, Changbin knew, almost free.
He’d had to help more than he’d expected, in the watching of that footage. He’d seen Seungmin getting more and more bogged down with it all, between that and prep work for the job, and in the end had made Seungmin transfer some of the files over so he could watch them himself. In the end, they’d found nothing. Three weeks of footage and that SUV had not once been near the house in that entire time. It had not come back around again, either; Seungmin had checked that, too.
It had been a considerable weight off their minds, but Seungmin’s most of all, it had seemed. He had been so relieved that Changbin had almost questioned him on why — Lee Jaerim knowing their location was, honestly, the literal worst thing that could happen, but they could just simply move if that had turned out to be the case. But when he’d thought about it, for Seungmin, it probably was that moving was the literal worst thing. All of his delicate equipment, all of his stuff. He had everything here set up like he wanted it, and Seungmin was not a creature of easy change.
“So what’s the verdict on last night?” he asked, half-leaning against Seungmin’s chair, not with his full weight but just enough that it moved the chair a little and Seungmin made a little huffing noise. “You and Hyunjin seemed convinced that they were going to fuck but I’m still not sure it wasn’t an assassination attempt.”
This was designed to make Seungmin roll his eyes, which he did. It had clearly not been an assassination attempt, watching — on Seungmin’s grainy monitors — Felix stalk towards Chan across the length of the office, because if it had been, they would not be having such a relatively quiet, relaxed day. But sometimes it was just fun to make that look come onto Seungmin’s face.
“I watched Chan-hyung and Felix go up to Chan-hyung’s bedroom last night,” Seungmin said, very balefully, like being forced to watch such a thing had been torturous. “They were holding hands.”
This utterly charmed Changbin. The thought of Chan holding hands with anyone who wasn’t a younger Jeongin tickled him a bit. “Oh,” he said. “That’s actually really cute.”
Seungmin’s little noise now was decidedly scoffing. “You would think that,” he said, very scornfully.
Changbin smiled, although Seungmin still wasn’t quite looking at him to see it. He lifted his hand and put it slowly, carefully, on the back of Seungmin’s neck, waiting to see if Seungmin would shake him off. Seungmin didn’t, and so Changbin let it settle there, fingers curled around the delicate bones, his thumb pressed just under Seungmin’s ear.
“Oh, would I?” he asked, letting his voice go low and quiet. He stroked his thumb against Seungmin’s warm skin. “I would think that? Why do you think I’d think that, hmm, pretty baby?”
He felt Seungmin shiver, felt it underneath his palm. Seungmin turned his head a little to the side and tried to glare at him but it didn’t matter, because Changbin had felt that, and he could see, too, the way Seungmin’s eyes were just that bit too wide.
“Because you’re a sop,” Seungmin said. He was clearly trying to be himself but he sounded— flustered. “You don’t have muscles, hyung, you’re just stuffed full of sappy mush.”
Changbin just kept smiling at him, just kept stroking his thumb up and down slowly. There were many things he could say, but at the front of his mind was last time we fucked, it was you that reached for my hand first. Saying something like that was likely to get him thrown out of the workroom immediately, and he was enjoying this too much to want something like that.
How different Seungmin was, to how Changbin had first thought of him. How different he was to the Seungmin who had first approached Changbin, in this very workroom. That Seungmin had been almost mercenary about it, so clinical and matter-of-fact about the whole thing that it was still sometimes a shock to Changbin that Seungmin ran so fucking warm in bed.
Before, in those early days, Changbin had never once thought about sleeping with Seungmin. Knowing that Seungmin had beautiful eyes and a beautiful smile had not translated over into any kind of sexual interest. Then one day he’d gotten a text saying, come down here, and so he’d moseyed down to find Seungmin standing beside the workbench, looking no different from usual other than the oddness of him standing, rather than sitting at his desk.
“Are you busy?” Seungmin had asked, not bothering with any other kind of greeting. Even at the time, Changbin hadn’t been bothered; that was just the way it was, with Seungmin.
“Nah,” Changbin had said with a rolling shrug. He’d finished all his duties for that day, the sun beyond the walls reaching for the horizon by that point. “What’s up?”
And Seungmin had stared at him with absolutely no expression for one long beat before saying, “I think you’re hot and I want you to fuck me, if that’s something you’d be willing to do.”
And just like that, Changbin had, in the space of about thirty seconds, gone from not thinking about fucking Seungmin to being blindingly into the idea.
In those thirty seconds, while Changbin’s brain had been processing what the hell was going on, Seungmin had added, “I already prepped myself, if that makes a difference to your answer.”
It had not made a difference to Changbin’s answer. It had, however, been incredibly fucking arousing, to think of Seungmin doing that in preparation for Changbin fucking him. Still, Changbin had taken the time, once he had Seungmin naked in bed, to thoroughly finger him open anyway; this, he had known even then, had taken Seungmin by surprise. He’d clearly expected Changbin to not bother if he didn’t need to.
He thought it was his right, to surprise Seungmin whenever he could, because heaven knew Kim Seungmin was an ongoing surprise to him.
“What would you have done,” he asked now, as Seungmin still didn’t shake his hand off and let Changbin continue to press his thumb under his ear, “if I’d turned you down, back then?”
Seungmin slid his eyes back to Changbin, the glare much more of a dry look, some of it reflected in his voice when he said, “Fallen back on Plan B: Minho-hyung.”
Changbin burst into startled laughter. He took his hand back, and laughed, and watched a smile come to Seungmin’s face, one that looked like it was trying to be repressed but couldn’t be. “Oh god,” Changbin managed, after he managed to catch his breath. “The destruction that would have caused. The house wouldn’t have remained standing, if the two of you fucked.”
“Mm,” Seungmin said. He leaned a little so that, for just a second, their shoulders were pressed together. “Good job that you said yes then.”
God, Changbin loved him. He loved him, and it was not difficult, or a burden, or anything like that. He wished only that they could be more open with it, but he knew that time would come, eventually, and then the others would know, exactly how he felt about this weird, interesting person who had asked Changbin for his body and accidentally stolen his heart in the process.
“Very good job,” he agreed, before standing up. He took advantage of being taller like this to lean down and kiss Seungmin, brief but heartfelt. “I’m going to go give my congratulations to Chan-hyung,” he said. “But I’ll come back down, later?”
Again, he felt that shiver in Seungmin, but Seungmin just said, “If you want.”
If you want, Changbin thought, as he climbed up to the third floor. Of course he wanted, and he thought that Seungmin didn’t quite get it, sometimes, the extent to which Changbin wanted him. Changbin wanted him like an under the skin itch. He wanted to look at Seungmin’s eyes until the end of fucking time.
He knocked on Chan’s office door and waited for Chan to call him in. Minho was in there, sitting at one of the chairs, pointing at a piece of paper laying on Chan’s desk. They both looked up at him as he came in the door, and then Changbin said, “Ah, hyung, congratulations on finally hooking up with Felix.”
Minho said, very loudly, “WHAT.” And then his head snapped around to look at Chan. Changbin could not see what Minho’s face was doing, and was kind of glad of that fact.
Chan was looking at Changbin like he was a step away from outright screeching. “How do you know that,” he said in a very strangled voice. “Did Hyunjin tell you?”
Changbin, silently, turned and pointed to the corner of the room where the camera sat, unobtrusive and, apparently, forgettable.
Chan went utterly white. He looked from the camera to Changbin and then to Minho, which made him blanch a little bit, so then he looked back at Changbin. “You—” he said. “I.”
“Seungmin turned them off,” Changbin said, deciding to take a little pity on him. “Don’t worry.” Hyunjin had absolutely screeched when Seungmin had done that. As soon as Chan and Felix had vanished from the workroom, Hyunjin had broke into Jisung and Seungmin’s bickering and declared that Jisung was annoying him. It hadn’t had any real bite, so Jisung had kept smiling, but he’d gladly skedaddled.
Then Hyunjin had stared at Changbin. “Go away, hyung,” he’d said.
“No,” Changbin had said, grinning. “Why should I?”
“Bah!” Hyunjin had cried, prowling over to the monitors and poking at one of the feeds, giving up on chasing Changbin out apparently. “That one, the one in Chan’s office, make it bigger.”
Seungmin, prone to disobeying simply on the basis of hating being bossed around, had actually listened, saying as he did so, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
And the three of them had crowded around, watching a low resolution image of Chan and Felix in the office. Chan, leaned back against his desk, Felix standing adrift in the middle of the room. And then Felix had abruptly moved forward with intent, and Seungmin had reached out and slapped the monitor off.
Changbin smiled now at the memory. He was glad Seungmin had spared him the actual visual. “But yeah,” he said to Chan’s ashen face. “We know. Congrats.”
“How could you do that,” Minho said. He, too, sounded strangled. He sounded like this was a very personal affront from Chan, like he thought Chan was fucking Felix at Minho. Knowing Minho, maybe he did think this.
“Minho,” Chan said. He struggled for words for a long few seconds and then eventually settled on, “Uh. You’re dismissed.”
“You have to be fucking kidding me,” Minho said, just less than a yell. The sound of it bounced around the room a bit anyway. “Hyung!”
“Minho,” Chan said again. He sounded more tired now. “I’m really not up for this conversation. You can leave, we can finish this up tomorrow.”
Minho was very obviously not happy about this, but he did get to his feet nonetheless, snatching up his piece of paper from the desk as he went. “Tomorrow,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“Ah, no,” said Changbin cheerfully. “It’s his birthday tomorrow, you can’t yell at a man on his birthday.”
Minho turned his glare on Changbin, who didn’t take it the slightest bit personally, despite the fact that Minho’s glare was— potent. It was a reasonable point to make, Changbin thought. It really wasn’t fair to yell at Chan on his birthday. “Fine,” Minho said after a moment. “The day after then.” And then he slammed out of the office door.
In the silence after the door closed, Chan just looked at Changbin for a long, long space of time. Changbin came further in to the room and took the seat that Minho had vacated and waited for what Chan wanted to say. Eventually, Chan said, “I’ve really made a mess of this, Changbin.”
“Nah,” said Changbin immediately. “It was more of a mess when you kept pretending like neither of you wanted each other.”
Chan gaped at him. “You think,” he said. “I mean— you think he— I don’t know, Changbin, I really didn’t want to take advantage of him like this.”
“Hyung, you’ve been so bogged down by the trees you’ve missed the forest,” Changbin said. “You want him, and he wants you, and that’s all that matters, surely? Because yes, he likes you, that’s been obvious to us all, as obvious as you have been. And you have been very obvious.”
Chan was blushing now, which always amused Changbin, because he felt like he never really got to see it much. “So you think this is— a good idea?”
“I mean, I think it is,” Changbin said. “Minho-hyung won’t, but I think it’s good. Frankly, hyung, you deserve something like this. Happiness like this, it’s something you’ve been denying yourself all these years, and I just— I’m happy for you, hyung, I really am. And I don’t want you to throw this away because you’re too focused on things that, in the end, don’t matter and aren’t actually problems.”
He’d known, all this time, what it was that was staying Chan’s hand. Even if Chan hadn’t been that kind of person in the first place, Hyunjin was there as a constant reminder to— never overstep that boundary. But it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t Chan forcing Felix into something Felix didn’t want, just to have a place to call home. If Changbin hadn’t already noted Felix’s shy, darting looks at Chan, he’d have known after he had watched Felix cling so hard to Chan after he was almost snatched.
“You deserve,” he said, more firmly, when Chan didn’t answer him, “to be happy.”
Chan deflated a little bit. “Thank you,” he said, quietly. “It means a lot, Changbin, it does. To hear that from you. And I had Jeongin down here earlier saying much of the same thing, so maybe I need to— get it into my skull. I just— fuck, does everyone know about this?”
Changbin ran through the people who had been in the room yesterday, and then the people who had apparently found out today. “Ah, Jisung doesn’t,” he said, then gave Chan a sly smile. “Do you want me to let him know?”
“Do not,” Chan said. “God, let me have one sliver of peace, please?”
“Sure,” said Changbin. He stood up again, smiling at Chan. He had meant what he said, every word of it. Chan deserved happiness the most out of them all, and Changbin wanted him to have it. “Just try to remember the cameras next time, hmm.”
“If Seungmin didn’t insist on putting them everywhere, this wouldn’t be a problem,” Chan grumbled.
Changbin laughed. That was probably true, but if Seungmin didn’t set cameras up everywhere, then Changbin wouldn’t have an unobtrusive file on his computer, labelled something innocuous and hidden a few folders deep: a video, ripped from the camera in Seungmin’s workshop, of him fucking Seungmin over the worktable. He’d been grateful to the cameras, when Seungmin had given him that.
Still, though. “I’ll pass on your complaints,” he said.
——
Minho had, ostensibly, come upstairs to make dinner. He’d done it almost on autopilot, his body bringing him up to the kitchen, because it was the time that he usually made dinner and, even four years removed from his last stint in prison, adherence to some kind of routine felt hardwired into him.
But he had not, once actually in the kitchen, started to make any kind of food. He did not even know what he would make, if he had started, because there was no room for thoughts such as those inside his head. Instead he had found himself wearing a groove into the floor as he paced in a loose figure of eight shape around the kitchen table and one of the couches, round and round and round, his mind racing.
This was, in a word, a disaster. He’d known, all this time, that Chan liked Felix, was attracted to him, wanted him — how could Minho not know, when Chan had made it so fucking obvious to everyone? It was frankly embarrassing, how obvious Chan had made it. If Minho had made his feelings for Jeongin half so obvious, he’d have had to leave years ago.
He had not, at any point, considered that Chan was so stupid as to do something about those feelings. Not now, at least, when they still had Felix’s job to do, when they still could not trust, fully, that he was who he said he was. There were so many parts to Felix’s story that were huge gaping holes, things that he had not explained, things that he had, as far as Minho was concerned, talked around enough that Minho knew there was something there.
Christ, they didn’t even know his real name. The others may have simply accepted him as Felix but Minho, at the very least, was not stupid: he knew that there was no way that Felix was his real name. He had a different name, something that he was keeping from them, and it made Minho wonder, sometimes, what exactly Seungmin had found on Felix when he’d run whatever background check he’d done. How could he have found out anything useful, when he didn’t even have a proper name to run on?
It had been difficult to bring all this up anyway, but it would be even harder now, now that Chan had taken Felix into his bed. Minho should have brought it up earlier, should have gone to Chan and laid out his concerns before, because he could see it now, if he went to Chan and said, Felix is lying to us and I don’t know where or why but I know he’s lying. Chan would send him out of the room as easily as he had done just twenty minutes ago. And he would keep fucking Felix regardless.
Round the kitchen table again, his knuckles accidentally brushing the back of one of the chairs as he walked past it. Chan, maybe, he should have considered a lost cause. It surprised him only that he thought Chan had more willpower, but lesser men than him had been swayed by a beautiful face. What really stuck in Minho’s throat was that he had not, as far as he could tell, seen any sign of that same desire on Felix’s face. Granted, he didn’t know Felix that well, which was mostly on purpose, but he had not noticed Felix coveting Chan in the same way Chan so obviously coveted Felix.
What was it, he wondered, circling the couch again now, that had suddenly made Felix willing to accept that desire. Was it to solidify his position here, make it so that nobody could speak against him? He possibly had not needed that, not when Hyunjin so vehemently supported him, but it made sense that Felix might want more security than that. If that was the case, it certainly went a long way to explaining some of the niggling confusion Minho had felt this entire time over how, exactly, someone so young and green had been so close to the Magpie. Sleeping his way there would certainly give Felix protection.
He paused for a moment, resting a hand against the island counter, before continuing his circuit. What a soulless little thing he would be, he thought, impressed despite himself. Impressed despite the danger this then posed for them all. With both Chan and Hyunjin under his thumb, it would be very hard indeed to be rid of him.
If, that was, how things were. Minho could only hope that his worst case scenarios weren’t true. But he was not the optimistic type. Twenty three years of life had taught him better than that.
A door opened down the hallway, and a few seconds later Jeongin bounded into the living room. He stopped dead when he saw someone else there and Minho watched his face visibly brighten. “Hyung!” he said. “Hello!” He added, voice suddenly very hopeful, his face following Minho as he walked, “Are you going to make food?”
Minho had almost not been prepared enough for the sight of Jeongin, and especially not for a Jeongin wearing a very oversized t-shirt that could not possibly belong to him, and a pair of shorts that showed his skinny calves and bony ankles. It was too much to handle, when his brain was whirring so hard.
“No,” he said, after a few seconds of silence.
Jeongin almost pouted before catching himself. “Oh,” he said. He rocked back and forth, his feet bare against the laminate. “Are you working on a job, then? Is that why you’re just walking around like that?”
Minho forced himself to a stop. It was more difficult than he’d have thought. “No,” he repeated.
Jeongin nodded. He did not look the slightest bit concerned about Minho’s odd behaviour. Instead, he was still smiling at him, cheeks dimpled, eyes a little narrowed with it. Jeongin smiled so much that Minho sometimes thought maybe he would get used to it, become immune to the effect, but it was impossible. Especially like this, nobody else in the room with them, and Jeongin’s smile focused fully on him.
“Did you hear?” Jeongin said, tone still so bright. “Chan-hyung and Felix-hyung slept together!”
Minho almost, almost, made a noise that if he allowed it out would have sounded like a furious teakettle being allowed to boil over. He reeled it in and said, “Yes, I have heard.” He tried to make it terse, but it came out strangled instead.
“Oh, who told you?” Jeongin asked.
“Changbin told me,” Minho said. “Just now, in Chan-hyung’s office, which was good, because Chan-hyung had failed to mention it.”
“Yeah, he’s embarrassed,” Jeongin said and then laughed, a happy sound. He looked nothing at all like Minho felt, nothing at all like he had any doubts or worries about this. He came to where Minho was standing almost in the kitchen and took him by the forearm, his hand loose enough that Minho could have broken out of the touch if he’d wanted to. Minho did almost flinch back out of it, but his brain was still so confused about everything he had suffered this night that instead he let himself be led to the couch.
He sat against the edge of it. He rarely sat on the couches up here, choosing inside to pull one of the kitchen chairs over to sit on. The couches were too low, too soft. Harder to rise up from, if needed. But it was clear that Jeongin wanted him to sit there, so he had, and now Jeongin was settling down on the other end, looking far more comfortable about it than Minho was. He had his feet pulled up onto the couch cushion, arms wrapped around his bent knees.
How are his toes cute too, Minho thought despairingly.
“This is terrible,” he said, the only thing he could think of to say.
“No, it’s great!” Jeongin said. He looked— happy, his eyes more narrowed now. He was even wriggling a little on the couch, just a small squirming movement that, on anyone else, would have annoyed the hell out of Minho. “I’m so happy for them! I really like Felix-hyung.”
Of course he did. Minho had known that already, had seen how much time Felix and Jeongin spent together, both of them without any real tasks to occupy them. Minho had not been happy about it all this time but there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was Jeongin’s right to be friends with whoever he wanted, despite Minho’s doubts about Felix.
“You like everyone,” he did say, morosely.
“That’s really not true, hyung,” said Jeongin, which was something of a lie, because it was true, Minho knew. How could it be anything but true, with the way Jeongin had been friendly with every single addition to the team. Jeongin had even been friendly with Minho, from the very beginning, which had made no sense, because Minho had been awful to him, those first several months.
So yes, of course Jeongin liked Felix; of course Felix had found another fan in Jeongin. Felix had never been anything but sweet and friendly, returning Jeongin’s own sweetness and friendly overtures back to him tenfold. How could Jeongin be expected to be suspicious of the man, when Felix was patiently teaching him to bake?
He didn’t say anything. He looked past Jeongin, at the wall, trying to not feel— a sense of betrayal, over Chan choosing to do this. It was not a betrayal, he knew. None of it had anything to do with Minho. But he wished, somehow, that he had been consulted overall.
Jeongin shifted, lowering his feet back down to the floor. His shorts had ridden up with the movement and that slight stretch of thigh was— Minho flicked his glance away from Jeongin’s legs up to his face, where Jeongin looked more serious now.
“I think Chan-hyung deserves this,” he said, soft but firm, firmer than he was with most things. There was a line of confidence in Jeongin these days that Minho had missed the cultivation of, which surprised him, because he noticed most things about Jeongin. “He deserves happiness, he deserves this kind of— physical and emotional closeness with someone. The romantic kind, I mean, that specific type. And he’d have to get it from an— outsider anyway, even if it wasn’t Felix-hyung,” he added. “Lord knows it couldn’t possibly be any of us.”
His tone was reasonable, patient; his words, too, were reasonable, and true besides, which didn’t really appease Minho all that much. He did snort a little, under his breath. No, there were not many options for Chan here, in this small group he had gathered around him. But if he had gone out to find an outsider, if he had brought an outsider in here of his own volition, that would be different. An outsider that they could properly vet, could run a background check on, who was not lying to them. But instead, Chan had chosen someone who had conveniently fallen into his lap.
Minho did not like it.
“Have you ever wanted that?” Jeongin asked, the words a little fast, like it was being blurted out of him. Minho looked at him, lost, not sure what on earth he was talking about. After a moment, Jeongin added, voice very soft now, “Love.”
Minho flinched, like the word had physically hit him. He could do nothing else, could not possibly restrain the reaction. He had not thought, in the slightest, that that was the explanation about to come out of Jeongin’s mouth, and so he had not had any hope of being able to brace himself against it.
Love. Had he ever wanted love? No, he thought, no, he had not wanted love, but it had found him anyway, seeping into all the hidden cracks of him until he had not been able to fix the corrosion. He’d had no idea when it had started, either. One day Jeongin had been a gangly teenager that Minho didn’t take seriously and the next Minho had been in love with him, like a fool. A stupid, lovesick fool who hadn’t even known enough to guard his own heart.
He loved Jeongin. He loved Jeongin so much that it was the slowest form of torture that possibly existed. He looked back at Jeongin, that handsome face, Jeongin’s serious dark eyes, and knew that Jeongin had no idea what he was asking Minho right now. He had no idea of all the things that Minho felt, the plunging depths of Minho’s love for him. But Minho had never wanted it.
Jeongin fidgeted a little, as the silence stretched on and on, Minho’s mouth held shut because he didn’t know what would come out of it if he opened it. He did not want to lie to Jeongin, did not want to be flippant or derisive of the question. Jeongin, he knew, took these things seriously. All those fucking romantic dramas he watched. But neither could Minho tell the truth. It was a sheer impossibility, to tell Jeongin the truth.
Jeongin didn’t know, how cruel this question was.
“I want that,” Jeongin said, eventually, quietly, when it became clear that Minho was not going to respond. “With someone. I want that.”
His voice may have been quiet but the note of sincerity in it was not. He sounded so sincere about it that Minho felt something inside him cry out in horror. Jeongin, in that moment, had made it sound so very real. He had sounded certain of what he wanted, despite the softness of his voice.
Minho sat in the silence for another few seconds. It was not surprising to him, to hear Jeongin say that, so baldly. He had known, deep down, that Jeongin would want that in the future, and that it was a future that would not have Minho in it. Because he could not stand to watch Jeongin fall in love with someone else, he simply could not. Even just thinking about it made him feel— wretched, a kind of wretched that went beyond anything he’d experienced before.
There was a misery in this world that was different to the miseries that he had suffered through before. A misery in knowing that once Jeongin had what he wanted, that somebody who would love him the way Jeongin deserved, everything good and bright in Minho’s life would be— over.
Jeongin watched him, one of his legs brought back up to rest on the couch. He looked a little nervous, now, like he thought he had said something wrong, or perhaps like he thought Minho was going to make fun of him, mock such romantic sensibilities. Probably Minho would have, a few years ago. Now he— could not. Now, he knew, he should say something: something reassuring, something that Jeongin actually would like to hear in this moment: you’ll find someone, he thought about saying, someone who deserves you. Even just thinking about it hurt so much that it was beyond Minho to put it into words.
How could he say that? How could he open his mouth and get those words out without choking on them. How was he supposed to wish Jeongin good luck on finding someone who was not him; he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t possibly. Not in the same sincere, real way that Jeongin had said his own words. But neither could he admit that.
None of it mattered, in the end. It did not matter if he couldn’t stand to watch Jeongin fall in love with someone else, because there was no other choice in the matter. It would not be Minho, could not be Minho, and so, eventually, this life he had would crumble to dust in his hands anyway.
Is this what Jeongin wants, he thought, hurting and exhausted with it, when he brings these things up to me? These conversations had been happening more and more often recently, conversations with Jeongin that felt like minefields to tiptoe through. Minho had never been good at that. He had learned to be silent in place of expressing himself in words.
It was too difficult, to walk this tightrope with Jeongin. That thin line between dishonest untruth and eviscerating truth.
“What I want,” he said eventually, his voice almost rasping out of him, “I cannot have.”
Jeongin blinked at him, looking a little startled by that answer. Perhaps the idea of Minho wanting anything at all was surprising to him. “Hyung?” he said, sounding confused, sounding like he thought maybe there was more to be said there. Like he wanted Minho to elaborate further on what he was talking about.
But Minho could not. He should not have even said that. He had admitted too much even with those few words, admitted to having someone in mind. It made his throat tighten up, the panic that Jeongin might see through him bringing his breath short and shallow in his chest.
He got to his feet in an inelegant scramble of motion. That made Jeongin look startled too, a hand reaching out as if to— steady Minho, or maybe to just touch him, like Jeongin did so often these days. Minho knew that if he let Jeongin’s fingers touch him, he would— go to pieces. It was the one thing he knew he could not ever let Jeongin see, could not let any of them see. His emotions, searing and hurting, were his own to bear.
“Goodnight, baby boy,” he said, and he turned and left the apartment as quickly as he possibly could, barely hearing the plaintive cry of hyung behind him over the awful rushing noise of his blood pumping in his ears.
——
It was late enough when Felix came up to the apartment that he was surprised to see Jeongin still awake, standing by the sink, his back to the door. Felix was not sure if he’d been washing dishes or getting himself water or what, but the taps were off and Jeongin was simply— standing there, seemingly staring out of the window above the sink that looked out over the rooftops of the nearby buildings, none of which were as high as theirs.
Jeongin had shown no indication that he’d heard anyone come into the room, but when Felix said, “Hello, Jeongin,” Jeongin didn’t react like he was surprised. He merely turned to look at him. There was a thoughtful expression on his face, and he looked at Felix like he was only just seeing Felix. This, Felix thought, was fine with him, because he’d been a little worried that Jeongin would smile at him in that same delighted way he had that morning, and Felix really did not think he could handle it right now.
“Hello, hyung,” Jeongin said, after a beat of silence.
“Are you okay?” Felix asked, slightly concerned as that thoughtful look on Jeongin’s face didn’t really shift or fade. It was late for Jeongin, and Felix was suddenly worried that something was wrong, to keep Jeongin awake at this time. He’d been down in the basement for the last little while, running through some light exercises, trying to build his strength back up without overdoing it, and hadn’t heard if anything had happened while he was down there.
“Yes,” said Jeongin. His voice was very slow, but he didn’t sound upset. He really did just sound like he was thinking hard. “I am fine. I am simply— trying something new. Trying to push. But I do not think it is working.”
Felix blinked at him, not sure what to make of that. He waited a beat to see if Jeongin would say anything else but Jeongin didn’t, he just kept looking off into the space vaguely beside Felix. “You’ve lost me,” Felix said.
Jeongin— shook his head, and when he next looked at Felix, he seemed more fully in the moment. “Ah, sorry, hyung,” he said, his customary smile coming back to his face, softening the oddly sharp way his face had looked. “I was just thinking out loud, you don’t have to worry about it. Are you going to bed?” After Felix nodded, Jeongin asked, “Can I use the bathroom first?”
“Of course,” said Felix, smiling at him. Jeongin beamed back and then almost scampered off to the bathroom, his bare feet slapping on the laminate flooring in the hallway. Felix went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, and stood for a moment sipping at it.
Most of his day had been spent with Seungmin, trying to keep his mind off what he had done the night before, the fact that there had been radio silence from Chan the entire day. As far as he could tell, Chan had been locked up in his office, working, which was not, he could admit, all that different from normal, but it felt— bad. He could admit that. It had felt awful, to have heard nothing from him, to have not even seen him.
Instead of thinking about it, he had done his best down in the workroom, because he knew that, if nothing else, Seungmin would not allow him to dwell on things, would not allow him to space out in his own thoughts. And so Seungmin had not. He’d given Felix plenty to do, keeping his mind and his hands occupied.
He had, however, caught Seungmin looking at him a couple of times, long searching looks, which told Felix that, embarrassingly, Seungmin probably knew something had happened last night. Felix had wondered for a moment who had told Seungmin, and then he had remembered the camera he’d seen that first day in Chan’s office, and promptly put the entire thing out of his mind, for his own mental wellbeing.
He sighed, and took his cup with him as he walked to the hallway and then to Hyunjin’s room, where he opened the door on Hyunjin laying on his bed with his phone held up above his face. Felix wasn’t sure what he was looking at, because Hyunjin looked across to him, dropped the phone down on the bed next to him, and said, “Hello?” like he wasn’t sure who Felix was.
“Hello,” said Felix, letting the door shut behind him, setting his glass down on the bedside table.
Hyunjin said, “What in the heck are you doing here,” and then rolled his way off the bed and up to his feet in a movement that should have been graceful, considering Hyunjin’s everything, but was just slightly awkward in that endearing way things often were on Hyunjin.
“Going to bed,” Felix said, very reasonably. But Hyunjin had already put his hands to Felix’s shoulders and had turned him firmly so he was facing the door again. Felix went with the movement, not really sure what Hyunjin was doing, but getting the distinct feeling he wasn’t going to be happy about it. “Hyunjin—”
“Don’t Hyunjin me,” Hyunjin said, as he ushered Felix back out of the room. Once they were back in the hallway, he let go of Felix’s shoulders, so Felix turned back to him and gave him a weary look.
“Hyunjin, I’m tired,” he said. Or maybe the word wasn’t tired. Scared, maybe. He’d believed Hyunjin as much as he could that morning, but there’d been a full, long day in between and now nothing made sense to him.
Hyunjin gave him a wide-eyed look of confusion, completely put on. “But this isn’t where you’re supposed to be tonight, angel baby,” he said, voice very light. He reached into the bedroom and got Felix’s water glass and held it out to him. Felix took it, for lack of anything better to do, feeling the cold condensation against his fingers again. “You’ve got other places to be, right?”
Felix just looked at him. Some of his anxiety was obviously written all over his face because Hyunjin’s face softened after a few moments, and he stepped close again. He turned Felix in the direction of Chan’s bedroom and kissed his temple gently. “Felix,” he murmured. “He’s into you. Trust me.”
Felix trusted that Hyunjin believed it. He was no longer sure what he believed, what he thought. But he couldn’t think of what else to do, as Hyunjin gave him a little shove forward and then very firmly shut his bedroom door on Felix’s back. He stood there silently for a minute or two and then sighed and went to Chan’s bedroom.
There was something horribly invasive feeling about simply letting himself into the room without Chan there. He half-expected someone to come and ask him what he thought he was doing but nobody appeared and he was able to go inside uninterrupted. When he switched the light on, the room looked much like it had this morning when he had let himself out, the bed still made up as he’d left it. It didn’t seem that Chan had been here all day.
He walked to the bookshelf, put his water down on one of the shelves, and then started to look through the books Chan had collected, trying to work out what his tastes were. It was an eclectic mix, some non-fiction history books, one about science, a lot of science fiction paperbacks the names of which Felix didn’t recognise. Felix had never really had time to read for fun, not until he came here, always too busy to just sit down and read. Maybe he could get into the habit here, now.
He sighed, gave up on the books. His eyes kept sliding over the titles and author names, not taking them in at all. He felt so twitchy, the room too large when it was just himself here alone. He brushed his fingers over a little shiny rock that was sitting on one of the shelves and then went to the bed and sat down, right on the edge.
He hadn’t been waiting long when the door handle turned and the door swung open. He sat upright, looked at the door, where Chan was stepping through. Chan came in a step, saw him sitting there, and then stopped, eyes going a little wide. His mouth parted but he didn’t say anything. Felix gave him his most apologetic expression, feeling wretched for springing this on him after what had clearly been a long day for Chan.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Hyunjin wouldn’t let me sleep in his room tonight.”
After a beat, Chan shook his head and came into the room properly so he could close the door after himself. “Don’t apologise,” he said. “You’re welcome here.”
Felix felt himself blush, his cheeks going hot. He had to look away, at the wall, with no idea what to say in response to that. Chan had said it the same way he had said stay with me tonight, like it was so natural for him to say it.
“Oh, but, uh,” Chan said, a little rushed, “if you did want to sleep in Hyunjin’s room, I can go talk to him. Or I can find somewhere else for you to sleep, it doesn’t have to be here.”
Felix looked at him, a quick little glance. Chan was a little pink too, looking unsure, nervous in a way that Felix felt resonated inside himself. Felix felt completely at a loss here — this whole situation was so new, so completely out of the realm of his experience that he really didn’t know what he was doing. And he felt, too, the niggling guilt at forcing the issue last night. It had been a little bit like losing his mind, and he’d forgotten that he would have to actually live with Chan the next day.
“If you did stay here,” Chan continued, sounding a little more firm, “nothing needs to happen. We can just sleep, like we did last night, if that’s what you wanted.”
Felix ducked his head a little, trying to hide his face with his hair. No, he thought, no, he wanted— more. More than the night before. He wanted it so badly that it was mortifying to think about, when he had no idea how to ask for it, or if Chan even wanted it, if he might still want Felix. In some ways he wished the Felix of the night before was back, so that he didn’t have to think so much. So he could just act, without all this worry.
“Lix,” Chan said gently, after Felix said nothing, could say nothing. “Come here?”
Felix nodded shallowly and stood. He made himself take the steps to Chan, and when he stopped in front of him, Chan reached out and gently took his hand, his skin warm. Felix couldn’t bear to look at him, not properly, his face still downturned, glancing at him through his lashes. He was just so handsome, in a way that Felix couldn’t handle sometimes.
Chan ducked his head too, tilted to the side, trying to catch Felix’s eye. He was smiling, soft and playful— and unexpected, that feeling, after how serious he had sounded just a few seconds earlier. Felix couldn’t help but laugh, a little huff of a sound, lifting his head. “Ah, hyung,” he said quietly. “Last night, I really— I lost my mind, a bit.”
Chan squeezed his fingers just a little. “Did you?” he asked, still so gentle.
Felix managed a nod. “I didn’t want to mess this up,” he said. “There’s so much going on, so much to— but yesterday, you were just so—”
He couldn’t continue; embarrassment had closed his throat up again. His face was even hotter than before, feeling like the surface of the sun. He looked back at the floor; he couldn’t bear to look Chan in the face. He hated that this was so difficult, both to talk about what he wanted, but also that he had no idea what Chan was thinking. He had thought, the night before, when Chan had taken him into his arms, that they’d been on the same page, that Chan had wanted that closeness the same way Felix wanted it. Waking up alone this morning had seemed to put a hold on that. It had felt like a little push, a warning to not get too close.
There was the lightest touch to his chin — Chan’s finger tip, tilting his head gently up, so that Felix had no choice but to look at him again. Chan looked serious, everything playful gone from his face. He appeared to be gathering his thoughts and then said, so slowly, so carefully, “Because of who I am— because I’m the leader, because it’s my job to look after those who are in my care, I can’t— put my wants ahead of that. I didn’t want to make— what I wanted obvious, because I never wanted you to think that you had to do this, for a place here, for my protection.”
Felix managed to keep his eyes on Chan’s face, absorbing his words. They both surprised him and yet did not — not, because Hyunjin had implied it, but also it was strange hearing it definitively echoed from the source. Felix would have never thought about it like that, never would have thought of being beholden to Chan in this way. Perhaps it was naive of him, but he hadn’t had any fear that by opening himself up to a relationship with Chan, of whatever kind they managed to figure out, that he would be putting himself in a dangerous position.
Yet it wasn’t surprising that Chan would think of it this way. Felix had been able to tell, over the past few weeks, even without Hyunjin pointing it out, that Chan, on some level, wanted him. His gaze had been too warm, a little too lingering, especially as time passed and they continued to spend so much time together. But he had also felt the way that Chan had tried to keep his distance, tried to put space between them. It had made it so difficult to know on what level Chan wanted him.
He still wasn’t sure, even now. Felix knew what he wanted, even while he knew that it was a stupid idea. He had no idea what he was going to do if Chan asked for some kind of no strings attached situation. Felix knew himself too well for that; he liked Chan too much.
“I never worried about that,” he murmured eventually. “I didn’t think about it like that. You’re too good of a man for that, hyung.”
Now Chan went red, which was— so charming, so cute. He looked away from Felix’s eyes, clearly embarrassed. “Ah,” he said. “I’m— not, not really—” He stopped, glanced back at Felix, still blushing.
He was, Felix knew. He was a good man, the best that Felix thought he had ever met. The goodness inside him seemed to radiate out, an all-encompassing warmth. Felix had never worried about Chan taking advantage of him, because he knew that Chan never would. Hadn’t he, in the end, been the one to snap, to go to his knees in Chan’s office? Even then Chan had tried to explain it to him, had made sure Felix knew that it came with no obligations. He was too good, way too good for someone in this business; Felix couldn’t wrap his mind around it sometimes.
Something about that shy, embarrassed look gave Felix the courage to say, “I wondered, sometimes— you always kept that distance between us and I just— I thought— at the club—”
Chan’s fingers clenched around his, not painful but a definite spasm. Felix stopped. Another little silence before Chan said, somewhat thinly, “Like I said, I was trying to not make it obvious, I didn’t want you to feel pressured at all.”
Felix shook his head a little. “I haven’t been pressured,” he said, the most truthful thing he’d ever said in his life. He couldn’t quite meet Chan’s gaze; he kept trying but his eyes kept sliding away. “I wasn’t pressured last night. I wanted it.” He paused, made himself say it. “I want it.”
He was so red by the end he was fairly certain he could fry an egg on his face. Chan said nothing for a moment or two and then the hand that was not holding Felix’s hand slid around the curve of Felix’s waist and he pulled Felix in, just a little, but it was enough that Felix took one slight stumbling step forward, his free hand bracing against Chan’s shoulder.
“Ohh,” he said, a little breathless. Chan’s face was so much closer now like this, the tilt of his eyebrows so serious but— his pupils blown wide, his eyes dropping to Felix’s mouth when he made the sound. His hand was so warm against Felix’s waist, even through the material of his t-shirt. It felt so good that it almost made Felix dizzy.
“Felix,” Chan murmured, his eyes focused on Felix’s now, “I need to know what you’re wanting. Is it just sex? Because I like you, I like you for more than just that.”
Felix had to close his eyes for a moment. There was so much inside him that he thought he might burst from it. “No,” he said, opening his eyes again, having to look almost to the side of Chan’s face in his shyness. “No, I mean— it was never just the sex, not for me, either. I like you, I really like you.”
Chan stared at him, looking like he couldn’t quite believe Felix was real. Felix couldn’t believe Chan was real. He really had never thought to plan for something like this, would never have anticipated in a million years. He had not really known that feelings like this could exist inside a person. How could he have braced himself against it?
“Well, I guess, we’ll— try this, huh,” Chan said. “You and me.”
Felix smiled, unable to stop it coming to his face, his happiness too much to be contained. He had never known happiness could feel like this, either, this almost-smug sense of contentment that warmed him down to his bones. He nodded, trying to temper his eagerness. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, you and me.”
Chan was smiling back at him, so sweet and warm. How Felix liked that smile, how he liked how Chan looked when he was happy. He could look at that smile for hours, and apparently Chan felt the same, because they did just look at each other, for a long, stretched out time, until Chan let go of his hand and cupped his cheek, his thumb just brushing the corner of Felix’s mouth. “Felix,” he whispered, leaning in a little, “can I—”
“Please,” Felix said breathlessly.
Chan kissed him, one graze of their lips and then another firmer press, his head tilting to catch Felix’s mouth at the perfect angle. Felix made a soft noise, unable to keep it inside, and pressed himself to Chan’s body, wanting— more, wanting Chan’s arms around him again. Chan had held him some last night but he had been too tired to savour it the way he should have. He wanted more, more; he wanted to be able to melt into Chan, to have Chan take his entire weight, to bury himself in the sense of sheer comfort that Chan’s arms seemed to bring to him. The hand not clinging at Chan’s shoulder wound around his neck, so that Felix could press himself even closer.
Chan’s arm around his waist tugged him nearer, almost clutching him in. He kept the kiss slow and steady though, a sweet syrupy thing, Felix’s entire body almost languid with it. He had done this so little. Few of the boys whose dicks he’d sucked on his knees over the past few years had given any thought to his pleasure; even fewer of them had been interested in kissing him. He hadn’t minded that, because it hadn’t been what he had wanted from them, but if he’d known that kissing could feel like this, he might have tried a little harder for it.
Eventually Chan pulled back, his mouth separating from Felix’s slowly. Felix made a little disappointed noise, and saw Chan’s mouth smile a little before he schooled his expression. “Last night,” he said quietly into the space between their faces, “you said— well, you implied that you’ve— never done more than what we did last night.”
Felix shook his head. “I never had the opportunity to do more,” he said. “More properly, I mean. And I didn’t want it to be a quickie in some gym locker room, or in a seedy motel.”
He felt the slight naivety in his words, knew that to some people it would strike as stupidity. But he’d always wanted— more, wanted it to mean something more, if he was going to do it. Someone had offered, one time: a boy in senior year whose name he barely remembered, standing in the locker room holding a bottle of hand lotion. Even inexperienced, Felix had known a bad idea when he saw it. He hadn’t wanted it like that, anyway. He had always wanted something like this, something meaningful.
“No,” Chan said, surprisingly fervent. “No, you deserve something better than that.”
Ah, this man, Felix thought, smiling at him again. He was too good, too sweet. Felix had been in trouble that very first day and he had no hope of getting himself out of it now.
Chan leaned in and kissed him again, a little harder now, his tongue touching the seam of Felix’s lips. Felix let his mouth drop open eagerly, let Chan curl his tongue into his mouth. Felix clung to him, head spinning at the feeling of it. He was getting hard just from this, just from how it felt to be held in Chan’s arms, to be kissed like this. He’d be embarrassed about it, since his shorts hid nothing, but he could feel that Chan was hard too, obvious when they were pressed up so close together.
“Ah,” said Chan, breaking the kiss suddenly. Felix panted. “Ah, but Lix, if you have no experience, then we’ll— we may not be able to do that today. We probably have to work up to that.”
Felix felt as brain-addled as he had last night, and it took him a couple of seconds to work out what Chan was getting at. When he did, he almost rolled his eyes. “Hyung,” he said. “I’ve fucked myself before.”
He watched something flicker across Chan’s face, his eyes going glassy for a moment before they cleared. Interesting, he thought, hiding his smile. “Really?” Chan asked, voice a little husky.
Felix nodded. He’d never tried with something as large as Chan, he knew that much from last night, but he’d managed to buy a dildo after high school and somehow had kept it a secret from his dad. He wondered which of his goons had found that when they cleared his bedroom out. “I can take you, I think,” he told Chan. I’m sure going to do my best, he thought.
Chan still looked unsure, but he nodded his head. “Okay,” he said. “You’re sure, Felix? You really— want it, with me?”
“Yes,” said Felix. He had never wanted anything so badly before. He was starting to feel a little desperate for it, now that he knew they were both on the same page about it. He rocked his hips into Chan’s a little, saw Chan’s eyelids flutter closed for a brief moment. “Hyung, I want this.”
Chan kissed him again. This time there was very little sweet about it, very little that was not— fervent, almost dirty, Chan’s mouth taking what Felix was perfectly willing to give. Chan’s arms were tight around his waist, his hand cupping the back of Felix’s head as he licked into Felix’s mouth, so slowly, so wetly. Felix moaned into it, the warmth spreading so quickly through his body it was like being feverish.
Chan nudged him backwards, an oddly gentle nudge compared to the way he was still kissing Felix in that heated way. Felix went as he was bid, stepping back inch by inch, letting himself be directed to the bed, wanting to be taken there. There was the brush of the edge of the bed against the back of his legs right as Chan pulled back, his mouth leaving Felix’s. Felix almost protested it, but Chan was already speaking.
“Ah, fuck,” he said, voice very rough at this point. “I don’t know if I have condoms.”
Felix stared at him, not sure if Chan was being serious for a moment and then realising he was. “Hyung,” he said, “you came in my mouth last night.” Despite the fact that Chan had been the one to do that, Chan blushed, hard, at the reminder. He was so— Felix wanted to kiss him again, but instead he made himself say, “I figured you were clean. I figured you would have stopped me, if you weren’t.”
There was no way, he knew, Chan would have let him do that, if there’d been any risk to Felix. Felix knew that down to his marrow.
“I mean,” Chan said, looking a little flustered. “Yeah. I mean, I am.”
Felix nodded, then let himself sink down onto the edge of the bed. He looked up at Chan, his still-pink face, and then scooted backwards so that he was reclined against the mattress, his head not fully at the pillows, propping himself up on his elbows. He looked at Chan, so far away now, too far away, his eyes feeling heavy-lidded, his legs spread just a little on the sheets. “We’ll need lube though,” he said.
“I have that,” Chan said. It was so enthusiastic, so excitedly earnest, that Felix couldn’t help but grin at him. Chan was just too cute; Felix wanted him so much, liked him so much. He stayed still as Chan climbed on top of the bed, climbed on top of him, and started to kiss him again.
Felix let himself sink down into the bed, laying fully on his back now. Chan’s warm, heavy weight held him down, his body so much broader than his own. Chan had one hand against his waist, the other cupping Felix’s face as he moved him to where he needed him, the kiss just as passionate as it had been a minute or so earlier. More so, maybe; Chan was making little cut off noises into Felix’s mouth now too.
He slid his hands under the back of Chan’s t-shirt, feeling every movement of his muscles as Chan shifted on top of him. Suddenly, he couldn’t bear another moment without seeing again. “Hyung,” he gasped, turning his head to the side, breaking the kiss. “Won’t you take this off?”
Chan quirked an eyebrow at him, a wry little expression on his face. “You’ve seen it before,” he said, leaning down to nuzzle at Felix’s temple.
Felix wriggled against him. “Yes,” he said. “That’s why I want you to take it off.”
Chan laughed but did as Felix wanted, sitting up and pulling his t-shirt up and off his body, one quick movement. It hadn’t seemed like he had any shame in it but once his shirt was off, he stopped and looked at Felix and then went a little pink. Perhaps it was because of whatever expression was on Felix’s face — he couldn’t really say, he felt like he’d lost control of it a bit.
He’d already seen it but the effect wasn’t any lessened: those abs, the clean lines of his muscles, the paleness of his skin. Felix reached out a hand and let his fingers trace down his stomach, feeling the way the muscles contracted under his touch. Chan made a breathy sound as his hand drifted down, but Felix stopped at the waistline of his pants. “Take these off, too?” he asked, much quieter.
Chan’s hands went to his waist, unbuttoning and unzipping his jeans, sliding them off his legs in a quick but unhurried movement. He was wearing boxer briefs, the bulge of his cock straining against the material. Felix put out a hand to touch but Chan was already pulling at the hem of Felix’s t-shirt. “You now,” he murmured, “here,” and he helped Felix pull it over his head.
The last time Felix had taken his shirt off in front of other people was when Hyunjin had dyed his hair for him; before that, it had been in high school, changing for gym class. He’d never been self-conscious about his body before, never given it much thought, other than to wish that it looked more like what his dad wanted it to look like. When Chan’s eyes raked over him, so hot that it was like a physical touch, a feeling passed through him that was hard to put into words — there was no desire to look anything other than what he did, when Chan was looking at him like that.
“Hyunjin was right,” Chan said softly. “Your waist really is small.” He put both hands against it, holding Felix there, his hands so warm on his skin. Felix relaxed back against the bed, wanting Chan to come down and kiss him again, but instead Chan was just looking at him, his eyes moving slowly across Felix’s chest.
“Hyung?” he asked.
Chan shook his head. “You’re still too skinny,” he said. Then he lowered his mouth and licked at one of Felix’s nipples.
“Oh,” Felix said. Nobody had ever done that, nobody had ever touched him like that, not even himself. He hadn’t been aware that it could feel good, not for a boy. But it did feel good, Chan’s mouth fastened around his nipple like in a kiss, his tongue laving over it slowly, teasing it to hardness. One of Felix’s hands moved without his volition to cradle the back of Chan’s head, holding him there without keeping him, stroking the hair there a little.
He was moaning, he couldn’t help it. Chan’s hands had slid up a little from his waist to across his ribcage, holding him in place gently. He sucked at Felix’s nipple a little, just a hint of teeth against Felix’s chest. “Ah,” Felix panted, his voice gone guttural, his other hand tangled in the sheets. “Ah, hyung, that— that feels so good.”
“Mmm,” Chan mumbled, before he lifted his head and moved to the other nipple, did the same thing there: a flat-tongued lick across it, before he closed his mouth around it. Felix squirmed, trying to wriggle his hips up into Chan’s. The air against his wet nipple was so cool after the heat of Chan’s mouth, a little shock of sensation.
Chan’s hand dropped to the front of Felix’s shorts and he palmed at his cock, just a brief touch that had Felix whining anyway. “Let’s get these off,” Chan said as he sat back up. He was flushed now, with hints of sweat along the lines of his shoulders. He tugged Felix’s shorts off, tossed them to join the pile of their clothing on the floor. Felix lay there on the bed in only his boxer shorts, his own cock tenting the front of them, and tried to catch his breath a little.
Chan touched the hem of his boxers. “Felix,” he said. “Is it okay if I take these off too?”
“Oh, please,” Felix said. He wanted to be naked, wanted to feel Chan’s skin against every possible part of himself. He wanted Chan to look, to look with the same heat he had looked earlier, wanted to see what Chan would do to him, once he had seen. He lifted his hips insistently into the air, making space for Chan to undress him. Chan swallowed, audible in the quiet of the bedroom. Then he pulled Felix’s boxer shorts off slowly.
He’d never been naked in front of someone before and in the place of nerves had come— pleasure, at the way Chan’s eyes widened as he looked at him, the way his hands shook a little as he touched the jut of Felix’s hip. Felix could not compare to Chan — he didn’t have the same build, the same muscles; he didn’t have anything close to the same cock. But maybe that was okay, maybe it was good, actually, because Chan was looking at him like he’d never seen anything so attractive in his life.
“God,” Chan said, voice a rough hiss. “Felix, Felix, you are so fucking beautiful.”
The praise shot through Felix, a shudder that started from the top of his head and went to his toes. It was a more intense version of what he had felt at the shooting range, Chan’s voice lowly telling him that he had done a good job. The same way it had felt last night, when Chan had called him beautiful then. It made him gasp out loud, his cock twitching against his stomach. It was almost too much.
He saw Chan notice his reaction. He thought Chan might say something but he didn't. Instead, he stretched to the side and pulled open one of his drawers from his bedside table and pulled out a bottle of lube, one which looked like, although it had been opened, it hadn’t been used much, if at all. “Yes,” Felix said when he saw it, before Chan could even open his mouth. “Yes, hyung, please, do it.”
Chan smiled at him, warm and amused. “You’ll tell me if I hurt you,” he said, more of an order than a question.
Felix nodded. He would, he would, but all of his brain seemed to have been taken over by that insistent voice which demanded Chan’s fingers inside of him right that second. It was the same voice that had driven him to his knees the night before, the one which seemed to wipe out any kind of higher thinking when it came. He had spent so much time actively not thinking about Chan’s tattooed fingers inside of him that now it was imminent it filled him with a kind of desperation.
Chan slid a hand around his knee, pulled his legs apart so that he could settle between them. Felix reached blindly behind him, found a pillow that he could stuff beneath his head to raise him up a little so he wasn’t looking at the ceiling. So he could look at Chan, his mouth parted a little as he took in Felix’s body spread out for him.
After a moment, Chan shook himself, a little burst of movement. He snapped open the bottle of lube and squeezed some out over his fingers, rubbing it against his thumb as if to warm it up. He closed it again and then set it carefully on the bedside table, where it could be easily reached, and didn’t just toss it to the side to get lost among the bedsheets like Felix would have done. Felix had no idea why he found that little action so arousing but he really fucking did.
Chan put his hand between Felix’s legs and circled his rim with his index finger for a moment. Felix could hear himself breathing, too ragged already, but he couldn’t stop. When Chan finally pushed a finger inside him, Felix let his head fall back against his pillow. It wasn’t a stretch, not one finger, not with the lube, but it was something, finally.
He felt, like a strange shock to the system, Chan’s mouth press a kiss to the jut of his hip, his lips a little damp. His finger slid out and then back in, a steady movement. “You’re okay?” Chan asked directly into his skin, lips dragging a little as he spoke.
“Yes,” Felix said, letting his eyes slide shut to focus on the sensation of it all. “Yes— please, you can add another, please, hyung—”
Chan hummed, kissed his hip again. He did as he was asked, pushed another finger into Felix in that same careful way. This was more of a stretch, the kind that Felix liked, feeling his body give way to the intrusion. Chan kissed up his side a little, his fingers moving inside of him, as steady and slow as he had been with one finger. Then he kissed back down, and down again, until each kiss fell on the inside of Felix’s thighs.
“Ohh, god,” Felix moaned, as he felt the wet brush of Chan’s tongue against his skin, the stretch of Chan’s fingers scissoring carefully inside of him. He arched into the press of those fingers, wanting more, and felt Chan push them in deeper, until he brushed against the spot inside Felix that made the pleasure spark in every single part of his body. He clutched his pillow with one hand, grabbed at Chan’s nearest shoulder with the other, fingers digging into the muscle there. “God, hyung, ah-hhhh, fuck—”
Chan was still pressing wet open kisses to his thighs. The skin was so sensitive there, more sensitive than Felix had realised it was — or maybe it was just with Chan, maybe this whole experience was heightened because of that. It had never felt like this, to finger himself open, it had never been this intense. His bones felt too small for his skin.
Chan pulled his mouth away again, but lay his cheek against Felix’s thigh. He was— he was watching his fingers move inside Felix’s body, Felix realised, watching as Felix took them so easily. “So beautiful,” Chan rasped. “Lix, you’re really just— beautiful, so perfect—”
This man, Felix thought, an echo of earlier, feeling half out of his mind with everything he felt for him. This man, who could say things like that without hesitation. What did he mean, calling Felix perfect, when he was the one who was perfect, the one who made Felix think, sometimes, that he had been waiting his whole life for this, for this person. Maybe all the pain and misery had been worth it, he thought, as he felt Chan’s breath against his inner thigh, if it meant he could be here, like this, with Chan.
“Do you think you can take another one, Lix?” Chan asked.
“Yes,” Felix gasped, thinking he would die if Chan didn’t give him another finger. “Oh, please, hyung.”
The stretch of three of Chan’s fingers felt, once they were inside him, about as much as the stretch of the dildo he’d had at home — and Chan’s cock would be more than this, an even bigger stretch, a thought which rather than filling him with apprehension, instead filled him with an almost delirious anticipation.
Chan, however, was clearly willing to take his time with him. He worked Felix open on his fingers slowly, sliding them in and out of Felix’s body with that same steady rhythm of earlier. While he did so, he kissed his way back up Felix’s body — against his hip, over his stomach, tickling just a little, and then back to Felix’s nipples, his mouth hot against them, first the right, then the left. Then he would repeat it, like he couldn’t quite make his mind up which to focus on.
It was so much; it was too much. Felix felt like his entire body was on fire. Every time he thought about how it must look, those skeletal tattoos on Chan’s fingers disappearing inside Felix’s body, stretching him open, a spike of pleasure went through him that was so intense it left him utterly breathless for a long second. He pushed his hips down onto Chan’s fingers, trying to get him deeper, wanting to be filled.
Chan kissed his way up to Felix’s throat, where he spent a long few minutes sucking a bruise into the thin skin there, until Felix was writhing, his legs spread wide around Chan’s hips. “You take my fingers so good, Lix,” Chan murmured against his throat, almost inaudible over the noises Felix was making. “So good for me, just like I knew you would be.”
Felix couldn’t breathe. “I need you,” he managed around the buzzing in his head, inside his mouth. “Hyung, I need— more, please, I need you inside me—” He broke off with low cry as Chan’s fingers pushed inside at just the right angle, the feeling so good that Felix almost sobbed with it.
“Okay,” Chan said, now nuzzling along his jaw line. “Okay, baby, if you’re sure, if you’re ready.”
“I’m ready,” Felix gasped. “Oh, god, I’m so ready.”
He felt more than heard Chan laugh. Despite his words, when Chan slid his fingers back out of him, Felix couldn’t help his whine at suddenly being so empty, feeling the loss of it in every part of him. He hated that feeling even when it was something he was doing to himself, the stretch giving way to nothingness. He couldn’t bear it right now, not when what he really wanted was so close at hand.
Chan sat up, looking down at him for a long second. He looked— god, he looked so good, like something that could only have existed in one of Felix’s best dreams. His hair was a mess around his face from where Felix had been tugging at it the last few minutes, red marks on his shoulder where Felix had accidentally scratched him. His mouth, already bad enough, was red and somewhat swollen, half-open as he breathed, showing little flashes of white teeth. He was still wearing his boxer briefs, Felix suddenly realised.
“Take those off,” he said, trying to sit up so he could do it himself. “Why are you still wearing them?”
Chan caught his hands but instead of knocking them away, he brought them to his waistband and together they eased his underwear down over his hips, Chan shifted so he could kick them off. His cock was so hard, precome pearling at the head. Felix wrapped a hand around his cock before Chan could stop him, which punched a groan out of Chan that seemed heartfelt; his eyes closed for a long moment, as Felix stroked him gently, up to the head to let the precome slick up his hand a little bit and then back down. It had felt so good in his mouth, in his throat last night, the ache in his jaw exactly the way he liked it.
Eventually Chan did gently remove his hand from his cock, his hold careful on Felix’s wrist. Felix let him do it and then, once Chan let go, brought his hand up and licked at the precome on his fingers. Chan stared at him; Felix watched Chan’s cock twitch against his stomach. “God,” said Chan faintly. “Lix.”
Felix hummed at him as he licked the last of it off his palm. God, he was glad that Chan wanted this, wanted them, because he didn’t think he could live without getting to suck Chan’s cock at least one more time. But that was for another night; for now, he wiped his hand on the bed sheet and said, “Fuck me, hyung? Please?”
Chan swallowed. When he reached out, Felix thought he would be pushed back down, to do this on his back with his legs wide, the way he had been while Chan’s fingers spread him open. But instead Chan said, “Turn over for me, baby, there, that’s it, good,” as he helped Felix roll onto his front, until he was laid out along the mattress. Felix took a few hitching breaths, unable to stop the instinctive rock of his hips against the bed. It felt so good, that pressure against his cock, trapped between his body and the mattress. Chan put a hand to his lower back, holding him in place for a second, but Felix had already stopped, already brought himself under control. He didn’t want to come like this.
Chan stroked the dip of his spine for a few seconds, his fingers barely even dragging against Felix’s skin with how the sweat had pooled there earlier. Felix brought his hands up to near his face, turned to the side on his pillow, waiting for Chan’s hands on his hips pulling him up, lifting his ass into the air — he hadn’t expected to be fucked in this position, hadn’t known Chan would want it, but he certainly wasn’t going to complain — but it never came.
Chan put his hands against the back of Felix’s knees, pushing them until they were more open on the bed, his hips lifting just slightly. His hands then cupped his ass, fingers digging into Felix’s skin just a little as he spread him open. Felix couldn’t help shivering slightly, couldn’t help his slight wriggle against the bed — he could feel Chan’s gaze on him, the heat of that look as he looked at the shiny slick mess between Felix’s legs.
“Hyung,” he whined, something about that exposure making his cock leak against the sheets. “Hyung, don’t— I need you.”
“Shh, shh, I have you,” Chan said. Felix felt the bed shift as Chan moved, the snap of the lube bottle again. Felix waited with a patience that he simply hadn’t known was in him, listening to the sound of Chan slicking up his cock, the lube bottle being closed once more. And then there was— Chan’s elbow braced by his rib cage, the hint of Chan’s warmth against his back, Chan’s cock sliding between his spread cheeks.
“Oh,” Felix said, pushing his hips back into it, as Chan rocked a few times against him. “Yes, oh, oh—”
Chan held him open with his free hand as he pushed his cock slowly past Felix’s rim. The stretch was such that Felix couldn’t even clench around him, couldn’t do anything but lay there and keep his body open and willing, as Chan sank his cock carefully into Felix’s body. Felix turned his face so that he was panting half into the pillow under his cheek, trying to smother a little bit the almost-sobbing moans he couldn’t keep contained.
“Are you okay?” Chan asked, voice strained but obviously concerned. “Lix, is it okay, does it hurt?”
“No,” Felix gasped, “more, give me more, yes, yes—” and felt it as Chan pushed into him even further, an inexorable press into him. It did hurt, but it was a good hurt, the very best kind. Chan was so much bigger than anything else he had taken before, and by the time he felt Chan’s hips against his ass, he felt like he was feeling it in his throat. He was filled so completely, there was no space for anything else inside of him except for Chan’s cock, pinning him to the bed. There wasn’t even room for air anymore.
He would feel it, tomorrow, every time he moved, every time he sat. God, he couldn’t wait.
Chan lowered himself down until he was laying against Felix’s back, every part of his skin so warm against Felix’s. It felt so good that Felix felt himself break a little bit, his mind going absolutely empty, as Chan brought his hands to Felix’s and locked their fingers together. Something about it felt like when Hyunjin had washed his hair for him, like he was living in a white noise machine. This feels so good, he wanted to tell Chan, but he couldn’t manage it, couldn’t remember how words worked.
“You like that?” Chan asked, his mouth directly against Felix’s ear, warm air brushing over Felix’s earlobe. He rocked his hips away and then back in, a shallow thrust. He was so big, the drag of it so good. “You like that, baby?”
Felix managed to gasp something that he assumed was an affirmative, because Chan rocked his cock into him again, and then shifted his position on the bed. Without lifting his chest from Felix’s back, without removing an inch of that warmth from Felix, he got the leverage for a proper thrust, his cock moving inside of Felix. He did it again and again, each thrust driving Felix’s hips into the mattress, his own cock sliding against the sheets. The friction of it was going to drive him crazy.
He clutched at Chan’s hands holding his, unable to do anything but lay there and let Chan fuck him, his hips moving a little faster but still a steady speed. Every thrust in made Felix’s body jolt on the bed, unable to really move, unable to do anything about the pleasure turning his body into the heat of a flare. Chan’s scent surrounded him, every part of Felix’s body so hot, feeling— safe, like this, even as he felt half out of his mind with how good it all felt. How could anything feel so good? He was so glad he had waited, so glad that he had not done this with anyone else — how could anything be better than Chan fucking him?
Chan kissed the back of his neck, right where it met the top of his spine, mouth open, gentle at first and then sucking, like he had done to Felix’s throat. Felix squirmed against the bed, squirmed back against him, wanting to press his hips back into Chan’s thrusting but unable to do so. He wanted Chan to— bite him, just a little, not enough to hurt but enough to feel.
“Ah, Lix,” Chan murmured against his skin, his voice rough in a way that made Felix shiver again. “You even have freckles here, too.”
Here, apparently, was the shell of Felix’s ear, because a moment later Felix felt the graze of Chan’s teeth, a teasing little nibble. Felix gasped, the sensation of it more striking than he thought it would be. Chan did it again, driving his cock into Felix a little harder now.
“They’re beautiful,” he said, his own gasp evident in his voice, “you’re beautiful, fuck, Lix, you feel so good, you’re so good for hyung, hmm?”
Yes, Felix thought, panting open mouthed against his pillow now. Yes, he thought again, and then said, almost sobbing it out, “Yes, hyung, yes, I’m— good for you, I’ll be— be so good for you, fuck me— hyung, hyung, fuck me harder, please, please—”
“Ah, christ,” Chan said, and Felix didn’t need to see his face to hear that he had his teeth clenched. “Lix.”
He fucked into Felix harder. Felix thought he might actually start crying, the pleasure of it truly overwhelming now. His hips were being rocked properly into the bed, and he could feel how wet his cock was, could feel it in the way the wetness of the sheets rubbed against his body. He twisted his head around, eyes closed, mouth open, seeking — and then Chan kissed him, just like he had wanted him to, just like he had been silently asking for.
It was a sloppy kiss, the angle bad enough, but Felix had just wanted the pressure of it more than anything, did not have the capacity to kiss back. Chan licked into his mouth, his tongue sliding slick against Felix’s, as Felix began to properly whine, an ahhhhh sound that he could not control, as he felt himself begin to slip over the edge.
Chan stopped and let go of his hands. It took Felix a few seconds to work out what had happened, his brain completely empty, and by the time he did so, Chan had worked an arm under Felix, gripping him to Chan’s chest, the other hand holding him by the hip. Then Chan rolled them, turning onto his back, Felix sprawled on top of him. The shock of cool air along his sweat-drenched front made him make a confused little sound.
“Like this,” Chan said, voice barely more than a whisper where he spoke into Felix’s ear, Felix’s head tipped back against his shoulder. “I want to feel you come like this.”
“Oh, ahh ah,” Felix gasped, as Chan began to grind his cock up into him, little motions that kept his cock where Felix liked it most: filling him up, claiming him as Chan’s. He let his legs fall open around Chan’s thighs. He felt exposed again, the same way he had when Chan had held his ass open to look at, his cock twitching against his stomach with each slight press of Chan’s cock in and out of him.
The arm that had been around Felix’s chest slid down over his stomach. It was no longer needed to hold him in place — Felix couldn’t move, would not move. He was no longer being pinned down but he still couldn’t go anywhere, do anything like this. There was something insanely good about being held prone like this, gravity doing all the work. Something good about how he had not reached for his own cock and instead let Chan take him in hand, stroking him slowly.
“So beautiful,” Chan was saying into his ear, as his hand moved on Felix’s cock, not rushing him but building him up; Felix thought he might scream from it. “So good, Lix, so good, I love the way you feel, it feels so good to be inside you like this, yes, that’s it, oh, you’re so good, so perfect for me—”
“Hyung, hyung,” Felix sobbed, one of his feet scrambling for purchase on the bed but unable to find it before he came on his own stomach, words breaking off into hitching, desperate breaths. He felt a little like he might black out, the feeling of it so intense, Chan’s hand stroking him through it, Felix’s hips jerking a little into the touch. Eventually he slumped back, limp atop Chan’s body, wishing he really could melt down into him.
Chan took his hand from Felix’s cock and took him by the other hip. Felix could feel the slight smear of his own come against his skin where it had gotten a little on Chan’s fingers. “Fuck,” Chan said, sounding close to the edge himself now. “Felix.”
“Inside me, hyung,” Felix said, letting his eyes slide shut. “I want you to come inside me.” If he didn’t, Felix wasn’t sure he could forgive him. He wanted it as badly as he’d wanted any of this, wanted to know how it felt, how it would feel.
Chan groaned into his ear. Then he used his hold on Felix’s hips to— lift him into the air a little, enough so that he could get one foot braced against the mattress, his knee bending up. It spread Felix’s legs further open, a slight pull of muscle in his thigh now. Chan thrust up, once, into his body. Felix’s eyes shot open again. “Yes,” he said, almost delirious with it at this point. “Yes, yes.”
Chan fucked up into him hard now — harder than he had fucked him before, chasing his own pleasure this time. It should have been too much — and it was too much, Felix’s body oversensitive, but it felt— he didn’t have the words, for how it felt, to lay there, held up only by the strength in Chan’s arms, to be unable to move at all while Chan fucked him. Felix kept himself pliant, his breath still gasping and hitching, each thrust shuddering through him, almost wishing he could get hard again. Physically, he couldn’t, but emotionally, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been more aroused in his life.
Chan came with a cry of Felix’s name into his ear, his hips slowing to a rocking movement as he did so. Felix moaned as he felt the warmth of it, the warmth of Chan’s come inside him. Even that felt better than he’d thought it would, felt like— the claiming that Felix had thought of earlier, like Chan putting his mark inside Felix so that everyone would know who Felix belonged to. Felix wanted that so badly.
Chan’s hips stopped moving, his breath still shuddering against Felix’s skin. After a moment, he put his arm back around Felix’s chest and rolled them over again, this time onto their sides. He kept Felix held to his chest, his mouth back against the back of Felix’s neck, not kissing this time but just pressed there as they both breathed. His cock was going soft inside Felix, and he couldn’t help clenching down around it, an almost instinctive action. He heard Chan hiss a little but he didn’t protest or say anything.
Felix lay there, held in Chan’s arms, his eyes closed. He felt like he was floating a little, sated and content, laying here like this.
After a couple of minutes, Chan sighed, the air ruffling the hair at the back of Felix’s head. He pulled back — Felix whined at the loss of his heat — and then carefully pulled his cock out of Felix’s body. It wasn’t any easier, to be empty again after being stretched full, but there was— a comfort, perhaps, in the way he could feel Chan’s come sliding down the inside and backs of his thighs. Not fully empty, he thought sleepily, I’m not fully empty.
There was the dip of the mattress as Chan got up off the bed. Felix thought about looking to see what he was doing but he didn’t bother moving, and instead just listened to the sound of Chan’s en-suite door opening, Chan’s bare feet against the tiles in there. A tap turned on, a brief burst of rushing water, and then off again.
He didn’t fall asleep, but he was zoned out enough that he didn’t realise Chan had come back into the room until Chan said, “Lix?” close enough that it meant he was back on the bed. Felix opened his eyes, twisted his head to blink at him. Chan was kneeling next to him, holding a washcloth, damp but not dripping. He smiled, heartbreakingly sweet, and then silently rolled Felix onto his back.
Felix let him do what he wanted, let Chan rub the washcloth over his skin. It was warm, Felix realised. Chan had used the hot water to wet it, so that it wouldn’t be cold against Felix’s skin. How, he thought, not for the first time and probably not for the last, could a man this thoughtful, this kind, do the job that he did.
Chan put his hand around the back of his knee the way he had done right before he had started to fuck him, but this time he bent it— up, more, opening Felix up so that Chan could wipe between his legs, clearing away the worst of the lube and come. Felix let him do that too, his eyes sliding shut again. He loved this, loved the way Chan took care of him, his hands so gentle on Felix’s body.
Chan took the washcloth away, let Felix’s leg drop back down to the bed. When he felt Chan leave the bed, he forced his eyes open so he could watch as Chan walked back into the bathroom, watched the brief flashes of Chan’s body through the doorway as he did whatever he was doing in there. When Chan came back out, Felix wriggled half-upright and held his arms open in a silent but very demanding request to be held.
Chan laughed, but he got onto the bed and crawled on top of Felix as Felix had wanted. He pressed a kiss to Felix’s cheek, then the other, then to the tip of his nose. Felix made a very pleased sound, feeling smug to have gotten his way. Chan smiled at him again, like he was charmed by Felix being kind of a brat.
“Are you okay?” Chan asked. He went down to one elbow, braced beside Felix’s head, and carded his other hand through Felix’s sweat-damp hair. “Are you hurting?”
Felix tilted his head into the touch. “I’ve never felt so good in my whole life, hyung,” he said.
It was true — no part of him hurt, no part of him felt anything other than happy and sated. There was nothing to stress him, not here like this, Chan’s hand in his hair, his thumb starting to rub in small, soothing circles against Felix’s temple. It felt like a culmination of the last few weeks, like finally, finally, he could actually rest, knowing he was safe here. How could anything hurt him, with Chan caring for him like this?
The only thing, the one thing that niggled at him, as Chan began to kiss his face again, soft and closed-mouthed, was the knowledge that he was, quite frankly, completely fucked. He’d known it from the start, known he was in trouble when he’d seen Chan in that office, so handsome that Felix had been unable to stop thinking about it. He’d tried so hard to keep his distance because he knew how bad it would be if he let himself do something like this— and yes, it was bad. He liked Chan so much, more than he wanted to think about, because he was scared that he was— no, he thought, no, we won’t think about it.
Later, later, a worry for later, when he wasn’t in Chan’s bed like this. He closed his eyes, Chan’s mouth moving across his skin, butterfly kisses against his cheekbones and nose, like he was trying to kiss every one of Felix’s freckles. His thumb moved against Felix’s temple, his body heat radiated down. There really was nothing bad like this, the fear of an entire lifetime simply wiped away. He let himself sleep.
Chapter 10
Notes:
in case you missed it, we posted a chanlix side smut here! a short little fic of them having sappy morning sex. the first two scenes of this chapter reference it a bit, but you don't have to read it for them to make sense. if you do read it, i hope you enjoy :3
Chapter Text
Hyunjin was sketching in the kitchen again when he heard the sound of a door gently opening and closing down the hallway, and instantly went on alert. It was not Jeongin, he knew that much, even though he hadn’t seen Jeongin so far this morning, because Jeongin was physically not capable of closing a door that softly. He put his pencil down and straightened up expectantly.
He was expecting it to be Felix, and was quite amused by the idea of sitting out here like a parent waiting for their wayward child for the second morning in a row, but it wasn’t Felix who came out of the hallway: it was Chan, his hair wet, yawning against his hand as he stepped into the room. He was wearing one of his endless amounts of black t-shirts, his tattoos very stark against his pale skin.
He saw Hyunjin sitting at the kitchen table and stopped for a moment. Hyunjin watched him actively decide to act like nothing whatsoever was up. “Good morning, Hyunjin,” he said, as he went to the kitchen and started messing around with the coffee machine.
Hyunjin picked his pencil back up and started spinning it between his fingers, a trick he had taught himself a few years back mostly because he knew it would make Jeongin insanely jealous that he could do it. “Good morning,” he said, watching Chan fill the reservoir up with water. He was not sure he had ever felt this smug in his entire life. It was almost certainly showing on his face, obnoxiously so, but he had a right to that, he thought. “You’re awake later than usual.”
Chan didn’t turn around, didn’t even look up from his task. “Am I?” His voice sounded casual, but it was so obviously feigned that Hyunjin grinned at him for a moment before he schooled his expression back into the smug one. Chan sounded like someone who had only ever read about what a casual tone of voice sounded like.
“You are,” Hyunjin said. Chan sometimes slept this late, if he’d had a particularly late night the night before, but he was usually up and about well before Hyunjin dragged his sorry carcass out of bed. “Where’s my baby?”
Chan did look at him at that, a quick glance over his shoulder, smiling in a way that made Hyunjin think he possibly hadn’t realised he was smiling. “He’s still sleeping,” he said. “Leave him be.”
“He’s still asleep?” Hyunjin raised an eyebrow, spun the pencil in his fingers again. “Because you tuckered him out, huh?”
That got a reaction, at least. Chan’s ears went red, and he turned back to the coffee machine, which had already spat out his coffee at this point. When he turned back to the table holding his mug, he tried to fix Hyunjin with a stern look but it was pointless because he was still smiling. “That’s none of your business,” he said.
Hyunjin shrugged at him. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to get the details out of Lix later then,” he said.
Chan snorted, and took a seat at the table. Hyunjin hadn’t really expected that of him, either, he’d figured that Chan would take his coffee down to his office where he could have some peace and quiet. But Chan just sat down in his usual seat, set his coffee cup down on the table, and looked at Hyunjin, still with that smile on his face.
“You’re very pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” Chan said, after a couple of beats of silence.
“Yeah,” said Hyunjin, because he was, he was incredibly pleased with himself. He’d managed to make this thing work despite both Chan and Felix insisting that it would never ever happen — and sure, he hadn’t actually been the one to tip Felix over the edge, but he’d certainly laid most of the groundwork for it. He looked at Chan, the way his ears were still red, the way he was smiling over the rim of his cup as he lifted it to his mouth to take a slow sip, and said, “You look pretty pleased with yourself too, though.”
Chan rolled his eyes at him. “I’m not sure if that’s the word I’d use,” he said. Hyunjin thought it was the right word, or at least one of them. Chan looked more relaxed than Hyunjin thought he’d seen him in years, or possibly ever, sitting loose limbed and calm in his wooden chair. He was still smiling, and it was genuine enough that Hyunjin, who wanted to tease him over it, thought it might make him feel bad to do so.
Was this what it looked like, he thought, knowing that it would be like pressing on a painful bruise but unable to stop himself, to have sex and feel— at ease with it, afterwards? He’d read, during his forays into the subject, trying desperately to fix something inside him that he was afraid was forever broken, that for a lot of people, sex left them calm and relaxed afterwards. A rush of endorphins, or something along those lines. Sated was a word he’d read and then been unable to forget.
Chan had that look about him now, or what Hyunjin imagined that look must look like, because if he’d ever seen it before, he’d very much put it out of his mind. It made him uncomfortable only in that he wished he, too, could one day know what it felt like, and knew that he probably would never be able to. But he was glad that Chan, at least, got to experience it.
“What word would you use?” he asked.
Chan was still drinking his coffee. He seemed very content to spend this time with Hyunjin, here in this quiet kitchen, Hyunjin’s sketchbook and pencils strewn across the table. He appeared to think about Hyunjin’s question for a couple seconds more and then said, “Happy. That’s the word I’d use. I’m happy.”
Hyunjin set his pencil down carefully. Happy. For what other reason had Hyunjin pushed this so hard? He had known, from so early on, that Chan and Felix had the capacity to make each other happy, in this specific way. Yet hearing Chan say it out loud, so baldly, so peacefully, made tears leap strangely to his eyes, so that he had to blink them away for a few moments.
“Hyung,” he said, once he thought he could speak without his voice wobbling a little. “I know I’ve been a little shit about this, like you said I was, but I just— that’s what I wanted, you know? I wanted you to be happy.”
After everything Chan had done for him, Hyunjin had wanted to give— something back. He had no real way to repay Chan for it, and he knew that Chan would never accept any kind of repayment, the same way he’d never do it if Jeongin tried. But that didn’t mean Hyunjin didn’t still feel some of that debt. Without Chan’s patience, his attention, his open, easy love, Hyunjin knew he would not be where he was now.
Chan put his coffee cup down on the table and held out one of his hands. Slowly, Hyunjin took it, feeling Chan curl his fingers warm and tight around Hyunjin’s. “Even without Felix,” Chan said quietly, “you know that I was happy anyway, right, Hyunjin?”
Hyunjin nodded. He did know that. That didn’t change the fact that there was, and always had been, room for more happiness in Chan’s life. “But you’re happier now,” he said. “And my baby is happy too. You scared him yesterday, you know, when you left in the morning without saying goodbye. Did you leave a note for him this time?”
“Oh,” said Chan. “No, I didn’t, but— uh, well, I’m sure he— won’t feel like that this morning. Although,” he murmured, almost to himself, as he let go of Hyunjin’s hand and started to push to his feet, “he might not actually remember. Maybe I should go and leave him a note.”
Might not remember what, Hyunjin wanted to ask, suspicious, but whatever it was, he was willing to bet Felix did remember, and he’d be able to get the information out of him later. Chan was distracted anyway, already heading back to the hallway, a frown on his face like the idea of Felix in any kind of distress was upsetting to him, which was the kind of thing that Hyunjin liked to see.
Hyunjin could not wait to spend the next several weeks making fun of the both of them at every opportunity he got.
“Hyung,” he did call, just before Chan disappeared. Chan stopped and half-turned to look at him, still looking like his mind was mostly on whatever note he was going to leave for Felix. “Happy birthday,” Hyunjin said, letting himself be sincere in this moment.
Chan blinked; then his face cleared, that warm, pleased smile from earlier spreading over his face again. “Ah,” he said, looking so happy that Hyunjin couldn’t help but echo his smile. “Thank you, Hyunjin.”
——
Felix had been in a dreamless sleep when he was startled awake by the bedroom door flying open like someone was trying to take it clean off the hinges. It was incredibly jarring — it was not like the previous morning, where he had simply not known where he was. For a moment, he thought he did know where he was — at home, in the old house, his own bed, his father coming to scream at him.
But when he jerked upright, it was not his father in the doorway, and this was not his own room. This was Chan’s room, and it was Hyunjin coming into the room, scowling at him. “Wake up already,” he said. “Do you realise how late it is?”
Felix, his heart still racing, said, “I’ve got no idea.” And how was he supposed to know, anyway. He didn’t have a phone. He didn’t even have a watch.
“It’s almost midday,” Hyunjin said. He threw himself onto the end of the bed, climbing on top of the sheets and duvet cover like he was perfectly welcome there. Felix was fairly sure he wouldn’t treat this space quite so irreverently if Chan had actually been in the room with them. “Is that a hickey?”
Felix’s brain was still coming back online, so it took a moment for the question to register and when it did, it came with the knowledge that he was sitting up in the bed with the covers pooled in his lap and his bare chest out on display. This didn’t really bother him, not with Hyunjin, but he did flop back down against the pillows and pull the covers back up, mostly just for the warmth of them.
“Probably,” he said.
Hyunjin leaned over and poked at his neck; the hickey, Felix presumed, which he now could remember Chan giving him. At the time, he hadn’t thought anything of it, too into the moment to care, but now, registering where Hyunjin was poking, he realised it was probably just a little too high up to be covered by any of the shirts he owned. He doubted Chan had done that on purpose but the idea that Chan could have done that on purpose gave him— a small thrill.
Hyunjin retracted his finger, squinting at Felix distrustfully. “So, you did it, then,” he said. “You slept together? You actually fucked him this time?”
Felix nodded slowly. He wondered what Hyunjin would say if he told Hyunjin that it wasn’t just that they fucked last night, that Chan had fucked him this morning too. It had felt— like floating on pleasure, a syrupy stupor state where the only thing that had mattered was the closeness of their bodies, Chan moving inside him, connecting them together.
He was reminded of another conversation like this, the two of them lounging in a bed talking, and Felix feeling an imagined phantom weight of Chan between his legs, his thighs. Not imagined anymore — he’d felt that, the heavy broadness of him, and he could almost feel it now again too. How much better it was, to think of something that had already happened and not just have to imagine it — or try to repress it.
Hyunjin squinted at him for a few moments longer and then his face relaxed into something— not empty, but less like he was trying to pull an expression over it. “Was it good?” he asked.
Felix didn’t even have to think about his answer. “God,” he said, so heartfelt, more heartfelt than he thought he’d ever been in his life. “It was so good, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin— smiled, just a small thing, remarkably sweet for Hyunjin. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe Felix had seen that smile, or a variation, on Hyunjin’s face a lot these past few weeks. He was sweet, and kind, underneath the brusque exterior. “Good,” he said, his voice smugly pleased. “You deserve it, I would have kicked Chan-hyung’s ass if he’d turned out to be shit in bed.”
“You could try,” Felix said dryly. “I’ve seen his body properly now, you wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“I have a secret weapon,” Hyunjin said. “It’s called, Chan-hyung loves me and couldn’t bear to hurt me, but I wouldn’t hesitate.”
Yes, you would, Felix thought, but didn’t say. He just smiled at Hyunjin, holding a hand out of the covers in a silent request. Hyunjin took it, threading their fingers together and squeezing lightly.
“You look so stupidly happy,” he said. “You look like Chan-hyung did earlier when I saw him. Just disgustingly happy, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look like that.”
“I am happy,” Felix murmured. He’d certainly never felt happiness like this before, not once in his life. He’d had happy times, mostly when his father was away on business trips and he could spend time with his sisters without fear of his father breathing down his neck. The times that they could bake together, have fun together. But even then it had never felt like this, a happiness that was going to go on, continue. Not something that could be snatched out of his hands so easily.
“You certainly look a lot more relaxed than you did yesterday morning,” Hyunjin said. “I’m guessing that you’re not having any second doubts about how Chan-hyung feels about you now, are you?”
Felix shook his head. No, there were no doubts this morning, none at all. He felt like almost nothing could penetrate the bubble of happiness around him, the way his body felt so relaxed and rested. Some of it was the sex, he knew, but a lot of it wasn’t — a lot of it was a feeling of security, to know that he belonged here with Chan, that he didn’t have to keep denying the truth of that.
“Hpmh,” Hyunjin said. “Good, because I was ready to shake you a bit yesterday, being so silly about it. He said he was going to leave you a note or something just in case, did he leave one?”
Felix twisted to look at the side table and saw, this time, a folded little scrap of paper there. He reached for it but Hyunjin was faster, almost throwing himself across the bed to grab it with the hand not holding Felix’s. Felix let him take it, relaxing back against the pillows. The fact of there being a note at all, even after their time together that morning, made the pleasure suffuse through him.
“Here, I’ll read it,” Hyunjin said, like he was being magnanimous. “Lix, urgh, I’ve gone down to my office to work, if you need anything just come and find me. Last night and this morning were amazing, I hope you feel the same. He’s such a sap, he’s even signed off with a little heart, look.”
Hyunjin held out the note for Felix to look at. Chan had indeed drawn a little heart next to his name, which struck Felix as both very touching and very funny, as did the words in the note itself. I hope you feel the same. How could Felix not feel the same? He wanted it again, and again and again, so much so that he almost shivered with it.
“Wait, what did he mean about this morning?” Hyunjin asked, suddenly snatching the note back out of Felix’s fingers. “What was amazing— wait, did you two fuck this morning too?”
Felix could only nod, trying to hold his laughter in at the way Hyunjin almost recoiled off the bed. He’d have felt worse about it if Hyunjin looked properly upset and not just disgusted to have been told about it. For a moment, he actually thought Hyunjin might jump off the bed entirely, but he didn’t, he just shuffled down and eyed the side of the bed Chan had been sleeping on warily.
“God,” he said. “I thought it smelled— bad in here, I was trying not to think about it. I thought maybe it had lingered from last night.”
Something about the way he had said bad made Felix reach out for his hand again. Because of course, he realised, the thought hitting hard, of course Hyunjin knew what it smelled like, the smell of sex. He fought to keep any wince of sympathy off his face, which he assumed worked, because Hyunjin didn’t call him out on it, he just said, “Last night and this morning?” He said it like he thought it was an excessive indulgence.
“Mm,” Felix said, stretching a little. His muscles hurt, just a bit, just from using them so strenuously over the past couple of nights after not doing much of anything before that. But underneath the pain was just a deeply sated feeling, like nothing really could hurt him.
As he shifted though, he felt— the come, from this morning, and possibly from the night before, too, slide slowly out of him. It had been easy enough to ignore when he was laying still but now he could feel it, and the sensation reminded him of the other things too — the way he still had that tacky-sweaty feeling on his skin, the curl of his hair sticking slightly behind his ears, the sweat hastening his need to wash it.
“Ah,” he said, struggling upright again, slightly reluctant to do it. The bed was so comfortable, and so warm; he felt like he could still sleep for hours. But he couldn’t, because he’d remembered, too, now he was awake, that it was Chan’s birthday, and he had a plan to carry out. “I need to shower, I think.”
“Urgh, fine,” Hyunjin said, dropping his hand again. “You can shower, I’ll allow it. I still want more details about this, though, you’re not getting off that easily.”
Felix nodded. He expected Hyunjin to get up and leave the room, but Hyunjin didn’t move, and Felix realised that Hyunjin was probably going to wait for him to shower and then interrogate him more. That would have been fine, Felix had no real qualms about being naked in front of Hyunjin, but—
“Hyunjin,” he said. “You need to leave.”
“Why?” asked Hyunjin. “I’ve seen basically everything already, it’s not like you’ve got anything unusual down there, is it.”
“No,” Felix said, very patiently, even though he could feel the blush overtaking his face, as hot as a wildfire. “It’s not that. We didn’t use condoms, Hyunjin.”
He saw Hyunjin take a moment to process what he had said. This time, when he recoiled, he really did jump off the bed, and stood in the middle of the room with an expression of horrified rage on his face, his hands curled into fists at his side. “You guys didn’t use condoms,” he said, sounding properly, really scandalised. “Chan-hyung? Didn’t use a condom? Felix!”
“He’s clean!” Felix protested. “And I was a virgin, so.”
“You mean to tell me,” Hyunjin said, just less than a shriek, “there is come inside of you right now?”
“Yes,” Felix said, and watched Hyunjin’s horror hit all new levels. He thought about saying, and to be honest, it feels fucking great, but he thought it might give Hyunjin an aneurysm if he did.
“I can’t believe this,” Hyunjin said. “In my angel baby? Chan-hyung did that to my angel? This is awful. No, no,” he yelled, as Felix pretended like he was going to fling the covers back after all. Hyunjin darted back towards the bedroom door, staccato little steps, like a cat skittering on tiled flooring. “Do not get up, I’ll leave, I’ll leave. Turns out I don’t need any more details! I’m going to go work on the painting of Jeongin, I’ll see you later.”
He turned and almost slammed out of the room. Felix, once the door had swung shut after him, threw his head back and laughed, the happiness inside of him too much to contain. He knew that Hyunjin, on the other side of the door, would be hearing it, and hoped that Hyunjin knew, just how happy Felix was. How much happiness Hyunjin gave him.
Then he did swing his legs out of bed, and began the surprisingly tricky process of getting to the shower.
——
Jeongin was practically skipping down the stairs when Jisung ran into him on his way up to the apartment. The smile on his face was perhaps one of the widest that Jisung had ever seen on him, which was impressive, because Jeongin had a face for smiling. People had said that to Jisung, before, that he had a face for laughter, but they just were mixing up the fact that he made them laugh with his actual personality. He was not like Jeongin, whose face seemed to almost constantly sport a smile.
Still, even for Jeongin, this was a lot. “You look very happy,” Jisung said, unable to help from smiling back at him.
Jeongin stopped on the stairs, beaming at him. “I am happy!” he said. “I’m so happy!”
Jisung laughed, not really at him, but a little bit at him. “What has you so happy?” he asked. “Did something good happen that I should know about?”
“Chan-hyung and Felix-hyung got together,” Jeongin said, voice so bright and cheerful that for a moment Jisung didn’t quite take in the actual words he was saying. “Last night, they finally got together.”
Jisung— blinked. Nope, actually, he really wasn’t taking the words in properly, because what Jeongin was implying made absolutely no sense. “What do you mean, they got together?” Jisung asked.
For the first time, the smile on Jeongin’s face faded but it was only because he was trying to pull on his customary I am disgusted in you all expression that he usually reserved for when someone was trying to express their love and affection for him in the form of hugs and kisses. The expression was not falling into place as easily as usual because he was still smiling way too hard for it.
“The past couple nights— urgh, god, don’t make me say it,” he said. “They slept together, I guess, but I’m trying to not think about it. The important development is they’re actually dating, finally, after all the nonsense, so I’m happy!”
Jisung stared at him. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, about what Jeongin had just said that didn’t confuse the fuck out of him. “Felix and Chan-hyung slept together?” he asked, his confusion making his voice remarkably flat, which was probably good, because Jeongin was speaking like this wasn’t some kind of surprise. He was speaking as though this was some kind of long-standing thing, which, Jisung knew, it was not.
“Yes!” Jeongin said. “I’m on my way now to tell him happy birthday and also to make fun of him, do you want to come with me?”
Jisung shook his head slowly. He didn’t know what was happening, he didn’t know how Jeongin could look so happy about this. He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of Chan and Felix sleeping together at all. He almost wondered, for a few seconds, if this was some kind of joke, but what reason did Jeongin have to joke about it? And to Jisung specifically, who had no real reason to care about it, no reason to think twice about it.
But what the fuck, he thought, as he watched Jeongin bound away down the stairs and disappear around where the stairs curved. Chan and Felix? There was something cold and awful pooling in his stomach, as the truth of Jeongin’s words sunk in, as he realised that Jeongin had not been joking at all, and that, apparently, last night, Chan and Felix had slept together and were now, according to Jeongin, a couple.
The anger, when it came, was both familiar and unusual. Familiar, because he had spent— years, in the grip of anger, feeling it from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep. An anger that had rendered him barely able to function, an anger that had slowly but surely ruined all of his personal relationships that he’d managed to cling to up until then. It had come upon him in high school, when he had grown strong enough that the abuse from his step-dad stopped. Once the constant fear had left, it had been replaced with that fury, and by the time he’d been thrown out of his house, he’d had very few people to beg to stay with.
It had taken a long time for him to get over that anger, to settle into the person he was today. But he felt it, now, a strange kind of rage, as he thought about Felix falling into Chan’s bed, after spending these last few weeks in Hyunjin’s.
You asshole, he thought, already stomping up the stairs. You fucking little shithead.
He could not wrap his head around it, was struggling to even comprehend what the fuck was going on here. Even if they discarded every piece of context that made Hyunjin’s trust in Felix so astonishing, it was still baffling to Jisung to think about someone having Hyunjin’s affection and love and to— simply throw it away, to just move onto someone else. This was Hyunjin they were talking about — Jisung would probably cut off his arm to have even half of the interest that Hyunjin had shown Felix these past few weeks.
But he could not discard the context, could not just choose to forget the fact that if Hyunjin had trusted Felix with this, with his body, then Felix owed him a hell of a lot more consideration than what Felix had apparently given him. Jisung wasn’t stupid; he’d noticed, over the last little while, that Chan had some interest in Felix, an interest that he was not overtly broadcasting but was still there. The weight in his eyes, the warmth in his voice when he said Felix’s name.
Had Felix seen that too? Had Felix seen the chance to work his way up the ranks in this way, to take advantage of the interest of someone who could provide him with much more security than Hyunjin, who was much further down the totem pole? Hyunjin may be deferred to in most things within this building, but he was still, as far as things went, a mere worker.
Is that how he got so close to Lee Jaerim? he thought viciously, as he let himself into the apartment. By fucking his way there?
Once the thought had filtered through, it shocked him enough to stop him dead in the middle of kicking his shoes off. It horrified him. What a nasty, awful thing to think — the kind of thing he would have thought so easily just a few years ago. None of the people here had seen that version of Jisung, because he’d worked so fucking hard as to never be that person. It wasn’t him, not really, and it almost frightened him how easily it had sprung to the surface now.
He stood just inside the apartment entrance and breathed carefully. Everything was silent, although he thought he could hear running water from somewhere — probably Chan’s bathroom, since he could usually hear the main one louder. Felix, then, if Chan was in his office. He pushed down the spike of anger that came at that thought, and instead focused on the one that said, in that case, Hyunjin will at least be alone in his room.
It still took another minute or so before he felt all the anger drain out of him again. He’d learned this breathing technique on the internet, working through articles and videos laying in the narrow bed of the worst goshiwon he stayed in, the room barely big enough for the bed, never mind all of his stuff, after his anger had gotten him thrown out of the apartment of one of his old high school friends. He’d taught himself to be better than this; he could be better now, too.
He knocked on Hyunjin’s door, a gentle tap so that it wouldn’t startle him too much. It took a moment for the response, which was, “If that’s Chan-hyung, fuck off. Anyone else can come in.”
Jisung hesitated for a moment, but then he pushed open the bedroom door and stepped inside. He’d been in Hyunjin’s bedroom before, but the last time had been almost a year ago now, and it had changed a bit in that time. There were considerably more art supplies all over the place, for one thing, a second easel set up in the corner, and Hyunjin’s desk, which had been mostly empty last time, had a neat stack of presumably finished sketchbooks next to a disaster of random pieces of paper.
Hyunjin himself was sat at one of the easels, on a little wooden stool that must have been bought for that purpose. When Jisung had come in, he’d turned to see who it was, with an irritated expression that had not faded in the slightest when he saw that it was Jisung. He had his hair tied back, although pieces were escaping the short ponytail, and he was wearing a t-shirt that had probably once been white but was now paint-stained.
Jisung— stared at him. For a moment, he forgot why he was here. He’d never in his life seen Hyunjin when he was like this, the painter, the artist, in his domain. He had a paintbrush in his hand, and he’d been working on a painting of Jeongin, the likeness remarkable. The fact that Hyunjin was purely self-taught blew Jisung’s mind whenever he thought about it.
He was silent for just a little too long, just looking at Hyunjin. Hyunjin put his paintbrush in a pot of water he had on the desk next to him and said, “Jisung?”
Jisung jerked a little, coming back to himself. There had been a note of impatience in Hyunjin’s voice, which was understandable, when Jisung had come in here and then just stood staring like an idiot. If he wasn’t careful, Hyunjin would tell him to leave. It was something of a surprise that Hyunjin hadn’t told him that already.
“Oh, um, right,” he said, wincing a little at himself, before he rallied. “I— I wanted to talk to you.”
Hyunjin’s eyes flickered past him to the open doorway he’d just come through, and then back to Jisung. “Yeah?” he said, when Jisung didn’t say anything else.
Jisung studied him, trying to work out what to say. Hyunjin didn’t look upset, was the worst thing about it, but Jisung knew— he knew how good Hyunjin was at hiding his emotions on his face if he wanted to. He knew, too, how often Hyunjin used his art as a way to avoid thinking about things. He knew that Hyunjin would probably be surprised, and probably upset, really, if he knew how much time Jisung had spent learning all these things about Hyunjin. The amount of effort Jisung had sunk into it, wanting desperately to avoid his almost constant habit of putting his foot in his mouth when they spoke.
He was not sure how to approach this, now. Some of the anger was back, now that he was looking at Hyunjin’s face. But he knew that to be direct about this was a sure way to get Hyunjin to shut down completely. He had not said, at any point in these last few weeks, what he and Felix were to each other, although it had been obvious to Jisung all along. He didn’t want to embarrass him by saying it out loud now, didn’t want to put Hyunjin in a position of having to confirm or deny his own feelings.
He didn’t want, more than anything, to make this entire situation any more painful for Hyunjin than it must already be.
“I heard—” No, that wasn’t right, that wasn’t the right approach at all. He didn’t want to bring Felix up, not least because he didn’t think he could talk about Felix at this point in time without his anger being obvious in his voice, and Hyunjin might feel a need to defend Felix if that happened. “I wanted to say,” he said instead, slowly and carefully, “that if you need someone to talk to, I’m— here.”
There was— silence. Hyunjin looked at him, his face slowly falling into a frown, but not one that seemed irritated. He once again looked past Jisung at the door, as if he expected someone else to be standing there, but when he saw that there still was no one, he looked back at Jisung and said, “What?”
“I… care about you,” Jisung said. The understatement of the century, frankly, but any more than that was going to be way too close to the knuckle for the comfort of either of them. “And I would listen, if there was— anything you wanted to talk about. If you needed— something like that, I can— be here for you. For that.”
Hyunjin simply kept watching him, looking like he expected Jisung to say something more, but Jisung had shut his mouth, because the words that were coming out of it were totally inadequate and he knew it. But he could not say, out loud, how much he knew this must be hurting Hyunjin, how awful this must feel. How deep the betrayal must go — because it was a betrayal, there was no question of it. Even if Felix didn’t know exactly how much he’d fucked up — and Jisung suspected he didn’t, suspected that nobody had told him anything of Hyunjin’s past — it was still a betrayal.
It shocked him, actually. That it was sweet, kind Felix to have done something like this to Hyunjin.
When nothing else was forthcoming from Jisung, though, Hyunjin just said, “Um, thank you?” He was still looking at Jisung like he was speaking half in gibberish.
He doesn’t understand, Jisung thought with a sinking feeling in his gut. It wasn’t surprising, Jisung was dancing around the subject so hard Hyunjin would have to be a mind reader to know what exactly he was really getting at. But it meant Jisung would have to be a little more explicit, and he wasn’t someone with a talent for subtlety.
“I just meant,” Jisung began, wetting his lips nervously, “you might need someone to talk to. Because. You know.” His voice dropped, just a little, as he finished, “Felix.”
Hyunjin’s expression of confusion was slowly morphing into something akin to a person being made to listen to a toddler they didn’t particularly like babble on. “Felix— isn’t going anywhere,” Hyunjin said slowly, eyebrows steadily lowering into a frown. “It’s not like he’s moving out of the building.”
“No!” Jisung agreed quickly, not wanting Hyunjin to— get angry, defensive, on Felix’s behalf. He desperately did not want to argue. “I guess not. It’s just— you’ve been very close.” Jisung fought down a preemptive wince, anticipating that might have been a step too far.
Instead, Hyunjin just shrugged, one shouldered and loose with it. “Yeah,” he agreed, so casual and flippant that Jisung blinked. “But I’m not going to begrudge him this, why would I? I’m fine on my own too, and it’s not like we won’t have time together.”
Jisung, after a long beat, nodded hesitantly. He’s not angry, Jisung thought. He isn’t even upset. Jisung did not understand, could not understand.
But he was different from Hyunjin.
“Ah, Hyunjin,” he said before he could think better of it, “you’re really so good.”
Hyunjin blushed, so quick it was hopelessly endearing, pink all the way to the bright red roots of his hair. Jisung thought, oh no I’ve embarrassed him, he hates that, right before Hyunjin snapped out, “Did you fucking hit your head when you woke up this morning? You’re acting even dumber than normal.”
Slowly, a smile spread across Jisung’s face. He looked at Hyunjin, his beautiful face, the errant drop of dark blue paint that Jisung had noticed on his neck, flicked there by a paint brush probably. His pink cheeks and eyes sparking with how Jisung had flustered him. But he wasn’t mad, not like he could get sometimes.
When Jisung just continued to stand there and smile at him like an idiot, Hyunjin, with a huff, added, “And, if you didn’t catch my meaning, you act very dumb normally, so this is really an accomplishment for you.”
“Yeah,” Jisung said, warm with it. “I’m really stupid.”
And now Hyunjin was outright scowling at him, the blush still lingering prettily on his face. Jisung’s grin got even wider, feeling— happy, in this moment, something close to banter passing between them.
He wanted to say— something, something more, something to extend this time together. Before he could work out what else to say though, Hyunjin was saying, clipped, “Was that it?” His lips were pursed around the words as they formed, like he’d bitten a lemon. “You just wanted to come into my room and smear some stupid around?”
“Sure,” Jisung said, and watched Hyunjin become even more visibly irritated at his affability. Jisung’s reason for coming here no longer felt like it mattered so much— not in the face of Hyunjin, clearly okay, somehow. Because he was good and kind, better than Jisung deep down.
“Okay,” Hyunjin said, shaking his head in a quick motion like he was chasing away gnats buzzing near his ears. His little tufty ponytail flicked around his head with the movement, cute. He snatched up his previously discarded brush and said, “Then get out?”
More quietly, Jisung said again, “Sure.” He stepped back out into the hallway, shutting Hyunjin’s door carefully.
His own face was warm, he could tell before he’d even set the back of his hand against his cheek. Blushing, maybe a little too, just like Hyunjin. That conversation had not gone how he’d thought— not that Jisung ever really knew what to expect with Hyunjin. Some tiny part of him had wondered if maybe Hyunjin would open up to him, would actually talk about what he was feeling. But that was never likely.
The shower was off in Chan’s room now. Felix would possibly be wandering around soon, and Jisung was no longer angry at him, not like he had been before. How could he be, what right did he have, when Hyunjin himself was not angry? But there was still enough of an edge of bitterness, perhaps, that Felix had thrown aside something Jisung had so coveted, that Jisung was not sure he wanted to see Felix just yet.
I would sacrifice my everything to keep him happy, he imagined saying to Felix’s pretty, freckled face. I wish that you had that kind of loyalty.
But that wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t his place. He could do nothing, say nothing, and much like he’d had to stand aside and let Hyunjin fall in love, now too he’d have to stand aside and watch Hyunjin let that love go.
Jisung turned quickly and left the apartment, returning to the cool embrace of the stairwell after slipping his shoes back on. His mind was much calmer now, not the roar of before, more contemplative than anything else.
Without the bright flare of anger blinding him, some things felt a little more clear. Maybe it made sense that Felix had gravitated to Chan, Jisung thought, ruminating over it as he descended the stairs. When Jisung thought of Felix, of all his needs and what had been given to him, his mind immediately leapt to Hyunjin, and how he had offered his room to Felix. Given food off his plate and precious hours caring for him. But were these not also things Chan had done for Felix? Was this not, ultimately, Chan’s home, to gatekeep how he wished? Chan had taken Felix in, fed and clothed him.
More than that, Chan had saved Felix from certain death, and not just once. Jisung thought of the bite of the winter, and of unknown hands clawing at Felix. So, yes, perhaps it really did make sense, for Felix to attach himself at Chan’s side, considering how very literally Chan had protected him.
Jisung closed himself into his bedroom, so that when he came out later, he could be happy for them. Happy for Felix, happy for Chan. Chan, who, of them all, deserved to be happy. Almost as much as Hyunjin deserved it.
——
Chan was humming under his breath as he climbed the stairs, so he was really glad that there was nobody around to hear him, because he would, quite literally, never hear the end of it. But he could not help himself; he kept clamping his mouth shut but the second he lost track of himself, he was back to humming, or smiling, or something else that made his happiness so obvious it was embarrassing.
He’d had to send Changbin out of his office earlier before they’d even finished their meeting because every time Changbin looked at whatever expression was on his face, he’d start laughing, and thus they had gotten nothing done. But maybe that was okay; it was his birthday, after all.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t have things to get finished, and after the relative lack of sleep he had gotten the night before, plus his surprising start to the day, his energy was draining quickly. He’d spent a solid ten minutes reading the same email over and over until enough was enough and he had decided to find a change of scenery for a while.
When he opened the door to the apartment, he certainly found that. He’d almost gotten used to the sight of Felix baking in the kitchen at this point, since he’d started doing it once or twice a week, whenever the urge struck him. When he worked alone, or sometimes with Hyunjin, the place stayed relatively clean, because Felix was, it seemed, a pretty neat person. When he worked with Jeongin, however, things tended to get messier.
The two of them had their back to the door when he stepped inside, their heads once again together as they stood in front of the oven on the back counter. The counter island where they’d apparently prepared whatever it was that was baking looked once again like some disaster had befallen it, although there was no flour everywhere this time, just bowls left out and a wooden spoon with batter on it left to slowly stick to the countertop. There was also a roll of paper towels sitting there that was half used up and had been almost full when Chan had left this morning, so there definitely had been some kind of problem.
It smelled wonderful in the room though, not like the usual smell of the cookies, or the brownies that Felix had made one time. This was something different, something buttery, something laden with vanilla. The two of them were so focused on whatever was baking that they didn’t seem to have noticed the sound of the keypad or the door opening. “Hello,” he said, and watched both of them jump. “What are you making?”
They whipped around to look at him so fast he was surprised they didn’t bump their heads together. Jeongin did have flour on his face, just a little streak of it, but Felix’s face was clean. The sight of that face made Chan smile, and it was such a pleasure to know that he could smile, didn’t have to try to hide it.
Felix didn’t smile at the sight of him; both him and Jeongin looked horrified. “Hyung!” Jeongin said, almost a yell, full of dismay. “What are you doing here, you can’t be in here!”
“My own kitchen?” Chan asked, amused at the idea.
“Yes!” said Jeongin. He had shifted so that he was standing right in front of the oven, shielding it from view even though from where Chan stood, he couldn’t see what was inside anyway. If whatever was in there was supposed to be a secret, then both of them were doing a great job of letting him know that there was a secret here in the first place. “Get out!”
Chan looked between him and Felix, who had thrown the towel he’d been holding down onto a clean part of a counter and was coming around the edge of the island. He was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt that Chan had never seen before, pale yellow with faint white stripes down it, and a pair of his old sweatpants. Chan realised that the shirt must have been one that he’d bought out with Hyunjin and Jeongin on their shopping trip. The sight of it filled Chan with the same guilty pleasure that he’d been feeling every time Felix wore something like that, although now, he thought, he maybe didn’t need to feel guilty about it.
“Hello,” Chan said again to him.
“Hi,” Felix said. He was smiling now, a little shy, not quite looking at Chan’s face, even as he put his hands on Chan’s waist and attempted to push him backwards, trying to physically make him leave the apartment. “Get out, please.”
He might as well have tried shoving at the building itself, Chan simply didn’t move. He didn’t even sway, not under the kind of strength that Felix had in his arms. “Aw,” he said, as Felix huffed and apparently tried harder. Chan could feel the pressure increasing and still didn’t really need to move under it. “But I wanted a coffee, can’t I make a coffee?”
“I’ll bring you one,” Felix said. “Be good and go back to your office and I’ll bring you one.”
Chan smiled at him, the affection inside himself almost bubbling out of him. He was not sure he’d ever felt this particular brand of happiness, where just looking at Felix made him want to laugh out loud. He’d been a little worried that in the cold light of day, last night would once again feel like a dream, or that despite it all, he’d still feel lingering guilt or remorse. But he didn’t, he just felt impossibly full of happiness.
He took a step back, letting Felix think that his shoving had worked and that Chan was leaving. Then he planted himself again and said, “What are you guys making, it smells amazing.”
“It’s none of your business,” Felix said in an almost-shriek, the loudest Chan thought he had ever heard Felix say something.
Chan laughed, and then caught Felix by the waist and reeled him in. Felix clearly hadn’t expected it but neither did he struggle. He just let Chan pull him in close and kiss him, a hand cupping around Felix’s jaw, fingers splayed around his eye, under his hair. One of Felix’s hands went to his shoulder, the other caught between their chests. Just like he had all the other times, he melted into the kiss, sighing slightly into Chan’s mouth. Chan was somewhat surprised by the pulse of arousal that little sound sent through him. He’d have thought, considering last night and then this morning, he’d have been sated for the day but that, it was very clear, was not even close to being the case.
How long did a cake take to bake, he wondered, as he shifted the angle a little and felt Felix’s mouth drop open without prompting. A while, surely? Perhaps he could—
“Oh, ew, gross,” said Jeongin’s voice.
Chan broke the kiss — Felix did not move, the slim line of him still pressed right down Chan’s front — and looked past Felix’s shoulder to where Jeongin stood in the kitchen. His voice had been a strange mix of delight and heartfelt disgust, a mix reflected on his face. He clearly didn’t know whether to be happy for Chan or whether to cover his eyes.
“I thought you wanted to be an adult,” Chan said to him, his thumb rubbing a little against Felix’s temple. Felix made a very small sound, small enough that Jeongin certainly wouldn’t have heard it, but it reminded Chan of the sounds he had made when Chan had kissed his thighs the night before, a barely there whimper. Chan could almost feel him going boneless, and tightened his hold around Felix’s waist just in case. “Adults don’t say that kissing is gross.”
“Show me the adult who doesn’t think it’s gross to watch their brother make out with someone,” Jeongin retorted. “You need to get out and I’ll bring you a coffee because I can’t have Felix-hyung distracted while this cake is baking.”
“Jeongin!” said Felix, starting to try to wriggle out of Chan’s hold, which was a shame.
“Ah, so it is a cake,” Chan said, and watched Jeongin replay his last few words and then curse. He was so cute, and finding him and Felix baking here like this, apparently baking his own birthday cake, made all the squirming emotions in his stomach move just that bit faster.
“It is a cake,” Felix said, sounding a little tired, but when Chan looked at him, he was smiling. Up close like this, those freckles were pretty much lethal. Chan, for a moment, resisted the urge to lean in and kiss them, and then realised he didn’t have to. When he pressed his mouth to Felix’s cheekbone, though, Felix laughed and then managed to work his way out of Chan’s arms, taking a step or two back out of danger. “Ah, but hyung, really, will you go away?”
The words sounded like something Hyunjin would have said, but the tone was pure Felix — soft, sweet, with a playful bite underneath. Felix hadn’t really spoken to Chan like that before, although he’d heard him talk to Hyunjin like that a lot, and it made Chan laugh slightly to hear it directed at him, a low chuckle. Felix was smiling so hard at him that the area around his eyes had creased. How beautiful he was, and how lucky Chan felt, to think that Felix had chosen this with him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go away. And I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Yeah, you’ll see me later,” Felix said, still smiling. “It’s your birthday party, hyung, you’d better be there.”
Chan nodded his head, and then dutifully slipped back out of the apartment. Actually, if he could help it, he’d prefer to not go to the party, which was, every year, an exercise in being embarrassed, so every year he tended to just hide in his office until they sent someone down to fetch him. He wondered who it would be this year. Last year it had been Jisung, who had stood in his office and sang a selection of hit pop songs very loudly, and increasingly off-key in an impressive way, until Chan had agreed to come upstairs.
He wondered if they’d send Felix this year. If they did, they’d probably regret it, because Chan would not be able to guarantee they’d make it back out of the office.
——
Jeongin twitched the curtains closed across the little kitchen window, sitting above the sink. The sun was beginning to set and it was beaming light straight through the kitchen and into a fuzzy square all the way against the living room wall. At least with the curtains closed it was a bit less glaring.
The apartment smelled like sweet vanilla and savoury grease, a not altogether pleasant combination. Jeongin returned to his task of setting out the food that Changbin had been to pick up — fried chicken, from Chan’s favourite franchise — with Felix when Hyunjin appeared in the room, his hair still slightly damp still from the shower he had taken earlier, saying, “Did someone go to get Chan-hyung yet?”
“Changbin-hyung is getting everyone,” Jeongin told him, opening boxes of chicken smothered in rich-smelling garlic sauce. “I think they’re going to go as a group to herd him upstairs.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Hyunjin said. “I was hoping I could go, I love an excuse to annoy him.” Then his eyes focused on Felix, and he said, “Oh, angel, I didn’t know you were wearing that top.”
Felix glanced down at the sweater he was wearing, the pale yellow one that he’d bought out with Hyunjin and Jeongin. Jeongin, after the baking had been finished, had gone to his room and changed out of his shirt, which he’d managed to get batter on at some point, and into the light purple sweater he’d bought that time too. It was soft against his skin, the colour something he didn’t think he’d ever worn before, but he’d put it on with black jeans and he’d used some product that he’d bought a year or so ago and then rarely used to do something to his hair to push his bangs up and away from his face.
I hope Minho-hyung likes this, he’d thought, looking at himself in the mirror, the same thing he’d thought when he’d decided to buy the sweater in the first place.
Felix had changed his pants, too, into a pair of pale jeans, and the whole outfit looked soft, sweet. Jeongin was looking forward to seeing Chan’s reaction to it. Felix shrugged and said, “It’s one of the nicest things we bought, I thought it would be good for Chan-hyung’s birthday party.”
“Hold that thought,” Hyunjin said, and he turned and vanished back down the hallway.
Felix turned to Jeongin with one very sardonic raised eyebrow, which made Jeongin laugh a little. Felix smiled back at him, and they turned back to unpacking all the food together.
Neither of them had spoken about the change in Felix’s relationship with Chan. Jeongin had thought, once or twice, of offering his congratulations to Felix directly, but something about it felt— off, like making too much of a fuss. Felix knew that Jeongin knew, after all, and Jeongin had tried to show his approval in a more meaningful way: by not treating Felix any differently, and by jumping at the chance, after Felix had knocked on his bedroom door to ask, to help Felix with the birthday cake.
In some ways, Jeongin reflected, it didn’t feel like much had changed. He had, he’d realised, considered something like this as almost an inevitable part of the future, like some part of him had been waiting, all along, for Chan and Felix to fall in with each other. Perhaps that explained his comfort with Felix from so early on, why their relationship had felt so subtly different to what Jeongin would have expected. A brother-in-law, maybe, before Jeongin even knew it — although it was probably a bit early to be thinking of it as that serious.
He knew it was though. He knew Chan: he knew how serious Chan was about this.
They’d just finished setting everything up when Hyunjin appeared again. He’d gone to his room to change, it seemed, out of the sweatshirt he’d been wearing and into the pale blue sweater that matched the one Felix had on, thin white stripes on his too. He’d paired it with a pair of dark jeans, and pulled his hair up into that soft half-ponytail that Jeongin secretly thought looked best on him. He came to a stop in the middle of the living room with a small flourish.
“There,” he said. “How about that?”
“If you wanted to wear couple outfits, we could have coordinated it earlier,” Felix said mildly as he washed his hands free of some sauce he had gotten on them.
Hyunjin deflated for a moment but then came and slung himself across Felix’s back. He did that to Jeongin sometimes, who was far more likely to simply let him slither to the floor when he tried it. Felix just took his weight as he dried off his hands. “You guys really did make a cake,” he said, looking at it set out on the counter, slightly to the side of all the food.
“We did,” Felix said. He did something with his shoulders that forced Hyunjin to stand up properly without dislodging his hold on Felix. Jeongin should have to get Felix to show him how he did that. “It came out good, I think, right, Jeongin?”
“Yeah!” said Jeongin. It had come out much better than Jeongin thought it would, which was to say, it had come out at all. He’d trusted Felix’s knowledge and skills but cookies and brownies had seemed fairly easy tasks compared to baking and decorating an entire cake from scratch. The task had started with disaster, when Jeongin had spilled most of a carton of milk over the counter, but it had ended with something that looked and smelled amazing, especially once they’d covered it in a chocolate glaze and topped it with the candles Changbin had gotten for them: a big two and four stuck in the middle of it.
The keypad outside sounded and when the front door opened, Jisung stepped in first, holding it open in a dramatic kind of way for Changbin to usher Chan in ahead of him. Chan looked thoroughly put out about it all, but there was a faint smile at the corner of his mouth that he was clearly trying to hide. He looked around the room, at the HAPPY BIRTHDAY streamer, which they’d had for years now and only used for these purposes, taped haphazardly to the wall and then all the food set out on the counters, the cake taking up the place of pride.
“You really did not need to do this,” he said, which he said every single year.
“But hyung,” said Felix, so earnest it was endearing, “it’s your birthday.”
Chan slumped a little. He absolutely did not have the willpower to stand up to that kind of expression on Felix’s face, and probably wouldn’t have had even before they’d slept together. Jeongin thought that Felix’s earnestness in this was all the more impressive in that he knew exactly how much of this birthday party was a joke, because Jeongin had filled him in on the backstory of it while they made the cake together.
Seungmin slipped in the door behind Changbin, letting it close with the beep of the keypad. “How old are you now, anyway, hyung,” he said, “forty-three?”
Chan whirled on him but Seungmin was already settling on the couch, curled up against the arm closest to the television on the wall that nobody ever used. He blinked up at Chan, who sighed and said, “Should we get started then?”
“Oh, wait, before that,” Jisung said, pointing at where Hyunjin and Felix were still standing almost fused together. “I didn’t know we were going to get team uniforms, where’s mine?”
Felix looked, for a moment, a little confused, before he clearly remembered the matching sweaters. Hyunjin, meanwhile, turned his face to the side, held at an angle where Jisung couldn’t see it, but Jeongin, still in the kitchen, could. He was smiling, just a little bit, just enough that it would be impossible to miss, if Jisung saw it.
Hyunjin did that a lot, Jeongin had noticed. He wasn’t sure if the others had; he knew Jisung had never noticed it, the way that Hyunjin sometimes turned his head away, or left the room after Jisung had made a joke, so that Jisung wouldn’t realise that Hyunjin had found it funny. This had always struck Jeongin as such a particularly Hyunjin thing to do: he had decided, very early on, that he did not find Jisung funny, and so he would keep up that facade indefinitely.
“Oh, if you wanted to get one, they had a lot of other colours too,” Felix said, not a hint of a joke in his own voice. “We could go back and get one for you.”
Jisung blinked at him. He looked like he wasn’t sure if Felix was making fun of him or something, or perhaps just like he wasn’t used to his humour being returned to him with some sincere seriousness. The look on his face made Jeongin laugh, and Hyunjin turned his head back, ruffled Felix’s hair, and said, “Ah, angel, please don’t encourage him.”
“You two do look very cute,” Chan said. He walked to the kitchen and held out a hand, not demandingly, almost absently. Felix was reaching out to hold it before Chan’s arm had even extended, and he went easily when Chan led him to the couch.
“Eugh,” said Seungmin, at the exact same time that Changbin, settling next to Seungmin on the opposite couch, said, “Aww.”
Chan flipped Changbin off, but he was a little pink across his cheeks as he sat against the arm of the couch. Felix, who was blushing furiously, looked like he might try to sit further away, put some distance between them, but Chan reached up and snagged him by the waist and tugged him down to sit tucked up against him. Felix didn’t even protest. He just went, fitted to Chan’s side.
Jeongin felt somewhere in the middle of both Seungmin and Changbin’s reactions at that. He was so, so happy for Chan that he thought he might burst with it if he thought too hard about it, but it was like he told Chan earlier — he didn’t need to see it.
“God, you two are so cute,” Hyunjin said. “It’s kind of sickening, actually.” This time it was Felix who lifted a hand and, with a strange kind of delicacy, flipped Hyunjin off. Hyunjin cackled at him; Chan threw his head back and laughed, which made Felix almost startle a little — or something like that, a flash of surprise over his face, quickly washed away by a smile, shy and beautiful.
“You didn’t get Minho-hyung?” Jeongin asked Changbin.
“Ah, no,” said Changbin. “His bedroom door was closed, I didn’t want to disturb him. I had enough on my hands getting this one to come upstairs,” he added, thumbing at Seungmin next to him.
“I was busy,” Seungmin said, but it was very quiet, with no bite to it. He had both feet pulled up on the couch, his toes almost tucked underneath Changbin’s thigh with the way he was sitting. Although it was warm in the apartment, it would have been cold down in the workroom, Jeongin knew from experience, and even now Seungmin had his hands pulled into the sleeves of his jacket.
“Maybe someone should—” Jeongin started, but the keypad was already sounding and when he turned to the door, Minho was there. He was wearing dark jeans and a blue sweater and it was hard to tell if he’d dressed up for the occasion or if he was just wearing what he’d been wearing all day. He did not react in the slightest to the way everyone had turned to watch him come in, and he didn’t take his sneakers off, to the audible annoyance of Hyunjin.
“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t miss it, did it?”
“No, you didn’t,” Chan said, with a sigh. “And now you’re here, so we can get it over with as soon as possible. Jeongin, go get your food, then the rest of us can grab something.”
Jeongin nodded slowly and found himself a plate to use. Even as he filled it with food, his attention was half on Minho, who had done his usual thing and dragged one of the kitchen chairs over to the couches to sit on. He had not joined in the chatter around him, but that was nothing unusual. It was hard to see his face from this angle, but maybe his shoulders were— tense, a bit.
Jeongin had pushed too hard, the night before, probably. He’d known that talking about feelings like that, love like that, would put Minho on the defensive, but he had not expected how— flustered he would get, how seemingly panicked his reaction would be. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it had surprised Jeongin, watching Minho almost flee from the room in the face of the conversation.
More shocking had been Minho’s actual words: What I want, I can’t have.
That had made no fucking sense to Jeongin. He’d been turning the words over and over in his head ever since he’d first heard them, and they still confused him. Minho had sounded— convinced, in that moment: not like it was a realisation he was just having, but something he had known to be a truth long ago. A long standing conviction. Something he had thought about, and come to accept all on his own, without Jeongin even being consulted.
It had never been a case, though, of Minho not being able to have Jeongin. He had always had Jeongin.
He went back to the couches, with his plate of food, and took the only spare seat, the one against the arm closest to where Minho sat. He wasn’t sure if Minho had positioned his seat there on purpose, because he knew that Jeongin would likely be sitting there, or if, at this point, Jeongin was— deluding himself with wishful thinking. Things which had always seemed so clear to him seemed a little bit more murky today.
As he sat, Minho didn’t acknowledge him. He was looking at Chan, who had gotten to his feet — his birthday was the only time that Chan could be convinced to choose his food next, after Jeongin — and pulled Felix up with him, the two of them still so close together that a complete stranger could come into the room and know what their relationship was. Minho was making no secret of the fact that he was scowling at them, but either they hadn’t noticed or were choosing to ignore it.
Hyunjin got up too, complaining that the food would get cold at this point, and then the others joined, Changbin heckling Chan a little bit as he tried to pile food on Felix’s plate at the expense of his own, Felix protesting the entire time. Minho, however, didn’t join. He sat, watching the chaos, his face almost in profile where Jeongin was sitting.
Jeongin— looked at him, knowing even as he did so that Minho would sense him doing it. It was just that Minho was so beautiful, like this, the straight line of his nose, the particular shape of his mouth. Jeongin couldn’t see any trace of his scars, on this side, and he wished that he could. The first time he’d seen those scars, they had made Minho seem dangerous, and it had sent his fifteen-year-old heart racing in a way he had barely understood. Now they were just part of Minho’s face, as loved as the rest of him.
He’d asked, once, young and stupid enough to be brave and nosy, how Minho had gotten those scars. Minho had looked at him with that coldness in his eyes and told him to mind his own business. Perhaps he’d tell Jeongin now, if he asked, but Jeongin was— smart enough to know better, at this point.
“Hyung,” he said softly. Minho didn’t move but Jeongin felt the way his attention moved to Jeongin, more fully than it had been before. A second later, he turned properly to Jeongin, fixing his eyes on him, not cold but— not quite warm, either. “Won’t you eat?”
“Not yet,” Minho said. He waved a hand at where everyone was working around each other to get what they wanted. “I’ll wait until that mess calms down first.”
Jeongin nodded. He picked up the disposable chopsticks he’d grabbed and snapped them open, and then looked back up at Minho, who was watching him now. Jeongin found him shockingly hard to read in that moment. “Hyung,” he said again, voice still so quiet, and Minho made a little noise in his throat. “I upset you last night. I wanted to say sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you at all.”
Minho raised his eyebrows, but Jeongin couldn’t tell if he was surprised at the words or that Jeongin was even apologising in the first place. Or, as sometimes Minho was inclined to, if those eyebrows were just a sarcastic expression in and of themselves. “You didn’t upset me, baby boy,” he said.
That was such a lie that Jeongin wasn’t even sure where to begin. “I was talking about things that made you uncomfortable,” he said. “I didn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable. I’m sorry, hyung.”
He hadn’t, was the thing, the true heart of the matter. He had meant to push, but not to make Minho upset to that extent. And he wasn’t sure what he would do, if Minho remained upset with him, or annoyed. If Minho grew tired of him, the same way he had always been so tired of Jeongin in the past, Jeongin nothing more than an irritation hanging around. It was, in many ways, Jeongin’s biggest fear.
Minho sighed. That didn’t sound annoyed, at least, it just sounded— exasperated, perhaps, a tone that Jeongin was far more used to hearing from Minho. His face, however, had softened, his eyes a lot warmer now as he looked at Jeongin. Did Minho know, Jeongin wondered, that he did that sometimes, looking at Jeongin?
“Baby boy, you do not need to say sorry,” he said. “If I seemed uncomfortable, it wasn’t your fault, okay? You don’t need to worry so much about your hyung.”
As if Jeongin could do any such thing. But instead of telling Minho how blatantly impossible that was, he just nodded wordlessly. He looked down at his plate, poking at a piece of chicken with a chopstick, and felt, briefly, a hand in his hair, ruffling it lightly. He thought, for a moment, that it was Chan, except that Chan was just settling back on the couch opposite, and when Jeongin glanced up in surprise, Minho was withdrawing his hand, not looking at Jeongin as he got to his feet.
“I’ll go get some food now,” he said, still not looking at Jeongin, which was just as well, because Jeongin had no idea what his face was doing. He was glad that nobody seemed to be paying attention to him, because he knew, at the very least, he was blushing. He let his head hang forward, shaking his hair out over his face, bent over his plate again.
Sometimes, he thought fiercely, the way Minho made him feel made him worry that he’d just turn into a puddle of goo in the middle of the living room and they’d have to scoop him up, except they’d never get him out of the cracks in the laminate. His entire body just a melting, heated thing.
Someone sat down next to him, an elbow knocking into his side, almost jostling him into dropping his food. “Hyung,” Jeongin complained, knowing without even needing to look that it was Changbin, and that he’d done it on purpose.
“Why are you spacing out,” Changbin said. “Eat your food— oi,” he added, as Seungmin took his seat next to him and did something with his own elbow that almost knocked Changbin’s plate completely flying. “Watch what you’re doing with those things.”
Seungmin rolled his eyes and tucked himself back up against the arm of the couch like he had been sitting earlier, his plate balanced precariously on his knees. “It’s not my fault you’re taking up too much space,” he said. “What am I supposed to do, with your thighs taking up half the couch.”
“I’ve worked hard for these thighs,” Changbin said. “Give them some respect.”
Seungmin mumbled something under his breath and stuck his toes more fully under said thighs so that he could lower his knees enough to actually eat. Opposite, Hyunjin had sat down next to Felix again, and was doing his usual thing of trying to make sure Felix had enough food. It seemed he didn’t trust Chan to have done enough of a good job, and Felix sat between them looking the most long-suffering that Jeongin had ever seen him look — but he was blushing, just a bit, pink and pretty with it.
Jeongin wished he looked like that when he blushed. He always thought he just went blotchy.
Jisung usually did what Minho did and pulled a chair over, but since Felix had been given his chair by Hyunjin, he seemed disinclined to use it at all. Instead, he rounded the couch and sat down against the wall under the television, his plate against the coffee table. This put him closest to Hyunjin, who glanced at him, at how he hadn’t taken another of the drinks that had come with the chicken, and said, “There’s fanta in the drinks fridge.”
His voice had been very dismissive, so Jeongin wasn’t surprised that Jisung took a moment to process the words. When he did, he smiled so warm and real that Jeongin almost felt embarrassed looking at him. “Really?” he asked, climbing back to his feet. “Thanks.”
“I mean, I didn’t get them,” said Hyunjin, tone even more dismissive. He said it like it was the height of stupidity, to have expected him to have been in a grocery store at some point.
“Thanks for letting me know, then,” Jisung said, cheerfully, like the tone didn’t bother him at all, and maybe it didn’t. Jisung seemed very good at compartmentalising when Hyunjin was cutting for the sake of it and when he was cutting because he was in a bad mood. Jeongin sometimes thought— it wouldn’t have mattered which it was, because if Hyunjin had ever spoken to him like that, Jeongin wasn’t sure he’d easily recover.
Jisung came and sat back down with his fanta, and then Minho took his seat again, so they were all gathered around. Only then did Jeongin actually start to eat, joining in with the others who had already started, feeling something settle inside him at the— completed circle, in a way.
The Jeongin that had only had Chan, who had spent all of his time in that single room apartment, alone as Chan made money, so grateful to get gone from that group home with the loudness and pain and terrifying older boys — what would he think, if he could see how full Jeongin’s life was now?
Actually, he reflected, as Changbin started bickering with Jisung over how much of a certain type of chicken he’d ordered, his past self would probably just be freaked out by the noise.
The conversation flowed, here and there. Jeongin talked with Seungmin across Changbin about a video game they had both watched other people play, while on the other couch Hyunjin kept off-loading pieces of chicken onto Felix’s plate, until it seemed like Felix had more than when he’d started. He huffed under his breath and tipped half of the chicken back onto Hyunjin’s plate, which he almost dropped.
“I can’t eat that much, Hyunjin,” he said. “I don’t need to eat that much, you eat it.”
“But you’re still too skinny,” Hyunjin said. Then he got a glint in his eye that Jeongin did not like, and he leaned across Felix a little to poke Chan in the thigh. “You’ve seen,” he said. “Isn’t he too skinny?”
Jeongin would have expected Chan to get flustered, or to tell Hyunjin to stop it, but he didn’t. Despite the way his ears flared red again, his voice was remarkably steady as he said, “He is, I told him so last night.”
“I’m not,” Felix said, almost grumbling under his breath. “I’m almost back to normal.”
“Mm,” said Chan, his voice so warm, so soft. “Then that’s still too skinny.” And he, too, nudged some chicken off his plate onto Felix’s.
Jeongin laughed, tickled by the expression on Felix’s face, a kind of exasperation that he wasn’t used to seeing on it. Changbin, grinning, leaned forward on the couch and said, “Ah, Hyunjin, aren’t you sad to be losing your baby to Chan-hyung?”
“I’m not losing anything,” Hyunjin said, in that particular tone he used for Changbin, a scathing one that managed to, somehow, be dripping with fondness at the same time. “He’s still my baby. Chan-hyung and I have shared custody now.”
Jeongin laughed again, as did Chan. “Oh,” he said, “is that how it is?”
Hyunjin opened his mouth but Felix beat him to it. He put his plate down on the coffee table and then took Hyunjin’s free hand in his, holding it tight. “Of course,” he said, smiling at Hyunjin, a sweet, closed-mouth thing. “He can’t get rid of me that easily.”
Hyunjin obviously melted a little, that haughty expression fading off his face in favour of his own little smile. He squeezed Felix’s hand back and said, “Ah, Lix, who would give you up?”
“Now who is sickening,” Chan said, but he didn’t look at all like he thought it was sickening. He put his own plate down next to Felix’s and then slung that arm around Felix’s shoulders, his hand curling into the curve of Felix’s upper arm. Felix did not move, really, but he gave the impression of relaxing into the hold, pressed along Chan’s side.
Looking at them, Jeongin had to fight the urge to glance to the side at where Minho had sat, mostly silent through the entire meal. He could only see in his peripheral as Minho picked at his food, clearly eating but going slowly. What would it be like, to sit like that on this couch, to have Minho’s arm across his shoulders in that easy, comfortably possessive way.
He couldn’t look at Minho, so he looked to the side, instead, and saw that Jisung was watching the three on the couch with a frown on his face. Not a small thing, either; something just confused enough to prevent it from being a scowl, which was an expression Jeongin wasn’t sure Jisung’s face was capable of anyway. Jeongin didn’t know what Jisung had to be so confused about, since he’d been the one to tell Jisung about it all to begin with. But he was looking at Chan and Felix and Hyunjin like he was— puzzling something out.
Then he looked up, caught Jeongin’s eye, and smiled at him. He was good at that, Jeongin knew. Good at masking. It apparently made him excellent on jobs, his ability to blend in, to make his face whatever he wanted, to talk his way out of almost anything. It did, to the people who knew him, make him somewhat difficult to read.
“Oh, wait,” Changbin said, grinning, “Chan-hyung is finished eating, which means it’s time for the annual family photo.”
Seungmin made a noise that sounded remarkably like blegh, and Jeongin heard Minho sigh just a little. Changbin was already turning around and getting to his knees on the couch, raising his phone up and trying to angle it in a way that would accommodate all of them. They would know from experience that Changbin would not be dissuaded, and truthfully it wasn’t often they all got together like this. Every year Changbin took a photo of all of them, and used it as his phone background for the next twelve months, which was a very Changbin thing to do.
It had been a while since they’d had a new face in the photo. Eight was starting to push to confines of the phone’s capability.
“Yah, Kim Seungmin, stop ducking away,” Changbin said, fiddling with the zoom, “and Hyunjin, can you lean into Felix a little more?”
“Maybe I should just take the picture for you,” Hyunjin said, leaning so far against Felix he was squashing him against Chan. “Longer arms.”
“Bigger head, you’d block the view,” Seungmin said, and Changbin cracked up, Felix laughing too.
They took the picture like that, most of them smiling, Hyunjin’s mouth halfway open on a retort, half of Seungmin’s face out of frame and Minho sticking bunny ears up behind Jeongin’s head.
“Alright,” Changbin said as he settled back into his seat, more than a hint of laughter in his voice, “present time now!”
“Thank you for the reminder, hyung,” said Hyunjin. Chan groaned loudly but Hyunjin just ignored him and looked at Jeongin and said, “So which of us is going first?”
“Actually,” said Jisung. “Can I go first?”
Everyone stared at him. Nobody other than Jeongin and Hyunjin ever got Chan gifts on his birthday. The point, truthfully, had never really been about the gifts, because in the beginning, the only things that Jeongin and Hyunjin had been able to afford had been snacks from the convenience store, the money given to them by Changbin once he’d ascertained why they were asking for it. None of the others had bought him anything, not even Changbin, because as far as the others were concerned, this was not really about celebrating Chan’s birthday, it was about making him sit down and be the centre of attention for a while in a way that he hated.
Jisung didn’t seem phased by the silence, reaching under the coffee table and retrieving, seemingly out of thin air, a wrapped box that he must have stashed there sometime earlier in the day. He grinned at all their surprised faces, and said, “Chan-hyung, happy birthday!”
Chan recovered first. “Wow,” he said, looking and sounding genuinely touched, as Jisung passed the box to Hyunjin, who handled it for a moment like he thought it might explode, and then passed it to Chan. “Jisung, wow, you didn’t have to do this?”
“I know,” said Jisung cheerfully. “I just saw this and thought it would be perfect for you, so I wanted to get it.”
“Thank you, Jisung,” said Chan. He opened the present carefully, unfolding the paper like he thought it would be saved which— yeah, Jeongin understood that, when he thought about it, but when he’d finally gotten the paper off it, it revealed simply a plain, cardboard box, with nothing on the outside to indicate what was inside.
Felix took the paper from it and balled it up in his hands. “Open it, hyung,” he said.
Chan did so, although it took a little finangling, and Minho had to fetch a pair of scissors from the kitchen so that Chan could cut through the tape holding the box flaps down. When it was finally open, Chan reached inside and pulled out a large mug, a dark shade of blue, with some kind of writing on it that Jeongin, at this distance and angle, couldn’t read.
Felix could: he snorted with laughter and then did his best to cover it up. Hyunjin, next to him, lifted a hand and covered his face with it. Chan, his voice a touch dangerous, said, “Jisung.”
“What,” said Jisung, very innocently. “Don’t you like it, hyung?”
“Jisung,” said Chan.
“Hyung, share with the class,” Changbin said.
Chan held the mug up, turning it so that they could see all of the writing, done in a playful white font that read WORLD’S BEST DAD. Jeongin burst into laughter, as did Changbin, neither of them able to help themselves despite the extremely done expression on Chan’s face — that expression just made Jeongin laugh harder, at how he looked, holding that mug up for them to see.
He heard, from the side, the soft noise of Minho’s laughter too, and just about stopped himself from snapping his head around to look. But Minho was laughing, as loud with it as he ever got in front of other people, that remarkably sweet sound out of the mouth of someone— so intimidating, so strong.
“I thought you’d like it,” Jisung said, pouting, which made Changbin almost howl with laughter. Next to him, even Seungmin was smiling around a mouthful of chicken.
Chan sighed, a sound so heavy and world-weary that Felix, who had been trying desperately to avoid laughing at him, lost it finally. He started to laugh, properly, and then when Chan gave him a look of fake-betrayal, Felix turned his face into Chan’s shoulder and muffled the sound of his giggles there. That falsely betrayed look dropped from Chan’s face immediately.
Hyunjin got up without a word, rounded the corner of the couch, and disappeared into the hallway. Jisung watched him, but didn’t seem surprised to see Hyunjin not joining in on the joke, and then his attention was snagged by Chan saying, “Thank you, Jisung,” and setting the mug back into the box and then sliding the whole thing out of sight under the coffee table again.
“Hyung,” Jisung said. “If you don’t like it, you can just tell me.”
“You know I don’t like it,” Chan said, exasperated.
“I like it,” said Changbin, leaning over to hold his hand out for a high five. Jisung beamed at him and slapped his hand. “Good job, Jisung.”
“Okay,” called Hyunjin’s voice from down the hallway. “I’m bringing Chan-hyung’s gift out now, prepare yourselves.”
Jeongin needed the warning. When Hyunjin appeared, he had the canvas held in his arms in front of him, a surprisingly large thing, with Jeongin’s face painted on it. It was— extremely good, which wasn’t all that shocking, since it was something Hyunjin had painted, and not only that, Jeongin knew he had spent a long time on making it as good as he possibly could. An acrylic painting, which Jeongin only knew because Hyunjin had told him, Jeongin’s portrait done in a slightly artistic style, some of the lines of his face blurred, the colours striking.
It was beautiful. It was. Jeongin just wished it wasn’t his face.
Hyunjin paraded it into the room. Changbin started to laugh again, although Jeongin wasn’t sure if it was because of the subject matter of the painting or the way Hyunjin was acting about it; either way, Jeongin pinched him hard on the thigh. It was like pinching a rock.
Chan, it was obvious to see on his face, loved it instantly. “Hyunjin!” he said, getting to his feet to take it from him to look more closely at it. “Oh, this is amazing, you really painted this?”
“Yes,” said Hyunjin. He was giving Jeongin a smug smile, but his voice, accepting the compliment about his art, didn’t sound it. He never really was, when he was complimented on something he had created. “It took forever, hyung, do you like it?”
“I love it,” Chan said, so sincere that Jeongin almost felt bad about hating the painting enough that even now he kind of wanted to set fire to it. “This is such a lovely gift.”
“Ah, yes,” said Minho, loud enough for everyone to hear, the laughter bright in his voice. “The greatest gift to be had, baby boy’s face.”
Jeongin whined and hid his face in his hands, sure he was blushing up to the roots of his hair. It was not entirely just due to the embarrassment, either — it was, for him, a particular delight to be teased by Minho in this way, not mocking but certainly teasing. To hear that tone of voice from Minho, directed at him, the intimacy that came from being teased by a person, who knew him well enough to get away with it.
“Thank you, Hyunjin,” said Chan, as Hyunjin took his seat again, sitting a little closer to Felix now. “This really is so nice, it’s beautiful. I’ll need to get a frame for it.”
Minho leaned in closer to Jeongin and nudged him with his elbow. “A framed baby boy’s face,” he said in a low voice, just for Jeongin.
Jeongin glared at him between his spread fingers but inside there was nothing but— relief, low-simmering pleasure. Minho really was not mad at him, really was not upset about what had happened the night before — or if he had been upset, he had gotten over it quickly, and was now back to normal. Better, almost, in this group setting, laughing and smiling at the jokes and playful banter between them all.
Maybe, Jeongin thought, pushing really is the answer.
Chan sat down and set the painting at his feet. He smiled across at Jeongin, who turned his glare on him now. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll put it up in my room, that way you don’t have to look at it.”
Felix made a small, muffled noise at that, and when everyone looked at him, he said, also blushing but with his own smile, “I’m not sure about that plan, hyung. Maybe I don’t want to see Jeongin’s face when we— you know—”
“Ah right,” said Chan hastily, as Changbin and Hyunjin hooted with laughter and Jisung hunched over the coffee table with how hard he was laughing. Jeongin, for his part, wanted the ground to open up and simply swallow him whole. He did not even want a facsimile of his face to have to be witness to that kind of thing. “I’ll find a place for it then.”
It took a little while for the hilarity to die down, and while it did, Jeongin went to get his own gift from his bedroom. He’d already been feeling a little— self-conscious about it, in the face of Hyunjin’s far more elaborate gift, but he knew that a large part of why Hyunjin had done it was purely to embarrass Jeongin. Jeongin had assumed he was going to paint the two of them, to match the photo that Chan kept on his desk. Jeongin wouldn’t have minded that so much. It was the fact that it was only Jeongin’s face that made it humiliating.
His own gift just seemed kind of shabby in comparison. But he was, at this point, on a war of attrition against Chan, and he had his own present giving agenda to follow through on. So he found his haphazardly wrapped parcel and took it back into the living room, where Changbin was over-the-top praising Hyunjin’s art skills.
“A master,” he was saying, “of your craft! A talent among us. You know, it’s all down to me, Hyunjin, really, since I was the one to take you to the art museums.”
God, Jeongin remembered that. The hours spent in those places, Jeongin hauled along because he needed the enrichment or something. He wasn’t sure he’d been enriched — he’d spent the entirety of those trips bored out of his skull as Hyunjin did his silent act in front of one painting, and then another. Jeongin preferred to look and then keep moving, but Hyunjin had just stood there, for long minutes at a time. Jeongin had assumed, the first time, that Hyunjin was reading the placard on the wall, but he hadn’t been. He had just been staring at the painting with a look in his eyes that they hadn’t seen up until that point. Something like— wonder.
He’d chosen which paintings he looked at at random, according to some criteria that only he knew. He could not be rushed, and Changbin had not let Jeongin try, no matter how dull he had found it. And afterwards, drinking grapeade in the cafe attached to the museum, Hyunjin had asked, voice so quiet, like it always had been in public back then, Can I try doing that?
“Chan-hyung is the one who buys my supplies,” Hyunjin retorted now.
“Stop fighting,” Jeongin said. He dropped his parcel in Chan’s lap and said, “Here. Happy birthday, hyung.”
Chan opened it, still smiling at him in that way he had. It really wasn’t anything special, just a maroon t-shirt Jeongin had found shopping with Hyunjin and Felix that one time, and a pair of blue jeans that he had bought even further back than that. They didn’t have to be particularly special, though: the point of Jeongin’s gift every year was not to be special, but to simply inject some kind of colour into Chan’s wardrobe.
“You’d better fucking wear those, hyung,” he said, like he always did.
“Of course I will, Jeongin,” said Chan, like he always did, even though he rarely ever did so.
The clothes joined the mug on the table. Jeongin got the sense the mug might get more use than the clothes, but that was okay, because the mug was actually very funny. A moment later, Felix said, “Oh, now we can do the cake! Jeongin, can you get the lights after I light the candles?”
“Wait, what,” said Chan, but Jeongin, already anticipating the look on Chan’s face, scampered to the light switches near the front door and stood there rocking gently back and forth on his feet as Felix went to the kitchen where the cake still sat. He lit the candles with a box of matches that they’d found in a random drawer earlier, and then Jeongin turned all the lights off.
Neither of them had planned to sing anything as they did this, but Changbin took it upon himself to start them off, and a moment later Jisung joined in, the both of them apparently competing to sing in the loudest, more ridiculous way. Felix was grinning, as he carefully brought the cake over to where Chan was sitting looking— like he wanted to be mortified by this, but was too charmed by the way Felix was smiling at him to let too much of it show on his face. Chan had come upstairs during the baking process, after all, and he clearly felt some kind of way about the fact that Felix had taken it upon himself to bake an entire cake, just for him.
That was part of why Jeongin had been so happy to help with that. Not just because of the embarrassment potential but because it added something, to the day, to the party that he and Hyunjin had invented together. They had been watching a drama on television when Hyunjin had brought it up, a quiet question of when is your birthday, after a character on the screen had blown out the candles on their cake.
I don’t remember, Jeongin had said. Sometime in February. How about you?
Hyunjin had shaken his head. He couldn’t remember at all, and later he’d chosen a day in late spring, the day that marked the first time Changbin had taken him to the botanical gardens. When they’d asked Chan when his birthday was, the revelation that he both knew the date exactly and that it was in a few days had sparked the first of these little celebrations: Hyunjin and Jeongin giving him snacks they had bought for a grand total of ten thousand won, and insisting it was a party for him. Changbin, beyond tickled by the whole thing, had joined in the next year.
Jeongin— loved him. Really and truly, this older brother of his. That had been at the heart of it all, all those years ago. It was, really, about nothing more than their love for Chan.
“Here you are, hyung,” Felix said, holding the cake out, looking a little bit like he wanted to laugh too, as Jisung hit a particularly high note at the end of the song. “Make a wish.”
Chan looked at him, a long few drawn-out seconds of just— watching Felix, a little smile on his face. He looked so happy; he looked like a man in love, and it made Jeongin’s heart feel full to bursting to see it on his face. He’d do anything, for Chan, and he was so desperately happy that this had worked out for him. That he had gotten this, what he wanted.
Chan leaned in, finally, and blew out the candles. This time, Jeongin joined in the cheers for him.
——
The backpack that Minho had bought him to replace the one that he had ripped was considerably nicer than the one he’d originally had. It was solid and study, a light grey that Felix had chosen out of the options that Hyunjin had shown him. He had no idea of the brand or how much it had cost — he had just picked out of a series of images and Hyunjin had relayed the request to Minho.
It sat open on Hyunjin’s bed, now, as Hyunjin packed up some of the things that Felix had acquired over the past month or so of living here. Most of it was clothing, stuff that Felix could use in the immediate few days as they moved more stuff over: his underwear, some of his socks, a pair of pyjama pants that had originally belonged to Hyunjin but had de facto become Felix’s at some point.
He handed Hyunjin a pair of his jeans, watched as Hyunjin’s quick fingers folded them up and put them in the backpack. There was a game of tetris happening here, Felix knew, and Hyunjin seemed to be an expert at it. “This is so good,” Hyunjin said, as he took the next t-shirt and somehow fit it inside the limited space inside the bag. “Did you see his face? He’s so happy you’re going to move over there.”
Felix kept quiet, watching Hyunjin work. He had seen, the rising sunshine smile on Chan’s face when, after the party had just about broken up, Hyunjin had bounded over to him and said, So Lix is going to come and stay with you now, right? Chan had very clearly been trying to keep his delight at the idea from being too obvious, just saying that Felix was very welcome to do so, if that was what Felix wanted.
Felix could have told him it was pointless to emphasise that. If nothing else, the past few weeks had taught him that what Hyunjin wanted, Hyunjin tended to get.
But Felix had wanted it, anyway, had wanted to be able to go back to Chan’s room and feel, maybe, comfortable in the space, more comfortable than he had the night before, before they had started kissing. It was not that he did not like sharing Hyunjin’s room with him, far from it, but he wanted, so much more, to sleep in Chan’s arms again. He had slept so well like that.
“Yeah,” Felix said, slow. “It feels a little surreal. I’m just glad everyone else has been so— kind about it. For the most part.”
Hyunjin made a quick, dismissive little motion. “Don’t worry about Minho-hyung, he’ll come around,” he said, and he sounded so certain, so at ease, that something in Felix relaxed a little bit at the assurance. Minho was still such an unknown variable to him and Felix got the impression that if he made efforts to try and get Minho to like him, it would have the opposite effect. Better to let the dust settle on its own, he figured. Hyunjin grabbed the backpack by the top and shook it a little, settling things more securely in the bottom, before saying in a rush, “You know, Jisung was in here being weird after he found out. But he was normal at the party, so I guess he got over it.”
Felix tilted his head to the side a little even though Hyunjin wasn’t looking at him. “He was?”
Hyunjin nodded, fiddling with something inside the bag. “I think he thought I’d be mad, or something,” he said. “Because you’d be spending less time with me.” Felix thought maybe that made sense, but Hyunjin was sighing like dealing with such an assumption had been a great burden. “He really is stupid.”
Now, Felix grinned. “Because it’s not like you’ve been super clingy with me, or anything,” he said, his amusement thick and obvious in his voice. “There’s no way it could make sense, that you’d be upset to be losing your angel baby.”
“I’m not losing shit,” Hyunjin said, shooting him a quick, squinted glare. “You will be giving me nap time cuddles.”
“Deal.” Felix’s grin only got wider.
Hyunjin shook his head, fondly exasperated. “Ah, Lix, you two are going to be so happy together,” he said. He finished packing the last of the clothing away and then zipped it up. It had been Hyunjin’s idea to move some of his stuff over, just so that he didn’t have to continuously come back to Hyunjin’s room every morning and evening. Chan had said something about getting Felix’s things out of the bathroom, but the only things Felix had in there was his toothbrush and a disposable razor that he used a couple of times a week, if that, so it probably hadn’t taken him long to do that.
Hyunjin handed him a hoodie that had been too big to go into the bag and added, “Chan-hyung I get, but I really don’t know why you were so against this happening. It’s great.”
Felix held the hoodie in his arms, feeling the slightly scratchy material of it. The words had tripped something in his mind, a sudden thought of — it would be okay, to tell Hyunjin. It would be okay, to trust Hyunjin with the truth of this, because Hyunjin had trusted him, in turn, with his own truth. Hyunjin had sat in this room with him and told Felix everything, everything that mattered. And so Felix felt like maybe he owed Hyunjin some of that trust back, some of that truth.
It’s okay, he told himself. It’s Hyunjin.
He hadn’t had to tell Seungmin, not with so many words; Seungmin had known immediately, and Felix had just had to confirm it. It was much harder than he’d expected to open his mouth and say, out loud, knowing he could not take it back, “It’s because I’m the Magpie’s son.”
Hyunjin, trying to stuff a last pair of socks into the front pocket of the backpack, snorted. “That’s a bad joke,” he said.
Felix kept silent, not sure what to say, not sure how he could find the words to insist that it wasn’t a joke. After a moment, Hyunjin looked up at him, and Felix could see it, the way Hyunjin took in his sombre expression, his wary eyes. The way Felix was not smiling, at all. He watched as Hyunjin’s own smile froze on his face, and then, after a long beat, it slowly dropped away completely, leaving something stricken behind. “Oh god,” he said, almost gasping it. “You’re serious.”
“I am,” Felix said quietly. He was.
Hyunjin sank down onto the edge of the bed, still holding a rolled up ball of socks in his hands, that shocked expression still on his face as he looked up at Felix. Felix held himself very still, tried not to read too much into his reaction either way. He would not allow himself to cry in this conversation. Hyunjin hadn’t done so, when he’d told Felix about his past.
“Felix,” Hyunjin said eventually. “Why?”
The question might have been funny, if it weren’t for how desperately unfunny this entire situation was. “It wasn’t my choice,” he said.
“Wasn’t—” Hyunjin dropped the socks on the bed and rubbed at his face with his hand. He seemed to be struggling to take this in, which Felix understood. Sometimes, it came as a shock to him, too, to think I am the Magpie’s son. Before he’d run away, it had always come with a stomach-dropping kind of anxiety, because to think it was to remember all the ways in which his life was not his own, and all the ways he could find to be a disappointment.
Recently, the thought had simply brought a kind of confusion with it. He felt like he was reminding himself of something that was just not true.
“Does Chan-hyung know?” Hyunjin demanded, his voice still low and hissing, his eyes darting every so often towards the door, like he was afraid someone might be listening in.
Felix hesitated a moment, not sure if he wanted to say this, wanted to expose Seungmin like this. Seungmin had been so good to him, this time spent here, not just with keeping his secret, but in helping him too, in other ways. Being another friend to Felix, something Felix hadn’t known he could have. He didn’t want to get Seungmin into trouble. But he didn’t want to lie, at all, in this conversation, not to Hyunjin, and so he said, “Seungmin knows.”
“Seungmin—” That looked like it had shocked Hyunjin all over again. “Wow. Okay. Seungmin knows. But Chan-hyung doesn’t?” Felix just shook his head. “Fuck. Felix. You have to tell him.”
“I can’t,” Felix said softly. He knew that he could not. Not yet. He knew it because he had heard the scathing way Chan said the Magpie’s name and knew that if he revealed who he was to Chan, he would not get the same reaction he was getting from Hyunjin.
“You have to,” Hyunjin said. He shot upright again, reaching out to take Felix’s hand, but Felix, for once, evaded the grab. “Here,” Hyunjin said, trying again. “Look, I’ll come with you—”
“Not today,” Felix said, stepping back and giving him a beseeching look. “I can’t do it today, Hyunjin, it’s his birthday.”
“You can’t because it’s his birthday?” Hyunjin’s voice was strangled, the words almost incoherent under the choking way he forced them out. “Felix, that’s not the point, that’s not the point at all.”
“I’m scared he’ll hate me,” Felix said, because that was the point. That had always been the point, the sticking point for him. In the beginning, he had simply not wanted to jeopardise the job, to make them call it off if they found out, but later— later he had just been afraid. Afraid that Chan would hate him, would look at him with those cold, awful eyes that Felix had seen on his father’s face so often. Even before last night, Felix had known, deep inside of him, how much it would wreck him, to be faced with Chan’s hatred. “I’m scared he’ll throw me out.”
Hyunjin scrubbed his hands over his face again, much harder than he had before. “Ah, angel,” he said. “He—”
He stopped, cutting himself off suddenly. For a moment, his facial expression didn’t change, but it didn’t need to, because Felix had read that cut off for exactly what it was: Hyunjin about to assure him that that wasn’t the case, but then realising— it might actually be. Probably would be. Hyunjin couldn’t promise him anything, not when it came to this.
Hyunjin twisted his mouth for a few seconds, looking a little over Felix’s shoulder at the blank wall, his eyes unfocused. Then he looked at Felix and said, not quite as firm as he’d been when he’d told Felix to tell Chan, “He deserves to know.”
“I know,” Felix whispered. He did know, he knew how awful it was to keep this from Chan. They looked at each other, the silence stretching out between them, Hyunjin clearly at a loss for words as much as Felix, because he could see on Felix’s face that he was not going to tell Chan tonight, not the way Hyunjin wanted him to.
“I’ll tell him after the job?” Felix said eventually. “So that way he— he’ll know that I— I’m loyal, to him. Only to him. No matter where I come from, I’m his now.”
Hyunjin stared at him, taking in those words. Felix had meant them, truly and absolutely: he was Chan’s, now. Perhaps he had been Chan’s the moment he had walked into Chan’s office, to see him sitting there behind that desk. He had never been his father’s, never belonged to him the way his father had wanted him to, but he belonged to Chan, and that was all there was to it.
Hyunjin sighed, and came forward, a little tentative, like he thought Felix was going to keep jumping away from him. But Felix let him approach, standing still, as Hyunjin put a hand against his shoulder and then leaned in and pressed his mouth, dry and soft and warm, to Felix’s forehead. “Lix,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Felix snagged Hyunjin’s sleeve with the tips of his fingers. “You won’t tell him, will you?” he asked. “Not until after? Please don’t tell him, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin shook his head, and the relief that swept through Felix almost threatened to take him to his knees. “No,” he said. He didn’t look happy about it, but Felix knew that Hyunjin— wouldn’t lie to him, not about this. “I won’t tell him, Felix. I’ll leave that to you.”
The walk to Chan’s room, his backpack and hoodie in his arms, felt— fuzzy, not real, like he was in some kind of trance. It was not like when he was aroused, nothing quite so pleasant — he just felt disconnected, almost totally. He had told Hyunjin, and the world had not fallen down around his ears. He had told Hyunjin, and Hyunjin had not been angry, or even all that upset, just worried and confused. He had told Hyunjin, and it did not feel real at all.
He knocked on the door and waited a moment before it opened to reveal Chan, whose face melted into a smile when he saw it was Felix there. “You don’t need to knock,” he said. “Come on, give me your bag, you can unpack tomorrow.”
Felix let him take the backpack, floated into the room, letting the door shut behind him with a quiet click. Chan set the bag on the chest of drawers and then turned and slid his hand along the curve of Felix’s jaw. Felix was so out of it that it wasn’t until he felt the heat of Chan’s mouth against his that he realised he was being kissed, hard and firm.
He fell back into this time and place with a bump that was almost painful. He was so completely back in his body, now, the blood rushing through his veins, his fingers and toes tingling, his mouth moving as he pressed himself closer to Chan with a small, helpless noise. Chan’s other arm went around his waist, held him there steady.
How could he be the Magpie’s son, like this? It was impossible. He was not, not at all. He was Felix, who belonged to Chan. That was all there was: he was only Chan’s.
Chapter 11
Notes:
chapter specific content warnings/tags: referenced physical child abuse; referenced child endangerment (neither related to Hyunjin); minor blood; the inherent intimacy of wound tending
so uhh unrelated to the above: sorry ._.
Chapter Text
Seungmin was only human, and despite what he liked to pretend, and what he’d like others to think, he was, in the privacy of his own head, very susceptible to temptations of the flesh. Not so much when it came to food — he’d live off soup, if it didn’t cause other people to fuss about how you can’t just live off soup — but when it came to Changbin being in his workshop at 10am wearing a short sleeved t-shirt, despite the relatively cool air in here, well. It was a bit much to ask of Seungmin, he thought.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked, without glancing away from his computer screens. He didn’t need to, though, because one of the monitors was turned off, and every time he looked at it, he could see the reflection of Changbin sitting at the worktable, doing something with his phone and a pad of paper he was scribbling on.
“Hmm?” Changbin asked, without looking up.
“In your t-shirt,” Seungmin said, knowing he was going to regret this conversation and unable to stop himself. “Aren’t you cold?”
There was silence. Seungmin very determinedly did not look at the darkened monitor to see what Changbin’s reaction was, to see if Changbin had lifted his head or not. It was enough that the sound of the pen scribbling on the paper had stopped, the quiet in the room very sudden. Seungmin knew that he really should look over his shoulder, pretend like he didn’t understand why Changbin had stopped working, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t sure he could feign that kind of innocence right now.
“I’m not cold,” Changbin said eventually. His voice was very light, the way he sounded sometimes right before he started teasing Hyunjin about something. He teased Seungmin too, but it was— very different. Seungmin had to take a little breath, hearing that.
“That’s good,” he said. He had not stopped working on the virus he was building since the conversation had started, his mouse clicking without pause, but he knew that Changbin was looking at him without having to check. The scratch of the pen did not start up again. Instead, after a moment, there was the scrape of a stool across the concrete floor, and then Changbin’s footsteps, heavy and solid, coming closer.
He wasn’t surprised, necessarily, when Changbin slung himself over the back of the desk chair, his arms hanging down over Seungmin’s shoulders. He did it a lot, like he wanted to take advantage of Seungmin being slightly shorter than him for once, to drape his weight against him, although the desk chair took most of it. One of his hands hung down next to Seungmin’s stomach; the other wrapped around Seungmin’s chest to hold him steady.
Seungmin held himself very still. If he looked to the left or to the right, the only thing in his vision would be Changbin’s arms, the muscles there exposed in the tight shirt. If he looked, he would see them, and so he did not, could not look. Instead he kept his eyes on the cameras, watching the stairwell carefully.
“Have you been sitting here thinking about my arms this entire time?” Changbin asked. His voice was very low, the words spoken almost into Seungmin’s ear, his breath just brushing the shell of it. Seungmin shivered and didn’t do much to hide it.
“Does that sound like me?” he asked, to cover up the fact that he had, absolutely, been sitting there the entire time Changbin had been in the room, thinking about Changbin’s arms.
Changbin snorted. “Yes, it does,” he said. “I know that you like having a buff boyfriend, baby, you can admit it.”
Seungmin wrinkled his nose and did turn his head then, so that he could bite Changbin on the arm, as hard as he thought Changbin could handle. He felt his teeth sink in, and heard Changbin yelp but he didn’t pull away at all, just let Seungmin do it. Maybe he, too, felt like what he said was a touch too far. Maybe he was just a freak who liked it when Seungmin bit him, that seemed a little more likely.
“Feral little thing, aren’t you,” Changbin said, his voice even lower now.
Seungmin let go of his arm but didn’t lift his head away. Instead, he pressed his lips in a very soft kiss to the curve of Changbin’s bicep, letting his mouth linger, moving his face just a little so that his lips dragged for a brief moment. The hand on Seungmin’s stomach pressed a little harder, the fingers pressing into the giving skin of Seungmin’s belly.
“I’m not little,” Seungmin said, barely lifting his mouth away from Changbin’s arm. “I’m taller than you.”
"You're not special," Changbin said, his voice still that low, intimate murmur into Seungmin's ear, his hand stroking gently at Seungmin's stomach now. "Most people are."
It was just a little bit too much, for this time in the morning, knowing that if he wanted anything to happen, he’d have to wait the long hours of the day before it could. Over the past few days since Chan’s birthday, Chan and Felix had gotten into the habit of disappearing at random hours of the day, presumably into Chan’s bedroom, although nobody had really asked and nobody had wanted to knock on the door to find out. They mostly hadn’t needed to, considering Chan’s bedroom was not in the slightest bit soundproofed. Changbin’s response had mostly been, “Well, at least he’s not just working every hour of the day.”
But Seungmin didn’t have that luxury. He couldn’t drag Changbin into his bedroom, couldn’t let Changbin between his legs, his thighs almost aching with the stretch as they spread around Changbin’s waist. Someone could come down at any point needing him, and they would have far less qualms about bothering him in his bedroom than they did with Chan.
He didn’t respond. He just sat with his mouth against Changbin’s arm, letting Changbin touch him, not pushing him away but not escalating either. Changbin pressed a gentle kiss behind his ear, not escalating either. Was he tired of this, Seungmin often wondered. Tired of sneaking around, of never letting anyone else know what was going on. He never complained, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it.
“Hyunjin is coming,” Changbin said, after they’d been quiet for a long few minutes, the warmth of Changbin’s body against him easing something in Seungmin’s shoulders. Seungmin lifted his head slowly to look at the monitors and saw that Hyunjin was not simply just coming, he was almost here, only one flight of stairs between him and the workshop door. No doubt he was coming here — he avoided the basement training room as much as he could.
Seungmin thought about letting Hyunjin walk in here. About letting him come in and see them intertwined like this, Changbin’s mouth still mostly against the back of his ear. But then he remembered the knowing looks the others had been giving Chan and Felix these past days, and he knew that he could not, not right now. The thought of being looked at like that still filled him with a twitchy anxiety.
It didn’t matter anyway. Changbin had already straightened up, with one last touch of his hand to Seungmin’s face, and made his way back to the work bench.
He had just sat back down when the door flew open and Hyunjin banged his way inside. Hyunjin complained a lot about Jeongin’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to doors and entrances but he could be just as bad, when he wanted to be, and Seungmin’s door didn’t deserve this kind of treatment.
Hyunjin stood just inside the doorway and looked around the room, without his usual scowl on his face. Without much of an expression on his face, to be honest, although there was a glimmer of impatience when he pointed a finger at Changbin. “Hyung,” he said. “Get out.”
Changbin raised an eyebrow at him, but didn’t look offended in any way; he was way too used to Hyunjin at this point. Seungmin had asked, once, why both he and Chan let Hyunjin get away with being quite so obnoxious, and Changbin had been quiet for a few seconds and then quietly said, it’s nice to see him with a personality.
“Why should I,” he said, picking up his pen like he was about to start writing again.
“Because I need to talk to Seungmin about something,” Hyunjin said. “In private.”
“In private?” Changbin repeated, sounding almost genuinely offended by that. “What do you possibly have to say to him that you can’t say with me in the room? After I raised you with mine own two hands?”
“First of all, Chan-hyung raised me, you just carted me and Jeongin to the zoo a couple of times,” Hyunjin said. Changbin gasped and slammed to his feet in fake-rage, taking his pen and pad of paper with him as he went. “Second of all, I have lots of things I could talk to Seungmin about that don’t involve you. Like how annoying you are.”
“Seungmin doesn’t find me annoying,” said Changbin. He sounded so overly confident of this fact that Seungmin couldn’t help but make a little sceptical noise in his throat, just to see the betrayed look Changbin sent him. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go someplace where I’m wanted, how about that?”
He was already halfway to the door as he spoke, and as he passed Hyunjin he reached out and patted his hip, as if to reassure Hyunjin that he wasn’t actually mad. Seungmin wasn’t sure if Hyunjin had actually worried about that or not, as far as he could tell Hyunjin never worried if Changbin was actually annoyed at him, because Changbin never seemed to be. But Hyunjin didn’t say anything else snarky, which he normally would have; Seungmin could almost hear the there’s nowhere you’re wanted, hyung that Hyunjin might have said otherwise.
But he didn’t. He just stood there, and let the workshop door close, the heavy weight of it causing a noise which echoed around the room. As soon as the door closed, any expression that had been on Hyunjin’s face completely fell away. Seungmin had thought he looked a little blank before, but that was nothing compared to this: the absolute absence of anything.
With his heart sinking a little, Seungmin realised that Hyunjin was probably here about another one of his little trips out with Jisung. It was so soon after the last one that it would be a little surprising, although not unheard of. Seungmin— didn’t think he had it in him, for more work, at this point, not between the van for Felix’s job, and finishing up all the last minute things for the job that Changbin and Jisung were set to take on soon. But this was one thing that Seungmin had never complained about doing, not even jokingly. Not even really in his head. It was too important for that.
But Hyunjin didn’t come closer and hand him a little slip of paper with a licence plate number on it, or the registration number of a CCTV camera to hack so they could backcomb the footage. Instead, he grabbed one of the stools from around the workbench and dragged it closer to Seungmin’s desk, the legs screeching a little on the floor, but Hyunjin was quiet throughout.
Seungmin let go of his mouse, which he had not even bothered to do when Changbin had been trying to feel him up, and swivelled his desk chair around so that he could face Hyunjin properly. The serious, sombre expression on Hyunjin’s face was so unusual outside of the context of one of those slips of paper that Seungmin couldn’t help but feel— intrigued, perhaps. Worried, maybe, unsure about what was going on here. His work was completely forgotten.
Hyunjin didn’t say anything for a long, silent few minutes. He looked down at the floor between them, his hands held loosely across his knees where he sat against the stool. Then he said, softly, “Lix told me.”
Seungmin showed no reaction. He did not even let himself feel anything, not at this stage. “Lix told you?” he asked, voice lilted in curiosity, not wanting to volunteer any information in case he was wrong about what Hyunjin was talking about. An incorrect assumption could be disastrous here.
Hyunjin lifted his head and looked at him. His eyes were deadly serious. “He told me he’s Lee Jaerim’s son.”
“Ah,” said Seungmin, mostly flat, but inside— he was reeling, the shock of hearing that like a bolt through him. It shouldn’t have surprised him, probably, not to this extent, but it did. All these weeks of not knowing if he was making the right choice or not and now— either Felix was playing four dimensional chess with them, or he really had been truthful with Seungmin from the very beginning.
It maybe should have felt like vindication. It didn’t, really.
Hyunjin was watching him, very carefully. He seemed like he was taking Seungmin’s lack of reaction as a sign of what it was. “You really have known all along,” he said, the words breathed out almost. He sounded like he hadn’t quite believed that until this moment. “Why didn’t you— tell Chan-hyung?”
“Why haven’t you?” Seungmin asked, the words blunt, his tone not especially softened either.
Hyunjin winced. “I’ve only known a few days,” he said. “Since the night of the party. Felix asked me to not tell him, so I haven’t, but…”
He trailed off, his hands clenching into fists now in his lap. He looked, in this moment, how Seungmin felt about the entire situation: guilty and more than a little wretched. If Felix really had spilled his secret during the night of Chan’s party, no wonder he’d asked Hyunjin to keep it a secret. That had been after he and Chan had slept together for the first time.
That had been a development that had severely tested Seungmin. It was one thing to let Felix exist here as the son of Lee Jaerim. It was another to watch Chan fall into bed with him.
“He asked me to not say anything, either,” Seungmin said. “I— trusted him.”
Hyunjin raised an eyebrow, as well he should. They both knew that Seungmin was not in the habit of trusting people, that it had taken this little ragtag group a few months before that trust had come. “How did you find out, anyway?” Hyunjin asked. “Felix didn’t say. Did it come up in a background check or something?”
Seungmin shook his head. “We went to middle school together,” he said. “I recognised him the minute I saw him on the cameras that first day.”
Hyunjin sat back. “Wow,” he said. “You didn’t show any of it on your face. You went into that meeting with him like he was a complete stranger.”
“Not a complete stranger,” Seungmin said. “But he basically could have been. We were in the same homeroom for just a year, and other than that, I never interacted with him. Back then, I knew nothing about him other than he was Lee Jaerim’s son and that he seemed unhappy.”
Hyunjin didn’t need to know, he reflected, about how not-calm Seungmin had been, when he had seen someone who looked, impossibly, like the Magpie’s son walk in their front door like it was nothing. How he had watched, his heart in his throat, as Changbin went to intercept him, thinking, even if he’s not Yongbok, he could have a gun, he could shoot hyung while I watch. It had only been when he had seen how calm and in control of the situation Changbin had ended up that Seungmin had begun to relax.
He hadn’t confirmed that Felix was, in fact, Lee Yongbok until he had come face to face with him in the kitchen. It had been a task, to keep any of it off his face.
“Unhappy,” Hyunjin said, almost musingly, like he was rolling the word around in his mouth in order to understand it. “It’s hard to imagine how anyone could be happy, with a dad like that. But it does explain a lot. Sometimes he seems baffled by basic kindness.”
Yes, Seungmin had noticed that too. It had been slightly less pronounced in middle school, maybe, if he was remembering correctly; probably, constant exposure to other people, other children, had given him some experience in the ways people could be courteous to other people. Perhaps that had faded as time went on, because sometimes Seungmin would thank Felix for his help with something and Felix would look genuinely surprised but very pleased by the thanks.
“I assume you trust him,” Seungmin said quietly. “And believe him.”
“Yes,” said Hyunjin, instantly. “Of course I do. It’s Felix, he’s as genuine as they come. He’s not lying to us, Seungmin, I know that down to my bones.”
“Okay,” said Seungmin. He had not been living with such conviction — he believed Felix, but still, there had been niggling doubts, Seungmin’s own paranoia and experience with liars not letting him fully commit to it. But there could be no doubt heard in Hyunjin’s voice. From day one, he had been on Felix’s side, and that was apparently set to continue.
“The question remains,” Seungmin added, “as to what we’re supposed to do about it.”
Hyunjin pinched between his eyes with his fingers. This, usually, would seem dramatic on him, the over the top way he did most things. Today, it didn’t look like that. It just looked— tired. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for days and I just cannot see a way that we can tell the others that doesn’t make things difficult for Felix.”
Seungmin nodded. Yes, that had been his problem this entire time. How could he tell anyone, when it would mean putting Felix in danger. It was a secret that he was keeping from Changbin, and at this point, Seungmin didn’t have many secrets that he kept from Changbin. It was this, and one other.
“He’s scared that Chan-hyung will throw him out,” Hyunjin said. “I’m scared of that too. And I keep thinking, like, why didn’t he just tell the truth from the beginning, but if he’d done that, they’d have never taken this job, would they?”
“No,” said Seungmin.
“And then he would still be out there,” Hyunjin said. There was a note of genuine distress in his voice, like just talking about this was upsetting him. Seungmin did not usually get to hear that kind of thing from Hyunjin. When Hyunjin was upset, he tended to simply get mean with it. “And he would have died, anyway, without knowing us, and every time I think that, it terrifies me, and every time I think of Chan-hyung making him leave now, I realise that it’ll be the same situation, he’ll be out there alone in the winter, and I can’t— I don’t want that, Seungmin, I don’t.”
“I don’t either,” Seungmin said. He didn’t say: actually, if he’d been upfront about who he was, they probably wouldn’t have let him leave the building alive.
“But I don’t want to lie to Chan-hyung, either,” Hyunjin said, barely more than a whisper.
Seungmin shrugged, a far more dismissive gesture than he meant, but when Hyunjin looked at him, he saw Hyunjin see it in Seungmin’s eyes, that fellow-feeling, that understanding. “I don’t either,” Seungmin said. “In fact, I really hate it, Hyunjin. I do. But if it’s choice, there’s only two options: you continue to lie to Chan-hyung, and keep Felix safe, or we tell Chan-hyung the truth, and Felix— gets hurt.”
“It’s not a choice,” Hyunjin said. “We can’t tell them.”
“No,” said Seungmin. “We can’t, not unless Felix decides he’s going to. But at least,” he said, feeling a burst of slightly uncharacteristically heartfelt relief, “at least we both know, now. At least it’s not something you have to— carry alone.”
Hyunjin looked at him, his handsome face very beautiful indeed when it was in these smooth, serious lines. “No,” he said. “And you don’t have to carry it alone now, either. We can look after him, right? He deserves this place, Seungmin, he deserves this home. Just as much as we have.”
Seungmin could barely bring himself to nod to that. A home, he thought and knew it was true. A home that would not be so easily destroyed as his last one, even with this lie that they were keeping together. He felt it so strongly, the conviction that this family was more real than his last one, a solid thing and not just a paper-thin facade over rot.
Hyunjin stood up, stretching a little although unlike most of the others, none of his joints made a noise as he did so. “I haven’t told Lix that I was going to talk to you,” he said. “I think he’s trying to mostly pretend like this isn’t happening, and I’ll let him do it, because I think we need to all act like that.”
“Yes,” Seungmin said, trying for a dry tone, not quite getting it. “That’s what I’ve been trying too.”
Hyunjin nodded. He set the stool back against the workbench and then went to the door, and for a moment Seungmin thought he would leave without another word. But then, once he had pulled open the door, Hyunjin paused, and looked back at Seungmin. “Thank you,” he said. “For protecting Felix.” And then he left before Seungmin could respond.
After the echo of the door shutting had faded, Seungmin sat for a while, staring at that door, his mind— nothing but a rush of thoughts too chaotic to truly make out. Then, with a sigh, he turned back to his monitors, saved the work he had been doing, and then set up all of his alerts and alarms, because he simply— could not do this. Not here, not right now. He was just too tired, cored out somehow.
He needed, with a desperation that made the exhaustion even worse, to lay very still in the dark for a while. He felt like he’d had a week’s worth of emotions in a single morning: he deserved it, he thought.
——
Minho needed to get out of his room.
He’d been sitting in here all day, poking at his notes for their various in-progress jobs, and listlessly flipping through a few books he’d slowly been reading. Nothing had managed to catch his attention, had been able to draw him out of his snarled stormy headspace.
Sometimes he liked being holed up in here, needed it. The quiet, the lack of needing to worry about— making anyone else uncomfortable. He could exist in silence, unconcerned about the space he was taking up.
But the trade off for that was how, sometimes, the sparseness, the same four walls, his windows plastered over with newspapers letting in only dim and dappled sunlight, reminded him of his long stints in solitary. And he always tried to push past that particular hang up, because he wasn’t in solitary now, he could leave this room whenever he pleased, but his body was not as firmly within his command as he would have wished it. That itch, that particular anxiety, could not be so easily chased away. Muscle memory.
It was, in a word, annoying.
The problem was, really, when he started to get like this, he’d go upstairs with his work, hang out in the kitchen for a while. A change of scenery. But he’d popped up earlier to get some food, and Felix had been in there, with the kitchen in a state of extreme disarray, open packets of flour and cocoa and cartons of milk everywhere. The entire place had smelled so thickly of sugar it nearly gave Minho an immediate headache.
“Chan-hyung’s birthday was earlier this week,” Minho had said, a lilt of annoyance in his voice that covered up his bemusement. There were enough in-progress baking goods that it was like Felix thought he’d be feeding a small army.
“Baby’s in a good mood from all the orgasms,” Hyunjin had said dryly from his seat at the kitchen table where he was idly drawing small, rough sketches of Felix himself. “He’s got lots of energy.”
“Hyunjin,” Felix had hissed, casting a nervous glance over at Minho. He was still just that slight bit skittish, and sometimes Minho liked it, wanted Felix to know he’d better— not fuck them over. But sometimes it also made Minho feel a little ashamed. “Did you want to make something for yourself? I can clear off—”
“No,” Minho had said, and he’d turned around and left again. But he did not want to be in his room, and he did not want to go out. A sort of tiredness threatened to overwhelm him, at the thought of even just walking around the neighbourhood on a light patrol. He did not want to be around strangers right now.
That left very few options. Really, it left only one; Seungmin’s workshop.
The problem with Seungmin’s workshop was Seungmin would be in it. But at least Seungmin was likely to be quiet. So he gathered up several folders, with various job printouts, notes, and lists, all sorted neatly, and then headed downstairs. He was not entirely sure what he would want to work on, and he didn’t want to have to come back up to fetch something else.
As Minho descended the stairs, he began to hear— music. But not proper music — it was the tinny, cutesy music of a video game. Seungmin played lo-fi music for himself sometimes, if whatever he was working on didn’t require too much concentration, but he wouldn’t be idly listening to this.
The workshop door was propped open, unusual in itself. Minho came into the room and there was movement from the battered couch, Jeongin sitting up and turning to look over his shoulder at who had joined him. In his hands was his gameboy. “Oh, hyung!” he said, immediately smiling, like he had never been happier, than to see Minho. He always smiled like that, such bright, simple joy. “Were you wanting Seungmin-hyung? I don’t know where he is, I think he must be napping.”
“Baby boy,” Minho said, a little mindless, a little empty, “what are you doing down here?” Of all the people he could have expected to run into down here, Jeongin was very low on the list. He had not been— ready. For Jeongin’s smile, for his dimples, for the fluffiness of his hair, clearly freshly washed.
Jeongin shrugged, one shouldered and loose. “Change of scenery,” he said, and Minho almost let out a humourless bark of laughter at that.
He could go back upstairs, he supposed. Just grit his teeth through the anxiety and sit in his room. But he viscerally did not want to.
“Hyung?” Jeongin said, voice small, and Minho realised he’d been lightly scowling at the wall behind Jeongin’s head. When Minho looked at him, Jeongin was glancing at all the folders in Minho’s hands. “Do you want me to leave?”
Minho was not surprised by the sharp kick of emotions that question caused to surge within him. He would not, would never ever want, Jeongin to feel unwelcome. This was his home. Minho was just living here, but this— this was Jeongin’s. “No,” Minho said quickly, “no, you don’t need to go anywhere, baby boy.”
“I don’t mind going upstairs,” Jeongin said, wide eyed and sweet with it, the collar of his shirt askew and showing the dip of where his neck met his shoulder. This was agony. Minho had been feeling it so much more keenly of late, and he hadn’t been able to escape, Jeongin— everywhere, somehow.
“No,” Minho said again, more firmly now. “Stay.” He watched Jeongin settle back a bit on the couch, from where he’d been positioned to stand up, but he didn’t resume his game, he simply stared at Minho, uncertain and so— unblemished, Minho thought. Just young and sweet and without artifice, always so genuine. Giving Minho unfiltered kindness, like sweet tree sap from the source. He was always so concerned about Minho, his comfort, making room for Minho even though Minho should be the one accommodating him, always.
Minho thought about the last few weeks, about Jeongin asking him about love, and how he’d wondered if Jeongin was hurting him on purpose. And then Chan’s party, where Jeongin had apologised, wide eyed and so sincere it was painful to see. How had Minho ever thought Jeongin was trying to wound him. Jeongin would never. And he should not have had to apologise to Minho, just like he should not be trying to bend himself around Minho’s— stupid, foolish weakness now.
“Are you sure?” Jeongin asked.
“Yeah, baby boy,” Minho said firmly, making the conscious decision to get over himself so Jeongin could stop having to think about him so much. He ran a hand through his hair, sighing a little. Jeongin, for some reason, tracked the movement of his hand, then his eyes flicked back to Minho’s face. “Just— turn the music down a little?”
When Jeongin smiled now it was sheepish, and he curled his legs back up into the couch, socked feet tucking into the cracks of the cushions. “Sure, hyung,” he said, and the volume immediately lowered to something much easier to ignore.
So Minho went to the workbench as Jeongin properly settled back in, putting the folders on the table and having a momentary panic about what side to sit on. His back to Jeongin would be too— difficult, too distracting, but would seeing Jeongin out of his peripheral be any better?
With a sigh he realised he wasn’t going to get any work done on job planning, not like this. Not when he’d solved all the easy bits and was now left with the more arduous process of working out kinks. So he’d work on his little side project, which required slightly less brain power and also needed the use of his hands.
Quietly, only the gameboy’s soundtrack to overlay his muffled footsteps, Minho fetched a small green tub from one of the lowermost shelving units. It held an array of plastic casing, circuitry, and wires. Minho’s own little bomb-making kit.
He sat at the table with it, choosing a side where Jeongin would be just in the corner of his left eye. Minho had never built explosives before in his life, but when he’d heard Felix specialised in it, he knew he at least needed to learn the gist. How could he know if Felix was building what he claimed he was building, when Minho didn’t even know what to look out for?
Of course he’d barely scratched the surface before they’d had to green light the Plaza Hotel job. But Felix didn’t know that. Minho had asked Felix to give him the schematics of the types of charges he’d be making, and Felix, in typical fashion, had complied with that shocking easiness that never failed to make Minho grit his teeth. He’d given Minho the instructions he was using and then some of his own notes. And Minho in turn had come to Seungmin and asked, “How do I make breach charges?” and Seungmin had given him some other references he’d managed to dig up. Minho could have done that himself but he rather thought idly searching up bomb-making techniques would flag something in some system somewhere. Seungmin would at least be able to be discreet about it.
And so Minho had studied, mostly holed up in his room, glasses perched on his nose as he’d squinted over things that made little sense to him. Then he’d come down here and loomed over Felix a few times, watching him work, and said, “Hmm,” meaningfully here and there. He had not thought Felix was doing anything— tricky with the charges, but he hadn’t known for sure. He’d hoped his presence and obvious attention would at least be a dissuasion. And, well, the charges had done what they were supposed to do. So either Minho’s menacing aura had worked, or Felix had never intended to do anything anyway.
Minho was not one for taking chances. He would continue to study. He would learn how to do this too, at least to some extent. He needed to learn to understand it, even if he didn’t ever actually get to a point where he’d be making live charges. The bits and bobs in this tub weren’t dangerous, nothing explosive about them. It was just the internal mechanisms, unarmed.
He dumped it all out onto the table, parsing through wires to find what he needed, and set to work, referencing several different print outs as he went. He’d need the little soldering iron later, but for right now he was using pliers and wire cutters, stripping off rubber casings to get at the copper.
It was tiny, annoying work, detailed and so fiddly. Minho kind of liked working on jobs like this, things with a lot of angles to consider, puzzles to figure out. But when it came to physical projects, he did not like these small things that required steady hands and holding one’s breath. He’d never thought himself impatient— quite the opposite, really. But these itty bitty circuit boards with their itty bitty through holes and receptors were testing him.
He stopped paying attention, a little. Grabbing a wire and falling back on muscle memory for it, he yanked it too taut and it snapped, recoiling back at him and lashing over his hand.
For a moment, he wasn’t even aware of what he’d done. It took a second for the pain to hit, sharp and stinging but— not the worst he’d had, at least. Not even close. He supposed this was why a lot of these guides said to use gloves, and eye goggles.
He stared at the slice across his palm, the quickly welling blood, and then said, “Oh.”
“Oh?” Jeongin repeated absently, tapping at his screen, an annoying little tap tap tap to go with the looping music.
“I cut myself,” Minho said, lifting his hand to try to stop the blood from continuing to drip down his fingers. It was dripping all over the workbench; Seungmin wouldn’t be happy. Blood tended to get stuck in the grooves of the wood.
“Oh?” Jeongin sat up, looking over, and then said, “Oh!” in such a loud voice that Minho actually startled a little at it. Jeongin tossed the gameboy down by his side, and didn’t even notice when it bounced off the couch onto the floor and then fell abruptly silent. “Oh my god, hyung, what did you do?”
Minho blinked at him. “I cut myself,” he repeated.
“There’s so much blood,” Jeongin said, visibly distressed, before he scrambled to his feet and ran to the cupboard where the cobbled together first aid kit was kept. Minho remembered it from Seungmin’s recent incident, but he hadn’t gotten a proper look at it that day. It was just a white metal toolbox with a red cross taped to the lid, which was— cute, the sort of thing Jeongin would do, maybe.
Jeongin put the kit on the workbench and dragged another stool over so he could sit with his knees knocking against Minho’s. The idea of being fussed over flustered Minho, compounded by the fact it was Jeongin doing the fussing. He didn’t need it. Wounds either healed on their own or they didn’t, and since merely catching sight of a doctor made him break out in hives, he figured one of the latter ones would just kill him some day. This was not one of those wounds.
Jeongin did not seem to care about that. Minho looked at him helplessly. “It’s fine, baby boy,” he said. “It doesn’t even need stitches.”
“You don’t know that!” Jeongin said. He snapped open the toolbox to reveal— a lot more than Minho had been expecting, actually. There were tubes of ointments and rolls of bandages and boxes of bandaids, small bottles of things labelled saline solution and disinfection alcohol, blister packs of pills with names that Minho didn’t recognise. There was a thermometer, which for some reason was the most baffling thing to Minho. Wound care he could understand, but since when did they ever get sick.
“Did Seungmin do all this?” he asked blankly, as Jeongin started rummaging around for things.
“No,” said Jeongin. “I helped! Most of this stuff is for burns, because Seungmin-hyung burns himself a bunch, but I got a bit of everything. I looked online to see what we should have.”
“Oh,” said Minho. He thought about Jeongin looking up what sort of thing was needed in a first aid kit, and then carefully collecting everything into this battered old toolbox, and had to close his eyes for a minute. The love that Jeongin felt for them all seemed, sometimes, to fill up the entire space he was in, until there was no room for anything else. Certainly there was no room for Minho’s cynicism, in the face of earnest care like that.
Jeongin took hold of his wrist, holding it in the loose circle of his fingers, and began to wipe the blood away with a piece of gauze. It was soaked in something that made Minho’s entire hand sting hard enough that he couldn’t help his hiss of pain through his teeth. “Sorry,” said Jeongin, looking genuinely distressed about it. He blew on the wound, the coolness of the air taking the edge off the sting.
“It’s okay,” Minho said. Truthfully, he was not really paying attention to the pain of it. His entire attention was focused on the feeling of Jeongin’s fingers touching his skin, the slow, careful way he was cleaning the wound. Touch was already a heady thing for Minho, but this— gentle tending to a wound, was absolutely potent.
Minho had been hurt a lot through the years. But the prison doctors had always been efficient to the point of roughness with anyone who came in injured, and had done it with the least amount of touching possible. Before that, when he was younger, he’d always had to fix up his own scraped knees and palms. Most of the time he’d just let them bleed, even as a child.
The one time he’d gone to a proper hospital— his mind turned from that memory before it could go far.
It had never been like this. Care, love. Minho couldn’t help his short, shaky exhale when Jeongin’s thumb brushed accidentally across the base of Minho’s hand. He had not known something could feel nice like this, relaxing like this. He didn’t want Jeongin to stop.
“You really should be more careful,” Jeongin said, head bent a little as he worked. “If this really had needed stitches, it would have been a real problem! I don’t know how to apply the butterfly stitches I bought, you know.”
“Mm,” said Minho. He looked at the top of Jeongin’s head as he worked, the dark strands of his hair. There was an unsettling urge to lower his own head and kiss that hair, if only just to see what Jeongin would do. Of course, he didn’t have that right. He would never have that right. Jeongin was not for him to taint.
“I would have had to look up a video,” Jeongin continued, “and you would have bled to death before I managed to figure it out.”
Minho smiled, a little quirk of the side of his mouth, where Jeongin couldn’t see. “I would not have bled out, baby boy, even if it had needed stitches. Nobody ever died from a hand wound like this.”
“Says you,” Jeongin retorted. He picked up a roll of bandages and made Minho hold one end of it between his thumb and forefinger before he started to wind it around Minho’s hand, above a small square of gauze that he kept over the wound. His fingers kept touching Minho’s wrist and fingers, his head bent over his work, the warmth of his breath just there against Minho’s skin. Or maybe that was wishful thinking; maybe he just wanted it to be true too much.
He should extract his hand and finish the job himself. He didn’t.
“I bet,” said Jeongin, as he finished wrapping Minho’s hand and tucked the end of the bandage away, “you wouldn’t have even cleaned it. What would you have done if you got gangrene and your hand fell off?”
“That— is not how that works,” said Minho faintly.
Jeongin didn’t answer. Instead, he cupped Minho’s hand in both of his own and then— lowered his head. Minho realised what was happening a mere flicker before Jeongin had pressed his mouth, gentle but firm enough for Minho to feel, against the bandages. Minho stopped breathing, his heart thudded hard in his chest. He had to bite the inside of his mouth to avoid making any sort of noise, from showing any other kind of reaction. Jeongin, when he lifted his head again, was smiling his usual smile, bright and unknowing of the thoughts in Minho’s head. “There!” he said. “All better.”
Minho could only nod. Jeongin gathered everything back up into the first aid kit and returned it to its place on the shelf. Minho watched him, a screech of noise in his ears. Jeongin didn’t seem to notice anything odd, as he retrieved his console from the floor and pressed a couple of buttons with a frown. The annoying music started back up.
“Oh, good,” he said. “It’s not broken. But I have to charge it. Bye, hyung!” And then he ran out of the room.
Minho sat without moving for a long few seconds. Slowly he curled his fingers in, touching the place where Jeongin had kissed with just the very tips. He let out a breath and thought quite seriously about finding something to smack himself over the head with.
He’d always been a person who was keenly aware of his surroundings, but he’d been so preoccupied with— Jeongin’s gentle touch, his earnest attention, that he had not seen Chan, come to a stuttered stop in the open doorway of the room. Nor had he seen Chan step back, out of sight, as Jeongin had let Minho go. And he should have seen it, the motion, or heard the sound of the footsteps, quiet as they’d been. But he had not. Because Jeongin filled him up, until there was noting left. And Minho was not a man who could be so careless.
He had not seen Chan then, and he did not see him now, moving in grainy pixels on Seungmin’s lowly lit monitors, returning to the doorway now that Jeongin had gone.
“You,” Chan said, voice a rasp of anger, and Minho startled guiltily, his head whipping up. There was a look of sheer murder on Chan’s face, and horror filled Minho, as he realised that Chan had seen. Seen them. Seen Minho. “Are you kidding me?”
Minho had never particularly been scared of Chan. He had no doubt that Chan could beat him in a fight, despite Minho’s— Jisung had once said Minho’s lack of gentlemanly morals which had been amusing enough that Minho liked to think about it like that, when he could. But even knowing that, he’d never been scared of Chan, because he’d never thought he had a reason to be.
He was, perhaps, a little scared of him right now. That was unfortunate. This conversation was unlikely to go well.
“Don’t,” Minho said, avoiding Chan’s eyes. He hid his hand under the workbench, forcing his expression to settle into something— blank. His heart had already been pounding, but now it was pounding all over again, in a sickly, cold way that washed out all the warmth Jeongin had left him with.
“Don’t?” Chan repeated, stalking across the room. “Don’t? Do you have the right to tell me that? What the fuck was that, just now?”
“I cut myself,” Minho said tonelessly. “He was helping me. That’s all.”
“Do not bullshit me,” Chan said, low and dangerous. He braced himself against the workbench opposite Minho, who didn’t move even though this was close enough for Chan to reach him. “You’re going to explain to me why you were looking at my baby brother like that. What the fuck, Minho.”
Minho could not look at him, stared down at a loose bolt laying atop the bench, beside the little drips of his own blood, soaking slowly into the wood. It was— mortifying, shameful, to know Chan had seen it, that Minho’s desires had apparently been written across his stupid face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, still in that same flat voice.
“You bastard,” Chan snarled. “How can you— he’s a kid.”
Minho repressed a flinch enough that he barely twitched with it. He knew that, he did not need Chan to scold him for it. Jeongin was young and soft and vulnerable and Minho— there was too much violence inside him for someone like Jeongin, too many fragmented parts of his psyche that even he didn’t know about. He was in the wrong, and always had been, and there was no getting around it. The pointlessness of Chan’s reprimands, when Minho could still feel the phantom press of Jeongin’s mouth against his hand, already exhausted him.
The side door opened and Seungmin came into the room, a blanket across his shoulders despite the fact that it was not cold. He slung himself down into his desk chair, yawning into one hand. “If you’re going to fight about something this stupid,” he said, “at least keep it down.”
Chan straightened, just slightly, shifting his attention between the two of them. “It is not stupid,” said Chan, tone marginally less dangerous now that he was talking to Seungmin. “And I’m not even yelling, though he deserves it.”
“Jeongin might be the baby of the bunch but he isn’t a kid,” Seungmin said, hunching into his blanket. “He’s almost twenty years old. Let me ask you, were you a child at nineteen years old?”
“Jeongin,” Chan ground out, “isn’t me.”
No, he wasn’t. At nineteen, Chan had just started this business up. At nineteen, Minho was fresh out of his second stint in prison proper, not even counting all his time spent in juvie. At nineteen, Hyunjin had— well. At nineteen, Hyunjin’s list of dead enemies probably couldn’t have been counted on two hands. But Jeongin wasn’t like any of them.
And Minho knew, too, what Chan was getting at, really getting at — it had been the whole reason Minho was on babysitting duty at the club, as far as Chan was concerned. Someone could easily see Jeongin’s sweetness, his naivety, and use that to their advantage.
Chan clearly hadn’t realised that the threat could have been coming from inside the house.
Seungmin gave Chan a flat, squinted sort of stare. “Felix is barely twenty-one, just over a year older than Jeongin,” he pointed out. “And he has that same sort of softness Jeongin does, that bright sweetness. Is he a child?”
Chan blanched a little, cheeks turning red in both embarrassment and upset. “That isn’t the same,” he said, though he was clearly set off balance. Silently, Minho agreed with him. It was not the same, not by a mile. “And it isn’t just about Jeongin’s age, or even his softness,” Chan pressed on resolutely, gathering his composure back. His eyes landed on Minho. “It’s also about— you. And what you’re like. If you were— gentler, less biting, then maybe, but— Minho, you know you’re—”
“Yes,” Minho broke in, lips barely moving. “I know.”
“Well, you were not looking at Jeongin like you know,” Chan shot back, uneasy in a way that was striking to see. “You were looking at him like you wanted to take him apart.”
Minho, for a moment, felt as if he was in freefall. Was it so obvious, what he was. He knew how he felt, but he wasn’t aware it was something that could be seen, too. Yes, he wanted that. Wanted to tear Jeongin apart, and Jeongin was so fucking good he probably didn’t even know people could have the urges that Minho had. It often felt like Minho was some kind of beast prowling around a creature too trusting of the world to even realise they needed to guard against the danger of him. Jeongin would tilt his head back for Minho to sink his teeth into his throat if Minho told him to, and that was exactly what Minho had to keep himself from doing. But the urge was there. The instinct. To keep Jeongin, to drag him away, to press teeth against his skin. It was a wild and deadly desire in him and it did not suit Jeongin at all, was not what Jeongin needed nor deserved.
Fuck, he hated that Chan had seen it.
“This is— it’s not allowed. Okay, Minho?” Chan said, quick and emphatic. “I don’t— if it were anyone else, I wouldn’t— but not Jeongin. Not Jeongin.” He slammed a hand against the worktable for emphasis, but all it did was make Seungmin look at him with an uncharacteristic expression of annoyance. “I don’t think you realise the extent of the damage you could cause even unintentionally—”
“Hyung, I do know,” said Minho through gritted teeth. He had always known, from the first moment he had realised what the feelings inside of him were. Minho would ruin Jeongin. He’d destroy him. He could not touch anything so good for long without bruising it. And he knew that. He felt— nauseated, sick to his stomach. This conversation needed to end, he couldn’t take much more of it. “I know more than anyone. I know what I am. Don’t think that I don’t. None of this is necessary. I’m not going to do anything to Jeongin, I’m not going to— whatever it is that you think is happening here is not happening. I am not, and I will never, try anything with Jeongin. I’m not that cruel.”
There was a tense silence. Seungmin eventually sighed. “You’re both fucking stupid,” he muttered.
Having this conversation was bad enough, worse that it had come with an audience. Especially since Seungmin didn’t seem to get it. “You don’t fucking know what you’re talking about,” Minho growled at him, some of the anger he’d been restraining while talking with Chan bursting out now.
Seungmin didn’t flinch. Others might have, but Seungmin didn’t. “I know Jeongin,” he said firmly. “I know he won't thank either of you for meddling in his life like this.”
He’s never going to know about this, Minho thought with a visceral determination. Jeongin would not, could not, ever know about Minho’s desire. He could not.
“Jeongin isn’t going to find out,” Chan said aloud, clearly having the same line of thought as Minho.
Seungmin didn’t look at Chan, he was staring hard at Minho, a strange expression on his face. It was pity, almost, but not sad enough. Minho hated it all the same. “You know,” Seungmin said to him, voice flat and serious, “if you just didn’t want to get with him because of your own complexes, then, like, fine, whatever, it isn’t my business to tell you to do something you don’t want to do— but that isn’t this.” He shifted his gaze to Chan instead, looking up at him, his shoulders still hunched under his blanket. “This is— you both making a decision for Jeongin without even consulting him, acting like his sweetness renders him too stupid to make his own choices. Or like a single bad mood from Minho-hyung is going to cause him to crumble into dust.” He jerked his chin in Minho’s direction as he said that, and added, voice growing stronger, “He’s not a wispy little lamb, he’s stubborn as shit and pretty fucking smart too. And he’s grown, hyung. Whether you like it or not he’s grown.”
“And as I said,” Chan said, his own teeth sounding a little gritted now, an edge of condescending patience to his tone, “if Jeongin— someone else, maybe, someone—”
“Not dry and sharp like Minho-hyung, yeah, I know what you’re saying,” Seungmin cut him off, oddly— sarcastic, almost, which surprised Minho. Like he thought Minho’s abrasiveness was nothing, a trivial thing to be concerned about, in regards to Jeongin. “But has it occurred to either of you that maybe Jeongin would want Minho-hyung?” Seungmin continued in a drawl, the words cutting like little knives at Minho’s heart. “He certainly likes him.”
“He doesn’t,” Minho said, immediate and absolute. He would not allow himself to entertain the notion at all. It would be foolish. It would kill him. “Not like that.”
“No,” Chan agreed. “Not like that. Jeongin— loves Minho the way he loves me. He respects him, looks up to him. And that is— exactly why this can’t go forward.” Chan shook his head, mouth twisted ruefully, tone gentle but unmovable all the same as he said, “Minho’s right, you don’t understand, Seungmin. Jeongin is the type of person who would do anything, anything, for the people he loves. To make them happy. To keep them loving him too. Even if it was something he maybe didn’t want. It wouldn’t even take any coercing. He’s just— that type of person. He loves very hard, too hard, and all he wants is that returned.”
Minho had to close his eyes for a long beat. Chan, so casually, so simply, was speaking aloud some of Minho’s worst fears. That Jeongin would yield to Minho, simply because he did not want to tell someone he cared for no. Jeongin, always so quick to comfort Minho, clearly wishing so much for Minho to be happy, would probably acquiesce all too quickly to any advances Minho would make.
He’d do it to please him. To give him that care he was always so willing to lay at Minho’s feet. Minho— recoiled deeply at the idea of it. Of Jeongin, confused and unsure, but laying beneath Minho anyway, because he was too good and wanted Minho to be happy. No.
Seungmin apparently had no retort for that, because he remained silent, gaze dropping down to the concrete floor. Perhaps he had heard the ring of truth in Chan’s words, spoken with the conviction of someone who had seen, perhaps, similar happenings in the past. Jeongin, cutting himself so others could feed.
With Seungmin’s qualms dealt with, Chan turned his full attention back on Minho. He leaned over the bench, resting his weight on his hands. Minho watched him, didn’t lean back out of the way of that looming. “Minho,” Chan said, calm now, quieter than he’d been before, some softness back in his gaze. “I’m not trying to— to be unkind, here. You know I appreciate you, you know I care. But this is— Jeongin, it’s my baby brother.”
“I know,” Minho whispered.
Chan stared at him levelly. “I need you to promise me you won't act on your— desires,” he said, stumbling a little over the word like it confused him, but sombre and serious all the same. “Please. You can’t— do this to him.”
He’d already assured Chan he would not pursue Jeongin, but if Chan needed to hear it like this, Minho would give it to him. “I promise,” Minho said, meeting Chan’s gaze and meaning every word. “I promise you that I won’t— touch him, I won’t hurt him. I’ll leave him alone.”
They stared at each other for a long few moments before Chan sighed and scrubbed his hand through his hair. “Okay,” he said. “You promised, okay? I know you keep your promises. So I’ll trust you with it. And we can pretend this never happened and just— be normal?”
Minho nodded. He didn’t think he could speak right now, couldn’t figure out the words. He felt so exhausted it was like a blanket smothering him. To be exposed like this was excruciating, to know that from now on Chan would be noticing, seeing everything.
"I just want to say, for the record," Seungmin said. "That both of you are doing Jeongin a disservice and while I’m not going to say anything, he is going to find out eventually, and he is going to be hurt and pissed to all hell about your meddling, Chan-hyung. He deserves more respect, and autonomy, than you’re giving him.”
Chan did not seem to be taking the words in at all. “Your protests have been noted,” he said, and Seungmin’s eyes squinted into a glare. It was somewhat ominous, and were Minho in a better state, he might have been a bit concerned about it. Seungmin in a bad mood could make their lives very difficult. But he was not in a better state. He could barely breathe, right now.
“Why are you here, hyung?” Seungmin asked, barbed. “Just to dictate your employees’ personal lives?”
“I need a physical copy of the route on the furniture job,” Chan said. There was an edge to his voice that spoke of waning patience. He’d calmed down, but he wasn’t calm. In many ways, he was probably still reeling, would be on edge, watching Minho keenly.
Seungmin exhaled, and it was halfway a hiss. He rolled so he was sitting properly at his desk, saying, “I’ll print it off for you now. Then I want my workshop quiet.”
Chan crossed his arms, said nothing, and Minho softly said, “I’m going to head back to my room.” Already he’d begun gathering the pieces of his project back up, quickly putting them all back into their tub. No one said anything more, as the printer booted up with whirrs and clicks, and Minho got to his feet and put the tub of parts back onto the shelving unit.
He left out of the door, open still. And he climbed the flight of stairs to his room. The room he had not wanted to be in, which slammed back into him, the remembrance of it, as soon as he’d stepped over the threshold, the door clicking shut behind him.
Minho did not step further into the room. Instead, he leaned back against the closed door and slid down, a stuttering descent. He brought his knees up, hugging them with his arms, and rested his forehead on them.
He breathed. And he did not move, for a very long time.
——
Jeongin took the stairs two at a time, his body so full of energy suddenly that he couldn’t be expected to do otherwise. It took until the third floor before the reality of such exercise caught up with him and he had to slow down, but even then, with the strain in his legs, he still felt like he was full of fizzing starlight, the sensation of it making him feel like his fingers were tingling.
Against his mouth, the sensation still of the warmth of Minho’s palm. He hadn’t even really touched Minho’s skin, had mostly gotten the rough, dry surface of the bandage, but he knew he could still feel— something. Something that made him feel like bursting. It was the closest he had ever gotten to Minho, if he didn’t count that secret little kiss he’d left on the back of Minho’s neck when he was drunk. And he didn’t count that, not really, because it was a secret thing, something Minho didn’t remember and which Jeongin couldn’t ask him about.
He’d told himself that next time he dropped a kiss on part of Minho’s body, Minho would know about it. He hadn’t really envisioned something like this — not something so chaste, something so small, something that in reality probably barely even counted as a kiss, more just a press of his mouth against not-skin, but still. Minho had noticed him do it — Minho had looked like even something as small as that had stunned him sideways.
Jeongin had to stop for a moment on the final flight of stairs up to the apartment, bracing himself with a hand against the cool concrete wall of the stairwell. He could not believe his own daring. He hadn’t planned for it, hadn’t gone into wrapping Minho’s hand like that with the expectation of kissing his hand; it had been a spontaneous thing, the urge coming to him almost like an intrusive thought, so that he had found his head dipping before he’d really thought through what he was about to do.
He’d expected Minho to— jerk away, maybe, yank his hand back, ask Jeongin what the fuck he was doing, what he was thinking. It was what seemed likely, after the last few times they had spoken together, Jeongin pushing the conversations in truer, more intense directions, and getting pushback each time, albeit only in the short term. He could still remember the way Minho had flinched when Jeongin tried to touch his face over their pancakes in the kitchen, and he’d thought something similar would have happened here.
But it hadn’t. Minho had just sat there, and let him do it. Jeongin wished he had a pillow right in this moment so he could scream into it.
He bounded up the rest of the way up the stairs and let himself into the apartment, almost messing up the keycode because he was so distracted. When he stepped inside, he found Felix and Hyunjin in there already, Felix taking a tray of cookies out of the oven and Hyunjin sitting at the table making his way through a considerable stack of them on a plate in front of him. There were two racks of cookies already cooling, and a giant tupperware sitting open on the table, clearly prepared for storing all of it.
“Hello!” he said, cheerfully even for him. “That’s a lot of cookies!”
“Yeah, we’re having a fucking baking party,” Hyunjin said, waving a half-eaten cookie in the air. “Tread carefully, lest ye be dragged into it.”
“I didn’t even ask you to help,” Felix said, as he set the rack of cookies with the other ones and then stripped the oven gloves off his hands. “Jeongin, do you want some cookies? I made double chocolate for you.”
“Oooh, yes,” said Jeongin. He got to kiss Minho’s hand and there were cookies on offer? If it hadn’t been for Minho’s injury, then Jeongin would have called this a great success of a day. He almost skipped over to the kitchen, where Felix was already picking some cookies out onto a plate for him.
Felix smiled at him when he arrived, that fond little thing that Felix had been giving him almost since he’d moved in here, the one which made Jeongin feel— remarkably cared for. He was wearing a t-shirt that Jeongin recognised, because it was one that he had bought Chan for his birthday two years ago, a pale blue thing with a little cartoon wolf on it in white over the left side of the chest. He’d never seen Chan wear it, and truthfully, he’d thought Chan had probably thrown it away, so god knew where Felix had dug it up from. It suited him better, maybe, except for how it was a little bit too big on him.
“You look very happy,” he said, as he added the last couple of cookies to the pile. There were probably more than Jeongin could eat, but now he was at the kitchen, he could see that there was a tray of brownie dough sitting in a pan, waiting to be baked, so maybe Felix was trying to get rid of as many as possible immediately.
“Yeah!” Jeongin said, holding his hands out for the plate.
“Did something good happen?” Felix asked, not handing them over yet.
Jeongin just shrugged at that, mostly because he wasn’t sure he could convincingly lie, and if he said yes again, they’d wanted to know what had happened and he could not tell them. Or, at least, there was no way he could tell Hyunjin. Felix wouldn’t make fun of him for anything, he sensed, but Hyunjin always made fun of him for everything.
“How about you?” he asked, instead of really answering. “Did something good happen, why are you baking so much?”
Hyunjin said, “Oh, it’s because—” And then Felix snatched up one of the tea towels laying on the counter next to him and threw it at Hyunjin. It was a shockingly good throw, hitting Hyunjin almost in the face but mostly just getting his shoulder and throat.
“Do not say a single word,” he said, as Hyunjin yelped in dramatic outrage, then balled the towel up and threw it back at Felix. Felix dodged so it fell to the floor, and then turned to Jeongin, finally handing him the cookies. “Here,” he said. “Enjoy them, ignore anything Hyunjin says.”
Jeongin looked between the two of them — Felix looking hassled but smiling, Hyunjin with the very worst of his smirks on his face, and decided to take Felix’s advice. He fled to his bedroom, which sat quiet, untouched from this morning and yet he felt— so different.
He put the cookies on his bedside table and sunk down onto his bed, one of his pillows clutched against his stomach. He didn’t scream into it, although the urge was still there. He just sat there, holding it, wishing, not for the first time, that he could tell someone about this, because the feeling inside of him was so overwhelming, a bright joy that could not be contained to just a smile.
He flopped down onto his back and kicked his legs up into the air for a moment. This is it, he thought to himself. This is the way forward.
——
Outside of his bedroom, where he could spend hours in front of his computer barely moving a muscle, Jisung probably spent the bulk of his time down in the basement, doing some kind of training. He had considered it something of a duty, in those early days, when he knew that Chan was taking a chance on him, to keep himself sharp and ready. Chan had been well within his rights to simply throw Jisung out, it was the least Jisung could do.
Now, it had simply become a habit, one that overlapped with Changbin’s own habit. There was an unspoken arrangement, to train together if they could, and so when Jisung had come downstairs in order to work on his shooting with one of the new guns they had received recently, and found Changbin at the punching bag, it had been easy to shift tracks and get onto the mat with him.
He ducked a hit and then skittered away from a follow up hit to his side, laughing a little as he went. “Whoa,” he said, as he found his footing again, hands up in front of his face. “That was fast, for you.”
“Fuck off,” Changbin said, but he was grinning too, his hair shoved back from his face. “Acting like you’re Mr. Twinkletoes over here.”
“Faster than you,” Jisung said, and did his best to prove it, too, darting in for a feinted hit to Changbin’s side, changing it to kick with his knee to the other side when Changbin tried to dodge. It caught, but only just, Changbin angling out of the way almost in time. He went back a couple of steps, shook it off, and then came for Jisung with a punch that Jisung knew, if it landed, would hurt.
That was something he had always, always appreciated with Changbin: he never pulled his punches, even in training sessions like this, where they were just having fun. Some of the guys at the boxing gym Jisung had joined at the tail end of middle school had done that: they had seen a kid, short and skinny, and had treated him like a hit harder than a mere tap would bring him to the ground.
I don’t want to hurt you, kid, one of the trainers had said one time, and Jisung had replied, I get hit harder at home, which had caused discomfort on both sides and Jisung had ended up finding a different gym further from his school, one that taught him what he actually needed to know.
Changbin had always treated Jisung like an equal, even that first time, when neither of them had known what to expect. Changbin had clearly not been expecting anything impressive, but he had come into the fight seriously, had taken Jisung seriously, even though Jisung was clearly smaller than him, if not shorter. And he had taken it with good grace, when Jisung had managed to knock him to the floor during that show spar. Jisung had liked Changbin immediately.
The punch didn’t land; Jisung jumped out of the way, brought his arm up to block another hit. That one was hard too, the smack of it vibrating through to his shoulder, but it felt— good, in a weird way. There was no point, he’d always thought, in training without any sense of danger in it. What was the point in sparring in a clean, careful way, only to get into a fight and be unable to take the hits?
He supposed the men in that boxing gym hadn’t actually been expecting to get into fights. It had been exercise for them, a fun way to get fit and build muscle. It hadn’t been that for Jisung — it had been a lifeline.
Changbin settled back on the balls of his feet, dropping out of the boxing stance he had been using for most of this fight and into something a little more fluid, although still solid in that way that only Changbin could do. He was slower than Jisung, it was a simple truth, and yet Jisung’s speed did not always translate into an advantage. It did not matter how fast Jisung was, when Changbin could act like each hit was nothing more than an annoyance.
Jisung had started with taekwondo as a child, before his stepdad had even been in the picture, and then moved into boxing later. It had not been until he had come here that he had learned— how to fight, outside of those structured lessons, how to use his speed and focused strength as true advantages. He had learned that here, with Changbin, who had trained in boxing only, and picked up the rest during his time working with other gangs. And yet, even now, their styles were different: Changbin was far more inclined to absorb a punch rather than try to dodge and risk leaving himself off-balance.
He did that now, taking Jisung’s hit to the side with nothing more than a quiet grunt of pain, and then hooked a foot around the back of Jisung’s knees and shoved him. He wasn’t fast, but he didn’t need to be, with the kind of power he put behind that shove, and Jisung went to the mat on his back hard enough that the air was knocked out of his lungs.
He gasped for breath for a long moment, fighting against that instinctive panic at suddenly having no air, the cramping sensation in his chest. It took a long moment but eventually he was able to inhale, a whoop of noise, before he rolled over onto his side and coughed a few times, tears in his eyes.
“Fuck,” he managed, his chest heaving.
Changbin appeared in his vision, hunched down to peer at him. He didn’t look particularly concerned, even as he asked, almost idly, “You still alive down here?”
“Barely,” Jisung gasped, but it was coming easier now, some of the adrenaline easing away. Changbin nodded and then stood up and wandered back out of sight, probably to sip at some water judging by the sound of crinkling plastic. That was something else Jisung had always liked about Changbin — he could fuss with the best of them outside of this training mat, but once they were here, sparring, he didn’t fuss at all. He simply trusted that Jisung would tell him if there was a problem.
Jisung waited until his breathing had fully evened out before he began the process of getting to his feet. Sometimes he’d try to be graceful with it, or economical with his movements, but this time he just got up in a fumble of limbs, groaning the entire time until he was back upright and he could see Changbin laughing at him silently. Jisung stuck his tongue out.
“Careful, it’ll get stuck like that,” Changbin said.
“Is that what happened with your face?” Jisung asked innocently. Changbin threw his empty water bottle at him, a remarkably accurate shot that Jisung only just managed to dodge. The bottle went bouncing across the concrete floor where it eventually came to a rest against the wall. Jisung looked at it, back at Changbin, and asked, “Let’s go again?”
Changbin nodded. He came forward on the mat, rolling his shoulders out. He was bigger than he had been two years ago, when Jisung had first seen him, masked and armed in that dry cleaners, and Jisung remembered thinking Changbin was pretty damn bulky even then. Of course, at the time, Changbin had been tying Jisung’s ankles and wrists to a desk chair with zipties, so his brain probably had over-exaggerated a little bit in his memories.
His stepdad had not been bulky. His stepdad had been an average, skinny man who Jisung had seen, through the years, yell at waitstaff, store clerks, anyone who could not fight or argue back. Never anyone bigger, never anyone taller, and Jisung had realised, before long, that the only way to make his stepdad stop was to become someone he didn’t want to mess with. He would never be taller, that much had been obvious, but he could be stronger, someone able to throw punches, someone not so easily hurt. It had worked, eventually: one night he had blocked the smack aimed at his head, knocking his stepdad’s hand away. Then he had looked at the man, dead in the eye, and thought, try it, I dare you.
They had looked at each other for a long, tense moment, and then his stepdad had not. He had not touched Jisung from that moment on. A coward, just like Jisung had always known him to be.
Jisung had spent a long time feeling sorry for himself. Angry and wallowing in the memories of a shitty childhood, remembering it every time he saw his own back in the mirror, the puckers of scars from the cigarettes on his shoulder blades. Resentful of a mother who had not cared enough for him to stop it. He’d been in the process of healing from it when he’d met Changbin and Chan in that dry cleaners office, but it wasn’t until he had met Hyunjin that he had realised, fully, that there were— so many worse things out there.
He and Changbin fought until the sweat was dripping down Jisung’s back, unpleasant and clammy against his heated skin. They were, by this point in their relationship, pretty evenly matched, although Changbin still managed to get the upper hand more often by virtue of being that bit stronger. Changbin combined brute strength with smart thinking and it was something of a dangerous combination in a fight.
Jisung was breathing heavily when Changbin, jumping out of Jisung’s legs trying to sweep his own from under him, said, “You might not want to wear yourself out too much.”
His own breathing was laboured, the words half-lost under the sound of it. Jisung rolled his eyes. “Hyung,” he said, letting the grin come back onto his face, “you’re not that hard to beat.”
Now it was Changbin’s turn to roll his eyes. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. He took a step back, and held up a hand when Jisung made to follow him, assuming he was just retreating back into a different stance. Jisung stopped, blinking at him. “Hyunjin was talking to Seungmin earlier. He kicked me out of the workroom and everything.”
It took a moment for the implication to hit. When it did, Jisung felt the grin drop off his face, some of his good mood draining out of him. “Oh,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Changbin. He was looking at Jisung with a calm, steady expression. It wasn’t a surprise to hear that Changbin knew about the revenge trips that Jisung and Hyunjin took together, because Jisung thought probably everything knew — or at the very least, Chan and Seungmin knew, and Chan was likely to have told Changbin about them, at some point. It was surprising that Changbin was letting Jisung know that he knew about them; they, like a couple of other things, had taken on a veneer of something that everyone simply looked past instead of acknowledging. “So you might need to be awake tonight, that’s all I meant.”
His voice was perfectly clear of judgement, or of any emotion honestly. Jisung had thought it often, but there was a strong urge to ask, in this moment, does it bother you that he takes me and not you, or Chan-hyung? Do you know why he takes me? Can you tell me why? But he didn’t think Changbin knew the answer to the second set of questions, and Jisung was not interested in hearing— speculation. He could come up with speculation on his own. He had done, long hours laying awake at his ceiling trying to figure it out.
“Oh,” he said again.
Any urge to continue this had completely left him, and he could see that Changbin had seen it on his face. He nodded, and then turned to head to the side of the mat, where he’d left his hand towel and his shoes. Jisung watched him for a moment, feeling— nothing, really, in the moment, his brain a little empty. Then he too went to the side and started putting his own shoes on.
Changbin was back at the punching bag when Jisung finished getting sorted, the light jacket he’d been wearing when he came down here tied around his waist. He thumbed over his shoulder at the door and said, “I’m going to head back upstairs.”
Changbin gave him a little salute, not mocking somehow. “Good match today,” he said. “You need to work on your kicks, they’re getting weaker.”
Jisung opened his mouth, and then shut it again. But he took a moment, as he passed by it on his way to the door, to snatch up Changbin’s water bottle and throw it back at him. Jisung’s aim was spot on, although it probably helped that Changbin had his back to him, already starting on his workout. It smacked him right on the shoulder blade, and Jisung fled before Changbin could take his revenge.
The journey up the stairs was— a slog, after Changbin had put him through the wringer. It was the one thing that Jisung had always thought was a negative about this building that they’d moved themselves into: four floors, plus a basement, and no elevator. Usually he didn’t really mind, since his bedroom was on the second floor and he had his attached bathroom, so he could be lazy when he wanted to be. But times like this, his legs screaming, he was cursing it all a little bit as he dragged himself all the way up to the apartment.
The kitchen, when he let himself in, smelled fucking phenomenal. Clearly Felix had been baking in here, because Jisung could not only smell the cookies and chocolate, but he could see, on the counter, a series of tupperware boxes and plates, all of them filled with different cookies. There was a pile of clean dishes at the side of the sink, freshly washed.
There was no sign of Felix himself, but Hyunjin was in the room. The sight of him was, as always, a little jolting, a little— overwhelming, when Jisung hadn’t expected him or planned for him. He was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, all of him covered up, and when Jisung had come in, he’d straightened up from where he was getting something out of the drinks fridge and looked across the counter at Jisung.
“Hello,” Jisung said, as he toed his shoes back off again, horribly aware of the way his shirt, sleeveless though it was, was sticking to his chest and back due to all the sweat. It felt gross on his body, which probably meant it looked gross, which might explain the way Hyunjin was staring at him, with that little furrow between his brows. If Jisung had known Hyunjin was up here, he might have showered first, but maybe it didn’t really matter in the long run.
“Hello,” said Hyunjin. He shut the fridge door with a bang but didn’t move away from it as he opened his can of diet coke and sipped at it. Jisung, padding in his socked feet over to that fridge, kept his gaze very firmly on the appliance and not anywhere near Hyunjin’s mouth.
“Sorry,” he said, as it became very clear that Hyunjin was not going to move out of the way and was just going to keep watching Jisung with that inscrutable expression on his face. “I need to get into the drinks fridge.”
“Hmm,” said Hyunjin, but he did shuffle slightly to the side so that Jisung could get at it without touching him. Only when Jisung bent to retrieve that last can of Fanta from where it had been shoved right to the back of the shelf did Hyunjin actually move, stepping away to go look in one of the cupboards, the one where they kept all the different types of ramen they collected.
Jisung looked over the plethora of baked goods on the counter and realised with delight that one of the tupperware boxes, the biggest one, held cut slices of brownies. Felix didn’t make those as often as he made cookies, apparently because they took a longer time to make, but every time he had, they were some of the nicest things that Jisung had ever tasted.
“You guys made brownies?” he asked, edging over to that side of the counter. “Can I have one? Maybe two? Maybe more?”
Hyunjin pulled a packet of ramen down, one of the less spicy brands, and turned to give Jisung a look. It was not quite as annoyed as it sometimes was, which probably meant that Hyunjin had been helping himself to cookies along the way and was in a good mood. That was a little surprising; Hyunjin was not usually in such good moods on the days he planned on turning up outside Jisung’s door at night, but it wasn’t an indicator that Jisung could use with any kind of accuracy, because Hyunjin was rarely in any other kind of mood when he was around Jisung, it seemed.
“Once again,” Hyunjin said, “I had nothing to do with it. Lix made all of them. But you can take some, if you want.” He fished around on the counter and pulled out a smaller plate, this one with some cookies on it, caramel flavour judging by the glaze on them. “These were put aside for you. You weren’t in your room earlier.”
Jisung took the plate. Their fingers brushed for a split second and Hyunjin snatched his hand back so fast that the plate almost fell to the floor, but Jisung managed to save it. He said nothing, not about that, not about Hyunjin’s words, because he had read between the lines and heard when Hyunjin was not saying — that Hyunjin, like he had done a few weeks ago, had brought these cookies down to give to Jisung personally, who was cursing himself suddenly for having gone down to the basement in the first place.
Would Hyunjin have stayed with him, like last time, if Jisung had asked? They might have been able to have a stretch of time together, unmarred this time, hopefully, by blood and carnage. But instead Jisung had gone down to train and missed his opportunity.
But he didn’t say anything about it, because he knew that Hyunjin would deny all of it. Instead, he just said, “Thank you.”
Hyunjin waved him off. He picked up his ramen packet and then started on the process of getting everything he needed for it — the pot out of the cupboard, filling it with water, fetching two eggs from the fridge. Jisung took a couple of the brownies from the tupperware and put them on top of the cookies on the plate. Then he sat at the kitchen table, watching Hyunjin for a moment, but then dropping his gaze and just listening to the sounds of it as he drank his Fanta, not wanting to make Hyunjin uncomfortable.
He’d been doing that a lot, recently — watching Hyunjin whilst trying to not watch him. Hyunjin wouldn’t thank him for doing it, but Jisung had just been trying to— figure it out. It had been at Chan’s birthday party that Jisung had first began to put the threads of it together: Hyunjin’s comment about having shared custody, the way he was still so comfortable around Felix, his physicality with him not diminished despite the fact that Chan and Felix were making no secret of their relationship.
It had bugged Jisung still though. Annoyed him, not just with Felix, but with Chan, too, who surely had not been oblivious to Hyunjin’s feelings for Felix either. How could Chan not be? He knew Hyunjin even better than Jisung did, had been there from the beginning of it all, had helped Hyunjin become the person he was now — this funny, sweet, sharp person that Jisung liked so much. But even Chan had acted like nothing was up.
It had taken Jisung longer than it should have to put it together. He’d wondered, all along, how Hyunjin, barely able to handle even the kissing in Jeongin’s dramas, had somehow worked up to fucking Felix, and in so short a time, too. Then he’d realised: they were not fucking. They had not been sleeping together in that manner, and so it made sense that Hyunjin was fine with Felix getting that from Chan. Hyunjin still got what he wanted from Felix, it seemed. That closeness, that intimacy; Jisung had come upstairs more than once in these past few days to find them cuddled up on the couch together, laughing at something on Hyunjin’s phone.
So it made sense. It did not make Jisung feel good about it. Jisung had long ago realised that if he could have Hyunjin’s love, his affection, then he wouldn’t need sex at all. It was something he could live without, happily and easily, if it meant he could have Hyunjin in return. But clearly that was not a thing Felix felt capable of doing, and Jisung supposed— well, it was fair enough. Felix was not him, after all.
If he were Felix, he reflected wryly, he might have had an easier time of it all around.
He finished the Fanta, stood up, tossed it at the trash can. It missed, embarrassingly, and he saw Hyunjin watch it out of the corner of his eye and then turn back to his ramen when the can hit the floor, his back to Jisung. Jisung sighed and went to pick up the can again.
“Hyunjin,” he said, as he dropped it safely into the trash can. Hyunjin didn’t look at him, but that was nothing unusual. “Do you need me to stay up tonight?”
There was a pause, and then Hyunjin did look at him, giving him a very confused look over his shoulder. “What?” he asked.
Jisung made his voice a little gentler. “Changbin-hyung said that you were talking to Seungmin earlier,” he said. “So I thought— maybe you would need me tonight.”
The confusion on Hyunjin’s face cleared, leaving something very blank behind. It was not the blankness Jisung saw, when Hyunjin stood outside his room in the harsh yellow lighting of the stairwell, but it was something similar. Something Jisung found even more difficult to interpret. Perhaps it was just the reminder of what it meant, if Hyunjin needed Jisung like that.
“No,” he said, eventually. “No, that’s not what I was talking to Seungmin about. I don’t need you. And Changbin-hyung needs to mind his own business.”
He didn’t sound properly angry but there was an edge to his voice, enough so that Jisung just said, very lightly now, “Ah, okay, he must have had it wrong. Sorry, Hyunjin.”
He was sorry — it was a little too close to gossiping, he knew, which was something Hyunjin hated. But Hyunjin just looked at him for a long beat and then sighed and said, “It’s okay.” His mouth worked, and then he said, voice dropped to a low murmur, low enough to almost miss, “You don’t have to say sorry to me for everything, Jisung.”
Jisung really had no idea what to say to that. His first instinct was to apologise again — sorry for always saying sorry, but that was ridiculous, and he knew he could not. Something about the words, the tone, caused a shudder up his spine, but not an unpleasant one. It felt similar to how it had felt to hear Hyunjin apologise for being mean to him in the quiet of the car, the words dropping into the space between them. Shocking and searing and totally unexpected. Totally unneeded.
Hyunjin, though, had already turned to his food, and the set of his shoulders made it very obvious that he was not willing to discuss this anymore. So Jisung said nothing, nothing whatsoever, and instead just let himself back out of the apartment, into the stale, cool air of the stairwell, and began the somewhat shaky journey down to his bedroom.
——
Felix was brushing his teeth in the ensuite bathroom when the bedroom door opened and shut, a little louder than usual. It made him jump, just a little jolt, the way most loud noises did, even now, but the instinctive stomach-drop fear was greatly diminished, thankfully. He took a moment to breathe in through his nose, and then craned his head back to look through the open bathroom door.
Chan was out there, taking his shirt off, undoing the buttons one at a time, revealing the undershirt underneath. His movements were a little jerky, oddly so, and when he turned to put his shirt in the laundry basket, he was scowling, an expression on his face that Felix didn’t think he had seen before. He tossed the shirt a little more aggressively than usual too, an irritated little flick of his hand.
Felix turned back to the sink, looking at himself in the mirror for a moment. Chan was still insisting that he was too skinny, taking his chance every time Felix was naked to playfully scold him for not eating enough, but looking at himself now, Felix could definitely say that he was almost back to the same weight he’d been at his father’s house. He couldn’t explain to Chan that he ate more here than he’d ever eaten at home, when the anxiety and stress had kept his stomach in constant knots, but it was true, all the same.
He spat into the sink, rinsed his mouth out with the tap water. He could hear Chan thudding around in the bedroom, doing god only knew what, and Felix took perhaps a little longer than normal before he stepped out of the bathroom to see what was going on. Perhaps some of that latent anxiety was seeping back, at those angry sounds.
Chan was sitting on the bed when Felix came out, stripped down to his undershirt and boxer shorts, his hands yanking at his socks. Felix stopped just outside the bathroom and said, “Hyung?” Even to him, his voice sounded unsure.
Chan— startled, somehow. He looked up and over at Felix and said, “Lix. Sorry. I didn’t even realise you were in there.”
That made Felix smile, just a little, if uneasily. He’d grown used to Chan’s face breaking into a smile when he laid eyes on Felix, and that had not happened just now. Chan instead just looked blank and maybe still annoyed. “You didn’t hear the water?” he asked.
Chan shook his head. “I was lost in my own head,” he said. He balled his socks up and stood back up so he could put them with the rest of his clothing. These, too, were thrown into the laundry basket a little too hard, and when he turned back to face the room, he ran a hand through his hair, still scowling.
Felix fought with himself. He was not scared of Chan. That much was true, that much he felt down to his bone marrow — it was impossible for him to be scared of Chan. But the way Chan was acting made him uncomfortable all the same, because if nothing else, then Felix did not like people being angry around him. He had felt this with Hyunjin as well, who he knew, too, would never hurt him — it was not a rational thing. Other people’s anger had always meant pain, to him, and he could not get his body to realise what his brain knew: there was no danger here.
Still, Chan was clearly upset about something. “Hyung,” he said again, still quiet. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Chan said, very shortly.
Felix made himself pad out into the room. He was wearing the t-shirt he’d been baking in, but he’d changed into a pair of shorts that he had found in Chan’s drawers, older things, he thought, because he thought they probably wouldn’t even fit Chan, considering how well they fit Felix. He saw Chan’s eyes follow him, watched him register that everything Felix was wearing belonged to Chan, and was pleased to see that some of that irritation dropped from Chan’s face. He was still frowning, but it was— less, now.
He sat on the edge of the bed, looked up at Chan. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You seem— upset about something.”
Chan sighed. When he ran a hand through his hair again, he scrubbed at it with rough movement, dislodging it from the carefully styled look Felix had watched him put it in this morning. “I’m fine,” he said, his voice— softer now, but not quite back to normal. He still had not smiled. “It’s nothing that you need to worry about, Felix.”
Felix absorbed that, quiet for a long few seconds. Then he said, “Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to hear, hyung. I want to— know what you’re thinking. I always want that. You don’t have to just deal with things by yourself, you can talk to me about them.”
Chan looked at him, their eyes meeting for the first time. He looked almost surprised by Felix’s words, which wasn’t overly shocking to Felix, who had already realised by now that Chan took it upon himself to do everything he possibly could by himself. He could delegate work tasks to Changbin or Minho or Seungmin as needed, knew how to step back and let his team work as best as they could without interfering, but he didn’t burden them with his emotions, his fears, his worries. He kept those inside.
“Ah, Lix,” Chan said eventually. “You’re so fucking sweet.”
No, Felix wanted to tell him. I’m just yours.
Chan sighed again. This time there was a little note of defeat to it. He came over to the bed, looking down at Felix for a moment with an odd set to his mouth, and then he sank down onto the bed next to Felix, close enough that Felix could feel the warmth of him, but not close enough that they were quite touching.
“I never told you,” Chan said, twisting so that he could keep looking at Felix, not quite in the eyes but instead, apparently, at the spray of Felix’s freckles across his cheeks, “how Jeongin and I became brothers.”
Felix blinked a little and then shook his head. No, Chan had never told him that, and neither had Jeongin, although it seemed like something of a non-sequitur in this moment. What did that have to do with Chan’s mood? But Chan was already reaching out to take his hand, and Felix let him, for the pleasure of Chan’s warm skin against his.
“No, you didn’t,” he said. “But you’re not— blood brothers, are you? You don’t look anything alike.”
Chan shook his head this time. “No, we’re not blood related. We’re not even really adopted, as in, there’s nothing legally connecting us. I guess it’s more like we just adopted each other.”
Felix didn’t say anything, just squeezed their hands together. Chan looked at their hands, then back up, and smiled for the first time since he’d walked into the room, although it still didn’t quite reach his eyes. He reached up and tucked a loose piece of hair behind Felix’s ear, a habit he’d gotten into. The graze of his fingers against the skin there was something Felix didn’t think he’d get used to.
“I had an older brother though,” Chan said. “Blood related, I mean. His name was Jun, he was seven years older than me. Our dad died when I was five, then our mom when I was eleven, and they let him look after me, after that. We had to live in this shitty building, I think we had the only unit with an intact roof, but we had each other, we only had each other.”
“You’ve never mentioned him before,” Felix murmured. Nobody had. But the emotion in Chan’s voice when he talked about his brother was so deep it was like looking into the darkness of the ocean.
Chan shrugged a little. “I don’t like talking about him, mostly,” he said. “The others know, of course, one way or another. But it’s hard, sometimes, to remember him.”
Felix nodded; he understood that. He didn’t like thinking about his sister, if he could help it, so he couldn’t blame Chan for this. He was stroking Chan’s hand now, his thumb sweeping over the back of his hand. He’d done this with Hyunjin, too, he realised, and almost stopped, but he wanted to give Chan some comfort, if he could.
“You know, the worst part is, when I was that age, I thought my brother was a real adult, so mature.” Chan laughed under his breath, the sound devoid of amusement. “But when he died, he was the same age that Jeongin is now, and I look at Jeongin and realise just how young that is. Like, he was still a teenager when he died. He’d barely lived at all.”
Felix thought about that — someone the age of Jeongin, in charge of an eleven year old. Even two years older than that, Felix didn’t think he’d be capable of it. That level of responsibility for a child was terrifying.
And then Chan said, “He was working for Lee Jaerim.”
Felix had to work very hard to keep his instinctual flinch at the name. It was not just that the reminder of his father’s existence was shocking, in this room with Chan, it was that Chan always, without fail, used the Magpie’s name. Always the full thing, always with that bitter note of contempt in it. And it made Felix remember the way his father used to sound, sometimes: Lee Yongbok, the full thing, right before he got angry.
“He’d been working for him in high school, too,” Chan continued. “Part time, just running little errands, I guess, because we had needed the money. After Mom died, we needed the money even more, so he went full time. He’d be away a lot during the night, and he’d never tell me what he was up to, he’d just sent me off to school like everything was normal. I think half the kids at that elementary school had parents or siblings working for some gang, so nobody blinked an eye. And then one day, just after my twelfth birthday, he didn’t come home.”
He looked exhausted, telling this story, like it was taking something out of him. Felix wanted to— hold him, kiss him maybe, wanted to take that tiredness onto himself. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t really move other than to keep stroking his thumb across Chan’s knuckles, because he suspected he knew where this story was going, and it horrified him.
“It took a couple of days for it to sink in that he wasn’t coming back. I knew he must have died, that he’d been killed somehow, because that was the only explanation for why he couldn’t come home. I carried on like normal because I didn’t want anyone to realise anything was up, just going to school and coming home, using the money he’d stashed in one of the empty units in our building to buy food. I shoplifted when I could. And after a week, I went to where I knew he worked, and tried to get them to tell me what had happened.”
“They refused, of course. Threw me out of the warehouse and told me to not come back. I’d have persisted but they were clearly not opposed to violence and it scared me. It wasn’t until years later that I found out what had happened to him. He’d been on a job and he’d been shot, caught in the crossfire. He needed a hospital, but he might have lived. He might have lived. But bringing him to a hospital would have garnered too much attention, might have brought the police asking questions, and so instead, Lee Jaerim had ordered for him to be put down, like a dog.”
Felix had to close his eyes for a long moment. Yes, that sounded like his father, sounded like something he would do. How easy he would have found it, to make that decision, to order it done. Felix had seen it happen before; his father had tried to get Felix to do it himself, once, put a gun in his hand and ordered him to shoot a man who had already been beaten almost to unconsciousness. Felix had not been able to do it. And the man had been shot anyway, and Felix had been beaten for refusing.
But this was not some nameless man, this was Chan’s brother. Felix imagined it: a young man who looked like Chan, perhaps with his nose, his dimples, Jeongin’s age but more serious with it, forced to grow up much, much too fast. It was sickening, to think of that young man shot on the orders of the Magpie. Shot, on the orders of Felix’s father.
I might never be able to tell him, he thought, the realisation sinking into him, guilt and despair all mixed up together. I can probably never tell him the truth. It was one thing to be the son of the Magpie when Chan’s only gripe with the man was that they were both players within the power struggle of this city. It was another, a totally different thing, to be the son of the Magpie, murderer of Chan’s older brother who he’d obviously loved. Who he loved still.
How alike they were. How similarly they felt, how closely their lives connected. And Chan could maybe never, ever know about it.
“He’s awful,” he eventually whispered. “I’m so sorry, hyung. He’s awful.”
Chan stayed silent. Felix kept his eyes closed, not quite wanting to see what his expression looked like, and then felt the touch of Chan’s mouth against his forehead. It was so sweet and Felix felt the tears leap to his eyes almost instantly. He felt so much for this man, it was almost unbearable, and the thought of keeping this from him for the rest of their lives weighed on him.
But it was like he had thought the night he told Hyunjin the truth — he was not the Magpie’s son, not anymore. He had wanted to shed that skin for as long as he remembered, and he felt like he had finally done it. Surely here, like this, he could be free of that?
He opened his eyes and found Chan looking back at him. He had that expression on his face that made Felix’s insides feel molten, a look of such soft affection that Felix thought he could die from it. He had to clear his throat and say, “So how did you meet Jeongin, then?”
“Oh, right,” Chan said, smiling again, more at the reminder of their original topic rather than out of humour, Felix knew. “Well, I got caught shoplifting one time, and they sent me to a group home. It— sucked, honestly, it sucked more than I had imagined. It was better to be in that one room apartment even though there was black mould in the bathroom. But I didn’t have a choice, so I was stuck in a room with three other boys my age with a penchant for stealing my stuff.”
He was quiet for a bit. Felix didn’t rush him, but he shifted on the bed, shuffling backwards and taking Chan with him by the hand until they were both leaning up against the headboard, their backs to the wall, Felix turned more towards Chan. Chan let go of his hand and instead started stroking his hair. Felix had to fight to keep his eyes open at that touch.
“They learned to leave me alone,” Chan said eventually, very quietly. There was a world of unspoken words in there, a world that Felix was not going to poke at. “When Jeongin arrived, I’d been there for just over a year? I kept my head down, I made sure nobody messed with me, and it worked, for the most part. But Jeongin was— younger than most of the kids in that place. The minimum age was usually ten, but he was only eight when he arrived, and he was tiny. This little slip of a thing, not able to defend himself at all, and so sweet that the other boys turned on him immediately.”
Felix had been spared most childhood bullying by virtue of his father, but there’d been enough of it in elementary school, before the other kids had come to realise who he was, to give him some idea of what it must have been like. And Jeongin, like Chan before him, would have had no one. Felix’s heart ached just thinking about it.
“When I first saw him, one of the caretakers at the home was screaming at him about something. They’d been screaming long enough that Jeongin was sobbing, just standing there taking it, and I overheard some of the older boys snickering about how they’d tricked Jeongin into breaking a rule so he got into trouble. Lix, I can’t— I can’t emphasise enough, how small he was. How vulnerable and alone he was, and seeing it cut through some of the emptiness I had felt since my brother died.
“If you ask Jeongin, he’ll probably say I saved him, but the reality is that he saved me. I felt nothing back then, nothing except the anger, which would come in waves every so often. It was unbearable. But looking after Jeongin, protecting him, gave me something to focus on, even when we were in the group home still. I did my best to keep the other boys from bothering him so much, but it had mixed results, and I couldn’t do anything about the caretakers. A couple of them had really honed in on Jeongin, because he was forgetful and prone to clumsiness. He still is, of course,” he added, a real smile breaking onto his face for the first time. Felix wanted to touch the curve of his mouth, feel that smile for himself, but he refrained. “But he was so much worse back then, he’d get into trouble almost every day over small, nothing things, and so they’d hit him, every day, and I couldn’t stop that from happening.”
Felix bit his tongue. This was not something he’d expected, a moment of fellow feeling with Jeongin, but he felt it — he, too, knew what it was like, to be hurt over something that was, in the end, inconsequential.
“He wanted them so badly to love him,” Chan said. His voice had some new note in it now, something maybe— haunted. “Wanted to please them, however he could. He still—” He stopped, his jaw flexing. It took another few moments before he continued. “All he wants is for people to love him. He wants to make people happy, however he can, whatever it takes. And he was like that then, too, desperate for their approval, for their love. But it never worked, it was never good enough, he was never good enough, and then one day— the other boys did something that could have killed him.”
Felix waited to see if Chan would elaborate but when Chan was silent again, Felix asked softly, “What did they do?”
“We had—” Chan shifted, sitting upright, like it would be easier if he did it straight-backed. “We had chores that we cycled through in shifts, and one of them was helping out in the laundry room with these big industrial washers and dryers. And it was Jeongin’s turn to help and—”
He stopped again. Felix did touch his face then, just a brush of his fingertips against Chan’s cheek. “I’m sorry,” Felix said, as Chan tilted his face into the touch. “You don’t have to tell me, not if it causes you pain.” Because it was clear that did cause him pain, to talk about it. The death of his brother was something that went so deep it felt like it had calcified inside him somehow, but the horror of whatever this was had not reached that point.
Chan shook his head. “I’m okay,” he said. “They— the worst of the older boys shoved him into one of the dryers, shut him in it — they latched, locked — and then they set it going. With him locked in it.”
Felix could not contain his gasp of horror, even as his hand cupped Chan’s cheek, trying to give some comfort. Even knowing that Jeongin was fine, knowing that he slept safely and comfortably in the bedroom opposite this one, the thought was horrifying. Something like that could have killed Jeongin so easily, and he had no doubt that those children who had done it to him had not thought of anything beyond scaring their victim.
“I usually hung out with him while he did his shift in there, I was just late that day, so by the time I got there, I was too late to stop them from turning it on, but I was able to turn it off again and get him out. They tried to stop me, but I broke one of their noses. Jeongin was terrified, banged up a bit and hot to the touch already, his hands a little burned, and the caretakers shrugged about it and then told me to not fight. And I knew then that those boys would escalate in revenge, and I couldn’t look after Jeongin every minute of the day, and so the next night, I helped him pack his stuff, and I ran away with him.”
Felix thumbed gently at the skin under Chan’s eye. There was something a little empty in that gaze, like he had sunken in on himself, and Felix kept his touch gentle, letting the silence stretch out as he watched Chan— resurface a little. “How old were you?” he asked eventually. He could guess, from how old Jeongin had been, but he wanted to hear it.
“Fourteen,” Chan said. Like it was nothing, like he hadn’t been a child himself. “I took him to where I had stayed with my brother, the place was still empty, and the cash was all still there. I don’t think anyone ever even looked for us, to be honest. And it was awful, a lot of the time, Jeongin was traumatised and the type of people who will give work to fourteen years olds are decidedly unsavoury, but we made it work. I made it work, and it was better, so much better, than being in that place.”
Felix nodded. Yes, it would have been better. It had been shocking to him, how in some ways his time on the streets, as difficult as it had been, had been so much better than living at home. He’d missed the roof over his head, the food and his bed, his sisters and the routine. But there had been times where he had felt like— he could breathe, for the first time. That constant threat of violence, simply vanished.
Fourteen, he thought. A fourteen year old looking after a nine year old, and doing such a good job of it that Jeongin had grown into someone sweet and kind, someone who knew his own mind, resourceful and strong in his way. Chan had done that, for Jeongin, when nobody else would have bothered.
Felix used the hand against Chan’s cheek to turn Chan’s head towards him. “You,” he said, a barely-there murmur, “are such a good man.”
Chan was going to protest, Felix knew, but he couldn’t because Felix drew him into a kiss, trying to put all the emotions he felt inside of him into it. It was remarkably tender, that kiss, because Felix could do nothing else. A almost-chaste press of their lips, Felix sighing into it a little, Chan’s arm going around his waist almost like instinct.
He let their lips part, Chan looking at him, his mouth slightly parted. Then Chan said, so carefully that it felt like an admission of something, “I love you.”
Felix looked at him, steadily and calmly. He expected Chan to get embarrassed, maybe, or to try to take it back, but Chan didn’t. Instead he swallowed, and said, “I know it’s early, for me to say that. I don’t expect you to say it back, but I—”
“No,” interrupted Felix gently. “Hyung, I love you too. I think I’m going to love you for a long time.”
Chan exhaled. Then he tilted his head so that their mouths met again, kissing Felix harder this time, more intent. Felix let himself be pushed down to the mattress, pulled Chan until Chan was on top of him, his weight solid and grounding against him. He did love Chan, so much that maybe it should have been scary — and it was, but there was a simplicity in it too. How easy it was, to be Chan’s.
He’d known, from an early stage, that the goodness of this man would be the ruin of him, and he knew now that that was true. Felix, with his lies, his secrets, was possibly not worthy of him, but he would work every day to make sure that he could return the goodness inside of Chan back to him.
Chapter 12
Notes:
content warnings: referenced child sex abuse, referenced sex trafficking, violence, blood, the inherent intimacy of wound tending 2: electric boogaloo
wow we got SO many comments on the last chapter, thank you all so much!! i guess making you all angry worked out!
with that in mind, here's chapter 12.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Chan, for most of his life, had never used an alarm, because his body naturally woke him early enough to not need it. The few times he’d set an alarm, he’d always woken up a good hour or so before it, and been unable to settle back into sleep, rendering the whole process as something of a farce. He rarely had early morning meetings or appointments, so it was not usually a problem.
He’d been going to bed earlier than usual this past week or so, too, coming upstairs to spend time with Felix. He’d been sleeping in a little later as well, lulled into comfort by the weight of Felix in his arms, the warmth of his body against his own. The press of their skin together. He was not sure that he’d ever been so well rested in his life before.
He woke today with the mid-morning sunlight creeping across his face, a narrow slant of it from the crack in the curtains, the room otherwise lit by just a gentle glow. He often woke up on his side with Felix tucked up against him, his chest to Felix’s back, the way they had woken up together after their first time sleeping together. Today, though, Felix lay on his side too, facing Chan, his head resting on Chan’s arm. He was still asleep, his mouth a little open, his hands resting in loose curls on the bed between them.
It was astounding, how beautiful he was. He’d filled out, just a little bit, over the past few weeks, and there was no longer anything haggard or drawn about his features. The spray of freckles across his face went down across his shoulders, too, and Chan had dedicated quite a bit of time to kissing those. There was, against the back of his neck, and on one of his shoulders, the slowly healing remnants of hickeys that Chan had left. He would have to renew those, possibly tonight.
Felix slept, safely, soundly. Chan shifted forward on the bed and slid his other arm around the slim line of Felix’s waist, splaying his hand against Felix’s back. There were scars, here, things he had noticed the first time he’d touched Felix here. He’d seen them too, now, rather than just feeling the roughness under his fingertips. It was not that they were marring, just that they were— odd, against Felix’s skin. Most of them long and thin, nothing that was easily identifiable, not like the time he had seen the scars on Jisung’s back, those small distinctive burns.
He had not asked Felix where he had gotten these scars. The first time he’d seen them, he hadn’t mentioned them, too distracted by how Felix had looked on his front on the bed. The first time he’d seen them and touched them, Felix had tensed, just a little, just enough to be noticeable — he usually was not tense, at all, when Chan had him spread out against the mattress. He was usually so— pliable, melting under Chan’s hands, but he had gone stiff, in that moment, as Chan’s fingers traced one of the long lines of discolouration, and so Chan had not asked.
He’d kissed them, though. One after the other, soft presses of his mouth, until Felix had relaxed again, loose-limbed and easy for it as Chan slid into him.
He leaned in and kissed Felix’s face, now, a gentle kiss to Felix’s cheekbone. Felix didn’t stir, so Chan kissed him again, trailing a slow line of them across Felix’s forehead, down his nose, against the closed eye that he could reach. Once he did that, Felix made a little noise, questioning and quiet, and squinted that eye open. “Hyung,” he said, voice sleep-rough. Chan would never get sick of hearing that deep, scraping tone.
“Good morning,” Chan said. He dipped his head back in so he could kiss Felix properly on the mouth, slowly at first, feeling as Felix’s mouth dropped open for it. Chan tugged him in closer, until Felix was pressed in against him. Unlike Chan, Felix was wearing shorts, although he’d gone shirtless last night, and when Chan moved his hand up further, his fingers spread between Felix’s shoulder blades, he felt Felix shiver a little against him.
Reluctantly, Chan pulled back. Part of him wanted to lose the morning in Felix, to roll on top of him and settle between his legs. Instead of doing that, he played with the back of Felix’s hair, watching Felix’s eyelids flutter shut again, and said, “I’ll make you breakfast.”
Felix opened his eyes after a long moment. When he did so, they were alight with that bright mischief that gave Chan such delight to see, so he wasn’t surprised really when Felix said, “I’m not sure I trust you with that.”
Chan stopped playing with his hair and instead tugged gently on a lock of it in retaliation. “I’m a perfectly good cook,” he said.
“Hyunjin told me about the ceramic dish incident, you know,” Felix said.
“You know, I told him at the time to not tell anyone about that,” Chan said. “So I don’t understand why he insists on telling everyone.”
“Well that was your first mistake,” Felix said. “Expecting Hyunjin to keep something embarrassing a secret.”
Chan snorted. Felix did have a point there. He let go of the lock of hair he still had between his fingers and trailed his hand back down the length of Felix’s spine, just his fingertips dragging, ignoring the way they bumped over any scars along the way. “I can cook eggs,” he said. “And those mini sausages. And I make a killer slice of toast, if I’m allowed to brag about it. Would that be acceptable?”
Felix smiled at him, close-lipped, beautiful. Almost too beautiful, up close like this, his face barely a couple of inches away from Chan’s. How had Chan gotten so lucky, to have Felix in his bed, to have Felix in his life like this? “Yeah, hyung,” Felix said. “That would be great.”
It took another few minutes to get out of bed, because every time Chan tried to move his arm from under Felix’s head, Felix would turn his face just enough to let the skin drag against his mouth, and Chan had to kiss him again. By the time he got his arm free, Felix was laughing, mostly at himself, and Chan climbed out of the bed before he stood smiling at Felix, just looking at him in the bed.
“Ah, don’t,” Felix said, once he saw how Chan was looking at him. “You’re giving me that look again.” He rolled half over until his legs were off the bed and then got to his feet in a charmingly uncoordinated movement.
“What look,” said Chan, as innocently as he could manage, when he knew perfectly well how his face had looked; he’d been able to feel it on his features, the lovesick nature of it.
“The look that made Jeongin come to me last week complaining about it,” Felix said. “He said it was too much to expect him to put up with and that I needed to make you stop it. I’m not sure how to do that, but consider this your warning.”
He forewent the drawers that held his own clothes, which Chan had cleared out for him — not a difficult task, since Chan didn’t have that much clothing to begin with, and this bedroom had come with a lot of built in storage space — and instead padded on his bare feet to the laundry basket, where he plucked out the t-shirt that Chan had been wearing yesterday.
“Lix, that’s dirty,” Chan said, smiling helplessly at him.
Felix lifted it to his nose, sniffed it a little, and then shrugged. “You didn’t even work out yesterday,” he said, as he began to pull it on. “I’ll change it later when I shower, let me wear it, please, hyung?”
Like Chan could do anything else. Like he wasn’t losing a little bit of his mind, seeing Felix like that, wearing something that just the day before had been on Chan’s own body. He got dressed himself, in sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt, in lieu of doing something like push Felix up against the drawers. By the time he felt like it was safe to look over, Felix was wearing his own sweatpants, and a pair of very fuzzy and warm looking socks. His hair, unbrushed still, was sticking up in fluffy tufts around his face.
“I said don’t,” he said, when he caught Chan looking at him, but he was smiling too.
Nobody was in the kitchen. Chan had checked the time, found that it was late enough that Jeongin would be up and busy, but it was unlikely that Hyunjin would emerge for another couple of hours. Who knew what Changbin was up to; he had not messaged Chan to let him know he was going out, so at the very least, he was in the house. Felix smothered a yawn against the back of his hand as he traipsed into the kitchen, feet sliding just a little on the wooden flooring in his socks.
Chan caught him as he tried to open the fridge, wrapping his fingers loose around Felix’s wrist and pressing up against his back. “I said I was going to cook,” he murmured into Felix’s ear. He heard Felix’s breath catch, and took his mouth away before he accidentally unleashed that side of Felix that he had seen a lot this week, that wide-pupiled needy thing. When he spoke again, his voice was normal. “You go and sit down.”
“Ah, hyung,” Felix said, almost squirming against him, a little whine in his voice. “I can’t just sit there doing nothing while you cook, let me do something. I could make your coffee?”
“I’m not sure I trust you with that,” Chan said, and got a sour little look from Felix over his shoulder that made Chan burst out laughing. He let go, let Felix draw away a bit, with a little toss of his head that he could only have picked up from Hyunjin at some point. “Lix,” he said, grinning all over his stupid face. “You’re so cute.”
Felix went pink, pretty across his cheeks and nose. “Shut up,” he said. “Make your eggs while I figure out how to work your dumb coffee machine.”
Chan did as he was told. He cooked scrambled eggs, made slices of toast, cooked the little sausages that they had. He even cut them so that they made little octopus shapes, hoping it would make Felix smile — and it did, when at last he set the plates down on the kitchen table. He’d learned that for Jeongin, years ago, not long after they’d left the group home. It had been a splurge, buying a bag of mini hot dogs like that, but he’d been paid and he’d wanted to treat Jeongin to meat of some kind, and it was the cheapest way.
He’d cooked a few normally before Jeongin had pressed up against his side, angled away from the temperamental stove that Chan had been cooking on, and said, “One of my foster moms used to make them look like octopuses, can you do that, hyung?” It had been, perhaps, the first time Jeongin had asked for anything, the first request he had made, and Chan had immediately set himself to the task. Jeongin’s smile, with his single missing tooth, had made it all worth the effort.
Felix slid a mug across the table at him. He’d been fiddling with the coffee machine the entire time Chan had been cooking and now he looked terribly pleased with himself, as the coffee steam rose in the air between them. “There,” he said. “It wasn’t too hard.”
It took you twenty minutes, Chan didn’t say. Instead, he just leaned across the table, half out of his seat, watching as he did so the way that Felix’s eyes slid shut in anticipation for it. When they kissed, Felix sighed a little, a barely-there sound, like it was a relief to have Chan’s mouth on his. As if it had been too much, to have not been kissed all that time.
Chan felt his eyes sting. The love inside him for Felix didn’t seem like something he could put into words. And yet he wanted to, so badly, he wanted to have an easy set of them, so he could know how to describe it. So he could know how to express what it was that he wanted for Jeongin, too.
It had been a few days since his confrontation with Minho in the workroom. He had tried his best to put it out of his head, the expression he had seen on Minho’s face as he’d looked down at Jeongin’s head bent over the cut on his hand, and had not quite managed it. It played on his mind every time he looked at Jeongin.
It had scared him, there had been no other word for it. The sight of seemingly all the intensity in Minho come to bare in a moment on Jeongin. He had never seen Minho look like that, specifically, but he thought that he had seen something similar when he watched Minho fight — he had not been exaggerating when he’d said that Minho looked like he wanted to take Jeongin apart. It had been in his eyes, violence and desire mixed up together.
Chan was, for the most part, very willing to let Minho do what he wanted. He was under no illusions as to Minho’s likely proclivities when it came to the bedroom, and figured it made sense, considering what he was like outside of that space. He was perfectly willing to let Minho have those urges, as little as Chan personally understood them, but he could not stand back and let Minho project them onto Jeongin.
Because he knew Jeongin. He’d watched Jeongin grow up, seen him every single day for the past decade, and he knew what Jeongin deserved. Chan had fought hard to give Jeongin that: the stability, but also the love, the care, affection. All he had ever wanted was for Jeongin to know the love that he had so desperately tried to earn in the group home, and before it, too, he knew from Jeongin’s stories. All those foster homes, wanting to please the parents there, only to be shuttled to a new one after one too many mistakes or messes.
Chan had never let him feel like that. In the earliest days, every small mistake that Jeongin made had brought tears; if he spilled something on the counter, or dropped something that he was holding, he would simply burst into tears, cowering away from Chan. He wet the bed, too, a couple times a week for months and months, so that Chan had spent money they did not have on mattress protectors and spare sheets, to make the clean up the easiest thing in the world. So that Jeongin could know how little any of it mattered.
He didn’t want Jeongin to have to work to be loved, never again. To never have to feel the weight of that, to want to be given back the love that he could pour into someone or something.
He would need to do that with Minho, Chan knew. He had known it in an instant, seeing that look in Minho’s eyes: Jeongin would destroy himself, trying to make Minho happy, if he ever knew that Minho wanted him. He would see that desire and think that he had a duty to respond to it, an obligation to fulfil the happiness of a hyung that he so much admired. And he would pour his entire being into trying to win Minho’s love for himself, and he would never get it, ever.
Minho was not capable of loving Jeongin the way that Jeongin would love him. It was not a slight on Minho, or even a criticism, or at least not one that Chan would usually level at him. Minho was just that kind of person: he had his desires, had his anger, his rationality, his deep-seated need for control. He did not love like that. He was not soft, nor caring, and the intensity that he brought would overwhelm Jeongin. Jeongin would fool himself into being in love, and Minho would break his heart in the end.
They both knew it, after all. Minho had agreed with him. It would be a cruelty, to slake that desire for Jeongin knowing full well that his inevitable affection would never be returned. And Minho, of all the flaws he had, was not cruel in that sense.
It was not a pleasant thing, though, to just have to trust Minho on this. He knew that he could, because of all people, Minho was a man of his word. He did not make promises lightly, and once he made one, he would stick with it. But in that room, almost begging Minho to agree, Chan had been so afraid that this was where, finally, they would run up against Minho’s— loyalty to him. That here was the thing that Minho would not agree to, the point at which Chan’s authority would not be adhered to. He had not been sure what he would do, if that had been the case. He was glad that he hadn’t had to find out.
There was a scrape of a fork across a plate, and he looked up to find Felix giving him a sheepish look. “Sorry,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Chan said. He had, apparently, finished his own food while lost in his thoughts. He did that, sometimes, when he was working too, his hand mechanically feeding himself as he was distracted by something else. He lay his fork down. “Is it good?”
“Yeah, it’s actually really good,” Felix said, smiling at him across the table, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
“I do know how to cook,” Chan said, “but thank you for the compliment.”
Felix laughed and turned back to his food. Chan lifted his mug and sipped at his coffee, which Felix had done a good job with, which made sense considering it didn’t take much experience to fit a pod into a machine and press go. Chan watched him as he ate, trying to not be obvious enough with it that Felix noticed and got self-conscious, but unable to look away.
This was what he wanted for Jeongin: a quiet morning like this, breakfast made for one another, the love involved in that. Spending the time to take care of each other. The knowledge that if he leaned across the table now, Felix would lift his head and automatically tilt it for the kiss that Chan wanted to give him— which Chan did, murmuring Felix’s name as he went, and watched as Felix looked at him. He felt Felix’s smile against his mouth when they kissed.
“I love you,” he told Felix quietly. They had said it a handful of times since the night he had told Felix about how he and Jeongin became brothers, and it felt like it was simply becoming more and more true each time it passed through his lips. There was something about it that still felt secret, in some way, or perhaps private. He’d not yet said it in front of any of the others.
“I love you too,” said Felix, so easily, so readily, like the words had been on the tip of his tongue the entire time. Maybe they had been. “I’ll do the dishes, okay, hyung?”
“Mm,” said Chan. He stole another kiss, short but sweet as sugar. He caught Felix, though, wrinkling his nose at the taste of the coffee now transferred to his lips, and hid his smile. “Then I’ll dry them, how about that?”
“Okay,” said Felix, a little sigh in his voice. “That sounds really nice, hyung.”
——
Jeongin was expecting the apartment to be empty, when he stepped inside, or at the very least for it to only be Felix in there, since the only other person to spend considerable time in there was Hyunjin, who was out. But when he came in the door, the television in the living area was on, playing some kind of nature documentary, the narrator voice calm and soothing, the sound just loud enough to be audible but not so loud that it would disturb anyone in the bedrooms.
Jeongin paused, surprised by that. Nobody really used the television in the living room, not to actually watch anything. If someone wanted to watch something, they tended to use Jeongin’s television room, with or without his permission. The documentary seemed like the kind of thing Jisung watched, but he always watched on his phone or his computer. Jeongin didn’t even know where the remote for this television was; he thought it had been lost down a couch cushion years ago.
When he padded into the room, he found that it was Minho who was in there, laying on the couch that couldn’t be viewed from the door, laid out on his back with his arm thrown across his face. Not sleeping, Jeongin knew, because Minho didn’t sleep during the day, or if he did, it would not be here like this, out in the open where anyone could see it. He’d be in his bedroom.
There were papers on the kitchen table, Minho’s phone face down on the coffee table next to that elusive remote control. Minho didn’t move as Jeongin came in, didn’t show any indication that he knew someone was even in the room with him, although he must have known, through the beeping of the keypad and the sound of the door opening and closing. And he would know it was Jeongin, too; he’d recognise the sound of his footsteps.
Jeongin took a moment to just— look at him, when he could. He couldn’t take long, not when Minho was likely to open his eyes any moment and catch him at it, not when he knew that Minho knew he was standing there. But he did just take that moment. He was wearing jeans, and his thighs were— something else. He was still wearing his shoes, up on the cushions.
Then Jeongin bounded further into the room. “Hyung!” he said brightly. “Hello, I didn’t know you were up here.”
He plonked himself down on Minho’s legs. He saw in his peripheral Minho’s arm slide away slightly from his face, presumably so he could look at Jeongin, who could almost feel the unimpressed look pressing into the side of his face. But he just ignored it, and cheerfully reached for the remote.
“Ow,” said Minho, belatedly.
“Oh, sorry,” said Jeongin, not in the slightest bit sorry. He shifted slightly, really just to get more comfortable, but also to see if Minho would make him get up, turf him off perhaps on the floor. But Minho didn’t, he just lay there, his arm going back over his face, and let Jeongin sit on him.
It was a bit of stupid thing to be so pleased about, really, but Jeongin was pleased. It had felt, the last couple days, like he hadn’t seen much of Minho, as he had spent more time in his bedroom, apparently working on things for the job Jisung and Changbin were going on soon, or working out the final kinks in the plan for Felix’s job. Once or twice he had heard Minho in the kitchen, at hours that were odd for him, and when Jeongin came out of his room, wanting to see him, he had either missed Minho entirely or Minho said something about eating in his room and disappeared again.
Jeongin had begun to wonder, with an anxiety that he didn’t usually feel, if Minho was avoiding him. If what had happened in Seungmin’s workshop had been a little too much. But he knew how busy Minho was, how much was on his plate right now, and instead of leaving when Jeongin came in, he had instead just stayed still. He was letting Jeongin sit on him. Jeongin was glad that Minho had his arm hiding his eyes, because otherwise he’d seen the grin on Jeongin’s face.
“This is great,” he said, just as brightly as before. He started navigating his way to Netflix, the sound of the documentary cutting off. “I was watching a show downstairs but if you’re up here, we can watch it together.”
This was not something he expected to actually happen. In fact, he expected Minho to say something like, brat, put my documentary back on or some of us have actual work, baby boy. But instead Minho just continued to stay silent, not moving, not turfing Jeongin off, as Jeongin found the show he had been watching and started up the episode.
He had only been watching it for a minute or so when Minho’s arm fell away from his face again and he said, face tipping to the side to look at the screen, “What fresh hell is this?”
“It’s a drama,” said Jeongin, a little distracted at this point by what was happening on the screen.
“Yes,” said Minho. “I can see that.”
“You don’t know it?” Jeongin asked. There was a very pointed silence in response, which was fair. Minho did not, usually, watch television, not in the same way that Jeongin did. He supposed it was possible that Minho had some kind of TV in his room that nobody knew about, but it didn’t seem likely. Minho really didn’t seem the type. He was someone who filled his time with work, training, someone not given over to idle pursuits. Jeongin was not sure if this was part of his inherent personality or something that had been trained into him in prison, the latter concept being something Jeongin preferred not to think about too much.
“Okay, well,” he said. “Do you see that man, the one in the big hat, the emperor? Yeah, so, he’s not really a man, he’s a woman who is in disguise as a man, because someone fucked up when she was a baby and accidentally killed her twin brother, so now she has to pretend to be a man—”
Minho began extracting his legs from under Jeongin, and Jeongin let him, moving just enough to accommodate him as he explained the plot of his drama. He was rambling, a little bit, he knew, as he kept watching the screen, trying to talk and take in the story developments at the same time. But very few people ever asked him about what he was watching, because he was usually doing it on his own, so it was nice to be able to explain it for once.
There was a small part of him, embarrassingly optimistic, that hoped that if he explained it well enough, maybe Minho would actually watch it with him. He’d tried before, in the past, to get Minho to sit down with him and just watch a movie, something short and condensed, even, and Minho had always given in a blank-eyed look and said no, in that deadpan way that always made Jeongin want to giggle. When he said it like that, Jeongin always knew that it was not necessarily time with Jeongin that Minho was rejecting, but simply the activity himself.
Unfortunately, there weren’t many activities they could do together beyond sparring, and there was only so much of that that Jeongin could take on a weekly basis.
“—but anyway, the doctor guy doesn’t know she’s a woman but he’s in love with her anyway, so I’m kind of hoping they end up together, but I don’t see how any of this possibly works out, since if they find out she’s a woman they’re going to kill her so—”
A hand grabbed him by the jaw and turned his face towards Minho’s. The relative roughness of it, the suddenness of it, made the words die in his throat, cut off so fast it felt like Minho had reached out and flipped his ability to talk at all off. It was deeply shocking, to be gripped like this, mostly because Jeongin had had so many fantasies of this over the years, of Minho’s strength holding him where he needed to be, of Minho treating him with this particular brand of — irreverence.
He stared at Minho, who looked back at him. Their faces were so close together, probably closer than they had ever been in his entire life, so close that Jeongin could have counted Minho’s individual eyelashes if he looked a little more closely. He wondered what Minho was seeing on his face: if he was seeing the way Jeongin was going pink, if he knew the way Jeongin’s entire body felt like a raw nerve to be held like this, Minho’s fingers still pressing hard and unyielding into his jaw.
Was he going to be kissed? Was that why Minho held him like this, so sure and steady, holding his mouth for Minho’s pleasure?
“Hyung,” he managed to whisper.
“Jeongin,” Minho said, his voice hard, devoid of any kindness. It was like being doused in ice water: shocking and awful and chilling to the bone. “I don’t care about your drama.”
He let go of Jeongin, almost shoving him away. Jeongin sat there, still looking at him, working harder than he thought he’d ever had to work before in his life to keep his hurt from showing on his face. It was not about the lack of kissing — it had been something of a ridiculous fantasy, at this stage — but because— Minho’s voice had not been that blank non-humour or even the detached indifference that so often played through Jeongin’s mind when he touched himself to thoughts of Minho.
No, Minho had spoken to him like Jeongin was an irritant on the base of his shoe. It had been years since Minho had spoken to him like that. He had not ever thought he’d hear it again.
He waited, a few seconds, to see if Minho would— apologise. To see if he would explain that he was just in a bad mood, and then Jeongin could offer to help him with it, and it would all be okay. That’s how it usually worked, when Minho snapped at him, although this seemed particularly bad. But Minho did not apologise, or give an excuse. Instead, he got up, went to the other, shorter couch, and lay down on his back with his arm over his face again.
Jeongin felt a little like he could not breathe. The coldness that had seized him at the sound of Jeongin felt like it was sinking further into him, a slow drip through the rest of his body. “Hyung,” he said, voice very small. “I’m sorry.”
Minho grunted. He didn’t say anything else. Jeongin looked at him, laid out on that couch, and thought— something is wrong, something is so wrong.
He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to make this better. He didn’t even know what was wrong. Perhaps this was related to the way he had kissed Minho’s hand against the bandages, but if that was the case, wouldn’t Minho have said something at the time? Wouldn’t he have reacted more in the moment? And even so, Jeongin didn’t expect— this, nothing like this. Not for Minho to be remote, so remote that Jeongin, who had spent years trying to bridge the gap between them, felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to that bridge.
“Do you want me to put your documentary back on?” he asked, voice still barely there. He pulled his feet up onto the couch, tucked himself as small as he possibly could into the corner of the cushion. His heart was pounding in his chest.
“No,” said Minho, shortly.
Jeongin looked at the television but he had no idea what was happening: he was looking but he was not watching, not seeing at all. The screen was nothing but a blur of colours as his eyes unfocused, his brain racing as he tried to figure out what to do. He was so panicked that it took him a long minute before he realised that he was chewing on his fingers again, pulling at the skin around his cuticles with his teeth.
He should stop, he knew. How many times over the years, since he was a child, had he heard the words stop chewing on your fingers. First it had been in the group home, usually accompanied by one of the carers there smacking his hand away hard enough to bruise his arms. Then it had been Chan, and Changbin, the words softer in their voices, coated with love and care and fond exasperation at this habit that they could not seem to get him to break.
If Minho-hyung saw me doing this, he’d tell me to stop, he thought, but Minho was not looking at him, and besides, it was too late — there was the taste of blood, coppery and tangy, in his mouth already.
“Hyung,” he said, taking his fingers out of his mouth only so that Minho wouldn’t hear him talking around them. “Are you— working on something? Did I disturb you? If you’re stuck on something, maybe I could help?”
He clamped his mouth shut again, desperate to not annoy Minho anymore. After a moment, Minho sighed, and then he sat up, slowly, turning to face Jeongin. Jeongin had tried so hard to learn how to read Minho but he still made it incredibly difficult sometimes and it was like that now, when Jeongin felt like he was walking on eggshells he thought he had already skipped past before.
“We don’t have enough people for Felix’s job,” Minho said. His voice sounded— more normal, now, less hard, less detached. “I am trying to work out what the fuck we’re going to do about it.”
With the mood he was in, Jeongin hadn’t expected him to answer at all, never mind give Jeongin a truthful answer. It did not make him feel better, not with how awful it had been earlier, but it did give Jeongin the courage to say, a little encouragingly but mostly just tentative, “Why do we not have enough people?”
“We need two people, if not three, for the casino part,” Minho said. “And three people, at least, for the vault, which I think is going to be a much harder job to pull off. Getting into the vault will take a lot longer than getting into whatever shitty safe the Magpie has in his office, so we could maybe just send two people to Blackbird’s, though I’d prefer not to. And we have to have three for the main vault.”
Jeongin frowned at him, confused about the maths involved. “But if you need six people, then you have six people, right?” he asked. “You, Chan-hyung, Changbin-hyung, Felix-hyung—”
Minho growled under his breath. Usually that sound sent warmth rushing through Jeongin. Now he had to hold back a little flinch, even knowing that Minho wasn’t growling at him. “I’m not letting that brat on the actual mission with us,” he said. “He’s going to wait here or in that van with Seungmin helping him do his stupid tech stuff, but I’m not taking him into the field.”
Jeongin nodded in understanding, although privately he thought Minho was being a bit— ridiculous about that. He would never say it, especially not right now, mostly because despite how showy his distrust seemed sometimes, it was obvious that it was not for show. Of them all, Minho was the one last hold out, the only one who seemed to still think that Felix was too much of an unknown element to be trusted. He had been like that with Jisung, too, but this seemed different, sometimes. It was like he could not get over Felix’s past working for Lee Jaerim.
“And I don’t want to have to bring someone in just for this job,” Minho continued, scowling at the very thought. “It’s too high profile, too high stakes. We wouldn’t be able to trust whoever it was.”
Jeongin counted again in his head, but even so, that maths still didn’t add up. “I’m confused,” he admitted softly, and Minho made a short, gruff noise that Jeongin supposed meant he could ask more questions. “Even without Felix-hyung, and with Seungmin-hyung hanging back in the van, you have five people?”
Minho stared at him, without any real focus, like he was seeing through Jeongin. He was bent forward, elbows resting on his thighs, his hands dangling between his knees. “I can’t bring Chan-hyung to the vault,” he said, a little toneless. “Because then it would be him, Changbin, and me in the vault. And in the event it goes sour— someone needs to run this operation. It would need to be one of us. And that can’t happen if we’re all dead.”
Jeongin suppressed his instinctive reaction to that thought. It did not bear thinking about, losing them all in one fell swoop. “So Chan-hyung has to go to Blackbird’s,” Jeongin said, thinking aloud in some ways, parsing through the puzzle. It was unfolding the more he ran through their roster. “And Jisung-hyung and Hyunjin-hyung are actually needed for Blackbird’s, and can’t be spared for the vault?”
Minho nodded shortly, his gaze dropped down now, staring at the floor slightly in front of Jeongin.
That made sense. They needed Hyunjin in Blackbird’s because he was their safe-cracker, and Jisung’s sniper skills would be necessary to get them in. Jeongin pressed his lips together, debating with himself, and then said, very tentatively now, “I mean— I could always come on the mission too, couldn’t I?”
And now Minho’s eyes snapped to his, much more alert than they’d been previously. “No,” he said, but it sounded almost like a reflex.
The irritation at being so quickly told no almost cut through the way his stomach was still churning. Even Minho, who usually treated him like a capable adult, was too inclined to simply dismiss Jeongin’s possible contributions out of hand. “Hyung,” he said. “I can do it.”
“No,” said Minho, more firmly now. “No fucking way, Jeongin.”
Again, that use of Jeongin, except this time, rather than upsetting him, it just pissed him off. Where had the Minho of a few years ago gone, the one who had been furious to join Chan’s team and find a couple of kids hanging around, viciously angry about how there were absolutely no plans to get Jeongin involved with the business.
There should be no space for freeloaders, he’d once snarled, within Jeongin’s earshot. Kids that green need to grow the fuck up.
Jeongin didn’t exactly miss that Minho, the one who had been pretty much a jerk to him every time they saw each other, but at least that Minho had believed, on some level, that Jeongin was capable of doing this work. He didn’t get to talk to Jeongin like this, while still denying him this opportunity.
The worst part was that usually, even up to about thirty minutes ago, Jeongin would have said that Minho’s hesitation came from not wanting to put Jeongin in danger, not wanting him to get hurt or worse. Now he was not sure that was the case, was not sure he hadn’t been— existing in something of a fantasy world, because he thought now that Minho’s reluctance instead sprung from the fact that he genuinely didn’t think Jeongin was good enough for it.
“I can help, you know I can help,” he said, matching Minho’s firm tone, perhaps a little sharper than even Minho had been. “You’ve taught me how to fight and I know how to shoot, I’m good at shooting, just ask Changbin-hyung or Jisung-hyung, they’ll tell you—”
“It doesn’t matter what they’ll tell me,” Minho interrupted, clearly biting the words out from between gritted teeth at this point. “I don’t care if you’re the best shot in this entire fucking city, you are not coming on this mission.”
Jeongin glared at him. Minho looked back, not quite glaring but looking like he would not be moved all the same. He had that look on his face, the one which said he had made his mind up and would not be swayed. Minho did not have the same stubborn mindset as Jeongin, but Jeongin had learned through the years that if Minho decided on something, he was not easily persuaded to change his mind. It was why it had taken him much longer to accept Jisung into the group. It was why he insisted, even now, that Felix, on some level, was not to be trusted.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Jeongin said. “You need another person for the job and I’m capable of—”
“No,” said Minho, almost a snarl now. “You are not coming, Jeongin, end of fucking story.”
Jeongin took a deep breath, his heart pounding in his chest now for completely other reasons. He was mad, he realised; this entire conversation had left him feeling— small, like he was just insignificant, like Minho had walked into this room and cut his knees out from under him. A couple of years ago, it would have made Jeongin want to go crawl into bed and lick his wounds. Now it just made him feel spiteful, petty almost, all the more determined to get his way.
“But you’re not the one who has final say,” he said, almost spitting it out. “Chan-hyung has final say over who goes on the jobs, so I’m going to just ask him if I can go.”
Minho’s jaw worked for a moment. Jeongin was already climbing to his feet, tossing the remote in his hands to the side as he did so. When Minho saw that, he also got to his feet. Jeongin thought for a moment that Minho was going to try to physically restrain him — his hand lifted a little into the air like he was going to reach out and grab Jeongin — but then instead he just motioned to the door and said, “You want to go ask Chan-hyung if you can come? Feel free. Why don’t we go together, hmm?”
He sounded, for a moment, mocking, a nasty little twist to his words that Jeongin had certainly heard from him before but not recently. He used to say baby boy like that, when he’d first stumbled on the nickname, calling Jeongin that in an attempt at drawing attention to the ways Jeongin was a kid: aw, is it nap time for the baby boy? baby boy, do you need me to get you a sippy cup for your juice? Later, he’d stopped speaking to Jeongin like that, and the nickname had stopped being mean and just become the thing he called Jeongin, something Jeongin held close to his heart.
He sounded like he knew Chan was going to tell Jeongin no, too.
Under the mocking, though, he just sounded angry, almost like he had expected Jeongin to fall into line and not argue with him. But if Minho had changed from that version of him who treated Jeongin so badly, then so too had Jeongin changed over the years. He was old enough now to argue his case.
Jeongin pushed past him out of the room, or he tried to — Minho stepped back right before their shoulders could collide, so that they didn’t touch each other. He did that a lot, so Jeongin maybe shouldn’t have noticed it, but truthfully he noticed it every single time Minho did that. The physical distance he kept between them, the way it was Jeongin who usually had to reach out to touch.
Minho followed him out of the apartment and down the stairwell to the third floor at a distance, and when Jeongin glanced back at him, Minho raised an eyebrow at him. He looked a little calmer now, somehow, that they were on their way to talk to Chan. It was going to be deeply humiliating if Chan said no, if he rejected Jeongin’s proposal as quickly and as out of hand as Minho had. The thought of it already made Jeongin feel like his stomach was being crumpled up inside his body. Minho saying no was not the end of it all; Chan saying no was. Jeongin might be able to wheedle his way with Chan, but if he firmly put his foot down, there was no way out of it.
It would be excruciating, for that to happen in front of Minho. It was too late now to back out, though.
He rushed through the PC room and to the door to Chan’s office, opening it without knocking and found Chan at his desk, tapping his mouth with a pen as he read something on his computer. He looked at the door when Jeongin came through and said, “Hello, Jeongin, that was a loud arrival even for you.”
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, storming into the room. “I want to come on the Lee Jaerim job.”
Chan looked at him like he had no idea who he was. Then he looked past him at where Minho had joined them, put his pen down, and sat up straighter. There was an expression on his face that unsettled Jeongin for a moment, because it was hard to read, and he’d never not been able to read Chan. Then it just settled into confusion. “What?” he asked.
“I want to come on the Lee Jaerim job,” Jeongin repeated. He flung himself down into one of the chairs in front of Chan’s desk, and watched as Minho, rather than taking the other one, just leaned against the back of it with his hands. “Minho-hyung said that you need an extra person to go on the job, the vault part of it, so I said that I could go because I can shoot, but he said no.”
“He can’t come on the mission,” Minho said. He didn’t even give an excuse, like Jeongin’s lack of suitability went without saying. Jeongin wanted to scream at him a little.
“You need an extra person,” Jeongin said heatedly. “I’m willing, I have the skills. I’m right here.”
Chan was silent for a moment, looking between the two of them. “You hadn’t told me there was a numbers issue,” he finally said softly, to Minho.
“I’m working on it,” Minho said, tight and angry, restrained.
To that, Chan nodded, before saying, “And what have you come up with?”
Before Minho could respond, Jeongin cut in. “Go with too few people,” he said, nearly snarling with it, “or hiring someone in from outside, which is stupid.”
“And bringing a rookie in on the highest stake job of our lives isn’t stupid?” Minho shot back, and Jeongin’s stomach pinpricked coldly with embarrassment. “Hyung, you know as well as I do, he cannot come on this job.”
Chan got that far-away, zoned out kind of look in his eyes that Minho had earlier when he’d been staring at the floor. Then he said, “Well.”
Minho straightened up immediately, like a bar of steel had suddenly been shoved up his spine. Jeongin felt his heart leap in his chest.
“Hyung,” Minho said, voice remarkably dangerous. “No.”
“It might be the only option,” Chan said on a sigh, running a hand through his hair; it was curly today, and doing that made him look a little bit like he’d stuck his hand in an electrical socket. “We can’t go in undermanned, and I’m not hiring someone unknown for this. It’s the vault, and you need someone additional for cover, right? Changbin has said Jeongin is good at shooting.”
“You cannot be fucking serious,” Minho said. He looked and sounded like Chan had just betrayed him in the worst possible way, and it would have been funny if Jeongin wasn’t so upset about this entire thing. If the shock and anger in Minho’s voice wasn’t setting him completely on edge, because it really did seem that Minho just did not think Jeongin was competent enough.
“I’m not saying he can definitely come,” Chan said, like he was trying to be soothing, but Jeongin already knew that Minho in this kind of mood was not a beast that could be so easily soothed. “I just think that it’s worth exploring the option. I don’t know about you, Minho, but I’ve never even seen Jeongin shoot.”
“He’s never seen it,” Jeongin said, ignoring the way Minho turned his glare on him. That glare had nothing on the awful way Minho had spoken to him earlier, his hand gripping Jeongin’s jaw. Jeongin could deal with that glare. It was the truth, after all. Minho had only ever seen Jeongin’s fighting skills, he’d never seen how he could shoot, and Jeongin was considerably better at it. More than that: he was good at shooting.
“Then how about we— test Jeongin first,” Chan said, looking at Minho, who seemed so angry he was about to start vibrating. “We can see how the shooting goes and make a decision after that, we don’t have to say yes or no right now. But if he’s good enough to come, then it doesn’t make sense to keep him off the job.”
There was something in Chan’s voice that Jeongin didn’t really like. Something— indulgent, perhaps, in the words, and he wasn’t sure if Chan was just trying to placate Minho in this way, by making Minho think he could influence the decision later, or if he was trying to signal to Minho that he didn’t think Jeongin would pass the test anyway. If it was the latter, Jeongin was going to fucking show them both.
There was a stretch of silence, both of them looking at Minho. Chan with a patient expression, Jeongin with a glare that felt odd on his face because he never looked at Minho like this. He never felt about Minho like this. They never really argued, even.
“Fine,” Minho said eventually, snarling the word out. He looked like he was going to say something else, his mouth twisting, but in the end he didn’t say anything. He gave Chan one last look of angry betrayal, and then turned and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him so loudly that Jeongin almost jumped.
In the ringing silence after that door slam, Jeongin sat for a moment. The second Minho had gone out of the room, his anger had drained out of him. He was just tired now, and with the anger gone the anxiety had come back, that awful throat-crushing desperation for air.
“Ah, Jeongin,” said Chan with a sigh. “He’ll get over it, you know how he is.”
Jeongin did know how Minho was. But he knew, too, that what had happened today was not how Minho usually was. Still, he just said quietly, “Thank you, hyung,” and got up and left the room too.
Back in the apartment, his drama was still playing on the screen, which seemed remarkable; he felt like he had aged years and yet it had only been a matter of less than an hour. Some sort of romantic scene was happening, the kind with the soaring saccharine soundtrack playing over long, heartfelt looks. He found the remote and turned the television off, unable to bear it. The room was plunged into silence.
He sat on the couch, brought his knees up to his chest so he could rest his forehead against it, his eyes squeezed shut against the light coming in from the window. It’ll be okay, he thought to himself, trying to reach for the same determination, the same stubbornness that had looked at Minho at age sixteen and thought, you will be mine, one day. He clung to that conviction, because it would be okay, he would make it okay. Whatever he had done wrong, he could fix it. He was not so weak as to lose his path now.
——
Seungmin chewed on the sleeve of his hoodie, so distracted by what he’d just watched on the monitors that he was barely aware of himself doing it. It was not a habit he fell back on, usually, just an anxious tick that had developed during the months of his father’s arrest and trial, but it came out, sometimes, when he wasn’t paying close enough attention.
He was not paying attention now. He was watching as Jeongin trudged back to the apartment room, his shoulders slumped, body language upset even through the grainy image on the cameras. Seungmin was not sure the last time he had seen Jeongin look like that, as he folded himself up on one of the couches, or at least not quite that— dejected.
Although he had the cameras running every hour of the day if he could help it, Seungmin was not in the habit of listening to the feeds. That, he’d found, the few times he’d tried it, tipped the entire thing too far for him, a little too much into voyeurism, perhaps, or maybe just it was an invasion of privacy a step too far. The cameras were not about Seungmin knowing and seeing all; the cameras were about security, pure and simple.
But he had been working, his attention only just on the monitors, when he had first noticed Jeongin and Minho in the apartment together, and he had unmuted the feed immediately, not sure what he was expecting to hear but needing to know, all the same. Not to gossip, not to do anything with, but simply to know, because what had gone down between Minho and Chan in this workroom, with Seungmin as unwilling witness, had been making him so unsettled since it had happened.
It shouldn’t have surprised him, to have heard the way Minho talked to Jeongin, because maybe he shouldn’t have expected anything other from Minho. But it had surprised him, the coldness discernible even through the staticky audio feed. He’d heard, before, from Jeongin and Hyunjin, about Minho’s anger at them being around, but Seungmin had come in for only the tail end of it, when the last dying embers had transformed into mild condescension, and it had been so long since even that.
But that coldness, the nasty twist to some of his words as he and Jeongin had argued about Jeongin going with them on the Magpie job — that had been something else. Seungmin had been fairly disbelieving of the argument that both Chan and Minho had put forward, that Jeongin was likely to be emotionally damaged by Minho’s edges; the argument had not held weight with him as someone who knew how resilient Jeongin truthfully was, and as someone who thought he knew where Minho’s edges were. Seungmin felt like he had run up against them enough.
He thought now that maybe he had not known those edges truly, that this was what Chan had been talking about. And he had watched as they had cut Jeongin, just a little bit. Listened as Jeongin’s voice had gotten smaller, more unsure. Watched him start to chew on his fingernails.
Jeongin had rallied, eventually, that stubborn edge coming back to him, the one which made him stand up and demand to be treated like an adult. But there had been damage done there, Seungmin knew, and it had been purposely done, and it had pissed him off.
“Baby,” he heard, “that can’t taste good.” And then there was a touch to his wrist, sudden and out of nowhere. He startled, a full body jolt away from the person touching him, an instinctive flinch. He could not remember the last time he had startled that badly, with the gut lurching panic inside him. He didn’t think he’d been this startled when that man had broken in and hit him.
He looked up to find Changbin standing beside him — because of course it was Changbin, he’d known it was Changbin from the first word and so his body was already settling down, but the panic was not quite gone. Changbin had stepped back already, taken his hand away, eyebrows raised but expression serious.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice low and measured. Seungmin’s heart was still racing residually, and he struggled for something to say for long enough that Changbin said, again, “I’m sorry. Are you okay? Do you need more space?”
Seungmin shook his head. He reached out this time and snagged Changbin’s hand, wanting the warmth of it, more comforting than anything else could be. “I’m fine,” he said, voice just a touch off steady now. “I just didn’t hear you come in, I didn’t see you on the cameras or anything.”
Changbin nodded. He had let Seungmin take his hand, and had taken a step forward, but was still giving him more space than necessary. This, Seungmin realised, was Hyunjin’s influence, probably. He had only ever seen one of Hyunjin’s panic attacks, years ago, a couple of months after Seungmin had first moved in here. He could not be touched, in moments like that; Seungmin wasn’t sure how they had learned it, whether it had taken long months of trial and error, but they had learned at some point that touching Hyunjin during those times just caused the panic to seize him even harder. And so, now, looking at Seungmin, Changbin was choosing to give him space.
“Hyung,” he said, and tugged on Changbin’s hand. When Changbin didn’t come much closer, Seungmin said, a little exasperated now, “I’m fine, you just startled me.”
“You don’t like to be startled,” Changbin said.
“I don’t,” Seungmin said. “But I dislike being handled with care much more. Come here.”
Changbin went, finally, stepping up close like he usually would when he came over to Seungmin’s desk chair. He looked down at Seungmin for a beat and then he leaned in and kissed Seungmin’s forehead. Seungmin let him, for once, without making a noise of disgust or turning away. Instead, he let his eyes flutter shut, just for a moment, as every last bit of residual panic left at the warm press of Changbin’s lips. Then he opened them again, so Changbin wouldn’t see his eyes closed.
Changbin pulled back, his spare hand cupping Seungmin’s face for a moment. Then he said, “You really didn’t notice me come in?”
Seungmin shook his head. “I was distracted,” he said quietly. An understatement. He’d never once missed a member of this team coming down to see him, never mind missed someone actually coming into the room when he was sitting here able to see them, and he knew that Changbin knew that. But Changbin didn’t say anything, didn’t point that out, just stood there holding Seungmin’s hand looking at him with that serious expression, his caring eyes. Seungmin said, “I need to tell you about something. Will you bring a stool over?”
Changbin nodded slowly. He fetched the nearest stool and pulled it over close enough that when he sat facing Seungmin, Seungmin had to slightly open his legs to let Changbin’s knee slide a little between them. It was not remotely sexy; it felt, instead, comforting, to have Changbin so close, his warmth against Seungmin’s body. As soon as he was settled, Changbin reached out and took his hand again. Seungmin let him thread their fingers together and took a breath.
“I was distracted just now,” he said, “because— Jeongin wants to go on the Magpie job. No, hyung,” he added, as Changbin inhaled sharply and then opened his mouth to speak, “let me finish. He wants to go on the Magpie job, because Minho-hyung told him about the issues he’s been having with the job plans. And Chan-hyung said that maybe he could go.”
He paused, trying to gather his thoughts. Changbin, clearly mistaking his silence for the end of it, said, “You were listening to their meeting?”
He said it without any kind of judgement, but Seungmin knew what he wasn’t saying, wasn’t asking. The last time Seungmin had listened in on a conversation had been when Felix had first arrived, and he was glad he’d done so, because otherwise he might have been too late stopping them for using that USB. But Seungmin had done that only because it was high stakes. So what, he knew Changbin was asking, made this high stakes enough to listen?
Seungmin nodded, a jerky motion. “Hyung,” he said. “Did you know that Minho-hyung likes Jeongin? That he— wants Jeongin, he’s attracted to Jeongin.”
Changbin stared at him. He looked like he thought Seungmin was suddenly telling a joke and couldn’t quite run with the sudden shift in mood. But Seungmin just looked seriously back at him and said, “I’m not joking, this isn’t a joke. Minho-hyung is attracted to Jeongin, and I think— I think Jeongin might like him back.”
There was a stretch of silence, as Changbin just kept staring at him. He kept their hands warm together and leaned forward in his seat and said, “Seungmin, what on earth are you saying to me? How do you know this?”
“You know about Minho-hyung hurting his hand in here a couple of days ago,” Seungmin said. Changbin nodded. “I wasn’t here, I was trying to nap at the time, but Jeongin helped him clean the wound. And afterwards, he kissed Minho-hyung’s hand.”
“He what,” said Changbin, very strangled.
“He kissed Minho-hyung’s hand,” Seungmin repeated, as calmly as he could. He’d watched the footage back, later, wanting to know exactly what had happened. And yet, it had been obvious on Minho’s face, as Jeongin had gently kissed the bandages over his hand, that he wanted Jeongin. The desire had been raw and open on his face for an awful, drawn out second, before he had managed to get it under control enough before Jeongin saw. But that desire had been animal-wild and for a moment, looking at it, Seungmin had seen what had caused Chan so much panic.
“Chan-hyung caught them,” he said. “Or no, he caught Minho-hyung, after Jeongin had left already, and he was— angry. I don’t think I’ve seen him that angry in a long time, if ever. I came out of my room to try to talk some sense into them but they just— they wouldn’t listen to me.”
“I didn’t know they argued,” Changbin said. He was frowning now, in confusion, because Changbin was the type to pick up on tension like that, and if Chan and Minho had argued, really argued, it was likely that Changbin would get pulled into the middle of it, as an intermediary if nothing else. But as far as Seungmin could tell, there had been very little tension between Chan and Minho since it had happened. No, the tension seemed to now be between Minho and Jeongin.
“They didn’t argue,” Seungmin said. “Not really. Chan-hyung was so angry but Minho-hyung didn’t argue with him at all. Chan-hyung warned him off and Minho-hyung just accepted. He told Minho-hyung that he can’t ever touch Jeongin, and Minho-hyung said that he wouldn’t.”
Changbin’s eyebrows rose but he didn’t say anything for a long time. That, too, was something that Seungmin had always liked about Changbin. He could be loud, overly playful at times, but he knew, when it was necessary, how to think about his words. He was always so careful to avoid hurting people with his words. Seungmin, who often used words as a way of getting people to leave him alone, thought it was— impressive, to care so much.
“Minho-hyung has the potential to hurt Jeongin greatly,” Changbin said eventually.
“Yes,” said Seungmin, a little impatiently, “but do you think he will?”
“No,” said Changbin, so instantly that it was obviously a reflex, and he looked, for a moment afterwards, almost surprised, like he hadn’t realised himself how honestly he believed that. He was silent for another minute and then he said, “You think Jeongin likes him back?”
Seungmin nodded. It had come to him during the argument itself, the ways in which Jeongin sought out Minho, the times that the two of them spent together that nobody else paid attention to, but which Seungmin had seen, idly, as he’d half-watched the cameras on a daily basis. When he’d thought back about it, it had started to make much more sense, this thing that he had just taken for granted all this time — there’d been jokes, hadn’t there, about Jeongin being Minho’s favourite, about how much Jeongin clung to Minho, wanting his respect. Was it not all part of a horrible picture that Seungmin didn’t know what to do with?
“I think he does,” he said. “And he doesn’t know what Chan-hyung did, and I can’t tell him, not without betraying Minho-hyung’s trust and as much as I think he’s being a fucking idiot about this, I don’t want to do that.”
It would be unforgivable, to do that. And maybe Seungmin wouldn’t have cared, once upon a time, but the problem with Minho had always been that he and Seungmin were just that bit too similar, and so that was how Seungmin knew, that if he went to Jeongin and told him about what he had seen on Minho’s face, what he had heard of Minho’s feelings, there would be no coming back from it. Minho would not be able to forgive him that. And Seungmin, for all that he didn’t care what Minho thought of him usually, did not want to damage their relationship like that.
He hated this. All these secrets to be kept, to be concealed. All of them seemingly on his shoulders, all of them things that he just had to sit on. Sharing Felix’s secret with Hyunjin had helped, but not enough; sharing this now, with Changbin, helped, but not enough. It didn’t solve the problem of the secret itself.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Minho-hyung is being kind of dick to Jeongin, I guess to cover up how he feels, but also he’s insisting that Jeongin can’t come on the Magpie job, so Jeongin was mad about that, and it’s all just a mess, hyung.”
Changbin sighed. He reached out a hand and laid it, careful and heavy, against the back of Seungmin’s neck, the way he had learned, at some point, Seungmin liked. Seungmin didn’t know how he had learned it, because Seungmin had tried to conceal it, but that was just like Changbin. He read things in Seungmin that Seungmin half the time didn’t even know himself.
“It’s not your problem to solve,” he said.
Seungmin opened his mouth to protest and then shut it again. It was not until Changbin had put it into words that Seungmin had realised that he had been thinking of it as his problem to solve, purely because he had been a witness to the conversation. The most shocking part of it was that he knew, before he had come here, he wouldn’t have thought twice about getting involved. He would have dismissed it as simply not his business and gotten on with his own stuff and let the chips fall as they may.
Fuck, he thought, as he slumped back, letting Changbin’s hand take some of the weight of his body, his skull. Changbin did it wordlessly, shifting forward in his seat so that more of their legs were pressed together. I like these people too much, huh.
They sat in silence for a few more minutes before Changbin said, “Okay?”
“Yes,” said Seungmin. Maybe he should hate it, to have been seen by Changbin, to have been perceived in this way. For Changbin to know the truth that Seungmin tried to hide. But it was not a new thing, not by far, and Seungmin suspected that Changbin perceived a lot more of Seungmin than Seungmin was willing to think about any time soon, so this much was just— acceptable. He could deal with it.
“Okay,” said Changbin again.. “I’ll keep an eye on that, and I’ll get involved if I think it’s going to cause problems, okay? But more pressingly, you said that Chan-hyung is thinking of letting Jeongin go on the Magpie job?”
“Maybe,” Seungmin said. “He sounded a little like he was just trying to please Jeongin but they’re going to test him out before they make a decision.”
“Ah,” said Changbin. He looked grim, at that. “Jeongin’s probably good for it, then, as much as I hate to admit it. I don’t relish the thought of him coming on such a dangerous job for his first one though.”
Seungmin didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned his face slightly in Changbin’s direction, looking at him, just looking. He was not looking at the monitors, despite the fact that they had almost been caught by Hyunjin a couple of days ago, despite the fact that Changbin had managed to surprise him just now. Changbin looked back at him, and the longer he looked, the more the corners of his mouth ticked up, like just looking at Seungmin was causing him to smile.
“I’m tired, hyung,” he said eventually.
“Yeah,” Changbin said. “It’s because you go to bed at four in the morning.”
Who are you, my mother? Seungmin almost asked, except his mother, all the way down on the southern coast, didn’t give a shit what he did or did not do, and probably never had done. So instead he said, “Maybe I’d sleep earlier if you were with me.”
Changbin smiled properly at him now, something that could have been a smirk on someone else’s face but on Changbin’s face it was simply too softened at the edges by the obvious love that he felt for Seungmin. Agonising, to look at that. “Seungmin-ah,” he said. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
——
Hyunjin stood near the edge of the curb, right at the intersection, watching the cars passing by through the green lights. It was a large intersection, four lanes converging on each other, and he looked to the side at where Jisung was standing next to him and said, “This is where you were originally going to do the intercept?”
Jisung nodded. He was wearing his leather jacket, the one that he must have bought second hand from somewhere because it was just that bit too big for him, and he had both hands stuffed in his pockets as they waited for the light to change so they could cross. “Yeah,” he said. “Changbin-hyung earmarked it but even on the maps I thought it was too open.”
“It’s way too open,” Hyunjin said. All these lanes, all this space for their target to simply drive around them. “The road you guys chose eventually was much better.”
Jisung flashed him a quick grin, which Hyunjin turned away from. They’d been out here for an hour now, working their way on foot through the route that Jisung had memorised for the job he would do with Changbin in a few days. They’d taken the bus over here, an experience that Hyunjin never much enjoyed — despite the fact that it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday, it had still been crowded, and there was something so much more precarious about crowded buses versus crowded subway cars. Harder to get away from the people around you; easier to have someone fall on you.
He’d managed it, though, without a word of complaint, and together he and Jisung had wandered through the streets, mapping their way along the car route. This was something they’d started doing about a year ago, after they’d been on a job and during the getaway, it had turned out their planned route had construction happening along it. It had not caused actual problems at the time, but it had freaked Minho enough that now they did this — two of them taking the journey on foot, on the basis that they could go slow and scout out any potential errors.
Jisung had been sent this time because he was the one who was going to be driving. Hyunjin had been sent because they were going to be stealing something and Minho had said, you have a thief’s instincts, which was perhaps the nicest thing anyone had ever said to Hyunjin. It was certainly the nicest thing Minho had ever said to him.
They were on their way back now, Hyunjin in his hoodie with the hood pulled over his hair as usual, Jisung in his boots and skinny jeans. He looked like some kind of college student, especially with his hair fluffy and covering the undercut, handsome and boyish and young. Hyunjin had been doing his best to avoid looking at him, which had been easier when he’d been focusing on their actual mission, trying to work out any logistical issues that might get in the way of the job.
Harder, now, in the mid-afternoon sunlight, the air crisp, and Jisung grinning at him.
The lights changed, and they crossed the street, Jisung still with his hands in his pockets, neither of them drawing any kind of attention as they went. There had been silence between them for most of the trip, which Hyunjin knew was because Jisung was in job mode, but that was apparently starting to wear off because as they walked, now, Jisung said, “I never told you this, but the painting you did for Chan-hyung’s birthday was really astonishing.”
Hyunjin kept his eyes forward, not looking at him like he wanted to. When it came to his artwork, he was, mostly, without artifice. He was good, he knew that, he knew that the same way he knew when other art was good, and he took the compliments in the manner in which they were meant — truthful, warm, kind words of praise from people who liked and cared for him. But he had very little ego when it came to his art, because in many ways, it didn’t matter if his work was good or not. That wasn’t the point of why he had turned to art in the first place.
Still, though. “Thank you,” he said, quietly and stiffly.
“He had it in his office a couple of days ago,” Jisung said. “Propped up against the wall where he could keep looking at it. Jeongin came in and saw it and turned it so that it faced the wall. He looked like one of those kids tasting a lemon for the first time.”
If someone else had said that, Hyunjin would have snorted with laughter, just imagining the look on Jeongin’s face. But it was Jisung who had said it, so he couldn’t laugh, so he did his usual thing: he bit the inside of his mouth to keep his facial expression perfectly flat and turned his face slightly to the side, out of even Jisung’s peripheral vision, so that he wouldn’t see if the amusement was in Hyunjin’s eyes.
He’d been doing this with Jisung almost from the start. In the beginning, it had been because he resented that he found Jisung funny in the first place. This annoying little twerp, who came in to where Hyunjin lived and whose first words to him had been a mocking, triggering joke. Truthfully, Hyunjin didn’t even remember what the joke had been, the words lost but he remembered how it had felt to hear them. He remembered his anger, his gut wrenching upset, but even that felt a little muted now, lost somewhat to time.
Hyunjin had been determined to not like Jisung, at all, and once he had gotten slightly over that first meeting, once he had realised that Jisung was just a harmless flirt who took none of it seriously, it had been the height of aggravating to realise that Jisung was, also, at the heart of him, a very funny person.
Now, Hyunjin couldn’t bear to let Jisung know just how funny Hyunjin found him, because he knew that if he did, Jisung would take that as— encouragement. Jisung liked to make people laugh, Hyunjin had seen him bond with the others through humour, and he knew that if he gave even an inch before he was ready for it, Jisung would leap at the chance. He would want to be Hyunjin’s friend, want to joke and play around with him.
If there was one thing Hyunjin could never be, it was Jisung’s friend, only his friend. He loved him too much for it; it had to be all or nothing.
Jisung was used to Hyunjin not reacting to things that he said, though, and he just strode along in the sunlight for a bit and said, “How did you paint it, anyway? Did you use a reference?”
He sounded interested, genuinely interested, and when Hyunjin turned his head slightly back, he saw that Jisung was half-watching him, half-watching the street so that they didn’t bump into the handful of people coming this way. Hyunjin didn’t look back at him but he could see it in the corner of his eye, Jisung’s relaxed expression.
“Yes,” he said eventually. “A photograph.”
“Oh, I see,” Jisung said. He didn’t sound disappointed to hear that the image hadn’t jumped fully formed from Hyunjin’s imagination. He’d seen people, in the comments of videos he’d watched on different art techniques, complaining that using references was cheating, but Jisung sounded like it was just as impressive to him either way. “Did Jeongin know you were going to paint him?”
“Not when he posed for the photograph,” Hyunjin said.
Jisung laughed. It was hardly the first time Hyunjin had heard Jisung laugh at him, but it somehow startled him this time, to hear it, because Jisung sounded a little startled, like he really hadn’t expected Hyunjin to make a joke. Hyunjin did look at him then, almost a reflex, and saw Jisung’s wide smile, the way his eyes were crinkled, the brightness of his eyes, and wrenched his gaze away.
“Poor Jeongin,” Jisung said, once he had stopped laughing so hard. “You tricked him!”
Hyunjin didn’t look at him, didn’t say anything else. This was why he had not spoken this entire trip except about the job, this was why it was such a difficult, tricky thing to talk to Jisung at all. He was torn between the desire for this, for Jisung’s open, easy conversation with him, Jisung’s laughter and comfort with him, and the need, just as pressing, to shut it down completely before Jisung tried any harder.
He could not do this. He needed — a break.
He stopped by the entrance to a side street, just large enough to not count as an alley but not much bigger. There was a taller building here, taller than the others around it, and when he looked, he saw that there was a fire escape on the side of it, like the one they had at their building, leading all the way to the roof. Jisung, a couple of steps ahead of him, stopped and looked back.
“Hyunjin?” he asked.
“I want to get higher,” Hyunjin said. “I want to see— the intersection, from above. I’m going up there.” He pointed at the fire escape; Jisung peered around the corner and then nodded.
“Okay,” he said, easy as anything. “While you do that, I’m going to go get a water.” He pointed, in turn, to a convenience store further away down the block. “Do you want me to grab anything?”
“No,” said Hyunjin. The need to get away was almost an itch now, that understanding tone in Jisung’s voice too much.
“Okay,” said Jisung again. “I’ll wait for you outside the store. Just come and find me when you’re ready.”
Hyunjin nodded, already moving away. He didn’t look to see if Jisung was watching him, or if Jisung had already left. He just stalked up to the fire escape, jumped into the air to pull down the ladder, and then started his way up.
He had always liked high places. He didn’t do this much at home, because the few times that Chan or Changbin had caught him up on the roof in their old apartment building, they had freaked out at him in a way that, at the time, he hadn’t quite understood, but now he knew — they had been afraid he was going to try jumping, and if he wasn’t, they hadn’t wanted to put the idea into his head.
But that hadn’t been it, at all. He just liked to be high up, his view as unrestricted as it could get — which, to be fair, wasn’t very much, in this city, but it worked well enough. It was the freedom, he thought. Eight long years of nothing but the four walls of a series of boring rooms and now he wanted to see as much as possible in one look.
At the top of the fire escape, he found a flat roof, not painted green like the roof of their own building, but then this one was definitely a newer build. From up here, he could see past all the other buildings around, and in the distance, just close enough to make out, he could see the intersection they had crossed, or at least the streams of cars waiting at the red lights.
There was no telling how busy it would be later in the evening, around the time that Jisung and Changbin would actually go out. But at this time of the day, still before rush hour, it was plenty bustling. He was glad they’d already changed the job to miss it out, because otherwise he’d have had to go home and find Minho and throw a spanner into his plan, and even though he knew that Minho trusted and wanted his professional opinions, Hyunjin disliked making more work for him.
He looked away from the intersection and instead turned slowly in a circle so he could take in the whole view, the stretch of city skyline under the blue sky. A bright day, barely any clouds, but still with that fall chill. He walked to the edge of the building, right up to where it gave way to a sheer drop, and took a few breaths of that cool air, feeling it fill his lungs.
A novelty still, maybe. This fresh air inside him.
He took a few minutes to just look, knowing that Jisung would wait for him. He didn’t have a choice, mostly, but he knew, also, that even if he stayed up here for an hour, or two, or more, Jisung wouldn’t leave. He might come up here after him, to see what the fuck was going on, but he wouldn’t leave. But the fact of that reassurance meant that Hyunjin could not take hours up here. He’d feel too bad for wasting Jisung’s time.
The journey back down the fire escape was a little slower than his journey up, taking his time with the descent just because he didn’t really want to go down. The one bad thing about fire escapes was that it was very difficult to be quiet on the metal steps, and so it was now, his sneakers clattering at a little as he went. He didn’t like making noise when he moved like that.
He didn’t bother with the final ladder. Instead, he just swung himself over the barrier and then let himself hang and drop the rest of the way. It was remarkably similar to how he had escaped that godawful room those years ago, although this was a much smaller drop, and he knew, now, how to land to avoid hurting himself.
As he dropped, though, he heard a door open from somewhere next to him, just before he landed in a crouch on the ground, trying to avoid touching as much of it as he could. As he straightened up, he found that it was a side door on the building he’d just descended from, and a man, tall and muscular, was staring at him. Hyunjin gave him a winning smile, lifting a hand to make sure his hood was still in place.
“Who the fuck are you,” the man said, his surprised expression sliding into a scowl. “And what the fuck were you doing on our fire escape?”
“None of your business,” said Hyunjin. He tried to dart past him, to the entrance of the side street, but the man grabbed him by the upper arm, hard enough that Hyunjin winced, and yanked him back. Hyunjin actually stumbled a little with the force of that pull, and he felt his hood slide back, as he was shoved back roughly until his back was against the opposite side of the alley.
“Not so fast,” the guy said. He was taller than Hyunjin was, even, looming over him. “I don’t like the idea of a little rat sneaking around. Tell me what the hell you were doing up there.”
Hyunjin felt an urge to stick his tongue out. He managed to contain it, somehow, and a moment later there was the sound of more footsteps, as someone else came out of the building. “Dongho,” said a new voice. “What’s going on?”
Hyunjin craned around the man in front of him like he wasn’t in the slightest bit bothered by him, and saw that newcomer was easily as big as the one who had stopped him. Fuck, he thought, letting none of his panic show on his face, keeping it set in a bored, insolent expression. Fuck, shit, Christ on a stick.
“I found this kid coming down off the fire escape,” said the first guy. “He won’t explain what the fuck he was doing up there.”
The new guy came and stood beside him, so now Hyunjin had two knuckleheads standing over him. He’d tried to be so careful, and this felt like the kind of rookie mistake that he would have made when he was first starting out on jobs, not almost three years down the line. He could, he knew, get out of this, but he was not, it had to be admitted, good at talking himself out of situations such as this.
“Hey,” said the second guy. “Wait, I know you. That hair— you’re that pretty boy who works for Chris, aren’t you? What’s one of Chris’s guys sneaking around here for?”
Hyunjin let his bored expression morph into something mildly puzzled, and had to clench his teeth to keep from saying anything. That pretty boy had almost caused a flinch, the sound of it dredging something up deep inside of him that he didn’t have the time to deal with now.
“Which pretty boy,” said the other guy, snickering a little. “Aren’t they all like that? That guy’s got a fetish.”
“Something I’m sure your employer can’t relate to,” Hyunjin said, before he could stop himself. That was his problem, really — all those years of never, ever talking and then once he’d learned how to, it was so fucking difficult to stop himself.
It took a moment for his meaning to sink in. Once it did, he watched as both men scowled again. “Try saying that again,” said one of them.
Enunciating carefully, Hyunjin said, “You both look like the backend of a baboon.”
A moment later he was shoved back up against the wall, held in place by a hand around his collar, knuckles pressing into his throat in a way that was deeply uncomfortable. Hyunjin had to fight against an instinctive panic, at the feeling of anything against his throat; if they tried to put their fingers around his neck, he would not, he knew, be able to hold that panic back. It had always triggered something in him that he simply could not control.
“Okay,” spat the one holding him. “Tell me what the fuck you’re doing here right now, or I’ll beat your stupid pretty face in so hard your own mother won’t recognise you.”
She wouldn’t recognise me anyway, Hyunjin thought.
“Fuck,” he said. “You.” And then the man hit him in the face.
The thing about being hit was that he had never gotten used to it. He’d been hit a fair number of times, before; the Venn diagram of men who found their pleasure in boys who could not say no and men who liked to smack around the merchandise was almost a circle. But it never got better, or easier, and he hated it, maybe more than he hated people laughing at him. The thud of a fist connecting, the sting of a slap — he was never ready for it, never prepared.
He had not been prepared for this. He slumped against the wall, breathing through his teeth shallowly. He’d cut his lip, a nasty split against his teeth, and he poked at it with his tongue, trying to work out the damage caused. His teeth were in place, his nose was not broken, but they were likely to hit him again and who knew what would happen then. His mouth throbbed with the beat of his heart, too fast.
“Little bitch,” snarled the guy who had punched him. “Is running your mouth the only thing you can do? You can’t even take a fucking punch?”
The man had let him go, a bit of space between them now, and Hyunjin straightened up as best he could. He’d scraped his elbow against the brick wall, too, and he couldn’t tell if he’d broken the skin. He opened his mouth in the kind of unsettling smile that Minho would use when he was in one of his rages, knowing he would look a fright with the blood smeared across his teeth. “That’s not all my mouth is good for,” he said. “Want to find out what else it can do?”
The two men recoiled, just like Hyunjin had known they would. Even the men who wanted his mouth for said purpose tended to flinch when he got too crude about it. They were always going to hurt him but they would hurt him even more now — if they could catch him. He pushed off from the wall and sprinted for the entrance of the alley.
A shout went up behind him. He didn’t look back, didn’t take his attention off his goal for a second. Maybe he couldn’t fight but he was fast, certainly faster than his pursuers. He burst out of the alley onto the main street and didn’t even check if there was any traffic before he raced across the road. There was a screech of tires, the sound of smacking footsteps still behind him. There were only a couple of people on the street with him, all of whom simply glanced in his direction and then decided to mind their own business — exactly what Hyunjin would have done in their position.
He was so focused on simply getting away that when Jisung stepped out of a doorway and grabbed hold of him, he couldn’t help his shriek. He raised one fist in an attempt at battering his way free, realised it was Jisung, and stopped trying to tug free.
“Hey, hey,” said Jisung, and then spun them so the blow that was meant for Hyunjin instead landed on his own back. Where Hyunjin would have gone sprawling across the ground, Jisung barely even swayed. He even took a moment and looked at Hyunjin with a smile that faded into a slight frown as he noticed Hyunjin’s bloody lip. “I was gone for like two minutes,” he said.
Hyunjin didn’t have the breath for the biting response he wanted to give. His attackers had fallen back a little, possibly regrouping after seeing their hit have no effect whatsoever on this newcomer. Jisung herded Hyunjin into the doorway he’d been lurking in, brought a tissue out from one of his pockets and started dabbing at the blood with it.
Hyunjin inhaled in a gasp and managed to say, “Ew, don’t touch me with that.” But he didn’t push Jisung away.
Over Jisung’s shoulder, one of the two men stepped forward, the ugly look back on his face. “Oi,” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”
Jisung ignored him. “They really got you good,” he said. He pressed harder with the tissue and lifted one of Hyunjin’s hands to it, squeezing to make him hold it in place. “Keep the pressure on,” he said. “Don’t move, okay?”
Hyunjin nodded. The adrenaline of it all was already rushing out of his system, a sickening sweep of energy out of his body. His mouth hurt more with every passing second. He wanted to find a small, narrow space to curl up in and pretend like he didn’t have a body, the way he had for years when it was all too much. Instead he was here, a small street in the fading afternoon light, and Jisung was turning to face the men who had hit him.
“You guys could have broken his nose,” Jisung said. His tone would have sounded cheerful, almost playful, to anyone who didn’t know him. “Or knocked out some of his teeth! Bad enough that you split his lip. How is he supposed to snark at us when he’s in pain?”
Hyunjin had the distinct urge to throw a rock at his head, regardless of if he was trying to help him in this situation or not. Maybe if were this a different kind of situation, he might have at least thrown some comment back, but unlike these men, Hyunjin knew Jisung well enough to hear what they clearly couldn’t. The anger susurrating softly under the light cover of his tone.
One of the men stepped up and grabbed Jisung by the collar. “I said,” he snarled into his face, “who the fuck are you?”
Jisung brought one hand up and put it around the one holding him in place, like he was trying to tug it away but it was clearly just resting in place. “Oooh,” he said. “Aren’t you scary?” Then his other hand did something incredibly fast that had the other man dropping to the floor, howling.
“Now,” said Jisung, stepping over the man who was clutching between his legs. Ah, Hyunjin thought. “Which one of you is the one who hit our Hyunjin?”
The thug that was still standing looked at the one on the floor and said, “You fucking bastard.” He did not look like he was thinking about taking the hint and running. Hyunjin would have commended him on not leaving his friend behind except that now he was barrelling down on Jisung. He was much taller and about twice as wide as Jisung, the very definition of hired muscle, but Jisung just stood watching him calmly, even as the guy hauled a fist back. Then at the last second he ducked to the side so that the other guy’s fist caught the wall behind Jisung’s head.
“They really don’t hire for brains anymore,” said Jisung, as the guy yelled in pain, clutching at his hand that he’d probably just broken a few fingers on. Then Jisung kicked a foot directly into the back of his knees, so the yelling man collapsed like a puppet with his strings let loose. Jisung grabbed him by the back of his hair and then, almost faster than Hyunjin could see, smashed his face into the wall.
The guy hung in the air for a second, unconscious but held upright by Jisung’s hold in his hair. His nose was broken, blood already starting to drip thickly down his face. Hyunjin looked at it, feeling the way his lip was still oozing blood a little, and felt a bit nauseated. It was strange — he never felt sick when he was sticking someone with a knife, but something about this always turned his stomach. Something about the reminder of animal flesh.
Jisung let the man go, watched him slump sideways to the ground. He shook his hand out, letting loose a small shower of black hairs that he’d apparently yanked out. “Okay,” he said, before turning his attention back to the man whose balls he’d probably crushed. That guy was starting to recover a little bit, halfway up off the ground, face twisted in an expression of pure rage.
“Now, see, the thing is,” Jisung said, as he walked over to him. He drew a foot back and kicked the guy in the stomach, the violence of the action at odds with the calm expression on his face. The man gasped, obviously winded by the kick, and collapsed back to the ground again. Before he could recover or even catch his breath, Jisung knelt on his sternum, in a way which looked like he was using all of his weight to press down.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” the guy groaned, breathless still, one of his hands scrambling up at Jisung ineffectually.
“No, you aren’t,” Jisung said, before he punched him in the face. It was a hard punch, solid; Hyunjin had to look away at the sound of it, the almost-wet thump. The guy’s hands fell away to the ground, but he was still snarling something through the blood on his face, in his mouth, so Jisung punched him again. This time he went quiet, although he was still conscious.
“The thing is, I can’t help but notice that out of the two of you, you’re the one with blood on your knuckles,” Jisung said, his tone almost like this was a normal conversation. “And while I hope that it’s not Hyunjin’s, I’m not actually that optimistic. Is he the one?” he asked over his shoulder, smiling at Hyunjin like nothing was happening.
Hyunjin shrugged. He couldn’t remember, he hadn’t paid enough attention to their faces, too afraid of what was coming, the impending hurt. Jisung’s smile brightened at him. “Oh well,” he said. “I guess it doesn’t really matter.”
He punched the man pinned beneath his knee again, and then again, until this time he passed out. Jisung was not like Minho: once his victim had gone still and silent, he sat back, shaking out his fist a little. He had blood on his knuckles too, his fingers smeared with it, which he wiped on the jeans of the unconscious man whose face said blood had come from. Only then did he stand.
If anyone else on the street had noticed the violence, they were paying even less attention than they had to Hyunjin’s running. Jisung didn’t give either man a second look as he walked back to Hyunjin and tutted in a particularly motherly kind of way. “I told you to keep the tissue on it,” he said. Hyunjin threw it on the ground before Jisung could try to touch his mouth with it again. Jisung seemed to find that funny. “Let’s go home,” he said.
Hyunjin glanced at the two men unconscious in the middle of the street and just nodded his head. Jisung ushered him forward, but didn’t try to touch him, which Hyunjin tried to not feel grateful about. But he was grateful, he was grateful for all of it. He had not known what to do, had not known how he was going to get out of this without being hurt more. But then Jisung had appeared, just like he always did, and it had been okay again, just like it always, always was. Sometimes Hyunjin craved that security, the knowledge that Jisung was always there, always ready to step in. Sometimes it made him want to lash out, angry that he needed it in the first place; a cat with all its claws out. Yet none of that changed the fact that Jisung had been there, and Hyunjin was grateful for the blood on Jisung’s hands, the sweat on his temple, the way he shook his hand out again when he thought Hyunjin wasn’t looking.
He was such a needy, pathetic child at heart.
Jisung took them through a couple of side streets until they were far enough away, and then flagged down a taxi. He held the back door open for Hyunjin, like a fucking dweeb, and Hyunjin rolled his eyes at him and climbed in. His mouth was really throbbing now, a constant pulse of pain with his heartbeat. When Jisung shut the door after him, the sound inside the car took on that strange muffled quiet that it did in cars sometimes. Jisung leaned forward to tell the driver where to go, and Hyunjin laid his head against the car door and didn’t listen to any of it.
He drifted a bit on the ride home, listening to nothing but the dampened sound of air rushing past, seeing nothing as he looked outside the window. Jisung let him be, chatting with the driver cheerfully but pitching his voice quietly, an unusual feat for him. Hyunjin let it all wash over him, let the pain in his mouth fade too, to some back place of his mind.
It was not the same thing as he had seen in Felix's face when he'd washed his hair or done his make up. There had been only contentment on his face then. Hyunjin did not feel anything close to contentment when he got like this. It was more like he was sinking, to a deep dark place, where he was no longer quite connected to his body, no longer physical flesh. It was not that he liked this sensation, only that it was— comforting. It always had been. It had been the only way to survive, for a long time.
He barely even noticed when the car rolled to a stop, and didn't move until Jisung put a hand, a touch of warm skin, to Hyunjin's hand where it rested against the leather seat. "Hyunjin," he said quietly. "We're here."
Hyunjin climbed back out of the car without feeling like he was quite in his body still. They were not quite home yet, a couple of blocks away, and without waiting for Jisung he started straight for home, walking in the way he did when he was coming home from a job, long sloping steps in the shadows that were cast by the late afternoon sun. Jisung let him be, followed behind in the light, looking perfectly happy to be doing so.
"Hyunjin-ah, come in the back," he called out eventually, when they were walking down the side alley that led around the back of the building. Hyunjin stuttered to a stop, an odd jittering motion that seemed to bring himself back a little. It gave Jisung time to catch up to him. “Seungmin has that first aid kit in his workroom, let me try to fix your lip a little bit, okay?”
Hyunjin hesitated but the world had taken on such a feeling of unreality, a haze across his vision, that the thought of climbing up the fire escape seemed impossible. So he nodded and he followed Jisung through the back door, down the little hallway that opened out into Seungmin's workroom, where Seungmin was waiting for them at his computer.
“How did it go?” he asked, looking around at them, and then, “Oh, fuck,” once he saw Hyunjin’s face.
Jisung made an acknowledging sound and then touched Hyunjin’s shoulder very lightly. Hyunjin stepped away from it and sat down on the couch, the ugly lumpy thing that Seungmin liked for some reason. It wasn’t comfortable but it was— familiar, now, a familiar discomfort, not one of pain or fear. He caught snippets of what Jisung was saying to Seungmin, was aware that Seungmin had slipped out of the room. A clatter, things rolling around inside a metal box, and then Jisung sat down next to him.
“Hyunjin,” he said, very gently. Hyunjin shivered. What was it, he thought with a hint of despair, that made him respond to Jisung’s voice like this. The way his name in Jisung’s mouth brought him crashing back into his body. It wasn’t just Jisung who could do this to him, Chan could have that effect too, but it was always stronger with Jisung. He blinked and found Jisung watching him seriously. He seemed to realise that Hyunjin was seeing him and not just looking at him now, because he suddenly smiled. “Hello,” he said brightly. “I’m going to clean your lip, okay? I’m sorry if it hurts.”
“It already hurts,” Hyunjin said. It came out mullish, which was better than how it had felt before he said it, which was sad.
“I know,” Jisung said. He was opening the first-aid kit as he spoke. “Your poor mouth. I wonder who those guys work for, maybe we should send Minho-hyung on a visit. Oh, no,” he added, with a wince, before Hyunjin’s face could do whatever it was about to do. “That was a bad joke, I’m sorry. Never mind, they get to live to be dumb another day. Hold still, okay?”
He touched Hyunjin’s mouth with an antiseptic wipe. It did hurt, a sharp sting that Hyunjin almost flinched from. But worse than the sting was the way Jisung was touching his jaw with his other hand, a gentle touch as he moved Hyunjin’s face so he could clean the cut better. Hyunjin wanted to smack his hand away; he wanted to crawl into Jisung’s lap and beg for more. It was, he realised, the first time Jisung had touched his face. His fingers were slightly calloused, a slight drag against the softness of Hyunjin’s skin. Hyunjin held himself perfectly still and did not lean into it.
Jisung tutted as he put the used wipe on the arm of the couch. It was stained a little with blood. Hyunjin couldn’t look at it. “How could they do this to you,” he said. He turned Hyunjin’s face a little, looking more carefully at the wound. Hyunjin wondered what it looked like, how marring it was. “The good thing is that it’ll heal fine by itself, though it’ll take a few days. I bust my lip once, in middle school, it’ll be okay.”
Hyunjin glanced at him, found Jisung’s face remarkably close, still with that intense look on his face as he looked back. Jisung was the one who flinched back at that, a little jerk of motion that he changed into sitting back and letting go of Hyunjin’s face. Hyunjin watched him, very quiet. He knew what Jisung had not said, what he had smoothed over. It was not that he had bust his lip, through some accident or clumsy action; it had been bust for him, probably at the hands of his stepdad. It was just like Jisung, to take the responsibility onto himself, rather than get caught up in questions of blame or retribution. How unlike Hyunjin he was.
“The bad news is that you shouldn’t eat any lemons for a while,” Jisung continued, “which I know will be a hardship for you, considering how many you eat on a day to day basis, but you’ll survive, I’m sure.”
Hyunjin said, “Are you calling me bitter?”
“Never,” said Jisung. His smile was soft now, that particular way he smiled sometimes that made Hyunjin’s pulse jump in his throat. Unpleasant right now, with the hurt of his mouth. “Oh, here’s Seungmin,” he added, as Seungmin shuffled back into the room. He had an ice pack in one hand and a mug of something in the other, steam gently rising into the air. He put the mug on the table and handed the ice pack to Jisung. He was looking at Hyunjin with an expression that was concern on Seungmin’s face.
Jisung tried to put the ice pack against Hyunjin’s mouth. Hyunjin intercepted it, snatching it out of his hand before it could touch him. He didn’t think he could bear it if Jisung touched him again, especially not now that Seungmin was in the room. Jisung let it go easily. “There you go,” he said, his tone tilted in a way that suggested he was not talking about the ice pack.
Hyunjin put the pack to his mouth. He didn’t like it, didn’t like to be cold, but it was still— nice, an instant relief. He nodded to the mug on the table. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Hot chocolate,” Seungmin said, voice and eyes serious. “I know you like it.”
For the first time, the very first time in this whole ordeal, Hyunjin felt himself abruptly on the verge of tears. It was that, more than anything else, that made him realise how completely he was back in his body. Tears always meant safety, meant the capacity to process reality. Back then, he had not cried at all, had held himself stiff and still and utterly dry. It had only been after, after it all, that he had been able to cry. For a while, when it had just been him and Chan and Jeongin and Changbin, he had not been able to stop.
He had to tip his head back against the back of the couch and stare at the ceiling to try to stop himself from crying. Even then, he didn’t quite manage it; a few tears slipped out, slid down his temples, shockingly warm. Jisung leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, looking up at Hyunjin where he sat with his feet planted on the couch. “There you go,” he said again. “There you are.”
——
Changbin rapped his knuckles on Chan’s office door and then opened it. He was not like Jeongin, who just barged in, and he wasn’t like Hyunjin, who had a whole thing about waiting for people to welcome you through doors. With Chan, Changbin gave an alert, and then came in anyway. Chan had once told him that he didn’t need to even knock, if he didn’t want to, but Changbin liked the— slight added formality of it. He and Chan were brothers, in a manner of speaking, but they were also still boss and underling, and Changbin liked the way this blended the two.
Chan looked up when Changbin came in and gave him a quick, somewhat tight smile. “Oh, good,” he said. “You got my message?”
Changbin nodded. He’d just stepped out of the shower when he saw the message from Chan lighting up his phone, asking him to come down to the office as soon as possible. Once upon a time, Changbin would have rushed — the two of them had worked, in the past, for people who meant five minutes ago when they said as soon as possible — but he had taken his time getting dried, pulling on clean clothes, and then came downstairs.
He took a seat, which he usually only did if there was no one else in the room with them. A habit that he’d had since the early days, when they had only had external meetings and Changbin had always stood just behind Chan in the offices of suppliers and weapons dealers and potential clients, trying to project an aura of do not fuck with us. He didn’t have to do that with the people in this team, the only people who came into this office, but he did it anyway. He liked having Chan’s back, literally.
“What’s up?” he asked, although he suspected he knew. “You said you needed to talk.”
Chan nodded. He reached out and turned his monitor off and then said, “Minho and Jeongin were in here earlier, talking about the Lee Jaerim job. Talking about Jeongin potentially coming on the job.”
Even though Changbin already knew about this, the surprise on his face wasn’t entirely feigned. Neither was the discomfort, the way just hearing Chan bring it up made him feel faint stirrings of anxiety. The thought of Jeongin on a job, any job, was something that he had been trying to avoid thinking about for years.
“Minho had told him about the issues he’s having splitting the group up,” Chan said. “About how we don’t have enough people—”
“We don’t?” Changbin asked, actually surprised at that. When he’d first seen the plans, it had seemed that they had enough.
“Not according to Minho,” Chan said with a sigh. Changbin just shrugged back at him. He had been very happy to pass off job planning to Minho when he had arrived and showed a talent for it, because Changbin had never been very good at it. He was good at beating people up, shooting a gun, and standing around flexing his muscles intimidatingly, and it was these attributes that he had been hired for in the first place.
“Jeongin suggested that he come,” Chan said, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “And Minho told him no, of course, so then they came in here to argue it out with me. Jeongin is insisting that he can do the job.”
Changbin nodded slowly. He had been turning it over and over in his head ever since Seungmin had first brought it up, trying to set aside his own personal feelings on the matter in order to focus on what he knew was objectively true. “If you’re asking for my professional opinion,” he said, “then I can’t say that it’s a bad idea.”
Chan gave him another tight smile. “I was afraid you’d say that,” he said. “I told Jeongin that we’d have to test him out, since neither Minho nor I have seen what he’s like when he’s shooting. When I said that, I was kind of trying to placate him without telling him no, but I remembered what you’ve told me in the past. That he’s good.”
Good was a little bit of an understatement, Changbin didn’t tell him. Jeongin had a natural talent with a gun, and Changbin did not know where it came from. He had required very little instruction once they had actually been willing to let him hold a gun in his hands, and had mostly just needed minor adjustments to his stance and to learn to deal with the recoil. On someone as clumsy as Jeongin, the care and competence he had shown had been nothing short of remarkable.
“He is good,” Changbin said. “He’s very good. As good as Jisung, if not better. We haven’t taken him out to try long distance yet but at short or medium, he’s good.”
Chan looked like he was torn between being proud at Jeongin’s abilities and grim at the implications of it. “So do you think it’d be a good idea to bring him on the job?”
“On a personal level, absolutely not,” Changbin said. “Hyung, I don’t want Jeongin out there in the field as much as you don’t want it. But he’s good, he’s grown, and if we have a need for him, then we should let him come. We cannot baby him forever.”
Chan was silent for a long, long few seconds, not looking at Changbin but instead at somewhere just past him. Changbin shifted to see if he was looking at anything in particular and saw that Chan was staring at the canvas that held the portrait of Jeongin. Someone, probably Jeongin, had turned it so that it was facing the wall, but what it was was still obvious.
“I don’t like it,” Chan said eventually. “And Minho won’t either. He was furious even at the suggestion we test Jeongin.”
He said it idly, in a way that included Minho in the three of them — the older trio, who wanted Jeongin protected from such things as this for as long as possible. And yet, Changbin knew, if he’d said such a thing a few years ago, it would have been laughable, to think of Minho not willing to let Jeongin come on a mission, to think of Minho insisting that Jeongin not be allowed to come, not because of any skills he may or may not have, but simply because he didn’t want Jeongin in the face of danger.
Because that was it, Changbin realised, and it was something he had not fully internalised over these past few years. He was so used to his and Chan’s stance on matters that it had seemed perfectly natural that Minho, eventually, had come to agree with them, to stand for the same thing. But it was strange, on someone like Minho, and Changbin hadn’t paid enough attention to really notice when he had changed his mind fully.
Did Chan even realise how much of a shift that was? There had been no sense of strain in his voice, no tension whatsoever, at this mention of Minho’s care over Jeongin, despite the fact that they’d apparently argued over Minho wanting Jeongin just a couple of days ago. They took it for granted now. And Changbin knew— if Minho had simply cared for Jeongin, Chan would not have been so angry. It was the desire, Minho’s desire specifically, that would have rattled Chan.
“Minho-hyung will get over it,” Changbin said, which had taken on the air of a proverb in their household at this point.
“Yes, but not without making his displeasure very known,” Chan said with a sigh. “He’s already been annoyed enough about my relationship with Felix.”
Changbin shrugged. “Well, he’ll get over that too,” he said. “Eventually.”
Chan smiled, for the first time since Changbin had come into the room. He was about to say something else but they were interrupted by a knock on the door. “Come in,” called Chan, and when it opened, it was Jisung pulling it open for Hyunjin to step in, almost but not quite touching Hyunjin’s shoulder as he ushered him inside.
Changbin stood up in alarm. “Hyunjin,” he said, already moving to put his arm around Hyunjin’s shoulders and guide him to the couch. “Sit down, what happened?”
Hyunjin sat. He looked exhausted; he had been crying, his eyes red-rimmed, but there were no tear tracks on his face. His bottom lip had been split open and was already swollen, the cut painful looking and nasty. It had been cleaned up, that much was obvious, but a cut like that would be horribly sore for a long few days. It would be difficult to eat, without it pulling or cracking open.
Hyunjin looked over his shoulder at where Jisung was closing the door behind him. For a moment, Changbin thought, Jisung did this? in absolute confusion, but then he realised that Hyunjin was just wanting Jisung to answer for him. Jisung saw Hyunjin looking at him, and nodded, and said, “We ran into a little trouble when we were out, just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Changbin, sat next to Hyunjin on the couch now, took Hyunjin’s hand between his own. His fingers were cold, and when Changbin squeezed them, Hyunjin only squeezed back very lightly. He had the vaguely empty look on his face that Changbin hated so fucking much, but he seemed to at least be in the room with them. “Where were you?” he asked Jisung, and in his concern for Hyunjin, it came out a little— accusatory. Although Jisung didn’t react in any way, Changbin winced, and said, “I didn’t mean it like that, I just mean— how did this happen?”
“It was my fault,” Hyunjin said. His voice was very quiet, almost wispy, but he was speaking at the very least. “Got caught. Ran my mouth. Don’t blame Jisung.”
That did get a reaction out of Jisung — he looked at once shocked and touched. After a moment, he cleared his throat and said, “I was waiting for him. I would have gone looking for him if he’d taken much longer but—” He smiled at Hyunjin, more subdued than he usually was, his voice a lot quieter than he’d usually be. “Hyunjin came out of that alley like a bat out of hell, I didn’t know he could run that fast.”
Hyunjin didn’t really react to that, either. Chan had come out from behind his desk, now, and he said, “Hyunjin, can I see?” Hyunjin nodded and tilted his head up, so that when Chan put his hand to his jaw, it was just a touch, not Chan moving his face in any way. He sat patiently as Chan looked at the wound, Changbin stroking the back of his hand now, trying to be soothing.
After a few moments, Chan nodded and then let go and stepped back, giving Hyunjin some room. He looked back at Jisung and said, “What happened to the guy who did this?”
“Well, there were two of them,” Jisung said. He had both hands in his back pockets and he was rocking back and forth on his feet, but his face was still serious and he was not quite taking his eyes away from Hyunjin. “And they didn’t want to tell me which one had hit him, so I just broke both of their faces to be sure.”
Hyunjin shivered a little bit. Changbin tightened his hold on his hand but nodded approvingly at Jisung, whose serious expression disappeared as he beamed back. It had been a hell of a shock, that first time sparring with Jisung, down in the basement to test out what use Jisung could be to them, that the small, skinny boy they’d tied to a desk chair in the office of that dry cleaners had been able to fight. Not just fight — been good at it, too, able to give Changbin a run for his money, had even managed to beat him a couple of times. Jisung might not be particularly big, or well-built like Changbin had become, but he had learned how to focus his strength. His punches, Changbin knew from experience, hurt.
Chan nodded. “Good,” he said. "Do you know what gang they were in?"
"Judging by the area, probably Cho’s gang," Jisung said. "Which figures, because those two were fucking huge but they didn't have a brain cell between them."
"They recognised me," Hyunjin said. He was slowly, but surely, leaning further and further into Changbin’s side, like he was letting Changbin take the weight that he didn't feel up to living with right now. Changbin put a tentative arm around his shoulders, not sure how Hyunjin would react to the touch, but Hyunjin let him do it, turning a little into Changbin’s warmth. Not cuddling but almost. His voice dropped to a whisper. "They called me pretty."
Changbin met Chan's eyes in one shared moment of anguished rage, and then Changbin turned his head so he could press his mouth to Hyunjin's red hair.
Into the silence, Jisung said, his voice very hard, "I wasn't there for that. Maybe I should have killed them after all."
"No," said Hyunjin, still quiet, but he lifted his head to look at Jisung. "You said. They get to live another day to be dumb."
After a moment, Jisung smiled at him. It was almost painful even for Changbin to look at that smile. Jisung wore his feelings for Hyunjin so obviously on the surface that sometimes it was truly shocking that Hyunjin had never noticed them. "That's right,” he said. “I did say that.”
Hyunjin nodded and laid his head back down against Changbin’s shoulder. Chan, his voice pitched so very gently, so very carefully, said, “Hyunjin, are you okay?”
They waited a moment for an answer, all of them looking at Hyunjin. Jisung’s smile had faded a little but he was still looking at Hyunjin like he was willing to burn down the world for him. In much the same way that Minho had come, eventually, to understand the importance of protecting Jeongin, so too was Changbin grateful that Jisung, in his way, had come to this realisation about Hyunjin.
“Yes,” said Hyunjin eventually. He straightened up a little, taking the heavy weight of his head from Changbin, who had to fight to not encourage him to lay it back down. But when Hyunjin continued, his voice was a little brisker, although nothing at all like his usual style. “We finished the check,” he said. “Other than it running through Cho’s territory, apparently, the route seems fine, hyung.”
Changbin looked at Hyunjin’s side profile and tried to tamp down the pride and worry he felt, hearing Hyunjin’s voice as relatively strong as it was. He was speaking, even though it would be hurting his mouth to do so, and Changbin knew, he knew, how much Hyunjin deeply, deeply hated to be in pain. In the past, Hyunjin being in pain had sent him to that silent, empty version of himself that they struggled to break through to — the one time he had caught the flu from somewhere, he had been capable of doing nothing but laying on the couch staring through them. The trip to see a doctor had been one of the most upsetting things Changbin had experienced. To see Hyunjin now, upset by what had happened but interacting with them, made Changbin want to weep tears of relief.
“That’s good, Hyunjin,” Chan said, almost like he was encouraging Hyunjin in something. “That’s good to know, thank you for telling us.”
Hyunjin nodded. He lifted himself to his feet slowly, Changbin’s hand immediately dropping to his back to help him, but once he was on his feet, he stood straight upright, and shook his hair back a little, not sassily, just absently, like it was annoying him in his face. “I want to go upstairs,” he said.
“Of course,” murmured Chan, looking at him with that expression on his face: that warm care that Chan wore so well. Changbin had been willing to follow Chan even before he saw that expression, trusting in this older boy working for the same gang that Changbin was, friendly and so willing to show Changbin the ropes. But it had been after Chan had introduced him to Jeongin for the first time, and Changbin had seen that expression on Chan’s face as he looked at Jeongin, that Changbin had known that Chan would have his loyalty for life.
Hyunjin slipped out of the door without another word, and Jisung looked like he was about to follow him, but Chan said, “Ah, Jisung, stay behind? I need more information out of you.”
Jisung looked at the door closing behind Hyunjin, clearly wanting to go with him, to make sure he was okay, but then he turned back to them and said, “Sure, hyung.”
He took one of the wooden chairs. Changbin got back to his feet and perched himself against the corner of Chan’s desk, facing Jisung. “Tell us more about what happened while you were out,” he said.
“We walked the route with no problems,” Jisung said. “There’s nothing that should disturb us or cause us to have to change the route on the night. That intersection that I said would be a problem was a problem, and Hyunjin agreed, he said the place we’ve earmarked is a better choice.”
Changbin nodded. “And what happened with Hyunjin?”
“I’m not actually entirely sure,” Jisung admitted. “He wanted to get an aerial view of part of the route by climbing up to the roof of a building nearby, so I said I’d go to a convenience store and meet him afterwards. I was only further down the block, so I thought it would be okay. But I guess when he was coming down, he got caught and one of them hit him.”
Changbin looked over his shoulder at Chan, who looked grim. When he caught Changbin’s eye, he said, “Find out for sure who is operating in that area. If it is Cho, I want to make sure they don’t try coming after either Hyunjin or Jisung for what happened.”
“Their leader might be stupid enough to try,” Changbin said. “I’ll get Seungmin to check it out.”
“Good,” said Chan. He turned back to Jisung, still looking grim, and said, “Jisung, while you’re here, I wanted to get your opinion on something.”
“Sure,” said Jisung easily.
“There’s a chance that Jeongin might be coming on the Lee Jaerim job,” Chan said. Jisung’s eyebrows shot into his hairline and he looked between Chan and Changbin for a moment like he thought it was some kind of joke. But it wasn’t a joke, and when Chan continued with, “What do you think?” Jisung looked utterly baffled to have been asked.
“You want my opinion?” he said, like he was double-checking. Chan nodded. “Well— I mean, he’s a good shot, that much I can say. He’s never beaten me when we’ve sparred, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be good in a fight. He’s scrappy. But I don’t know, hyung, he’s never been on a job before and I have no idea how good he’d be in that situation. There’s a lot more to being on a job than just being able to shoot or throw a punch.”
That was true, and that was where Changbin thought the problems might come in — Jeongin was so stubborn, and so prone to clumsy accidents, and neither of these things were great attributes to bring on a job. They had no idea how he would react under pressure, because they had so carefully tried to engineer things for most of his life so that he would never be under that kind of pressure.
When he had been attacked in his home, however, he had done well, Changbin remembered now. He had not done what was demanded of someone hurting him. He had been brave then, and he had been so young. Changbin had no doubt he could be brave again.
Chan sighed and for a moment dropped his face into the palm of his hand. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” Jisung said. His voice sounded like he could be joking or not and Changbin couldn’t figure it out.
“No, you’ve been plenty helpful,” Chan said, very reassuringly. “And you’re right, besides, we don’t know any of that yet. Thank you, Jisung. You can go now, if you don’t have anything else to tell me?”
Jisung apparently did not, and so they set him free from the office to go do whatever it was Jisung did in his spare time. After the door shut behind him, Changbin looked back at Chan again and said, “I know you don’t like it, but we cannot baby Jeongin forever. We can’t.”
“I know,” Chan said.
Do you? Changbin wanted to ask him, but couldn’t, without explaining what he knew. Because he could understand Chan’s rationale all he wanted, could think about Minho wanting Jeongin and feel that same flash of fear and concern that he had no doubt Chan felt — but that did not make the meddling any better. It was hard to imagine Minho, paranoid and reserved and sharp with both his humour and anger, wanting Jeongin in a way that Jeongin knew how to handle. But that was not something that they should have any say in, it was not even something Minho had a real say in, if he did, in fact, want Jeongin like that. It should be purely down to Jeongin.
“You’ll set up the test, then?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Chan tiredly. “I’ll get Minho to set something up.”
——
Minho’s hands ached as he hit the punching bag, over and over, almost but not quite in that rhythmic violence he got into in a fight. There was no physical threat here, so he had not fully slipped into it, but it was something like that, the way his hands kept hitting and hitting, even though it hurt. Maybe it was because it hurt that he could keep going. Pain had never been something he’d allowed himself to shy away from.
He’d wrapped his knuckles, at least, before he’d started. Bruises he’d be able to hide from the others, but if he split his skin, that would be less easy. It had seemed important, at the start, but now he was beginning to suspect that— his body no longer cared about it.
He wasn’t sure how long he had been down here in the basement, going at this. He had spent some time in his room, pacing at first, and then simply sitting on his bed, staring at nothing, feeling the walls begin that steady pressing in, the way they always eventually did. Sometimes it came on faster than others, and it had come on fast, today, like being engulfed by a wave, a flood that crashed over his head and left him breathless.
He’d fled down here, and he had been hitting this bag ever since.
The exercise was tiring out his body but it was doing nothing for the nails-on-blackboard screech inside his head, the one that just kept thinking, Chan-hyung didn’t say no, Chan-hyung didn’t say no. He had been certain that Chan would say no — he would never have encouraged Jeongin to go ask Chan if he’d thought there had been the slightest chance that Chan wouldn’t agree with Minho and shut the entire idea down.
All these years. All these years of Jeongin being kept so completely out of danger. He’d known that Jeongin had been, over the past couple of years, wanting to go on jobs, wanting to help out where he could. Once Hyunjin had been allowed to come on jobs, they had been waiting for Jeongin to start properly campaigning for himself. He had not, though, not the way he had today.
But then, Minho reflected, as he hit and hit and hit, they’d never had a job that required a skill that only Jeongin had. The others could shoot and fight too. Why should Jeongin be a part of that, when he didn’t need to? And so it had been shoved off into the future, nobody ever really bringing it up, and Minho had hoped, hoped beyond words, that it would get shoved for so long that it would never have to happen. That he would never have to face a reality where Jeongin would be on a job, on the front lines, in danger.
Maybe he would have felt different if it was a smaller job. If Jeongin could be sent on something small, something low-risk, as low-risk as they could get. Even then, the fear and panic would be overwhelming for Minho but it would have been bearable. This was not that kind of job, though. This was going to be dangerous, and every time he thought about Jeongin going with them, it scared him so much that he felt like the air was being stripped out of him. Oxygen so far away, leaving him this gasping, frightened creature with no words to explain what it was feeling.
Chan-hyung didn’t say no, he thought, and then, stop, and then, instead, the self-loathing like a punch to the gut, you grabbed his face.
He’d been trying so hard to not think about that, either, but it was impossible, because he could still see, every time he blinked, against the darkness of his eyelids, the look on Jeongin’s face when Minho had grabbed him. He had not seemed scared, but he had been uncertain, looking at Minho with wide, confused eyes. Trusting Minho, trusting in his hyung, even as Minho was hurting him; he’d seen, right before he let go, the white of where his fingers dug into Jeongin’s skin.
He hadn’t meant to do it. Until he’d gripped Jeongin like that, he hadn’t really known he was going to. It had just been— too loud, maybe. Too much, sitting in that room, listening to Jeongin’s voice, trying to stop up his ears so as to stop himself falling under Jeongin’s spell. A siren, Jeongin sometimes felt like, pulling Minho in. He had just needed Jeongin to stop, but when he’d tried, a couple of times, to say Jeongin’s name, Jeongin hadn’t heard him, so— Minho had shut him up another way.
His shoulders were aching now. This was not exercise, this was not simply him trying to work through his anxiety. It was something else, now, something he knew that he should stop but he would not. He never stopped himself when he was like this. He knew where it was leading, and yet— he would not stop.
Unforgivable, really, to have done that. To have touched Jeongin like that. If nothing else, it was proof that he was unsuitable, proof of what Chan had said, what Minho had known all along: Minho was simply too violent for it. Too inclined to bruise when he should caress, maybe, too inclined towards force when he should be soft.
And yet, even so— the sickest parts of him, the darkest part inside of him, wanted to hold Jeongin like that again. To hold Jeongin’s face still for Minho to kiss, to make Jeongin take it. Not unwillingly, never unwillingly — rather, he wanted Jeongin to want it in a way that Minho knew Jeongin never could. It was why he had shoved Jeongin away so roughly; he had been afraid, in that moment, that he would do something even worse.
How he hated this part of him, the snarling animal that craved Jeongin beyond words. He should be proud that Jeongin was potentially capable of going on this mission. He was not. He didn’t want this. He would, if he could, keep Jeongin tucked away out of it all and make sure that he was warm and safe and protected until the end of Minho’s time with him. It was a selfish thought, not least because he had no right to dictate Jeongin’s life in that way. He’d never had that right. As Jeongin had said, it was Chan who made these decisions. It was Chan who would let this happen.
He could not believe Chan. He could not believe that Chan was contemplating this. He could not understand it.
Chan didn’t trust Minho with Jeongin’s heart, with his body, which was— right, it was fair. Minho could not be trusted in that regard. But to turn around and effectively hand him Jeongin’s life— it did not make sense. Minho did not want that kind of responsibility, not when it came to Jeongin. It was enough that he bore the weight of the others, something he felt keenly every time he sat down and began the meticulous process of planning out a job. He never wanted any of them to get hurt because of an error in his calculations. But if that happened— he’d bear it. He could bear it. He did not want to, but he could.
He could not bear Jeongin dying because he’d fucked up. He could not bear Jeongin dying anyway, but for it to be his own fault—
There was blood smeared against the surface of the punching bag, dark red against lighter red. It took him so long to work out what he was looking at that by the time he was able to bring his body to a stop, both hands were bleeding. He hadn’t noticed it, the skin splitting under the wraps, the blood seeping out. Even now, the pain felt like it wasn’t really registering, until he flexed his fingers and felt the cuts across his knuckles stretch as he did so.
He stood there, chest heaving, his breathing like that of a wounded, dying animal. He wanted to keep punching. He wanted to— make it hurt more, as if he thought the hurt of it could somehow wipe clean the stains of his sins. But this was already too far, the kind of damage that would take time to heal. A mistake, another one to add to the long list; if he needed to fight, now, he could do it, but it would hurt.
“Fuck,” he whispered, and leaned his head against the punching bag, holding it still with his hurting hands. He was careful to avoid actually touching it, but he was close enough to smell the blood, the metal of it. His blood. He thought about the last time he had seen that, his hand held so gently in Jeongin’s, and wanted to tear his own heart out of his chest.
He had no control in this, and he hated it. All he could do was make the test tomorrow as challenging as possible, and hope Jeongin failed it. It was an ugly thing to hope for, when he knew Jeongin would be humiliated and upset. He did not want Jeongin to feel that way. But an upset Jeongin was better than a dead Jeongin.
He stood for a long time, shivering as the cold air of the basement cooled the sweat on his skin, not moving, letting his knuckles bleed under and through his wrappings. He would keep Jeongin safe. He would do that until it was the last thing that he did.
——
Hyunjin entered the apartment as quietly as possible, wanting, for once, to not draw that much attention to himself. It was empty in there, the lights off. It had taken long enough to clean his mouth and then talk to Chan and Changbin that now the sky outside was the deepening purple of approaching night, but he didn’t bother switching the lights on.
He bypassed his bedroom, and instead he went to Chan’s room. He did not want to. He wanted, more than anything, to go to his own room and curl up under the covers in his bed for the rest of the night. He wanted, maybe, to get under his bed. To hide away, literally, in the dark.
But he wasn’t allowing himself to do that, for all that the prospect of what was about to take place made him feel like his brain was emptying the more he thought about it. He had come up here in order to talk to Felix, and he could no longer simply not do it because he didn’t want to, because it scared him. There could no longer be peace in that, the way there might have been in the past.
He could not stop thinking about Jisung. He could not stop thinking about all the times this week he had gone looking for Felix and realised that he was in Chan’s room with him. In his brain, the thoughts were muddled and looping, a mess that he knew he couldn't untangle on his own, because he had tried, he had been trying, and it hadn’t worked.
He needed to talk to Felix about it. He couldn’t put it off anymore. Not after today, not after learning what it was like to have Jisung’s touch against his face, gentle and kind and everything that so utterly terrified Hyunjin.
He knocked on the bedroom door and heard Felix, sounding confused, call out a welcome. When he opened the door, he found Felix sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed reading one of Chan’s books. It was nice to see him in there, comfortable in the space, relaxed in what was obviously one of Chan’s sweaters, the shoulders much too big. Hyunjin had knocked, waited for a response, and when he stepped inside, Felix first brightened at the sight of him — Hyunjin might have felt flattered at that, if he’d had the mental energy for it — and then his face dropped.
“Oh my god,” Felix said, dropping his book to the side without even marking the page and then scrambling off the bed. “Hyunjin, what happened?”
Hyunjin shrugged. “Ran into some assholes while scouting,” he said. Felix reached up as if to touch his face, and Hyunjin flinched a little, just enough that Felix hesitated. “It’s okay,” Hyunjin said, very softly. “I just— it took me by surprise.”
Felix nodded, but he didn’t move to touch Hyunjin’s face again. Instead, he took Hyunjin’s hand, curling his fingers around Hyunjin’s, and said, “Come and sit down with me? Or were you looking for Chan-hyung, he’s in his office.”
Hyunjin shook his head. He wanted to sit, but not in here, not on Chan’s bed. He had, many times before, and it didn’t cause any problems normally, but right now he wanted— his room, the familiar softness of his own bed, the smell of the paint and paper. “I was looking for you,” he said. “Can I talk to you? But not here, in my room. I’d like to go to my room.”
“Of course,” Felix said. He looked very worried now, which made Hyunjin want to reassure him somehow, but he couldn’t work out what to say. So he just tugged Felix out of Chan’s room and across the hallway to his own, which was feeling a little empty since he’d passed off the painting of Jeongin to Chan. He hadn’t had a chance to start something new, not something on a canvas like that; he hadn’t had the time or inspiration recently. Maybe he would, now. Art always had a way of getting him out of his head.
Felix didn’t ask for permission, he just climbed onto Hyunjin’s bed and grabbed a pillow to hold in his lap, the same way he always had done whenever they’d sat like this together before he moved to Chan’s room. It was so— reassuring to see, the way that Felix still took Hyunjin’s space to be his own, in some ways, that he was comfortable claiming it for himself still.
Hyunjin climbed up there with him. Felix passed him the other pillow, which Hyunjin took, feeling, for the first time, like he might smile. But he couldn’t because of the pain in his lip. It already hurt enough to talk. “Is it about your mouth?” Felix asked. “It looks so painful, Hyunjin. I can’t believe someone punched you.”
Hyunjin could. But Felix was right, it could have been so much worse. The pain in his mouth was horrible, a constant aggravating ache that he couldn’t quite stop feeling. It was not the worst pain he’d experienced though, not by a long shot, if for no other reason than he knew he could live with this pain. There’d been pain in the past that he thought would kill him.
“I don’t want to talk about my mouth,” he said. “I want to talk to you about— you and Chan-hyung.”
Felix looked instantly wary. “Hyunjin,” he said, “I told you I would—”
“No,” said Hyunjin. “That’s not what I meant.” He didn’t want to talk about that at all, didn’t want any kind of reminder of the awful secret that he was keeping from Chan. Especially not now, after how carefully and gently Chan had touched him in his office, the way he always left the contact in Hyunjin’s court. He and Changbin had always been like that, had always taken such care to give Hyunjin every possible bit of autonomy they could, and sometimes the thought of how good they both were made him feel like he might lose his mind over it.
And so he knew, he thought, the answer to the question that he had for Felix, but knowing something intellectually had never made a difference to Hyunjin, and he had to know. So he made himself open his mouth, and ask.
“Does it hurt?” he asked. He saw Felix furrow his brow and before he could be interrupted, he added, “When you have sex.”
That furrowed brow rose to Felix’s hairline. He seemed genuinely shocked by the question, or maybe just taken by surprise by Hyunjin being the one to ask. “Um,” he said. As it sunk in, Hyunjin watched him go pink, the same way he had whenever Hyunjin had brought up the possibility of him and Chan fucking before they’d gotten together. It was what had surprised Hyunjin so much about how he had talked about sucking Chan’s cock that time — there was something so sweetly innocent about Felix like this.
He wasn’t even a virgin anymore, so Hyunjin would have thought the blushing would stop. Apparently not.
“No,” Felix said, after a long pause. “It doesn’t hurt?”
He sounded confused, and Hyunjin wasn’t sure if that was because of the question itself or because he wasn’t sure about his answer to the question. “I mean,” he said, “penetrative sex. Does it hurt, when you two do that?”
It had been difficult to get the word out, as clinical as it was. He’d looked up the most clinical terms for everything that he could, trying to see if it would help in his head if he removed any sense of emotion from it, but it hadn’t helped at all. It had almost made it worse, to think of it as penetrative rather than something like getting fucked.
Felix took his hand. The expression on his face was sliding into— understanding, maybe, something just warm and concerned enough that Hyunjin could ignore the obvious pity underlaying it. “Hyunjin,” he said. “No, it doesn’t hurt when we do that.”
Hyunjin nodded, but the response niggled at him. It had been too fast, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Felix was simply saying it. If Felix was afraid to say otherwise, because it would maybe reflect badly on Chan, if so. But the concept seemed— impossible, to Hyunjin. It was not that he did not trust Felix, but neither did he quite believe him.
“Why are you asking?” Felix asked, quietly. “What brought this on?”
Because Jisung, Hyunjin thought. Because he touched my face and it felt so different to how it felt when Chan-hyung did it, and I think, sometimes, that I might go fucking mad like this.
“I didn’t really think,” he said, instead of saying that, “at the time, when I was— trying to shove you two together. I didn’t think about what it would mean, for you. I don’t— I don’t want it to hurt for you.”
“Ah, Hyunjin,” said Felix. He squeezed Hyunjin’s hand, very lightly and then shuffled forward on the bed until they were sitting with their knees pressed together. Even just those little bits of contact felt like they were soothing something inside of Hyunjin, and he wondered when that had become the case. Maybe it was just because it was Felix, but he’d felt something similar with Changbin, earlier, sitting side by side in Chan’s office. It used to be that, when he felt like this, anyone other than Jeongin touching him would send him into a flight response.
He let himself think, for a moment, what it would feel like if Jisung touched him right now, even just something as innocuous as a hand on his shoulder. The depth of his longing was shocking; the depth of his immediate panic was not.
“It doesn’t hurt for me,” Felix said. This time he sounded very firm, very certain of himself. “Even if it did, that wouldn’t make it in any way your fault, but it doesn’t hurt, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin nodded slowly but part of him wanted to argue with that. It would be his fault, a little bit, if he’d been the one to push so hard for Chan and Felix’s happiness together, only for that to be a cause of— pain and distress to Felix. He was scared, he realised, that Felix, sweet and all too willing to place not being an inconvenience over his own comfort and needs, would not speak up in a situation where he was uncomfortable. Felix would not sleep with Chan in order to have a place to live — if nothing else, his love for Chan radiated out of him — but he might not know how to protest against this.
“I don’t want you to be hurt,” he said. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, not like this, not with Chan-hyung.”
“I’m not, Hyunjin,” Felix said. “I really don’t feel like that. It’s never hurt with Chan-hyung, not the way you’re meaning. Besides,” he added, voice so serious but so gentle at the same time. Not like he was treating Hyunjin with kid gloves, but like he wanted to be careful with him all the same. “I don’t think — I can’t speak to uncomfortable, different people have different bodies — but Hyunjin, it’s not supposed to hurt.”
Hyunjin thought he knew that, on a very intellectual level that had nothing to do with how he actually felt about it. He’d tried, many many times, to watch some kind of porn, to see if he could see himself in those positions quite outside of his own— experience, so to speak. Even seeing the way that the guys in those videos seemed to be enjoying themselves, he’d never managed to finish a single one, because the panic that rose in his throat at the thought of being in their position was overwhelming.
It frustrated him, to a level that he sometimes just could not handle. Instead of thinking about it, it was easier to simply repress it, where he didn’t have to think, didn’t have to want. He much preferred being the person he was today over who he had been even a year or two ago, but at the same time things had been so much easier when he didn’t have the capacity to even want this kind of thing.
He resented Jisung for being the one to unlock that inside him. He hated himself for wanting it in the first place. Of all people, why did it have to be Jisung. A straight man, with everything that came with that.
He had to sit in the silence for a while, focusing on his breathing, focusing on the warmth of Felix’s hand in his own. When he could speak, he had to whisper it; it was the only way to say it. “It always hurt,” he said. “It always hurt, for me.”
Something crumpled in Felix’s expression, and for a moment he looked like he might start crying. Hyunjin— didn’t want that, but at least it would give him something to focus on, rather than all the emotions inside him at this moment in time. He was talking about this because he had to, because if he continued to not speak it out loud it was going to slowly kill him. But that didn’t mean that he wanted to do it. He had never wanted to talk about this, and it was only because it was Felix that he could.
Hyunjin watched Felix visibly compose himself, though, the tears getting tucked away somewhere. “Hyunjin, I promise you, it’s never hurt for me. I wouldn’t lie to you about this. It’s— different,” he added, too fast, the words almost tripping out of him. “It’s different, with someone you love. With someone who loves you. There’s an intimacy, a softness, in trusting someone with your body. Someone who loves you wouldn’t want to violate that trust.”
Hyunjin nodded again. That made sense, when he thought about in the context of Chan and Felix, it made sense that Felix would find that with Chan, who did love Felix, more than Hyunjin had expected even when he was trying to set them up. Their love for each other made him feel— envious, as little as he wanted to admit it.
“That’s good,” he said. “Of course, I knew that, with Chan-hyung— I knew that he’d look after you. He takes care of you so much anyway, I hoped he’d take care of you in bed, too.”
Felix closed his eyes for a moment. Hyunjin watched his face, the freckles, the long eyelashes. He was just— relieved, he thought, that Felix had someone he deserved. He deserved that care, the affection and love that Chan could give him.
His thumb slowly stroked the back of Hyunjin’s hand, comforting in a way that Hyunjin wouldn’t have expected. “Hyunjin,” he said, voice so gentle it was almost painful. “You don’t think Jisung would be careful with you, too?”
The question made Hyunjin feel like Felix had reached inside his head and dug his fingers into the tender meat of his brain, a painful squishing sensation. The entire concept of someone taking care of him in that way was— foreign, an odd thing to think about, even though he knew that— yes, Jisung would. Jisung always took care of him, was always there to protect him, to look after him when Hyunjin needed him to. Was always there even when Hyunjin didn’t ask for it, when Hyunjin could barely tolerate it, because that was simply the kind of person Jisung was.
“It’s not the same,” he said.
“Why?” Felix asked, his voice still gentle. “Why is it not the same?”
Hyunjin didn’t answer. It was such a tangled mess inside his head that he knew that if he tried to explain this particular thing to Felix, it wouldn’t be coherent. But the fact of the matter was that it was simply not a case of care. It wouldn’t matter how much care Jisung did or did not take of him, because the problem ran so much deeper than that.
Felix was still watching him, his thumb stroking over Hyunjin’s skin. He’d done this too when Hyunjin had told him about his past, and Hyunjin was one again struck with gratitude that Felix had found his way to them. “Hyunjin,” he said, when the silence had stretched long enough that it was obvious that Hyunjin would not, could not answer. “You deserve that kind of care, too.”
If that were true, Hyunjin wanted to ask, then why did no one do so in the past. But he couldn’t say that, not to Felix, and so he whispered, “It’s not that.”
It was not about the intimacy or the care or even about the pain. The pain was— secondary, almost, because if he took the pain out of the equation, a thought experiment that he struggled with but could just about manage, then the thought of it was still unbearable. The thought of Jisung moving inside of him, Jisung using his body to get off, was so agonising that even sitting in this quiet room with Felix holding his hand, his breath felt tight inside his chest.
He knew how it felt, to experience that. To be nothing more than something through which another person could take their pleasure. He knew that Jisung would never agree to— being on that end of things. No straight man would, not for an exploratory fuck. Hyunjin wouldn’t even want to ask him; he didn’t want the humiliation of Jisung rejecting him. And so it would have to be him, he would have to do it, and he couldn’t. He could not.
“What is it then?” Felix asked.
It’s that my body isn’t right for this, Hyunjin thought, miserable with it.
It wasn’t that he wanted to be— a woman, something he wasn’t. He’d never wanted that. Even loving Jisung like he did, knowing some things about being with Jisung might be easier if he’d been born differently, hadn’t changed that. He didn’t want to be a woman, didn’t want to be seen as one, didn’t want to pretend to be one. He’d had to, in the past, made to wear skirts and bows, and he’d hated it, never understood, because there were girls, too, in that place, so if these men wanted that, why pick him?
No, that wasn’t where this line of misery was coming from. He simply wasn’t sure he could enjoy— penetrative sex, getting fucked, in the body he had. Other men could, theoretically — Hyunjin wasn’t sure he trusted the actors in the pornos he’d seen— no, in fact. He did not trust them at all. But he did trust that for Felix it, somehow, must feel good. Felix wouldn’t lie to him. Hyunjin just could not understand it, and he was beginning to think he was simply not built for it, was not capable of enjoying the sensation, even if he went into it willingly. But it would be what Jisung would expect, would want.
As much as he didn’t want to face that reality, what other choice did he have?
“You know,” Felix said, after Hyunjin once again said nothing. “You can be with someone and not have penetrative sex, Hyunjin. You don’t have to do that at all, if you don’t want to.”
This struck Hyunjin as such an odd thing to say that he squinted at Felix despite himself. “Well, we’d need to do something,” he said. He could not ask Jisung to come to bed with him and then lay fully clothed next to each other on top of the covers, after all. “What else is there?”
Felix, now that they were talking about this, was back to blushing a little. “Hands,” he said. “Mouths. There’s a lot of ways to get each other off that doesn’t involve this thing you don’t want.”
This, Hyunjin knew, was true to some extent. He did know about these things, and he’d thought, in the past, that if nothing else, perhaps he could offer to blow Jisung. Even then, though, there would have been more restrictions than any normal person would find acceptable — a blowjob given by someone who could not bear to be touched during it, not even gently, not even with the care that Felix was talking about.
But it wouldn’t be enough, he knew. It wouldn’t be enough, for someone who preferred women, someone who could go out and find women who would happily fuck him. For someone who had that easy option open to him.
His doubt clearly showed on his face because Felix said, “Not every gay man enjoys— anal sex, Hyunjin. There are so many who don’t, and there are lots of couples who simply never do it, and that’s fine. It’s what they want.”
Felix didn’t get it, Hyunjin thought tiredly. It wasn’t his fault — he had Chan, who was attracted to men in the first place. Hyunjin didn’t have the luxury to think about what gay men did or did not want, what men attracted to men might desire in bed.
No, as far as he could tell, he only had two options: never have sex with Jisung, or learn to be able to be on bottom, the way he would have to be if Jisung agreed to it. He wanted Jisung so badly, wanted to know the touch of Jisung’s hands against his skin, that the first option was rapidly becoming untenable. So it would have to be the second.
Jisung would want one thing from him, and Hyunjin would have to give it to him. He just would have to learn to be okay with it.
He didn’t say that. He got the feeling that Felix would try to argue with him about it, and he was just— exhausted now. His mouth pulsed with pain, irritated by all the talking he had done, and he wanted to go find some pain medication in the bathroom and take it and maybe take a nap, although it was already tipping into late afternoon and was too late for it.
“Thank you,” he said. “For talking about this with me.”
Felix squeezed his hand, looking oddly stricken. “Hyunjin,” he said. “Please, you need to talk to Jisung about this.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Jisung,” Hyunjin said, almost on autopilot, but he knew— it was too late, really. Somehow Felix had seen right through him, almost from the start, and that thought terrified him in turn. He had worked so, so hard over the past couple of years to make sure that Jisung never knew about his feelings, and then that had changed into stalling until Hyunjin was in a position to give Jisung what he would want from him, but now it felt a little bit like there was a time crunch for him. If Felix could see how he felt, then surely it was a matter of time before Jisung himself could see it, and Hyunjin needed to be ready when that time came.
“Please, Hyunjin,” Felix said, almost a whisper.
Hyunjin, barely human in so many ways, didn’t deserve a friend as good as Felix was. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you leave? I need to be alone.”
Felix didn’t move for a couple of seconds. The others would have, as soon as he made the request, would have let go of his hand and removed themselves from the room as fast as they could. Felix just sat with him, his hand tight around Hyunjin’s and then he said, “Sure, Hyunjin. Would you like me to get you some medicine for your mouth?”
God, Hyunjin really did not deserve him. He wasn’t sure anyone other than Chan ever possibly could. “Please,” he said, his own voice almost a whisper too. “Thank you, Felix.”
Felix nodded, giving him a small smile that seemed a struggle for him. Then he untangled their hands and slipped carefully off the bed. Perhaps because he was planning on bringing him some pain pills, he didn’t close the bedroom door fully, leaving it open just a crack, through which Hyunjin could hear voices from the kitchen — Jeongin asking if they had eggs to add to his ramen, and then Changbin answering him.
Hyunjin held himself still. He didn’t want to talk anymore. He didn’t want to be a part of their group right now. He wanted to hold himself still and cold and silent, to pretend to not have a body, not one that had wants and desires, not one that could crave another person the way he craved Jisung. But his ability to do that had been whittled away so slowly over the years that instead of that, he just sat on his bed and felt so fucking much it was, he knew, probably going to break him some day.
——
Felix was already in bed when Chan came into the room, awake but mostly under the covers as he tried to read. Chan had been making noises about getting him a phone recently, so that he could use it for watching videos or just internet browsing, but Felix had been so long without one at this point that in some ways he preferred it. In lieu of a phone, he’d been working his way through Chan’s collection of books, and he’d tried to pick up where he’d left off before his conversation with Hyunjin earlier, but he was struggling to focus on it.
It was late, though, getting to be late even by Felix’s standards. He’d always kept late hours, and now that he was mostly caught up on sleep, he was starting to slip back into that — especially after he had moved into this room with Chan. With Hyunjin, he had always just gone to sleep whenever he wanted to, whether Hyunjin was going to or not; he’d drifted off to sleep many nights listening to Hyunjin’s pencil scratching at paper, or a paintbrush rasping over a canvas, the muffled soft sound of Hyunjin’s music coming through the headphones he was wearing.
With Chan, Felix tried to stay up. Not even just because sometimes it meant he got sex out of it. He just liked to be awake when Chan came in the room, to see this, now: the way Chan saw him awake, and smiled, so warm and affectionate it was like Felix was being slowly eased into a hot bath. “You’re awake,” Chan said, closing the door behind him. “I’m sorry, I’m later than usual.”
He was, just a little bit, but Felix got the sense that this was more typical for Chan than it had been over the last week and a half, and that Chan had been coming to bed earlier than usual simply for Felix. “It’s okay,” Felix said. He put his book aside and sat upright in the bed, letting the covers fold into his lap. He was wearing one of his own t-shirts, for once, one that he’d bought during those months on the streets, and just his underwear underneath it, not that Chan could see that.
Chan came over to the side of the bed and stood looking at him for a few moments. Felix looked back, letting his own smile come to his face, but he could tell even from how it felt on his features that it was not quite up to scratch. Chan leaned down and in and kissed him, something almost unbearably intimate without being all that heated. Felix kissed him back, and made an involuntary displeased noise when Chan pulled away too quickly.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his eyes moving over Felix’s face slowly.
Felix nodded. “Thinking,” he said.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Chan asked gently.
Felix thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Get ready for bed, first,” he said. “I don’t want to talk while you’re wearing pants.”
Chan blinked and then laughed, the smile coming back to his face. He kissed Felix again, a much more brief kiss, and then straightened up so he could do as he was told. He was quiet throughout the process — undressing most of the way, until he was just down to his boxer shorts, and then slipping into the bathroom, leaving the door open.
Felix listened to him washing his face and brushing his teeth, these half-muffled sounds of domesticity. Sometimes it felt like this life couldn’t really belong to him, like he’d managed to steal a happiness that belonged to a different person. He marked his page in his book and set it aside on the bedside table, the one that he had taken over as his own, not that he kept much on there. Right now it was just the book, and a tub of hand lotion that Hyunjin had given him and which Felix hadn’t actually used yet.
Chan came back out after a few minutes and padded almost silently up to the bed. “I assume you would still like me to wear my underwear,” he said, a little playful in a way that Felix liked so much.
“For now, yes,” Felix said. Felix had assumed, those first few nights they spent together, that Chan had slept naked because they had both been naked, the two of them drifting off post-coitus wrapped up in each other. But then one night they had not had sex, and Felix had worn some version of pyjamas and Chan had still stripped naked and gotten into bed with him. It had been a pleasant surprise, and even nicer when morning had arrived and there had been no clothes blocking Felix’s way.
Chan climbed into the bed, pulling back the covers and then tucking them back over his lap, mimicking Felix’s position. When he looked at Felix, he looked— so patient, so calm, like he was prepared for anything Felix could say to him. He wasn’t, Felix knew. There were things that Felix could tell him about that would leave Chan anything but calm.
“What are you thinking about?” Chan asked, when Felix didn’t say anything right away. He reached out and took Felix’s hand in both of his, shuffling a little on the bed so that their legs were mostly pressed together. It was more comforting than perhaps Chan knew, to have the slight skin contact at their knees.
“Hyunjin was in here earlier,” Felix said eventually. “Do you know about— his mouth?”
Chan nodded. “Yes, he came to see me,” he said. “He seemed he was doing okay, all things considered. Was he okay when he saw you?”
“Yes, and no,” Felix said. “I thought he wanted to talk about what had happened when he was out, but he didn’t. He wanted to talk about— sex.”
Chan almost jerked with surprise, his hands twitching around Felix’s. “Sex?” he repeated. “Hyunjin wanted to talk about sex with you?”
Felix nodded. “He wanted to know if it hurt,” he said, his heart still aching at the question. “When we have sex, I mean. He was asking if it hurt, for me.”
He watched the way his words landed on Chan like some kind of blow, the way his face flinched a little, like he couldn’t control it. There was a long silence, before Chan said, very carefully, “What did you tell him?”
There was a note in his voice that sounded like repressed fear, and it pained Felix so much to hear it. “No, of course,” he said, firmly. “It doesn’t hurt, of course it doesn’t hurt. I told him that, that it’s never hurt for me, but I’m not sure if he— believed me. Or, no,” he corrected, “I think he believed me, he just didn’t understand it.”
As he’d spoken, Chan had relaxed a little bit, his shoulders loosening just enough that Felix knew he really had been afraid of Felix’s answer, afraid that he had been hurting Felix all this time. That could not possibly be further from the truth. Sex with Chan felt good in a way that Felix could not put into words, a pleasure that seemed to extend down to his bone marrow every time. Chan took so much care of him.
But even having relaxed just a touch, Chan still looked confused and concerned. “Did he say why he was asking?” he asked. “Was he asking because it’s something he’s thinking about for himself?”
He sounded utterly baffled by the idea, which didn’t exactly surprise Felix but it struck him as a little intense, perhaps, that confusion. Chan said it like the idea of Hyunjin wanting sex had literally never crossed his mind before, which Felix got, in the abstract, because he knew that Hyunjin wasn’t ready for it now. Their conversation had proven that. But that didn’t mean it was the case that he would not be ready for it in the future.
“I think so,” he said. “He didn’t say as much, but I think so.”
Chan looked even more confused by that answer. “Who is he thinking about having sex with?” he asked, like this was an absolute bonkers concept to him. “Does he have someone in mind?”
Yes, Felix thought. He knew exactly who Hyunjin was thinking about having sex with, and it pained him deeply to know how much Hyunjin was struggling with it. The conversation had been so convoluted and confusing, and at the same time so seemingly futile, that Felix simply didn’t know how to help Hyunjin with it. If he could have simply gotten to the real truth of the matter, the real thing that was causing Hyunjin to think in these tangled lines, he could have maybe helped to pick it apart. But he had failed to notice what that was, or Hyunjin had concealed it from him, either on purpose or accidentally.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said, “without breaking Hyunjin’s confidence.”
Chan stared at him for a long moment, not like he was upset with that answer and more just like he hadn’t fully understood it. “But you know?” he asked. Felix nodded; Hyunjin may not have told him with his words, but Felix knew. “That’s— wow. Okay.”
He was frowning, now. Not at Felix, seemingly never at Felix, because as his face made that expression, his hand lifted and rubbed a small circle against Felix’s temple, like he was trying to soothe a headache that Felix wasn’t feeling. Still, Felix had to ask. “Are you upset that I can’t tell you?” he asked.
“No!” said Chan, immediately and so earnestly that it could not be anything but the truth. “Not at all, of course not. I’m— happy, I’m so happy that he has you. That he has someone who he’s comfortable talking to about these kinds of things. It’s just that— it’s always been me, in the past. He’s always come to me with this kind of stuff.”
“Oh,” said Felix. He thought about that, about Hyunjin taking his worries and fears to Chan, laying them in front of him and hoping that his hyung could help, perhaps, and had to close his eyes for a moment against the rush of love that he felt for both of them. He could not imagine his life without Chan, at this point, but it was even stranger to think of a life without Hyunjin.
“I’m the only one who knows,” Chan said, his voice dropped to almost a whisper. “About what happened to him, in the past. In that place. I’m the only one he told.”
It was Felix’s turn to stare at him now. “He told you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Chan said. “Everything. I heard— everything, every part of it. And so it’s strange, to not know what’s going on with him. I hadn’t realised he was starting to be ready for this kind of thing. Honestly, I thought— he never would be.”
“Fuck, hyung,” Felix said. What little he had heard had felt like it had left him hollowed out in some ways, to know that his friend had been hurt, in a way that had left scars that Felix could not possibly comprehend the scale of. For Chan to have heard everything, to know exactly what was done— a good man like he was, kind to a fault and sympathetic with it too. How it must have pained him.
“I’m not going to ask you anymore about it,” Chan said. “I want Hyunjin to be able to trust you with this, and to be able to trust me with whatever he feels up to trusting me with in turn. It’s good, it’s so good, that he has someone else to share these things with, you know? You are such a good friend to him, Lix.”
Felix shrugged, a little delicately. “He’s a good friend to me,” he said. “I never had one of those before.”
Chan looked at him for a moment, then untangled their hands so that he could put them against Felix’s hip, around his back, and draw him into Chan’s lap. Felix went as he was bid, happy to do so, until he was straddling Chan’s thighs, looking down that short distance to Chan’s face. Chan’s hand stroked his back gently, the expression on his face intent, but he didn’t tug Felix down to kiss him, like Felix thought, and hoped, he might.
Instead Chan said, “You fit so perfectly here. With him. With me, in this house. But it’s not just that, I see you with Jeongin, too, how good you are with him, and with Seungmin. It’s like you fit a gap that I didn’t know was there, and I think that’s how Hyunjin views it too.”
Felix almost squirmed in his lap. “Ah, hyung,” he said. “I’m not— trying to do that, I just— I like everyone here, that’s all. I like you.”
Chan kept looking at him seriously for some drawn out seconds, the eye contact almost too much for Felix to take. He wondered what Chan was seeing in his eyes, and hoped that he couldn’t read the lies there. The lies that Felix wanted desperately to keep hidden forever. If Chan did see them, he didn’t comment. Instead, eventually, he used the hand on Felix’s hip to pull Felix down and closer, and then he kissed Felix, open-mouthed and deep. There was love in that kiss, so much of it that Felix’s head spun.
He put everything out of his head, to focus only on the kiss, to focus only on Chan. It was easy to do. It was the easiest thing in the entire world.
——
Felix’s information had been bad.
Or, perhaps, the boy simply had not known the building as well as he’d thought he did. Minho though, at this moment, was not inclined to be so charitable in his assumptions of Felix’s loyalty. Whichever the case, the reality of the Magpie’s vault building was far more complex than they’d thought. They were six turns too deep and at this point, Minho had no idea where they were, or where they needed to go. Seungmin’s voice was little more than garbled static in his ear.
The lights kept flickering too, which wasn’t helping Minho’s disorientation. This far underground, when they dimmed, there were no windows to supply additional light, and everything went dark. He hated it, that momentary blindness. A little bit too like being locked up in his solitary room, those times when the lights were turn off without warning, no way to know if it was day or night.
“Hyung?” Jeongin’s voice, small and tentative from behind him.
Minho glanced down two identical hallways. “This way,” he said, picking one at random, because they couldn’t slow down. Their entrance had gone badly, and they were being pursued. He might be getting them more lost but it was better than getting them caught. The footsteps following them grew ever nearer, the sound of them clattering behind them getting louder. Minho’s heart was in his throat, breath short and rapid. He wanted to take Jeongin’s hand but he could not. That was not something he was allowed, not even here, not even like this.
The hallway turned, and then turned again, and a third time, and they should have been where they were before, but they weren’t. Minho stopped, panting in despair, as again the lights went out. They were going to be trapped forever down here. Minho, always able to stay level-headed on a job, thoughts quick but coherent, currently could not string any rational plan together. They probably needed to backtrack, but—
The lights came back on, brighter than before, and Jeongin cried out, a wordless scream that was quickly drowned out by rapid gunfire. By the time Minho had whirled around, Jeongin was already dropping to the hard floor, the man at the far end of the hall nothing more than smudged shadow.
Minho fell to his knees, watched as blood bloomed red and dark across Jeongin’s chest, multiple entry points. “No,” Minho said, pressing his hands to the bullet holes, but it made no difference at all. Blood welled up and ran over his fingers, hot and thick and taking Jeongin’s life with it. It flowed onto the floor, soaking into the knees of his jeans, so much, too much. Minho pressed harder, sobbed out, “No no no.”
Jeongin was gasping, blood overflowing from his mouth, streaming out of his nose. His hands clawed at Minho’s wrists, fluttery and frantic. He couldn’t breathe, he was going to drown in his own blood before he even bled out.
“Baby boy, please,” Minho gasped, hands wet with his love’s blood. “Please.” Like Jeongin could stop it, like he could stay at Minho’s side through sheer force of will. “Jeongin, baby, no—”
Jeongin was so— such a force, as unstoppable, to Minho, as the change of the seasons. He was everything. He was Minho's everything. He couldn’t die. He could not.
And yet, Jeongin, in this moment, did not look like any of that. He just looked like a terrified young man, his eyes sparkling with tears and fear, bright with it in the light of the hallway Hyung, he tried to say, but there was too much blood, the liquid choking him.
“Hyung’s here,” Minho said, the words hitching with his own tears. Jeongin stared up at him, searching, pleading, and Minho could do nothing but watch him die. “I’m here, I’m so sorry.”
There was no blame, in Jeongin’s gaze. Only fear, only desperation. He was so young. That was not the worst of it, but it was something terrible: he was so fucking young.
And then there was nothing, in Jeongin’s gaze. Nothing but the reflection of the lights above their heads, glinting off his empty eyes.
Minho cupped Jeongin’s face, found his skin soft, downy hairs covering cheeks that were already losing their colour. It should have been me, Minho thought hysterically, as his fingers left blood smeared across Jeongin’s cheekbones. Those eyes, pupils expanded in death, tracked him. Jeongin’s tears were still wet on his face.
“Take me instead,” Minho gasped, losing all strength and laying his forehead down on Jeongin’s unmoving sternum. “Take me, not him, never him, I’d rather be dead, I’d rather be dead—”
Minho woke with a broken sob, clawing his blankets off himself and heaving upright, where he pressed his hands over his face and wept, and wept.
Notes:
seriously though thanks so much for all the uh love on the last chapter, it really means a lot ♥
Chapter 13
Notes:
one small announcement first of all: due to not being quite as far ahead with writing as we'd like (despite me completing nanowrimo!! i'm in hell!), the next chapter (14) is going to be posted in three weeks instead of the usual two. that means chapter 14 will be up on december 23rd. we apologise for the delay but we need some extra writing time sobs
chapter content warnings: suicidal ideation in Minho's pov
Chapter Text
Jeongin’s boots clicked on the concrete of the basement stairs, louder than he usually was in his sneakers, which was, he could admit, loud anyway. He was not like Minho, or Hyunjin, able to move silently in most situations. Jeongin was someone who most people heard coming, and he’d made his peace with that years ago, and so he didn’t try to disguise his footsteps as he went down.
The basement door was closed. He looked at it for a second, the heavy, grey-painted metal of it, and then reached for the handle. Even then he had to take another moment: a moment to breathe, to fill his lungs with the cold air of the stairwell, the metal handle cool against his palm. You can do this, he told himself, and only then did he push the door open.
He’d known that Chan and Minho were already down there, setting up since earlier in the morning. When Jeongin came through the door, Minho was doing something with one of the targets, Chan standing by the table they had set up at the end of the range. They both looked over when he came into the room, neither of them smiling, although Chan looked like he was trying his best to do so. “Good morning,” Chan said, although by this point, it was barely morning.
“Hello, hyung,” said Jeongin. He looked at Chan and then at the table, where there were a couple of handguns laid out, along with some ear protectors and a few magazines. Jeongin had practised with both of these handguns before, one of them a little bigger than the other. Most of what they had in the safe was like this, things that were easy enough to conceal, although they had a couple of shotguns in there, and one bolt-action sniper rifle that Jeongin hadn’t gotten to touch yet. The first time Jisung had shown Jeongin that gun, he’d called it his baby.
“How are you feeling about this?” Chan asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. Jeongin wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be reassuring but it honestly felt just condescending enough that when Jeongin shrugged in response, he made sure that it dislodged the touch.
“Fine,” he said. If anything, Chan had sounded more nervous than Jeongin necessarily felt. His hair was unstyled today, curly around his face, and he looked a little tired, like his insomnia was maybe making a comeback. He had appeared relatively well-rested recently, probably thanks to all the sex he was getting, so Jeongin thought, I’ll keep an eye on it. He knew, more than anyone, the kind of stresses that Chan took on himself when he didn’t need to.
He looked over at the shooting range, where Minho was still doing something— attaching a coloured tennis ball to one of the mannequins, it appeared. Jeongin put his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, watching Minho work. He’d apparently changed up the shooting range at some point this morning. The set-up seemed to be almost the same as it usually was, some of the targets moved into new positions, but all of the targets now had half a tennis ball screwed into them, either into the wooden support beams or into the head of the target, depending on if it was paper or cork. All the tennis balls were different colours, painted that way by the look of it.
Jeongin wondered if Minho had done that. The idea of Minho sitting in his room patiently painting tennis ball halves, surrounded by tubs of paint, would have been amusing if Jeongin had been in the mood for amusement.
When Minho finished and turned back, Jeongin turned his head away to look at Chan. He didn’t want to see what was on Minho’s face right then. He hadn’t seen Minho since their argument yesterday, and he was fairly certain that was deliberate on Minho’s part. While it rankled, in some ways it had been fine, because Jeongin had had no idea what he would even say to Minho in the first place, if they were to meet. It was his very first time being even slightly upset with Minho, and he really didn’t know what he was doing.
Still, even without looking at Minho, he knew when Minho had walked over, when he brushed past the table, picking up some of the ear protectors. He always knew where Minho was in a room, knew it like an instinct. “Let’s get started,” Minho said, from behind him, and Chan nodded.
“What is it that you want me to do?” Jeongin asked Chan, even though he knew it was Minho who had set the test up.
“Just shoot, for now,” Chan said, motioning to the table. “Pick your gun, and just show us what you can do normally.”
He picked up a pair of protectors and held them out to Jeongin, with an encouraging smile. Jeongin knew he wasn’t trying to be condescending, really, so he just sighed a little as he took them, but it was annoying. He knew, also, that Chan had agreed to this only really as a way of placating Jeongin. He didn’t know if Chan really believed that Jeongin wasn’t good enough, or if it was something else going on, but it had been obvious in Chan’s voice, both in his office that time, and here, now: he thought, on some level, that Jeongin wouldn’t do a good job.
This was probably a consequence of raising Jeongin from the age of nine and seeing him, over the years, break something at least once a week, and spill something considerably more often. Jeongin had gotten better at that, grown up in so many ways, but he knew it was hard for Chan to see it.
Jeongin took the ear protectors and slid them over his ears. It was always so strange, the way everything got so incredibly muffled. Chan did the same and then he and Minho both stepped back, away from the table. When he glanced over his shoulder at them, they were standing slightly apart, but both with their arms folded over their chests. Chan gave him another encouraging smile.
When he glanced at Minho’s face, Minho just looked back at him blankly, his face an empty mask. None of his usual warmth in his eyes. Jeongin didn’t know what he had done, to cause this. It had started to make him feel sick every time he remembered it.
It wasn’t the time to worry about it now, though. Instead, he stepped up to the table, picked up the larger of the two guns, and slid the magazine into it. The weight of it was familiar in his hands. Shooting was the one thing, seemingly in his entire life, that had always come easy to him. He was not sure why, or how, but it had been such a huge relief, the first time he’d stood down where, with Changbin at his back directing him, to realise that here, now, was finally something he was good at. Maybe he’d never be the best in a fight, never be the strongest, or the sneakiest, or good at art like Hyunjin or computers like Seungmin, but at the very least, he could shoot.
He looked at the range, then back over his shoulder, but neither Chan nor Minho seemed like they were going to explain what was up with the tennis balls. They hadn’t given him any instructions, nor any indication that he needed to pay attention to them, so he simply didn’t. Instead, he raised his gun, feeling himself settle into an easy stance, one of the first that Changbin had taught him. Changbin had taught him this, how to shoot whilst standing: the basics, the stance, the importance of keeping your grip tight, of not letting the recoil work against you. It had been Jisung who had taught him how to shoot on the move, how to keep his aim as accurate as possible even when running.
At one point Jisung, caught up in the training and how well it was going, had said, maybe I could run around holding a target and Jeongin could try to shoot it, and Changbin had smacked him over the head to knock some sense into you.
With no actual instructions to go on, and feeling in excruciating detail the way both Chan and Minho were watching him, Jeongin decided— fuck it. Neither of them were expecting anything special from him, he knew, and so he would— show them, as best as he could, what he was capable of. So he shot first at the target closest to him, a perfect shot, the paper target perforating right at the bullseye. Then he shot the next one, just slightly behind the first, working his way down the targets as fast as he could, hitting the bullseye in every single one.
Is this good enough, he thought, almost vicious with it inside his own head. Is this good enough for you?
He wasn’t sure if he was speaking to Chan or Minho, as he reached the end of the targets and then shifted slightly on his feet and shot at the cork targets. One little hole to a throat, one little hole in a forehead. Then, before he could shoot a third time, he felt a very soft touch to his shoulder.
He didn’t jump, although it was a close thing. He lowered the gun and turned to see, to both his surprise and not, that it was Minho standing behind him. Not surprised, because only Minho would be willing to touch a person when they had both their back to him and a gun in their hands; surprised because Minho had willingly touched him, however briefly.
Jeongin uncovered one ear and said, “Hyung?”
Minho looked at him for a moment, his face still that blank mask. He was wearing a hoodie, which wasn’t necessarily unusual, but it was overlarge and swamping him, in a way Jeongin usually only saw with Hyunjin or Felix. It meant when he lifted his hand, holding it palm up to Jeongin, the sleeve covered half his palm. Jeongin was not used to this, was more accustomed to seeing Minho with his sleeves rolled up, the muscle and sinew of his forearms on full display. He wondered what had caused the change; it wasn’t that cold down here.
“Give me the ear protectors,” Minho said.
Confused, Jeongin did as he was bid, pulling them off and placing them in Minho’s hand. Minho set them back down on the table and said, “You won’t have these on the job, so you need to learn how to shoot without them. Here’s what I want you to do. You see those tennis balls?”
He pointed behind Jeongin at the range. Jeongin didn’t need to look, he’d seen the balls before, but he did so, anyway, just to give himself a respite from the blankness of Minho’s eyes. He’d expected, maybe, some kind of— respect, or at least for Minho to look a little impressed by what Jeongin had just shown him. Instead, there was nothing.
“I’m going to tell you a colour,” Minho said, once Jeongin had looked back at him, “and an area on that target to shoot, and I want you to shoot where I tell you to, as fast and as accurately as you can. Okay?”
Jeongin nodded slowly. Minho stepped away, back to Chan, who did still have his own ear protectors on, although Minho didn’t replace his. He stood planted on the floor, feet a little apart, arms folded over his chest, and looked at Jeongin with an expression that Jeongin semi-recognised from some of their training sessions before. It was a look that said, do your best, I’m waiting.
This time though, it was tempered somehow by something cold. Something that suggested Minho thought Jeongin couldn’t do it.
The stubbornness surged up in Jeongin. What he’d done had already been impressive enough, surely, and he knew that he could prove himself with this, too. So he turned back to the range and slid back into a stance and raised his gun, waiting for the order to come.
When it did, it was a bark in Minho’s voice. “Red, torso.”
Jeongin found the target with the red tennis ball screwed into it, swung the gun in that direction, and shot before he’d even finished moving, trying to be fast, trying to — finally impress Minho, perhaps, trying to wipe that cold empty look off his face. Even as he was doing it, he knew that his aim wasn’t perfect, that he was perhaps not going to hit the right spot on the target. The crack of the gunshot was startlingly loud, louder than Jeongin had been anticipating at all. It made him jump, enough so that his shot, already slightly off target, went wider still and hit the chosen target on the upper arm instead of the torso.
His stomach sank, a sickening rush of motion, but he didn’t have time to even think about it too much, because Minho was already barking out, “Yellow, head.”
Jeongin took a moment, this time, took his time moving his gun to the yellow target and aiming properly and making sure that the sound of the gunshot didn’t make him jolt too much. It was slow, much slow, too slow — he knew even as he was doing it that it was embarrassingly slow, that in a proper gunfight that kind of movement would end with him shot and bleeding on the floor.
It was accurate, at least, a perfect shot through the head of the target, but he couldn’t work out if it were better to be fast, but miss, or slow but accurate. Which of these was less humiliating?
“Green, chest,” snapped Minho, and Jeongin jerked into motion. He swung to the green target, shot, hit the chest, not perfectly centre but the chest at least, but before the sound of the shot had even faded Minho said, “Orange, stomach,” and Jeongin had to move again, finding the cork mannequin with the orange ball and shooting it in the stomach, part of his brain on the task and part of it listening for Minho’s next order.
“Pink, head,” said Minho, completely dispassionate, and Jeongin did as he was told.
It was difficult, so much more difficult than he’d been anticipating, as the minutes passed and Minho kept calling out colours and areas to shoot, his voice empty, pausing only long enough for Jeongin to change his clip once the one in his gun ran out. Jeongin did that as fast as he could, too, knowing without needing to be told that it was part of the test. After that first shot, he didn’t miss again, and once he’d managed to sink into it, he got his speed up to something— less embarrassing, he thought, but he had no idea if it was fast enough, no idea of the time he took adjusting his footing and aiming was being held against him.
He fired the last bullet in the second magazine (“Yellow, stomach”), and looked for a third one to slot into the gun, but there wasn’t one on the table, and Minho had fallen silent anyway. The only sound now was the ragged noise of Jeongin’s breathing, echoing a little in the wide open space. There was sweat on his forehead, between his shoulder blades, despite the coldness of the air, and when he put the safety back on the gun and placed it on the table again, his hands were trembling.
Shooting had never felt like that before. It was not that it had always been fun, to be down here training with Changbin and Jisung — especially not with Changbin, whose love for Jeongin had not meant that he had gone easy on him at all. But this felt so different to that. It had been so shockingly loud that his ears were ringing, his hearing was half-dampened, as he turned slowly to look at Chan and Minho and saw them exchanging a very grim look between them.
He wanted, suddenly, to throw up a little. The humiliation of it threatened to overwhelm him, the shame more than he thought he had ever felt in his entire life. He had been so confident, was the thing, coming in here knowing that this was something he was good at — that this, shooting, being accurate and fast, was maybe the only thing he was good at. And he had wanted, so badly, to impress Chan, and Minho, especially Minho, and instead he had just fucked it up.
They’re not going to let me go, he thought, trying to catch his breath but unable to do so around the shame threatening to choke him. They’re never going to let me do this, ever.
A child, nothing more than a child. One to be coddled and protected. His chance to prove himself, to show what he could do, and instead he had walked in here and embarrassed himself.
He had to hold in a sob. It would be far, far more embarrassing to cry here, now, like this, in front of them. It would be the final confirmation that he really was too young, nothing more than the crybaby they’d always known him as. So instead, he stood there, holding the tears back, and just looked at them.
Chan pulled off his ear protectors and said, “Okay, Jeongin. Can you go upstairs and wait in my office for us? I need to talk to Minho a little bit first.”
That’s it? Jeongin wanted to ask, but he didn’t dare. He didn’t dare open his mouth for fear of what might come out. He looked between Chan — still grim — and Minho — still empty — and simply nodded his head. There was nothing else he could do, nothing he could say to make this better.
Neither of them said a word to him as he slipped past them to the door and let himself out into the cold stairwell. He was starting to shiver as the sweat cooled against his face and neck, and his legs felt heavy, so heavy, as he started to drag himself up the stairs to Chan’s office. His hands were still shaking. And in his head, only this: that look of disappointment that had passed between the two people he had wanted most to impress.
——
There was a ringing silence left in the wake of the door swinging shut behind Jeongin. Minho felt— chafed raw, felt like he’d been clawing to grasp at something and it had slipped out of his hands anyway, leaving his fingertips and nails bloody and open.
Chan had one hand on his hip, the other pushed through his unruly hair, as he stared at the perforated targets. “He’s a shockingly good shot,” he said, and it was grim rather than pleased.
“Yes,” Minho agreed dully. He could not pretend to be happy about it any more than Chan was. Jeongin had clearly put in the effort somewhere along the line to get good at this, and Minho had not realised it was happening. He wasn’t sure what he would have done, if he had — he did not have the reason nor the authority to forbid it, no matter how much he may have wanted to.
But that lack of action on his part, his incapacity to stop this before it could begin, had led him here. Standing in this huge concrete space with Chan, grappling with the knowledge that they really couldn’t refuse Jeongin this. All Minho’s hopes that the confidence Jeongin had shown yesterday would pan out to be nothing more than youthful cockiness had been thoroughly shattered. He did not relish in the idea of seeing Jeongin shamed, or upset, but still Minho had— hoped. He’d known it was an ugly sort of hope, but what of Minho was not ugly.
Really, he’d practically been counting on it. Climbing down the stairs to the basement early this morning to paint tennis balls various colours, driven by the determination to set Jeongin off balance. Sabotage him, almost.
And then Jeongin had not fumbled, not at all. Not only was he an excellent shot, he’d managed to quickly change tacks once Minho had asked him to, adapting and still managing to hit most of his targets. His hand-to-hand skills weren’t the best, but Jeongin was small, and Hyunjin couldn’t fight for shit either, really. If Jeongin could shoot like this—
“We have to take him on the job,” Chan said, and it was tired, so tired.
Minho grit his teeth, wrestling with his emotions, with the implacability of those words. It was let Jeongin on the job, or refuse him without cause — because neither of them could truthfully say he wasn’t good enough to come. And denying him now, for no other reason than the love they bore him, would be doing him no favours. He would not thank them for it.
He would, if they kept refusing him, eventually resent them deeply. It was not fair of them to keep him caged.
Minho knew this. He knew, too, that they needed the extra hands in the vault building, they needed another person. But the knowledge of it didn’t change how he felt. It did not change the image he saw, every time he blinked, of Jeongin’s face streaked with blood, his pretty eyes dimmed of all light.
Was a Jeongin who resented him, even hated him, not still better than a Jeongin who was dead? Minho recoiled deeply from the idea of Jeongin’s loathing, but yes, yes he would rather have a Jeongin who hated him and was safe, than no Jeongin at all. He could not survive losing Jeongin.
Minho looked to Chan, who did not look like he wanted Jeongin along on this job any more than Minho did. Instead of placating Minho, a bitter anger bubbled up his throat. If Chan had outright told Jeongin no yesterday, like he damn well should have, they wouldn’t be here right now, staring down a future where Jeongin would be put in grave danger. Chan had no right to look as haggard over this as he did now.
You should have told him no, he thought fiercely, lips pressed into a thin line.
Even though he hadn’t said the words aloud, Chan seemed to be able to read it on his face. “I didn’t think he’d be so good,” he said softly, and Minho whipped away from him, staring out at the gun range, all the perforated targets, the pieces of cork crumbled across the floor. “And I can’t lie to him, and pretend he isn’t. It isn’t fair on him, Minho.”
Minho’s temper flared, a sudden flame-hot spike. “Maybe I don’t give a fuck about fair, Chan-hyung,” he said, loud and echoing in the space, letting the anger carry him away a little. “I don’t want him on the job.” He turned again, feeling the ugliness of the expression on his face. Chan stared back at him, neutral and reserved. “Fair,” Minho sneered. “Fair is for— fucking children. It’s my turn on the swing now. I cannot express how low on my list of priorities being fucking fair is, when it comes to jobs. When it comes to our lives.”
“So, what then?” Chan said, calm and even. He held his hands out, palms up. “We go in with too few people? We hire someone else? How do you think Jeongin will feel, if we do that, and something happens to you? Or Changbin? He has to live with that—”
“And if he dies on the job it will be my fault, don’t you get that?” Minho demanded, nearly a shout. “And then I have to live with that!”
Except he wouldn’t. Or at least, he wouldn’t live with it for long. He wondered what Chan would say if Minho voiced that, if it would make any difference. That if Jeongin died, Minho would put a gun in his own mouth before his body was even cold.
He didn’t say it. Chan would grieve Jeongin’s loss, the whole household would. It would be— devastating. And what would losing Minho be, after that? A footnote, at best. Really, losing Minho would be more of an economical blow than anything else. Chan would not feel Minho’s absence in any way other than the convenience he would lose. Not like he would feel Jeongin’s. It was not really a chip Minho could use to bargain.
Chan chewed on the inside of his cheek, quiet as Minho breathed heavily into the silence. Then he said, “I can go on the vault job.” He was still so level, so steady, eyes serious and dark. How could he be like this, in this situation? “And you can go with Hyunjin and Jisung to Blackbird’s. That way he’s my responsibility.”
“That’s not—” Minho cut himself off. The fire was draining out of him now, leaving him tired again. Slightly more evenly, he said, “It’s my plan either way. And you can’t go on the vault job.” Chan’s brows twitched into a small frown, and he opened his mouth to counter, but Minho spoke before he could. “No, you can’t. You can’t go because it’s so dangerous. If you get caught at Blackbird’s you’ll be arrested; if we get cornered in the vault we’re dead. They aren’t calling the cops to Lee Jaerim’s personal stash.” Minho shook his head. “You can’t go on the vault job. This team can’t lose you.”
Chan stared at him for a long moment, assessing. “So I can’t go on the vault job,” he said slowly. “Hyunjin can’t go because he’s a shit shot, and Jisung can’t go because we need his sniper skills for entry into Blackbird’s. We could switch him and Changbin around but then we’d be right back to needing one other person for the vault. Felix can’t go because he could barely shoot a cow at twenty paces, and you don’t trust him anyway. And Seungmin— is Seungmin.”
Why do you want Jeongin to go so badly? Minho wanted to scream in his face. But Chan wasn’t being condescending, he wasn’t even raising his voice. He just sounded tired. And the rational side of Minho, so quiet under his terror, knew that Chan wasn’t advocating for bringing Jeongin along so much as he was simply stating the facts of things. And the facts of things were simple: they needed an extra person who could shoot and provide cover while Changbin was drilling into the vault wall. Jeongin was present, and could shoot. They had no one else.
It was such a simple puzzle piece to this problem Minho had been chewing and chewing on for days going on weeks that it should have felt like a relief when Jeongin suggested he come. It should have been a quick and easy decision, Jeongin slotting into place along with everything else Minho had built into the plan so far. But the mere thought of it had Minho feeling like he was inhaling glass shards. He’d never let his emotions get so thoroughly in the way of a job before.
He knew bringing Jeongin along on the job was the solution, possibly the only solution. The alternative was potentially— scrapping the job entirely, simply not doing it. And with the size of this job, the potential payout, Minho should baulk at the idea of letting it go. His love for Jeongin, though, was so fervent that honestly, saying fuck it to this whole thing seemed reasonable, if it kept Jeongin safe.
If Minho’s nineteen year old self could see him now, wanting to back out from the biggest job of his life because someone on the team might get hurt, he’d be shocked and disgusted.
I’m being unreasonable, he thought, and had to turn away from Chan again, to blink stinging eyes at the wall, breathe unsteadily through his nose.
This was their life, his life, the world they lived in. The reality of it. It was guns and it was blood and it was danger. And Jeongin did not want to keep letting them venture into it without him. Even if Minho pitched the ultimate fit and kept Jeongin from going on the Lee Jaerim job, Jeongin would still end up going on others. Maybe easier ones to start him off, but eventually dangerous ones too. It was not something Minho could stop, in the end.
All he could do was prepare Jeongin for the reality of their world, protect him when they were in the field. With his own life, if he had to.
And if it did go sour, he could always— end it. He’d had the thought earlier and something about it had brought an odd sense of comfort he’d not expected. Losing Jeongin would be agony but it was an agony he could quickly stop.
Minho liked to have a plan. It made even the worst case scenarios that much more bearable.
“Minho?”
“I want him down here more,” Minho said, the words rushing out of him, hoarse. His eyes flickered over the targets, thoughts whirling. “I want him down here with Changbin, and Jisung, to hone his shooting. And I’ll— spar with him more, shift his training to focus on downing targets bigger than himself, or on evasion. We could ask Hyunjin to help too.”
When he turned to look at Chan, it was to find Chan giving him an odd look in turn. “Alright,” he said. “Whatever you think he needs.” He paused, and then continued, “I know you might not trust in his abilities, but I do think— I do think he can do this. I think he is capable.”
The words were— soothing. Trying to be soothing. Like Chan thought Minho was so angry at the idea of Jeongin coming on the job just because Jeongin might fuck it up for them. Like Minho’s outburst about being responsible for Jeongin’s life had simply been rooted in a desire to not have to babysit their youngest member. Irritation over a liability being put under his purview, over potentially being blamed and having to live with someone else’s deficiencies hanging over his head.
“It’s not just about his abilities,” Minho said, the words rasping out like he really had been breathing glass. “He could be the best shot in the country, and still get killed on this job. It’s just— dangerous, there’s danger outside of our control, that has nothing to do with how good he is or isn’t.”
“I know,” Chan whispered, looking heartsick. He had his hands on his hips, and he was chewing on the inside of his cheek as he stared down at the concrete floor. Silence stretched between them for a long moment, grim and heavy, before Chan sighed. “Come on,” he said, moving toward the stairs. “He’s waiting for us.”
Minho clenched his hands into fists, felt the scabs across his knuckles pull and crack, stinging, and loosened his hands quickly. Then he followed Chan out of the basement, the two of them making the long slog up to the third floor. Minho felt vaguely ill at the prospect of telling Jeongin he could come along, at having to watch Jeongin— smile, maybe even be smug, over this thing that was causing Minho to feel like his organs were dissolving.
The door to Chan’s office was cracked, and when they pushed it open, Jeongin was just standing in the middle of the room. He turned to face them as they came in, his normally-pink cheeks pale in the light.
Chan went to stand in front of his desk, rather than sitting behind it, and Minho closed the door, opting to come stand between where Jeongin was still fidgeting and Chan.
“Okay,” Chan said on a sigh, leaning against the edge of his desk. “Well.”
He was waffling too much and Minho couldn’t take this dragging on. “You can come,” he broke in, clipped and simple. “On the job.” Jeongin had been looking at Chan but his gaze snapped to Minho then, a little wide. He didn’t smile, and neither did he seem particularly relieved. He just stared, searching over Minho’s face, which he was keeping carefully locked down. “I’m going to rework the plan to include you. But it’s— Jeongin, there’s no arguing, when we’re out in the field, do you understand? When I give an order, you follow it.”
“Yes,” Jeongin said immediately, oddly quiet. “Yes, I know.”
“And you’re going to be training more,” Minho continued in that same emphatic tone, as if Jeongin hadn’t spoken. “Everyday, in fact. Some sparring, some shooting. If no one can help you, I want you on the machines pushing your endurance a bit.” Jeongin looked hesitant, unsure, his hands clasped together in a knot over his stomach. Minho wasn’t about to listen to any arguing, any excuses, and he reiterated, “Everyday, Jeongin.” He knew Jeongin might not be happy with the extra training, with being made to bulk up, even a little, but he had to. He had to.
“Okay,” Jeongin whispered, shoulders rounding a little.
“We’ll need to get him a different gun,” Chan said, regrouping a bit apparently. He sounded close to normal, thinking about the reality of the logistics. Minho glanced at him and saw Chan absently tapping his desk with two fingers, mouth pursed in thought. “All of you, to be honest. Some kind of automatic rifle, probably. He’ll need to practise with that too.”
Minho winced just a bit over that before smoothing his expression over. He didn’t really have much experience with that sort of gun, none of them really did, although it was certainly more than Jeongin had. Of them all, Jisung would likely be able to handle it best. “Jisung will have to practise first and then teach it to Jeongin,” Minho said, putting a hand on his hip and widening his stance, rubbing his other hand over the back of his neck. His brain was back to humming, snatching at all these new pieces he needed to fit into his place. “We’ll have to get those soon to give them the time they’ll need.”
Chan nodded, pulling out his phone to jot down a reminder. “I’ll call Hyunjae.”
“I’m sorry to cause a fuss,” Jeongin said, still so quiet. He scuffed the toe of his boot on the thinly carpeted floor, face downturned. His eyes kept flickering between Minho and Chan, dark under the sweep of his lashes. “I don’t want to give anyone else extra work.”
“This is the cost of having you along,” Minho said flatly. He would not let Jeongin shirk out of any of the necessary preparations. Jisung could handle a bit of extra work, they all could, Minho included. “You’ve never done a job before, we need you to be ready.” Jeongin did not look wholly convinced, his bottom lip caught between his teeth, posture still so tentative. Minho thought Jeongin would be pleased to come along, even if the cost was additional preparation. It didn’t bode well, if Jeongin was baulking now, unwilling to put in the effort. Minho met his eyes seriously and said, “There’s no margin for error on the field. These men— they’ll be shooting back at you, Jeongin. You have to kill them first.”
“I know,” Jeongin said, wringing his hands properly now, mouth downturning. “I know. I’ll— do better.”
Minho frowned, just a little. Is he having second thoughts? he wondered. “Do you still want to come along?” he asked, and Jeongin immediately nodded his head, his hair flopping with the movement. “Coming on jobs is a lot of work,” Minho said, stern while trying not to be unkind. He simply needed Jeongin to understand that this was real, it wasn’t a game. They were taking it seriously because it was. The job itself was important, and what Minho had said was true: there was no margin for error on the field, when an error could be a bullet to the head. “It’s not easy, Jeongin, you have to— be willing to—” He had started speaking in that same tone, both hands on his hips now, but he stuttered then stopped, when he noticed Jeongin’s bottom lip wobbling. “Jeongin,” he said, alarmed and softer, “what’s wrong?”
“You’re mad at me!” Jeongin burst out, tears welling up quickly in his eyes. His hands were clenched so hard his knuckles had gone white. “I did badly on the range and you don’t want me to come and you’re mad at me!”
“Jeongin,” Minho said blankly, watching as Jeongin blinked quickly to try and keep his tears from falling. “No. I’m not, I’m not mad at all—”
“You keep using my name!” Jeongin cried, his gaze— searching, raking, over Minho’s face. There was a desperate, pleading note to his voice, awful to hear. “You never use my name!”
Minho found himself shocked into silence, a wave of sorrow surging up to engulf him before he could even brace against it. He had not thought Jeongin would notice, let alone thought it would upset him. He was— trying, so hard, to abide by his promise to Chan. Trying to wedge some distance between Jeongin and himself, so he wouldn’t be so in danger of— fucking up, at any given moment. Of saying something too true, or worse: doing something he could not possibly take back.
Jeongin was swiping impatiently at his face, brushing the moisture out of his eyes, curled in on himself like an animal that had been kicked. Minho couldn’t breathe.
Chan came forward, setting a hand on Jeongin’s shoulder, and Minho felt sick and bitter over how easy that touch was. Envious that Chan could touch Jeongin, and not have it leave a stain. “Hey, hey,” Chan said gently, soothing, “we’re not mad.” Jeongin gave a little sniff, hands dropping enough that he could look at Chan through lashes clumped together with tears. Chan gave him a small smile, squeezing his shoulder. “We’re just stressed. It’ll be your first time coming on a job and we love you— we’re just concerned, is all. No one is mad at you.”
Jeongin listened but didn’t seem to take it to heart the way Chan clearly wanted him to. He looked at Minho as soon as Chan finished speaking, gaze plaintive and still sparkling damply, searching for confirmation in Minho. “I’m not mad,” Minho said automatically, because it was what Jeongin needed to hear.
Even to his ears, the baby boy that should have gotten tacked onto the end of that sentence was stark, its absence obvious. He knew Jeongin could feel the lack of it, and Minho himself could feel it lingering heavily on his tongue, the words thick and choking.
Jeongin looked as wretched as Minho felt, Minho’s reassurance seeming to have the opposite effect from what was desired. It was as if the words had been yet another blow, Jeongin staring at him in sorrowful disbelief, still searching for something Minho had to withhold.
Minho looked away. He heard Jeongin make a tiny, cut off noise.
“Jeongin-ah, why don’t you go upstairs and get yourself some water and calm down a little, hmm?” Minho heard Chan saying, dim under the blood rushing in his ears. He kept his gaze fixated on the far wall, eyes unfocusing a little, watching Chan and Jeongin as smudges in his peripheral. “It’s okay, really, it is. You did well. We can talk about this more tomorrow.”
Jeongin didn’t argue, which in itself was striking, especially when it was obvious Chan was fobbing him off, a bit. He simply left, very quickly, in a way that Minho knew meant he was about to start crying properly and wanted to escape before that happened. He didn’t watch Jeongin go, but he could tell Jeongin had his face tucked down, heard the momentary fumble with the handle before he got the door open and fled the room.
The door swung closed behind him, latching with a soft noise. Both Minho and Chan stared at it for a long beat in mutual silence before Chan said, voice strained, “You don’t have to be so cold to him, you can call him baby boy still.”
Minho felt exhausted, a tiredness that went beyond his physical flesh and into his very soul. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be upset,” he said numbly. I don’t know what you want, I wish I could make you forget what you know. “I’m putting distance between him and I.”
“I didn’t want that, I just want— you can act normal,” Chan said, running his hand through his curly hair, mussing it all up. “What he thinks is normal.”
Chan did not understand. He’d made a request, a demand, that Minho leave Jeongin untouched, and did not get that the road Minho was on, that so-called normality, was a riptide catapulting Minho into snapping one day and taking what he should not. Minho could not maintain this forever. He had to break away.
But that was not for today, apparently. Instead, he nodded stiffly to Chan, feeling more than ever this widening gap between them, and strode after Jeongin to try and fix what he’d wounded.
Assuming Jeongin would have listened to Chan and gone to the apartment, Minho rushed through the PC room and headed up— only to find Jeongin on the small landing between the third and fourth floors, crying softly and wiping at his face with his sleeves.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, so full of sorrow he felt like a cup overflowing with it. Jeongin’s head whipped around, and he made a damp noise of surprise. Minho had stilled on the stairs still, a couple off from the landing, so he was looking up at Jeongin’s tear-stained face, his red nose. I did this, he thought, and wanted to throw up. I was cruel and I hurt him. “I’m not mad,” he said, desperate to make this better, to stop Jeongin’s crying. “You did a really good job today.”
Jeongin shook his head a little, face crumpled. “Don’t— please be honest with me,” he said.
“I am,” Minho said, meeting Jeongin’s eyes even though it hurt, to see him like this, to know it was his fault. He took another step up, hand on the railing, so careful. “I am being honest. You’re a better shot than I am. Really. You did so well.”
Despite how hard Minho was trying to express his sincerity — because he was being sincere; he was not angry, and Jeongin had done well — Jeongin was still crying, though it had slowed. He was looking at Minho like he was— afraid, maybe. Wary.
“Then why are you mad at me,” he asked, voice husky with his tears.
“I’m not, baby boy,” Minho promised, adding on the nickname in the hopes it would help.
But Jeongin simply shivered, turning away a little and staring down at the floor. He brought his hands down from wiping at his face to instead hold his own upper arms, hugging himself. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he whispered, and Minho felt like the walls were closing in. Or like he was slowly being herded into a trap, one that would soon close metal jaws around his ankle. “And you keep snapping at me.”
Minho could not even deny it. He should try. Try to pretend it had been in Jeongin’s head, maybe. But he did not want to torment Jeongin that way.
When Minho remained silent, warring with himself, Jeongin glanced at him, and he looked— tired, in a way that mirrored Minho, and made Minho feel sick to see. Jeongin should not look like this, his cheeks blotchy with tears, dark eyes watery and fathomless. “Hyung, did I do something wrong?” Jeongin asked, still so quiet.
And there it was, the sudden jolt of metal against Minho’s flesh and bone, crushing and painful and inescapable. How could he explain this? Explain it without revealing his promise to Chan, or his own heart. Without being too cruel, or too kind. With enough truth that Jeongin would believe it, but enough lies that he wouldn’t see what Minho was so desperate to keep hidden.
The truly awful thing was, in spite of what Chan wanted, his orders for Minho to bring things back to normalcy, Minho knew the best option in the long run would be to— make this worse. Drive this wedge in further, keep Jeongin away from him. He should tell Jeongin yes. Yes, he did something wrong. He overstepped. He acts too immature. That if he wants to come on jobs he needs to stop the childish antics. Stop being so fucking soft, touching Minho in gentle comfort, or sitting on his legs, brushing ticklish fingers across his shoulderblades as he walks by.
The kiss. Minho clenched his bandaged hand, remembering a beat too late his bloodied knuckles, reminded by the sting.
He could stop it. Here, now. Stare at Jeongin’s lovely, vulnerable eyes and tell him that Minho did not want this friendship, not the way Jeongin had been giving it. Channel a younger version of himself, who would be able to say the words easily, and mean them. Jeongin probably wouldn’t even find it all that out of character.
But that did not mean it would not hurt. Because oh, it would. It would hurt Minho, it would hurt Jeongin. It would hurt him deeply. And Minho could not do that, could not make Jeongin cry on purpose. Each word hitting like the lash of a whip, Minho having to stand here and watch them land.
No, Minho thought, fisting both hands now because he needed the sting, needed the pain, to keep him grounded. To keep tears out of his own eyes at the thought.
But if not that, then what? Minho wished, for a moment, that he had the strength to do it. It would be agony, but some things would be so much easier, if Jeongin simply— avoided him. Hated him.
Minho had stopped praying and expecting an answer when he was a child. But God, God help him, he thought, gaze roving over Jeongin’s sweet young face, these features Minho so loved, but he could never, ever hurt Jeongin. He would rather eat his own insides than harm Jeongin.
He stepped up onto the landing, moving before he could think better of it, acting on desperate impulse to fix this, to make Jeongin stop looking so haunted. Minho brought his hands up, shaking his overlong sleeves back, and touched Jeongin’s face. Jeongin stilled, eyes going wide, and Minho wiped quick, efficient fingertips over his cheeks, damp with tears, soft and warm with life. After wiping off the worst of the tears, Minho swiped his fingers under Jeongin’s nose, the moisture there a little sticky. Then he wiped his teary-snotty fingers across the shoulders of Jeongin’s shirt.
It worked; Jeongin giggled. It was a watery giggle but a giggle.
“Hyung,” he said, damp with it, still smiling a little.
Minho skimmed his hands down Jeongin’s arms, shaking his sleeves back over his hands before Jeongin could see the scabs, see his knuckles oozing red. “You haven’t done anything, baby boy,” he murmured, and if Chan had heard it, he’d be screaming at Minho all over again. Minho hadn’t meant to let so much emotion, too true, seep into his tone. But it had. When he spoke again, he tried to sound— less. Less in clawing, aching, fucking agonizing love. “It was me, it was on me. I’ve been stressed, but also— you’re getting older, and I just thought— maybe you’re wanting something different. You’re wanting to come on jobs, and you’re not— not a kid anymore, not a baby. I just— I thought it was maybe time to retire the nickname.”
Jeongin was shaking his head by the end of it, nudging a little bit nearer. “No,” he said, quick and earnest, “I like being your baby boy, hyung.” His blotchy cheeks went a little pinker, but his eyes didn’t waver from Minho’s.
Minho, very suddenly, wanted to fling himself backwards down the stairs. He was not sure Jeongin had ever said anything so devastating before, he had not thought Jeongin could say something so devastating. His insides felt like they were slowly vibrating into mush inside his body. He had no idea what to say, in an entirely new, different way from before. He wanted to cry. He wanted to pull Jeongin flush to his body, kiss his swollen mouth, feel the tip of his cold-damp nose pressing into Minho’s cheek.
How was he supposed to do this? Chan breathing down his neck and Jeongin with no idea of his feelings, saying such sweet things so seriously. He could not maintain this.
There had been moments in the past that had tested him. But he’d never felt so close to losing his grip on himself, as he did in this moment. Only the panic that reared up, instinctive, at the idea of doing something he had no right to do stopped him, brought him back to his senses, enough so that he could step back a little, look away, at the railing. Breathe.
He touched said railing, the cold metal a shock against his skin. That had been far, far too close.
“Well,” he whispered, “so long as you don’t mind the nickname.” It was all he could think to say.
“I don’t,” Jeongin said, and Minho chanced a glance at him. His cheeks were still a little flushed, but not so bad, and the tears had all but gone, leaving only reddened eyes behind. “I don’t mind it, not from you.”
Minho stood there, braced against the railing, feeling every inch the rundown animal he was. This was— this was unsustainable. He fought not to pant with the force of his suddenly rising panic, as he realised the truth of that. Jeongin would continue to get older, grow lovelier, and Minho would be dragged deeper and deeper, every day being worn down that little bit more— he was going to snap. It was inevitable, unavoidable. He would break his promise to Chan. He would lay hands on Jeongin and cause damage no matter how he tried to be careful.
He could not.
But how was he supposed to stop it.
Leave. The word flashed through his mind, the fear in him reminiscent of how he felt when he imagined Jeongin dying in his arms. And like in that scenario, perhaps the solution really was so simple. Remove himself from the situation. Permanently.
Again, there was a sort of deadening of his emotions, like a blanket tossed over a fire. It was not quite a calmness, but it was a reprieve from the panic. Such a simple solution. He had not considered it before. But he could, couldn’t he? He could leave. After the Magpie job, he’d have enough money to start fresh. He could— go. Vanish one night. If things got too bad, got to that point, where he felt himself tipping— he could run. Save Jeongin from him, protect him.
It was not an ideal plan. Minho was not so foolish as to think his leaving would not upset Jeongin, but Minho wouldn’t be here to see it. It would be easier to live with, if he didn’t have to see it.
And living after leaving would be hard enough, after all. An empty, hollowed out existence. Alone. Everything good and bright in Minho’s life, rendered to memories.
But at least. At least he would have spared Jeongin.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, a little breathy, a little concerned, “you’re bleeding?”
Minho looked down. There was a droplet of blood on the concrete floor of the landing. Jeongin was already reaching for his hand, incorrectly assuming it was the cut from the other day. Minho twitched his hand away, watched Jeongin flinch back in turn. “It’s— I got carried away last night,” Minho said, gentle and soft because Jeongin was looking wary again. He brought his hand up and shook his sleeve back; it was the wound over his middle knuckle that had split and was dripping.
“Oh hyung,” Jeongin said, sounding so sad. He came back, a little slower, more tentative, and this time Minho let Jeongin take hold of his fingers, let him draw his hand closer so he could inspect the wounds. “Your poor hands.” Jeongin reached into the pocket of his sweatpants and pulled out a balled up napkin, which, while crumpled, still looked clean. He pressed it across Minho’s knuckles, cleaning up the blood.
Minho took the napkin and his own hand back, using the napkin to keep pressure on the reopened cuts. At the very least, he didn’t want to drip anywhere else. “It’s fine, baby boy, it’s nothing,” he said.
Jeongin looked at him with eyes full of reproach, bottom lip pouted out just a little. “I don’t like it when you’re in pain.”
That, of all things, made Minho feel especially hysterical. If only Jeongin knew. “I’m okay, I promise,” he lied.
Jeongin sniffed, and it still sounded a bit moist, when Minho knew he’d intended to sound huffy. Minho wanted to thank him, for always worrying. For showing kindness, over and over and over, no matter how much Minho cut him. No matter how little Minho deserved it.
He did not know how he was going to survive without it.
“Baby boy,” he said instead, “you really— you really did so well today. I’m proud of you.” Minho found, under the fear and the sorrow, he was very proud. Jeongin was skilled and intelligent. If only those things didn’t mean he was now primed to be put into positions of peril.
Jeongin blushed, properly, all across his face. “Being nice now isn’t going to make me less annoyed at you for cutting your hands all up,” he groused. He wiped the back of his hand under his nose, sniffling again. “I thought— it felt like I did really badly. I missed.”
“Some,” Minho agreed. “But not even Changbin could be perfect every time. It doesn’t mean you did badly. Okay?”
Jeongin seemed— soothed, a tension in him loosening just a little. “Okay,” he echoed.
Minho was glad that he’d somehow managed to get Jeongin back into an okay headspace, had managed to comfort him somewhat. But he could do little more, right now. “I need to go back downstairs and talk to Chan-hyung,” he said. He’d been lying more and more to Jeongin these days. Well. Explicitly lying. He’d always been stepping around the truth of what was in his heart, but this outright lying felt worse, somehow. “You go rest. I can come upstairs and make dinner for you later?” The offer was out of his mouth before he could think better of it. It was just— there was still a lingering gloom over Jeongin he wanted to chase away.
“That sounds nice,” Jeongin said, and he meant it, too, that much was clear. But there was an awkwardness still, like they’d fought and were still stepping around the debris of it, even though that wasn’t exactly right. Jeongin was staring at him like he wanted to say more, the fingers of one hand picking at the sleeve of the other. And then he moved away, a stuttering motion, unsure if he should stay or go and finally deciding on go.
He’d gotten halfway up the stairs before Minho called up, “Baby boy.”
Jeongin turned back, looking over his shoulder.
Minho swallowed. “Will you give me a smile?” he asked, voice dropping, husky.
He thought Jeongin might quip about it, but he didn’t. He blinked, and then his fading blush returned in full force. And then he smiled, quick and ready, the shallow indents of his dimples framing it.
Minho couldn’t help smiling back, close lipped. “There you are,” he murmured. There was a reverence in him so potent it made him feel he should be on his knees. “No more crying today, baby boy.”
Jeongin’s smile had faded, but not dimmed. Simply become something a little softer. “I won’t,” he promised. “I’m alright. Thank you, hyung.”
Minho watched as Jeongin turned away again, as he let himself into the apartment, vanishing behind the metal door, the keypad locking behind him with a series of beeps. And then he began to slowly make the trek down to his room.
He would need to begin looking for an apartment.
——
Felix looked out of the window in the kitchen as he finished cleaning the dishes he had used to make lunch, setting them aside to dry. Outside, the sky was the bright blue of a chilly day, the sun deceptively bright. Looking at that sky made him feel, for perhaps the first time since he’d arrived here, the stirrings of a desire to— go out. To maybe go somewhere, see something. He wasn’t sure what, and he didn’t want to go alone, besides. He hadn’t been out alone since the time he was almost kidnapped. Hyunjin had mostly come with him on trips to the grocery store. Changbin had tagged along once, and Hyunjin had made him carry all the bags back.
Maybe, he thought, looking out at that sky, it was just that it might be nice to go somewhere with Chan. A date, maybe. He’d never been on one of those before. Although, he thought, the smile coming to his face a little wry, very fond, it might be something of a task finding a space in Chan’s schedule where they’d have enough time for something like that.
Perhaps the sex would have to count for that kind of thing. He was more than happy living with that.
As he was putting the last bowl into the rack the keypad sounded, and when he turned around, Jeongin was coming into the room. He had his head down, his hair hiding most of his face, as he slipped his shoes off slowly. There was something about his body language, the tense lines of his shoulders, that made Felix say, gently but loud enough to hear, “Jeongin? Are you okay?”
Jeongin looked up at him, stepping properly into the room as he did so. He had been crying, that much was obvious, his eyes red and a little swollen, some of the tear tracks still visible on his face, but he was not crying anymore. When he spoke, his voice had that slightly stuffy quality that spoke to tears just finished. “Ah, hyung,” he said. “Hello.”
It wasn’t an answer to Felix’s question, not at all. Felix dried his hands on a towel and then skirted around the island counter so he could come up to Jeongin to look at him properly. “You’ve been crying,” he said. He lifted a hand and dabbed at Jeongin’s face with the edge of his sleeve, and was a little surprised that Jeongin let him. “Who made you cry? I can’t beat them up but I’ll tell your hyung, he’ll do it for you.”
That drew a little smile onto Jeongin’s face, and he caught Felix’s dabbing hand and held it in his own. “Chan-hyung already knows,” he said.
Felix said, a little confused, “Was it Chan-hyung who made you cry?” He lifted his other hand and started wiping away the tears with that one.
Jeongin didn’t answer that question either. He let Felix fuss over him for a few more seconds, standing there in the middle of the room in his socks, his eyes bloodshot from the crying. He didn’t seem inclined to push Felix off, and the way he just stood there made a feeling of protectiveness surge up inside Felix. He knew, from things that Hyunjin had said, that Jeongin had a bit of a reputation for being a crybaby, but it was the first time Felix had seen it, and he wanted so badly to help, and didn’t know how.
He dropped his hand eventually, taking Jeongin’s other hand in his and squeezing lightly. He thought Jeongin wasn’t going to say anything more to him, although he seemed shockingly willing to just stand here with him like this, but Jeongin looked at him for a long, long moment, his eyes truly unreadable, and then he said, quietly, “Hyung, can I tell you a secret?”
It was so incredibly odd to hear those words coming out of someone else’s mouth that it took Felix a second or two to process the question and reply. Once he had, he squeezed Jeongin’s hands again and said, “Of course, Jeongin. Why don’t we sit down? Or do you want to go to your room?”
Jeongin glanced at the hallway and said, “Is Hyunjin-hyung in his room?”
Felix nodded. “He’s painting,” he said. Felix had been in there most of the morning with him, reading while keeping Hyunjin company, but when he’d asked if Hyunjin wanted to eat, Hyunjin had given him some vague, nothing response and waved him off. If he didn’t emerge from his art cave in an hour or so, Felix was going to make him food and go hand feed it himself. If Hyunjin could kick up a constant fuss about Felix not eating enough, then so could Felix about Hyunjin.
“Then let’s go to my room,” Jeongin said.
Felix had never been in Jeongin’s room, despite all the weeks he’d spent living here. He’d seen it through the door, the times he’d knocked on Jeongin’s door to talk to him or ask him if he wanted to hang out, but this was his first time actually going in. There was something very Jeongin about the space, although it didn’t as obviously explode with personality the way Hyunjin’s room did. The furnishings, though, felt simple but carefully thought out, like Jeongin had taken the time to figure out exactly what he wanted — and then proceeded to turn it into a slightly messy, chaotic space all the same. There were clothes on the floor, empty glasses on the desk, Jeongin’s bed unmade. His electronics were piled onto his bedside table: laptop, then Nintendo, then his phone on top, in a higgledy little pile. There was, at the very least, a lot more personality here than in Chan’s room, which looked like a space that he had designated for sleeping and not much else.
Jeongin sat down on the unmade bed, so Felix followed suit, sitting next to him, not as close as he would if this were Hyunjin but close enough to not seem distant. Jeongin looked so serious, with his red-rimmed eyes and lack of smile, that Felix still felt the worry inside himself — not just for Jeongin, but also for whatever this secret Jeongin had was. It was a little baffling to think of Jeongin having any kind of secret in the first place, especially one that required such a sombre air around him. How could Jeongin have anything bad to hide? Much like Felix, he didn’t leave the house, didn’t seem to go anywhere alone at all.
Beyond that, Felix wasn’t sure why he was the one being trusted with a secret. He had no idea what had caused Jeongin to think he was worthy of that.
“Jeongin-ah,” he said, when Jeongin sat for a bit in silence. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Jeongin twisted his mouth. “I’m trying to work out how to say it,” he said. “I’ve never told anyone this before, hyung. Will you— do you promise to not tell Chan-hyung? Or Hyunjin-hyung, please don’t tell Hyunjin-hyung?”
“Of course, Jeongin,” Felix said. “If you say it’s a secret, I won’t tell them.” And he meant it, too. He was touched, to be trusted with this, something that Jeongin couldn’t even tell Chan or Hyunjin, the people he was closest to. Of course, he amended to himself, if what Jeongin was about to say was something dangerous, something that made Felix concerned for him, perhaps he would break the promise. But he couldn’t imagine that being the case.
Jeongin nodded. Then he said, “I’m in love with Minho-hyung.”
Felix almost said, out loud, What? but just about caught his tongue before he did. Still, the words seemed incomprehensible to him at first, like Jeongin had opened his mouth and absolute nonsense had simply fallen out. He had not thought Jeongin would say anything like that, and he knew he was staring at Jeongin like an idiot, his mouth a little open, his eyes wide. Jeongin just looked back at him, remarkably calm. He didn’t squirm, didn’t rush to qualify or disseminate what he meant. He was simply— steady.
Then the words actually sunk in a little and Felix thought, Oh, actually, maybe this makes sense.
“You’re in love with Minho-hyung,” he repeated, just to confirm what Jeongin had said.
Jeongin said, “Yes, I am.” Again, he was steady. He sounded very sure of himself. If Felix had been inclined to ask if he was certain that was what he felt, Jeongin’s tone would have cut the question off. There was no doubt in Jeongin’s voice as to what he felt.
Felix shifted, sitting back a little bit. It really did make sense, now that he was actually thinking about it. He’d seen, over the past few weeks, all the ways in which Jeongin gravitated towards Minho; he seemed to find a comfort in Minho’s presence that Felix was not yet capable of feeling. Felix remembered: the way Jeongin had blushed when Minho had complimented him during that first planning session, his face hot red with it, something Felix had not seen Jeongin do with anyone else. The way he had blushed, too, when Hyunjin had said that he was Minho’s favourite.
“Huh,” he said. He felt like his brain had been picked up and shook around a little bit and then slid back into his ears. A lot of the last month or so felt like it needed to be rearranged inside his mind in the light of this information. He had discovered Hyunjin’s feelings for Jisung so easily and yet had no inclination as to this, despite all these signs. “Wow, you’re very good at hiding it, I wouldn’t have guessed.”
Jeongin gave him a very weak little smile. “I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said. “I’ve loved him for— a while.”
Felix didn’t press for more information than that, but he could hear it, in Jeongin’s voice, the truth of it. There was something heavy, something old in Jeongin’s voice as he said it, and Felix knew, just from that, that however long it had been, it had really been a long time, and that it was starting to wear Jeongin down.
“Ah, Jeongin,” he said quietly, reaching out and taking Jeongin’s hands in both of his again. The sympathy inside him was almost drowning. How awful, to be in love with someone for a long time, to live with them and see them every day, and yet not be able to have them. “I’m so sorry, this must be so painful.”
“It is,” Jeongin said. “But not because Minho-hyung doesn’t love me. Minho-hyung loves me back.”
Again he sounded perfectly sure of himself. He said it so bluntly, self-assured in a way that Felix didn’t usually hear from Jeongin. Felix blinked at him a couple of times, not sure how to respond, because he knew that any words out of his mouth might come out kind of condescending, and he didn’t want to do that to Jeongin. But the idea of Minho in love was striking him as something bizarre. He just didn’t seem like the type to fall in love at all.
Or— maybe not. Minho’s baby boy in that softer voice, the way he had looked after Jeongin at the club, the way he had agreed to come in the first place simply because Jeongin had asked. Maybe Jeongin wasn’t creating clouds out of gossamer after all.
“Or at least,” Jeongin added, sounding a little less sure of himself, “I think he does. I always thought he did, but recently he’s been blowing hot and cold, and I’m just— I’m very tired, hyung. It’s tiring to keep this to myself, to not let anyone know.”
“I’m sorry,” Felix said again, much quieter, just holding Jeongin’s hands, doing nothing more. Were there more words to be given? He couldn’t promise Jeongin that it would work out, because Felix had no control over that. There was nothing he could do except be this ear that Jeongin needed, a person whom Jeongin could trust with his secret.
They sat in silence for a long, long time. The light coming through Jeongin’s window had actually moved positions before Jeongin shifted and said, “Thank you. For not asking if I was sure.”
“Jeongin,” said Felix, very seriously. “You know your own heart. You’re old enough to know how you feel about him. I just— I wish it was easier for you, that’s all. Does it feel better, to have me know?”
Jeongin thought about it and said, “It does. It feels good to have actually said it out loud. I’ve never done that.”
“Then I’m glad,” Felix said, smiling at him, managing a proper smile now. “I’m glad that I could help.”
Jeongin nodded. Felix thought about untangling their hands but Jeongin didn’t seem inclined to, and truthfully Felix was liking it too much to do so. He still wasn’t sure what this sensation inside him was, the way touching other people had, over the time he spent living here, become something that he craved, so desperately. He’d never touched anyone as much as he touched people here, not even his sisters; it had been impossible, to cuddle with them. Even beyond his father catching them at it, his relationship with them had been— more distant, maybe, than he would have liked. Self-preservation, on all their parts.
But sometimes, Hyunjin stroked his hair, or Chan touched the skin of his back or rubbed at his temple, and Felix felt like all his higher thinking processes simply shut off. It was one of the nicest things in the world.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin eventually. “Do you love Chan-hyung?”
Felix— blushed. It was quite embarrassing, how quickly the colour leapt to his cheeks. But the words were easy; he’d said them to Chan already, after all. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
Jeongin nodded. “Good,” he said. “That’s so good. I never said it before but I’m so happy, for both of you. You both deserve that, Chan-hyung especially.”
Felix did untangle their hands now, so he could brush some of Jeongin’s hair back from his forehead, a very gentle touch. Jeongin let him, didn’t knock his hand away like he was afraid Felix was going to ruffle his hair, like the others so often did, rough and playful. He just let Felix touch him, his eyelids fluttering for just a moment, like he wanted to close them and then stopped himself.
“I hope it works out for you, Jeongin,” he said quietly. “I’m rooting for you, you should know that.”
“Yeah,” said Jeongin, his smile still such a weak thing, nothing at all like it usually was. “I hope so too, hyung.”
——
Changbin was helping Jisung fit his over-the-shoulder holster properly when Chan came into the workshop, stepping through the open door with his hands in his pockets. Seungmin usually didn’t keep the door open but he’d let Changbin prop it open while he and Jisung prepared to leave, and he had been sat in his desk chair looking at his computer screens and ignoring them for the past five minutes, but Changbin could feel, every so often, the sensation of Seungmin watching them, watching him, in the reflection of the screen.
Seungmin did look around when Chan came in, twisting in his desk chair to acknowledge him and then turning back. Changbin, pulling the holster tight and then stepping back, said, “You didn’t have to come down.”
“I know,” said Chan quietly. He didn’t say anything else, just watched them finishing up their preparation. Truthfully, Chan always came down to see off anyone who was going on a job, even if he only had time to put his face in for a couple of minutes. He’d made a point of it especially after he’d stopped going on jobs himself, as if trying to demonstrate that he understood the risks he was asking other people to take in place of him.
There weren’t many risks involved tonight, at least. All they were doing was stealing a van of antique furniture. There weren’t even going to be any armed guards, they’d made sure of that fact. Nobody cared enough to arm the people shuttling a bunch of old furniture from one place to the other.
Chan, after a few seconds in the doorway, eventually came further into the room and leaned against the workbench with a hip. His voice was still quiet when he said, “I really just wanted to let you know, Changbin, that Jeongin will be coming on the Lee Jaerim job with us.”
There was silence for a beat, and then Jisung let out a low whistle, mostly under his breath. Changbin felt, for a moment, like his insides were cramping, awful and painful. “He did well, then,” he said, trying to not let that distress into his voice. He had known Jeongin would do well. There’d been no doubt in his mind. And yet he hadn’t wanted this outcome, not really.
“Shockingly so,” Chan said. “He is excellent, it was— he’s worked hard at it, hasn’t he.”
Changbin nodded. Jeongin had, although Changbin thought a lot of that training had maybe happened where Changbin hadn’t seen it, during some of Jeongin’s downtime that he spent mostly alone. There could be no denying that Jeongin had a natural aptitude for it, and perhaps that had led to his willingness to work harder at it, to hone it into a true, worthy skill.
Chan heaved a sigh. It sounded truly heartfelt, like the truth of this exhausted him. “Yeah,” he said. “So. We’ve agreed to let him come, although he’ll be in training from now until we leave. I’ll need you and Jisung to help him out.”
“Of course,” murmured Jisung, voice absolutely serious for once.
Chan came forward and laid a hand on Changbin’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “Good luck,” he said. “Come and see me after you get back, just to let me know how it goes.”
Changbin nodded. While Chan always came down to see them off, he rarely hovered, waiting for them to come back, watching on the cameras. Sometimes he did if it was just Hyunjin and Jisung out together, spending the time in the workroom, an audio feed in his ear, but not when it was Changbin leading the job. Changbin remembered how honoured he had felt, the first time he’d realised that, touched by the sense of trust that Chan was showing in him.
You’re good at this, Chan had told him, when Changbin tried to talk to him about it. You know what you’re doing, Changbin.
Chan slipped out of the room, probably to go up to his office to work. Even if he wasn’t going to watch their progress, he wasn’t going to sleep. He’d stay awake, waiting for them to return — or waiting for Seungmin to let him know something had gone wrong. As the door shut behind him quietly, Jisung said, voice still quiet, “Ready to go?”
Changbin was about to nod when Seungmin said, “Ah, hyung, let me check your earpiece? Something seems off with my feed from it.”
He was already getting up, sliding his feet into the slippers he wore when it got colder like this, ridiculous fluffy things. Jeongin had bought him some that were in the shape of dogs, which Seungmin only wore on the coldest of days, but when it got cold like that, they usually set up space heaters in here, so that Seungmin wouldn’t actually freeze. In his sweatpants and giant sweater, Seungmin looked remarkably small, even despite his height, as he came up to Changbin.
“I’ll go get the car started, then,” said Jisung, and Changbin spared him a quick glance before Jisung left the room. By that point, Seungmin was already in front of him, a hand lifting to touch his ear. Changbin hesitated a moment, and then put his hands on Seungmin’s hips, feeling the bones of them under his palm.
Seungmin didn’t check his earpiece. Maybe he would have done, if Jisung had still been in the room, and the realisation that it had just been an excuse to get close enough to touch before Changbin left filled Changbin with sunlit warmth. Maybe some of it showed on his face because Seungmin snorted under his breath, a barely there sound. “Don’t look so smug,” he said.
Changbin just hummed under his breath. They had a few moments to spare, these moments that Seungmin had bought them, and he wasn’t sure what Seungmin had been planning for them. They stood in silence, as Seungmin touched first the shell of Changbin’s ear, a gentle finger tracing it, and then slid those fingers into Changbin’s hair, stroking the strands carefully.
Seungmin was not usually so gentle with him. He didn’t like to be treated in this way, and it was rare indeed that he was like this in turn. Changbin said not a single word; he was too busy basking in it.
Eventually, though, Seungmin sighed, and then he leaned down. Instead of kissing Changbin’s mouth, like Changbin expected, he used the hand curled around the curve of Changbin’s head to turn his face so he could press his mouth, lingering and sweet, to Changbin’s cheek. “Hyung,” he said. “Be safe.”
Changbin’s hands flexed a little on Seungmin’s hips, unable to help it. “It’s not a dangerous job,” he said, not sure if he was trying to reassure Seungmin or convince himself.
Seungmin pulled back a little bit, looking him in the face. His eyes were glittering in the lights overhead, beautiful but a little unreadable. Changbin was good, at this point, at reading between Seungmin’s lines, but his eyes, still, could throw him off. Perhaps it was just that when Changbin looked in Seungmin’s eyes, it was clear that there was a wealth of emotion bubbling underneath that Seungmin rarely, rarely let out.
“Fine,” Seungmin said eventually. “Get fucked then, I guess.”
Changbin laughed, startled into it. He let Seungmin go, seeing as he did so the slight uptick to Seungmin’s mouth, pleased at himself at having made Changbin laugh. Changbin didn’t watch him go back to his seat, didn’t linger any longer. He just turned and followed Jisung out of the house.
In the car, Jisung had the engine running already, the car’s heater blowing warm air gently into the space. Changbin settled into the passenger seat, fastening his seatbelt as Jisung started to pull them slowly out of the parking lot and down the narrow side-street that led out to the main road.
“Seungmin fixed the problem?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Changbin said. He wondered if Seungmin was listening already, or if he would just tune into their feeds when they were actually at the intercept. He wasn’t going to know until — or if — Seungmin chose to speak to them; he didn’t always do so. “No real problem.”
“That’s good,” said Jisung.
They drove in mostly silence for a while, a comfortable one, interrupted every so often by Jisung humming some song or another under his breath. Changbin didn’t recognise any of them. What he knew of music, he knew from hearing songs play in convenience stores, snippets of whatever was popular at the time. He’d cared, once, maybe, in middle school, but then he’d had too much else going on to pay attention.
Jisung was into music, Changbin knew. Some of it popular, but most of it not. He and Jeongin used to share recommendations together, Jisung suggesting rap or old rock songs, Jeongin telling him about whatever song had been on the soundtrack of his latest TV show. Changbin didn’t know if they still did that.
“That was surprising,” Jisung said eventually, when they were halfway across the city. “About Jeongin.”
Changbin turned away from where he’d been watching the city go past in the window, all the lights of the buildings and signs blurring, lost in thought of how it had felt to have Seungmin kiss his cheek like that. When he looked at Jisung, Jisung had his eyes fixed on the road in front of them, even though there was very little traffic, at this point of night, that point where it was tipping over into late.
“Was it?” he asked.
“Not that he was good enough,” Jisung said. His voice was a little light, and it was hard to tell if it was artificial or not. “Nobody who shoots like he does would have failed that test. But it’s surprising, even so, that he’s being allowed to go. You’re all so protective of him.”
Changbin didn’t answer for a while. He wasn’t really sure what to say. Jisung did glance over at him, eventually, possibly checking that he hadn’t annoyed Changbin with that remark, and whatever he saw on Changbin’s face made him add, “I get it, I really do. You want to— preserve his innocence, I guess? I understand. So I was kind of expecting that even if he passed the test, Chan-hyung would tell him no anyway.”
“Chan-hyung isn’t unreasonable,” Changbin said, with a little sigh. “But— it’s not just that we wanted to protect his innocence. It’s just hard, especially for Chan-hyung, to face the fact that Jeongin’s grown up now.”
Jisung snorted. “Just Chan-hyung?” he asked. “Hyung, I know you’re just as bad.”
Changbin reached across and pinched him on the thigh, not caring that Jisung was driving. Jisung yelped in pain but didn’t react otherwise, so perhaps he’d expected retaliation of some kind. Still, Changbin had to admit that it was probably true. He was protective of Jeongin, overly so, but maybe that was what came from knowing someone when they were a child, a scared one, still struggling to get over the trauma of all they had suffered. It was what made it hard, sometimes still, to reconcile the sassy, capable, funny Hyunjin with the boy who had come to them.
But it had always been easier, for him, than it had been for Chan.
Changbin had known Chan for months before he even heard about Jeongin, never mind got to meet him. He’d been aware that Chan had someone he tried to be home for, someone he turned down some evening or overnight jobs for, but Changbin hadn’t thought much about that. He’d assumed that Chan had a situation similar to him, a family member that he had to look after. Changbin didn’t like leaving his grandmother alone overnight either, because sometimes, back then, she tried to do too much, and fell, and he wasn’t around to help her if he was working.
But eventually, after they had grown so close that Changbin, even then, was thinking of Chan as his brother in his head, Chan had said, “Do you want to come and meet my little brother?”
The building that Chan had led him to had not looked, at first glance, like it should be housing anyone at all. In fact, Changbin had mostly been shocked that it had not simply been condemned and torn down, but in the area of the city Chan lived in, buildings like that had been so common that the local government had clearly decided it wasn’t worth the money. Changbin had followed Chan to an apartment on the second floor, one so old that it still had a physical lock and key, although it had been unlocked when Chan opened the door and stepped inside.
The apartment had been— depressing. A ramshackle little kitchen, the stove of which hadn’t always worked; a floor table, with some threadbare cushions around it to serve as seats; and then a mattress, not very big, pushed into the corner, two pillows and a heap of blankets. There’d been a boy on that bed, rubbing sleepily at his face, whose eyes had widened when he saw Changbin come in behind Chan.
He hadn’t said a word. Instead, when Chan had said, “Jeongin-ah, come and greet hyung’s friend,” Jeongin had gotten to his feet, ran up to him, and tried to hide behind him.
He’d been eleven, just. Small, back then, short and skinny; Chan had said that he hadn’t grown much since they’d left their group home, still as small as he’d been at eight. He’d been able to hide very easily behind Chan’s bigger, bulkier frame, peeking around him at Changbin, who had looked at this small boy and thought, like a bolt to the head, help he’s so cute?
Chan had rubbed a hand over Jeongin’s hair, which had clearly been cut in this one room apartment with some blunt scissors. “Jeongin-ah, this is my friend, Changbin. Can you introduce yourself?”
Jeongin had not. He had stayed silent, looking at Changbin warily but not distrustfully, and instead of speaking he had just lifted a hand and stuck his fingers in his mouth. He’d chewed on them for about ten seconds before Chan made a soft noise of amusement and said, “Jeongin, stop doing that,” and then he’d tugged Jeongin’s fingers back out of his mouth and then wiped them on his own pants. Jeongin had let him do it without a single noise of protest.
Watching him do that had solidified something in Changbin’s mind that had been building and building over the past few months, this time that he had spent getting to know and work with Chan. A knowledge, deep and true inside him, that if Chan asked him, Changbin would follow him— everywhere. Anywhere, for any reason. There was just something in Chan that resonated so completely with Changbin, something he couldn’t put into words, not back then and not even now, all these years later. But he’d known it, as he watched Chan smiling softly and using his own jeans to clean the saliva off his younger brother’s hand.
“This is Jeongin,” Chan had said, his hand settled gently on Jeongin’s hair. “Sorry, he’s shy around new people.”
“That’s okay,” Changbin had said softly. “It’s very nice to meet you, Jeongin.”
He hadn’t heard a peep out of Jeongin for almost a week, although he had come over every single day after that, mostly just for a few minutes to meet Chan before they went off to whatever job they had going on. Every day, as Chan left, he fussed over Jeongin: don’t go out, he would say, rubbing dirt of unknown origin off Jeongin’s cheek, or handing him an egg he had peeled for him, don’t touch the stove, if you get hungry there’s snacks in the cupboard, I’ll be home by ten, can you point to that on your watch, good as Jeongin pointed wordlessly to the right hands on the battered wristwatch that Chan had picked up for him from somewhere, potentially shoplifted.
It had taken a week of careful one-sided conversation, before Jeongin had snapped a square off a small chocolate bar that Changbin had brought for him, and held it out to Changbin. Here, hyung, he had whispered, and Changbin had been in love instantly.
“And never mind you two,” Jisung said, as he turned down a narrower side street away from the main streets, “I’m surprised Minho-hyung is allowing it, he’s almost as bad. You’d think Jeongin would be allowed to at least cook for himself by now.”
At that, Changbin just hummed under his breath. Again, a strange sense of— a missing step, perhaps, as he realised just how much everyone in their little cobbled together family took it for granted that Minho was protective and careful with Jeongin. Maybe it made sense, with Jisung, because he had arrived long after the last of Minho’s anger had faded. He’d no doubt have heard stories, maybe even from Jeongin, but he had never seen it, never known anything other than Minho’s— care, with Jeongin, for Jeongin.
It had been such a fucking odd time, since Seungmin had told him that Minho wanted Jeongin. Changbin had wanted to observe them, in a way, but it had become very, very clear that Minho was either avoiding Jeongin or avoiding them all, because he had spent most of the last day tucked away in his room, where he was never disturbed unless necessary.
It hadn’t been necessary. The whole thing had taken on the tint of something that Changbin should have maybe seen coming, except for the part where he would never, in his life, have called it. It was not that he had not wondered, in the past, what kind of people Minho went for, because he had wondered about it, idly. He’d known that Minho went out, sometimes, to Maniac, or another club, and picked people up and spent some of his spare time with them. Minho was private about it, but he always made sure Chan knew where he would be, just in case.
In the past, Changbin had sometimes wondered to himself, What kind of person would Minho-hyung even want? He’d thought: someone no-nonsense, like Minho was. Someone quiet, maybe, someone with an edge to them; someone who wouldn’t be worn down at all by Minho’s rough edges. Someone with a bark to go with Minho’s bite.
He hadn’t been joking, or exaggerating, when he’d told Seungmin that Minho had the capacity to hurt Jeongin. A Jeongin fooled into being in love would be especially susceptible to those edges, that bite. He had thought, briefly, about that eleven year old Jeongin gnawing on his own fingers, set against a backdrop of Minho’s intensity, and thought, Oh fuck no.
But it wasn’t like that. Jeongin was not that child, Minho was not the angry, resentful man who had first come to work for them. They still saw that anger, all of them, in some moments or others — all except Jeongin. Changbin had remembered that, thinking about it all: Minho never, perhaps since that day he caved in a man’s skull for hurting Jeongin, shown his anger to Jeongin. He had been short, yes, sharp sometimes with his words, but never angry, never hurting. In fact, most of the time, his voice held a softness that was missing with everyone else. They had all just taken it as Jeongin’s due.
He softens himself for Jeongin, he’d thought, laying in bed staring at his ceiling in the dark, unable to sleep as he turned the whole situation over and over. He doesn’t need someone as sharp as him, because he can make himself gentle.
Terrible, that thought, because he knew what that meant. He saw it happening more and more every day with Seungmin.
“Hyung?” Jisung asked quietly.
Changbin looked up. They were pulling slowly into the side street from which they would emerge when the van carrying the furniture arrived. Changbin glanced at the clock on the dashboard, saw that they were a minute or two ahead of the schedule they’d planned out. Jisung rolled to a stop, the car just poking out of the end of the alley, but didn’t take his hands off the steering wheel, didn’t turn the engine off. The only thing he did was turn their headlights off.
Changbin reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the two balaclavas that they’d stored there. He passed one to Jisung, who pulled it over his head, as Changbin did the same. He wondered what he looked like, because looking at Jisung like this was always very, very strange.
“Now we wait,” he said, glancing at Changbin.
Changbin sighed a little. “And now we wait.”
It was not a long wait. Whoever had done the time calculations, Seungmin or Minho or both of them together, had done it well. They’d been idling for a couple of minutes when they saw the van coming up on their left, not going too fast but fast enough. Jisung waited for the right moment and then, almost lazily, drove forward until their car was blocking the entire narrow street, no space for the van to go around them at all.
It screeched to a halt, not far away from caving in the driver’s side of their car. Jisung didn’t even flinch. Changbin was already undoing his seatbelt and opening his passenger side door, pulling his handgun out as he went.
In planning, Minho had said, someone will get out to yell at you, and Changbin had said, surely they’ll just back up? and Minho had shaken his head at him like Changbin was an idiot, and thus Minho was once again proven right because the passenger side door on the van opened too, and one of the delivery men climbed out. “Hey, asshole!” he shouted, slamming his door shut. “Move your fucking car!”
Changbin lifted his gun and pointed it at him, hand very steady. Even in the dim lights of the streetlights around them, the whites of the man’s eyes were obvious as his eyes got wider, taking in the sight of that gun. “Get away from the van,” he said, projecting his voice out in that way that made Jeongin pretend to cry sometimes.
The man did so, taking some quick, shuffling steps away from the door. Jisung was out of the car now too, and he went to the driver’s side, yanked open the door, and then reached in. Changbin thought he was going to grab the man, but when his hand returned, it was clutching a cell phone, which he tossed over his shoulder, far away. Then he pointed his gun at the driver. “Leave the keys in the ignition and you get out too,” he said, pitching his voice a little lower than normal.
The driver did so, slowly and gingerly. He was somewhat bigger than the one Changbin still had his gun trained on, but not by much. Neither of them were big, to be honest, because neither of them were trained security. They were just delivery drivers. Changbin felt almost a little guilty about the fear on their faces.
He directed the two men up against the side of the van, their hands pressed flat against the surface. Only when they were prone like that did Jisung click the safety off his gun and put it back in his holster, so that he could begin the process of tying their hands behind their backs, the zipties flashing white in the lights. He did this in silence, Changbin with his gun trained on the men, not taking his eyes off either of them for a second.
It wasn’t until Jisung had bent down and finished tying the men’s ankles together that he waved the zipties in the air and said, “Wow, really just like old times, huh!”
“Shut up,” said Changbin. Jisung snickered. Changbin stored his own gun away, and then came forward to help him haul the men away from the van and over to the side of the road, where they, as carefully as they could, helped them to sit down on the ground. One of them, the slightly bigger man, landed a little heavily and let out an oof.
“Sorry,” said Jisung, with a wince. “And sorry about this, too.”
This was the roll of duct tape he pulled out of his bag, which he used to cover up the men’s mouths. This was a precaution that Minho had started to insist on, if they were leaving witnesses alive, so that they couldn’t shout for help. A good idea, all in all, but Jisung always apologised for doing it. Probably it was because if someone did it to him, he might actually expire from not being able to talk for an extended period.
After he was done, Jisung got to his feet and looked down at the men with the air of someone admiring their handiwork. Changbin cuffed him on the shoulder and said, “Let’s get going.”
Jisung nodded. He went to the van and hauled himself up into the cab of it, closing the door after him with a remarkably quiet sound; Changbin had expected him to slam it, somehow, but maybe Jisung didn’t want to make much more noise. There were a few seconds of nothing, just Changbin watching through the windscreen as Jisung tried to figure out how the van worked, but then the engine turned on and the headlights flared to life.
Changbin went to the car and got into the driver’s seat, the seat still warm from Jisung’s body heat, a little weird to feel. Their engine was still running, and he carefully reversed back, to let Jisung pull ahead in the van. He went slow, at first, and then faster, his speed nothing that would draw attention either way. Changbin let him drive past, and then he pulled out of the side street and turned to follow behind him.
——
Hyunjin already had the fourth cookie in his mouth before he realised that he had eaten the previous three in as many minutes. He took the bite that he’d been planning on and then carefully laid the cookie back down on the plate, before pressing his hand flat to the table. He took one deep, steadying breath, the taste of the chocolate thick in his mouth. Eating so quickly had made his lip begin to throb a little, and he hated it so much.
He felt— like an idiot, sitting here at this kitchen table, unable to focus, unable to do anything to distract himself. He’d tried drawing, but any and all inspiration had fled him as the evening had drawn in and then it had become nighttime and he had known, even if he hadn’t seen them leave, that Changbin and Jisung had gone out on their job. He’d put the sketchbook away then, defeated finally, and tried reading, tried looking at his phone, tried pacing. Nothing had worked.
This was, he thought, grumpy and frustrated, particularly stupid. It was not as though the job that they were on was even all that difficult. Hyunjin had walked the route, seen the plans, given his own advice. He trusted both Changbin and Jisung on a job like this, something straight-forward, something that would go fast and quick. He’d seen them both working before, after all. He knew how good they were.
It hadn’t mattered, not to his stupid brain. It never used to be like this. In the past, whenever people went off on jobs without him, Hyunjin had been so relaxed about it all that sometimes he’d already been in bed, asleep, by the time they got back. Jeongin was doing that now, trusting so much in their team that he rarely stayed up to welcome people home — he’d done it that last time only because it had been Chan on the job.
It was not even that Hyunjin didn’t trust them to do the job right. He did. He trusted Changbin — he trusted Jisung, too, maybe even more, because Jisung on a job was someone who could be relied upon. Hyunjin relied on him, every time. But still, he was here, the anxiety bubbling inside of him, and—
He was eating that fourth cookie, not even aware he was doing it, his hand and mouth moving on autopilot. He swallowed the mouthful and then cursed under his breath.
A door opened down the hall. Too late for Jeongin, and sure enough it was Felix who came into the room, his footsteps light but his bare feet still slapping a little on the wooden flooring. He was wearing a pair of Hyunjin’s pyjamas that Hyunjin had given him and never taken back, and one of his own t-shirts, one that Hyunjin had kindly let him buy a size too big when they’d got it. He looked— cosy, the shirt swallowing him up a bit, his pants rolled up at the bottom.
He didn’t look surprised to see Hyunjin. “Hello,” he said, smiling at Hyunjin, sweet and closed-mouthed, as he came into the kitchen and went to the sink to pour himself a glass of water, apparently. “Are you finishing off the cookies?”
“Apparently,” said Hyunjin. He put the last mouthful into his mouth and then brushed his hands off, watching small crumbs fall to the table. Truthfully there were more than a few cookies left from Felix’s last batch but considering how quickly he had demolished these ones, they probably weren’t going to last much longer.
Felix turned to him, leaning back against the counter, his glass of water in his hands. His smile, now, had that little note of mischief in it that Hyunjin usually liked so much, that spark that Felix held inside him. Now, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to hear whatever Felix would say, and sure enough, Felix said, “You’re waiting for Jisung?”
Trust Felix to put into words the thought that Hyunjin was trying to avoid, he thought grumpily. “No,” he said, trying to be snotty, not sure he was managing it to the usual extent. “Don’t be silly, angel, it doesn’t suit you.”
“If you say so,” Felix said. He was still smiling, looking at Hyunjin softly. He didn’t believe Hyunjin in the slightest, but Hyunjin had never expected him to. How lovely it was, in many ways, to have discovered a person who understood Hyunjin so well without words even needing to be passed between them; how awful it was, too, to be so exposed, to not be able to hide the way he could with the others. He could deny all he wanted, prod and push Felix away all he liked — Felix would understand him, all the same.
“Why are you bothering me?” he grumbled, looking away from that smile, back to the few cookies still on the plate in front of him. “Why not go bother Chan-hyung, I’m sure he could use a distraction.”
“He’s working,” Felix said. “In his office. I’m going to go to sleep. We can cuddle for a bit, if you want, until Jisung gets home.”
Hyunjin’s head snapped up and he fixed Felix with a glare. Felix was grinning at him, clearly pleased with that reaction. He’d been teasing Hyunjin more recently, usually not about Jisung but more like he was simply learning how to do it. Becoming more comfortable with that kind of playful nature, now that he had some space for it. But he’d dropped a few things like this about Jisung, insinuating little asides or hints that made Hyunjin’s heartbeat a little faster. Never in front of other people, thank god, but if this was payback for all the times Hyunjin had done this about Chan, well, Felix sure was getting paid.
“You are so lucky you’re cute,” he complained, flicking his fingers in Felix’s direction in a dismissive motion. “Go get some rest, baby, I’m going to go paint or something.”
“Sure you will,” Felix said, rolling his eyes, but he didn’t protest any more. Instead, he came around the counter so he could lean down and kiss Hyunjin’s forehead, a dry press of warm lips. Hyunjin blinked at him, a little surprised, but not really. Physical affection from Felix was not entirely shocking to him. It was just that Felix had been doing things like this more and more since he’d started to sleep with Chan. Hyunjin was not sure if it was Felix trying to make sure Hyunjin knew how much he still cared for him, or if Felix was just more comfortable doing these kinds of things now.
“Goodnight, Hyunjin,” Felix murmured, squeezing Hyunjin’s hand where it was resting against the table, and then he disappeared back down the hallway, one of his pyjama bottoms trailing on the floor where it had rolled down.
Hyunjin waited until the door had clicked shut after Felix before he got to his feet. He was not going to paint. Felix had known that he was lying, anyway, which stopped Hyunjin feeling bad about doing it. Instead, he cleared up his plate of cookies, putting the ones he hadn’t eaten back into the tupperware container, and washed it and set it aside. Then he let himself out of the apartment.
It was cold in the stairwell, it always was. The concrete walls, the lack of windows, meant it was always so much colder here than it was even outside the building. He pulled his hands up into his hoodie as he climbed down the stairs, taking his time, forcing himself not to rush. His footsteps echoed in the space, in his battered old sneakers that he used for walking around the house in.
When he opened the door to Seungmin’s workroom, Seungmin turned slightly in his chair to look at him, for just a moment. He was checking, Hyunjin realised, if Hyunjin actually needed him for something. Hyunjin wasn’t sure what to say, but apparently it didn’t matter, because whatever was on his face made Seungmin shrug a little and then turn back to his computer without a single word.
Hyunjin followed suit. He took a seat at the workbench, the stool closest to Seungmin’s bank of monitors, so that he could see what was happening on them. He’d missed the actual intercept, he realised, as he watched their car trail behind a van, probably white but with the greyscale CCTV footage it was kind of hard to tell. Some of the weight lifted a little off his shoulders at that. Apparently they had not had any problems, because there were no police chasing them, and Seungmin seemed very calm.
Seungmin in fact had one foot up on his desk chair so he could rest his chin against his knee, face impassive, and every so often he did something with his keyboard that made the images flicker, changed the camera feeds so they could continue to watch their progress. There was a little bluetooth headphone in his ear but it seemed to be on mute, because he wasn’t saying anything into it. He was just— watching.
So Hyunjin didn’t say anything either. They simply sat, in the silence, and watched as the staticky image of the car and van made its way through the city.
——
It was past midnight by the time Jisung and Changbin arrived at the warehouse where the van was being stored. It was really more of a storage unit than a warehouse, small and on the very outskirts of the city, a good hour away from home even this late at night when there were very few cars on the road. Chan had bought it for this purpose, keeping goods here until they arranged the handover, and so now Jisung drove the van carefully into the parking lot inside the building and cut the engine.
It was very late now. They’d driven slowly, carefully, to avoid being pulled over in any way. Seungmin had not notified them at any point about there being police along the route, but they’d taken that care anyway. Now, as Jisung climbed out of the cab of the van, bouncing the keys up and down in his hand, Changbin leaned against the driver’s side of the car, parked just outside the gate, and said, “Hurry up.”
“Why,” Jisung said, even as he locked the van behind him and headed to the car. “Do you have something to be home for?”
“Yeah, my bed,” Changbin said, already climbing back into the driver’s seat of the car. Jisung snorted, and turned to close the chain link gate behind him. Changbin had opened it for him earlier, the rattle of the metal moving disturbingly loud, and so it was now as Jisung closed it. It was lucky that this was an area without anyone around to hear, because that kind of noise might have brought someone out to find out what was going on.
He padlocked the gate shut and then skirted around to the passenger side door, half-expecting Changbin to try driving away before Jisung could open the door. Changbin did that sometimes, when he was in a playful mood, but apparently that wasn’t the case tonight, despite the successful job, because he let Jisung open the door and climb in and get settled before he started to drive off.
Jisung let out a careful breath as they left the warehouse behind and started on the somewhat convoluted route that they’d take back to the house, relaxing into the passenger seat in a slump. He had been stiff driving the van, keeping that steady driving pace, figuring out how it worked as he went. He’d driven vans before, but they weren’t always as interchangeable as cars could be, and it had taken him a long few minutes to get used to the extra size of it too. Now, though, he could relax, and let Changbin ferry them back.
“Good thinking with the cell phone,” Changbin said, once they were out of the small industrial area and back on the bigger roads, with a handful of cars around them, mostly cabs. “I didn’t even notice him going for it.”
“Ah, yeah,” Jisung said, turning his head to look at Changbin rather than out of the window. “Honestly, I didn’t see him going for it, I just sensed that he was trying something.”
Changbin nodded. “You have good instincts,” he said. “I’ve always said so to Chan-hyung.”
It was not the first time Changbin had complimented Jisung’s skills, not even the first time to Jisung’s face, but it always made Jisung feel a little bit like he’d been knocked off balance trying to walk on a moving train when it happened. It didn’t fluster him, not the same way it did whenever Hyunjin was nice to him, possibly because he knew that Changbin did appreciate and welcome Jisung’s abilities. It was just that Jisung never knew how to handle that kind of earnest sincerity from Changbin.
From anyone, really, he knew, but especially from Changbin, who had been known to throw Jisung to the floor and call him a snot-nosed little fuck because Jisung had tried to tickle him during a fight instead of actually sparring.
So instead of thanking Changbin, or matching that sincerity, Jisung fluttered his eyelashes at him and said, “Aw, hyung, you talk about me to other people?”
Changbin reached out a hand and socked him in the thigh, hard enough to actually really hurt, hard enough that Jisung went, oof, and jerked away. He rubbed at the quickly growing numb patch on his leg, pouting dramatically, but Changbin just said, “Of course I talk about you to Chan-hyung. Sometimes he asks how you’re doing, how your training is going.”
“Oh,” said Jisung, more subdued now. He hadn’t realised that. There was something— warm about it, that knowledge, a similar feeling to how it had felt when Chan had asked for his opinion on Jeongin coming on the Magpie job. He’d been working with them for two years now, after all, and had proven himself again and again, but this felt like evidence of— acceptance, maybe. Recognition, as a part of the team, after such a shaky start.
He hadn't expected to be asked about Jeongin, honestly. He’d expect Chan and Changbin and Minho to decide it all between themselves, the way they so often did when it came to matters like that. They’d started asking Jisung more and more for input on jobs, on the plans that they put together, but he’d always figured that that was just because he usually going on the jobs. It had been really something shocking, to realise that Chan valued his input on something as important as Jeongin, as important as the Magpie job in general.
“You should know,” Changbin said, after a brief stretch of silence, “that Chan-hyung values you as a member of this team, Jisung. That he cares how you’re getting on. Surely that doesn’t surprise you?”
“No,” said Jisung slowly, the syllable stretching like taffy. “It doesn’t surprise me. I guess I just never thought about you guys thinking about me that much. Or— like, I didn’t think you’d worry about it at all. There’s other people who need more attention.”
Changbin shot him a quick glance, looking a little bit like he didn’t know what to make of Jisung’s words. But it was true, as far as Jisung was concerned. He needed very little from them, not like Jeongin, not like Hyunjin. He’d always had to be self-sufficient, always had to get along without people hovering over him.
“Yeah, you’re independent to a fault,” Changbin said eventually, rolling his eyes a little. “That doesn’t mean we don’t still take an interest. You’re part of this team, an important part.”
Jisung kept quiet, because he once again didn’t know what to say. This conversation didn’t make him uncomfortable so much as he had never thought he’d be inside it and he didn’t have words prepared. He’d never really known what to do with this kind of sentiment, to be praised or valued in such an honest way. Felix talked like this, and Jisung was often at a loss for words then, too, because his usual reaction was to joke it off, but Felix never seemed to take that bait.
After a silence, Changbin said, the laughter obvious in his voice, “Did I embarrass you?”
“Shut up,” Jisung grumbled. He slumped a little lower in his seat, and watched out of the corner of his eye as Changbin drove, his eyes on the road but his shoulders moving as he laughed at Jisung. That felt a little bit more normal to Jisung, because Changbin was constantly laughing at him, whether or not he had a good reason to be doing so.
“Well, I’m going to embarrass you even more,” Changbin said, driving them now through a part of the city that Jisung recognised more, closer to home. “Because I wanted to thank you, properly, for looking after Hyunjin yesterday.”
This, Jisung couldn’t really let stand. “No, hyung,” he said, sitting bolt upright. “Come on, you really shouldn’t thank me for that.”
“No, let me thank you,” Changbin said. His voice had taken on that implacable note that he used when he was in charge of a job. Jisung wasn’t sure if Changbin even knew he was using that tone, the one which seemed to say leader somehow, even though Jisung knew that Changbin, really, wasn’t the leader type. He was too good at being the right hand man, at following and executing orders. He could be bossy, when he wanted, but Jisung knew— Changbin would struggle in Chan’s position. He knew it because Jisung would struggle too, and he and Changbin were similar in ways such as those.
“Hyung,” he whined.
“Hyunjin can’t fight,” Changbin said. “It was the biggest sticking point in letting him go out on jobs on his own, and I worried about him so much. But I don’t need to worry when he’s out with you, because I can know that you’ll look after him. That’s a weight off my mind, Jisung.”
“But you don’t need to thank me for it,” Jisung protested. He thought he might be blushing, which was particularly embarrassing. “I’m just—”
No, he thought, cutting himself off. He wasn’t just doing his job, it was never just his job when it came to Hyunjin. There was a protective streak in him when it came to Hyunjin that simply was missing with anyone else. Of course, he would do whatever he could to protect Jeongin, or Seungmin even, if they needed him to do so. He’d risk his life to keep them safe.
He would willingly die to keep Hyunjin safe. It was not even a question in his head.
“Even if you’re just doing your job,” Changbin said, with another little side look at Jisung, as if to say, we both know that’s not the case but I won’t call you on it, “I still need to thank you for it. Mostly because I kind of blamed you for it yesterday, and I don’t want you to think that I do. I’m very grateful that you were there and could look after him.”
Jisung thought his face might burst into flames, which would serve Changbin right, saying stuff like this to him. Still, though, there was something nice about it, to listen to these words, Changbin as sincere here as he had been earlier, because once upon a time, Jisung had thought that Changbin disliked him. Maybe not as much as Hyunjin had done, but that made sense, since the offence had been given to Hyunjin in the first place, but Changbin had not been particularly warm for a few days after that fiasco had happened.
“Of course,” he said, just above a mutter. “Hyung. I’ll always look after him.”
His feelings were raw in his voice, unable to be hidden. Maybe it didn’t matter, because he’d always known that basically everyone he worked and lived with knew about his feelings for Hyunjin. Changbin, in particular, knew because he’d been there, that first time meeting Hyunjin, when Jisung had made such an awful fool of himself. Changbin had witnessed it all.
It had been in Chan’s office, the first time he’d met Hyunjin, after they’d tested him in the basement with Changbin and then decided to keep him around on a trial basis. This was after Minho had thrown what Jisung had thought of as a temper tantrum over the whole thing, insisting that Jisung was a security risk and probably an agent working for the enemy, or something along those lines, Jisung could not quite remember. He'd watched Chan sit patiently for Minho to finish his rant and decided it was probably safe to tune most of it out.
After Minho had stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him, Changbin had said, "I'll get Hyunjin to come down and say hi, should I?"
"Yeah, that'll be good," Chan had said, like nothing had really happened.
Hyunjin, when he had knocked at the door and been let into the room, had turned out to be tall and slim and so beautiful that Jisung felt his breath catch at the sight of him. His blond hair had been pulled back into a half ponytail, wisps of it around his face. He'd been wearing a dark, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of slim legged sweatpants.
He'd come into that room and Jisung had lost his fucking mind, that was the only explanation for what had happened.
"Oh," Hyunjin had said, blinking at where Jisung sat on one of the hard backed chairs. "Is this the new guy Minho-hyung was just yelling about?"
"Yeah," Chan said, sounding just that bit tired now. "This is Jisung. Jisung, this is Hyunjin."
Hyunjin had opened his mouth to say something but Jisung beat him to it, blurting out, "Oh wow, you are so hot." There had been a brief, very shocked seeming silence. Hyunjin had stared at him like he'd never been told that before, which Jisung had, at the time, thought was obviously impossible. Figuring he'd already made a fool of himself quite beyond any salvaging, he had added, "I don’t suppose you have a spot in your schedule for me later?"
It had mostly been a joke— well, no, it had been completely a joke, except for if Hyunjin had said that he did have time later, in which case Jisung had planned on pursuing that line of thought to the very end. But Hyunjin had not said that. Hyunjin had looked at Chan and Changbin, and then back at Jisung. The shock on his face had been replaced by a black anger, and he had looked at Jisung with a kind of hatred that Jisung had not even seen on the face of his step-father.
Then, without a word, he had turned and slammed out of the room again.
"Oh fuck," Jisung had said, leaping to his feet. "I was just joking, I didn't mean to—"
"Sit down," said Chan, and his voice had been so implacable that Jisung had found himself sitting before he'd even processed the order. He'd looked at Chan — blank-faced — and then Changbin — uncomfortable, possibly angry — and felt his chances of joining this group slowly slipping from his fingers.
You fucking idiot, he'd told himself. You stupid flirt. His mouth had always gotten him into trouble in the past, but that was usually because he hadn’t been able to control his temper and had a tendency to start fights he couldn’t always finish. It had been a little surprising, however, that it had never gotten him into trouble like this before. Flirting with pretty people out of his league hadn’t exactly been something he shied away from.
“I was just joking,” he had repeated, voice very quiet. He’d expected Hyunjin to blink impassively at him and say something along the lines of, You wish. And then they’d laugh, mostly at Jisung’s expense, because— yeah. That was normally how that went.
“You can’t make jokes like that,” Chan said. His voice had still been hard, and there’d been a definite fear inside Jisung that if he didn’t smooth this over, he’d find himself pushing up daisies. He’d taken a risk finding this place and climbing in their window, and he’d known that they were unlikely to let him run off again now he knew where they lived.
“I know,” Jisung had said, as fast as he could, “god, that was so inappropriate, I was just— he was so pretty, and I’m— I’m stupid, you know, it’s just—”
“No,” said Chan, interrupting him, thankfully, because Jisung had wanted a cavernous maw to open up in the carpet and bite him into pieces. “It’s not just that. It’s— you can’t make jokes like that with Hyunjin.”
Jisung hadn’t known how to respond. He’d thought, for a moment, that Hyunjin was just especially sensitive about his looks or something, which Jisung couldn’t relate to, because if he’d looked like Hyunjin, he’d have accepted any and all praise directed his way. Perhaps the confusion on his face had been obvious, because Chan had sighed, and ran a hand through his hair, before looking back at Changbin, who had seen whatever expression was on Chan’s face and then shrugged and nodded. When Chan had looked back at Jisung, he had still just looked very blank.
“Hyunjin was taken by the Macaque Syndicate when he was eight,” Chan had said, very quietly. Jisung had felt his stomach drop, the guilt rushing through him in a sickening sweep. “And he was held there until he escaped at sixteen. So I trust I don’t need to explain further about why those kinds of jokes, or comments, are unacceptable to or around him.”
“Of course not,” Jisung had said. His mouth had felt numb, his hands numb, and inside his stomach nothing but the roiling panic and guilt. He was not sure he had ever felt so wretched in his entire life, and by that point, he’d had plenty of things to feel bad about. His lingering remorse over all the broken and ruined friendships left behind in the wake of his temper had been nothing compared to this, the absolute shame that had permeated through his entire body.
It had been a joke, but that didn’t make it better. He hadn’t known, but that hadn’t made it better, either. And he hadn’t even meant it like that at all anyway, not the way Hyunjin must have heard it. But that, too, didn’t fix this. What an awful thing to do, to make such a joke to someone who had been through what Hyunjin had been through. Jisung, sitting in that room, had almost not been able to take it in, the horror of Chan’s words. To be a victim of that Syndicate had not been something Jisung had ever come face to face with before. He had thought about that dark look of anger on Hyunjin’s face and thought he might throw up.
He’d tried to apologise. Gone up to where Changbin had said Hyunjin’s bedroom was, knocked on the door, tried to get an apology out. Hyunjin had slammed the door in his face. Who could even blame him? Jisung had not tried that again, figuring that he’d get another chance to apologise. Figuring that if he could just explain that it had been a horrible joke, Hyunjin might— forgive him, at the very least.
He’d never managed it. Instead, for months, as soon as he had entered a room, Hyunjin had left it, sometimes looking annoyed, sometimes upset, but mostly just— skittish. He had looked at Jisung like he had been afraid that Jisung would make another joke like that, like Jisung would draw attention again to the ways in which Hyunjin was attractive, in which he was— desirable. It had made Jisung feel a depth of remorse that had been like plunging into the deepest parts of the ocean: crushing and black and he hadn’t known which way was up anymore.
He’d never let himself linger on Hyunjin’s looks after that. Tried to never think of Hyunjin in any kind of sexual way. He could acknowledge that Hyunjin was beautiful without bringing sexual desire into it, and so he had made himself do that; how could he do otherwise, knowing how deeply uncomfortable that desire made Hyunjin.
He was lucky, he knew, that they’d kept him on. Lucky that Chan and Changbin had not simply thrown him back out, or worse, in the face of Hyunjin’s obvious and enduring discomfort with him. He still wasn’t sure why they had not. Instead, they had invested time and money in him, training him until he could go on jobs, giving him a place to live after so long of having to bounce around. And then, eventually, they had sent him on jobs with Hyunjin. Trusting him, somehow, bizarrely, with Hyunjin’s safety.
They’d forgiven him for what he’d said. He was so fucking grateful for that. But he’d never been able to forgive himself. And despite the fact that Hyunjin, now, could stand to be in the same room as him, could stand to talk with him, he knew that Hyunjin had never forgotten those words either.
Changbin, now, looked properly at him, as they waited for a traffic light to change. Yes, Jisung saw, Changbin knew about his feelings for Hyunjin, and there was sympathy in his eyes, and understanding there, too. He wondered if Changbin pitied him, sometimes, and almost told Changbin not to. It wasn’t something to be pitied, to be in love with Hyunjin like this. Even when it hurt, when it ached beyond belief, it wasn’t something Jisung wanted to be pitied for.
Who would he be, if he didn’t love Hyunjin? He barely even knew.
“I know,” Changbin said, quietly. “I know that you’ll always look after him.”
“Yeah,” Jisung said. He slumped back down in his seat, looking away from those eyes. Turned his face to the window beside him, looking at the lights of the street outside. The convenience store lit up, the buildings on either side in darkness, a person leaning in a doorway smoking. “So that’s why you shouldn’t thank me for it.”
Changbin didn’t say anything more. The lights changed, and he pulled forward, his gaze back on the road and away from Jisung. Jisung kept watching the street, let the lights in motion blur as his eyes unfocused. Neither of them said anything else for the rest of the journey home.
——
It wasn’t until the camera feeds of the house showed the car pulling around the corner into the alley at the side of the building that Hyunjin stood up. Seungmin, who had been watching the monitor, heard the screech of the stool legs against concrete floor and turned to see Hyunjin on his feet already, his arms folded across his stomach a little, as if he were protecting himself, or holding something in.
Neither of them had said a single word this entire time, but now, as Hyunjin turned to leave the room, Seungmin struggled for a second and then said, “Hyunjin-ah.” Hyunjin looked back at him, one of his eyebrows raised just the slightest. “You should stay. It would mean a lot to Jisung, to know you were waiting for him.”
The words were a hell of a gamble. He’d known there was a good chance that Hyunjin would get angry with him. He wasn’t even sure what form that anger would take, because this was completely uncharted territory, for both him and Hyunjin. But sitting here in this workroom with Hyunjin, both of them watching the feeds in silence together, Seungmin had thought — oh, wait.
Seungmin had an excuse. It was his job to track their progress, to keep his eye out, to listen to the police scanner to make sure nothing dangerous happened. But that was not the reason he was doing it, not the reason he felt like his gaze was gripped to his screen, not wanting to look away for a second for fear that he would miss something. Hyunjin didn’t even have the excuse of it being work for him. He’d just come down here and sat in the quiet with the same intensity of focus that Seungmin felt in himself.
It was unlikely to be for Changbin. And besides, Seungmin didn’t even consider Changbin. He’d known immediately that Hyunjin was down here for Jisung, waiting for him, and then he had wondered, how do I know that, and then he had remembered: all the times he had watched Hyunjin on the kitchen feeds, puttering around when Jisung was out on a job, going to his bedroom only when he knew that Jisung had returned. All the times he’d seen Hyunjin restless and snappish whenever Jisung was out.
It was Jisung that Hyunjin took on his trips out to kill the men who had hurt him. Only ever Jisung.
He’d said the words almost as a test. He thought Hyunjin would deny it, angrily, offended at the notion: don’t be so fucking stupid, what the hell are you talking about. Seungmin would have even accepted being called a few names, because it was a bit of a shitty thing to say to Hyunjin, of all people. To drag it out into the light all of a sudden, to let Hyunjin know that Seungmin, at least, had seen through him just a little bit.
But Hyunjin didn’t react with anger. He still didn’t even say a word. He just looked at Seungmin, his eyes shadowed in the overhead lighting, his mouth flat, his expression— hard, somehow. He didn’t look like he was surprised that Seungmin had figured it out, but he definitely wasn’t happy about it either. He didn’t look happy about it at all. After a beat, he simply turned and left the room, footsteps almost silent, the door shutting after him less so.
Seungmin sat there, staring at that closed door. Fucking hell, he thought, as the full scope of the situation hit him like a freight train. He’d expected some kind of tsundere response, that thing that Hyunjin did so well to anyone who was not Jeongin, and recently Felix. Not getting that was like getting a confirmation of something that he hadn’t even really contemplated when he’d asked Hyunjin to stay.
He’s really in love with Jisung, he thought, as he heard the beep of the back door in the hallway. Oh, that’s probably not good.
The door opened again. Changbin came in, a sight for sore eyes maybe, already stripping out of the jacket he’d been wearing so he could offload his gun and holster. He’d been wearing just a t-shirt underneath, black and a little tight, and Seungmin let himself be distracted from everything in his head in favour of looking at his arms for a few seconds.
Behind him was Jisung, his boots clacking on the floor, rubbing at the side of his face in a slightly tired way. It was Jisung who greeted him, a cheerful, “Hey, Seungmin,” as he unbuckled his holster from his shoulder.
“Hello,” Seungmin said. He let Jisung get his gun off and waited until the magazine had been ejected before he said, “Hyunjin was down here waiting for you.”
Jisung’s head snapped around to look at him but rather than being surprised or even hopeful, he just looked completely confused. “What?” he asked.
“Hyunjin was down here waiting for you,” Seungmin repeated, and then to clarify, in case Jisung got the reasoning wrong, “For you to get back, I mean. He wanted to make sure you were back safely.”
Jisung just kept blinking at him. Changbin had finished taking off everything that needed to be taken off and he was looking at Seungmin too, now, from a little behind Jisung, and he had his eyebrows raised at Seungmin as if to ask what he was doing. Truthfully, Seungmin didn’t know. Maybe Changbin had been rubbing off on him a little bit too much, making him into a soft touch, but he just hadn’t been able to bear the thought of Jisung leaving without knowing what Hyunjin had done.
If Hyunjin had been angry, or denied any of it, Seungmin would have kept his mouth shut. Instead, Hyunjin had brought Seungmin into it, made it into Seungmin’s business. Jisung deserved just a little comfort, maybe.
“Ah, he was probably down here for Changbin-hyung,” Jisung said eventually, rubbing at one of his eyes now with the heel of his hand.
“No?” said Seungmin, pursing his lips. “He was here for you.”
Jisung snorted under his breath. “I don’t think Hyunjin really cares if I get back safely or not,” he said.
Seungmin opened his mouth. He had no fucking clue what was about to come out of it, because that statement was such an insane thing for Jisung to say that there didn’t seem to be words enough to explain it. Even if Jisung didn’t believe that Hyunjin liked him, of course Hyunjin cared if he got back from a job or not.
Before he could say anything though — probably just as well, because whatever the words were felt like they might land stinging against Jisung’s skin — Changbin said, “Ah, maybe he was here for both of us.”
“If you say so, hyung,” said Jisung. He wasn’t looking at Seungmin now, turned away from him. He held some keys out to Changbin, not their car keys, these ones dangling from a bright orange keyring of some kind. The van keys, Seungmin realised. “You’re sure you’re okay to go with Minho-hyung for the handover tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Changbin said. “Go sleep, Jisung. You’ll need it, I think Minho-hyung will be dragging you into Jeongin’s new training regiment tomorrow.”
“Oh, you think?” Jisung asked. He sounded a little brighter at that, like the prospect of helping Jeongin was something he actually found fun. Maybe he did. Seungmin had never trained with any of them, so he couldn’t speak to that, but he did know that the mere idea of training sounded as fun to him as chewing plasterboard. “Maybe we can try the moving target idea.”
“Sure,” Changbin said, “if it’ll mean I’ll no longer have to deal with your stupidity. Go to fucking bed.”
Jisung vanished. After the door closed, there was quiet, the only sound that of their breathing, Changbin’s a little louder. He waited a few seconds, as if to make sure that Jisung wouldn’t come back in, and then he crossed the room to where Seungmin was sitting, an unhurried pace.
Seungmin had his head tipped up even before Changbin arrived, a silent, almost-embarrassing plea to be kissed. He didn’t need to say the words, though, because Changbin leaned down and pressed their mouths together, as unhurried in that as he had been about his footsteps. Seungmin kissed him back, trying to keep the— clinging, cloying feeling inside him and out of the non-existent space between their mouths.
He had watched on the video feeds as nothing had happened, but it was not until Changbin was here in front of him, safe and whole, that he felt like he could relax.
He was a little breathless when Changbin pulled back. “Was Hyunjin really waiting for him?” he asked.
Seungmin blinked his eyes open. He hadn’t realised he’d squeezed them shut. “Yes,” he said.
“Huh,” said Changbin. If he’d put it together like Seungmin had, he didn’t say so, and there was a little frown on his face that suggested he hadn’t quite gotten there yet. Seungmin wasn’t going to drop Hyunjin in it with Changbin, of all people. Changbin was not sensible, when it came to Hyunjin, not really. He might try to actually talk to Hyunjin about it, and that was probably a mistake.
Seungmin tugged him back into a kiss, mostly just because he wanted to, and partly to distract Changbin from thinking too much about it. It worked, too; Changbin was not much of a multitasker, and he poured too much of his attention into thoroughly kissing Seungmin. Seungmin let his feet slide off the desk chair and then to the floor, his knees spread around Changbin’s, wanting to tug him even closer into the vee of them.
“I have to go report back to Chan-hyung,” Changbin said, before too much time could pass, before he could get fully lost the way Seungmin was maybe trying to drag him into. “He’ll be wondering where I am.”
Seungmin grumbled but let go of him. Changbin stepped back, looking down at him with a horrible little smile. He looked at Seungmin like the fact of Seungmin’s desire tickled him somehow. “Fine,” Seungmin said. “Go.”
Changbin turned to do so. It at least took that smile away from Seungmin’s eyes, but also now he could see Changbin’s back in that t-shirt and it was hardly a better situation. What was this, he wondered, feeling a little at a loss. Sometimes he thought that if he’d known where he would be almost a year down the line, he would never have asked Changbin to come and fuck him; other times, he thought that if he’d known, he would have asked Changbin to fuck him way earlier than he did.
“Hyung,” he said, right when Changbin opened the door. Changbin looked back at him immediately, his focus on Seungmin completely. Seungmin almost shivered but held it in. “Hurry back, okay?”
The invitation was clear. Changbin watched him, mouth quirked up at the corner, and said, “Okay.” Then he left the room.
Seungmin turned back to his computer and started the process of putting everything to sleep. He kept the camera feeds up, as usual, and primed all the alarms he needed for when he wasn’t there to watch. By the time he was finished with that, he had watched out of the corner of his eye as Changbin had climbed the stairs, crossed the PC room, and then gone into Chan’s office. Only then did Seungmin get out of his chair.
The air in his small bedroom was cold. He changed out of the sweatpants he’d been wearing and into a pair of pyjamas bottoms, which was probably a waste of time, since they were likely to be pulled off him sometime soon, but it was too cold to be without. He sat on his bed, his feet tucked up underneath him to keep him warm, and thought— I want him here. Because he did. He wanted Changbin in his bed, this narrow little thing, solid and warm underneath Seungmin’s body.
His head was too full. Too much knowledge rattling around in there, too many things that he knew and could do nothing about. At least this was simple. His desire for Changbin, physically and emotionally, was, he knew now, so simple it was as if he had been waiting his entire life for it.
That didn’t make it less scary. It just made it simple.
Chapter 14
Notes:
hello it is i, the grinch, here to ruin christmas
Chapter Text
Hyunjae’s warehouse was in the north of the city, tucked away in an innocuous corner of an industrial park, where vans and trucks coming and going wouldn’t cause too much of a stir. As far as Changbin knew, he did operate a legitimate business in alcohol shipped from Japan and China, specialty things to be sold to bars and clubs in the city, but they got that kind of thing elsewhere; Chan hadn’t wanted to mix club business too much with the less savoury stuff they did.
When he and Minho arrived, Hyunjae was standing outside the doors waiting for them, shielding his eyes against the early afternoon light with a hand. “You guys are late,” he called, as Changbin got out of the driver’s seat door.
“No, we aren’t,” Changbin said. He waited until Minho had climbed out, locked the doors, and then walked to the doors of the warehouse so Hyunjae could clap him on the shoulder. He didn’t do that to Minho, just giving him a friendly, if short, nod. Nobody had ever had to tell Hyunjae not to touch Minho. Minho wore his personal space like an iron shield in public.
“Well, if you say so,” Hyunjae said. Changbin did say so, since they were actually five minutes early, but Hyunjae was just grinning as he motioned for them to enter the warehouse ahead of him. Inside the warehouse, outside the glare of the surprisingly warm sunlight, it was very cool, the air crisper. Changbin was glad, now, of the jacket he was wearing.
The warehouse was, for the most part, just a large square building, with a couple of service entrances for trucks and vans, but otherwise no windows. Half the space held nothing but heavy looking pallets, some men milling around them boxing up crates of bottles, the clanking sound of glass filling the air. There were two trucks near one of the service entrances, where the crates were being handed, presumably for delivery to the rest of the city.
Hyunjae led them past the bustle along to where a metal staircase went up to the second floor, which was just a smaller platform level that overlooked most of the warehouse. Up here was the employee break room and the admin office, which Hyunjae led them past to his office, a larger room furthest away from the entrances on the first floor.
Changbin had been here a fair number of times now: first when they’d approached Hyunjae about contracting him for weapons, and then more often over the past couple of years in order to place orders and pick things up. Minho did not come as often, it was usually Jisung who came with him, since he had, somehow, made a study of guns, probably through documentaries he’d watched, but this morning, Jisung had worked with Jeongin on his sparring, since Jisung knew something about taking on targets bigger and seemingly stronger than himself, and had been given the afternoon off in return.
Hyunjae’s office didn’t have any windows, either, which meant it probably should have looked like a dungeon in here, with the metal wall along the side and the basic overhead lighting, but instead it had been decorated in a way that made it feel light and airy and not at all like it belonged in the warehouse of a gun runner. Changbin wasn’t sure who had decorated it, because it certainly was not Hyunjae, but he’d never asked. He tried to not ask anything too personal of their vendors.
There were two seats in front of the desk, remarkably stylish things, pale wood with dark upholstery. Changbin took one, pulling his phone out of his pocket and laying it on Hyunjae’s desk, the way he always did when he was away from Chan and needed to know if anything came up. Minho did not take a seat. He stood behind the other one, folding his arms across his chest, as Hyunjae rounded the desk and sat behind it.
He looked at them, still smiling, warm and friendly. It wasn’t put on, on Hyunjae’s face; he was a good guy and they had, as far as it could be, a good working relationship. “It hasn’t been that long since you were in to see me,” he said. “Did you guys break the last toys I got you?”
“No,” said Changbin. The last toys had been a handgun for Minho, something heavy and dangerous that he kept in his room somewhere, and a pump-action shotgun that Changbin hadn’t even got to try out yet because as soon as it had arrived, Jisung had taken it off on a trip into the forest outside the city and shot cans with it all day or some shit. “We need some new things. Something different from our usual style.”
Hyunjae raised an eyebrow, but he was already pulling a pad of paper over, and plucking a pen from the pot on his desk. For business such as this, Hyunjae only ever kept handwritten notes, scrawled in some kind of code that seemed to only be known to him. “How unusual are we talking here?” he asked, pen poised above the paper. “If you’re here about the rocket launcher, I’ll have to order a new one in.”
“You have a rocket launcher?” Changbin asked, not sure whether he was fascinated or horrified at the idea.
“Well, not anymore,” Hyunjae said.
Definitely horrified, Changbin decided, but it wasn’t worth asking Hyunjae who he had sold it to, because Hyunjae would refuse to tell him. At the very least, he could be safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t Lee Jaerim. They hadn’t yet made enough of an enemy of anyone else to be concerned about.
“It’s not the rocket launcher,” Changbin said. Hyunjae muttered something like I imagined not. “We need four assault rifles. Preferably M16s, if you can get them, but we’ll take something a little lighter if you can’t. Bullets for all of them, as many as you can get us. A new Remington 700, any model, and a silencer for it.”
Hyunjae was scribbling as he wrote but his second eyebrow had joined the first up by his hairline and when Changbin finished speaking, Hyunjae lifted his head and looked at him and said, “Not a rocket launcher but you’ll still be packing some heat with this kind of thing.”
Changbin shrugged. Hyunjae knew he wasn’t going to explain, so it was pointless trying to fish for information. It was enough that Hyunjae would know, just from looking at these requests, that whatever they were up to, they needed something a lot stronger and more hard-hitting than he had provided for them before. Their shotguns and Jisung’s sniper rifle had been what he described them as: toys, things for them to play around with. Jisung had made that much obvious when they’d ordered it, laughing about getting a new present at Chan's expense.
Four of the same heavy duty guns? Hyunjae wasn’t stupid.
“Can you get them?” Minho asked, voice very cold, colder than normal, like he wasn’t best pleased by Hyunjae’s apparent curiosity.
“Oh, sure,” said Hyunjae, not acting at all like he heard that edge in Minho’s voice, although he must have done. Changbin supposed that Hyunjae met all manner of dangerous people in this line of work, although sometimes it was a little difficult to imagine someone more dangerous than Minho when he was pissed off. “I don’t have that many in stock, you understand, but I can get them for you.”
“How long is it likely to take?” Changbin asked. Seungmin was almost finished fitting out the van to his exacting specifications and the sooner they got the guns, the better. It was not just Jeongin who would have to be trained on using them. Changbin hadn’t touched one of them before, although Minho had apparently used one once on a job before he came to them. He had not seemed interested in sharing his expertise in using them.
“About three weeks,” Hyunjae said. Minho shifted in Changbin’s peripheral vision, clearly unhappy with the answer. “Sorry, but that’s the best I can do. These guns might be everywhere but it’ll take a bit of time to arrange for four of them to fall off the back of a truck, if you catch my drift. And they’re a little more… conspicuous than my usual weaponry.”
“You just told me you got a rocket launcher for someone,” Changbin said, a little amused.
“I didn’t bring that into the city,” Hyunjae retorted. “That stayed out on the coast where it belongs. Three weeks is the best I can do, Changbin, I’m sorry about it but that’s how it is.”
Changbin nodded. He wasn’t unhappy with that answer, not like Minho was; he’d been expecting it to take some time. Really, they should have put the order in earlier, since they’d known they would need these kinds of guns in the first place, but with Jeongin coming along now, they’d have had to get another one anyway. “And how much are you going to gouge us for it?” he asked.
Hyunjae grinned. “What a question,” he said. “The guns, I think you’ll be surprised about. Like I said, they’re not extremely difficult to find in and of themselves, every fucking military in the world is using them. The ammunition, depending on how much you want, might run up your bill. I thought you had a rifle already, Jisung’s special toy.”
“We need another one,” Changbin said tonelessly. They weren’t going to take Jisung’s baby on this job because this rifle was going to be fired once and then probably left behind. If they could snatch it back up another day, they’d try, but it’d probably get found by the police. Jisung wasn’t going to take his other rifle on a job like that.
“Well, the kind you want isn’t that expensive, and neither is the silencer, you’ll be pleased to know,” said Hyunjae.
Minho leaned against the chair he wasn’t sitting on. “How much?” he asked.
“Twenty-five million,” said Hyunjae, smiling slightly.
“Ten million,” said Minho, not smiling at all, and now, neither was Hyunjae.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “Who is trying to gouge who, here? You’ll put me out of business with prices like that.”
“Eight million,” said Minho, voice completely empty.
Hyunjae gave Changbin a pleading look. Changbin grinned at him and said, “You can’t give us some kind of discount? Not even for old regulars?”
Hyunjae pursed his lips. It was a front, Changbin knew. The price he’d named at the start was way too high, even for how awkward he was claiming it might be to get the guns into the country. He’d been expecting them to counter, and he knew, too, that Changbin was the good cop here, the one with which he could actually barter. Minho was too likely to simply keep lowering his price.
Changbin’s phone buzzed against the desk, the screen lighting up with a message alert. When he glanced at it, it was from Seungmin, asking him to pick something up on his way back and leave it in the workroom, because he was taking a nap. Changbin held in his smile, and picked up his phone to thumb it open so he could remind Seungmin that a nap at almost 4pm was likely a bad idea. But as he did so, he saw Hyunjae looking at his phone too, now frowning a little bit.
“What?” asked Changbin.
“Nothing, just—” Hyunjae pointed at his phone. “Can I see your lock screen again?”
Changbin blinked at him, but did as he asked, pulling up his lock screen and holding the phone out so Hyunjae could see. It was the photo he had taken at Chan’s birthday party, all of the team squished into frame. Hyunjae looked at it, and then glanced up at Changbin and said, “I didn’t know you were working with Yongbok.”
His voice sounded— off, a little, confused and maybe a touch wary. His eyes, too, seemed unsure, as he looked between Changbin and the phone again. Changbin didn’t have to look to know that Minho had gone very still next to him. Changbin took a moment to steady his voice and said, “Yongbok?”
Hyunjae nodded. The phone screen had gone dark now. When his eyes met Changbin’s again, he looked a lot more confused, like he didn’t understand Changbin’s own confusion. Changbin showed him the lock screen again, pointing a carefully held finger at where Felix sat in the picture, tucked under Chan’s arm, smiling broadly. “This guy, right? You know him?”
“Yeah, that’s the Magpie's son,” said Hyunjae. “Lee Yongbok.”
There was a silence so absolute that Changbin was not sure anyone even breathed. Minho, behind him, had gone completely still, that stillness that spoke of imminent, sudden violence. Changbin, looking at Hyunjae’s face, knew that he was not lying, or even was mistaken, but he still needed to ask, just to make sure. “You’re certain?” he asked. “This kid is the Magpie’s son?”
“He’s pretty, right?” Hyunjae asked. He looked deeply uncomfortable with this line of questioning now, like he regretted bringing it up. Perhaps that was just that Minho was not cold, right now, but instead there was a bloodlust kind of feeling radiating from him that Hyunjae probably had not felt before. “Small with a bunch of freckles?” At Changbin’s shallow nod, he added, “Yeah, that’s Yongbok, I’ve met him a few times in the past.”
Changbin felt like his heart was pounding in his throat, every thought inside his head wiped away under the shock of the words. Because if there was someone who would know, it was Hyunjae — he had worked with the Magpie before. In fact, before Chan had come onto the scene, Hyunjae had worked exclusively with Lee Jaerim, and it had taken a lot of time and quite a bit of work on Chan’s behalf to detangle him from Lee Jaerim’s business and establish him elsewhere. If there was someone who would know Lee Jaerim’s son — his only son, Changbin knew — then it would be Hyunjae.
There was movement: Minho, turning and leaving the room in a violent flurry of motion, wrenching the door open so hard that Changbin was surprised he hadn’t pulled it off the hinges. He disappeared outside, and they could hear his footsteps against the metal flooring, loud and clanging. Changbin felt like he was going to throw up, the nausea sharp somehow, burning inside him.
When he looked at Hyunjae, he could see that some kind of clarity was coming to Hyunjae’s face. The realisation that they hadn’t known who it was they were working with, hadn’t known who it was that was sitting so close and cosy under Chan’s arm. Changbin, remembering that, remembering— that Chan was sleeping with Felix, thought he really might throw up. But instead, he got to his feet, and slammed a hand down on Hyunjae’s desk. It was gratifying to see Hyunjae actually jump a little.
“If you say a word of this to anyone,” Changbin said, his voice as low and threatening as he could make it, “we’ll make you wish you’d never been fucking born.”
Hyunjae looked at him. He didn’t look scared, but he did look wary. He knew that they could do it, and Changbin knew that he knew. “Changbin-ah,” Hyunjae said, serious, so fucking serious. “I’ve already forgotten everything other than the gun order.”
Changbin nodded once, shortly. Then he turned and raced out of the office, too, and down the stairs, taking them two at a time, because he knew that if he didn’t get to the car as soon as possible, Minho would probably try breaking through the door and hotwriting the engine to make it start. As it was, when he emerged into the sunlight outside, Minho was standing by the car, watching for him, almost vibrating with— anxiety, perhaps, but something more than that. Something very dangerous.
“Open this fucking car,” Minho said, and Changbin did, and didn’t bother waiting to watch Minho get in the passenger seat. He just went around, got in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. He didn’t need to be told. He felt it too: the panic in every part of him, the awful realisation of who it was they had left back at home with their family. With Chan, with Jeongin. With Hyunjin, who cared so much about a snake.
With Seungmin, he thought, and threw the car into reverse.
——
By the time they hit their fifth red light off the journey, Minho wanted to simply shove open the car door and take off running down the street, his body so full of the worst kind of anxious energy that his leg was juddering, his foot bouncing rapidly against the floor of the car. By the eighth red light, Minho said, through gritted teeth, “Just fucking drive, Changbin.”
Changbin did not. His hands were clenched around the steering wheel, so hard that the knuckles were pale-white. “I’m not getting us fucking pulled over right now, hyung,” he said, sounding like his own jaw was as tight as Minho’s was.
What did that matter, Minho wanted to ask, but he knew that Changbin’s caution there was probably for the best. If they got pulled over, Minho wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep his temper, and that was— bad enough at the best of times, never mind up against a police officer. But that was the rational part of him, the part that was in a losing battle with the irrational part of him. The irrational part that wanted to shove Changbin out of the car through the driver’s side door and climb in and put his foot to the pedal, and to hell with the consequences.
He should have insisted on driving.
“They’ll be fine,” Changbin said, but there was something in his voice that made it clear that he was saying the words aloud only in an attempt at convincing himself that they were true. He didn’t sound at all like he thought they’d have any effect on Minho.
And they didn’t, because there was nothing Changbin could say, or do other than drive fucking faster, that would have calmed the panic in Minho’s head. Because he knew something Changbin did not, and he couldn’t say the words out loud without the cause of his distress being so obvious that Changbin would know, just from his voice, how he felt about Jeongin. Even in the grip of this fear, he didn’t want that.
But Minho had made breakfast that morning, for him and Jeongin, the two of them the only ones awake in the murky light of the morning, Jeongin sitting at the kitchen table looking pleadingly at Minho until Minho had set a plate of eggs and stir-fried spam down in front of him, both of them pretending like Minho hadn’t planned on giving him that food in the first place. Minho had sat with him, taking his time with his food, watching Jeongin shovel his faster than the fucking speed of light, and listened as Jeongin outlined his plans for the day: a shower, then sparring with Jisung a bit, and then he had plans with Felix until Minho and Changbin returned, at which point he would be dragged back into training for the remainder of the day.
Plans with Felix, plans with Felix, Minho thought, his throat feeling tight like someone was slowly winding a garotte around his neck. Plans with Felix, because the two of them had been watching a drama these past few days, sequestered away together in Jeongin’s television room. Minho had put his head in once, on his way to Chan’s office, and seen them sitting there watching the screen seriously, as two people he hadn’t seen on the screen shrieked at each other.
The thought of that now, the knowledge that Jeongin was with Felix right that second made him feel like he seriously could not breathe.
“Oh my god, fuck this,” Changbin said, as they neared yet another light turning yellow, and he slammed his foot down and they shot through the intersection.
Minho knew that in reality, it didn’t take them long to get back from Hyunjae’s; it had certainly taken them a lot less time to get back than it had done to get there, with Changbin’s increasingly speedy driving. But it still feel like agonising years before Changbin pulled the car around the parking lot in the back of the building. Minho didn’t even wait for him to finish parking. He simply waited until the car had slowed enough that he wouldn’t injure himself getting out, shoved open his door, and scrambled out of the vehicle.
He thought he heard Changbin call out to him, but he didn’t hear the words. He was already at the back door, jabbing in the keycode so fast that he was somewhat surprised the damn lock didn’t break. He was more surprised that he managed to put it in correctly the first time, but perhaps muscle memory was doing more for him than he realised. He wrenched open the door and ran for the stairs.
He saw this sometimes, in his nightmares. He took the stairs two at a time, his chest heaving, and wasn’t sure, for a moment, if he was awake or asleep. In his nightmares, he was always running like this, running up these same stairs, and in his ears was the sound of Jeongin screaming. Sometimes it was the screams of a younger Jeongin, the screams he had heard as he made his way up to batter a man to death in front of him. Sometimes the screams were those of Jeongin now, the voice deeper, more grown up.
In some of the nightmares, Minho never made it. He just ran, and ran, and ran, and the stairs stretched on and on forever, the end never once appearing, and Jeongin screamed and begged for him the entire time. Please, please, Minho-hyung, hyung, help me, until Minho was crying too, and never managed to reach him.
Other times, he made it. He ran, listening to Jeongin’s screams, and he made it to the door, his hand on the doorknob, and the screams— stopped. They always stopped, right as he arrived, just like they had those years ago, Minho right there and listening to Jeongin’s voice break off. In reality, he’d opened the door and Jeongin was alive, and Minho had saved him, somehow. In his nightmares, he told himself wake up, wake up, and he never did, and he always opened that door, and found Jeongin dead. Jeongin, laying on the horrible threadbare carpet they’d had in the room at the time, his eyes empty and lifeless, his blood a slowly spreading puddle, thick and making the carpet squish under Minho’s feet as he stumbled to him. He only ever woke up when he tried to touch Jeongin.
He wasn’t sure which of the nightmares were worse. They all left him sobbing as he woke up. They all haunted him in their way.
He burst into the PC room, sprinted past the computers to the back door there. Once he’d wrenched that open, he could hear the sound of the television, filtering through from the ajar door of the TV room. They were still in there, then, and he burst into that room hard enough that he wouldn’t be surprised if the door left a dent in the wall behind it.
He took it in in an instant: Jeongin on the couch closest to him, against the wall, looking over at him with wide, surprised eyes; Felix on the couch opposite the door, tucked up against the furthest corner from Minho, hand against his chest like the bang of the door had made him jump. The sight of Felix’s face, those big eyes that had tricked so many of them into thinking he was harmless, made the rage in Minho roar to life, engulfing him in a split second.
“You fucking snake,” he snarled, already stalking into the room towards him, and saw as the shock on Felix’s face was transformed into fearful panic. Minho didn’t have to say anything else; Felix knew instantly what Minho meant. He was scrambling off the couch in a second, already in a half-run as soon as his feet hit the floor, bolting for the door. He moved with a haste that suggested he’d expected this, like he’d been waiting for it.
Changbin’s voice behind them, in the door. Felix tried to swerve around Minho, and he was fast, Minho had to give him that, fast on his feet, but now he was between Minho and Jeongin, still sitting on the couch, and Minho— didn’t think. He moved on pure instinct, not willing to let Felix get even a little bit closer to Jeongin, not sure if Felix was still trying to get to the door, blocked now by Changbin, or if he would— try to grab Jeongin, use him in some way.
Minho grabbed Felix by the upper arm, seizing him any way that he could, and yanked him away, almost throwing him across the room in his need to get him away from Jeongin. Felix went to the ground, landing on his back, and Minho would have liked to keep him there, but Felix used the momentum to roll backwards up onto his knees, and was quickly getting back to his feet. Someone, somewhere, had taught him that; it was too fluid of a motion to be anything other than engrained through practice. Minho had known, of course, that Felix had received some kind of training, because Jisung had commented idly on it once, but now he saw— it was not basic.
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t entirely steady on his feet before Minho was on him, shoving him bodily against the wall face first, the bang of Felix’s body against the surface echoing in the small space. Minho had one of Felix’s hands wrenched up behind his back, using it to hold him there against the wall; the other was trapped against his own stomach, and Minho was not going to give him any space to wriggle that free.
Felix was panting, his face turned slightly to the side, so that Minho could see the animal fear in his eyes. He was trying to look at Minho, trying to keep him in his sight, so Minho pressed him closer to the wall, yanked his arm up a little higher against his back.
Then there were hands against his shoulder, trying to pull at where Minho’s own arm was holding Felix prone. “Hyung, hyung,” Jeongin said, sounding frantic, tugging at Minho like he wanted to get Minho to let go. Minho didn’t budge. “What are you doing?”
“Jeongin,” said Changbin, somewhere behind them both. “Come over here, come away.”
Jeongin didn’t listen. He was looking at Minho with an expression on his face that normally would have made Minho flinch, but right now he just looked back, implacable. He wasn’t sure what his face was doing. There was that violence inside him again, the animal pushing at the boundaries of his skin, but he couldn’t let that out when Jeongin was there, touching him still. His hand, now, trying to pull Minho’s hand away from Felix, trying to peel at his fingers. “Hyung,” he was saying, “let go, hyung, please—”
Minho ignored him. He did not like, at all, the sight of Jeongin’s hands so close to Felix, did not like that he was standing right next to them. He was going to call for Changbin to come and physically take Jeongin away, but before he could say anything, Felix squirmed underneath him, an odd little movement where Minho wasn’t sure if he was trying to push forward away from him or try to throw him off.
“Please,” he gasped, “it’s not what you think.”
Minho snarled, the anger spiking in him at the sound of Felix’s voice, and twisted Felix’s arm even higher up his spine. Felix’s words cut off into a high-pitched noise of sheer pain.
“You’re going to break his arm,” Jeongin cried. He sounded really, truly frightened now. “Stop, stop, please!”
Minho, for a second, did not give a shit; he almost opened his mouth and said, that’s the point, baby boy. But through the haze of his anger came the reminder of Jeongin’s cast, holding his bones in place as they slowly healed. Jeongin sitting on that PC room floor, his arm at an odd angle. Jeongin had been held like this too, Minho remembered; he had not seen it, but Jeongin had told him about it. And now he was watching Minho do it to someone else.
The anger didn’t change but some of the violence seemed to drain out of Minho in the light of that. He wanted to keep Jeongin safe — he didn’t want Jeongin to be afraid of him. He loosened his hold just slightly, not enough for Felix to really move, but enough that they all heard the gasp of relief he let out.
Minho yanked Felix’s other hand out from against his stomach and brought that up too, pinning both his wrists together, held prone. “Don’t move,” he hissed, “or I swear to god, I’ll kill you.”
“You can’t kill him,” Changbin said, sounding very tired, and closer, too. Minho chanced a glance at him and found him standing next to Jeongin, trying to pull Jeongin away like Minho had almost asked him too. “We have to explain everything to Chan-hyung first.”
“What is going on,” Jeongin said, sounding close to tears. He wasn’t letting Changbin touch him, but he’d stepped away from Minho too, and was still giving him that wide-eyed look of horrified confusion, like he’d never seen Minho before in his life. But he had, after all. He had seen Minho in worse situations than this. I wish you’d let the others see the goodness in you. Perhaps Jeongin was seeing the truth of that now. “What are you both doing, let him go.”
“Fine,” said Minho, to Changbin. He pulled Felix away from the wall harshly, and didn’t really give him a moment to recover his footing before he spun him away to start marching him out of the room. “Let’s see what Chan-hyung has to say.”
——
Chan was staring at an email from one of the suppliers for Maniac, trying to make heads or tails of it, when the door to the office slammed open, loud and without warning. Chan’s hand leapt instinctively for his gun, yanking it out, moving before his brain was even engaged in what was happening, but it was— just Felix, stumbling through the door, Minho behind him. Chan paused halfway to standing, for a moment, while he tried to calm his suddenly pounding heart.
“What—” he began, shoving his gun back into its holster while he got the rest of the way to his feet.
Minho was restraining Felix, he realised, and as Chan watched he shoved Felix hard, sending him sprawling down onto the thinly carpeted floor. Felix landed on his hands and knees with a small cry, palms skidding a little so he went down on one elbow. Chan expected him to right himself, but he didn’t; he instead just shrunk in on himself, head bowing.
“What are you doing—” Chan began to snap at Minho, but before he could say anything else, before he could come around the desk to help Felix to his feet, Changbin came through the door, the set of his mouth grim. Behind him was Jeongin, expression wide-eyed and frightened. Neither of them moved to help Felix. Whatever this was— it wasn’t just Minho in a random outburst. Changbin wouldn’t let this happen if it was.
That gave Chan pause. “What’s going on?” he asked, voice gone shockingly soft. It was like the air in the room had gone thin, like he wasn’t getting enough oxygen with each breath.
Minho’s face was twisted in contempt, words nasty with viciousness as he said, “We just got back from Hyunjae’s.”
On the floor, Felix— twitched, his whole body moving in a jerky shudder. “I can explain,” he said, voice small and shaking. Chan, looking down at him, could see his shoulders trembling. His head was still bowed, forehead almost touching the floor. Not looking up at any of them.
Chan was trying to think around the dread growing in his gut, around his instincts screaming at him to protect Felix, to comfort him. Only Changbin, standing with his arms folded across his chest, unmoving with his feet planted on the carpet, stopped him. Hyunjae. What could Hyunjae have possibly told them—
Minho ploughed on. “And Changbin, you know, he has that photo of us all as his phone background. So Hyunjae points to his face—” Minho gestured sharply down at Felix, hatred thick on his features. “And he says that he didn’t know we’d started working with Lee Jaerim’s son.”
There was the strangest sensation, like everything around Chan suddenly got sucked away: the room, the floor, a sensation like he was falling, like he was being wretched sharply into a cold, empty void. The corners of his vision went dim.
Even quieter than before, almost a whisper, Felix said again, “I can explain.”
Chan couldn’t feel his body, his legs. He was shocked to find he was still standing. “You,” he said, mind flickering. His thoughts too fast, bouncing everywhere, the shock of what he was hearing rendering him incapable of processing any of them. Nothing he could grasp at, nothing real or solid. It was just a kaleidoscope of horror. “No, wait. Wait.”
It could not be true.
But Felix hadn’t denied it.
“Hyunjae told us his name is Lee Yongbok,” said Changbin, quietly. Beside him, Jeongin’s eyes were flitting between them all, a hand pressed to his mouth. “He was very clear that that’s who was in the picture, they’d met in the past.”
No, Chan thought, the desperation lurching up inside of him almost sickening. Hyunjae was wrong. There must have been a mistake; there could be no other explanation.
All Chan could see of Felix was the crown of his head, the black roots coming in against the blond, his narrow shoulders and back. Why was he not denying it? “Look at me,” Chan said numbly. There was a beat of stillness and then Felix, slowly, lifted his head. He met Chan’s eyes over the edge of the desk, and Chan had hoped— he didn’t even know what he’d hoped for. It wasn’t there. Whatever could have salvaged this wasn’t on Felix’s face.
The only thing on Felix’s face was fear and guilt, his eyes wide and swimming with tears. In the unflattering light of the office, he was so pale as to appear almost grey. Even those freckles appeared washed out.
Chan was breathing hard, lightheaded. Right then it felt less like the air was thin and more like there was simply no air at all. “It’s true?” he asked, his voice sounding— like it belonged to another person. “You’re his son.”
Felix’s face crumpled, and the tears gathered in his eyes fell over thickly, streaming down his face. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, and Chan just— this couldn’t be real, it couldn’t be happening.
And yet it was, it was happening, Felix gasping out another apology, his chest beginning to hitch under the force of his crying. His body folded and small on the floor like a doll that had been tossed aside. Chan saw it, heard it, as if from very far away. Every memory, every moment with Felix over the last few months, was suddenly laid bare and strange under the light of this new information.
“Fuck,” Chan said, choking on the word. “Are you— you’ve been lying to us all this time, lying to me— you let me take you to bed!”
His voice had risen to a shout by the end of it, echoing around the room. Felix sobbed, flinching under the sound. His head bent down to the floor again, like he could no longer hold it up, could no longer look at Chan like he’d been asked to. Chan hated himself for the way Felix was cringing at his anger, wanted to comfort him—
And then his own words bounced back at him, and he realised— no. Felix hadn’t let Chan take him to bed. Felix had come into this very office and gone to his knees. Pretty, shy, gentle Felix had come in here and sucked his cock like a professional. And then he’d blinked those beautiful, wide eyes up at Chan and told Chan he’d not really ever been kissed, that he was a virgin.
Oh, oh, Chan was fucking stupid.
The shape of this was coming into terrible, ugly focus.
From the beginning it had all been too perfect. Not just the job he’d brought them, the golden information contained within a simple USB drive, but Felix himself. This beautiful, sweet human, pliant and willing in Chan’s hands. Returning Chan’s stolen glances from the moment he’d walked in here, blushing through their conversations, every interaction so easy, too easy. Chan even remembered thinking Felix was like a dream, that he’d been crafted to sit at Chan’s side, to lay next to him in bed. Everything, anything, Chan could have ever wanted, wrapped up in this boy who was so beautiful he put paintings to shame.
That wondering part of him had always thought that this felt too perfect to be real.
And that was because it wasn’t real. It had never been real at all.
Despair clawed wretched talons through Chan’s body, his throat tight and eyes stinging. “I suppose you were told to seduce me,” he said, the words falling angry and bitter out of his mouth. Felix’s head snapped up, and he began to shake his head, but Chan was not going to be fooled again. “You got in the door by spinning some sob story just like mine, sitting in this fucking room and telling me about a dead sister, and then you—” Chan’s voice broke, and he shook his head, bracing his fingertips against his desk as he breathed deeply, trying to compose himself, feeling the efforts failing.
“No,” Felix said indistinctly around his tears. He was— damned good at this, at projecting an air of helplessness, at making himself appear small and in need of protecting. An act crafted beautifully into exactly what would make Chan weak. He must have read Chan like a book the moment he came into his office. “I didn’t— that wasn’t—”
“Stop fucking lying to me!” Chan cried, and Felix’s lips pressed together, the corners of his mouth quivering. Chan wanted— he wanted to slap Felix, to demand he stop with this act, because it was tearing Chan to shreds. He could feel the warring factions inside him wrenching at each other. “Haven’t you lied enough? Do you have any— any sense of— of fucking decency in you?”
No. No, Felix didn’t. A son of Lee Jaerim— fuck, his only son. His heir. Who had told Chan he loved him with all the honeyed sweetness of hidden poison. How could a boy like that have decency? Chan had meant his own confessions, meant them down to his bones. And Felix had known that, would have seen that clear as day. Manipulative and primed for this as he’d been, he’d probably been laughing at Chan on the inside all this time.
Chan wanted to cry, but he would not. He wouldn’t let himself. He wasn’t going to let this child of Lee Jaerim see his tears.
“It’s not like that,” Felix was sobbing. Chan felt like he was hearing it through water. “Please— it’s not—”
Minho shifted, just slightly, and it was a good thing too, because Chan felt like he was about to really lose control of himself, like he was going to start screaming and just never stop. He was not even sure there would be words in there, and not just an endless shriek of despair, of pain. He wrenched his gaze away from Felix, who managed to look lovely even when crying, and looked instead at Minho, whose posture was rigid with sharp intent.
“We need to think about the wider implications, hyung,” Minho said, firm and angry.
Chan stared at him blankly. He could think of nothing, right now, beyond the agony of every precious moment he’d shared with Felix crumbling to ash. It was strange to actually feel it happening inside him, all that happiness just— gone. Those memories forever ruined. He would never be able to think back on this time again without feeling that agony.
“We’ve been working off his info for weeks now,” Minho explained, at least somewhat correctly reading Chan’s expression. He was speaking in that way he got, each word almost staccato as they left his mouth, everything crisp and clipped. The anger in his voice matched the expression on his face. “We have to assume that his father knows exactly what we’re up to.”
“It’s probably all been a trap,” Changbin said, and where Minho was hard, Changbin— there was an edge of pity in his voice that was arguably worse. “We’ve been a thorn in Lee Jaerim’s side for a while, and something like this, getting in with us, luring us to our deaths, would be exactly the type of thing he’d use as an initiation for his heir.”
And now, Chan was truly in danger of passing out. He could feel the sickly, cold way his face went white, and he collapsed back into his desk chair, legs unable to hold him up, eyes focused blankly on the wall. Not looking at any of them now.
What have I done, he thought despairingly. He wanted to peel his own skin off, wanted to scrub away the memory of how Felix felt against him, the smooth warmth of his skin. What a fool, what a fucking fool he was. So busy sleeping with the enemy he hadn’t even seen the grave danger he’d put his family in. He’d never been able to be objective when it came to Felix. Even from the beginning, he’d wanted, desperately, to trust him. First for the sake of this job, so long coveted, and then just for the sake of his own desire.
An image of Jeongin, eyes open but empty, his blood spreading in a dark pool, flashed through Chan’s mind. Hyunjin with a bullet hole in his temple, his red hair matted with blood. Chan could nearly feel the cold barrel of a gun pressing against the back of his skull, a phantom touch. They’d have never walked out of Blackbird’s alive. Felix would have taken everything from him.
Felix was shaking his head when Chan looked over at him, a frantic, fast motion. Chan could feel the heavy emptiness of his own gaze, the unmoving expression on his face. “No, that’s not true,” Felix said, words catching with the hitching of his chest. He was speaking to Chan. Always to Chan. The weakest link. “The mission is real, I didn’t lie about that—”
“Chan-hyung,” said Changbin, softly but it cut Felix off anyway. Again, there was that note of sorrow in his voice. “Hyung, we— we can’t let this stand.”
There was a sort of horrified embarrassment in Chan, at the fact that Changbin felt he needed to be reminded of this. That Changbin thought that Chan was so blinded by his feelings for Felix, that he’d— just let Felix walk out of here.
The worst part was, everything in Chan really was, right now, recoiling from the dawning knowledge of what needed to be done. The only way this could end.
“I—” Chan broke off, voice a little unsteady. From the floor, Felix was just staring at him, his face soaked with tears.
“Let me handle it,” offered Minho. “I’ll take him out back, we can send his body to his father.”
Felix gasped, his nails digging into the carpet. Something shifted in his face — Chan didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but suddenly, Felix seemed to understand this was not going to go his way. Felix may have been laying the helpless act on thick but that fear— that was real. And it made Chan want to throw up. He was disgusted with himself, and so, so fucking angry at Felix for making him feel this way. For sinking his dainty claws so far into Chan’s very soul, that even now, Chan wanted to go to his knees beside him and draw him in against his chest.
Felix was scared, Felix was suffering, Felix Felix Felix.
Chan fisted his hands atop his thighs, knuckles going white. He would rip Felix out of himself even if doing so took bloody parts of himself with it. Parts that he knew he couldn’t ever get back. Even if doing so felt like it might kill him. He had to. God help him, he had to.
“We don’t need to go that far right out the gate,” Changbin was saying, and it washed over Chan in an indistinct hum. “I was thinking— we could ransom him, or hold him hostage. Having him could be useful—”
Felix could not stay here.
“Why go through the hassle when a simple solution is right there,” Minho snapped back.
Neither could he be allowed to return to his father. Letting Felix leave was nothing less than suicide.
“Because that’s very permanent and I think we should at least talk to the others before acting on our feelings,” Changbin insisted. “We’re all upset right now. We need to calm down and think.”
Calming down would not change the fact of this. Chan knew it; he knew the others did too.
“Every moment he is here we are in danger,” Minho said. The strength of his conviction rang true and real in his voice. “We need to dump him dead on his father’s doorstep and then fucking move.”
Felix had to be—
“Alright,” Chan said, almost a whisper, and everyone fell quiet. Chan— glanced at Felix. Felix looked back at him with that tear-streaked face, just as beautiful as always. It had been a mistake to look at him, to see that expression on Felix’s face. But he needed one last look. He would never see Felix’s face again. Only in his memory. Only in his dreams.
The gazes of the others were heavy on Chan’s skin. He looked back at the wall.
“Minho,” he mumbled, and a frisson went through the energy of the room. “Take him away. I can’t— please just end this.”
——
Felix stared up at Chan, his brain nothing but white noise.
Hyung, Felix tried to say, but no sound came out, his lips simply forming the word. He didn’t think, could not think. This room suddenly felt too small, like being trapped back at home all over again. There was something shocking about laying here like this without his father looming over him. He swayed even on the floor, leaning more heavily on his hands.
Chan wasn’t even looking at him, a horrible sort of frozen emptiness to his gaze as he stared at the wall.
Felix had always been afraid that Chan’s hatred of Lee Jaerim would outweigh his love for Felix, but he still had not expected this. Was Felix himself so insignificant, so weak and easily dissipated, that when dissolved down the only thing of importance was simply his father? He had not wanted to believe it— but then, why else had he tried so hard to break from that identity. The Magpie’s son.
Yes, his father would always cast his shadow over Felix, until Felix was so fuzzy around the edges as to be indistinguishable.
He just— he had hoped, somewhere, deep down, that Chan had come to love him enough that it wouldn’t matter.
There was the faintest sound of movement behind Felix, and he looked back over his shoulder, fear spiking hard and strong through his body. Minho was coming forward, a neutral pace. For a moment, Felix thought he might actually pass out. The blood rushed in his ears, until he couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t do anything but sob helplessly, cringing away.
“Please,” he said, as Minho drew closer, his eyes hard where Chan’s were blank. Felix was barely able to see through the force of his tears, barely able to breathe through the hitching of his chest. “I’m not a traitor, please—” Because of course, of course they would think that. It made sense, it made awful, mocking sense. And he had no way to prove otherwise, nothing to give them except his word — except his word wasn’t worth anything, not now, not after this, and Minho did not pause.
He was going to die — he was going to die, and his father would probably thank them for it.
No, Felix thought, near hysterical. Not like this, not like this. All he could think of was that man, that— that body in Seungmin’s workshop, that skull rendered to pulp. All those times that his father had beat him, the thudding grinding pain of it, and he did not want to die like that. Battered until his bones gave, someone cruel and uncaring standing over him. His entire body felt cold at the thought, cold down to his bones, and he was shuddering with it.
He jerked hard when someone touched his shoulder, making a high pitched whine of pure terror — he’d been so focused on Minho’s approaching form that the rest of the room had faded out. When he looked, it was Jeongin — Jeongin kneeling down, putting his arm around Felix’s shoulders, hunched as if shielding Felix from a blow. Felix blinked at him, so surprised for a second he stopped sobbing.
Jeongin held a hand up, palm out, in a gentle stop motion. Minho stopped in his approach, motions arrested. The hardness on his face shifted into something sharper, angrier— lethal. His gaze flicked between Felix and Jeongin, the movement of his chest kicking up a little faster.
“Jeongin,” Minho said, hands flexing at his sides.
He’s afraid I’m going to hurt Jeongin, Felix thought, with a surprising clarity through the fog of his terror.
Jeongin held Felix a little closer. “I want to hear his side of things,” Jeongin said. “You all just keep cutting him off. He’s done nothing to deserve this, no matter who he really is. He should be allowed to speak.”
His voice was surprisingly firm. Even Felix, half out of his mind, noticed how the energy in the room shifted at that declaration. Jeongin hooked a hand under his shoulder and helped him gently, carefully, up to his feet. Felix stumbled a little, legs shaking like he had just run a mile. Jeongin took his weight and helped him to the couch, where he sat Felix down and then covered his legs with the throw blanket there. Felix was trying to get his crying under control, and that gentleness almost undid him again.
Minho cursed under his breath. “You are too soft, baby boy,” he said.
Jeongin ignored him. He sat on the arm of the chair next to Felix, not touching him but close enough that Felix could almost feel the warmth of him. He was still so cold, shivering like he had a fever. Jeongin said, kind in a way Felix did not deserve, “Tell us. Tell us everything. Just— start from the beginning.”
Felix looked at him, his serious but earnest face, and then out at the rest of the room. Chan still sat at his desk, face white, lips pale, expression empty. Minho looked pissed, arms folded across his chest, but he seemed content to plant himself in the middle of the room and glare. Changbin leaned against the desk, looking resigned.
Felix should have realised: not one person in this room was in the habit of telling Jeongin no.
“I— okay,” he said, voice rough and husky from his tears. He wiped at his face with his sleeves. He wasn’t sure if it actually fixed up his face at all but he at least felt like he could see better now. His shoulder ached from Minho’s earlier manhandling, and now his head was aching along with it, a throbbing pressure behind his eyes.
Start from the beginning, Jeongin had said, but which beginning? His life, his miserable childhood, what it had been like to be the only son of Lee Jaerim. His sister’s death, and his own cowardice, his decision to finally run. Or when he’d walked into this building for the first time, worn down and low on hope.
He didn’t think it mattered where he chose to start from; they were probably going to kill him anyway. But he could— tell them, tell someone, finally. After holding it all in for so long, he could purge himself of it.
“My real name is Lee Yongbok,” he said, the name strange and foreign on his tongue. A stranger, a past that felt so far away. He hated having to say it, and dropped his gaze down to his hands rather than look at the faces of the others any longer. “Felix was— the nickname I picked up at the English academy my sisters and I went to. It felt right, to use it after I ran away.”
He had always been more of himself, when he was Felix, when he was with his sisters. Those precious moments they could steal together. If he was to be anyone, he wanted to be that version of himself. A homage paid too late, to siblings he’d abandoned.
“I have two sisters,” he said, and then paused, swallowed hard. “Had two sisters.” In his lap, his hands clenched. He’d just about gotten his crying under control, and he focused on telling this story coherently, as if it was something he’d witnessed, and not experienced. It was the best way to try to avoid coming to pieces again. “You know stuff about my dad, you probably know about his family set up — I’m the middle kid, the only boy. I didn’t lie about— what happened. My younger sister is dead; our father killed her.”
He chanced a glance up, when silence resounded after he’d spoken. That kind of shocked, still silence. Everyone was still looking at him, but Changbin’s posture was a little looser, settled into his spot. Chan was still just— staring. His attention, though— his attention was very focused.
“I don’t mean that metaphorically,” Felix continued. “I don’t mean he killed her through neglect, or that she died accidentally. A casualty of the business. I mean that my father murdered my younger sister.”
“Actually, I do remember this,” said Changbin suddenly. “Didn’t he say it was a hit and run, something like that? I know Shim’s operation got taken out in retaliation.”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Felix. “I know that’s what he said. And I know it wasn’t because I saw him do it myself.”
“What?” Jeongin said on a gasp. “You saw it happen?”
“Yes.” Felix had thought about it so much over the past six months, living in the repeated memories of that day, that right now in his despair he was a little surprised to find himself actually sitting here and not there, in that room, with his father’s hands around his sister’s neck. It was impossible to remember it, and not feel the wound anew every time. “He strangled her. They’d been arguing, I could hear that, and when I came to peek into his office, he was already holding her down. I couldn’t— I was too—”
Scared. Too much of a coward to help her. Knowing that he could not, knowing that his father’s strength overpowered him, but not even making an attempt at it. She’d been seventeen, skinny and small like him, her body limp as a rag doll by the end. His father yelled at her the whole time, face puce with anger, almost incoherent with it. Felix had never seen him quite like that before, but he’d experienced his father’s rages; he had the scars to show for it, after all.
“He killed her,” he whispered. “And I let it happen, and then I just ran away. I just ran. All I had was— the clothes I was wearing, my backpack, my wallet with nothing in it. I didn’t— I took as much money out of my bank account as I could, but I didn’t have any long term plan, and no connections in the industry of my own. I’d begun to think maybe I should just try to start my own life, something normal and quiet, when that man— found me, tried to take me in. I escaped but I knew then that I’d never be able to live, not really, unless I could nullify the threat that my father posed.”
In a small, gentle voice, Jeongin asked, “So that’s why you found us?”
Felix nodded. “I knew I’d need help,” he said, soft. “And I knew I couldn’t go to— anyone who had any connections back to my father, no matter how big the potential payout of my job might be. I still don’t know how much he is offering, for the hit on me. Which is why I chose— you. He’d been complaining about you, for about a year before it all happened. He hated you. And I thought— maybe they’ll help me.” His voice wobbled despite his better efforts, that ugly pout his father hated so much beginning to tug the corners of his mouth down. “Maybe they’ll be— enough, to help me— get revenge for her. Maybe you could help, where I had failed.”
The tears started up again, Felix unable to stop them. He twisted his fingers in the blanket on his legs, holding on like it could anchor him.
“But you were all so nice,” he sobbed. “You didn’t question who I was and you took me in and I just— I just didn’t want to be his son. I didn’t want you all to look at me and only see him, I wanted to start anew.” He looked at Chan, imploring, but Chan’s face was a strange, unmoving mask. Something in Felix collapsed a little, as he realised that maybe nothing he was saying mattered. His chest hitched with his sobs as he said, “So, yes, I didn’t tell you, but I didn’t— lie— not about what mattered, not about— her— not about— Chan-hyung, please—”
Felix was begging, but not even really for his life. He didn’t want to die, but more so, he didn’t want Chan to believe that everything between them had been a lie, a terrible manipulation. Felix digging his fingers into the soft recesses of Chan’s heart, using his looks and body as the worst kind of weapon. No, it had never been that. And he desperately wanted Chan to know it, didn’t want Chan to hurt, not any more than he had to, upon finding out the truth of Felix’s origins.
He could not help with the rest of the pain, the betrayal. But he could, at least, give some reassurance. Too little though it may be.
Chan didn’t reply, just kept staring, his face too pale, so it was Changbin who shifted, clearing his throat lightly. “Can you prove it?” he asked Felix, not unkindly. But then Changbin had never been unkind to Felix. “Can you— prove any of what you’re saying?”
Felix was having trouble breathing around the force of his crying again, and he dropped his gaze to the ground. Could he prove it. No. He could give them more information, things he had held back before because it would give his identity away. But that wouldn’t prove the truth, and wouldn’t even necessarily prove loyalty, when it could be argued he was only doing it to save his own skin.
He could, perhaps, reveal that he hadn’t kept it a secret from everyone — call on Seungmin and Hyunjin as witnesses. But no, he could not do that to them when he had no idea of the repercussions. He didn’t think they’d hurt them, but before tonight, he hadn’t thought Chan would order his death over his real identity. Not now, not after they had— shared so much of one another. Break up with him, kick him out maybe. But not kill him. And he couldn’t risk Hyunjin and Seungmin suffering in some capacity, for something Felix had foisted upon them, something Felix had given them no choice in.
Wordlessly, eyes still fixed on the muddled static of the carpet, Felix shook his head. Then he closed his eyes, feeling a fresh wave of tears fall warmly down the cold skin of his cheeks.
No one spoke, no one even shifted. The room was silent. When Felix finally opened his eyes, Changbin wasn’t looking at Felix anymore. He was giving Chan a helpless look of indecision. Deferring to Chan, to make the call. Minho was also staring at Chan, but it was a sharper look, pointed and full of unspoken pressure. To do what needed to be done.
Chan— his frozen mask had cracked, his lips slightly parted as he panted shallowly, like a wolf caught in a trap. His eyes were haunted. It was not the expression of a man on the precipice of forgiveness, but rather, one on the edge of a cliff, knowing he had to make the plunge and being terrified, because it could not be taken back.
Felix clenched his hand on the arm of the couch, steadying himself, bracing. He was no fool, he knew what this ringing silence meant. “I know— I know it isn’t enough,” he forced out around his hitching chest, his heart which felt like it was pounding in his throat. “I know—” He choked off, momentarily so overcome he could not even speak. Moments like this, he was harrowingly reminded that he was just an animal, at the mercy of his body and his emotions. It had been like this when his father had cornered him, sometimes, Felix nothing but terror, the feeling of his blood screaming through his veins, his cries so thick he could barely breathe.
He grit his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut, breathing deeply through his nose. “It’s okay,” he said softly. To himself, to Chan. He forced himself to open his eyes, to look at Chan. “It’s okay,” he repeated. I forgive you, for doing what you have to do. “You— you have to do— what you must— to protect your family,” he managed to say, getting most of it out before his sobs turned gasping, and he felt his face crumple again. He worked to keep eye contact with Chan, but it was so hard. “But please,” he whimpered, “please, if you have to kill me— I don’t want— let it be you, Chan-hyung, please.” Chan flinched back like Felix had hit him, expression twisting wretchedly. Felix, desperate, pressed on, “If it has to be anyone, let it be you. I want it to be you.”
Felix knew he was asking too much. But he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else doing it, of someone else putting their hands on him. The very idea made his vision go dim around the edges with fear, the horror of it all, of dying like that. But with Chan— suddenly even violence didn’t seem so terrible, if it was Chan’s hands enacting it. Those hands, which had only ever been vessels of affection and softness to Felix. Chan being the one to remove the light from him— it felt right, felt like coming full circle. Even if it hurt, even if he suffered, that peace Chan gave him would remain, he thought. He was content to let those hands be the last thing his body ever knew.
But Chan was shaking his head, a small, slow movement, and Felix was as light headed suddenly as if someone had struck him over the head. His vision began to go spotty, and his breathing turned ragged, the sound of his own gasping far away.
“Please,” he choked out, barely aware of himself. “I’ll— I’ll cooperate, I p-promise, I’ll— whatever you want, anything—” Chan continued to shake his head, a little faster, and Felix wanted to claw at his own face, he didn’t know what to do with his body. This can’t be happening. He was going to die, he was going to die and it would be cold and dark and alone— “Please, please, I need it to be you. I need you.”
“Stop,” Chan said harshly, his voice hoarse, and Felix made an incoherent noise of panic. A single tear rolled down Chan’s face, his mouth twisting. “Stop.”
“Chan-hyung—” Felix sat forward quickly, leaning towards Chan, mindlessly imploring, and Minho jerked sharply, taking a fast step forward.
A high cry of fear escaped Felix, and he shot to his feet, leaping backwards from Minho’s descending form, away from all of them. His limbs felt so far away, dizziness smothering him, and he stumbled until his back hit the concrete wall hard. He barely even felt the impact over the panic, over the darkness descending upon his mind.
He couldn't breathe, he couldn’t breathe, there wasn’t enough air in the room. His eyes were open and he couldn’t see. The panic was wrenched away, and so was everything else— his thrumming body, his senses. Inky numbness took him under, and Felix, in his exhaustion, didn’t even bother trying to fight it.
——
It was lucky Felix had been leaning back against the wall when he fell unconscious, Jeongin knew, but he still went down hard. He slumped sideways and landed on his hip, then his shoulder, his head connecting with the thinly carpeted floor. Then his crumpled body lay motionless.
Jeongin rushed forward, kneeling down beside him to make sure he was still— alive. He pushed Felix gently so he was laying on his back, instead of on his side, saw he was still breathing in a hitching, softly gasping way. He might have been unconscious but his body was still calming down. His cheeks were wet with all his tears, freckles standing out starkly against the paleness of his face.
Suddenly there was a hand on Jeongin’s upper arm, a firm hold yanking him backwards and onto his feet. “He could be faking,” Minho hissed at him, like Jeongin needed admonishment.
“He’s not,” Jeongin snapped, wrenching his arm out of Minho’s hold. He was more angry with him than he could ever remember being in his whole life. Minho’s expression was a mask of cold cruelty and Jeongin was a little disgusted with him right now. “You’re being horrible, he’s innocent.”
Minho ignored him. “Chan-hyung,” he said, the name both a demand and a request.
Jeongin looked at his older brother. Chan was crying, softly, his jaw gritted like he was trying to stop himself. But the tears kept seeping out anyway, slow and steady. He was halfway off his chair, sitting on the very edge, as if he’d moved when Felix had gotten up and then stopped short when he’d collapsed.
“I can’t do this,” he moaned, and then smacked his hand over his mouth, hunching over, like he hadn’t meant to say it. Jeongin held in his soft noise of despair; he’d rarely seen Chan cry, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him like this.
Wordlessly, Changbin came over and placed his hand on Chan’s upper back. He didn’t move it, just let it rest there, a steady comfort, while Chan audibly tried to get himself back under control, bent forward with his head between his knees.
Quietly, Changbin said, “Let’s hold a group meeting. I want to know what the others have to say. Then we can all come to a decision together.”
Minho made a noise, an unhappy little huff, and before he could speak, Jeongin said, “I think that is a good idea.”
He couldn’t tell from from Changbin’s voice if he had come to believe Felix or not. Jeongin did, he believed Felix, without question, and he did not want them to hurt Felix. He wasn’t sure about how Seungmin or Jisung would feel, but Hyunjin would likely also believe Felix was telling the truth, and hopefully that would help. All Jeongin could do was— hope. For Felix’s sake, for Chan’s.
He did not want Chan to be made to hurt Felix. He didn’t think his brother was actually capable of it.
“Are we gonna wait for him to wake up?” Minho asked, tone clipped and unpleasant.
Changbin tipped his head. “We can put him in the holding closet,” he said, reaching around Chan and opening one of the drawers of his desk, fishing out a set of keys.
Chan let out a long exhale. Then, slowly, he sat up. His tears had stopped, but there was a terrible flatness to his eyes, like the windows of an empty home. Absently, he wiped at his face. “Yeah,” he whispered. “We’ll— do that.”
They all stared down at Felix’s unconscious form. His chest was still hitching, just a little, tears beginning to dry in visible trails. He looked so— small, so young, which Jeongin knew was silly for him, of all people, to think. But Felix had always had that vulnerability around him, the kind of thing that made people want to protect him, look after him. And right now it was compounded, under the sharp yellow light, his body unconscious and bared for any violence they could choose to enact.
Jeongin moved to kneel, so he could scoop Felix up. It might be a bit of a struggle but he could do it, he thought. “I’ll—” he began, but Chan had slipped off his plush desk chair and sank to his knees beside Felix.
Minho huffed, a short noise, as Chan gently slid one arm behind Felix’s shoulders, the other behind his knees, and hefted him up. Felix’s head lolled back, lips parting, and he didn’t stir as Chan got to his feet holding him. “Unlock the door for me?” Chan rasped quietly, and Changbin juddered into rapid motion at the words. He darted around them all and left the office, leaving the door open behind himself.
The holding room was a repurposed closet right next to Chan’s office. Emptied of all shelves, it had just enough space for a small mattress set upon the floor. A folded blanket, musty by now no doubt, sat at the head of the mattress. They’d never used this room until now. They’d never had any need.
Chan went in and set Felix down on the mattress, his head pillowed by the thin blanket. He was excruciatingly gentle, heartbreakingly so, every movement so careful. And the whole while, he never— looked at Felix. He simply stared ahead, or glanced around him, like he was afraid to look at Felix directly.
As Chan was rising to his feet, Felix’s lashes fluttered. “Chan-hyung,” he mumbled, and Chan flinched, stepping back away from him sharply. Felix blinked slowly, eyes unfocused as he stared up at him, his mouth a little parted, his hands still loose by his side.
Still, Chan didn’t look at him. “We’re talking to the others, to see what needs to be done,” he said stiffly, his back turned to the little room. Then he pushed past them all, heading back out to the hallway, his footsteps fading as he went through the door to the PC room.
“Come on,” Changbin said quietly to Jeongin, and Jeongin stepped back so the door could be closed. He wanted to say something to Felix, something comforting, but didn’t know what, and so they shut Felix in with nothing else.
The walk back out into the stairwell was oddly long, the atmosphere so tense that it made Jeongin want to do something stupid to break it, but he couldn’t think of what, and he didn’t think it was a good idea besides. But he didn’t like this, he didn’t like any of this. Everything about this situation made him want to rip his hair out.
“Seungmin’s sleeping,” Changbin said quietly, to Chan, when they caught up with him just outside the door to the PC room. “I’ll go down and get him. Jisung too.”
Chan didn’t respond, and neither did Minho; they just split away, Changbin going downstairs and the others up, and Jeongin floundered, for a moment, on the landing, unsure who to go with. He had his fingers in his mouth, biting at his cuticles, and even with them there, he could feel them shaking.
He chose to follow Chan and Minho up to the apartment — he didn’t want to be away from his brother, and he wanted to keep an eye on Minho too, angry at him though Jeongin was. He simply— could not fully believe how fast Minho had switched into being willing— to wanting to kill Felix. Without even hearing what Felix had to say, without even wanting to hear what Felix had to say. It was an unusual level of cruelty from him. And then in the television room, to have hurt Felix like that, to have nearly broken Felix’s arm— Jeongin knew what that felt like, the agony of it. And he knew Minho knew, knew he remembered. It left Jeongin feeling a little sick, and very cold.
On the entire trek up to the apartment, and even once inside, Minho did not look at Jeongin even once. Like he was mad at Jeongin, for not letting them simply kill Felix.
Strange, that the apartment felt unchanged. There were still dishes in the drying rack from when he and Felix had eaten lunch together and then washed their plates. There were cartons of food up there now too, closed tupperware. One of Hyunjin’s sketchpads was on the coffee table. Chan went straight to the kitchen and sat heavily at his place at the head of the table, sinking into his seat like his legs had been in danger of giving out all this time. His eyes were red, gaze hollow.
Minho began to turn. Jeongin spun away before he could, heading down the hallway so he could knock quietly on Hyunjin’s door.
“Yeah?” Hyunjin called from the other side, and Jeongin opened the door just enough to peer inside.
Hyunjin was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his phone in his lap, watching something, or reading maybe. His hair had been freshly dyed, glossy red in the light, and his lip had finally healed enough that it was barely noticeable.
He looked over when Jeongin came in. Whatever he saw on Jeongin’s face had his expression morphing from arched attention to concerned confusion in a fast blink. “Jeongin-ah,” he said, already unfolding his long legs so he could stand. “What is it?”
“We’re having a team meeting,” Jeongin said, and his voice was quieter than he’d meant it to be. A little rougher, too. With the sweep of adrenaline leaving him, he was beginning to feel very wobbly. “You need to come out here.”
He backed out of the doorway, leaving it ajar behind him. On the short walk back to the kitchen, he tasted blood for the first time tonight, a sharp sting of pain on his right forefinger. It was oddly comforting, grounding.
But when he came into the kitchen and took his usual seat at the table, he pulled his fingers out of his mouth, not wanting anyone to scold him over it. Under the table he surreptitiously pulled his sleeves down to cover the damage. Chan, sitting just to his left, had not moved. He didn’t seem to even register Jeongin had returned, his face so pale; still in shock, Jeongin thought. He hooked his fingers around Chan’s under the table where the others wouldn’t be able to see. He expected Chan to shake him off, or not react at all, but instead Chan curled their hands together, squeezing a little once. He was shaking. Jeongin’s heart ached for him.
Jeongin tried not to fidget in his seat as he waited for the others to gather around the table. This table, which had seen so much, and kind of felt like the heart of the house at times, this place they gathered to reach out to one another, over and over. A little scuffed up, the chairs mismatched and cobbled together. It matched them, Jeongin had always thought.
Hyunjin sat opposite Chan, on the other short end of the table, and as he was taking his seat, the keypad chimed and the others came in. Seungmin was sleep-rumpled, in an oversized hoodie and pyjama bottoms, his cheeks pink from the warmth of his bed still. Jisung was fully dressed, but casual, and he was quiet and mostly seemed a little confused, in a subdued way. Changbin made sure the door latched behind them. There was a tiredness over him that reminded Jeongin of Chan, though not so severe. He came to lean back against the counter with that same sort of slow, aching movement that Chan had sat down with.
Jeongin found himself a bit squished as Seungmin took his usual spot to Jeongin’s right, their arms pressing together. Now that the others were here, Minho came back from where he’d been agitatedly stalking back and forth in the living room to take his spot opposite Jeongin. He scooted himself in so roughly his knees knocked against Jeongin’s, and Jeongin just resisted the urge to kick Minho’s shins.
Jisung hopped up onto the counter next to Changbin before he noticed that the chair Felix had unwittingly displaced him out of on Hyunjin’s right was still empty. It felt like a gaping hole in the room.
“Where’s Felix?” Hyunjin asked, a thread of unease in both his voice and written on his face. His gaze flickered rapid and sharp across them all, gathering data, putting pieces together. He was good at that, Jeongin knew, and he could see fear, slow but strong, creeping further over Hyunjin’s handsome features the longer the silence drew on.
Finally, Changbin stepped in when it became clear Chan wasn’t going to — or rather, was unable to — lead this meeting. “That’s why we’re here,” he said, in a voice of forced calm. “We—”
“Where is he?” Hyunjin demanded, voice a little raised, and in the stifling, tense atmosphere, the volume of it was somehow shocking.
“He’s downstairs,” Jeongin said, much more quietly. Hyunjin’s gaze snapped to him, and he settled back in his seat, just a fraction — for a moment there, he’d looked like he was about to stand up, leap into some kind of action. Jeongin couldn’t smile at Hyunjin, couldn’t really offer any reassurance, but after Felix had been almost kidnapped in the past, he really didn’t want Hyunjin to think the worst. “He’s in the holding room.”
Hyunjin’s brow immediately crumpled into a frown, gaze darting again. To Chan, to Seungmin, to Minho, to Changbin, then back to Seungmin.
“The holding room?” Jisung echoed, disbelieving. “What’d he do?”
Nothing, Jeongin thought, both angry and sad.
“He’s Lee Jaerim’s son,” Minho said, his mouth curving around the words like they tasted bitter. “His only son.”
At Jeongin’s side, Chan flinched, a short aborted movement that would have been missed if someone didn’t know him. Unfortunately, everyone in the room knew him well, very well; they all saw it. Jeongin had felt it, too, in the jerk of his hand.
“WHAT,” said Jisung, leaning forward so quickly he almost accidentally slid off the counter. “Are you— are you sure?” His eyes were darting around now, reading reactions, faces, trying to make sense of it.
But it was odd, because he wouldn’t be getting much. Jeongin expected an outburst from Hyunjin, maybe questions or denial, and horror from Seungmin, with his paranoia, how much he coveted safety. But Hyunjin’s plush mouth had simply flattened into a thin line, lips pressed together hard, and Seungmin— was like a statue.
“We already talked to him,” Changbin answered Jisung. “He confirmed it.”
“It’s probably all been a set-up,” Minho said. A few minutes ago, such a comment would have finally garnered him that deserved kick from Jeongin — now, though, Jeongin halfway didn’t hear it under the roar of his own thoughts, as he watched Hyunjin’s eyes lower, the corner of his mouth twitching, brow furrowed.
Guilt.
He already knew, Jeongin thought, dazed with it. Felix-hyung must have told him. He did not know how to even begin to process that, other than to feel a slight amount of vindication. Jeongin had been right about Felix, about standing up for him — he might have lied about his identity, but he hadn’t lied about himself, not really. If he’d told Hyunjin, then surely he would have told them too, once he’d felt safe enough to do so.
Seungmin shifted slightly in his chair, his arm rubbing against Jeongin’s as he did. It was the first time he’d moved in all of this. “Did he say anything else?” he asked, voice level in a way that didn’t match what Jeongin would have expected of him right now. “Did he explain why he was lying about it?”
“He said—” Changbin sighed, looked at Chan, and then continued. “He had a sister. His father killed her, and Felix saw it. He ran away, he came here, he hired us because he wanted revenge. But he thought if he told us who he was, we wouldn’t take the job. So he lied. That’s his story.”
“Which, functionally, isn’t any different than what he’d told us in the first place,” Jeongin pointed out, bolstered by his new discovery. Hyunjin was still sitting silently, clearly running through his own thoughts. Maybe deciding if he wanted to come clean or not. Jeongin would let him have that time, if he needed it. He continued, “Felix-hyung always said that Lee Jaerim killed his younger sister and that’s why he wanted revenge. He just never told us what his actual relationship was with Lee Jaerim.”
Minho said, “He still lied to us.”
“A lie of omission,” Jeongin threw back, feeling so out of place, sitting at this table with Minho, staring across from him, under such strained and dire circumstances. Normally, this was a place of refuge for them. Normally, it was the one place Jeongin got to see Minho’s softness. It had been such a place for them just this morning, Jeongin eating the food that Minho had made him for him with such care.
Jeongin wondered if they’d be able to go back to that, after this. The Minho staring back at him did not seem to have any softness, not even for Jeongin’s sake. The stark overhead kitchen light cast his scars into sharp relief, his dark eyes like chipped obsidian.
“No,” said Minho, in a way that made both Hyunjin and Jisung come to attention, Hyunjin finally lifting his head, his expression clearing into something more— intense. “It was a lie. He lied to us, for months now. We have no way to know whether or not he’s telling us the truth now. It could all just be a sob story to stop us from killing him.”
“Minho-hyung is right, surely,” said Jisung, speaking up. “We don’t have any way to know.”
Hyunjin gave him an absolutely filthy look, and then he snapped out, “Fuck, alright.” He glanced askance at Seungmin, something passing between them before he ran a hand through his hair, blood red, pushing the wispy strands out of his face. Then he straightened up in his seat, his shoulders locked like he was bracing himself. “You all are going to be pissed at me,” he said, and now Jeongin was bracing himself too, “but— Felix told me. He told me who he was. I’ve known for— a while, now.”
There was one brief moment of absolute silence. Then Chan hoarsely said, “You what?”
Hyunjin just about managed to suppress his wince. Maybe if it had been anyone other than Chan, he’d have managed it. “He told me right after you’d gotten together,” Hyunjin said, and while he was still firm with it, there was a clear note of apology in his voice, the sincerity of it reflected on his face. “When I asked why he’d put up so much of a fight about it. Getting with you, I mean. He told me it was because he was the Magpie’s son.”
Another beat, where the only sound was Chan’s fast breathing. It was scarily ragged.
“And you didn’t think to mention this?” Changbin asked in a strangled voice.
“He asked me to keep it a secret,” Hyunjin said. “He was afraid you’d kick him out, and I wasn’t convinced that might not be the case. So we were going to wait to tell you, until after the job.”
Chan slumped back in his chair, his eyes wide, lips slightly parted. He looked, horribly, like he might burst into tears again.
Minho was not having the same reaction. “What the fuck were you thinking?” he asked, staring at Hyunjin with hurt betrayal written all over his face. It was surprising to see only because it meant Minho had, actually, really trusted Hyunjin. That trust had very clearly just shattered. “You’ve always had a soft spot for him, but I never thought it would render you fucking stupid.”
“I know him better than you,” Hyunjin said with a sort of stiff dignity, maintaining his composure where others might have baulked. Icy compared to Minho’s fire. “I spend more time with him. I see him. There’s a reason those that know him well are advocating for him, and it’s not because we’re stupid, hyung. It’s because the truth of Felix, the real truth, is glaringly obvious once you’ve spent any amount of time with him.”
He glanced at Jeongin as he said it, and Minho looked over as well, but whatever was going on behind his gaze was— not what Hyunjin was wanting him to see. “Did you— know too?” Minho asked, and for a flicker his mask of outrage cracked to reveal something horribly vulnerable.
Jeongin almost wanted to lie and say yes, just because he knew it would hurt Minho. But he never could do that, not like this, not when he knew it would cut deeply. Deep enough that Minho, who Jeongin sometimes thought could forgive him anything, would not be able to come back from it.
No matter how angry Jeongin was right now, how upset he was at Minho, and how desperately he did not want Felix to be harmed, he couldn’t bear the thought of breaking Minho’s trust like that, of hurting this wounded creature who believed in him so very much.
“No,” Jeongin said, hating the way his voice softened. He was angry, for fuck’s sake. But Minho, under it all, looked like he’d just handed Jeongin a knife, and was terrified that Jeongin might use it. “I didn’t know.” He let his voice sour a little. “If I had, I would have said so back in hyung’s office, to shut you up.”
Minho’s shell snapped closed again. Jeongin didn’t miss the flash of relief on his face before a new scowl descended, and it made annoyance flare up in him all over again. Fucking Minho and his reticence, these emotions he tamped down and refused to just let Jeongin see. His pride and his stubbornness and—
“You really should have told us,” Changbin said on a sigh, clearly to Hyunjin. It was his disappointed dad voice, which didn’t come out all that often anymore. “But knowing he told you— changes things, I think?”
Minho tossed his head a little, flicking his bangs out of his eyes. “How so?” he asked, back to— his normal of the moment. Which was slightly unfortunate, because that normal seemed determined to be a huge fucking jackass. “We can’t verify he did tell Hyunjin, any more than we can verify his story. Hyunjin isn’t usually so stupid, maybe he is lying to cover for Felix.”
Now, Jeongin did kick him under the table. It didn’t do much damage because he was wearing socks. In fact, it might have hurt Jeongin more than it hurt Minho, his toes connecting with the hardness of Minho’s shin. Minho didn’t even react.
Hyunjin opened his mouth to argue, and judging by the spark in his eyes, whatever he said was not going to lead anywhere good — but Seungmin was turning, a statue come again to life. There was a forced neutrality to his face, his eyes empty.
“He’s not,” Seungmin said to Minho, firm and flat in that nasal way he had. “Lying. He’s not. I knew too.”
Minho blinked at him. Changbin said, scandalised in a way that was almost humorous, even given the situation, “Seungmin.”
Seungmin ignored them, his eyes sliding to Chan, who stared emptily back. “We went to middle school together,” he explained, and Chan exhaled, long and slow. How terrible this must be for him, Jeongin thought. The back and forth, not knowing what to think, what to believe, about someone he’d come to hold so dear. Seungmin said, “I recognised him as soon as I came into this room and got a good look at him that first night.”
“Holy shit,” Jisung whispered, and silently Jeongin agreed. Hyunjin keeping Felix’s secret was a given, but Seungmin doing so was nearly unthinkable.
“Seungmin,” Changbin said again, his crossed arms going loose over his chest in surprise, “why didn’t you tell us?”
Seungmin shrunk away from him a little, something like shame flittering over his face. “I confronted him, and he didn’t try to lie about his identity, or fight me, or run. He just explained, and asked me to keep his secret,” he said, tone just edging on defensive. “And his story made sense to me. I never could quite figure out why Shim would order a hit on the Magpie’s daughter, something that would obviously start a war they would lose, with no insurance that they wouldn’t be wiped out. Makes a lot more sense that he killed her in a fit of rage. Even when we were in middle school, Felix would come to class sometimes looking like he’d been mugged, half of his face black and blue.”
Chan’s face went positively ashen. Jeongin couldn’t help his own little flinch, the brief memory of the group home.
“Yeah,” Hyunjin said softly. “He told me about that, his father beating him. It’s where he got his scars. They’re from his dad whipping him with the buckle end of his belt.”
Abruptly Chan shoved his chair back from the table, practically scrambling to his feet and then fleeing out of the room, down the hallway. Jeongin looked around, searching for answers or reactions to gauge what he should do, seeing only stark shock and sadness on most of the others’ faces. He came to his own decision, pushed to his feet, and chased after his brother.
He let himself into Chan’s bedroom and closed the door after himself quickly, before the sound of Chan throwing up could make its way down the hallway to the kitchen. In the en suite bathroom, Chan was hunched over the toilet, head low over the bowl, still retching. The smell of it was awful, the sound almost worse, although as Chan gagged, it became clear that he had thrown up everything inside his stomach already. Now it was just— the aftermath. The way the body kept it up long after there was nothing more to give.
“Hyung,” Jeongin murmured. He got down to his knees beside Chan and lay a hand, careful and gentle, against Chan’s back. He was shaking, his spine and ribcage heaving under Jeongin’s touch, and Jeongin let himself rub gently, trying to be soothing. He didn’t really know how to do this, not when it came to Chan. He’d never seen Chan like this before.
“He— his scars— I always wondered—” Chan said between heaves, the words almost juddering out of him.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said again, chest heavy with sorrow. His hand slid up, wrapping around Chan’s shoulder to try and coax him back. “Don’t— just calm down, try to calm down—”
Chan’s head raised, his red-rimmed eyes seeking out Jeongin’s. “I don’t know what to think, Jeongin,” he gasped, lips pale. It was like he couldn’t even hear Jeongin. “I don’t know what to believe.” He was slumped over the rim of the toilet, like his body had been utterly weakened, while his fingers were white where they gripped the porcelain.
Jeongin bit his bottom lip, at a complete loss for words. Was there anything he could even say that would be of comfort? The truth was going to cut just as deeply, the aftermath of tonight would be a painful, jagged thing either way.
Tears had streaked wet trails down Chan’s face, and his eyes welled anew as he looked at Jeongin, mouth twisting as his face crumpled. “He’s not a traitor, is he?” Chan said, choked and strained around his tears. He sounded like he already knew the answer, and wanted Jeongin to lie to him.
Jeongin answered him truthfully all the same. “I don’t think so.”
He didn’t. He never had done, not from the moment he had heard who Felix’s father was. How could he put it into words, though, the way that although the news had been shocking to the core but for Jeongin, it didn’t really seem to change anything? But of course it changed things for Chan. It changed everything, for Chan.
Chan made a noise, something like a wounded animal, and dropped eye contact, hunching back over the toilet though he did not begin to heave again. Instead, all that came out of him were sobs, wracking and making his whole body shiver. Jeongin could hear the rattling of his teeth. It was a swift and brutal sort of collapse, like a flood sweeping everything away. Chan just— was going to pieces before Jeongin’s very eyes and Jeongin felt, for a long terrible moment, like he just didn’t know what to do. His brain had gone empty, every thought fleeing him. For one selfish moment, he just didn’t want to do any of this.
Then he rallied, tightened his hold on Chan’s shoulder. “Hyung,” Jeongin said, pulling at Chan with a little more insistence. “Come here, come away—”
Finally Chan relented and let Jeongin coax him away from the bowl, let him help him to sit back against the shower wall. Chan continued to cry, making no moves to wipe those tears, no move to stop them. He brought his knees up a little, wrapped his arms around himself, as Jeongin flushed the toilet, not looking at what was inside, and then pulled some toilet paper off the holder.
“Here,” he said gently, wiping at Chan’s mouth with some of the paper, as careful as he could. That got tossed into the toilet to be flushed later. He used some other paper to start wiping Chan’s tears, wishing he had something softer, something kinder to Chan’s face.
“I don’t know what to do,” Chan said, voice hollow and face blank, his eyes dimmed and shuttered. He wasn’t looking at Jeongin, tears still seeping slowly out no matter how much Jeongin patted them away. “Do I— can I let him stay here? Should I? He still lied. He knew, he knew I would— he knew how I— and he still slept with me. I don’t know, I don’t know if I can forgive him, if I can— move past this.” His bottom lip trembled, voice losing that emptiness in favour of wobbling as he said, “But— the thought of him out there, alone— I can’t—”
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, as he watched Chan start to shake apart again, “hyung, it’s okay.” He ran his hands over Chan’s shoulders, down his arms, trying to comfort him, trying to do what he could. “You don’t have to decide right now, I don’t think. Sleep on it? The others will understand.” They’d better; Jeongin was not going to let Chan go back out there like this, so they’d simply have to understand. The next bit was less certain, but he said it anyway, his voice softer, “So will Felix-hyung.”
Chan— laughed. A hollow sound, tinged with no small amount of hysteria, a hysteria that Jeongin could see on his face too. It frightened him, a bit, but the fear was for Chan, not because of Chan. “I nearly had him killed,” he said hoarsely. “He might not want to stay. He probably— probably never wants to see me again.”
“Hyung, I don’t think that’s true,” Jeongin said softly, stroking a hand through Chan’s sweaty hair.
“He told Hyunjin,” Chan continued, relentless, coming to conclusions Jeongin wished he could protect him from. “He trusted Hyunjin with it. But he didn’t tell me. And Hyunjin didn’t tell me. Neither of them—”
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, desperate to interrupt, desperate to stop him from falling down this particular rabbit hole.
“I proved him right,” Chan said, grim and hard. He met Jeongin’s eyes, mouth curving into a mockery of a smile, full of regret and self-loathing. “He couldn’t trust me with it. I proved him right.”
What could Jeongin say to that? Any reassurance would be a lie — Jeongin had been there in the room with them and he could not understand Chan’s rapid switch. Or rather, he could understand it, but he could not— fathom it. To go from such fierce love, to a willingness to allow an execution in a matter of minutes. But Jeongin was not sure he had ever hated someone, the way Chan hated Lee Jaerim. He was not sure he was built to even feel an emotion like that the way Chan was.
So Jeongin could offer no reassurance. Chan’s anger, his hurt and his feelings of betrayal, made sense, and he was entitled to that wound. Anything beyond that, Jeongin could not condone.
And how strange, for Jeongin, who would not have ever thought Chan would react this way. Felix had managed to predict it, while Jeongin would not have. How odd and humbling and awful it was to know Chan for so long and have a stranger come in and read him better, before they’d even met. How terrible for Chan, too, to feel like he had lived up to an expectation of cruelty.
“I don’t know what to say,” Jeongin said, voice small.
Chan, for the first time in this conversation, looked at Jeongin and seemed to actually really see him. There had been an air, all this time, of him almost seeing through Jeongin, or maybe just— speaking at him, rather than to him. His eyes softened now, though, the corners of his mouth downturning a little. “Ah, Jeongin,” he said, voice thick with tears. “I’m sorry.”
“Hyung, no?” Jeongin said, but Chan was visibly withdrawing now. Coming back to himself enough to remember their respective roles, his stubborn refusal to lean on anyone. Jeongin least of all.
Chan shifted, moving as if to get to his feet, and Jeongin swiftly got his arm under Chan’s shoulder, wrapped around his back, and helped him up. It was hard to say how much Jeongin actually contributed; Chan was much heavier than him, solid muscle where Jeongin was lithe. But Chan did lean on him some, as they made their way back into the bedroom, Jeongin insistently making for the bed while Chan seemed like he might divert to the door.
“The others—” Chan said weakly, as Jeongin pushed him down to sit on the edge of the bed.
“I told you,” Jeongin said firmly, “we can pick this up tomorrow. Please, hyung.”
Chan visibly swallowed, blinking quickly against new tears. “Okay,” he whispered.
How small he looked, somehow, in the expanse of the bedroom, at the edge of this bed he had shared with Felix. Chan looked like he was having the same line of thought, his gaze falling down to the comforter, breathing a little shaky.
Had Felix known, before he and Chan slept together, what it was, exactly, that kept Chan’s anger for Lee Jaerim alive? Jeongin hoped not, hoped he hadn’t known about Chan’s brother at the time. Of course it felt like a violation, for Chan, to have slept with the son of his enemy, the son of someone who had caused such suffering.
Jeongin was still holding a crushed ball of toilet paper, and he dabbed at Chan’s face, drying the remaining wetness while Chan fought valiantly against fresh tears. “Hyung, lay down?” Jeongin said gently, and Chan obediently allowed himself to be guided into a reclined position.
Jeongin— really did not know what to do beyond this, trying to remember what it was that Chan had done for him when he was sick as a child. He’d caught a stomach bug, once, when he was about twelve, who even knew where from, and spent a couple of days throwing up, curled up on the bed with a plastic bowl that Chan had found for him. Hours where he had cried, hours where Chan had helped him drink some water and then held him as Jeongin threw it back up, hours of Chan cleaning out the bowl, cleaning the sheets, cleaning Jeongin. He’d had to cancel a job, to look after Jeongin, and the only time he had been able to take a break had been when Changbin had come over to help.
You’re okay, he’d murmured to Jeongin as he stroked his hair, although afterwards he had admitted that he didn’t think Jeongin was okay, that he’d been afraid the entire time they’d have to figure out how to take him to a hospital without getting social services involved. You’re going to be okay.
Jeongin didn’t say that to him now. It wasn’t okay. He wasn’t sure it would be okay in the future, either.
“I’m going to— tell the others the meeting is dismissed,” Jeongin said slowly. He grabbed the tissue box off the nightstand, set it down on the bed beside Chan’s shoulder so it was easier to reach. “And I’ll get you some water too, okay? I won’t be long.”
Chan looked up at Jeongin, his eyes red and swollen, his face so pallid-pale, looking at Jeongin like he thought Jeongin had all the answers, like he hoped Jeongin had the answers. “Okay,” Chan whispered.
Jeongin turned away, unable to stand the way Chan was looking at him. He left the room, closing the door but not latching it behind him.
When he entered the kitchen again, he found the others pretty much how he had left them, though considerably more subdued. They’d been speaking quietly, enough so that Jeongin had not been able to make out the words as he came down the hall, and then all fell silent when he emerged into the room.
It was likely that despite Jeongin’s efforts, they’d heard at least some of what had transpired. But Jeongin wasn’t about to air any of it explicitly, not even to these people, who both he and Chan viewed as family. Chan was always so private with his darker emotions, keeping his vulnerability tight to his chest. Jeongin didn’t want to inadvertently share things Chan would later be shamed by.
“Chan-hyung— can’t continue this right now,” Jeongin said, trying to make himself seem steady and implacable, when he still felt so off balance, so shaky. “He said we should pick it up as a group tomorrow.” Not exactly true, but Jeongin figured— what else could be done?
Everyone looked at each other and then Changbin sighed. He looked older than usual, and incredibly sad. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess it can be put on pause until tomorrow.”
Minho’s hand, laying on the table, curled into a fist. But he said nothing.
“Fine,” said Hyunjin. He pushed up to his feet and held out a hand, moving his fingers in a gimme movement. “Who has the keys to the holding room? I’m going to go give Felix some food.”
Jisung’s eyebrows rose, genuine alarm coming over his face, while Minho gave Hyunjin a scathing side-eye that Hyunjin outright ignored.
“I— don’t think that’s a good idea,” Changbin said.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Hyunjin said, almost a snap, doing the gimme movement faster now, more insistent, much less patient.
“I really don’t want to hear that from you,” Changbin muttered, but he fished the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Hyunjin, who caught them easily. He tucked them into his pocket before poking around the cartons of food that had been left from whoever had brought in take-out earlier.
Jisung slid off the counter and said, slowly, “Maybe I should come with you, just in case.”
Hyunjin looked over his shoulder at him. The expression on his face could have dropped a tiger dead at twenty paces. “I don’t need you,” he said in a freezing tone.
Jisung paused. Then he lifted his hands in acquiescence and took the seat that Hyunjin had left. Everyone waited in silence until Hyunjin had flounced out of the room and then Jisung put his head on the table and said, “Okay, fuck.” Jeongin came over and sat down next to him, patting him on the back.
“He’s going to get us all killed,” Minho said tightly, and then his angry glare turned on Seungmin. “So are you.”
Seungmin stared back calmly, while Changbin shifted from one foot to the other, a restless little motion. “If Felix came in here with an intention to betray us, he would have done it already, and not bothered with some elaborate plot to get us all killed attempting a heist,” he said, flat and clinical, the same way he spoke when he was showing them some footage off his monitors. “You know that doesn’t make any sense. Especially not when I recognized him right off the bat, do you really think Lee Jaerim would risk his heir like this?” He paused, and then added, “And do you think Lee Jaerim would want his son getting fucked by a rival gang leader either? I can’t imagine he’s the type of man to be alright with that.”
Jeongin silently agreed, on all points. It simply made no sense for Felix to be a traitor. The worst thing he’d done to them, his only crime, was that he had not told them the full truth of his identity. But he was not a danger beyond that.
Even Minho, in his current anger, his hatred over being deceived, must be able see what a stupid plan it would be, to send Felix in here to— lure them out on a job they might not even take? Why bother, when moving in on them here would be easier, and far less risk to Felix himself. Maybe if Felix was just some throwaway employee, but he wasn’t, he was Lee Jaerim’s only son.
Minho would never sign off on such a stupid plan if someone brought it to the table. He was intelligent enough to recognise that a man like Lee Jaerim would not do something so foolish either.
“But you had no guarantee of any of that when you saw him for the first time that night,” Minho said, his hand still fisted atop the table. The scabs over his knuckles were straining. “You chose to conceal this from us.”
“I’m not in the habit of revealing other people’s secrets,” Seungmin said, voice oddly pointed.
Minho, strangely, turned a little pink. Jeongin looked at Seungmin, confused, but he couldn’t make out anything, from Seungmin’s expression.
Changbin sighed again. “To be honest,” he said, “I think Seungmin is right, that if Felix was going to betray us, he would have acted very soon after we took him in, since his cover could be blown at any moment.” For a moment his mouth twisted, as he chewed on the inside of his cheek in thought, and then he continued, addressing Minho now, “I get why you’re pissed, he did lie to us. But really— if he hadn’t, we’d never have listened to a word he said, and he’d have known that. For all he knew we might have killed him outright, or tried to ransom him back to his father, which would not have gone well for him. Considering we were going to kill him anyway—”
“Ouch,” muttered Seungmin.
“—he didn’t have much reason to keep lying to us, especially since he still thought we’d kill him after he told us his story. I don’t know, hyung. I think he’s actually telling the truth.”
Minho gave Changbin a long flat stare, and then looked at Jeongin. In turn, Jeongin narrowed his eyes at Minho, as threatening as he could possibly get. Minho sighed roughly and said, “Even if he is telling us the truth now, he still lied, and that withholding of information could have cost us, and has definitely put us in danger.” Even now, his face was a thin mask of anger. “I’m not inclined to forgive that kind of deception, how can I? And I’m still not convinced we’ve even got the full truth out of him now. He was very quick to try to run.”
“Because he was scared,” Jeongin said. It had been written all over Felix’s face, an animal fear that had wiped away all logical thought processes. “That’s not a fair indication of anything, and you know it. He was just scared.”
“I’d be scared too if Minho-hyung and Changbin-hyung suddenly came at me,” said Jisung, lifting his head off the table. “I’d probably have run too, even if I didn’t do anything. Sometimes that’s— that’s just how you react.”
Minho hummed. “Maybe,” he said, sounding not at all moved. He scowled at the door to the apartment. “I want him out of here regardless,” he said.
“Well that isn’t your choice to make,” Jeongin snapped at him, thoroughly fed up.
“Alright,” Changbin said, when Minho’s eyes sparked. “Alright. It’s pointless to argue now, we’ll decide tomorrow, once Chan-hyung is— up to it.” He pushed off from where he’d been leaning, stretching. “Maybe one of us really should check on Hyunjin,” he said, almost to himself.
“Not it,” Jisung said, shooting to his feet. “Contrary to all evidence, I can learn from my mistakes. I’m going to go patrol for a bit or something.” He practically ran out of the room to the stairs, like he thought that if he stayed too long, Changbin might make him do it after all. Changbin looked at Jeongin, then at Seungmin, and then followed Jisung out of the front door.
After a moment, Seungmin pushed to his feet too, silent, slowly, like his body was too heavy to move. He touched Jeongin on the shoulder once he was upright, and when Jeongin tilted his head to look at him, Seungmin looked back down with a solemn, serious expression. Jeongin was used to seeing Seungmin serious but this was very different. He looked sad, his mouth pulled tight at the corners.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, long enough that Jeongin blinked at him questioningly. But eventually Seungmin said, “You’re such a good kid, Jeongin.”
Jeongin hid his internal wince and just nodded. He could accept the compliment but being called a kid right now— stung. He wasn’t a kid, and he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to prove it to them, when everyone was so determined to keep him one. He didn’t mind being the baby, didn’t mind the protective indulgence most of the time. But he hated the way they didn’t take him seriously.
Seungmin left too, probably to go to his workroom, the door shutting quietly behind him. This, Jeongin realised, left him alone with Minho, who was watching him steadily. Jeongin was almost used to that feeling by now; Minho always seemed to be watching him. Sometimes it felt like a sucking, hungry thing, but sometimes, like right now, it just felt like Minho was looking at him. Like he was seeing Jeongin. It made Jeongin suddenly so angry, to be looked at like that after everything that had happened, that he, too, got up, not looking at Minho at all.
“You should go,” he said shortly. He went to the cupboards and grabbed a glass, intent on filling it with water to bring to Chan. He might bring him one of the Valiums they had left over from when Changbin got his wisdom teeth removed too. Maybe.
He heard the sound of Minho getting to his feet, although it was quiet. Everyone else always made the chairs scream against the floor but never Minho. He somehow always knew the right way to move so that it never happened. But Jeongin heard his footsteps, closer and closer, and wasn’t surprised when Minho came to stand beside him at the sink.
“Baby boy, what have you done to yourself?” Minho sighed, reaching out to grab Jeongin’s wrist.
Jeongin jerked his hand away before Minho could touch him. It had been a mix of instincts; foremost was the urge to hide the damage, as always. He’d made himself bleed, red pooled along the nail beds of his middle and index fingers. He hated this habit of his, an anxious drive that sometimes felt like a compulsion, something he had developed in that group home. He tried so hard to stop, but tonight had been so difficult.
Additionally he was just— upset, didn’t want Minho’s hands on him right now. It was an ugly feeling compounded by the fact that Jeongin was always fucking trying to get Minho to touch him, Minho always pulling away first. But of course he’d initiate a touch now. It just stoked Jeongin’s fury higher.
He pulled his hands back into his sleeves and glared at Minho, whose face had flickered rapidly from surprise to hurt to nothing. His hand fell to rest on the edge of the sink, no longer reaching for Jeongin.
“You’ve been,” Jeongin said with slow poison, “so fucking awful tonight.” And unrepentantly so, which just chafed Jeongin all the more. Chan was crying himself sick, while Minho was just implacable in his cruelty.
Would Chan have even thought to execute Felix, if Minho had not been there, putting the idea into his head? Pressing, pushing, insisting. Leading Chan down a path that Jeongin wasn’t sure Chan would have been able to recover from. And for what? Minho did not have the same reasons Chan did, to hate the Magpie. Minho just wanted Felix to die for the crime of lying, it felt like. And he would not be budged.
As if on cue, Minho’s face went a little hard. Not the kind of hard it went when he was angry, not the look that promised impending violence. This wasn’t a look that Jeongin thought he had ever seen directed at him. Though he had seen it, earlier, when Minho had been pinning Felix down. “I’m not taking criticism on what I do to keep you safe,” he said.
“Keep me— I wasn’t in any danger!” Jeongin cried, unable to understand what, exactly, Minho was seeing that he simply wasn’t. “You didn’t have to— throw him across the room! You nearly broke his arm!”
“Yes,” Minho said, completely unapologetic in a way that made Jeongin want to kick him in the shin again. “He was a threat and I needed to subdue that threat.”
“Except he wasn’t,” Jeongin said. He wished he knew how to get through to Minho, who right now seemed to be being stubborn just for the sake of it. “You had no proof of him actually being a traitor, you totally overreacted—”
“But what if he was?” Minho cut in. His voice was a little sharp but not even close to matching Jeongin’s tone. He looked like he was— not even listening to Jeongin, not taking his words in at all. He’d been like that all the time when Jeongin was a kid, but over the years it was like he’d started to always listen to Jeongin, even when the others weren’t. “I don’t have the luxury of giving people the benefit of the doubt. He could have taken you hostage. What would you have done then?”
“Defended myself!” Jeongin said. “Hyung, what the hell are you talking about? It’s Felix, if you think I couldn’t take him in a fight then I don’t know why you bothered teaching me how to do it.”
“That’s not the point,” Minho said again, this time decidedly a snap. He looked frustrated, like his words, usually so quick to come, had completely failed him.
“Then what is the point?” Jeongin threw his hands in the air. “That we should strike before we can be struck, just in case? That I’m foolish and soft for disagreeing, and thinking you went overboard? You aren’t even sorry!”
There was a faint flush of colour along Minho’s cheeks, his breathing sped up just slightly. It should have warned Jeongin off, would warn most sane people off. A raging Minho was not to be trifled with. “Jeongin,” Minho bit out, a bracing, warning sort of tone.
“Don’t— not that tone, not after all these years,” Jeongin shot back, shaking his head. “Do you really think I’m that stupid, that weak? That I wouldn’t have defended myself from a threat? Do you not think I can decide for myself if I need to take that kind of action? Do you know— do you know what it would have done to Chan-hyung, if I hadn’t stopped you? Do you even care? You’re acting like I’m a naive little idiot, but I’ve thought about this, I’m not some stupid soft child, I’m really not—”
Minho grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, not hard, but enough that Jeongin’s words died in his throat. He’d been so busy ranting that he hadn’t noticed the way Minho had stepped up close to him, but he was close now, close enough that Jeongin could see the red rims to his eyes, the tenseness in his jaw.
They looked at each other, the silence unspooling between them. Jeongin kept his eyes on Minho’s, trying to clutch his anger close to him, holding it tight. He was angry and he had a right to be, but it felt a little harder to keep stoked when he could feel the warmth of Minho’s hands through his shirt.
If Minho kissed him now, he thought, a little dazedly, then he wasn’t entirely sure what he would do.
“I was scared,” Minho said quietly, fiercely, when the silence had stretched just a little too long. His hands flexed against Jeongin’s shoulders, before he let go and turned and walked away, through the kitchen and out of the apartment, the door shutting after him with an incongruously soft click.
Jeongin, not really sure what had happened, slightly confused to find that he had once again not been kissed, let him go. Then the anger that had been in danger of dissipating suddenly came roaring back to him. He had the very strong desire to hurl the glass in his hand across the room.
Instead, he put the glass down on the counter very, very carefully and then went to the living area, where he picked up one of the plush cushions strewn atop the couches so he could scream into it, a short wordless cry of rage. It made him feel like the child he had just been insisting he wasn’t, but it also helped. Sometimes, he thought hopelessly, he really fucking hated being the youngest.
He flung the pillow back onto the couch and then resumed his original task, getting water for Chan. His brother needed him, and everything else would just have to wait.
——
Hyunjin unlocked the door to the small room on the third floor, and then rapped his knuckles against it. There was no response, but he hadn’t really been expecting one — if nothing else, one didn’t expect one’s jailer to ask for permission to come into a room — so after a few moments he just pushed it open.
He’d watched, those years ago, as Chan and Changbin cleaned this room out, taking out the shelves, putting in the narrow bed. He’d never been entirely certain what this room was for, since none of them had ever slept in it, and he’d never bothered to ask them about it, but he guessed this was what it was for: holding people.
Felix didn’t look up as he came in. He was sitting on the ground, back to the bed but not touching it. He had his knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them, and his head bowed as he sobbed. Hyunjin felt his heart break a little. He dropped the plate of food he had prepared onto the bed and went to his knees next to Felix.
“You poor thing,” he said, wrapping an arm around Felix’s shoulders and trying to pull him in. “You poor, poor thing.”
Felix lifted his head a little, looking at Hyunjin through eyes so swollen with tears that Hyunjin would be surprised if he could even see properly right now. “Hyunjin,” he choked out. “Hyunjin, I—”
“Hush,” Hyunjin said. He put both arms around Felix’s shoulders now and rocked them both a little, tucking Felix’s head against his shoulder with careful hands. “I know. I know, they told me what happened, you don’t have to say anything. Lord. I can’t believe they locked you in here, it’s so fucking grim.”
Felix was steadily turning the material of Hyunjin’s t-shirt into a damp mess. It was, objectively, extremely gross but for once in his life Hyunjin wasn’t going to complain. He mostly just wanted Felix to stop. “I ruined everything,” Felix sobbed, his hands clutching at Hyunjin’s back. “I ruined everything.”
“No, you didn’t,” Hyunjin said. He kissed the top of Felix’s head, once, twice, then tightened his arms around him. “You haven’t ruined anything. They’ll all come around, you’ll see. They’re just a bunch of knuckleheads, you already knew that.”
He’d hoped Felix might give him— something, for that remark. Maybe a snort. But Felix just kept crying against him, so Hyunjin kept rocking him back and forth; truthfully, he wasn’t really sure what to do. The others didn’t get like this. Usually it was Hyunjin having a hysterical breakdown, and he’d never seen it from the other side. When Felix did eventually speak, it was mostly incoherent. “Chan-hyung,” he said. “He— and I never— I didn’t want—”
“Christ,” said Hyunjin. He sat back, started wiping at Felix’s face with the hem of his shirt. “You’re going to make yourself throw up and Felix, honey, I’m not cleaning that up. Come on, calm down a bit. I’m still in your corner. You’ve still got me.” He reached over and fished up the plate of food, careful to not spill it. “Here,” he said, “eat a dumpling.”
Felix took a few hitching breaths, but opened his mouth obediently and let Hyunjin feed him a dumpling. “There,” said Hyunjin, as Felix chewed and then swallowed, all of his movements somehow conveying a feeling of imminent waterworks. “Good boy. Eat another one. What a load of assholes they are. Sometimes nobody in this place thinks.”
Felix wiped at his own face with his sleeves, then pulled a face when he realised they were already wet. Hyunjin would have brought tissues if he’d known. “Chan-hyung is never going to forgive me,” he said miserably.
“He will if he knows what’s good for him,” Hyunjin said darkly. “Besides, it’s you who shouldn’t forgive him, scaring you like this.” Locking him in a fucking closet, like he was a threat. Chan really should have known better, should have paused before doubting Felix to this extent.
Tremulously, Felix shook his head, chewing his second dumpling slowly. “You didn’t see him,” he said, bottom lip quivering. “It broke his heart. He hates me now.”
“Baby,” Hyunjin murmured, shifting his hold on the chopsticks so he could pet Felix’s hair. Chan’s pale, stricken face flashed through Hyunjin’s mind. “No, he doesn’t. He’s just upset, but we told him, you know, Seungmin and I, that we already knew—”
Felix’s eyes snapped to his, watery and red. “You did?”
“Yeah,” Hyunjin said gently. “So he knows now, that you weren’t really hiding it.” Felix’s face crumpled a little, blinking quickly against a fresh wave of tears. Hyunjin fed him another dumpling, studying Felix as he chewed through it. “Lix, why didn’t you tell them Seungmin and I knew already?”
Felix swallowed, then sniffled. “I was afraid of what they might do to you,” he said, the picture of misery. “I didn’t want you getting hurt because of me.”
Hyunjin was so touched by that, but also very confused. “Felix, baby, they wouldn’t hurt me?” he said, sure of that like he was sure of so little in this world. “You know that.”
“I— that’s what I would have thought, before tonight,” Felix said, nodding in a bobbing sort of way that made it seem like his neck bones had gone to putty. There was a haunted kind of anguish written all over his features. He’d really been frightened, not just for his own sake but Hyunjin’s too. Minho really must have put the fear of God into him. “But before tonight I also would have said Chan-hyung would never—”
The door swung open again. Changbin loomed in the doorway, a frown on his face. Hyunjin felt Felix flinch in his arms. “Okay,” Changbin said, taking in the scene. “That’s fine, I guess.”
Hyunjin’s eyebrow twitched. “I thought I made it very clear that I didn’t need someone to come and check up on me,” he said.
Changbin shrugged. “No, you told Jisung not to come check on you,” he said. “I can do whatever I want. Jisung’s gone out, I think Minho has too. I need to talk to Seungmin. When you’re finished here, for god’s sake, don’t forget to lock the door and bring me the key afterwards.”
Hyunjin clambered to his feet. He wasn’t in the habit of being intimidating, to be honest, but times like this his extra height over the others did come in handy. Not that he was really intimidating Changbin; that was a particularly difficult thing to do. Hyunjin wasn’t sure even Minho had managed to do that. But still, Hyunjin would do his best.
“I’m not leaving him here,” he said. “Are you kidding me, hyung. This place sucks. He can come and stay with me again, I’ll watch over him if that’s what you want. But I’m not letting you lock him up here all night.”
Changbin looked exasperated. “It’s one night, Hyunjin, it’s not going to kill him.”
“It’s a prison,” Hyunjin insisted.
“Now who is being dramatic,” Changbin muttered. Hyunjin just stared at him, arms folded over his chest. He would not back down on this. And he saw, on Changbin’s face, that he— got it. There was not a part of Hyunjin that could allow Felix to be locked up in a small room like this. Changbin sighed and said, “Fine. Don’t let him get out or Minho-hyung will be calling for your head next.”
“He’s not going to get out,” Hyunjin said. He was thoroughly tired of them all now. He kept thinking about the way Jisung had said we don’t have any way to know and wanting to shove something over in annoyance. Hyunjin had met some real psychopaths and sadists in his time, and it was obvious to him that Felix was, at the very least, genuine in the personality he showed to them. The others might be able to dismiss Jeongin as naive or childish but they couldn’t do the same with Hyunjin.
Changbin shrugged. He looked tired too, like this whole situation had aged him. Hyunjin felt a small burst of sympathy for him, because he knew that none of this would be easy for Changbin, either. Minho might be able to switch his brain from ally to enemy at the flip of a switch but Changbin had always been the heart of their little operation, the one who cared for them all in his way. During Hyunjin’s first few weeks here, it had been Changbin who brought him every kind of take out food imaginable just so Hyunjin could figure out what it was that he liked. And it had been Changbin who had tried to help Felix be at home here too. No one could doubt that Chan was in the most pain, but Hyunjin could see it on Changbin’s face — he did not like this either.
“Just, be careful,” Changbin said. “Try to not let Minho-hyung know about this.”
Hyunjin nodded. Changbin left the room, leaving the door ajar behind him. Felix was still sitting on the floor, looking up at Hyunjin with his swollen red eyes. “You shouldn’t,” he said, sounding thoroughly miserable but resigned to it. “You really should just leave me here, I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“No one is going to hurt me,” Hyunjin said. He knew that, trusted it like he trusted the sun to rise the next morning, even if Felix was a little dubious about it. The next bit was a little more tricky; Minho did have a habit of being unpredictable about outside elements. “Nobody is going to hurt you either. Come on, up you get.” He held out a hand and Felix took it, hesitatingly, and let Hyunjin pull him up to his feet. He’d clearly been sitting curled up on the floor too long because he stumbled somewhat and Hyunjin had to steady him. He picked up the food from the side table and held Felix’s hand with his other hand.
Changbin had likely been right about Minho leaving, as they managed to avoid absolutely everyone. The kitchen was empty, food containers still out on the counter, everyone’s bedroom doors closed. He heard some kind of movement coming from Chan’s room as he led Felix through the hall, but the other rooms were still and silent. Felix trailed after him silently. Chan’s closed bedroom door felt like a glowing beacon in the corner of Hyunjin’s eye but he did his best to ignore it and just ushered Felix into his own.
Felix stood in the middle of the room, looking blankly into space as if he’d never seen the room before. Now that the crying fit had eased, he looked exhausted, zoned out like he was no longer quite in his own head. It was a feeling that Hyunjin was intimately familiar with, and he wondered if this is what he looked like when he got like that: blank-eyed and empty, face pallid and pale. It freaked him out to see it. No wonder Jisung and Chan always spoke so quietly to him in those moments.
He wasn’t like Jisung and Chan; he didn’t have the knack of quiet, kind words. So instead he said, “I’ll get you something to sleep in. You change while I go get—” He stopped, remembering that, of course, Felix’s toothbrush had migrated into Chan’s en-suite, and Hyunjin couldn’t just go in there to get it. He tried to remember if they had any spares. Felix didn’t really look like he was listening but he finished anyway. “Anyway, I’m going to get some stuff, so just get changed, okay?”
He pulled some sweatpants and a t-shirt out for Felix, some of his softest, most worn ones. They were the kind of things Hyunjin liked to wear when he needed the most comfort and he figured it couldn’t hurt to try them on Felix. He slipped out of the room to the bathroom, which was luckily free, and looked in the cupboard under the sink and found a collection of spare toothbrushes that could only have been bought by Chan, because nobody else on this floor was organised enough for that. He brushed his teeth, quickly, probably the fastest he’d ever done it in the past five years, before he put some toothpaste on the only yellow spare toothbrush he could find. He filled a plastic cup with water, soaked a spare hand towel with cold water, and stole a roll of toilet paper just in case.
Jeongin was in the hallway when he finished, waiting to use the bathroom. He was dressed for bed too, looking remarkably small in his oversized t-shirt and boxer shorts, and his eyes looked a little red too. He looked at things Hyunjin was holding and then up at Hyunjin’s face. “Is Felix-hyung okay?” he asked quietly.
“Not really,” said Hyunjin, trying to keep his voice as gentle as possible, since Jeongin had clearly always believed in Felix the same way Hyunjin did. “Terrified out of his mind, mostly.”
Jeongin wrapped his arms around his stomach, like he was holding himself. “Yeah,” he said, barely more than a whisper. “Minho-hyung— threw him around a bit, and for a moment there I wasn’t sure we’d be able to stop him before he did something worse.”
Hyunjin felt a stomach swooping anxiety at that news, even knowing Felix was whole and safe and relatively unharmed in his room right now. It didn’t surprise him, exactly, and he didn’t blame Minho for it, when that was just— how he was. He took their safety deadly serious, and he’d never seemed to fully trust Felix. He’d certainly not come to hold any fondness for him.
It was both Minho’s greatest strength and weakness: he would do anything in his protection of them all, but it often made him rash, made him stop thinking clearly.
“Well,” Hyunjin said, mouth feeling a little dry, “at least you were able to stop him, in the end.” Hyunjin, for all his bravado with Changbin, was suddenly a little nervous about having Felix in his room, because Minho might— cause problems. Hyunjin still didn’t think Minho would lay hands on him, but Felix was evidently a different story. He supposed if it came to that, Hyunjin could just wrap around Felix like a barnacle and hope nothing escalated. Minho was many things but he was not cruel, and no matter Felix’s true identity, he was, in all respects to the physical, totally helpless.
Jeongin had an odd look on his face that Hyunjin could not parse through; something angry, foreign on Jeongin’s features which were built for joy. “Changbin-hyung stopped him, not me,” he said, a tang of bitterness to the words. “He ignored me.” The anger morphed into something harder, something determined, as he met Hyunjin’s eyes and said, “I won’t let him hurt Felix-hyung.”
It was not the first time that Hyunjin had felt that slight sadness over clear proof of Jeongin’s growing up, but it was the first time it had hit him so strongly. This was not the baby-faced teen who had found Hyunjin in that rain soaked doorway, the one with braces and a voice which was still breaking. Hyunjin had been aware of it happening, of Jeongin getting older, becoming less of a kid and more of the man he was supposed to be, but now he thought— when did this happen. He felt like something had passed him by.
“No,” he agreed, “he won’t.” He put a hand on Jeongin’s shoulder, squeezed once. Then he brushed past him back down the hall to his bedroom. He heard the bathroom door click shut.
Felix had changed, the clothes he had taken off dumped into Hyunjin’s laundry basket. The sweatpants were too long on him, puddled around his ankles, and he hadn’t bothered to roll them up. He just stood, looking small and lost, and Hyunjin sighed a little to himself. He meant what he had said earlier, he found — Chan better beg for forgiveness after all of this. He understood Chan’s upset, he did, but Felix didn’t ask to be that man’s son. He didn’t deserve to be so hurt, for something he had never been able to control.
“Here,” he said, holding out the toothbrush. Felix took it, looked at it for a moment like he didn’t know what it was, and then held out his other hand for the cup of water. Hyunjin passed it to him and Felix finally put the toothbrush in his mouth and started to clean his teeth. Hyunjin got the bed sorted as he waited for Felix to finish, separating out his piles of pillows like he had done that first night too. He found some sleep clothes of his own, a new t-shirt to replace the one Felix had gotten wet with his tears, and some shorts that he had stolen from Changbin years ago. Then he climbed into the bed, laying on his side to watch Felix finish up, rinsing his mouth out with the water from the cup and then spitting back into it, and waited.
Eventually Felix turned off the lights and clambered onto the bed with him. Originally Hyunjin had planned to use the cold towel to try to soothe his poor, swollen eyes, but Felix looked exhausted, like he couldn’t hold himself up any longer. Hyunjin rolled onto his back and let Felix plaster himself along his side, a warm weight against his body. Hyunjin wriggled until he got an arm under Felix, tucked around his waist, and pulled him closer, the way he knew Felix liked but Hyunjin could usually not stand for too long. Felix put his head against Hyunjin’s shoulder, his arm across Hyunjin’s stomach. He sighed, a soft, miserable little sound.
“Ah, Lix,” Hyunjin said, very quietly, after a long few minutes of silence. “It’ll be okay. I promise you.”
Felix didn’t answer. He turned his face closer to Hyunjin’s shoulder, rubbing his face a little into the material of Hyunjin’s t-shirt. His face was dry now but every so often his shoulders hitched, like he was holding back a sob. Hyunjin could think of nothing to make any of this better, so he just held Felix until Felix’s breathing evened out and he drifted off to sleep. Only then did Hyunjin let himself rest too.
Chapter 15
Notes:
i just wanted to say thank you sooo so much for the response to the last chapter. it genuinely blew us away, it was amazing. i'm sorry that i wasn't able to get to reply to all the comments, there were so many and we were unexpectantly busy these past couple weeks, but we read them all multiple times and are so, so grateful for every single one.
also i wrote a chunk of this chapter last minute on my phone on a train and i frankly don't recommend you follow my example
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
When Changbin pushed open the door to the workroom, Seungmin had already turned to face him, his desk chair fully swivelled around. He must have seen Changbin on the screens coming down the stairs and had chosen to turn and look at him, instead of his usual thing, which was pretending, at least for a few seconds right at the start, like nobody had come into the room.
Behind him, most of the monitors were switched off. The ones that usually held the active camera feeds were on, but otherwise the only screen lit up showed a still from outside the building, blurred because it was a video that had been paused. Seungmin was already going through the footage, then, checking if Felix had left without them knowing.
He’d expected a different expression on Seungmin’s face. He had a certain expression that he used when he thought he was going to be criticised for something, a way of setting his face in an obnoxious look so if to say, I’m going to be as difficult as possible. Coming down the stairs, Changbin had told himself that when Seungmin looked at him like that, he wasn’t going to react, wasn’t going to give him anything to be difficult about.
But Seungmin didn’t look like that. No, he was looking directly at Changbin, his face blank, his eyes— shuttered. No warmth, but nothing else either. He had both of his feet on his chair, pulled up like he’d had his chin resting on his knees, his feet in dark socks. His glasses on his face, for once. The sight of that made something squeeze around Changbin’s heart.
Neither of them said anything. Changbin came in, closed the workroom door behind him. There was a lock, but he didn’t bother with that. He would keep an eye for anyone coming to disturb them, although it was unlikely, at this point in the night. Jeongin had gone to sleep, Hyunjin had Felix sequestered in his room. Chan was— in bed, hopefully unconscious by now, all cried out. Changbin had no idea where Minho was, but he didn’t have the energy to care right then about that.
He still didn’t speak, as he crossed the room, skirting around the workbench and then sitting down on the couch against the wall. He patted the cushion next to him, not playful, just— firmly. “Come and sit with me,” he said.
Seungmin didn’t move for so long that Changbin thought he was maybe going to refuse. Eventually, though, he unfolded himself from his position on his chair, and slipped his socked feet into his slippers. They slapped against the floor as he made his way over, the sound surprisingly loud in the absolute silence between them otherwise. When Seungmin sat, he made sure to leave a space between them, curled up against the other arm of the couch with his legs tucked back up underneath him, his body positioned a little away from Changbin.
He wasn’t looking at Changbin, either. There was a tenseness to his jaw, a tightness to the set of his shoulders, as he looked across the room, mostly at the floor. Changbin wanted to reach out and press his thumb into the spot where Seungmin’s skull met his neck, wanted to remind him not to clench like that, but he didn’t know if Seungmin would want to be touched.
All of this, every little part of it, felt like uncharted territory between them. The most remarkable part of it, for Changbin, was how the murky path forward didn’t really scare him at all.
“Seungmin,” he said, very low. He watched a muscle in Seungmin’s jaw twitch. “Why didn’t you tell me about Felix?”
Seungmin remained silent for a minute or so. Changbin waited. Was that not something he’d learned, these past few months of being with Seungmin, being in love with Seungmin? He would never have considered himself a particularly patient person in the past, but it was a vital skill when it came to Seungmin. He would not be rushed. Trying just made him dig his heels in further.
“What would you have done,” he said eventually, very quietly, still not looking at Changbin, “if I had told you?”
Changbin thought about it. He hadn’t, actually, in all the ways he’d envisioned this conversation happening, thought about the answer to that. But in the end, it was something of an easy thing. “Told Chan-hyung,” he said, knowing as he said the words that it was, insofar as Seungmin’s motivations went, probably the wrong answer.
Seungmin finally turned to look at him now. His eyes were not so shuttered, but they remained hard to read, dark under the feathers of his eyelashes. “Yeah,” he said. “And that’s why I did not tell you.”
Changbin sat with that for a long few minutes, saying nothing. Seungmin looked away from him again, staring back out at the room. It was strange, to be alone in a room with him like this and be so far away from each other. Seungmin had every part of his body held so that there could be no accidental brush against each other, so that Changbin, if he wanted it, would have to be the one to bridge the gap.
“Seungmin,” he said eventually, “that was really fucking risky.”
“I know,” Seungmin said. His voice was tight, his jaw tight; he didn’t look away from whatever spot on the opposite wall he was glaring a hole into. There was something about his body language that simply felt— obstinate. Something about the silence that kept dropping between them seemed to be making that tenseness in Seungmin more and more pronounced. “Of course I knew that, hyung.”
“So then why did you not tell anyone?”
“Maybe I just trusted him,” Seungmin said, and it was so falsely dismissive, so clearly geared at provoking Changbin, that it came to Changbin in an instant — Seungmin was afraid that Changbin was angry at him. He was afraid, maybe, that Changbin was going to yell at him. It was just like Seungmin, to lash out first before anyone else could land the first blow. To not be able to wait patiently for the fight to come to him, but instead try to control how and when it started.
He had learned that, Changbin knew, from the destruction of his family. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Seungmin,” he said. “Baby. Don’t do that. Look at me, please?”
Seungmin’s eyes snapped back to Changbin's face. He looked as if he hadn’t meant to do it, like the speed of his own reaction had surprised him. His expression, for a split second before he smoothed it out, was terrible — a mix of shock and hope and desperation that Changbin, probably wisely, didn’t comment on. But he had seen it, and Seungmin would know that he had seen it.
“I’m not here to fight with you,” Changbin told him. “I’m not here to reprimand you, or argue with you, or shout at you. All I want is to know why you chose to keep it a secret. I want to understand why, that’s all.”
Seungmin was quiet, his eyes scanning over Changbin’s face, possibly searching for if Changbin was telling the truth. He was. He was not angry, he had not been angry even upstairs, sitting on the counter learning for the first time that Seungmin had kept such a huge, devastating secret from him. It had been shocking and heart-breaking, to think of Seungmin holding onto it, but he had not been angry.
Seungmin always had his reasons, for everything he did. He was not someone prone to spontaneity; quite the opposite, in fact. So even upstairs, Changbin had known there was a reason for it.
“You really want to know,” Seungmin said, so quietly that if it weren’t for the silence of the room, it might have counted as a whisper.
“Yes,” Changbin said. “Of course.”
He held out a hand to Seungmin, palm up, letting it hang in the space between them. He kept his face in neutral lines, not pushing Seungmin to take it either way, but it wasn’t more than a few seconds before Seungmin took it, a little tentatively, his fingers curling around Changbin’s slowly. Changbin squeezed them, and then let their hands drop to the couch cushion, shifting as he did so to be just that little bit closer to Seungmin.
“I thought you would be angry,” Seungmin said, voice a little rough.
“I mean, I’m not happy,” Changbin said. “At the situation, I mean. But I’m not angry at you.”
For a moment, Seungmin’s eyes fluttered shut. An expression flickered across his face: sheer relief, the kind of thing that Changbin had never seen on him before. The kind of thing that Changbin knew Seungmin would usually repress, stop from showing up. It was sometimes astonishing how much emotion Seungmin did show on a day to day basis, when he had been even more blank, more empty, when he had first arrived. He had rarely shown anything other than annoyance, back then.
That relief, slight and brief as it was, felt like a beacon. He really had been scared. Changbin felt his heart— clench.
“Tell me,” he murmured. “Please.”
Seungmin looked away from him again, but not, this time, like he was trying to provoke Changbin in some way. “I said earlier,” he said, “about the bruises. It was more than just that, when we were in middle school. Even then it was obvious that he was miserable. I didn’t know him well, he barely spoke to any of us and we were all even bigger assholes than most middle schoolers normally are, but he— it was obvious. What was happening to him. It was obvious. And nobody did anything about it.”
Changbin sat quietly, letting him talk. He had heard Seungmin tell stories, of his life before, before his father’s fraud arrest, his suicide, before his life went to hell in a handbasket. He always spoke of those times with a probably unhealthy amount of irony in his voice, the self-deprecation, the self-disdain dripping from the words. It was always weird to hear about those times, to know that while Changbin tried to look after a grandmother whose memory was rapidly fading, while Chan and Jeongin shivered in a bare little room together, Seungmin was— living a life free of any of that.
A life in which enough wealth had been acquired that Seungmin had had the best schooling, foreign vacations, the best of everything, never going without anything he asked for. My first nanny, he’d once said, so off-hand with it that it had taken Changbin a solid thirty seconds before he’d interrupted Seungmin’s subsequent words with, Wait, your first one?
Of course, most of that wealth had been embezzled, so it was no wonder Seungmin always talked about it as if that time in his life had been some kind of big joke. That tone was completely missing here, though. When he talked about the Felix he knew in middle school, he sounded serious. He sounded— haunted, in a way.
“The story he told me when he came here made sense to me,” Seungmin continued. “I wouldn’t— I know it was risky, I knew that. But I also knew that if I told you guys, if I had walked into that kitchen or into Chan-hyung’s office and said, this is Lee Yongbok, the Magpie’s son, he would have died.”
“We wouldn’t necessarily have killed him,” Changbin said, although he had no way of knowing that. The maths, now, was certainly different to how it would have been back then. Now, knowing Felix a bit better, he’d felt comfortable arguing for Felix to remain alive. Back then, he didn’t think even he would have put up anything more than a token protest.
“You wouldn’t have needed to do it yourselves,” Seungmin said. “You remember what Felix was like, back then. He had nothing. And the best case scenario for what would happen if I told you all who he was, was that you would have thrown him back out on the streets. He would have died there. He would have frozen to death, or someone would have caught up to him, at his father’s behest. I knew that, looking at him, and hyung, I couldn’t bear that.”
“Seungmin,” Changbin murmured, but Seungmin was already barrelling on.
“Do you see, hyung? If I had said anything and he had died, that would have been on me. If he was telling the truth, I would have sentenced him to death for nothing.”
“And if he were lying?” Changbin asked. “You made a choice for all of us there, Seungmin. Put all your eggs in the Felix-is-innocent basket.”
“I watched him,” Seungmin said. “I watched him on the cameras every day, and I questioned him almost as often, while he was down here helping me out. His story never wavered, never changed. He never went out alone, he didn’t have a phone to contact people with, and he never touched the computers up in the PC room. Mostly he just spent time with Hyunjin or he baked.”
Changbin nodded slowly, taking it in. Yes, he could see now, the calculations Seungmin would have done, what he would have been on the lookout for. It was true, even Changbin knew, that Felix didn’t have any contact with the outside world. He’d been reluctant to even accept a cell phone, Chan had said to Changbin once, laughing at the time about how cute that was. Was it likely that Lee Jaerim would send his only son, his heir, on an undercover mission with no way of contacting him? No, it was not likely. But not likely was not a certainty.
“And if,” he repeated gently, “he were lying?”
“Then I would have told you,” Seungmin said, voice dropping back down to just about a whisper. “You, or Chan-hyung. I wouldn’t have— I wasn’t going to let him hurt anyone. If he’d done anything suspicious, I would have told someone.”
“And if he’d tried to hurt you,” Changbin said, “to keep his secret?”
That had been what had really, truly been playing on his mind the past couple of hours, after he had heard that Seungmin had known all along. For a while there, Seungmin had been the only one who knew, the only keeper of Felix’s secret. All this time, Seungmin had been in incredible danger and Changbin had not known it in the slightest. It had been the same feeling inside him as when he had come home to blood on the workroom floor and cuts on Seungmin’s face: Seungmin could have been lost to him forever and Changbin would have been in no position to stop it happening.
“He would have been stupid, to do it,” Seungmin said. “To even try it. If he’d killed me, he would have been the first suspect, just by virtue of being the latest addition.”
“Well, yes,” Changbin said, “but him being a prime suspect wouldn’t have stopped you being dead, Seungmin.”
Seungmin closed his eyes again. He would have heard the emotion in Changbin’s voice. Unlike Seungmin, Changbin wasn’t in the habit of hiding his emotions. It was what had made keeping this relationship a secret so much of a challenge for him.
“I know,” Seungmin said eventually. He opened his eyes again, looked at Changbin, for the first time, in the eye. Those eyes, so beautiful, always so dark, were not the eyes of someone who had taken any of this lightly. “I knew that, hyung. But I couldn’t have lived with the guilt, if he had died because of something I had said. It would have— I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.”
No, he couldn’t have, Changbin knew that well enough. Seungmin had made a career of being the person in the background, someone working with technology, computers, cameras: physical things, never messy in the way things often were on jobs, or when one was dealing with other humans. He kept himself at that distance, and so it made sense that he didn’t have the stomach, for looking someone in the eye and knowing that they would die as a result of a choice you made.
What difference was there, really, between Seungmin saying, this boy is the Magpie’s son, and Changbin lifting a gun and shooting someone in the chest? Fundamentally, nothing was different there. The only difference was that Changbin was good at his part. Seungmin not wanting that blood on his hands was not something to condemn him for.
“Thank you,” he said softly, “for telling me. I understand more, now.”
Seungmin’s fingers clenched around his, apparently involuntarily. “Hyung,” he said, his voice a little raw. “I didn’t want to keep it from you.”
He hadn’t, that much was obvious, just looking at him. Somehow it made Changbin feel worse, to know that for the past couple of months, Seungmin had just been— living with this. The stress of it, the pressure, the only one who knew the truth, and he had been unable to tell anyone about it. It must have weighed on him, and Changbin had not been able to help him with the burden of it.
“I know,” he said. “Of course I know that, Seungmin. And I don’t— I’m not angry with you. I understand why you made that choice. I don’t agree with that choice, but I understand it. Your reasons were— very valid.”
Seungmin let out a breath, and then he shuffled, just a little, along the couch, so that there was not as much space between their bodies. His knee pressed to Changbin’s thigh, their hands still clutched together, and after a moment of hesitation, he lay his head, tentatively, against Changbin’s shoulder.
Changbin immediately shifted so he could put his arm around Seungmin’s shoulders and hold him close. Seungmin made a small noise, seemingly something louder that got immediately repressed, and relaxed a little more.
“I hated it,” Seungmin said. “Keeping it from you. And I’m sorry that you had to find out in that way, in front of everyone.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t great,” Changbin said. It had been awful, actually, standing there and listening to this devastating secret being dropped in front of him, not knowing what to think, not knowing how to react. He had known even in that moment that Seungmin would have had his reasons but it had not made it easier to deal with. There had been something deeply shameful in that, in having not known, saved only by the fact that nobody else knew enough to know how shameful it was. Which—
“I almost called you baby, in the meeting,” he said. “I almost asked, baby, why didn’t you tell me, which would have been— bad.”
He thought Seungmin might, at best, snort. At worst, Changbin was probably about to catch an earful: how could you do something like that, that would have exposed us in front of everyone, you know I’m not ready for it, until Changbin had to do something to distract him from the scolding.
What he didn’t expect was for Seungmin to jerk upright, looking at him with wide eyes. His expression had cracked open completely and Changbin could see, clear and bright on his face, all those emotions that Seungmin so desperately didn’t want anyone, not even Changbin, to see. His love for Changbin was obvious, his stress and upset and the sheer fucking relief of it all.
A moment later, there were tears in Seungmin’s eyes, and he had to tilt his head back to stop them falling. Changbin wanted to tell him to not bother. “I was afraid,” he said, the words shuddering out of him, choked by those tears, “that I had ruined everything.”
Changbin’s heart ached for him. “Baby,” he said, and watched Seungmin lose his fight with the tears with a pulse of alarm. “Seungmin, no, that—”
“Not just this,” Seungmin said, pulling his hand away from Changbin’s so that he could scrub at his face, a little angrily. He hated to cry. “Not just what we have, although— I didn’t want that. But everything. I had kept it a secret and risked so much and ruined everything that we have here and I didn’t— I don’t want that, hyung, I don’t—”
Changbin put an arm around his waist and almost full-body hauled Seungmin over and halfway into his lap. He didn’t manage to get him all the way but it didn’t matter because Seungmin simply climbed the rest, putting his face into Changbin’s neck, his body shaking under Changbin’s hold as Changbin wrapped both arms around him. Anyone could come in now and see them like this, see Seungmin struggling to compose himself, see Changbin pressing soft, but firm, kisses to Seungmin’s hair, ear, cheek.
Anyone could come and see them. He didn’t care. He didn’t give a single shit.
Eventually Seungmin took another shuddering breath and went slightly limp in Changbin’s arms; the tears passing, the energy going out of him. What he had carried, these last couple of months, all of the pressure of knowing that if something went wrong because of what he had not said, he would be responsible, yet unable to make a different choice. Changbin stroked his hand down Seungmin’s spine.
“You haven’t ruined anything,” he said quietly, when he felt Seungmin tense a little against him, like the reality of it had just kicked in for him. The realisation that he had just sobbed in Changbin’s arms, some of the embarrassment stepping in. Changbin didn’t want that, he didn’t want Seungmin to think this wasn’t open for him. “Not a single thing. We’ll all get through this, somehow or another.”
Seungmin did sit up, just a little bit, just enough so that he could look down at Changbin. He didn’t move from Changbin’s lap, didn’t try to separate their bodies. He was all bones, sharp corners and skinny limbs, but so soft all the same, in his hoodie and pyjama bottoms, oversized on his frame. Changbin loved him so much that it was— shocking sometimes. He’d never thought he could have a love like this. Never thought it was something he could fit around his work, his dedication and loyalty to Chan.
And yet here was Seungmin, his face streaked with tears, but some of his usual composure settling back in, as he said, “You can’t promise that, though, hyung.”
“No,” agreed Changbin, lifting a hand to brush away some of the wetness on Seungmin’s face. “But I don’t need to promise it, I just need to know it. Everything is going to be okay, you’ll see.”
He believed it, he really did. He could see that Seungmin didn’t, not really, not after all the other times that something had fallen down around his ears, but he wanted to trust in Changbin, so instead of arguing, he just nodded. Then he put his head back against Changbin’s shoulder, his breath tickling the skin on Changbin’s neck, and let Changbin hold him.
——
Minho only came back to the house when the anxiety over not being in the same building as everyone finally overpowered the need to make sure that their territory was secure. It took less time than he’d fully expected, had planned on being out in the darkness, walking the streets with their broken streetlights, for a good long time. But as midnight drew nearer, and the air became colder and colder, he had found himself drifting closer and closer to the house, walking there in convoluted patterns until finally he was at the back door.
He had taken his phone, but kept it in his pocket, set to vibration mode so that he would know if he was being called or if he was simply getting a message. It had not mattered: nobody had contacted him. He had messaged Chan to let him know he would be leaving but he had banked on Chan not being in any kind of state to tell him to not go, and in the end his message had been read but not replied to.
Before today, before he’d seen Chan in his office, or watched him at the dining table, he’d thought sometimes about— the triumph, perhaps, of knowing what it was that Felix was lying about and being able to hold it up in front of Chan, as if to say, look at this, look at the truth of him. It was not that it had been a game, but there’d been a nasty part of Minho that had seen it as a chance to be right.
There was none of that now. He was not sorry that the truth had come out, but he was sorry for the devastation it had wrought on Chan. It was no pleasant thing, to see a man so strong brought so low.
His bedroom called to him as he climbed past it on the stairs, the locked closed door not a haven for him but something— something that he craved, all the same. But he knew that even if he went to bed, he wouldn’t sleep, not really. He thought that it was very possible that he would be in the house for just long enough that the need to return to patrol would grow stronger again and then he would be outside trailing the streets until the sun came up. It would be pointless, to go to bed, to lay there in the dark and let the anxiety consume him.
Instead, he climbed further, up to the third floor, where he went through the silent PC room, everything turned off, none of the PCs even humming in that teeth-grinding way. He turned on the lights in the hallway, those yellow-tinged fluorescents over his head, and then saw— the door to the holding room was slightly ajar, the room beyond dark.
Minho stood for a second, staring in confusion at it, and then, in a flurry of movement, he wrenched the door the rest of the way open and looked inside. There was no Felix curled up on the narrow mattress in there, no Felix standing inside the doorway to rush him, like Minho had been thinking he would be. There was no Felix whatsoever.
The panic spiked in him so hard and fast that for a moment it was like his vision blacked out. One moment he was looking at that empty room, the made-up bed, the plate on the floor still holding one of the dumplings that Hyunjin had brought down earlier, and then the next he was already moving, slamming the door shut and almost sprinting in his haste to get through the PC room again.
There had been no blood. His brief look had shown him that much, at least. So there’d likely been no struggle. But there wouldn’t have had to be one if, god forbid, Hyunjin had done the unthinkable and left the door unlocked, left an opening for Felix to escape. The repercussions of that hardly bore thinking about, but it was the most likely option. Minho needed to find Chan, needed to—
He burst out of the PC room and into the stairwell, so hard that he thought that if the door wasn’t reinforced like it was, he probably would have taken it off the hinges. Changbin was on the stairs, apparently running, although Minho barely spared him a glance. “Hyung!” Changbin called.
“Not now,” Minho said, voice a little too frantic, already halfway up the stairs, taking them two at a time at a run. “Felix is gone, I need to—”
“Hyung, stop, stop, I know where Felix is.”
Minho stopped so suddenly he almost lost his balance; he had to brace himself against the concrete wall. He whirled around to look down at Changbin, who was a few steps behind him, and looked like he was pleased Minho had stopped but— wary, too, at the glare on his face.
“Explain,” he snapped.
“When Hyunjin came down earlier, he took Felix up to his room with him,” Changbin said. There was a slight pant in his voice, from where he had been running up the stairs. “They’re upstairs together.”
Minho looked at him in sheer horror. The words were so awful that he could barely take them in. “You let him take Felix upstairs?” he asked, unable to believe it.
“I mean, he was going to do it whether or not I let him,” Changbin said.
Minho heard him as if he were coming from far away. He had been struck almost dumb by the realisation that while he was out, walking around the streets, Hyunjin had taken Felix up to the apartment — Hyunjin, who could not fight, who trusted Felix even now, had taken the Magpie’s son out of their holding cell, where they knew there was a locked door between him and the outside world, and invited him upstairs to where he could—
“It’ll be fine, hyung,” Changbin said. “Felix isn’t— he’s not a threat, I really don’t think he’s a threat.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Minho asked. His hands were shaking and he had to ball them up against his thighs to stop himself from grabbing Changbin by the throat and shoving him up against the wall in his anger at how Changbin had let this happen. How naive could Changbin be? Just like Chan, he was too inclined to trust in the best of people. “He’s up there— he’s up there with Jeongin, Changbin.”
He would have said more, but his throat closed up. Felix was upstairs, in that apartment, with Jeongin, who had stood up for him and loved him, in his way, and who, despite his words earlier, Minho knew could not easily raise a hand against Felix. Jeongin, who would be sleeping, an easy target like that, because he slept so soundly and deeply.
He would have turned to continue running up the stairs but before he could, he glanced at Changbin and caught sight of the expression on Changbin’s face. It was such a confusing look to Minho that it arrested him in motion, his attention snagged on it. Changbin was looking at him with— pity? Pity, perhaps, and some strange kind of empathy, and a wordless understanding. He looked, more than anything, like he simply felt sorry for Minho.
Chan told him, Minho thought, the realisation of it dropping his stomach out of his body. Chan told him how I feel about Jeongin.
How humiliating, how excruciating, to be standing here watching Changbin feel pity for him. To stand here knowing that Changbin knew how Minho felt, and yet was choosing not to say anything. Was that kindness? Changbin probably thought so, probably didn’t want to embarrass Minho, but he couldn’t know that even just Changbin knowing the truth of his feelings was almost more than Minho could bear.
He had not wanted anyone to know. He would have wanted to take this secret to his grave.
“Seungmin is watching the cameras,” Changbin said softly. “He’ll warn us if Felix tries to leave.”
Minho sneered at him, his heart pounding in his chest. He wanted to go to his room and curl up in the corner on the hard tiled floor and shake and shake. He wanted to go out the back door and run through the streets until he simply collapsed, sweating and winded. He wanted to go to the basement and punch a punching bag until his hands were nothing but blood and bone fragments, the way he had destroyed the head of that man who had broken Jeongin’s arm.
“I don’t trust Kim Seungmin to tell me shit,” he said. “And I don’t understand how the fuck you could, either.”
Changbin just looked at him, not saying anything, although his mouth twisted a little like he wanted to. Minho had no idea if he wanted to stick up for Seungmin or if he wanted to say something about Jeongin, because instead of staying and listening, he turned around and started up the stairs again, still taking them two at a time.
He didn’t take his shoes off in the apartment. He never did anyway but there was a spiteful part of him that was glad of that because he knew how much it annoyed Hyunjin, and even if Hyunjin couldn’t see him doing it right now, at least he knew that Hyunjin would be mad about it if he saw it. It would serve him right. He was risking too much, trusting Felix so much like this.
He went straight to Jeongin’s room, not bothering to soften his footsteps, although he knew how to move silently even in this apartment, with the creaks in the floorboards. He pushed open Jeongin’s bedroom door, feeling something like panic grip him as he did so, climbing his throat until he saw, in the light coming in from the hallway, the curled up form of Jeongin on the bed. Even from this distance, the easy, slow rise and fall of his breathing was obvious.
Minho— watched him. He wanted to go into the room, pad in silently and stand and look at Jeongin’s face. He was facing the door but he was half covered by his blanket, and Minho could not quite make out his features. But this was not a space he should so easily intrude on, no matter if Jeongin wouldn’t wake.
Jeongin wouldn’t, Minho knew. And it— terrified him, suddenly, the realisation that he could stand here in Jeongin’s doorway, could enter so easily, and Jeongin wouldn’t stir. He slept too deeply, too soundly for that, and Minho had, in the past, found that endearing — he had once watched Jeongin, asleep on the couch, sleep completely through Changbin yelling down the phone at someone or another who had messed an order up for Maniac. But right now, it terrified him, because Minho had never quite realised how vulnerable it made Jeongin.
He didn’t even lock his bedroom door. How trusting of the world he was. How Minho wanted to— protect that.
He stepped back into the hallway and closed Jeongin’s door with a quiet click. He lay his forehead against the surface of it, breathing carefully. In his head was the look on Jeongin’s face when he had said, you’re going to break his arm. The fear there. The way he had looked at Minho in a way that had not been fear for himself, or even really fear of Minho, but something else. Something that had made Minho think, oh, you are seeing me now.
He had never wanted Jeongin to see that truth. He had always wanted Jeongin to see that truth. The tangle of the thoughts in his head felt like they were tripping him as he tried to work out what to do. He’d upset Jeongin, he knew that much. Once the fear for Felix had faded, it had been replaced by anger. Jeongin, angry at Minho for proving to be the beast that everyone else always knew him to be.
Hyung, you make me feel safe, Jeongin had once told him. That had broken tonight, Minho thought. Shattered apart finally, from the force of Minho’s violence.
At least Jeongin wasn’t frightened of him, he supposed. He could not bear that, for Jeongin to cower from him. But he didn’t relish having Jeongin angry with him either. Far from it — there was a part of him, perhaps the biggest part, that felt like it was slowly collapsing under the weight of it, a bitter, extended crumbling. But he was used to punishment, used to having to do penance. He had learned to do that for the first time as a child, in that bathtub, his father’s hands holding him down.
He forced himself away from Jeongin’s bedroom door. Instead, he stepped back down the hallway, past the bathroom, and then to Hyunjin’s closed door. He didn’t try the door, to see if it was locked. Either way, it would wake Hyunjin, and as pissed as Minho was with him, there were things that even his soul could not countenance doing. Walking in unannounced in the middle of the night to Hyunjin’s bedroom was a line he could never cross.
Instead, he got down onto the ground, turning as he went so that his back was pressed up against the wood. He folded his arms across his chest, his feet set on the ground, knees bent up. His spine was flat against the door. If someone opened it, he would know. He would be able to stop them.
He hadn’t turned the light off. It was bright over his head, and he wished there was a way to— mute it, somehow. Turn down the brightness like volume. But maybe it would have to do, in lieu of punching his hands to shreds, or running until his lungs gave out. Maybe he could just sit here and keep vigilance in the bright hallway and make sure that nothing, nobody, could hurt Jeongin. Maybe that could be enough.
——
Chan gave up on sleep somewhere in the early hours of the morning, after he had done nothing but lay there in the dark staring blankly at the wall. He thought he had maybe slept a little after Jeongin put him to bed, his exhaustion finally overwhelming his body, but if that had been the case, it had been little enough sleep to not matter. He had spent most of the night just laying awake.
It was too big, in this bed. Years of being the only one to sleep in it, and it was all ruined after a matter of weeks. He lay with his back to the side that Felix normally slept on but he felt that absence like it was a drill boring a hole into his skull. There was nothing but cold, empty bed against his back, and it was a kind of agony to know about it.
He couldn’t bear it. He got up, sitting for a long few moments on the edge of the bed, his feet planted on the floor. Outside the bedroom curtains that Jeongin had forgotten to close before he left last night, and which Chan hadn’t had the energy to get up to close, it was still dark, without even that bluish cast to everything that came with sunrise at this time of year. Very early, then, earlier than even Chan was used to being up.
He made himself wash his face, brush his teeth, finally clearing the vague taste of vomit from his mouth. It took— so much energy to do it, to make himself even go through those motions. His body felt heavier than he could ever remember it being, his limbs dead and weighted, holding him down. After he had brushed his teeth he caught sight of himself in the mirror for a moment, and was arrested by the look of his own face: the paleness of his skin, the dry-redness of his mouth, the swollen bruises under his eyes. He looked, more than he had realised, exactly how he felt: like a man being punished for something.
He changed his clothes. The first thing he picked out, just from the top of his drawers, he realised as he held it up was a sweater that Felix had worn only the week before. Something about that, the realisation that so much of his wardrobe was— connected, in some way, to Felix, caused some of the nausea to rise up inside him again. He had to dig through his clothing until he found something he knew that Felix hadn’t worn: black sweatpants, a black t-shirt at the bottom of the pile, a zip-up hoodie stuffed to the back of a shelf in his wardrobe.
He had to take a long, bracing breath before he could face stepping outside of his bedroom door. There were many things he’d tried to never be, and a coward was one of them, but on a day like today, he wanted to be one. He didn’t want to go out there, where reality was going to set in, where he would be expected to make decisions, to— figure things out. Where he would have to be the leader, with everything that came with that.
But he couldn’t avoid it. Not permanently. So he made himself leave his room.
Outside, in the hallway, the lights were still on. For some reason, that surprised him more than the sight of Minho, sitting on the floor outside Hyunjin’s bedroom, his back against the door, his head drooped a little down towards his bent-up knees. Chan wasn’t sure if he’d been sleeping or not, but when Chan’s bedroom door clicked shut behind him, Minho’s head lifted and he looked right at Chan.
I know, Chan wanted to say, I know you were right, all along, but that wasn’t the look on Minho’s face, as he looked at Chan from the length of the hallway. He didn’t look like a man smug to have been right, or a man who was pleased about the situation. Mostly he just looked tired, his eyes more shadowed than normal.
“Hyung,” he murmured.
Chan came down the hallway to stand above him, trying to not loom as best as he could. Minho simply looked back up at him, uncurling only a small amount, lowering his knees but not moving his back from where it was pressed, solid and straight, to Hyunjin’s door.
Chan glanced at Jeongin’s closed door, and then Changbin’s, and then back to Minho. “What are you doing?” he asked. His voice raked out of him a bit, his throat— tender, after throwing up the night before.
“After the meeting broke up yesterday,” Minho said, his voice quiet, but hoarse himself; he clearly hadn’t used it for a few hours, “Hyunjin brought Lee Yongbok up here. I needed to make sure he didn’t get out.”
Chan couldn’t hide the flinch that use of Felix’s real name brought out in him, and so he didn’t bother. He let Minho see it, and watched as Minho chose to not comment on it. Chan looked at the wood of Hyunjin’s door, painted white to match the rest, and slowly let himself process the fact that Felix, rather than being a whole floor away, a locked door away, was instead just behind this one.
In there with Hyunjin, who had known before Chan, who it was that Felix really was, and who had chosen to keep that secret.
Was it a surprise, that Hyunjin would bring Felix upstairs? No, especially not when they had had him locked in the holding cell. A tiny room, locked from the outside, a place to simply be kept. No, maybe it wasn’t surprising in the slightest that Hyunjin would not have been able to stand seeing someone he loved in such a place.
He let out a slow, juddering breath. He felt like if he didn’t keep a grip on himself, on his thoughts and emotions, there was a quick downhill slide into madness waiting for him. Behind the tiredness, the exhaustion, the sheer mental weight of it all, was a maelstrom that would simply overpower him if he let it. So he was, by the skin of his gritted teeth, holding it at bay. But it had come that much closer, to know that Felix was just— there. Right behind that door.
“You should go get some sleep,” he said to Minho quietly. How long had Minho sat like this, propped up against the door? Chan knew as much as anyone how badly Minho did on a lack of sleep. “I’ll stay in the apartment, make sure that nothing— goes wrong.”
Minho looked at him, that same way he had looked at Chan when Chan had first stepped out of his bedroom. What was he seeing, in Chan’s face? There was no way that Minho could doubt that Chan would do the right thing, if it came down to it, not after yesterday. Hadn’t Chan proven himself, in some way?
The thought of that, of it being worded like that, genuinely made Chan worry he might throw up again.
Eventually, though, Minho just got to his feet. This didn’t seem like a particularly pleasant process; he was clearly stiff after a night spent on the floor, and Chan heard more than a couple joints pop as Minho hauled himself upright. Chan held out a hand to help him, at one point, but Minho either ignored it or didn’t see it in time. Once he was on his feet, Minho looked at Chan and said, “Hyung, do not leave this apartment.”
“I won’t,” Chan said.
Minho looked like there was more he wanted to say, perhaps more reminders for Chan to stay here, stay put, but maybe he saw it on Chan’s face: he wasn’t planning on going anywhere. He wouldn’t go down to his office, not while Felix was up here. So Minho just nodded and said, “Call me if you need anything.”
He left the apartment, looking, from the back, as upright as usual. Chan knew, in the back of his mind, that Minho was not actually going to go to sleep. He had no doubt that Minho was actually going to go back out on patrol, out into the cold, grey light of morning to walk the streets, to feel like he was doing something. Chan could have stopped him, could have forbidden it. He didn’t have the capacity for the argument this morning.
He went to the kitchen, where the lights felt too bright for his eyes. He made himself coffee, fitting the pot into the right place almost on autopilot before it hit him, suddenly and out of nowhere, the memory of Felix in here, fiddling with the machine, muttering to himself under his breath, as Chan stood next to him and cooked them both breakfast. For a moment, he could almost hear it, that low voice, murmuring softly.
No, he thought, not yet, clawing himself back, holding onto his composure as much as he could. He braced himself over the counter, listening to the coffee machine gurgling, letting the almost-white-noise of it keep his brain from thinking too much. Not yet, not yet, he told himself, watching the coffee drip into his cup, focusing on the steady splash of it.
When it was done, he took the cup to the table and sat down with it, at his usual spot. The spot he had sat in last night, where he had heard that Hyunjin and Seungmin had known, before he had, who Felix was. Who it was that Chan had taken into his bed, who it was that Chan had taken into his heart.
Okay, he thought, letting himself think about it, now. Hyunjin, he knew, had been worried that Chan would be angry with him about it; it was possible, too, that Seungmin was worried about the same thing, although he was far harder for Chan to read. He always had been, and probably always would be. But his anger at them, once he had calmed down from the initial shock, was strangely missing.
It was impossible to be angry with Hyunjin over it. Hyunjin hadn’t known, in those earlier days, and he had seemed— sorry, yesterday, sorry enough that it had penetrated through Chan’s misery. But maybe it was just that it was Hyunjin, who Chan loved in the same way he loved Jeongin, unconditional, familial. Hyunjin, who Chan had raised to be his own person, to know his own mind, able to make his own decisions. How could Chan be angry at seeing Hyunjin exercise that freedom?
Seungmin, perhaps, he could— resent. Maybe there was the ghost of something there, but he thought it was more just that he was surprised, to think of Seungmin, of all people, keeping a secret like this. Seungmin, who valued his own safety so completely that he spent every day sitting in front of a computer screen of camera feeds, watching everything that happened in and around the building. That same Seungmin had let the Magpie’s son walk into this house and let him put down roots enough that Chan had fallen into bed with him.
He would have to talk to Seungmin, get his reasonings, find out what had gone into the decision. But no, he didn’t think he was angry with Seungmin.
That seemed to be reserved for Felix. Only Felix.
He put his head in his hands for a moment, overwhelmed by the surge of emotion just thinking of Felix’s name brought up in him. Even now there was a part of him that struggled to reconcile Felix, the man who he loved, whom he had loved probably since before they had even become a couple, with Lee Yongbok, the only son of the Magpie. The heir to such a man, the successor to such a man.
The son of the man who had killed Chan’s brother.
He took in a breath, almost gulping it in a desperate attempt to keep himself from crying, from letting the tears out once again. Felix hadn’t known that, the first time they slept together, but he had known, later, heard about it from Chan’s own mouth. And yet he had continued to sleep with Chan, let Chan fall deeper and deeper in love with him. Had told Chan that he loved him back, knowing what it was that they truly were to one another.
It made Chan feel genuinely sick to think about. All of those memories of sex with Felix, previously warm and soft-tinted, now felt like there was something crawling over them, something many-legged and foul. Something corrupted, something corrupting. Chan had wanted to sleep with Felix, freckled and sweet and pretty. He had not wanted, would not ever have wanted, to sleep with the only son of Lee Jaerim.
Was there room in Chan for forgiveness for that? He didn’t know. He genuinely didn’t. He was furious with himself for even contemplating it, for wanting to do it. But in his head, also, was the way Felix had sounded when he had said, I just didn’t want to be his son. I didn’t want you all to look at me and only see him, I wanted to start anew, how real and raw and true it had sounded.
Chan didn’t know what to do, was the heart of it. The real meat of the matter, when he got down to it. He did not know what to do. And the others would expect him to have made a decision, to sit down with them and tell them all, this is what we’ll do. But he wasn’t capable of it, wasn’t capable of figuring out his own mind, never mind what to do with this god awful mess they found themselves in.
A door creaked open down the hallway. Then there were footsteps, light and soft, and then the bathroom door opening and closing. Chan knew without having to look that it was Felix. Hyunjin and Jeongin were not in the habit of getting up to go to the bathroom in the night — or morning, as the case may be — and besides, Chan didn’t need to know that, to know that those footsteps belonged to Felix. Had he not spent the last few weeks listening to those exact same steps as Felix padded his way to the en suite?
There was a kind of— energy, inside him, as he sat there waiting for the toilet to flush. He could not have explained what that energy was, only that it was not a good thing. He waited until he heard the sound of the sink before he pushed himself to his feet and went, carefully, to the entrance of the hallway and stood there, feet slightly apart, waiting for the bathroom door to open.
Felix, when he came out, spotted him right away. His eyes went wide and instead of stepping into the hallway properly, he pressed himself against the wall, right against the bathroom door frame, his shoulders curved so that it almost looked as though he was trying to disappear into it. The fear was obvious on his face, the way he blinked at Chan, the way he almost seemed frozen there.
He’s afraid of me, Chan thought. Felix was tired and afraid, and it was all thanks to Chan, all because of Chan. He hated it, down to his very bones. He hated to think that he was the reason that Felix looked like that, felt like that. And yet, part of him insisted, wasn’t it good that Felix was scared of him? After what Felix had done to him, wasn’t it right that Felix was afraid in this moment?
Another part of him whispered, This is how he would have looked around his father. This small, timid thing. Scared. This is how he would have looked when his father would beat him, how he would have looked when he got those scars that you kissed so gently.
No, it wasn’t good that Felix was afraid of him. It was not good at all.
And yet Chan couldn’t blame Felix one bit for his fear because the last time they had been in a room together, Chan had ordered his death. Felix didn’t know what Chan now knew, what he had maybe known even as he had given the order: he could not bear for Felix to die. He probably would have stopped Minho, in the end, but that didn’t matter, that wasn’t worth shit, because he had still given that initial order. He had still, in the moment, been willing to let it happen.
They looked at each other, along the length of the hallway. Felix was silent, his face pale, his tiredness obvious. Had he slept, unlike Chan? It didn’t look much like it, he looked drawn and wan, similar to how he had looked in those first few days. Was that another piece of evidence in his defence? That starvation, that exhaustion, had certainly been real.
Chan wanted to— go to him, wanted to fold him into a hug. Wanted to kiss that perfectly shaped mouth, let the comfort of it seep down into his skin and muscles. He’d grown too used to having that, the past few weeks. Long days of work, upsets with the club or other business, job planning gone awry: all of it fixed, his bad mood soothed, just by being able to kiss Felix.
He wanted that back. He wanted his Felix back.
What was he supposed to do, when what had caused him so much pain this time, was Felix himself?
“We’re going to have a group meeting later,” he said eventually. His voice was still hoarse, especially since he hadn’t actually managed to drink any of his coffee yet. Felix didn’t move when he spoke other than to press, a little harder, into the wall. “Including you. We need to figure out if you can stay here, going forward. And what we’re going to do, about the— job. Your job.”
Felix didn’t move, didn’t speak. He just kept looking at Chan with that empty, tired expression. His eyes were a little red. Had he cried more, in Hyunjin’s bed? Had Hyunjin comforted him, where Chan could not?
“No one is going to hurt you,” Chan said. It was almost against his better judgement, to make that promise, but it was true, and he knew it. He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt Felix the way he seemed to still be afraid of. “If you can’t be here, you’ll be allowed to go.”
It was hard to imagine Felix wanting to stay. Hard to imagine him wanting to remain in a place where someone who had claimed to love him had been so willing to simply— snuff the life out of him.
He can’t leave, he thought, almost hysterical with it, he doesn’t have any money. Then, on the back of it, I can give him money. The thought wasn’t— soothing, not really. How could there still be such a big part of him that couldn’t bear the thought of Felix not being around anymore?
After a moment, Felix nodded, a short little motion. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even open his mouth. Nothing about his body language changed. He was still scared, so scared of Chan, and it made Chan want to cry. It made him want to— say good, petty and spiteful. It made him want to go to Felix and pull him into his arms and whisper, it’s okay, I forgive you, I’m sorry too.
He took a step back, just enough to indicate a dismissal. Felix immediately skittered into motion, taking the few steps it took until he could slip back through the door into Hyunjin’s bedroom. There wasn’t any sound from inside there, so Hyunjin must have still been asleep. Chan thought he already knew that: if Hyunjin had been awake, he would have come out here to interrupt the conversation.
He made himself return to the table, made himself take a sip of his coffee, lukewarm and slightly bitter with it now. His hands were shaking, the coffee sloshing in the cup as he held it. He still didn’t know what the fuck to do. Seeing Felix face-to-face had clarified absolutely nothing for him— but it had done something else.
It had made the stomach-churning, horrible thought of maybe he was my Felix all along get louder inside of him.
He didn’t want that to be true. Let the truth be anything but that. He didn’t want to have been the one to sentence his Felix to death. He couldn’t stand that. It would have been the worst of everything, for that to be true, and yet Chan was starting to see it, with awful clarity, that it probably was true. That it had probably always been true, all along.
All this talk of forgiveness. Chan had almost had him killed. Was it Felix who needed forgiving, in this situation?
——
If it weren’t for Hyunjin, Felix knew there was no way he would have been able to step outside of that bedroom and into the apartment proper. Brave, Chan had once called him, but Felix had known then that he wasn’t, and he wasn’t now, either. Nothing about him was brave. He was just scared, and tired: tired because he was scared and scared because he was tired, an ongoing loop of awfulness.
“Come on,” Hyunjin murmured, as he closed the bedroom door after them. “It’ll be okay, angel, I promise.”
He’d promised that the night before, too, a promise that they both knew he could not make and keep. Felix clung harder to his arm but made his feet take the steps forward necessary to follow the faint murmur of voices out in the main room, until they emerged out and found that it was Changbin talking quietly to Chan. Seungmin sat at his usual place at the table, his hands pressed flat to the surface.
They all looked over as Hyunjin and Felix came into the room, the conversation cutting off. Felix came to a stop, feeling just as he had earlier in the morning, when it had just been him and Chan in the hallway. Frozen with all that he felt: the fear, mostly, and the guilt, the regret; the feeling of reverting, somehow, like his true identity being found out had transformed him back into his father’s son. But not the son that they thought of in their heads, not that heir, that potential apple of a monster’s eye.
No, this was the truth of it, of being the Magpie’s son: this gripping, choking fear, the feeling of the ground constantly shifting under his feet. The aching of his jaw as he clenched it shut rather than say anything that might bring violence down upon him.
Hyunjin paused too, waiting with him, maybe. Chan looked at the two of them, his face and eyes empty. He had been impossible to read in the hallway earlier this morning and he was impossible to read now. Felix knew he shouldn’t, but he hated it, the way that he thought he knew Chan, or at the very least was coming to get to know him, the way he ticked. He had cherished that understanding. Now it was crumbled into dust at his feet and he only had himself to blame.
It was Changbin who broke the silence. “Why don’t you sit down,” he said, very gently.
Felix let Hyunjin shuffle them forward but when Hyunjin tried to guide him down into his seat, Felix couldn’t bear to let go of Hyunjin’s hand. Hyunjin understood, the way he understood so many things about Felix, and instead of making Felix let go, he sank into his own seat at the end of the table still holding Felix’s hand. There was something about the tilt of his head, the set of his shoulders, that indicated very strongly that he had his opinions on how this meeting would go.
A door down the hallway quietly opened and shut and then Jeongin came into the room. He was dressed very casually and comfortably, in sweatpants and a sweater, but he moved in a similar way to how Hyunjin was sitting. Felix already knew that Jeongin could be stubborn — sometimes, when they went to the grocery store together, Jeongin could insist that he could carry everything home, and Felix had learned quickly to not bother arguing — but it was the first time that he had seen that stubbornness expressed purely through body language.
“Hello,” he said, but was mostly greeted by silence, only Changbin saying, good morning, Jeongin. Jeongin didn’t seem to mind. He went, first, to Chan, and lay a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, a little. Chan lifted a hand and covered the one squeezing, but it didn’t seem he had a smile even for Jeongin.
Felix couldn’t bear to look at his face. Instead he looked down at the table, blinking away the sudden burst of tears in his eyes. How could a person cry so much? How could there be more to give? And yet there was, he could feel it inside him. More tears, more hurt, and nothing to be done about it.
The chair next to Felix slid out, and when he glanced across he found it occupied by Jeongin. He was confused for a second, because that was not Jeongin’s usual seat. Usually he sat opposite, on Chan’s other side, facing—
Facing Minho, he realised, with a sick surge of fear through him at the thought. Of course, he hadn’t put that one together yet. It was Minho who sat on this side of him, or at least, this was Minho’s seat, because Felix had never actually attended a team meeting where Minho had used the chair. But he knew it was Minho’s, because he had seen Minho in it before, seen him and Jeongin sitting facing each other when he’d stumbled across them eating meals together.
He looked at Jeongin, who looked back and gave him, fleetingly, a little smile. He’d done it on purpose, then, taken this seat instead of leaving it open for Minho. Felix almost sagged in relief. This would mean he’d have to sit with Minho on the other side but that was okay. It was easier to feel less in danger, when there was an entire table between you and the other person.
Changbin checked his phone and said, “Minho and Jisung are on their way.” Hyunjin made a little scoffing noise. Felix wasn’t sure which of them it was supposed to encompass.
The door to the apartment opened, the sudden beeping of the keypad making him jump a little, but only Hyunjin would have noticed. Jisung came in first, slipping his shoes off in the doorway, and then Minho, who didn’t bother to do likewise. The moment he came into the room, his eyes were focused on Felix, a scowling angry look that made Felix clutch a little harder at Hyunjin’s hand, and then feel ashamed of it. But Hyunjin just squeezed his hand back and said, his own scowl on his face, “Hyung, don’t do that.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Hyunjin,” snapped Minho. Felix flinched again. Jisung gave Minho a glance over his shoulder, Felix unable to see what his face was doing, but Changbin gave him an outright warning look. Hyunjin, for his part, didn’t seem at all bothered by the venom in Minho’s tone. He just rolled his eyes.
He really didn’t fear these people. Felix— envied him that, a little bit.
Minho stalked forward a couple of steps and then seemed to realise for the first time that his chair was occupied. He stopped, looking at Jeongin, and for a moment there was a flicker of something over his face that was not that anger, not the one that promised violence. Felix could not have said what it was, that emotion, perhaps Jeongin knew, but whatever it was, it made Jeongin straighten up even further in his seat, his body tilted just to the side so that for a brief moment, his shoulder touched Felix’s.
Minho didn’t say anything. His jaw worked, a muscle jumping there, and after a few seconds of absolute silence, he came forward and took the chair that Jeongin would have been sitting in. This put him right next to Seungmin, who didn’t bother to hide the way he shifted his seat away from Minho and closer to Hyunjin.
There was a brief stretch of silence. Felix looked down at the table but he could feel Minho’s eyes still boring into him, but when he looked up again, Seungmin was looking at him too. He gave Felix a very tight, but seemingly genuine, smile. Felix was so grateful to Seungmin for having admitted that he knew the truth; he just hoped, so much, that he hadn’t caused any long-lasting trouble for Seungmin.
After a few seconds, Jisung said, “Soooo.”
Changbin sighed, very heavily. At the head of the table, Chan still looked exhausted, like he wasn’t up for any of this, and oh, how Felix hated doing this to him. To have been the cause of this pain. Chan, though, visibly rallied, and said, “I’m going to preface this by saying that I’ve already spoken to Felix, and let him know that we will not be hurting or harming him in any way.”
A ripple went through the room, some of the tension seeming to bleed out of it a little. Well, apart from where Minho sat, because he clearly was not happy about that proclamation. He wasn’t going to hurt Felix right now but he did not seem like he had, personally, crossed out the possibility for the future.
Jeongin, however, put a hand on Felix’s knee and squeezed briefly before lifting it off again. Felix tried to not react to that, but he wanted to. He wanted to cover Jeongin’s hand with the one not still holding Hyunjin’s and return the gesture.
“I want to ask you, Felix,” said Chan. Felix looked at him, found Chan looking back at him, but not quite. He seemed to be doing that thing that Felix had done a lot with his father and his father’s associates: looking just past Felix, or perhaps just focused on his ear or something, so that he was at once looking someone in the face but not having to look at them. Felix wanted— Chan to look him in the eye. Wanted him to see what it was that Felix wanted him to see. “Is there anything that you’ve held back? Anything that you haven’t told us?”
Felix wet his mouth a little. “I—” he started, and then stopped. Everyone was looking at him now, their attention focused solely on him, and it was making his heart pound. He had to take a moment to collect his thoughts. “Nothing about me. Only things about the job. There’s some stuff I couldn’t tell you before.”
“You held back information about a job that has the potential to get us all killed?” Minho asked, his voice scathing.
“Nothing like that,” Felix said, quiet in the face of that tone of voice but trying to be firm, trying to— get the truth across. “Nothing— important like that. Just— some extra stuff. Stuff that you didn’t necessarily need to know in order to do the job.”
The first time they had had a meeting like this, in the kitchen, Changbin had been hopped up on the counter beside Jisung, the two of them perched there side by side. Today, he was standing just behind Chan, the way he had done that first time in Chan’s office. A silent show of support, Felix thought, a reminder of Changbin’s position in this group. “Tell us now,” Changbin said to Felix. “Please.” But it was not a request, not with that tone of voice. It was an order.
Felix nodded, took a deep breath. Hyunjin shifted so that their shoulders bumped a little and Felix wasn’t sure if it was done on purpose or not but it helped him untangle the words stuck in his mouth. “The vault,” he said. “I was vague to being with, about what it is that’s actually in there, because I couldn’t have explained how I’d actually seen inside it. But it’s not just money. It’s— my father is meticulous.” Something of an understatement: he was the kind of man who noticed the slightest thing nudged out of place in a room. “He keeps records of everything, just in case, and he keeps his ledgers in the vault. And he’s scamming his business partners. Every single one of them.”
Another pause, as they took that in. He saw Chan glance over his shoulder at Changbin, who had an eyebrow raised. Up on the counter, Jisung wasn’t swinging his legs back and forth for once. He looked serious, his arms folded across his chest loosely.
“Physical ledgers or electronic?” Seungmin eventually asked, leaning across the table a little to get Felix’s attention.
“Both,” said Felix. “A lot of the newer stuff is electronic but these ledgers go back— a long time. This isn’t a new practise, or a discriminate one. He is fleecing every person he works with. He just can’t help himself.”
Felix hadn’t known about it until his father had given him access to the vault security system for upgrades, and Felix had gone digging around for— something that even then he hadn’t really thought he would have a chance to use. Then he had seen, the real ledgers and the fake ones his father created, the ones which didn’t show all the money he was skimming off the top, from every single person he worked with. Felix had known, before that, about all the ways his father screwed over vendors for the casino, contractors hired to do work there or at home.
It was like he said: his father simply could not help himself. Felix thought it was like a compulsion, the need to— get one over the people around him. To prove himself smarter, perhaps. For those below him on the pecking order, it was a flex of his power, since they could do nothing about it. For those he claimed to view as equals, it would give him a rush, to know that he was pulling the wool over their eyes.
“And these ledgers,” Chan said, a little intently, a little bit like he had spoken their first meeting together, when Felix had brought up having the plans to Blackbird’s, “they would prove that?”
“Yes. And—” He was, he realised, leaning even further into Hyunjin now, and tried to straighten up as subtly as possible, as little as he wanted to do so. “Some of these people are dangerous, to say the least. If they ever found out what was going on, it would not end well for my father.”
This, Felix knew to his bones, and his father knew it too. It was, he thought, probably another large part of why his father was trying to track him down and bring him in, because even just Felix mentioning the possibility of such a thing would cause problems. Felix had met most of his father’s business partners, the people that he worked with, and had thought, at the time, that his father was either very brave or very stupid, to be playing around with some of these people in this way.
Minho reminded him of some of those people, except even now, he knew they were— worse. Minho, at least, was not cruel. Not like they so obviously had been.
“Like who?” asked Changbin.
“The Red Tiger group,” said Felix. “Noxus and their associated clans.” Someone from Noxus had once asked his father, drunk and leering at Felix sitting meek and quiet at his father’s side, how much for a night with his son. His father had laughed it off as a joke and then beaten Felix for, as far as Felix could tell, the crime of being pretty. If Chan wanted to know, Felix could tell him exactly which of the scars Chan had kissed had been inflicted upon him that night. “Bae Gahee. Most recently, he started working with Kim Hodong, the weapons dealer, after Hyunjae-hyung cut ties.”
Changbin whistled under his breath. Up on the counter, Jisung said, “Well, shit.”
“You said, originally, that we could use this just to prevent him coming after us,” Minho said, a little low, but less scathing, less nasty, than before. “But that was always just a failsafe, in case he figured out that it was us. This kind of information— if this leaked, it could destroy him. It would destroy him.”
“Yes.” Felix almost whispered it, his voice so small. “That’s what— I was always hoping we would do just that, afterwards. Once you saw what it was that you had.”
“Shit,” said Jisung again. Seungmin was looking at Felix with a raised eyebrow; there was something on his face that almost looked impressed. Did they think him cold-blooded, to be willing to cause the death of his father like that? Because they knew what it would mean, what Minho had meant when he used the word destroy. If this information leaked, with the proof that Felix knew existed, it would be a race to see who could kill the Magpie first.
The only thing inside Felix when he thought about that was regret, that he had not thought to use the information earlier, and a desire in him that was not hot, nothing like the desire that he felt for Chan. This was a cold thing, numbing down to his bones. He thought he understood, sometimes, why people poisoned others over long periods of time, watching as they got sicker and weaker. Sometimes he thought he understood his father, too, when he had stood over Felix, bleeding and aching and quiet with it, like he had been taught, with that pleased look on his face.
Sometimes you just had to watch a person you hated suffer. That’s what Felix wanted for his father. He wanted him to feel fear, and he wanted him to suffer.
“I think,” he said, with sudden boldness, “that was why he killed my sister. I— I can’t confirm it. I have literally no evidence of this. But she was— the pretty one, according to him.” It had always sickened Felix, the way his father had said that. The way he had spoken about her looks — not like he had wanted them for himself, but like they were simply another asset in his arsenal. Felix’s looks had been a flaw, but his sister’s had been something he could use. “He wanted to marry her off to a prospective business partner, an older guy, much older, but she was still in high school so it got put off. But she didn’t want it, I know she didn’t, and I think she dug something up on him. She was smart like that, she would have found something she could have used to get out of it. And I think he killed her for it.”
“A man like that,” murmured Changbin, “information like this? It would make sense.”
It did make sense. It always had made sense, to Felix, and he hated it. He hated that his sister had simply been trying to grab at her own freedom, a chance to get out from under her father’s thumb, and instead managed to lose her life in the process. And her brother had stood there, in that room, and watched it happen, and only then, only once she was dead, had he tried to do anything about the man who had tormented them their entire lives.
Chan sat back in his chair, the wood creaking a little under his weight. He looked haunted, perhaps at the reminder of how closely Felix’s sister’s story matched with that of his brother. Two precious people dead because of the Magpie, the trajectory of their sibling’s lives changed forever. Perhaps it was simply the knowledge that Felix had not been lying about his dead sister.
“Okay,” he said, his voice tired and soft because of it. “We should discuss, as a team, what our next steps are. If we wanted to continue with this job. And we should decide— if Felix should stay, or go. I want us to— be clear about where our comfort lies.”
Felix hoped, deep down, that Chan might continue, might say that— he wanted Felix to stay. It was a foolish hope. There had been nothing, thus far, to suggest Chan would, or even could, forgive Felix. Nothing to hint that he wished for Felix to remain.
Chan looked around, dark circles stark, waiting for the others to speak. Would he be relieved, Felix wondered, if they kicked him out? It would be easier to heal with Felix gone, to begin to pick the pieces up of their wounded little family and pretend he’d never existed at all. He almost couldn't stand the thought of staying, if Chan wanted him gone. If any of them wanted him gone, really, it would be a difficult fact to live beside. To always feel he was intruding, unwanted and untrusted.
Perhaps he should simply offer to go.
Unsurprisingly, it was Minho who spoke first. “He can’t stay here,” he said, very firm. Felix breathed through the way his heart was fluttering rabbit-fast in his throat. “Even if he’s telling the truth, that would be insanity. We cannot continue to harbour the heir of the Magpie, it’s too dangerous.”
“You don’t get to decide that,” Jeongin said, almost snapping it out. Again that flicker of something across Minho’s face that Felix could not parse. “We should all get a say.”
“Well,” said Changbin, “maybe we vote on it—”
“If he goes,” Hyunjin said, “then I leave with him.”
There was silence. The ringing kind, like every sound had just been sucked out of the room. The kind like Hyunjin had just tossed a grenade into the middle of the room and nobody had any idea what to do with it now. Chan and Changbin’s faces went completely slack with shock. Even Minho, sitting across the table, looked thrown by it.
Felix felt nothing but a spike of pure, overwhelming panic, as he whipped his head around to look at Hyunjin, who only looked at him from the corner of his eye, most of his attention on the room at large. “Hyunjin, no?” Felix said, feeling frantic, his voice coming out higher than usual. “No. You can’t leave with me.”
“I can,” said Hyunjin. “I will.”
He was still mostly looking out at the room, but Felix could not have said what was happening out there because he was clutching at Hyunjin’s arm, desperately trying to get Hyunjin to look at him, to focus on him so he could see how little Felix wanted this. “Hyunjin,” he said, feeling wretched in every part of himself, “please, don’t— this is your home, you can’t—”
“If you make him leave,” Hyunjin said, none of his attention seemingly on Felix, totally implacable, “I will go with him.”
Felix could no longer help himself: he burst into tears. They came upon him so thick and fast that it was like he was, for a second, utterly consumed by his misery. He hated this, he hated everything about this. The last thing he wanted, the very last thing, was for Hyunjin to leave his home, his family, just because of Felix. It was hitting him, finally, just how loyal Hyunjin was to him, what it was that their connection really was. It had always been something so comforting for him but right now it was terrifying. It was scaring him more than he could put into words.
Hyunjin finally turned to him, the hard, determined expression melting off his face as he took in the tears, whatever it was that Felix’s own face was doing. He started to wipe Felix’s tears, his fingers very gentle. “Don’t cry, angel,” he said quietly. “You won’t be alone. I won’t let you be alone.”
Felix sobbed. He didn’t know how to argue against this, how to make Hyunjin see — especially when Felix didn’t want to be alone, not again, not like last time, when he’d had nothing but the clothes in a threadbare backpack and a dwindling supply of money. Of course Hyunjin had seen that, seen what it was that scared Felix deep down inside. Hyunjin had always seen him.
But Felix saw him too. And there was a note to Hyunjin’s voice that let Felix know that although Hyunjin was not bluffing, not in the slightest, not about any of it, he also hadn’t realised how deep this bond between them went. It was hitting him, too, in this moment, the reality sinking in hard.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, but Felix didn’t know who he was talking to. He could feel fingers, very light, against his back, and thought it must be Jeongin, but he couldn’t look, to see.
Nobody asked if Hyunjin was serious. It was obvious from his voice that he was, that he was telling the absolute truth. It was Changbin, though, who said, “Hyunjin, you can’t leave.”
He sounded heartsick at the mere idea, horrified at the thought of Hyunjin leaving. Of course he would — Felix had barely been living with them for any time at all before he had realised just how much Changbin loved Hyunjin. He hadn’t even known the specifics of their relationship, what it was, exactly, that they were to one another, but he’d known that. Now, knowing what he did know, knowing how the joke of I raised you was barely a joke, it was not surprising to Felix that Changbin couldn’t bear this.
He managed to lift his head, his vision blurred with the tears still flowing out of him. He saw Changbin looking at Chan, who was looking across the table at Hyunjin and Felix with an expression that, even through the tears, Felix could tell was shaken.
“If I’m not leaving, then Felix isn’t leaving,” Hyunjin said. His hand was still wiping Felix’s tears away. “He’s staying here, with me.”
The room felt like it had done the day before when Jeongin had put his foot down and demanded that they listen to Felix’s story. Even Felix knew that Hyunjin’s words had settled the deal for them, and Felix— did not know what to do, to say. If they’d wanted him to leave, he would have gone. But now none of them would make him, even if they wanted to. He was grateful. He was wretched.
“Hyunjin,” he said tearfully.
Hyunjin shushed him, very gently, but firmly. His fingers were so careful still against Felix’s skin, as he looked back up at the others. He had the same set to his shoulders that he’d had at the beginning, and Felix wondered— did he have this tucked away in his back pocket the entire time? Had Hyunjin always known, from before the two of them had even entered the room, what he was going to say? This ultimatum already planned, knowing that they’d never allow it, that Chan and Changbin would cave instantly to him.
“Fine,” said Minho eventually, puncturing the silence that had settled over them all, broken previously only by the way Felix was still trying to stop crying. “Fine, he can stay.”
Felix looked at him, surprised to hear that from Minho. He had expected Minho to be the last hold out, to be the one to say something like, Okay then, get out, you brat. But as reluctant as the words obviously were, as annoyed as he obviously was to have had the acquiescence pulled from him by force, he was not looking at Hyunjin like he resented him. He was looking at Hyunjin like he, too, couldn’t fathom the idea of Hyunjin leaving, not being here with his family.
“But,” Minho added, voice harder, “he’s not to be alone, not ever. He goes nowhere without someone there watching him.”
“He never goes anywhere alone anyway,” Hyunjin threw back. He didn’t even look smug or relieved by Minho’s capitulation. He just looked as annoyed by the whole situation as he had done the entire time.
Felix felt vaguely like he might faint again, was glad to be sitting down. He could not quite stop his tears.
Seungmin cleared his throat, a very quiet noise. “What about the job?” he asked, looking away from Felix’s crying face, Hyunjin’s stubborn one.
Chan very visibly had to mentally set himself back on track. His face had gone a bit pale. “I need to think about it,” he said, the words rasping out of him. “This— some of this information might change things. I want to talk about it with— Minho and Changbin.”
Changbin stepped forward, placing a firm hand on Chan’s shoulder. “Then we can regroup, come back to it once we’ve talked more about it,” he said, and he was only a little more steady than Chan. “It’s not a time sensitive job, we can take that time. Okay, hyung?”
Chan nodded weakly, sighing. It was a sorrowful, exhausted kind of sigh, his eyelids drooping. Felix was still crying a bit and that sigh almost made him start up all over again. He wanted desperately to go to Chan, to gather him close and soothe him with the warmth of his body, cradle his face and kiss the delicate lavender skin beneath his eyes. He wanted Chan to find peace in him, comfort, as he had done these past few weeks. But that was over. It could not happen again.
Felix did begin crying all over again as he had that realisation, an ugly little hitching sort of noise falling unbidden from his mouth. He pressed a hand over his mouth to try and stifle it.
Hyunjin got to his feet, winding an arm around Felix and tugging gently. “I’m taking Felix back to my room,” he said as Felix unsteadily stood, leaning heavily against Hyunjin’s side.
Nobody protested. Beneath it all, there was something remarkably similar to that first night about all of this. The suspicion, the lingering feeling of waiting. Except Felix on that night had hope, and determination. The Felix of right now was not sure he wanted to even try for either of those things.
He let himself be herded, meek and cowardly, into the sanctuary of Hyunjin’s room.
“Hyunjin,” Felix gasped wetly, once the door was shut between them and the rest of the apartment. Hyunjin shushed him, pushing him down to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Not now, baby, you need to breathe, need to rest,” Hyunjin said softly, trying to nudge Felix into laying down, but Felix wouldn’t let himself go.
He grabbed Hyunjin’s forearms, fingertips catching on Hyunjin’s sweatshirt. “I can’t stay,” he said, clutching harder when Hyunjin made to gently pull away. “I can’t— Hyunjin, I can’t bear the way Chan-hyung is looking at me.”
Hyunjin’s eyes took on a shuttered quality as he opted to stop trying to pull away and instead knelt beside Felix, putting their faces nearly level. “Felix,” he said, bracing, almost, and Felix’s fingers on his forearms spasmed. Hyunjin wasn’t listening.
“If he wants me gone, then I want to be gone,” Felix said, knowing he was— wild, almost, in his desperation.
“We can go, if that really is what you need,” Hyunjin said calmly, meeting Felix’s eyes.
“No no no,” Felix said, frantic with it. He felt like the walls were closing in, the steady, sinking realisation that he was trapped here like a noose slowly closing around his neck until he couldn’t breathe. He needed to leave, he had to, but he could not do so if it would drag Hyunjin with him. “No. You can’t come.”
“I’m not letting you go alone,” Hyunjin said simply, Felix’s panic breaking upon that resolve like the sea upon stone. “I don’t want to leave, but I can’t stay here, never knowing where you are. If you’re even still alive. I think it would break something in me.”
“And leaving wouldn’t?” Felix cried.
He thought of all Hyunjin had here, a family after nearly a decade of solitude and misery. Of his love for Jisung, still budding, yet to bloom. Felix could not take him from that.
Hyunjin did not flinch. “It’s my choice.”
“You’re forcing my hand,” Felix accused, letting him go only to grab at the collar of his sweatshirt, fisting the fabric and shaking Hyunjin lightly. He wanted Hyunjin to— crack, to show him something real, not this blank facade. He wanted to scream. “You know I won’t leave if it means you’ll follow. Just like you knew they wouldn’t kick me out, if it meant making you leave too.”
Hyunjin’s hands came up, gentle, encircling Felix’s wrists lightly. They looked small, breakable, under those hands. “Felix—” he said, still that same neutral tone.
Felix stood suddenly, unable to bear being still. He stepped out from between Hyunjin and the bed, backing away swiftly. “I don’t want you to come!” he shouted down at Hyunjin who’d frozen, peering up at him, his hands still raised. Felix backed up so far he hit the desk, the edge unyielding against his lower back, and on it all the jars and brushes jostled, the sound delicate and tinkling.
He wasn’t far enough. He wanted to run, and run. Until it was all he could feel, the strike of his feet on unyielding pavement, the cold winter air searing his lungs. Nothing but that.
Hyunjin stood, every movement careful, like Felix was a feral animal that might lash out. He came closer. “Lix.”
Felix slid along the desk, until he hit the wall, knocking sketchbooks and pencils onto the floor. Something on the desk fell over and he didn’t know what, couldn’t even look to check. “I don’t want it, Hyunjin!” he cried, as Hyunjin came closer, his hands outstretched carefully. Felix held his own hands out, a motion to try to ward Hyunjin back. “I don’t— I don’t—”
Hyunjin grabbed his wrists, and this time his hands weren’t gentle. They weren’t rough, either, perhaps Hyunjin never would be rough with him, but the grip was firm and warm on Felix’s skin. Holding him still, holding him here.
His vision blacked out, and he struggled mindlessly, nowhere to go: he’d trapped himself against the wall. He kicked out, writhing, and was vaguely aware of the sounds scraping out of him, raw sobbing cries. Hyunjin didn’t let go, followed him when Felix squirmed his way right down onto the floor.
“Felix,” he heard faintly, “Felix.”
Felix wasn’t Felix for a long, drawn out several minutes.
When he was Felix again, when he was human again, he found himself held firmly. His hands were freed, but caught up in fabric, and his face was tucked into a shoulder. Warm, it was warm, it felt— safe. For a delirious moment Felix thought it was Chan, holding him so tightly, arms clutching Felix close, making him feel small.
It wasn’t Chan.
He could smell Hyunjin’s shampoo. Could see, when he opened his eyes, Hyunjin’s red hair, vibrant, at the corner of his vision.
He was still sobbing, his chest hitching with it. He held Hyunjin back, muffling himself against Hyunjin’s shoulder. But his body was tired out, the panic receded some. It left— little behind. Felix felt like he had been ravaged, like fire took a forest. Smouldering ashes and charcoal where there had once been life.
Hyunjin loosened his hold a little, feeling the way Felix had gone lax. He brought a hand up to pet the back of Felix’s head gently. He was trembling.
“I’m sorry,” Felix sobbed against him.
“No, angel, no,” Hyunjin whispered, and it was tight, choked.
Felix barely heard it. “I love him,” he said, the only thing left in him besides the guilt. He’d brought nothing good here, not to Chan, not to Hyunjin. These people who’d loved him and for what. “I love him, and he hates me. I feel like it’s going to kill me.”
A gentle stroke along his hair, and then another. Felix should find it comforting, but he didn’t. “I don’t think hyung hates you, baby,” Hyunjin murmured.
Felix squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, tears flowing down his face. “He wants me gone,” he said brokenly. “He wanted me dead, but Jeongin stopped him. Now you’ve stopped him from kicking me out—”
Hyunjin pulled back, just enough to look Felix in the eyes. His own face was a little flushed, eyes prettily damp, mouth full. “What?” he asked, confusion evident in his voice.
Felix could scarcely parse the question. “I don’t want to be here, Hyunjin,” he said, miserable with it. He searched Hyunjin’s eyes, the warm brown depths of them, looking for something he was not seeing. “I can’t stand it.”
Hyunjin’s mouth twisted, gaze soft as Felix began again to weep quietly. “Shh,” he murmured, wiping at Felix’s cheeks with gentle fingertips. “Shh, baby. Little love.” He cupped Felix’s face, thumbs brushing across Felix’s freckles, and said, very firmly, “If you go, I go. That’s just all there is to it.” Felix whimpered, tucking his face down, and Hyunjin let him go, choosing instead to once again stroke a hand over Felix’s hair. “Angel baby,” he whispered. “What did you mean, Chan-hyung wanted you dead?”
Felix took a deep breath, felt the way it shuddered through him, unsteady. He kept his eyes fixed on the space between them, the tangle of legs on the floor. “Yesterday,” he said, the word raspy with tears. “They weren’t sure what to do with me. The hyungs. Changbin-hyung suggested— ransom, but Minho-hyung said it would be simpler to just kill me.”
Hyunjin was still stroking his hair, but the motion felt a little more idle. A little more absent. The rest of him had gone very still. “And Chan-hyung— agreed?” he asked, careful.
“He told Minho-hyung to take me away,” Felix whispered, remembering the way Chan had sounded, the flat inflection of it. The way he’d looked at Felix, anger like white fire, cold and burning with it. “He told him to— to end it.” Felix looked up at Hyunjin, raising lashes laden with tears. “I never thought he’d want me dead. But he did. Maybe he still does.” Something, at last, flickered in Hyunjin’s gaze, but what it was, Felix couldn’t stay. He touched Hyunjin’s chest, the hardness of his sternum, over his beating heart. “I can’t stay, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin caught his hand with the one that was’t stroking Felix’s hair, so warm as to almost be hot against Felix’s freezing skin. He must have felt like a corpse. “You love him still?” Hyunjin asked after a long beat of just searching Felix’s face.
“Yes,” Felix said, barely audible, more a movement of his lips than a sound.
Hyunjin’s head tilted. “How?” he said, brow furrowing.
The question confused Felix, cocking his head in turn. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Hyunjin’s hand on his hair slid down, along the side of his face, until he could wipe at the tears clinging under Felix’s jaw. He was no longer looking at Felix, his gaze drifted somewhere over Felix’s shoulder. Lost in thoughtful silence. The movement of his fingers was still idle, automatic almost, swiping over and over.
Finally, he looked back at Felix’s face and said quietly, “Stay until after the job, at least.”
It was an echo of a past conversation. After the job. “There isn’t going to be a job,” Felix said, because— there wasn’t.
“There will be,” Hyunjin said, with a finality that could shape worlds. He stopped his absent motions to instead cup Felix’s cheeks again, and this time he leaned forward, pressing tender kisses across Felix’s swollen, tender eyelids. Felix could feel his lashes brushing against Hyunjin’s lips, a breathy sigh escaping him. “Stay,” Hyunjin murmured against his skin, and then he pulled back, steel in his expression. “Or do I need to go downstairs and ask Seungmin to forge us a pair of passports?”
Felix could not fight him, could not fight this. He was too tired all of a sudden. Wordless, he shook his head.
Hyunjin hummed. Then he helped Felix up, into his bed. This time, Felix let himself be moved, pliant as Hyunjin laid him down, drew a blanket over him.
“Rest, Lix,” Hyunjin said, holding Felix’s corpse-hands in his warmer ones, until Felix drifted away.
——
The only sound in Chan’s office was Chan’s fingers against the keyboard, the pages in Jeongin’s book being turned slowly. He was reading perhaps the slowest he had ever read in his life, because he had to read every paragraph at least two times to take everything in. The words felt like they were going into his head but not being processed, so that he could get to the end of a page and have no idea what any of it said.
He didn’t stop reading, though. He didn’t bother trying to speak. He didn’t have any actual words to offer, nothing that could make this situation better. Everything he tried to come up with just felt wholly inadequate, like he was offering platitudes in the face of something huge and grieving. He didn’t want to bring up what had happened, but talking about anything else felt wrong. So he just sat in the silence, trying to read.
Chan hadn’t said anything either. He had nodded to Jeongin’s request to sit in here with him, but had, for the last ten minutes, simply been working, clicking at something Jeongin couldn’t see, typing something he’d never read. Every so often he would stop, and just look at his computer screen, but Jeongin couldn’t work out if he was doing something or if he was simply— staring. There was something awfully empty about his face.
Jeongin hated to see him like this. He had hated it the night before and he hated it now, to see his brother brought so horribly low. Every time Jeongin thought about how Chan had seemed these past few weeks, the happiness and joy that had been so evident on his face, the sight of that empty look on his face almost took Jeongin’s breath away. That happiness felt like it had crumpled into nothing in an instant, and there was so much horror in that.
He’d come down here mostly to just be with Chan, a silent show of support after everything that had happened. Hadn’t Chan been that for him, all these years? Someone who Jeongin could rely on, who always, no matter what, wanted what was best for him and worked so hard to make that a reality. Just because his ideas and Jeongin’s didn’t always line up didn’t mean that wasn’t the case.
The fact that Minho was unlikely to bother him down here was an added bonus. He’d seen Minho looking at him during the meeting, trying to catch Jeongin’s eye, perhaps, and he had known that Minho would try to talk to him, about yesterday, about what had happened with Felix, or their argument later on. About how Minho had grabbed him, so hard that Jeongin had been almost— disappointed to find there were no bruises there this morning.
It was just so strange to be angry with Minho. He’d never been angry with him, not once in his entire life up until now — he’d been mad when Minho had insisted he not go on the mission, but even that felt different to this. That had been— a professional argument, perhaps, whereas this felt like real anger, true anger. He felt like he couldn’t even look at Minho without remembering the way he had pulled Felix’s arm up behind his back, how he had not stopped even when Felix was so obviously in pain.
He’d known that Minho would try to talk to him. He’d known, too, that if he stayed in his room, that was no guarantee that Minho wouldn’t simply seek him out there. So he had come downstairs, and made a haven of this space with his brother.
He had managed to comprehend another half a page before there was a clattering in the hallway. Chan’s face turned from the computer to the door, a sudden jerk of a movement. Warily Jeongin took his feet off where they were curled up on the couch and put them back on the ground, slipping them back into his sneakers, not sure who it was coming down the hallway.
It was Hyunjin: he burst into the office with such violence Jeongin got the feeling that if the door hadn’t opened fast enough, he might have taken it off the hinges. He barreled in, almost slamming into the chairs in front of the desk, and snarled, “You fucking asshole, you were going to kill him?”
Chan flinched, so hard that his hand knocked his keyboard across the desk with a screech. Jeongin swallowed, looking up at Hyunjin. He had never seen that expression on Hyunjin’s face. The anger there was frightening, his eyes alight with it. His hands, where they clutched at the back of a chair, held on so tight that his knuckles were already white.
Chan said, his voice raspy, “Hyunjin—”
“No,” spat Hyunjin, “no, don’t give me that reasonable tone. I already heard the story from him and I don’t need your attempts to spin it. You were going to put him down the same way Lee Jaerim did to your brother?”
Jeongin’s breath caught. He stared at Hyunjin, shocked by the words, but Hyunjin just stood there staring Chan down, his chest heaving with the force of his anger. Chan looked stricken, frozen in his seat, mouth slightly open as he looked back at Hyunjin.
“That’s not fair,” Chan said eventually, almost a whisper.
Hyunjin exploded. “Don’t you fucking talk to me about fair,” he yelled. “How could you do this? What the fuck were you thinking, ordering something like that? Without talking to any of us, without talking to me, without letting any of us have a say?”
“You weren’t there,” Chan said, his own voice raised. Not quite the echoing shout of Hyunjin’s, but closer, now, to that. “You were not in that room, Hyunjin, you don’t know—”
“I don’t need to have been there!” Hyunjin looked like he was a few seconds away from smashing the chair he was holding over Chan’s head. Jeongin had never, literally never seen him like this. He’d been angry at Jisung before, Jeongin knew, but that felt like child’s play in the face of this. “I don’t need to have seen it to know that whatever happened, you should never have ordered something like that! It’s Felix, it’s Lix, you know him.”
“I thought I knew him,” Chan shouted. “But maybe I didn’t, maybe I—”
“Oh fuck off,” Hyunjin screamed. “That’s so— How could you say something like that? I thought you loved him!”
“It’s not that simple!” Chan had both hands clenched on the desk now, not like he was thinking about swinging at Hyunjin but instead like he was trying to hold onto something, perhaps his composure. Jeongin wanted— to get up, go over there, cover those fists with his own hands, trying to soothe. He wanted, too, to go to Hyunjin and put a hand against his shoulder and see if Hyunjin was shaking like Jeongin suspected he was.
He didn’t do either of those things. He just sat on the couch and thought, I hate this, I hate all of this.
Hyunjin’s upper lip curled, distaste heavy on his features. “You know, I asked Lix if he still loved you, and he said— he asked why wouldn’t I?” His voice was little more than a sneer. “And you sit there saying it’s not that fucking simple. Which I suppose is answer enough.”
“I do love him!” Chan surged to his feet. “I do! I loved him then and I love him still. But I love you all too. I would do anything, anything to keep this family safe, even— something so terrible it would have haunted me for the rest of my life.” He was no longer yelling. Instead, his voice was choked, the tears spilling suddenly down his face. “You think the idea of hurting him didn’t break my heart?”
His voice broke on that last word, and he sank back down into his chair, one hand coming up to cover his face. His shoulders shook with the force of his tears, and he hunched over, almost like he had done yesterday, like it was too much, too difficult to keep upright. His gasping, broken sobs made Jeongin feel like his heart was breaking all over again.
Hyunjin watched this happen and gave no indication it had moved him at all, his face a mask of coldness. “Broke your heart, but not enough to stop you from doing it,” he said, voice like ice. “He gave you his everything and this is what he gets in return.”
"His father killed my brother," Chan mumbled thickly, a weak defence as he tried to wipe his face clean even as more tears fell.
"So you condemn an innocent to death over it?" Hyunjin shot back.
"I thought he was a traitor!" Chan cried, his hands dropping so he could look at Hyunjin through eyelashes still damp with tears. "I thought he’d come here under orders— he’d lied from the get-go about who he was. What else was I supposed to think?"
"You could have trusted him," Hyunjin said, not pausing at all, his voice steely with surety, "could have believed in him. Could have paused for one fucking second to think. And instead you took out on him your hatred for another man, one who Felix is more a victim of than you."
"I didn’t know," Chan said quietly, almost a mumble with how little he moved his lips. Like if he said it softly enough, Hyunjin wouldn't use it against him.
"You’re right! You didn’t!" Hyunjin said, mockingly upbeat. "But you were still hot to put a bullet in his skull." Chan shrunk away, his broad shoulders rounding, full bottom lip beginning to wobble again. Hyunjin arched an eyebrow at him, positively acidic. "Oh, you don’t have the right to look queasy over it now," he drawled. "Or are you finally realising you almost did the Magpie’s dirty work for him? Do you think he’d have shelled out at least a partial reward, even if Felix was dead, when he’d wanted him alive to torture?"
Chan shook his head, breath hitching wetly. "Stop."
"You could explain that you’d done enough," Hyunjin continued, heedless. "Made him fall in love and then slid a gun into his mouth. He loves you so much he’d have let you, gentle as a dove. He’s willing, even now, to leave this place because he thinks you want him gone, despite knowing he’ll die out there."
Chan sat forward at that, new tears falling in a rush as he gripped the edge of the desk. "Don't let him go," he said, the words breaking. "Don't let him— I don't want—"
Hyunjin’s eyes flashed with new anger, mouth twisting into a sneer. "You—"
"Enough," Jeongin said, able to bear this no longer. He got to his feet and came to stand beside the desk, nearer to Chan, but it was Hyunjin he faced down. "Please, Hyunjin-hyung."
Hyunjin stared at him, breathing heavily, while Chan continued to cry softly. When Hyunjin spoke again, his voice was much quieter. "Did you wonder why Felix didn't reveal he'd told me the truth?" he asked. "Not even when faced with his own death. He was afraid for me. Afraid you'd hurt me. He was willing to die if it meant protecting me. From you." These words, delivered the gentlest of them all, were the sharpest, the most eviscerating. Chan stared up at Hyunjin with eyes that begged for mercy, but there was none to be found on Hyunjin's face. "That's what you've done to him. That's the person who gave you his heart, who you condemned to death. Felix. Just Felix."
He turned without another word and slammed back out of the room. There was a feeling, in the sudden silence that his departure left behind, of having been witness to some kind of natural disaster, like some kind of tornado had swept into the room and rearranged everything and then swept back out again. Jeongin stood perfectly still for a moment, not quite ready to move. Not quite ready to— process what had just happened.
Chan was still crying though. Jeongin went to him, put both of his hands carefully on Chan’s shoulders, squeezing lightly. He thought that might make things worse, and perhaps it did, in a way he hadn’t expected: he saw Chan try to pull himself together, which wasn’t what Jeongin had wanted. He didn’t want team leader Chan right now, the older brother who never showed Jeongin this side of him. The person who never burdened others with his emotions, with his pain.
“Hyung,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”
Chan shook his head. He was wiping at his face as if he were trying to brush away his tears but it was pointless because they were still falling. “Don’t,” he whispered.
“But hyung,” Jeongin said, implacable, knowing he needed to say it, “I think Felix-hyung will forgive you. I really think— I think he can still love you.”
“Jeongin,” Chan whispered. “That makes it worse.”
Jeongin pulled him around in the chair and then pulled him into a hug, the kind that Chan always gave him when Jeongin was crying. Warm and close, Chan’s head pillowed against Jeongin’s chest, his shoulders heaving as he broke down completely, his arms hanging loosely to the floor. Jeongin held him, feeling Chan’s tears soaking into his shirt, wet and warm. He did not know how to fix this; he did not know if there was a way it could be fixed.
He put his face down into Chan’s hair and let that hide his own tears.
——
Jisung stood outside of Hyunjin’s bedroom for a solid five minutes without knocking before he accepted that he simply didn’t have the nerve for it.
It was a little galling, to realise that he was capable of being a coward about this. He was not usually a coward, although he had perfected the art, over the years, of learning when to run from a fight and when to stand and take it. He didn’t think running away, usually, made him a coward though. Usually it just meant that he was being smart about his choices.
Here, now, he was being a coward. He wanted to talk to Hyunjin, and the only way to do so was to knock on that door and wait for Hyunjin to answer it and then actually ask to talk. He had been wanting to talk to Hyunjin since the meeting last night, but had known better than to try. He had not had a chance this morning, and he had let Hyunjin disappear into his bedroom with a sobbing Felix and then gone down to his room, where he had sat on his bed staring blankly at his wall for a long, long time. Only then had he come back upstairs to stand here, like this, outside this bedroom door.
He knew why he was hesitating. It was not just that he knew Hyunjin was likely still angry with him, really angry, and he didn’t want to deal with it — although that was true, he didn’t want to have to handle that. Things had been okay between them recently, Jisung feeling less and less like he was maybe walking on eggshells around Hyunjin. He was so tired of managing to undo weeks or even months of progress with a single sentence, and yet that seemed to be what happened every time.
So no, he didn’t want to have to look at Hyunjin and know, once again, that he had managed to upset him, this time in a new and interesting way. But it was more than that. It was that Hyunjin was in his room with Felix, cloistered away in there together, and Jisung really didn’t want to disturb that.
Felix, whom Hyunjin loved. Felix, who Hyunjin had, just hours before, been so totally dedicated and loyal to, that he had threatened to leave with him if they tried to force Felix out.
It had turned Jisung’s blood cold. It had felt like plunging from a great height and not knowing, for a moment, if he would hit the ground or hit water. Hyunjin had not been bluffing, that much had been very obvious, and they had all known it, and Jisung had looked at the others and thought, desperation pulsing through him, don’t let him leave, don’t let him leave. He had barely been able to breathe around the panic.
They hadn’t, of course, but right now, it made Jisung feel a little bit like he had a hangover, albeit from the fear rather than from any alcohol. Maybe that loyalty to Felix shouldn’t have surprised him but it had, in that moment. He had never once contemplated the idea of Hyunjin leaving, of Hyunjin simply no longer being there. And he had seen on the face of the others, especially Changbin and Chan, that they had never thought about it, either.
It had not been a bluff, but even if it had been, nobody would have called him on it. No one, not even Minho, had been willing to take that risk. And so Hyunjin had protected Felix, made sure he was safe — Jisung should not have been surprised. He would have done the same, for Hyunjin.
Jisung sighed and rubbed a hand across his face. No, he couldn’t disturb them. He couldn’t face it. He didn’t want to open that door and see Hyunjin in there with Felix. He’d done his best over the past couple of months to live with it, and he knew that he could, he knew that he could accept it again. But perhaps just not right now.
He left the apartment again, and had just let the door close behind him when he heard footsteps, loud and echoing, coming up the stairwell. He went to the top of the landing and looked and saw Hyunjin coming up towards him, stomping with every step. The expression on his face, the anger there, made Jisung almost take a step back away from him. It was remarkably intimidating.
He had seen Hyunjin angry before, of course he had. He had seen Hyunjin angry at their very first meeting, and that expression lived with him, haunted him. But this anger was different to that; this anger was alive, terribly bright on his face. He looked like if he was touched, he would shock someone, or else burn them, leave them smoking and scarred.
He saw Jisung, and stuttered to a stop on the stairs. His face— darkened a little, something more familiar to Jisung, perhaps. Some of the anger replaced with that customary annoyance that he showed in Jisung’s presence. But rather than make it better, it just made his face even worse, because now he was looking at Jisung like he had never hated another person so much.
It was not until Jisung felt the full force of that, that he realised that over time, his relationship with Hyunjin really had improved in some ways. He was no longer used to being looked at like that. He wasn’t sure he had the stamina for it anymore.
“Hyunjin,” he said, knowing as he did it that it was a mistake, “can I talk to you for a minute?”
“I am so completely not in the mood right now,” Hyunjin said. “Get out of the way.”
Jisung did step to the side, not willing, even now, to trap Hyunjin anywhere, but he said, “It’s about last night.”
Hyunjin stormed past him, still managing to not touch him but with an air like if he had, he would have shoved Jisung away. “Then I really am not in the fucking mood,” he snarled.
Jisung should drop it, he knew he should, but he didn’t want to be a coward, didn’t want to run from this — and besides, the last time he had told himself he would apologise later to Hyunjin for something, he had never gotten the chance. He needed to do it now, or else he never would. “I just wanted to say—”
Hyunjin, almost to the door, whirled around, that anger back so completely on his face that Jisung was surprised he wasn’t feeling the burn of it even across the distance separating them. “Fuck off, Jisung!” he snapped, loud and echoing in the stairwell.
Jisung flinched back. He couldn’t hold it back, couldn’t control the instinct. He was right, he didn’t have the stamina for it anymore, couldn’t bear to have Hyunjin’s anger on him like this. He was used to the biting remarks, the ways in which Hyunjin could use his tone to rend flesh, but this was so different from that.
His voice, when it came, was very soft, the misery inside him almost drowning. “I just wanted to say that I was sorry,” he said.
Hyunjin had gone still at that flinch; at the words, the anger broke on his face, split clean down the middle, and was replaced by guilt, something Jisung so much hated to see on Hyunjin’s face. He looked, for a moment, wretched. Jisung felt awful for making Hyunjin feel like that — it had not been his intention at all, and he wished, in some ways, he could take the words back.
Hyunjin lifted both hands and scrubbed them at his face for a few seconds. He didn’t pull them away again, instead leaving them against his face as his shoulders moved, his chest rising and falling in an oddly erratic kind of way. He was trying to not cry, Jisung knew, and the sight of that, the sight of Hyunjin struggling to hold his composure, made Jisung feel like someone had reached their hand through his chest and grabbed hold of his heart, their fingers digging into the organ.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin said, his voice a little thick, face still hidden behind his hands. “I’m sorry.”
Jisung stood there uselessly. He wanted, with a fervent kind of urge, to go to Hyunjin now and fold Hyunjin into his arms. Pull him in, pull him close, let Hyunjin tuck his head into Jisung’s neck and offer him a place to simply— let go. But he couldn’t do that, he had no right to it, and so instead he just stood still and said, “It’s okay, Hyunjin, I— get it.”
Hyunjin lowered his hands, still breathing so carefully. His eyes were red-rimmed, his lips pressed together for a moment so tightly that they were white. “They were going to kill him,” he said, and the careful breathing did not seem to be helping all that much, because his voice was tremulous, shaking with every word. “Chan-hyung, and Minho-hyung and Changbin-hyung. They were going to kill him, without even letting us vote. If Jeongin hadn’t been there—”
He stopped talking on a small noise, his head tipping a little up to the ceiling for a few seconds as if that could help him be composed. There was something truly haunted on his face, something that, to look at, made Jisung feel a coldness deep inside his stomach. What a horror, to contemplate, for Hyunjin especially. What a horror for Jisung to contemplate.
“I wouldn’t have even known,” Hyunjin continued, quieter now. “I would have been in my room while Felix was dying, I would have come out and he would have just been gone forever.”
The tears spilled over. A few drops, to begin with, and then a few more, Hyunjin shuddering like he could feel himself on the verge of something much stronger and was still, even now, trying to hold it back. He looked miserable, a kind of misery that Jisung couldn’t stand to see on his face — Hyunjin had had enough of misery, Jisung thought. He had suffered enough.
He stepped forward before he could talk himself out of it, and carefully, slowly, raised a hand, telegraphing his intentions, his every move. He expected Hyunjin to flinch like Jisung had done earlier, or else jerk away, perhaps dramatically. If he did that, Jisung would lower his hand, step away, give Hyunjin his space.
But Hyunjin didn’t do that. Instead, he looked at Jisung and let Jisung put his fingers to the soft, giving skin of his face and wipe at the tears under his left eye. After a moment, Jisung lifted his other hand too, not touching too much, not doing what he really wanted to do, which was to cup Hyunjin’s cheeks in his hands and cradle his face. He just brushed those falling tears away with his thumbs, and then continued to do so when Hyunjin continued to cry.
“I should trust him more,” he said, softly, but seriously, honestly, “because you trust him. You know him better than I do, better than most of us but especially me. I’m sorry that I said what I said.” Hyunjin closed his eyes at that, more tears squeezing out, and Jisung brushed those away too. “I didn’t know they almost did that to him. I’m sorry.”
Hyunjin stood, silent but not tense, and let Jisung wipe his tears. This was only the second time that Jisung had ever touched his face, and it felt more real, like this, because the first time he had been so much more concerned about Hyunjin’s mouth, barely even realising what he was doing until he had seen Hyunjin’s face so close to his. This time though, Jisung was very present — feeling every single moment the softness of Hyunjin’s cheeks, the dampness of those tears against the pads of his thumbs. The way he could feel, just slightly, the warm brush of Hyunjin’s breathing.
Eventually, though, Hyunjin reached out, took hold of Jisung’s wrist, and pulled it away from his face. Gentle, unhurried, his fingers loose where he held Jisung. Jisung let his other hand drop immediately, but he knew enough to know that Hyunjin wasn’t upset by the way Jisung had been touching him. He had seen Hyunjin do this with others, pull their hands away carefully, when he had simply had enough of being touched. Usually he did this with Jeongin, which made sense, because the thought of shoving Jeongin away, of thinking that Jeongin meant a person harm, was ridiculous.
Jisung was surprised to feel it like this now. To have been tugged away so gently, not batted, not pushed.
“It’s fine, Jisung,” said Hyunjin softly. He was still holding Jisung’s wrist. “You’re right, you don’t know him as well. And I’m not mad, I’m not mad at you. I’m— I’m sorry, too? I’m sorry.”
“Ah, Hyunjin,” Jisung said helplessly. “Please, please don’t apologise to me. You had every right to be upset.”
Hyunjin let go of his wrist. He looked exhausted, standing there. Sometimes it felt almost easy to forget that Hyunjin was only a handful of months older than Jisung, because the way he held himself so often seemed to be the bearing of someone older. Jisung had never felt the urge to call him hyung or anything, but he could see why people would be shocked to hear how young Hyunjin was.
Not now. Hyunjin looked exactly as young as he was.
“I’m sorry for snapping at you, though,” he said, and when Jisung clearly made some kind of face at that, he added, “Let me say sorry, Jisung. For once. Please.”
What could Jisung do? He nodded, wordlessly, and didn’t say anything else when Hyunjin nodded back and then rubbed a hand at his face again. “I need to get back to Lix,” Hyunjin said, his hand moving up to run through his hair, clearing it away from his eyes.
“Right,” Jisung murmured. Back to Lix, who had been distraught, earlier, and now Jisung knew it was with good reason. “Is he— what will you do?”
“He doesn’t want to stay,” Hyunjin said. “I don’t blame him, how could he want to be here, after—” He broke off and took a deep breath, clearly struggling with the words, the sudden reminder of how close he had come to losing Felix. Jisung thought, for a moment, of being in this same position, of it being Hyunjin who had almost died while Jisung sat, unknowing and naive, a floor or so away, and felt the fear and horror of it in his stomach like a physical cramp.
“But I can’t let him leave on his own,” Hyunjin added, after he had composed himself again. “He has nothing. He has no one. I’m trying to convince him to stay until after the job, at least. With his father out of the game, it will be a little safer.”
“And then you’ll leave?” Jisung asked, the words feeling like they were choking him to ask. The thought of the Magpie job as some kind of deadline for his time with Hyunjin felt like it was suffocating him.
“I’m hoping by then he won’t want to anymore,” Hyunjin said quietly.
“But if he does,” Jisung said, needing an answer, needing to know.
“Yes,” Hyunjin said, devastatingly. “I’ll go. We’ll leave the country, I think.” His voice took on a thoughtful note — not dreamy, not in the slightest, not happy at all, just— thoughtful. “Go somewhere warm and pretty, somewhere we can disappear. I don’t want it to come to that, but I’ll— do what I have to.”
You can’t go, Jisung wanted to tell him. Don’t go. But Jisung had no right to forbid Hyunjin to do anything. Nobody did, not anymore, but especially not Jisung, and he certainly had no right to trap Hyunjin here. But neither, though, could he stand the idea of losing Hyunjin into the void of the world, never seeing him again.
It would drive him crazy, Jisung knew. Literally, completely, the sense of always looking for Hyunjin, always searching him out. He would see Hyunjin’s face everywhere he went and it would never actually be Hyunjin. It would be intolerable; it already felt intolerable and it hadn’t even happened yet. Desperation clawed at the back of his throat, bitter and choking.
When Jisung did nothing but stare in horrified silence, could do nothing more than that, words lost inside him, Hyunjin turned and went to the apartment door and entered the code, the only sound between them now the high pitched tone of each button. Jisung watched him without letting his gaze linger too long, his shoulders, the obscured lines of his body under his hoodie. The defeated slump of them.
“I’ll go with you,” he blurted out.
Fuck, he thought, but the words were out there, now, unable to be taken back. He had said them too loudly for that. Hyunjin had already turned back to look at him, halfway through the door, his eyes so wide in his face. In for a penny, in for a pound, Jisung figured, and he said, “If you leave, I’ll go with you.”
Hyunjin’s mouth opened a little, his tongue flickering out to wet his lips. He looked at Jisung like he was struggling to process what Jisung was saying to him. It was too much, it had been too much, Jisung knew, and he wondered if Hyunjin was seeing, really seeing what Jisung meant, what it was that Jisung felt for him. He hadn’t wanted Hyunjin to ever realise it, didn’t want to put that kind of pressure on Hyunjin, but— he needed Hyunjin to know this too. That if Hyunjin left, Jisung would follow him, anywhere.
Something flickered across Hyunjin’s face, a delayed reaction that Jisung could not read. Then he took a half-step back, almost hiding behind the open door. He was blushing, a slow pink blush rising sunrise-slow across his nose and cheeks. Jisung had seen Hyunjin blush before, as rare as it was; usually it was when he was embarrassed, when Jisung had said something to fluster him. But this didn’t seem like that, and Jisung could not have put into words why.
“Thank you,” Hyunjin whispered, still half-hidden behind the door. Then, without another word, he stepped back and the door shut between them.
Jisung looked at the door, the wood panelling on top of the reinforced metal, and let out a breath, slow and measured, not letting it overwhelm him. Then he took the stairs slowly, one at a time, keeping his mind blank and empty, holding onto it by the skin of his teeth.
It was not until he was in his room, sunken down in a heap on his bed, that he let himself think, despairing and helpless, Fuck, he’s so pretty when he blushes.
——
Chan rapped his knuckles on Hyunjin’s bedroom door, not bothering to soften the sound at all. Jeongin would be asleep but he’d sleep through Chan knocking on a door further down the hallway. It was not so late that he thought he’d be waking Hyunjin or Felix in turn though, and sure enough, after a longer pause than there usually was, Hyunjin called, “Come in?”
Chan opened the door but barely stepped in, just enough to make his presence known without intruding. Hyunjin and Felix were sitting on Hyunjin’s bed, but not together. Hyunjin had been drawing, that much was obvious, a sketchbook open in his lap, pencils strewn about the covers. Felix was sitting in a way that suggested he had been laying down before Chan had knocked. A book lay page down next to him. Not one of Chan’s, this time.
“Hello,” Chan said quietly, before Hyunjin could order him back out again. Hyunjin was glaring at him, arms folded across his chest. A real glare, with real anger still behind it. Hyunjin had never looked at Chan like that before, and it made Chan feel sick. But it wasn’t any better to look at Felix, sitting on that bed, still looking at Chan so warily. “Felix,” he said, and tried to pretend he didn’t see the way Felix shrunk away a little, “I’d like to talk to you. About us. Come with me?”
Felix looked back at him for a long moment, his reluctance obvious on his features. Then his gaze dropped, his shoulders rounding, and he nodded a little, shifting as if to rise.
Hyunjin put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “He doesn’t want to,” he said, voice a vicious snap. “Where will you take him, your office? He doesn’t want to be alone with you.”
“Hyunjin,” Felix whispered, brow furrowed and eyes plaintive. Hyunjin paid him no mind, just continued to stare Chan down, face carved into fierce lines. With his beauty, he looked like some kind of avenging angel.
Chan swallowed, trying to keep hold of his emotions. “If you really don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to,” he said, forcing the words to sound even. Felix looked at him, eyes large and dark in his face, surprised almost. “I wasn’t going to bring you down to the office, I was going to have us sit in the kitchen.” He wanted to say, I’m not that cruel, Hyunjin, but that would be akin to handing Hyunjin a loaded gun right now, and Chan had been eviscerated enough for today.
It wasn’t just for Felix’s sake anyway. Chan wasn’t sure when he’d be ready to have Felix back in his office, when the image of him curled on the carpet was still so fresh. The way his tears had glinted in the low light. The way he hadn’t even fought. Gentle as a dove, Hyunjin had said, and Chan had to turn away from the mental image of Felix opening his mouth to accept the barrel of a gun.
Felix unfolded his legs out from underneath himself, the slim, coltish length of them lost in the bagginess of a pair of Hyunjin’s pyjama bottoms. He got to his feet, pulling out of Hyunjin’s grasp. “Lix,” Hyunjin hissed, like Chan wouldn’t be able to hear him. “You don’t have to.”
“I know,” Felix murmured. He came forward, back straight, hands clasped in front of himself, fingers barely peeking out from his sweater — Hyunjin’s also. Chan wondered, for a moment, if Hyunjin was making some kind of a statement, dressing Felix up in his clothing like this. Then he realised that it was just that Felix didn’t have any clothing in Hyunjin’s room; they were all in Chan’s, by this point.
Felix’s eyes were lowered, lashes covering his irises.
Chan expected him to speak, but he didn’t. He just stood there, two paces away, waiting. Chan blew out a breath, pushing the door open further, and then, as gently as he could, said, “Follow me.”
And Felix did. Chan headed to the kitchen, hearing Hyunjin’s bedroom door close behind him and light, padding footsteps after him. The same footsteps he had heard this morning, before the sun was even up. How could a person’s footsteps be so familiar to him?
He walked to the table and was just about to take his seat when he caught sight of Felix, still lingering at the opening of the hallway. “What is it?” he asked.
Felix bit his bottom lip for a moment, before shaking his head, just slightly. “Nothing,” he said, taking a shuffling step forward. His gaze, quickly, darted to the door of the apartment, and his breathing was speeding up a little.
“Felix,” Chan said, coming around the table so he could put himself in front of Felix, who gave the impression of wanting to step away, though he did not move. Chan felt wretched. He said softly, “We really don’t have to do this now.”
“I want to get it over with,” Felix whispered. Still that lowered gaze, the stiff spine, the clasped hands. Subservient, Chan realised. Possibly something engrained into him from his time with— his father.
Chan was starting to feel like he couldn’t breathe.
“But I don’t know if I can do it— here,” Felix said, voice barely audible at the end. His head tipped down a little, shoulders losing some of their rigidity to instead curl forward, just a bit. “I’m sorry.”
“Here?” Chan repeated, confused for a moment. “The kitchen, you mean?”
After another moment, Felix nodded. Why, Chan wanted to ask, but then he got it, the way Felix’s eyes had darted to the apartment door, the way he was sticking, even now, to the entrance of the hallway, barely even in the room properly.
It was too open, this space. Too open to whoever wanted to come into it, a place with regular foot-traffic. And suddenly Chan did not want to be here either, sitting at this table, having this conversation with Felix, where any moment they could be interrupted: Jeongin or Jisung or, god forbid, Minho, coming into the apartment and see— well, Chan wasn’t sure yet what they’d see. Something that they probably shouldn’t.
Not here, then. Not in his office, either. It left really only one space available to them, only one place where they were unlikely to be interrupted, but Chan desperately didn’t want to go there. But there was no other choice, not if he wanted to have this conversation, not if he wanted to be able to talk to Felix without seeing the awful way Felix’s chest was rising and falling too quickly, the longer the silence stretched between them, the longer it seemed like Chan might actually make them talk here in the kitchen.
“We’ll go to my room,” he said, heavily, resigned to it. Felix looked up at him, at that, almost looking up at him through his eyelashes — not coyly, not cutely, but uncertainly, like he was scared to do much more than that. Chan paused a few seconds, waiting to see what Felix would say, if it were an— acceptable solution for him, but at the end of those seconds, his eyes merely lowered again, his throat bobbing with a swallow.
Chan felt like something was gripping him around the chest, hard as a vice. He made himself walk forward, made himself go past Felix without so much as brushing against him. Felix watched him without saying a word, and without shrinking back, although he clearly was holding himself tense to stop it from happening. Their journey down the hallway was silent, Chan once again listening to those quiet padding footsteps. It felt a little bit like he was being haunted by them, in some way.
His bed was still unmade from this morning, the covers flung haphazardly in a pile against the mattress. He tried to not look at it, that bed that they had shared together, as he let Felix come into the room, their bodies still held carefully apart, and shut the door behind him.
Felix took a few steps away from him, and then turned back to face Chan, still in that same, deferential way he had stood in Hyunjin’s bedroom, and in the kitchen: stiff and straight and not looking at Chan. Chan wanted Felix to look at him; he wanted, more than anything, for Felix to keep looking away. What would he see, in Felix’s eyes, if he looked into them? It terrified him to think about it.
“I want to discuss with you,” he said, quietly, “what we’re— going to do, going forward.”
Felix’s head bobbed. “Yes,” he said, his own voice so quiet it was barely more than a whisper.
Chan waited, to see if Felix said anything more. But maybe it had been obvious that Felix wouldn’t. He had been quiet through this entire thing, not volunteering his words unless prompted to by Chan. Chan would have to speak, would have to start, but he barely knew where to begin. “Well.” He faltered, the words stalling in his mouth again. “Do you— what do you want?” he managed eventually, his tongue feeling thick and stupid in his mouth. “How are you— feeling?”
There was nothing but silence. Felix still was not looking at him, his head a little bowed again. He looked — like he was braced for something, Chan realised, like he was holding himself tense in the upcoming face of Chan’s anger, his yelling — or worse, maybe, Chan thought with a sickening lurch in his stomach. He looked a little bit like he was braced for a blow of some kind.
“Felix, I’m not going to—” he started, but there was a desperation in his voice that he worked to strip back, turn off. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to yell at you, or scold you. We just— we need to talk, don’t we?” He bit the inside of his mouth for a moment and then added, quieter, a little sad, “Don’t you have anything to say to me?”
Felix bit his bottom lip for a moment. Once upon a time, Chan would have told him not to, would have gently tugged that lip free. Instead, now, he just stood there, as Felix said, his voice a little shaky, “You want me to go. I can go. If you’re willing to— I can sneak out, without Hyunjin. You’ll just have to order Seungmin to look the other way.”
The words seemed to make little sense to Chan. They felt like they had come out of nowhere. He’d have understood if Felix had said them as an accusation but he hadn’t, he’d said them so matter-of-factly. “I don’t want you to go,” Chan said. “I want you to stay. But is that what you want.”
Silence, again.
“I can give you money,” Chan tried, “if you want to leave. I can set something up for you, so you’ll be safe.” Even just offering such a thing felt like it was breaking up something inside him, but he had to offer, he had to let Felix know that he wasn’t trapped here, not like that.
“You don’t have to do that,” Felix said in a small voice. “You don’t have to— make things up to me. Make amends. I’d rather you didn’t.”
Those words were even more confusing; Chan felt like he was trying to find his way through fog in this conversation. “You’d rather I didn’t,” he echoed blankly, and Felix just shrunk again, his shoulders rounding, his feet shuffling like he wanted to take another step back, a step away. It was impossible, this conversation, impossible to have with Felix like this: refusing to look up, to look at Chan, determined to keep himself contained. He was impossible to read, this strange, timid creature, even more timid than he had been in the beginning.
He had let himself be led here, to this room, and was seemingly willing to take whatever Chan wanted to dish out. Ready and braced for the abuse.
“If I hit you right now, what would you do?” Chan asked. An unfair question, bordering on cruel, if it didn’t step over that line. What the fuck was Felix supposed to say? That he’d take it, the same way he would have had to take it when it was his father doling it out? That violence, that pain. “Would you hate me?”
“No,” whispered Felix.
“Why not?” Why not, why not, how could he not? But Felix didn’t respond, he just stood there again. “Felix. Look at me.”
Felix didn’t. He kept his eyes downcast, looking at the floor. Everything about him in that moment was small, and his chest was back to that rapid rise and fall, his breathing so quick that Chan could hear it. Chan— could not stand it, talking to this shell of a person, this boy who cowered away from him. He strode to Felix and grabbed him by the shoulders. Not hard, not trying to hurt, but firm. “Look at me.”
Felix’s face rose, then. His hands came up between them, and for a moment Chan thought he might push Chan away, but he didn’t; he did nothing with his hands but curl them, close together, against his chest. He was malleable as a doll under Chan’s hands, and his eyes were wide, brimming with unshed tears. “Are you going to hit me?” he asked, wet and thin.
“No,” said Chan. Ridiculous, to be the one to bring up the idea and then feel horrified by the idea of it. “I’m not. I never could.”
Felix’s face crumpled. “You were going to let Minho-hyung kill me,” he said, almost a gasp, as one then two of those tears fell down his cheeks. “You were going to let him beat me to death. You promised he would never hurt me and then you—”
Felix ripped himself out from under Chan’s hands. Chan let him go, didn’t hold him in place, as Felix stumbled back, away from him, and then to the bookcase against the wall. He wedged himself, somehow, into the gap where the bookcase met the wall, his back to Chan, breathing heavily. A shuddering quality to it now. One of his hands came up to grip a shelf, his knuckles bone-white.
Chan had done this to him. Chan, only Chan. Chan who had stood there and watched Felix be tossed to the floor by Minho, Chan who had not helped him. Felix had always been afraid of Minho’s violence, always seemed unsettled by it. Chan remembered that he had said once, you have nothing to be afraid of, and Felix had not seemed to believe him, and now Chan knew why, he knew why Felix had never been convinced of his safety there.
It had been Chan who had promised Felix that he would be safe, from that violence. Chan who had tried to reassure Felix, wanting him to have a place here in this house, somewhere he felt protected. But in the end, Chan had not tried to protect him, had not done anything to help. Instead, he had condemned him to death. He had been willing to hand him over to the very person he knew Felix was most scared of.
You were going to let him beat me to death. Was that what Felix had thought was coming, curled up on that carpet, Minho bearing down upon him? Of course he had thought that. No wonder he was so terrified of Chan now.
“Felix,” Chan said, after a moment of nothing but Felix’s gasping breaths. Chan felt like he might break down. “Can I fix this?”
Felix shook his head, but it wasn’t in answer. It was too jerky for that, the movement off. It was more like he was trying to clear it, perhaps physically, like his ear was blocked with water. “I was so scared,” he whispered. He turned a little, just enough, so that his shoulder was braced against the bookcase. But now, like this, his tear-streaked face was visible. The hitching of his chest was visible. “I’m still scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Chan said, choking on the words. “I’m so fucking sorry.” But Felix was shaking his head again; this time it did seem to be in response to what Chan was saying, and so Chan said, “Felix—”
“I can’t forgive you,” Felix interrupted. Chan’s heart was pounding in his throat, he could not breathe around it. “Because I’m not— angry. I don’t blame you, you were just trying to protect— this. Your family. But that doesn’t erase the hurt. It doesn’t take away how I felt. On that floor.” His voice wobbled heartbreakingly. “I thought you loved me.”
I thought you loved him. Chan had; he did. So help him, he did. That was why it had been so painful, why he had not been able to think. He loved Felix like he had loved nobody else in his life before. He loved Felix like he could love nobody else again. “I do.”
“No, I thought— I thought you loved me enough that when you found out, it wouldn’t matter,” Felix said. He was no longer crying, somehow, but the tears were still on his face, and he didn’t make a move to brush them away. Chan’s hands felt like they itched to do it for him. “I’d hoped that I could be— me, before I was the Magpie’s son. But that isn’t your fault. I think it was an impossible thing to want.”
“It wasn’t, it isn’t. God, Felix— it wasn’t your fault. It was me, it was all on me.” Chan struggled, for a few seconds, for the words, the phrasing to explain. “I just— when I found out who you were, and the idea was presented that it had all been a lie, all I could think was, that makes sense. It makes so much sense. You were too perfect, too beautiful, too good. Of course it was never real.” His own voice wobbled a little now. “You weren’t real, this love couldn’t be real. Couldn’t be mine.”
“Hyung,” said Felix, just a breath.
“I was angry,” Chan said, like an admission. “And hurt.”
Perhaps some part of him had expected, when he had brought Felix into this room, this bedroom that had belonged to the both of them over the past few weeks, that knowing the truth of who Felix really was would— transform him, finally, in some way. Like he would look at Felix here and see, somehow, someway, the sign that he had missed. There had to be something different, surely. Some cruelty that had flown under the radar, something nasty that he’d overlooked; something that he could point to and say, there, see, that’s the son of Lee Jaerim.
But there was nothing, of course. The person standing in front of him was Felix, as he had always been. Sad, yes, miserably sad, and scared, as he looked at Chan with those eyes, that swollen mouth, the silence stretching on between them again. But he was Felix. He’d only ever been Chan’s Felix.
Chan had been lost the moment he had laid eyes on Felix. That was what had been so humiliating about it all.
Chan stepped forward, just once, and Felix watched him, although that movement had caused a slight flinch, like he had been taken by surprise. “When I found out,” Chan said, in a whisper, “I thought, Lee Jaerim has taken everything from me, again.” He paused, and looked at Felix, his lovely face. He was just so desperately beautiful. Chan had looked at him long enough, closely enough, that he thought maybe he knew the placement of those freckles by heart at this point. He had spent hours, potentially, watching Felix sleep. “Has he? Did I— let him? Is this ruined?”
Felix closed his eyes for a moment, longer than a blink, and then opened them again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Can you forgive me? I lied— I didn’t want to, but I made that choice all the same. I just needed you to listen to me, and if I had told the truth, you wouldn’t have.”
The worst part was that it made sense, it was true. They wouldn’t have listened to Felix if he’d told the truth, and it would have been a genuine risk to Felix’s life. He would not have had what he had had these past months: food, a warm bed, affection and love. The only son of Lee Jaerim delivering himself into their hands would have been a disaster for Felix, no matter what the outcome might have been.
Still, perhaps it would have been easier to hear it from Felix’s mouth? Chan would have been angry, would have felt betrayed either way. He didn’t know. He felt like he was scratching blindly in the darkness searching for something to make sense again.
In an even quieter voice, Felix added, “And I shouldn’t have slept with you. I tried so hard not to. But when I came here— I never expected this, hyung. I never expected you.”
“I just—” Chan lifted his hands and pressed the heels to his eyes for a moment before he let them drop back to his sides. “I never would have wanted to sleep with the son of Lee Jaerim.” His voice was very small. It was the one hold out, the one thing he was having trouble forgiving. How could he explain how it had felt, sitting in his office and realising who it was he had fallen in love with. What a betrayal to his brother’s memory. To have taken Felix to bed, to have made love to the son of the man who had killed Jun, if not by his own hands then with his words, his orders.
But if, like Felix said in his office, he was not a true son of the Magpie— what then? What did that mean, for them, for this? What did that mean, for Chan’s honour of and duty to his brother?
“I know,” Felix said. “And I’m sorry. But you never slept with the son of Lee Jaerim. I haven’t been his since the moment I became yours.”
Chan’s eyes snapped to Felix’s. Felix looked back at him, his eyes— honest, in this moment. Perhaps honest in every moment that had passed between them, honest where it mattered, where it really counted. He had concealed his identity but not who it was that he actually was, not the true soul of him.
He gave you his everything, Hyunjin had said. And if that were the case, as Chan— had to accept it probably was, what was it that Chan had done with the trust there? What had he done with the heart and soul and body that Felix had placed with him, laying them carefully at Chan’s feet, an offering in many ways?
Chan stared at him, lost for words. The emotions rolled through him, wave after wave, until he feared they would drown him. “Don’t go,” he managed to choke out. “Don’t leave, please.”
“Is that what you actually want?” Felix asked, quietly. “Or do you just feel guilty?”
If he’d been capable of it, Chan might have laughed at that. As it was, it almost brought him to the brink of tears. “Oh, I’ve never felt so fucking guilty,” he said. “But that isn’t why I want you to stay. I just want you here, warm and safe.” He held out a hand, not for Felix to take, necessarily, but just to bridge some of the space between them. “Will you come away from the bookshelf?”
It took a second but Felix did step away from the wall, looking a little self-conscious. He had no need to be; Chan could not blame him for trying to be safe like that. He was still— teary, a tremulous pout to his mouth. He was wringing his hands a bit as he said, “I don’t want your kindness given out of— a feeling of obligation. I want— I want you to want me here. Not because of guilt, or because you feel like you have to make it up to me. I don’t want it like that.”
“It isn’t like that, I promise,” Chan said. “I wouldn’t ask you to stay if I didn’t simply want you here.” Felix looked a little more settled by the words, like even just that much was relieving to him. “Do you want to stay?”
Felix took the few small steps to the bed, where he sat, right on the edge. It was remarkably similar to how he had sat that first time, after he had seen that body created at Minho’s hands. He looked tired, small and above all, wounded. Moving like the hurt was a physical one. It was painful, so fucking painful, to see that.
"I didn't," he said softly. "I couldn't stand the thought of being here and having to— avoid you. To see you but be unable to touch you, to even speak to you. To know every day what I'd ruined." His voice had dropped to something even softer, but the truth of the next words was clear. "I can't live like that."
Chan closed his eyes for a moment before he opened them again. "You don't have to."
"I fucked it all up," Felix said, almost as though he hadn't heard Chan at all. "And even now I just want you back. I want things to go back to how they were. I want this to have— never happened."
"Felix," said Chan. A little louder, just a touch, just enough that Felix fell quiet. But when he looked up at Chan, he looked wary, unsure, the last thing Chan had wanted. He looked like he thought he'd gone too far, somehow, like Chan was angry at him once more.
Chan could no longer bear it. He took a few steps forward and then sank to his knees in front of where Felix was sitting on the bed, feeling less like it was a voluntary movement and more just like— his legs had given way, the strength fled from them completely. Felix made a little aborted movement, almost like a flinch caught mid-motion, his hands lifting a little in the air and then pausing, frozen. His eyes were very wide.
Again, Chan said, "Felix." It came out as a whisper. It came out more reverent as anything Chan had ever said, somehow more reverent than Felix's name had been in his mouth during sex.
Felix heard it; he watched Felix hear it. "I'm sorry," Felix said, his voice still a little watery. "Forgive me, I never intended to trick you." His sincerity was obvious in every wobbly word.
"Can I touch you?" Chan asked.
Felix nodded, something in his expression almost— shy. Chan put his hands on Felix's knees, carefully, slowly, and found him warm through the fabric of his pants. At the touch, he heard Felix let out a breath, something barely there, but audible when Chan was as close as this.
"Can I forgive you," Chan whispered, as Felix looked back at him. "Yes." Felix's eyes widened. But it seemed cruel, almost, to be talking about Chan’s forgiveness, right now, when by all accounts it was Felix who had been truly wronged. Chan’s grievances, in comparison to his own actions, were so petty and small. "You didn’t lie to me out of malice. I believe that. I believe you."
Felix's face crumpled; a moment later he covered his face with his hands, half-slumped over with the force of his tears. Like yesterday, Chan wanted to hold him, and like yesterday he kept himself still. This time was the fear of overstepping, his hands safe on Felix's knees. His heart ached like nothing he had felt before.
"I hated being his son," Felix sobbed, the words hitching on every breath, coming out in a rush like a dam had been broken. "Everything gets— tainted by it. My entire life, people have looked at me the way that you looked at me yesterday." Chan had to close his eyes again at that, take a breath, feeling it stutter inside his chest. "I wanted to shed it like a snake with an ill-fitting skin, and when I walked in here that first time, I realised that that was what I could do. I didn’t have to be his son. I could just be— me."
"Yes," said Chan. "I understand that. I do. I see you, now."
Felix made a little noise at that, the whimper of something wounded, something hurting. Chan felt it, the fracturing inside him, that same feeling he had been feeling again and again throughout the day, but worse, so much worse now, kneeling here looking at Felix like this.
The tears, when they came for him, were an onslaught. His own dam against them had been desperately built, rocks and stones built up in a frantic attempt at keeping himself from buckling under the force of the water. But something like that could not last, and he bent over where his hands rested on Felix's knees and he sobbed.
Yesterday it had been the opposite of this: Chan, looking down, Felix looking up, and there had been no sympathy in Chan, nothing but a hard, cold anger. He had looked at a crying Felix and reached only for the cruelty.
He had been no different to Lee Jaerim, in that moment. What was it about him that had let him say those awful things to Felix, to open his mouth and let those words fly out, wanting nothing more than to maybe make Felix hurt as much as Chan was hurting? What was different about Chan, what was it that had gone so wrong, when Hyunjin and Jeongin had never once wavered in their support of Felix?
You weren’t there, you weren’t in that room. But Jeongin had been. He had seen Felix sobbing and afraid on the floor and he had been as compassionate as always. It had been Chan, the one who had told Felix that he loved him so, so many times, that had not believed him at all.
“The question isn’t my own forgiveness,” Chan said, trying to get the words out around the tears, the shuddering of his bones. “It’s— Felix, can you forgive me?”
Felix finally, finally lowered his hands, and looked at Chan. His face was once again streaked with the tears that were still falling, his eyes luminous with them. “I told you,” he said, voice thick, “I’m not angry. I— I understand, too.”
“It’d be easier if you were angry,” Chan said, desperately. “You should be. Hyunjin— he screamed at me, did he tell you? Why aren’t you angry?” Chan could not wrap his head around it, could not fathom it, and yet it was there, in Felix’s voice, the absolute absence of any anger, any blame, directed at Chan. “I almost killed you,” he added, and then, more broken, the words cracking under the force of his emotion, “I almost killed you. You were so frightened, and still I—”
Even in that moment, when Chan had condemned him to death, what Felix thought would be something slow and painful, Felix hadn’t begged for his life. He had only begged for Chan. He had only wanted Chan. Felix, his Felix, the one that he had spent all day wishing he could have back, the one who had seemed like a figment of his imagination, had been with him all this time.
“God, fuck,” he choked, “what have I done, Felix, I’m so sorry—”
For the first time, Felix touched him. His hand came up and carefully pushed the hair back from Chan’s forehead. Chan shivered with it. “I know,” Felix whispered, as he let his hand drop back down to the bed. “I know you are.”
“Can I fix this?” Chan asked. It seemed impossible, completely impossible. “Can I? I’ll do anything. Tell me, please, tell me what to do.”
Felix looked down at him, tired but thoughtful. The tears were still falling down his face, slow drips of salt-water against his skin, over those freckles. In a small voice, he eventually said, “I just want to be with you.” He said it almost like it were a secret. “I want you to love me. I want to be safe. I think I can— heal, I think we can— if I have that—”
“Anything,” said Chan, fervently. “Yes.” He rose up on his knees, one of his hands still clutching at Felix’s knees, the other reaching for Felix’s hand, resting against the bed. Felix let him take it, gripping back with the same strength that Chan did. Their faces were closer, now, like this, close enough that if Chan moved in just a little closer they would— not be kissing, but their cheeks could rub together, perhaps. Their noses brushing in a butterfly kiss.
“Never again,” he said. Felix’s eyes fluttered shut for a moment. “I’ll never— never again, Felix. I promise. I know my word might not— be worth anything right now. But I promise.” A promise to himself, more than anything, perhaps even more than to Felix. Never again.
Felix whispered, “I believe you.”
They looked at each other. A long, drawn-out moment of eye contact, where Chan thought, I could kiss him, but did not. He did not want to, almost, he just wanted this — the silence between them, the understanding they had reached, without anything else involved. It felt a little bit like they were going to have to get to know each other all over again, and he wanted to take that slow. Let himself fully understand Felix. Let Felix fully understand him.
“Felix,” he said, but right as he said it, there was a knock on the door. No, not a knock — a thump, loud and sudden enough that Felix startled, badly, and Chan shot to his feet, upright without conscious thought, instincts honed over the years. “Who is it?” he called.
“It’s me,” came Hyunjin’s terse voice through the door.
Chan looked at Felix, who was still crying, just a little bit, tears dripping down his face, and thought of his own face still tear-streaked, and sighed. “Come in, Hyunjin,” he said.
The door slammed open immediately, like Hyunjin had been waiting, poised, for permission. He stormed into the room and looked at the two of them by the bed, his eyes narrowed as he took it in: Chan standing, Felix sitting, their closeness otherwise. Felix’s damp eyes, Chan’s damp face, and how, even though Chan had stood upright, he still had hold of the very tips of Felix’s fingers.
Hyunjin’s eyes flicked from that to Chan’s face, and he sneered, just ever so slightly, making sure that Chan saw it. Then, with a dismissive little flick of the head, he turned to Felix. His face turned softer, all the annoyance and anger leaving it immediately, at the sight of Felix’s tears.
He held out a hand. His voice, when he spoke, was gentle but very firm, with no room for argument. “Angel,” he said, “it’s time for bed.”
Felix looked at Hyunjin, then at Chan, and then back to Hyunjin. He sighed, a little, not in exasperation or annoyance but more like — tiredness, just sheer exhaustion. “Okay,” he said, and he rose to his feet and took the hand Hyunjin had offered him.
For a second, they were connected like that: Felix holding Hyunjin’s hand, Chan holding Felix’s fingers. Then Chan let go, and took a step back, giving them both space. Hyunjin glared at Chan, the heat in his eyes absolutely searing, before he immediately started tugging Felix to the door, his head turned sharply away so that it was clear that Chan, standing in the middle of the room, was no longer worth any of his attention.
It made Chan feel sick all over again. It made him want to go to Hyunjin, get to his knees, beg for forgiveness, but he knew Hyunjin well enough to know how badly that would go. Hyunjin would not forgive him, if he did that. Hyunjin would dig his heels in even further. So instead, he waited until Hyunjin was almost through the open bedroom door before he said, “Goodnight, Hyunjin, Felix.”
Hyunjin showed no indication that he’d heard. Felix looked back over his shoulder, but didn’t say anything either, just let himself be led away. The door hung open after they were gone, and Chan waited until he’d heard the click, down the hallway, of Hyunjin’s door closing before he went to it and closed his own.
He stood in the silent, empty bedroom for a long time, staring at nothing. How different it all felt, to be alone in it like this. The tears were drying on his face, leaving his skin salt-tacky, his eyes swollen and gritty. There was the beginnings of a headache pulsing behind his eyes. He should brush his teeth, wash his face. Try to get some sleep.
He sat at the foot of the bed. He put his forehead to his knees, and closed his eyes against the light overhead. And he tried to remember how to breathe again.
Notes:
at this point, you're probably wondering, why am i putting myself through this?? but not to worry, there's minjeong in the next chapter!
Chapter 16
Notes:
when we were writing chapter 4, we were like THIS CHAPTER IS SO FCKN LONG and now every single chapter is just that length. i am watching that word count increase with great concern.
also i once again did not get to reply to all comments and i once again apologise. the mind was willing but the flesh has a job
chapter content warnings: references to physical child abuse, some mentions of suicidal ideation
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Hyunjin slipped into his bedroom, not surprised to find the curtains still drawn and Felix still a small, curled up lump on the bed. He was awake — or Hyunjin had woken him, with the turning of the door knob, the soft rustling of the plastic bag hanging from his hand. His eyes opened when Hyunjin came into the room, unerringly focused on him. Only those eyes and his forehead was visible above the blanket, and he didn’t say anything, just blinked in a tired sort of way, as Hyunjin went to his desk to set the bag down and then came over to the bed.
He sat on the edge, careful to avoid sitting on any part of Felix. When he pulled the blanket back from Felix’s face, he half-expected Felix to resist, but Felix didn’t; he let Hyunjin uncover his head, so that he could stroke a hand through his hair. Felix closed his eyes at that touch but he didn’t look comforted by it, not in his usual way. He just looked tired.
“Baby,” Hyunjin said softly, still stroking gently through those blond strands of hair. “Did you sleep any more?”
“No,” said Felix. His voice scraped out of him, clearly the first thing he had said aloud. He had been awake when Hyunjin had gotten up, dressed, and then left the room earlier in the morning, but he’d kept his eyes closed and Hyunjin hadn’t called him on it. If Felix didn’t want to talk, then Hyunjin hadn’t been about to force him. He’d felt Felix tossing and turning most of the night, too, and now he was going on almost two nights of very little sleep. Hyunjin had let him be, hoping the entire time that Felix might drift back off. Apparently that hadn’t been the case.
Hyunjin sighed. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” said Felix again. “Your hand is cold. Did you go outside?”
“Yeah,” murmured Hyunjin. “I went to get some stuff for your hair.”
A pause, and then Felix pushed the blankets back further and struggled upright into a sitting position. He had his legs crossed, a pillow tugged into his lap as usual. With his hair fluffy and messy around his face, he looked— pathetic, in a way that gripped Hyunjin’s heart and squeezed. There was something about his countenance that reminded him of how Felix had looked after he was almost kidnapped.
Felix had whispered to him, in the darkness of the bedroom, Hyunjin’s arms wrapped around him, what he and Chan had discussed the night before, that he had forgiven Chan for what had happened. But he was clearly still feeling the aftermath of it all, the stress and upset still flowing through his body. He looked diminished, in this bed, and it hurt all the more having seen all the ways that Felix had flourished over the past couple of months.
“My hair?” Felix asked, his voice still a little rough. He cleared his throat and then said, “What about my hair?”
Hyunjin touched his hair again, just a brush of his fingers above Felix’s ear. “Your roots are awful,” he said. “They give me a migraine to look at. Let me fix them for you, please?”
Felix blinked. He looked from Hyunjin’s face to the plastic shopping bag on the desk and said, “You got more bleach?”
Hyunjin nodded. He rubbed his thumb against Felix’s temple, a touch that was guaranteed to make Felix melt, and watched as it only caused Felix’s shoulders to relax a little. As tired as he was, he didn’t seem like he could relax into anything. In fact, he was frowning at the bag, and then he said, slowly, “Hyunjin, I really— I don’t think I could stand to have the bleach on my head right now.”
“I thought that might be the case,” Hyunjin said. It was a process, even to bleach roots, and it would require the toner, too. It would probably take hours to sort out, and even as he’d stood in the dye section of Olive Young, he’d known he was asking a lot of Felix right now. “That’s why I got some dyes as well, brown and black. We could just cover the bleach with one of them, so that your hair can grow back. It’ll take less time, and it won’t hurt you.”
At long last, Felix slumped a little. He actually did something with his body, a little sideways movement, that brought his shoulder against Hyunjin’s, so that Hyunjin took some of his weight. “Let’s do that, then?” he said.
“Okay,” said Hyunjin. He should, he knew, insist that Felix eat first, sit him down at the table and get some food into him. But that could be a task for afterwards, for after Felix had woken up more, perhaps, or for when he was more relaxed after having had Hyunjin’s hands in his hair for the next hour or so.
He didn’t bother taking Felix down to Jisung’s room to use his bathroom. It was mid-morning, but that didn’t necessarily mean Jisung was awake, and it was one thing to commandeer Jisung’s room when he wasn’t in it, another to swan in there and simply throw Jisung out. There was another bathroom they could use, and if they were using it just this once, they probably wouldn’t cause any lasting damage to it.
Truthfully, though, Hyunjin didn’t really want to even see Jisung right now. Their conversation on the stairs had unsettled him in an odd way. He was used to being angry at Jisung, angry with Jisung; he had been angry at Jisung the very first time they met, and it had seemed likely that their relationship would continue in this way. Jisung, kind and accommodating, Hyunjin angry and bitter and all too prone to pick a fight.
But that was not what had happened. It was a shift in Hyunjin, more than anything. He just— was not sure he could remain angry at Jisung, not in the same way he once had been able to. His own feelings could not bear it.
And then Jisung had said, I’ll go with you, and Hyunjin had, for a second, been back in that dim car driving along those darkened streets, feeling once again the head-blow knowledge of realising that Jisung loved him.
He had, all this time, done his best to avoid thinking about it, at least while he could not do anything about it. But yesterday, in that cold, concrete stairwell, he had thought, he loves me, he loves me, and his anger had dissipated inside him, and he could not, this morning, bear to even look at Jisung’s face.
The main bathroom in the apartment was even less set up for amateur hair salon antics, but Hyunjin knew how to make it work, after all the time helping Jeongin when he had the cast. “Which colour do you want, black or brown?” he asked.
Felix barely even glanced at the boxes Hyunjin was holding up. “Brown, I think?”
Hyunjin nodded, setting that box down on the closed toilet lid, while the other one he shoved into the cabinet above the sink. “Take off your shirt?” he said gently.
Felix did so, a mimicry of what he had done that first day he was here. The difference was startling, when Hyunjin really thought about it — Felix had filled out, no longer all rib-cage and horrible pointed collarbones. Still on the skinny side, but he didn’t look like a lost little waif anymore. The tired way he stood aside, the faint bruises under his eyes from the awfulness of the past few days aside, Felix just looked better.
He was still so fiercely glad that Felix had found them, found him. That he’d had the space and time and resources to heal from those days on the street. It was like he’d said to Seungmin: there hadn’t really been a choice, not if he wanted to keep Felix safe, and he was so fucking grateful that Seungmin had done the same math right at the beginning and gotten the same answer.
“Here,” he said, holding out one of his old t-shirts, the neck of which was stained from his hair dye and the front discoloured from paint he had spilled on it. “You can wear this.”
Felix took it and pulled it on. There was something— bad, actually, about seeing him wear it, to see him back in Hyunjin’s old clothing, after the past few weeks of seeing him in his own clothes, or in Chan’s. But Felix just pushed his hair out of his face and said, “How are you wanting to do this?”
There was nowhere to really sit, in this bathroom; the toilet seat, when closed, sloped in a way that meant it couldn’t be sat on. After looking at it for a moment, and then at Felix, Hyunjin went back out into the hallway and then into the kitchen to grab his dining chair. One of the older chairs they had, by this point: there had been three matching ones, when he’d arrived on the scene, and his had been the first one to not match, a darker wood, a lattice-effect seat that he’d covered in a black cushion at one point.
He carried it down the hallway into the bathroom, where he set it in the middle of the room and then pointed to it. “Sit on this,” he said.
Felix did as he was told, his spine a little curved. His posture was normally great, but today he sat a little bit like he was wounded, his shoulders curled forwards. He folded his arms across his stomach, almost hugging himself, and Hyunjin asked, concerned, “Are you cold?”
Felix shrugged. “A little,” he said. “It’s nothing bad.”
Hyunjin wanted to argue with him. He didn’t want Felix to be cold — in fact, there was a part of Hyunjin that so deeply hated the idea of Felix ever being cold that he knew he was projecting something there. Possibly it was just the residual fear that surged up in him when he thought of Felix out on the streets in the winter. Maybe it was just the shadow-memory of how cold he had been rain-soaked and hunched on the ground in that doorway. Whatever it was, he didn’t want Felix to be cold, but he couldn’t really do anything about the temperature of the room right now, so perhaps he just needed to make sure this went quickly.
He put the towel he used for his own hair dyeing adventures around Felix’s shoulders, tucking it a little closer than he might have otherwise, trying to see if that could warm Felix up anyway.
It was a quiet process. He mixed the dye in silence, watching Felix sit on that stool with an almost empty look on his face. Last time they had done this in Jisung’s bathroom, Felix had hardly been chatty but he had been willing to talk, tired but cheerful and sweet. Now he looked like there simply weren’t words inside him.
Hyunjin didn’t know what to say to him. He had tried, both in the immediate aftermath of everything, and yesterday too, to find the words to make this feel better for Felix, to try to fix it, but he knew that there were no words. He knew that better than anyone, the way that there could be times when speaking, or listening, would make no difference.
There had been days where Hyunjin had lay on the couch of their old place and said nothing, crying silently as the hours stretched on and on, and nothing anyone could have said would have made a difference to him. They had tried, Chan and Changbin, murmuring to him quietly, trying to break through to him, trying to let him know that he was safe and that it would be okay, in the end, but it hadn’t made a difference. The only thing that had helped had been the quiet way Jeongin had sat with him, Hyunjin’s head in his lap, not even complaining about the way Hyunjin’s tears had soaked his pants.
Felix had gone to bed last night with the obvious signs of tears on his face, but he hadn’t cried when he curled up against Hyunjin. Was he cried out? It seemed unlikely; Hyunjin didn’t think Felix was the type of person who could run out of tears like that.
He began to slather the dye onto Felix’s hair, one hand holding a brush, the other sectioning out parts of Felix’s hair to make sure it all got covered. The box dye came with a plastic glove, an oversized one that was awkward to use. Hyunjin never used those anyway, but he’d been especially determined to not use it this time. Instead, he had covered his hands in latex gloves, so that when he touched Felix’s hair, it was as close as he could get to normal, physical touch.
He watched a slight shiver run down Felix’s spine. He did not quite relax, not like he normally would have done, not like Hyunjin hoped he would have done. He was so used to Felix almost melting at a touch like this that seeing it not happen was distressing. His heart ached for Felix. Of all people, he deserved this least of all. He had done nothing at all to deserve to feel this way. To have had comfort stripped out.
He tried to be as fast but as thorough as he could. Even after using the toner, Felix’s hair was bright enough that any missed spots would be glaring, and Hyunjin could always do this a second time, but he’d prefer not to, if for no other reason than he didn’t want Felix to have to sit here like this again. So he made sure that he had covered every single strand, the scent of the dye filling the air, sharp and chemical in his nose.
Felix didn’t say a word. He just sat there, letting Hyunjin work, moving only when Hyunjin directed him to, with a soft word or a touch to his head. At one point, he did let his eyes close, Hyunjin saw, but there still was none of that head-empty look which had so struck Hyunjin that first time. He was just still and silent and as pliant as he could be under Hyunjin’s hands.
He was glad to finish. Silence between him and Felix had always been comfortable, and so it was now, there was nothing about it that made him wish to fill it up, but he was aware, the entire time, of how in other circumstances, there would be something filling it up. As much as silence had never been a problem, neither had conversation, and he didn’t know what to do when there was no conversation to be had.
He stripped his gloves off, saying as he did so, “Okay, we’re done with that.” The sound of his voice in the room was startling even to him — he watched as Felix jerked a little in surprise. “You have to wait about twenty minutes.”
Felix nodded. He didn’t move, didn’t look up. He looked like he planned on spending those twenty minutes just sitting there staring into space, which Hyunjin supposed he had a right to do if he wanted, but he thought he might go and fetch his phone so that he could at least play them some music.
He’d just tossed his gloves into the trash when Felix brought the towel in closer around his shoulders and said, very softly, “This feels right.”
“What feels right?” Hyunjin asked, stopping and looking at him. Giving him his full attention, not wanting Felix to think he hadn’t been heard.
“My hair,” Felix said, still just as soft. “Changing it. When I changed it after I ran away from my dad, it was— it was about disguising myself, yes, but it was also about becoming something that he couldn’t control? Becoming my own person, someone new, I guess.”
Hyunjin just nodded, not interrupting. But he understood that, more than Felix maybe understood. His hair had been long when he’d escaped. They’d gone at him with scissors every so often but nothing neat or careful. Years of not enough washing, with no access to even shampoo, never mind conditioner, had left him with something knotted and uneven, and in the end Chan had simply cut most of it off, newspaper spread out on the floor in that little all-purpose living space in the old apartment, the scissors making Hyunjin flinch every time he heard the sssnip of them.
Hyunjin’s hair had been short, for a long time after that. He’d learned how to wash it properly, how to take care of it, learning what he liked and what he didn’t like. When he had started growing it out, there had been days where he would wake up with it against his mouth and he would think fuck, fuck, where am I, until he had opened his eyes and he was his own bedroom, smelling his paints, the flowers.
He’d thought about cutting it off again. Keeping it short. Sometimes he had wanted it so short that there could be no chance of anyone grabbing him by it. But instead he had just kept growing it, until it had reached the length that he wanted, and he was glad he had done it. Glad to have reclaimed even just that small thing for himself.
“I guess this is like that,” Felix said, hunching even further into himself, looking at the tiled floor. “Becoming a new me.”
Hyunjin came around and hunched down in front of him, looking up at Felix’s face. With his hair slicked back with the hair dye, he looked especially pathetic, like some kind of small animal that had been left in the rain for too long. His freckles were very stark in the bathroom lighting. Hyunjin took one of his hands, held it in both of his own. Felix’s fingers felt ice cold.
“I should have told him from the start,” Felix whispered.
Hyunjin stroked his thumb against what he could reach, just over Felix’s knuckles, it felt like. “I don’t think there were any right answers, angel,” he said. “I don’t think anyone knows what the right choice was.”
He knew that much was true. There had never been a right choice, the thing that would make everything work out. There had been, perhaps, the morally right choice, which was to have never lied, to Chan or to anyone, but one could not survive on morally correct choices. Perhaps Felix should never have allowed himself to have Chan, regardless of his own feelings for him, but then— was it better, Hyunjin wondered, for him to have had such joy, such honest, caring love for the past few weeks, if it meant pain now, or was it better to have never experienced that at all.
It was a genuine question. The maths was something Hyunjin didn’t know how to configure. It was something he struggled with himself: was it better to have Jisung for a short time, even if it would be agony when he lost him, or was it better to exist like this, in this half state? Which would hurt more, in the long run? He didn’t know.
Felix didn’t respond. He looked down at their joined hands and said nothing. Eventually Hyunjin asked a question that had been playing on his mind. “Do you still want to leave?” he asked gently.
“I— Chan-hyung says he wants me to stay,” Felix said, looking up again. His eyes were almost anguished. “I want to believe him.”
Hyunjin bit his tongue against the sarcastic remark he wanted to make about what Chan did or did not want. Unlike his anger at Jisung, this heat he felt towards Chan still spiked hot every time Hyunjin was reminded of it. “Things will settle, angel,” Hyunjin said instead, brushing his fingertips over Felix’s cheek just to watch the way it gave. “If that’s what you want, we can work towards going back to what it used to be.”
“That’s what I want,” Felix said softly. He inhaled deeply, the air catching a little, Felix shuddering. His gaze went a little distant. “That’s what I want.”
Hyunjin stared at him for a moment. “You know,” he murmured, “Jisung said he’d come with us, if we left.”
Felix roused a little at that, like Hyunjin knew he would, some more attention coming to his eyes. “He did?” Felix asked, and Hyunjin nodded, feeling his cheeks warm just like they’d done the previous day, when Jisung had made his offer. Felix went a little wobbly, his lip quivering. “Oh. Oh, Hyunjin.”
Yeah, that was pretty much Hyunjin’s sentiments on the matter too, but seeing Felix’s expression, hearing the tremble in his voice, made Hyunjin suddenly regret admitting to it.
What would his life look like, if he ran away with Felix, and Jisung came along? Suddenly, in so many ways, it felt less terrible. Jisung would chatter endlessly on the long bus rides and he’d always make sure Hyunjin had eaten and he’d come home from work into whatever little villa they’d rented with bags of soda and snacks in hand. Felix would sit under a beach sun and get frecklier and Jisung would turn golden, and maybe, maybe they could have a life.
He wondered if Jisung knew how that offer had lifted such a weight from Hyunjin’s shoulders.
Hyunjin cleared his throat, shaking the thoughts off. It was looking like it would not come to that. He patted Felix on the knee and then fetched his phone from where he had set it on the side cabinet. “Here,” he said. “I brought this so we could watch some videos while we wait, just like last time, yeah?”
Felix looked between the phone and Hyunjin’s face and didn’t manage a smile, although he did say, “Okay. But no dog videos, this time? Just — something different, please.”
Hyunjin nodded. And so they spent the next fifteen minutes watching a series of videos about frogs, captioned with soothing instrumental music over the top. Hyunjin got bored after the first two, but Felix seemed mesmerised by them, so Hyunjin kept clicking on the next one, and then the next, until the minutes had ticked by and Felix’s face seemed just a little bit looser.
When the time was up though, Hyunjin looked at the shower and said, “Actually, I have no idea how I’m going to wash this out of your hair.”
It wasn’t like in Jisung’s room, where Felix could simply lean back in some way, as uncomfortable as it may be. He was about to suggest that Felix strip to his boxers and simply sit in the shower when Felix said, “Can’t I just do it? I’d like to take a shower, I can do it myself.”
Hyunjin hesitated. It was not that he didn’t trust Felix to do it, because it was just hair dye, anyone could wash that out well enough. It was that he had been thinking, the entire time he was applying it, of how it might be if his hands were properly in Felix’s hair and there was hot water to provide even more comfort. Perhaps, then, Felix might finally have felt better, perhaps then Hyunjin might finally have seen the lines of his body melt again.
But he couldn’t insist on something like that, not when it made much more sense to simply let Felix shower and wash it out that way. Felix looked up at him, still perched on the chair, and Hyunjin slumped a little and said, “Yeah, okay, that makes sense. I’ll go get you a change of clothes, okay? I’ll set them just inside the door. Come and see me afterwards. I’ll just be in my room.”
Felix nodded. He’d already started to stand, pulling the towel away from his shoulders, apparently judging correctly that Hyunjin wasn’t going to care if the dye got a little bit on the shirt underneath. It was astonishing to Hyunjin even now how little Felix cared about stripping in front of him, and sometimes he wondered if that applied to just everyone — he had undressed and dressed again very easily in front of Jeongin the time they went to Maniac after all.
Hyunjin sometimes envied that ease. His body was still something he was learning to coexist with.
Outside the door, he could hear someone in the kitchen, moving around but not the sounds of anything being cooked. He thought about going to check who it was but he didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Instead, he went to his room, where everything was familiar and made the most sense, where his paints and sketchbooks and boxes of pencils were. A lifeline, once, the thing that had kept him sane once upon a time. He’d let it work its magic now, too.
——
The shower had done some good, which Felix had known it would. He had taken his time in there, letting the hot water flow over him, and made sure to be very careful washing the dye properly out, since he didn’t want to get brown dye all over Hyunjin’s pillows later when they went to bed.
Hyunjin’s bed, the main bathroom. It was like returning to a life that felt smudged, like his reflection in the mirror when he looked at himself after the shower, the steam fogging it up. He’d grown too used to sharing Chan’s bed, having his bathroom to use, which was strange, because he’d spent far longer taking up space in Hyunjin’s bedroom than he had with Chan. But at some point, Chan’s space had started to feel like a home, a true home, and as much as he knew he deserved it, it still hurt to have been ripped from it.
He dressed in the clothes that Hyunjin had brought him: sweatpants, his own, and one of Hyunjin’s hoodies, an old one judging by the faded colours, the worn softness of the material. Hyunjin liked his hoodies big, swamping him, and on Felix it felt a little bit like he was swimming in it. The sleeves went past his fingers, the bottom hem almost to mid-thigh.
Had Hyunjin known how comforting that would be, for Felix? To be obscured, his physical form muffled under this clothing, nothing tight or constricting against him. Hyunjin, he knew, was perceptive about these things, and if nothing else, he’d probably learned something about Felix’s preferences when they’d gone shopping together. But also, maybe, this was how Hyunjin liked to be, on his worst days: covered up and unrestricted.
He wrapped his towel back around his shoulders to catch the water dripping from his hair and let himself out of the bathroom, where the air was much cooler. He closed the door behind him, thinking about going back to Hyunjin’s room, maybe getting back into bed in some way, when he heard from the kitchen, “Come here, Lee Yongbok.”
Felix felt the fear seize him, in an instant changing him into the scared little creature he had been for twenty years in his father’s house. Even knowing that it wasn’t his father who had said that didn’t much help, because it was Minho who had said it, and that came with its own terror.
He could call for Hyunjin, he knew. Refuse to go out to the living room and just bolt for Hyunjin’s door, between where he was now and where, now that he was looking, he could see the edge of Minho’s body sitting at the kitchen table. Minho was sitting down, he wouldn’t be able to catch Felix. He could just ignore him, seek out Hyunjin as a buffer.
Instead, he took a breath, and then walked out into the living room and stood, silent and unmoving, just inside where the hallway opened up into the room. He put his hands slightly behind his back, to hide the way that they were shaking, a trick he had learned somewhere along the way working for his father. That feeling was so familiar that he almost straightened into the stance that he’d perfected at that time too, his back straight, posture alert, a stance that said he was not to be fucked with whilst also not losing the deferential air that his father had demanded. He’d been expected to always hold himself over the men who worked for his father, but never overstep the mark and trod on his father’s feet.
It had taken him a few missteps to figure out the perfect balance. He thought it would have been another mistake, to fall into it here, in front of Minho.
Minho just looked back at him for a long minute, silent too. He had a way of making his face blank and empty that was scarier on him than it was on other people. It wasn’t even the scars, it was something else, something wordless, perhaps something inherent to Minho that was missing on other people. But Felix didn’t like thinking about it that way. It came too close to thinking of Minho as somehow other than human, and as scared of him as Felix often was, he knew that wasn’t true. Minho was human, his father was human, Felix was human. They were all capable of terrible things in their way.
Eventually, Minho pointed at the chair opposite where he was sitting. Not Felix’s usual one, but Minho wasn’t sitting in his usual one either. “Sit down,” he said.
Felix nodded and padded to the table and took the chair he was being ordered into. On the table was a collection of folders, some scattered papers that Felix didn’t bother glancing at. He wasn’t interested in what was on them, and if Minho caught him looking, he might find that suspicious. Instead, Felix simply folded his hands against the surface of the table and looked at Minho, and waited.
“I think Jeongin wants me to apologise for what happened,” Minho said, when enough time had passed that Felix almost, almost shifted in his seat. “I won’t, of course.”
Felix didn’t move, didn’t say a word, but inside he was— confused by the idea. Of course Minho wouldn’t say sorry; he didn’t have anything to be sorry about. He had seen Felix as a threat to his family, to his home, and so of course he had protected them how he knew. In that moment, there had been no fundamental difference between Felix and the man who had broken in and hurt Seungmin.
It was what had made it so absolutely terrifying, why, when Minho had thrown him to the floor, Felix had scrambled back to his feet any way he possibly could. He had known that if he stayed down, if he had been on the ground when Minho got to him, he’d die. If he’d stayed down on that threadbare carpet, he’d suffer.
“I think the fact that I’m letting you remain alive, despite all the lying, should be enough,” Minho said, after a pause. “And I hope, for your sake most of all, that there aren’t any more things you are lying about.”
“There aren’t,” Felix said. His throat felt a little dry, and he had to swallow to stop his voice scratching out of him. “I’ve told you all everything. I’ve told Chan-hyung everything.”
Minho eyeballed him. He didn’t look convinced, but then Felix wasn’t sure what convinced would look like on Minho. He seemed determined to treat everything in the world with the utmost suspicion. Perhaps he was right to do so.
Sometimes it surprised Felix all over again, to know that Jeongin was in love with Minho. It was hard for Felix to imagine falling for someone like this, the intensity that seemed to get applied in all the wrong ways, the violence that, at the start, Felix had thought was random and sudden. But it was not random, and it was not sudden; it was, in many ways, horribly predictable. There was a safety in Minho’s violence that Felix had never felt but which he knew the others must — maybe Jeongin saw it most clearly, the way that violence was entirely turned outwards, at enemies, never inwards at the people who resided in this house.
Felix knew he should count his lucky stars that Jeongin had been in that room with him, able to stop Minho from simply killing him there and then, able to get the others to listen to him and show that slightest bit of mercy. But he knew, too, that if Jeongin had not been there, if Felix had not been such an apparently immediate threat to Jeongin, Minho might not have been so wild about it. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, he simply did.
He thought now that maybe it really was true, what Jeongin had said, about Minho loving him back, and that Felix had learned that somewhere along the way without actually internalising it.
“The others have all agreed to let you stay,” Minho said. He didn’t sound happy in the slightest about that, even a day after that meeting. “And they’ve agreed to trust you. I’m not going to be able to change their minds, but it doesn’t matter. Just because they trust you, doesn’t mean that I will.”
What else could Felix do? He nodded, and said, “I know.”
“If Chan-hyung says you can stay, you can stay.” Minho had not, really, moved at all during this conversation. He sat like someone had welded a length of pipe to his spine, but it didn’t look stiff. It looked the same way Minho so often looked — like he was an instant away from some kind of fast, sudden movement, the kind of thing that would make Felix flinch. The fact that he continued to not make that movement didn’t help Felix’s nerves. “And if he wants to go ahead with the job, then I’ll be a part of that. But you should know that I am going to be watching you from now on.”
“Yes,” murmured Felix, barely more than a whisper.
“The second you put a foot out of line, I’ll be there,” Minho said. His voice had gone low, dangerous. Deadly serious, in a way that if Felix didn’t already believe him, he would now. “I will be there, and I will make sure that you don’t get a chance to hurt any of the people here. I will make sure that you don’t get another chance to weasel your way out of it. I won’t care what Chan-hyung or Hyunjin or Jeongin will say. The next time I catch you lying to us, or working against us in any way, I will kill you. Do you understand me, Lee Yongbok?”
Felix had to swallow again. Sitting here in this brightly lit kitchen, against a table that had a scratch in it that was apparently from an experiment with a box cutter courtesy of Hyunjin, Felix wasn’t scared in a traditional sense. He was not frightened that Minho was going to hurt him right this second. And neither, really, did he have any need to be concerned about the future — he didn’t have anything that he was still lying about, nothing that he needed to be worried would come out in the wash. He had bared himself to them and come out on the other side alive, if not unscathed.
Perhaps what he was actually feeling was just the guilt. The regret. The pain of looking at Minho, who had never really looked at him kindly but had, at least, potentially been on a path to that eventually, and knowing that there would never be that in the future. No matter what anyone else thought of Felix, he knew now that Minho would never, ever trust him.
“I understand,” he said. “But, Minho-ssi, can I… ask something of you?”
Minho raised an eyebrow, devastatingly sardonic with it. It made Felix want to curl up into a little ball and whither away, to see that expression on his face. “I really don’t think you have any right to ask anything of me,” he said.
“I know,” Felix said, in something of a rush, not wanting Minho to shut the conversation down before Felix could get it out, “I know that, and I wouldn’t otherwise, but— please, please, can you not call me by that name?”
Minho looked slightly taken aback by that, before he controlled his expression again. “But Lee Yongbok is your name,” he said. He sounded like he was making a point with it, which he probably thought he was. He’d never believed that Felix was called Felix, had always said his name with a slightly mocking edge, like he thought it was a joke they were all in or something.
“Not anymore,” Felix said. “That name was given to me by my father. I don’t want it anymore, I’m just Felix now. I just— want to be Felix.”
Minho was silent. He looked at Felix like he was chewing on something, not physically but mentally. But before he could say anything else, a door down the hallway opened and then Hyunjin appeared in the room. “Lix,” he said, and then saw who Felix was talking to.
He stomped over to the table, coming to a stop behind Felix and resting his hands against Felix’s shoulders. Felix tipped his head back to look at him, and although it was difficult at this angle to see his face properly, the anger there was obvious. “Hyung,” he said. “Can’t you just leave Felix alone?”
Minho looked at Hyunjin. His expression was so incredibly difficult to read, but his voice was softer than before when he said, “I know you trust him, Hyunjin, but I don’t have that luxury.”
“No, you’re just being stubborn about it,” Hyunjin said. He sounded properly annoyed, but not quite angry. He sounded a little bit like he didn’t even really expect that much different from Minho. “Felix isn’t going to hurt us, he’s not, and the sooner you just accept that, the sooner everything can calm down. I don’t want— I don’t want Felix to feel like this isn’t still his home, hyung.”
Felix had to stifle a small noise at that, something that he knew would come out as a sob. The sincerity in Hyunjin’s voice threatened to undo him. It was almost too much, to know how completely he had Hyunjin on his side, and that he had done nothing, really, to have earned such loyalty.
Minho just glanced at Felix, though, and said, “Felix and I have an understanding. That’s all it is.”
Felix stared at him, while Hyunjin made a derisive, slightly mocking noise. Minho didn’t blink, gave no indication of anything one way or another.
Hyunjin drew Felix up and then laced their hands together, all the while complaining about Minho’s lack of manners, accusing him of being cryptic. He pulled Felix out of the room, and Felix had the distinct urge to look over his shoulder, maybe even to mouth thank you to Minho, but he had no idea how that would be taken. So he simply let Hyunjin herd him back into his bedroom and shut the door behind them.
“What did he mean, understanding?” Hyunjin asked as Felix gingerly sat down on the bed. Hyunjin threw himself down next to him. “What the hell did he say to you?”
Felix shrugged a little. He felt so tired, so exhausted to his bones. He wanted to curl back into a ball on this bed and simply never move, perhaps forever. “He said that he’ll kill me if I fuck up again,” he said.
Hyunjin gasped in outrage, a sharp inhalation. “Christ,” he said furiously, “he’s such an asshole sometimes.”
Felix sat for a moment. Then he reached out and laced his fingers through Hyunjin’s. He could feel the dampness of his hair still against his neck, the towel turning the shoulders of his hoodie wet, the thumping beat of his heart inside his chest. The air filling his lungs. Alive, despite it all. Alive, despite the times he had almost not been. He should probably be grateful for it. Probably think that it was enough. But he had learned to be greedy, somewhere along the way, and now he just wanted more.
“No,” he said, quietly. “It’s just that he cares about you all. That’s all it is.”
——
Of all emotions, Seungmin was least used to feeling shame. Somewhere along the line he had simply decided to— not care about things like that anymore. He thought it had probably come about as a result of now much shame he had carried for a while, a sixteen year old feeling the eyes of the world against his back, unable to escape from it, knowing that his every move was being judged. Too young to do anything about it but old enough to experience fully every excruciating moment of it.
Anything else simply paled in comparison. He’d come out of it cold and locked-up, someone that the world could no longer touch. Someone the world could no longer see, hidden away in his various workrooms over the years. He’d learned, in those rooms, to not care about what other people thought about him. He’d learned to say whatever he wanted without worry, to be blunt with his words, scathingly honest with his opinions, even as he kept his emotions tucked away in secret. He hadn’t cared what people thought of him any longer — it was why he had been able to ask Changbin so openly to fuck him.
He was feeling it now, that shame, sitting in this workroom, looking at Chan in the doorway. He’d felt it yesterday, talking to Changbin, but there was almost something worse about it now, with Chan. Perhaps it was just the memory of Chan in the meeting, broken nearly completely by the truth of who Felix was; Seungmin had felt, quite keenly, his own role in that.
“Hyung,” he said. “Hello.”
“Hello,” said Chan. He stood just inside the door, a hand holding the frame. “Can I come in?”
Seungmin held himself still in his desk chair, feeling slightly like his muscles were locked up. He had to fight with himself to not plunge into that way he had almost been with Changbin yesterday, defensive and mean with it, provoking some kind of reaction. Wanting someone’s anger, because if they got angry with him, that meant he had won — even if he were in the wrong, it didn’t matter if the other person yelled first. But that hadn’t worked with Changbin, yesterday, and it wasn’t going to work with Chan, today.
Still, he couldn’t help but say, “Hyung, you own this entire building.”
Chan nodded. He looked exhausted, a little bit like he was on his very last nerve. Seungmin felt an additional burst of guilt, seeing that, because he had slept— better than expected, but perhaps that was because Changbin had come back downstairs after seeing to Minho and whisked him off to bed and pressed him down bodily into the mattress with his weight until Seungmin’s anxiety and regret had been unable to stand up to it and he had relaxed into sleep.
He’d woken early in the morning with Changbin still there with him, Seungmin’s head pillowed against Changbin’s arm. This is unsustainable, he had thought, looking at Changbin’s sleeping face, and known it to be true.
Chan came into the room, carefully closing the heavy metal door behind him, not letting it slam shut the way Seungmin hated, the way Jeongin always did. He looked for a moment like he would take a seat at the table but instead he grabbed one of the stools and brought it over to where Seungmin still sat at his desk.
Seungmin watched him, not saying a word. He didn’t even really move, as Chan sat down next to him, oddly hunched on that stool. Chan looked past him, at the monitors, which for the most part were showing the feeds of all their cameras. Earlier Seungmin had watched Minho and Felix talk in the kitchen, his phone open to Changbin’s number just in case, but now Minho was alone in there. The only other person not in their room was Changbin, who was down in the basement beating the shit out of a punching bag. Seungmin had had one eye on that the entire time he had been working on his other stuff.
That other stuff was open on a separate monitor, and it was here that Chan was looking, Seungmin knew. He’d gotten out of bed this morning, leaving the warmth of Changbin’s arms with miserable reluctance, and come out here to get started on backtracking through all the footage that he had already kept a close eye on over the past couple of months. Working his way back through all the videos that he’d already watched, time spent daily going over what had happened while he slept, whichever set of day or nighttime hours that had happened to be.
It had become a waking up routine for him, almost. Wake up, drag his carcass out of bed, and skim eight hours of video feed on quadruple speed, just to check that Felix hadn’t been up to anything suspicious. He had done it every time, even though Felix had never once done anything suspicious.
He’d paused it when Chan came in the room, and the screen was almost filled with a blown up still of Felix in the kitchen from last week, standing at the counter mixing dough. The sound was muted but if Seungmin unmuted it, he knew that there would be the fuzzy sound of Felix humming to himself. All of it was like this: innocuous, peaceful, in a way. A boy simply learning to be happy again, maybe.
Chan cleared his throat. “I wanted— Changbin mentioned that you’ve been working on backtracking through the footage,” he said. “I wanted to see how you were getting on.”
“I’m not very far through,” Seungmin said. “But— I don’t need to be, because I’ve been doing this anyway, hyung. I’ve been keeping an eye on all the footage ever since he arrived. Just in case.”
Chan nodded again. He closed his eyes for a second, and the area under his eyelids seemed — bruised, somehow. A total lack of sleep, then, something Seungmin recognised in himself from years ago. The night in his living room, the police gone after delivering the news of his father’s suicide, his mother pacing the floor and cursing out the man Seungmin had once thought she loved. She’d gone to bed with a headache, in the end, and Seungmin had stayed up to figure out how to start paying back the debts they still had.
There was still a raspy quality to Chan’s voice when he spoke. “What have you found so far?”
Seungmin motioned to the screen with a jerk of his head, at that still of Felix. “I don’t know what to tell you, hyung,” he said, with a small shrug of his shoulders. “He literally never leaves. Not alone, at least.”
Chan nodded for a third time. What was that expression on his face? Resignation, perhaps, although it was hard to tell under the tiredness. “Right,” he said, almost a whisper.
“The only time he left alone, he was almost kidnapped,” Seungmin said. Chan made a small movement at that, not a flinch, or maybe a flinch quickly repressed. “And in the aftermath of that, while I was checking for the van, I was checking to see if he’d had any outside contact with the world. He didn’t, hyung. Unless he used Hyunjin’s phone where I couldn’t see it, he was not in contact with anyone outside of this building the entire time he has been here.”
Chan had the look of someone being told something he had already known was true, the final nail in his coffin. Seungmin had, of course, gone back and watched the footage from the office, watched as Felix sobbed on the floor, watched as Chan sentenced him to death. Had Seungmin been surprised by it? No, probably not, not when the news came as such a shock, the truth given not by Felix’s mouth. He’d done that maths months ago and had known the outcome.
He hadn’t even been surprised by Changbin’s attempts at tempering the emotions in that room. Even as Seungmin had been grateful for that voice of reason, he’d thought, ah, hyung, sometimes I think you’re too soft for this kind of work.
“You could check, couldn’t you?” Chan asked. “If he’d used Hyunjin’s phone, I mean. Even if he’d deleted the messages.”
“Yes,” said Seungmin levelly. “I could check that. I could check all our phones, just to make sure, if you’d like me to, but I doubt I’ll find anything. Hyung, there is seriously no way that the Magpie sent his only son in here and his only way of contacting his father was to use someone’s phone when they happened to leave it lying around.”
“You’re right,” Chan said hastily. “I know that, Seungmin. I just— I want to make sure that it’s— definite. Air tight. For Minho, if nobody else, I want evidence I can take to him, otherwise he’s going to patrol himself into an early grave.”
Seungmin thought it was a little optimistic that even with evidence, Minho would calm down about all of this. The fear, Seungmin knew, was less for the future and more for the past: the realisation that all along, there had been a threat living with them, existing in their space with them, and Minho wouldn’t have known until it was too late. Seungmin knew that feeling, the way the past could suddenly be a source of such deep anxiety.
Minho might never forgive Seungmin for keeping this secret all this time. It pissed Seungmin off to realise that he actually felt kind of bad about that.
“I’m checking it all again,” Seungmin said, “and I can give it all to Minho-hyung to check himself, if he doesn’t believe what I’m telling you. But I’ve been watching him this entire time and he’s not a traitor, hyung. He’s just— not.”
“I think that’d be good, if you could let Minho have all the videos,” Chan said softly. He looked again at that still of Felix on the screen for a long few seconds, and then turned back to Seungmin, serious and solemn, the skin at the edge of his eyes obviously pinched. “I wanted to ask,” he said, “why you didn’t tell us about Felix that very first night.”
Perhaps it had helped, to have talked about this with Changbin, to have the answer close to hand. “Because he was tired and starving,” Seungmin said, “and I didn’t want him to die.”
And there had been— guilt, there, too, he could acknowledge it now. Looking at Felix and seeing the thirteen year old Yongbok with his swollen face, the bruises up and down his arms, the welts on his back when they’d changed for gym. He’d said to Changbin that nobody had done anything about it, and that was true — the teachers had very clearly looked the other way, cowed by the knowledge of Felix’s father.
But it had been more than that, with Seungmin. He’d been thirteen himself, and what he could have done had been highly limited, but he hadn’t even cared to try. He’d seen that quiet, lonely boy in pain and thought, oh well, that’s none of my business, and done— nothing. He’d never spoken a word to Felix beyond what was required in the classroom, and he’d watched the others do the same and had not questioned that.
It hadn’t been until later, when Seungmin had been the boy alone and in pain and in desperate need of friends, that he’d understood the shame of it. Everyone he knew, everyone he considered a friend, had looked at what was happening to him and thought, oh well, that’s none of my business, and he’d been left to drown.
He’d survived that, somehow. He’d wanted to make sure that Felix did too, in the end.
“You let me sleep with him, knowing who he was,” Chan said. There was a remarkable lack of judgement in his voice, but that may have been because he was making it flat on purpose.
“I did,” Seungmin said. He kept his own voice flat too. It was the one part he had truly struggled with, knowing how Chan felt about the Magpie. “It wasn’t easy, hyung. But— he loved you. That much was obvious, to me.”
Chan shuddered a bit. He sat with his eyes closed again for a few moments. When he opened them, he still did not look at Seungmin with the anger that Seungmin had been expecting. He’d seen that anger, in the office, the bright flare of it. They rarely saw Chan angry but when he was, it burned hot. Seungmin had been expecting it this entire time, waiting for it to come, but it hadn’t.
“Hyung,” Seungmin said, surprised by how easy the words were, “I’m sorry.”
Chan blinked at him. He seemed surprised too, probably by Seungmin apologising for anything. If he wasn’t in the habit of shame, he really wasn’t in the habit of apologising for things in this kind of sincere way, and it might have been the first time Chan had heard it at all, from him. But he was sorry, for his role in this mess, for his part in what he knew Chan considered a betrayal. He had let Chan sleep with the son of the Magpie. That was no small thing to have stood aside and let happen.
“Thank you,” Chan said, after a pause. He reached out and squeezed Seungmin’s knee, a brief, chaste touch. Yesterday, when Changbin had confessed to almost calling him baby even in the moment of Seungmin’s betrayal coming to light, it had felt like something had cracked open inside Seungmin’s chest. That touch against his knee felt a little bit like it was doing something similar: a wrenching open of an emotion that Seungmin had been trying to avoid looking at.
He’d been scared. Changbin had seemed convinced it would all be fine, but Seungmin had known that it was not fine until Chan said it was. It was like he said: Chan owned this building, and therefore he could do what he liked, including throw Seungmin out for all of this. And Seungmin knew, without the need for discussion, that if Seungmin was forced to go, Changbin would not be going with him. The loyalty was to Chan. The loyalty always had been and always would be to Chan.
Chan stood, an odd heaving of his body upright. “Try to get the footage to Minho as soon as possible,” he said. “And— if you do find anything strange on it, please let me know immediately.”
“Of course, hyung,” Seungmin said. He watched as Chan returned the stool to the table, watched as Chan walked out of the room, the door swinging shut after him with a clanging bang when Chan didn’t quite catch it in time. A shudder ran through Seungmin at the sound.
He looked at that door for a few moments, before he turned back to his computer. He let himself bring his hand up so that he could worry, just with a couple of teeth, at the edge of his hoodie sleeve, just enough to soothe the awful roiling feeling inside him. Then he hit play, and watched the sped-up Felix on his screen work his way through making muffins.
They had been good, those muffins. Chocolate chip with almonds. He wondered if Felix would ever make something like that again for them.
——
It was strange, how quickly a body could get used to a new routine. Jeongin had spent years in this house doing mostly nothing with his day: watching television, reading in his room, playing games on the computer. Finding stuff to occupy his time, in the absence of anything more useful. But recently, he’d had his training schedule, and he’d grown used to that remarkably quickly.
There was nothing stopping him, he knew, from continuing it. He could go down to the basement and work out, like he’d been told to, lift some weights, try to run on the treadmill for longer than twenty minutes without wanting to die a little bit. But he couldn’t do it, because if he went downstairs, he had no doubt that Minho would, eventually, come and find him there.
Instead he had spent the day holed up in his room, sitting at his desk with his laptop open, watching a drama on there instead. It frustrated him, just because the screen was so small and he was used to something much larger at this point. That, plus the light through his window meant that it was hard to see what was happening sometimes. Such small, petty things to be frustrated about, and yet he was; he resented that he felt cooped up in here.
Now, though, it was well past time to eat, and so he paused his drama and took his headphones out of his ears. There were no voices from the kitchen, seemingly no sound whatsoever, which seemed like a good sign. He knew that there had been a meeting planned in Chan’s office today, so now seemed as good a time as ever to go out and get some food.
He left his bedroom, padded down the hallway in his socks, hands pulled up into the sleeves of his hoodie. There was still silence from the main room but when he emerged out into it, he found that there was someone in there. To his utter dismay, it was Minho, too, sitting in a different seat from usual, not easily seen from the hallway. He was looking up at Jeongin as Jeongin appeared, his gaze— fixed, like he had known exactly where to look, exactly what he was looking for.
He probably did. Jeongin had seen Minho do that before, lift his head from something he was reading or looking at and in an instant locate Jeongin in a room. Sometimes it felt like he didn’t even have to look to see, he just knew. It made Jeongin ache, sometimes, because he felt the same way so often, like he just knew where Minho always was.
Jeongin hadn’t expected to see him now. He stood there in his socks and sweatpants and hoodie and thought, of course he’s out here, of course. It made the anger, which he had been trying to keep relatively banked, rise up in him like a roar of flame. Jeongin had done so well avoiding him these past couple of days and now, when he thought it was safe, here Minho was.
Minho just looked back at him, without saying anything, that carefully blank expression on his face. He seemed like he was waiting for Jeongin to speak first. He’d been working on something, a few papers on the table, a print out of some kind of layout. Not Blackbird’s, which meant it was for some other job, one Jeongin didn’t even know about.
Jeongin knew that if he tried to go to the kitchen, to make something, Minho would try to help. More than that: Minho would simply take over, would not let Jeongin even try, insist on taking on the whole task for himself. Usually, Jeongin didn’t mind that kind of coddling, the way it screamed of Minho’s care for him, the way it meant that he got Minho’s home cooking without having to even try. But he didn’t want that today, he did not want Minho to do it for him.
He huffed under his breath. He made sure that Minho heard it, saw it. And then he turned and stormed back to his bedroom without saying a word.
He almost slammed the door behind him, and only the fact that it would definitely be viewed as the behaviour of a child stopped him from doing it. He did, however, flop face first down onto his bed, letting his legs swing up behind him as he did so. He pulled a pillow to his head so he could put his face into it and groan, just a little. Not loud enough to be heard outside of his room, but enough that it got some of the emotions inside him out.
He tipped his head to the side after he was done, just enough so that he could breathe, smelling the scent of the detergent that they used. There was a prickling feeling in his eyes, tears that he was determined to not let come any closer to the surface. He didn’t want to cry, to weep and wail like a baby. He wanted— he wanted to not feel this way at all.
He was just not used to this, at all. In many ways, and he knew they were naive ways, he’d thought that he would never have a reason to be angry with Minho. Sometimes he found him frustrating, yes, and sometimes he made Jeongin want to tear his hair out, but he’d never, in all their years of knowing each other, been angry with Minho, not like with some of the others. He’d been angry at Chan before, and Changbin, and a few more times with Hyunjin, especially in the old place, which was understandable when they spent so much time cooped up together. One time they’d yelled at each other outside a convenience store until Changbin had come back out without any purchases to ask what was going on. Hyunjin had insisted Jeongin was at fault; Jeongin had sullenly reported that Hyunjin had started it.
I don’t care who started it, I’m ending it, Changbin had said, and Hyunjin and Jeongin had caught each other’s eye and made up in an instant in favour of chorusing Okay, mom together.
That was easy, it was always easy with Hyunjin, and with Chan and Changbin too. There never needed to be words between them, never any need for actual apologies or explanations. Ruffled feathers simply smoothed themselves out, hurt feelings were soothed one way or another, with no grudge held. But it was different with Minho, as it always was, for Jeongin. The way he felt for Minho was unlike anything he had ever felt for anyone else, so it made sense that this, too, was different.
It made it hard, though. Harder still in that he knew, in his heart, that Minho did not get it. He had tried to explain, in the immediate aftermath, but his words had not penetrated. Jeongin didn’t know how to get through, how to explain it in a way that Minho understood, because he could tell that Minho had chosen something to be stubborn about.
There was a knock on his bedroom door, not hard but enough that even if Jeongin had been wearing his headphones, he would have heard it. “Baby boy?” called Minho, through the door.
Jeongin sat bolt upright, his hair falling into his face. He was glaring at the door, which was kind of stupid, but he couldn’t help it. He’d known yesterday that his bedroom was unlikely to be a perfect sanctuary for him, because it was too easy to simply interrupt him. In his room, it was easy to seek him out, so perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised that Minho did just that, once he knew that Jeongin was in here.
He didn’t say anything, though. After a moment, there was another rap of knuckles, but Minho didn’t repeat the nickname, didn’t call anything else out. Jeongin sat in the silence, looking at the door, waiting with baited breath for— something. Another knock, maybe, or perhaps just for Minho to simply open the door and come inside. It felt a little bit like it had done after that team meeting, standing there with Minho’s hands on his shoulders, angry and hurting and wanting, all the same, for Minho to kiss him, finally. A confused mess of emotions.
But there was nothing but silence, nothing but the beating of Jeongin’s heart inside his chest, for long enough that he realised— Minho was gone.
He slumped a little, irritated at himself for feeling this way, angry all over again with Minho for causing this confusion inside him. He felt like these past few weeks had just been full of this, an endless up and down sensation where he never knew where he stood, or what Minho was thinking anymore.
And he was still hungry, and he hated feeling this way, like he was trapped inside his room, unable to move freely through the house like he wanted to. It was tickling something in the back of his mind and he couldn’t quite figure it out — the group home, perhaps? Perhaps earlier than that, but he thought of the group home, before Chan had started looking after him, when even his bed hadn’t been a place to escape the torment, in a room with other children as it was.
He waited another few minutes, just to make sure, and then he slipped off the end of his bed and went to the door again. Silence, once more, from the kitchen, which clearly wasn’t a sign of anything. He pulled open his door, just to see if he could hear anything now, and found, right outside his door, a covered bowl, which when he hunched down and lifted the plate from the top, turned out to contain some kimchi fried rice.
He stared at the bowl for a long couple of moments, his brain as empty as it had been in the moment he first saw Minho in the kitchen. This was not some leftovers that Minho had simply heated up, because they didn’t have any leftover kimchi fried rice. Instead, after Jeongin had stormed away to sulk in his bedroom, Minho had made him this, fast and easy with the sliced ham that Jeongin liked best, and left it outside his door for him.
The care of it; the effort of it. Minho knowing without needing to be told that Jeongin was hungry and so, despite Jeongin’s anger towards him, despite Jeongin’s silent treatment and avoidance, he had still made this for him and left it wordlessly outside his room.
How kind he could be, how giving and sweet. It made everything about the past couple of days so endlessly frustrating.
He picked the bowl up with both hands and stood and carried it out into the main room. It was empty, this time, the table cleared of papers. The cutting board and frying pan were washed and drying by the sink. Jeongin put the bowl down on the table at his space, looking at that empty spot opposite, the chair tucked in carefully. The entire room looked as though Minho had never even been in it.
Jeongin fetched a spoon and took his seat and sat looking at the food a little longer before he started to eat. He probably should warm it back up in the microwave, the rice not quite hot after sitting outside his door, even with the plate covering it, but he didn’t want to. Instead he just ate it slowly, his thoughts even more of a muddled mess. His head almost hurt with them all.
It had been awful, was what it was, standing in that room, begging Minho to stop, and seeing— the cruelty on his face. A cruelty that Jeongin had never really believed Minho capable of, despite the violence, the temper. He’d seen it, in the aftermath of Minho’s aggression: the emptiness inside him, the blank, hollow look on his face. No, Minho didn’t enjoy violence, not even his own, and Jeongin had always known that.
He’d been enjoying it, hurting Felix. That had been the sickening part.
But he remembered the way Minho’s hands had gripped him, the way his voice had shook, just a little bit, as he admitted to being scared. Scared of what, Jeongin had thought, but he didn’t need to wonder, he knew it. Minho had come into the room where Jeongin sat with an apparent threat, and he had reacted accordingly. Was Jeongin surprised? No, in the end, he was not surprised; it was a different thing, to feel disappointed about it.
Minho wasn’t in the habit of admitting to fear. He wasn’t in the habit of admitting to much of anything, so it meant something that he had confessed that to Jeongin, even if he had done it in the heat of the moment.
And perhaps, too, there was a little bit of shame that lived inside Jeongin, a little bit of— self-reflection that needed to be done on his part. Because sitting here, eating this rice, he could admit that at the core of it, his pride had simply been hurt. He needed to be adult enough to admit that, grown enough to know when something petty was affecting him like this: his ego had been bruised.
He’d always thought of himself as someone who Minho listened to, someone who could, maybe, control that violence that Minho sometimes let out. Had those been childish daydreams, romantic ideas that he knew the others would tease him about if he ever expressed them? Probably. Almost certainly, in the face of the evidence, which was that when he had wrapped his hands around Minho’s arm and begged him to let Felix go, to not hurt him, Minho hadn’t listened. He’d barely even looked at Jeongin. In fact, he’d hurt Felix more.
There was bitterness there. But was it Minho’s fault, if Jeongin had— projected something onto him that had proven false?
He put his spoon down, put his face into his hands, groaned for a moment, with great feeling. In his nose was the smell of this food that Minho had made for him and he wanted to— forgive. He wanted to sweep it under the rug, to accept that perhaps they could not see eye-to-eye on what had happened, but it was over now. Felix was no traitor, they had cleared everything up, and even Chan was willing to forgive and forget. Perhaps Jeongin could do the same.
He’d almost finished the rice when a door opened and then Hyunjin appeared in the living space. His hair was pulled back out of his face, scraped back in an unstylish way which suggested he had probably been painting. He saw Jeongin sitting at the table, saw the rice, and then scowled at him.
“What,” said Jeongin around a mouthful of food, taken aback by that look.
“Did Minho-hyung make that for you?” Hyunjin asked. When Jeongin nodded, Hyunjin huffed, shaking his head. "God, he's unbelievable."
Jeongin swallowed, letting the confusion on his face speak for itself.
“He pulled Lix aside like an hour or two ago,” Hyunjin explained, a hand coming to rest on his hip, “and told him he'd kill him if he so much as breathes wrong, and then he turns around and makes you food.”
Jeongin stared at him. “He— huh?” he said weakly. The anger was coming back again, sweeping through him in a noxious tide, leaving him shaking so hard that when he put his spoon back into the bowl, it rattled against the ceramic. He hadn’t known that, he had not known that at all, and now the smell of the food made him feel like it was turning over in his stomach.
“Yeah,” Hyunjin said, the turn of his mouth grim. “What an asshole. I expected him to lash out initially, but this— he's calmed down enough now that this isn't okay. I don't really know what to do about it.”
Neither did Jeongin. How could Minho be this same person? The one who made Jeongin food with such obvious care, and the one who looked at someone, a victim as much as Jeongin had ever been, and used his strength over him to frighten him? To continue to make Felix feel unwelcome in this home, which Jeongin wanted desperately to feel like somewhere Felix still belonged.
Jeongin could have forgiven what had happened in that office, when Minho had been scared, shocked by what had happened, unknowing of the truth. He could not forgive this: the ongoing cruelty to someone who deserved it least of anyone.
——
Minho was the last to arrive to the meeting, which wasn’t unusual necessarily, but he was a few minutes later than their start time, which was. Minho had a habit of being disturbingly punctual, and Changbin didn’t know if that was down to his inherent nature or if it was something that had been drilled into him inside prison, but Minho seemed to have a mantra of five minutes early is on time that the likes of Jisung and Hyunjin never quite managed to adopt.
He was not on time today though, and he offered no explanation as he let himself into Chan’s office and found them waiting for him. Changbin, back to the wall standing just behind Chan’s chair in his usual spot, watched him as he came into the room, not reacting to Jisung’s comment of, “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever been somewhere before you, Minho-hyung.” He just silently took the other chair next to Jisung and put a brown folder on the table without opening it.
He looked tired. In fact, more than that: he looked exhausted. Minho had always had dark circles, a seemingly natural trait, but right now they made him look half-dead, like his face had been cast into shadow although the angle of the lights were doing no such thing. Had he slept last night? Changbin hadn’t thought to check. Minho hadn’t been around, and Changbin had assumed he was in his room, but now he thought— did he go out on patrol again? Another night of walking the streets, running on nothing more than what he had snatched sitting outside Hyunjin’s bedroom door, which Changbin had seen him do when he had gone back down to be with Seungmin.
He’d need to keep an eye on Minho, then, if that were the case. A Minho running on no sleep was— likely to be unpredictable.
“Okay,” said Chan. Truthfully, he didn’t look much better than Minho did. Changbin was not surprised by that, though. Chan struggled with sleep at the best of times, and this was definitely not the best of times. “Well, first of all, I wanted to— apologise for how chaotic the last couple of days have been.”
There was a beat of shocked silence before Jisung said, “Fuck, hyung, what are you apologising for?
“None of it has been professional,” Chan said, “especially not my behaviour, and so I wanted to— say sorry and ask—”
“Alright,” interrupted Changbin, stepping forward so he could squeeze Chan’s shoulder. Chan was stiff as he touched him and tensed up more when he felt Changbin’s hand against him. “Hyung, nobody blames you for any of this and you don’t need to apologise to us.”
“Yeah!” said Jisung, serious in that way that only Jisung had, where he didn’t get quiet with it but somehow more upbeat. “Come on, hyung, this was hardly a normal situation, there’s nothing to forgive you for. Right, Minho-hyung?”
Minho was silent for a moment, looking at Chan. Changbin was not sure if the look on his face was supposed to indicate that he did, in fact, blame Chan for what had happened, but mostly he just looked like he hadn’t quite taken in what was being said. Chan grew even more tense under Changbin’s hand but eventually Minho just said, “You don’t owe us an apology. Can we get on with our meeting now?”
His affect was flat, his face blank. If it was anyone else, it would have felt— hollow, way too dismissive, but there was something about Minho’s business as usual tone that seemed to pull Chan back together, and he straightened up, nodding his head. “Yes,” he said. “Right, you’re right.”
Changbin lifted his hand away and took a step back again, out of Chan’s personal space. It had been hard, these past couple of days, to watch Chan fall apart in this way. He had never seen it; he wasn’t even sure if he’d ever seen Chan cry before. Even in the old apartment, arguing in furious whispers with each other about what could be done about the Magpie, Chan hadn’t cried. Neither had he cried the first time he told Changbin about his dead brother, or about what had happened to Jeongin in that group home.
Chan was the strongest man Changbin knew. But even strong men had their breaking points. Changbin wished Chan hadn’t been pushed to his.
“I had a call from Hyunjae earlier,” Chan said. Minho twitched a little. “He wanted to know if we still needed our order for the guns. I told him I would get back to him about it, but I’d prefer to have an answer for him before the end of the day because the longer I take, the more I worry about the hit our reputation might take.”
“I don’t fucking like that he knows that Felix is with us,” Minho put in, voice like chipped ice. “I don’t like it at all, not when there’s still a hit out on that kid’s head.”
“Hyunjae-hyung will keep his mouth shut, surely,” said Jisung, looking around at them. Changbin gave him a little shrug, but he suspected Hyunjae would. His tone had been deadly serious when Changbin had threatened him, the look in his eyes one that had acknowledged the power that Chan’s team held. Despite Hyunjae’s relatively bigger operation, Chan could shut him down, if he applied his energy towards it. “He hates the Magpie too.”
“We still don’t know how much Lee Jaerim is offering,” Minho said, very darkly. “Money can be a powerful motivation.”
“I’m not concerned about Hyunjae leaking anything,” Chan said. “I’m not even concerned about him selling us out to Lee Jaerim. I understand what you’re saying, Minho, but it would have to be a hell of a lot of money to send him crawling back to Lee Jaerim, after what he went through working for him.”
Minho grumbled something under his breath, but didn’t protest that. A lot of Hyunjae’s trouble made more sense now that they had the added information from Felix, but it had gone beyond that. Hyunjae wouldn’t want to be in debt to Lee Jaerim, wouldn’t want to have that kind of relationship again. It had almost destroyed his entire business.
“I’m more concerned,” Chan continued, “about our relationship with him suffering. There aren’t many arms dealers that I’m willing to work with in this city, and Hyunjae is the best of them. I don’t want this— mess to affect how we do business together.”
None of them wanted that. The Magpie might have, according to Felix, leapt to the worst of a bad lot when Hyunjae was no longer an option for him, but that still left them with a bad lot to choose from. They’d had plenty of bad dealings in the past: guns that weren’t what they ordered, missing ammunition, a particularly harrowing experience where Changbin’s gun had jammed in the middle of a job. None of them wanted to go back to that.
“You’re cancelling the order,” Minho said. He said it less like he was trying to order Chan around and more like it was so much the obvious choice that he hadn’t thought of any other options.
“Well,” said Chan delicately. “That depends on whether or not we continue with the Magpie job.”
Minho twitched again, almost like a body jerk, his face falling into a scowl. Changbin watched him, keeping his own face perfectly neutral, not letting anything show. He’d known that Minho would be upset about the idea of it, known that as far as Minho was concerned, the job was cancelled. But Chan and Changbin had discussed it after Hyunjae had called, and it was something they needed to actually talk about.
“What do you think, Jisung?” Changbin asked, pivoting the attention away from Minho, before he could jump in and derail the meeting.
There was again that look of mild surprise that flickered across Jisung’s face. They’d seen that look on Jisung’s face a lot over the past couple of months, as they’d started on the work of bringing him more and more into the job planning process. He was shocked every time, like it had never once crossed his mind that they’d ask him, or take his opinion into consideration, when they had been doing it regularly for a while now.
It made sense that they would ask him now. Even if Chan was going to Blackbird’s with him and Hyunjin, it would probably be Jisung taking on the bulk of that work. If he had doubts, they needed to hear them now.
“Um,” said Jisung. He looked at Chan, then at the scowling Minho beside him, and winced a little bit. “Well, I think— as far as we can tell, Felix hasn’t been lying to us about the job. It seems to me that him being the Magpie’s son almost adds credibility to the job.”
“Explain,” Minho said tersely. “You’re not stupid, Jisung, but that sounds fucking stupid.”
Jisung shifted in his chair. Not like he wanted to shift away, not like he was scared of Minho, but almost more like he wanted to make the kind of rude gesture he would have given Changbin in this situation and was having to physically stop himself. “He’s the Magpie’s son, and the Magpie sucks ass, to be honest, so is it really that difficult to believe that he wants revenge? With just what Seungmin and Hyunjin said about his scars, I’d buy it, but add in his sister and, yeah, it makes sense.”
“We have no proof that Lee Jaerim actually killed his youngest daughter,” Minho said. “And it is just as likely that a boy brought up under the thumb of the Magpie would go the opposite way — he could be very willing to do something like this if it meant gaining his father’s approval.”
“God, hyung, you don’t be stupid,” Jisung said, a little heatedly for him; it made Changbin blink. “The Magpie’s been beating the shit out of him since he was a kid, and you think he’d come and do something like this to please someone who did that to him? It doesn’t inspire loyalty in a child.”
There was a beat of silence, everyone looking at Jisung who was not looking at any of them. They’d all seen the scars on Jisung’s back, after all, at some point or anything, the three of them who were most likely to be down training at the same time as him. Ugly things, small and circular and more than there should be: cigarettes stubbed out against a child’s back. It had sickened Changbin to his stomach when he had first seen them, but Jisung had shrugged it off when Changbin had asked about them.
Changbin expected Minho to retort, to respond to that angry note in Jisung’s voice, which had certainly never been directed at Minho before. Jisung would never have dared in the past. But Minho just looked at Jisung with an expression of confusion, obvious on his face. “Since when were you his biggest fan?” he asked, a slight bitterness in his voice.
It was something of a good question, Changbin had to admit, since Jisung had, not forty-eight hours ago, been on Minho’s side when it came to doubting Felix’s loyalty. As it was, he was also not surprised when Jisung said, “I talked to Hyunjin. He knows Felix better than I do, and so if he trusts Felix, that’s good enough for me.”
Minho sneered. Whatever was about to come out of his mouth was probably something he’d regret later. He was clearly in that kind of mood, where he was willing to stick to his guns in the face of anyone else’s disapproval. Changbin, before he could speak, said, “Minho-hyung, do you seriously think that Felix is loyal to Lee Jaerim?”
Minho looked at Changbin, eyes narrowed, and then growled under his breath, just slightly. Changbin wasn’t worried about it, and it was probably a sign of how far they’d all come that nobody else in the room reacted either. Jisung looked like he almost rolled his eyes at it.
Minho, though, did not look happy to have been called out like that. “No,” he said, after enough time had passed to make his reluctance to answer obvious. “No, I don’t think that. There is clearly no love lost between him and his father. But that doesn’t mean that I have to be happy that he’s here.”
“Well, no,” said Chan. His voice sounded weary, without any other kind of emotion in it. “Nobody would ask that of you, nobody is expecting that of you.”
“Hyunjin certainly does,” Minho said, “and Jeongin. And I bet you will too, in the end, hyung.” There was something resentful in his voice, but more than that, something simply frustrated, like he too could see the writing on the wall with Chan. Changbin could too: it was fairly obvious that Chan was on his way to forgiving Felix, if he hadn’t already, and from there it was probably a short leap back to their previous relationship. Changbin didn’t think Chan had it in him, to keep himself at a distance from Felix.
Chan took the attack with only a small flinch, that probably only Changbin saw anyway. “Minho,” he said, patiently, quietly. “Please trust me when I say that I don’t get any pleasure out of your discomfort with this. Seungmin is looking through all the footage of Felix’s movements since he first arrived, although he told me that he’s been doing that anyway, that he's been watching Felix this entire time. I've asked him to give all the footage over to you, too, so that you can look it over yourself."
Minho's lip curled nastily. "Yeah, one of us should double check that," he said, "since we clearly can't trust a fucking word out of Kim Seungmin's mouth."
Changbin was speaking before he was even aware he was going to do so. “Hyung, shut the hell up,” he snapped. “You have no idea how difficult it was for him keeping this secret from us, so don’t run your mouth on things you don’t understand.”
The silence this time was considerably longer, and considerably more shocked than it had been after Jisung’s outburst. Even Chan turned around to look at him, an eyebrow raised. Changbin felt himself flush, just a little, but he hoped they just took it as anger — because he was angry, tired of listening to that sneering, horrible tone in Minho’s voice when he spoke about Seungmin’s supposed loyalty.
What did Minho know, of Seungmin’s loyalty? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He had not been in that room while Seungmin sobbed with the relief of literally months of stress suddenly coming to an end. Minho and Seungmin’s relationship had always been— fraught, Changbin would have said, except that wasn’t quite it. They were too similar, perhaps, and while that caused friction sometimes, it always meant that they aligned on something they both considered important: the safety of this team.
But Minho hadn’t been there, he hadn’t seen it. He didn’t know the truth of Seungmin. And Changbin couldn’t just let him talk like that, even if he knew that it was— too much. Even if it brought him a little too close to revealing something he could not yet reveal.
Changbin had expected Minho’s temper to flare in response, trying to brace himself for it, for whatever bitchy little comment he would direct at Changbin next. But Minho just stared at him, mouth parted, looking genuinely shocked. Jisung, next to him, looked much the same, and a little uncomfortable besides; anger in a room with him like this always did make him skittish, even if it wasn’t directed at him.
It was Chan in the end who said, “You spoke to Seungmin about all this already?”
Changbin didn’t really know how to defuse the situation, so he just said, “Yes. Not about the footage, just— other stuff.”
Chan looked a little confused but he just nodded slowly and then turned back to Minho, whose face was slowly turning from surprise back to a scowl, and Jisung, chewing the inside of his own mouth visibly. “We can trust Seungmin,” Chan said, “and I know that you know that already, Minho. He didn’t keep Felix’s identity from us for bad reasons. But we’re not here for that, we’re not here to talk about Seungmin. I want to know what you think about going ahead with the job, Minho.”
Minho took his eyes away from Changbin and looked at Chan again. Changbin didn’t move, didn’t loosen his stance, but it was a relief to have those eyes away from him. Minho was smart, and he was used to seeing details that other people missed. The last thing Changbin wanted was for Minho to be the one to figure things out first, although he got the sense that whenever Changbin and Seungmin came clean, Minho was not going to be happy about that, either.
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Minho said. His voice was aggressively toneless, nothing at all like it had been through this conversation. He had stripped out any annoyance, any frustration, any emotion whatsoever; the voice of a man who did not think his words would make any difference. “It was a risky job anyway, and it is more risky now that we know that the Magpie is not just looking for a random techie but his son. I have no doubt that since Felix has been missing, their security has been put on a higher alert. We’re also working on considerably outdated information at this point.”
“Security was always likely to be on high alert,” Chan said. “And the information has always been outdated.”
“Yes,” Minho said, flatly, emptily, like that little fact didn’t make a difference to him. “Like I said: risky. We will be risking our lives on the word on Lee Jaerim’s only son. You will be risking Jeongin’s life on the word of Lee Jaerim’s son. Make of that what you will, hyung.”
Chan nodded, the set of his shoulders tense, and then lifted a hand and scrubbed it at his face. Minho watched him, his face unchanging, his eyes— remote. A statue, the way only Minho could achieve, a kind of stillness that, on jobs, let him fade so completely into shadows that the people he killed often only knew what was happening to them when the pain started.
When Chan lowered his hands, he first looked at Jisung, and then turned around to look at Changbin, who nodded at him. He had no idea what Chan was going to decide, no idea what words would come out of his mouth, but it didn’t matter. In this case, as was the case with most things, Changbin would support whatever choice he made. That was what Changbin was made to do.
“Okay,” Chan said slowly, as he turned back around. “The fact is, we still have a lot of prep work to do for the Blackbird’s job, not to mention that we’ll need the time that it will take Hyunjae to get the guns to us. That gives us time to regroup, time to— make a different call later. But for now, we’ll continue with our prep work, with an eye to carrying out the mission on a delayed schedule.”
“Okay, hyung,” said Jisung. He sounded mostly relieved that a decision had been made.
Minho nodded, shortly, sharply, a little jerk of movement. He picked up the folder that he had put on the desk earlier and then got to his feet, nothing at all like his usual smoothness present in his limbs. He really did look tired, but more than that, in this moment, he looked almost defeated.
It was like Chan had said earlier: nobody took any pleasure in seeing Minho like this. In fact, looking at him, Changbin almost felt bad about snapping at him — but only almost, because Minho, at times like this, was determined that everyone should know his displeasure.
They’d always said Minho will get over it but there was something about this situation that made Changbin wonder if he ever actually would. If he ever actually could.
Minho left the room without saying a word. Chan had not dismissed them but he didn’t protest, didn’t call Minho to come and sit back down. He just let Minho leave, a remarkably quiet exit, although the door slammed just slightly behind him. As soon as he was gone, Jisung said, “Ah, is it okay if I go, too?”
“Yeah,” said Chan. He waved a hand towards the door. “You can go, Jisung, thank you for coming up here.”
“Of course, hyung,” said Jisung, climbing to his feet. “I think it’s a good call, you know? To keep up the prep work at least.”
Chan just nodded. He didn’t say anything until Jisung had left the room too, and Changbin had come around to take the seat that Minho had vacated. There was silence, long between them, but not uncomfortable, not on Changbin’s part. Chan was looking at his desk, chewing on his bottom lip, and Changbin was content to let him think.
Eventually Chan looked at him. “Do you remember,” he said softly, “back when I— the morning after the Plaza Hotel job and I said that I had really made a mess of everything? I’m starting to think that really was true, Changbin.”
“You haven’t, hyung,” said Changbin. “And even if you had— hyung, this isn’t all on your shoulders, and that means it’s not all on you to fix. We’ll get through this, you know we will.”
Chan didn’t look convinced. He just looked tired. He needed sleep but there was no way Changbin would be able to convince him to do so. Chan didn’t nap, he just continued as he was until he dropped for the most part.
“You still have me, hyung,” said Changbin. “You know that, right? You’ll always have me, hyung.”
Chan blinked at him. There was an expression on his face that was like— someone being surprised by a fact they had forgotten they already knew. And after a moment, he managed to smile, small but there, an uptick at the corner of his mouth that filled Changbin with something akin to utter relief. “Yeah,” said Chan. “I know that. I always know that. Thank you, Changbin.”
——
Minho dragged himself up the stairs to the apartment, an odd lethargy in his limbs, his legs feeling almost like they were going to be unable to bear his weight. He was not used to feeling like this outside of training sessions where he’d pushed himself to the absolute brink. It was a physical weakness he did not like.
Something in him, small and barely there, reminded him he probably needed rest, but it was easily pushed away. Maybe later. Maybe. Right now, he could put off eating no longer, though there was no hunger gnawing in his gut. It had been replaced with anxiety, nausea lingering at the back of his mouth.
He should have anticipated Chan would go through with the job. It just had felt so monumentally awful that he had not been able to believe it would really happen. The danger, the risk, cranked up even farther than what Minho had initially estimated, and he’d estimated enough. And he could not stop Chan, nor the others, from flinging themselves headfirst into that danger. He could back out of the job himself, but that would not halt it. And he would die before letting Jeongin go in without the cover Minho could provide.
So all he could do was listen. Obey. Reassess his plan, factor in how Felix being the Magpie’s son might change how they needed to approach this. The idea of it was exhausting, draining him of reserves he did not currently have. He wanted to scream, to rail against Chan, anything to just— stop this. He wanted desperately to curl up in a corner and, when he emerged, to be in a reality where none of this was happening. He felt like he was being slowly pressed between two walls, feeling the crush of them stop his breathing, break his bones, slow and agonisingly without reprieve. And above it all a panic, as the inevitable slowly came for him.
Standing in that office, as the others had overwhelmingly disagreed with him, had not even listened to a word he said, had made Minho feel defeated in a way that he wasn’t sure he’d felt since his first long stint in solitary. Why am I here, he’d wanted to ask. Why do none of you care what you’re doing to me.
It wasn’t personal. He kept telling himself this as he approached the apartment door. It wasn’t personal. But that didn’t make living like this any easier, this fear, his heart always going a little too fast. His palms clammy and his muscles aching with how he kept locking them.
How was he supposed to keep the others safe like this.
He came into the apartment, and stopped dead barely out of the entryway. Felix and Jeongin were in the kitchen, their backs to him as they did the dishes together, Jeongin on drying duty. They had apparently not paid much attention to the sound of the keypad outside but Minho had shut the door after himself a little harder than normal, a slam in his shock at seeing them there together. At the sound of it closing too loudly, they both looked over, Felix shutting the water off quickly as he whipped around. His eyes were wide with fear; Jeongin’s were squinted in displeasure.
Minho’s breathing was shallow. Jeongin’s face, cast into lines of almost distaste, felt like another spike in Minho’s chest. Another, another. Lodging itself beside the memory of Jeongin’s fingers prying at his hands, his begging voice — his expression, earlier, as he’d come out of the hall and been unhappy to find Minho in the kitchen. A first, for them. Jeongin was always happy to see him. And instead he’d turned and hid behind his bedroom door.
Minho had hoped that making Jeongin lunch — a wordless apology, all Minho could think to do — would soften Jeongin a little. He normally could read Minho so well, and Minho had hoped— but it had apparently not helped at all.
There was a buzzing, insistent anxiety in Minho that grew in intensity the longer he stood there and Felix did not put any space between himself and Jeongin. In his tiredness, he could tell he was not doing a good job keeping his emotions off his face, out of his body language. The threat would have been obvious.
The silence in the wake of the rushing water was almost like a physical thing, pressing on them. Finally, Jeongin broke it.
“Hyung, come on,” he said to Felix, grabbing his elbow. Minho’s vision dimmed around the edges, zeroed in on that close contact. “Let’s go watch something downstairs.”
“No,” Minho said, a harsh rasp, rawer than he’d intended. He normally did not dole out orders quite like this, his own rather than enforcing something Chan had decreed. But he could not— he did not think he could survive knowing Jeongin was closested away with Felix. It felt like his heart might actually give out. “I don’t want you alone with him in such an isolated area.”
Jeongin gave him an absolutely scathing look, reminiscent of Hyunjin looking at Jisung, and it made Minho feel sick. Jeongin did not give any heed to Minho’s words anyway, opting instead to tug on Felix, who in turn moved but very hesitatingly, his eyes darting to and away from Minho quickly.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, a little louder than he’d intended — he did not feel fully in control of his body. He felt a little bit like his awareness of his limbs was— diminishing. “I said no.”
Now, Jeongin looked at him, a quick little flare of his nostrils, his chest expanding in a sharp inhale. Before he could speak, Felix planted himself, seeming a little shaken by Minho’s tone. “Ah, Jeongin, I’m tired,” he said, giving Jeongin a thin smile when Jeongin turned to look at him, surprised. “Maybe another day?”
“But—” Jeongin stuttered out as Felix pulled out of his grip and skittered off to the hallway, clearly seeking haven in Hyunjin’s room.
Jeongin watched him go and then, once there was the click of Hyunjin’s bedroom door closing, whirled on Minho, looking at him with such poison it was shocking. Not because he was angry, Minho had known that, it was just that— Minho had not thought Jeongin would ever look at him with something so similar to hate in his eyes. Colour rose up from Jeongin’s neck, a wash of colour coming up to cover his cheeks blotchily. His hands fisted at his sides, and Minho could see them trembling.
For a long moment they stared at one another. Minho expected Jeongin to yell at him, but all he did was breathe, his face twisted in fury. His trembling worsened and worsened, until finally he just made an inarticulate sound of anger, seemingly snapping himself out of whatever loop he’d been in before. He burst into a flurry of motion, running past Minho and smashing his feet into his sneakers and then shoving out of the door.
Minho caught the door on the backswing, chasing after him. “Baby boy!” he cried as Jeongin took the stairs down two at a time, vanishing around the curve.
“No!” Minho heard echo back up to him, as he caught flashes of Jeongin’s dark hair, his pale shirt. “No! I’m not your baby boy today!”
Minho physically lurched at that, taking a second to brace himself against the wall of the landing. He felt, momentarily, like he might actually pass out. But he was resolved to catch up to Jeongin, to try to fix this, somehow. To explain. Jeongin had always, always understood him. He needed that now.
He regained his footing and leapt over the railings, hitting the lower stairs in a motion that jarred up all along his legs in a way that made him hiss out in pain. He barely let the feeling register, though, before he leapt down the remaining few and caught the door to the PC room as it was swinging shut.
He’d expected Jeongin to barricade himself in the television room, but instead as Minho came into the PC room, Jeongin stopped and whirled to face him, expression no less angry in the low red of the LED lights in the corners.
“Leave me alone!” Jeongin screamed at him, and Minho stuttered to a stop, his heart thumping hard and awful. “Just— leave it! I get it! He gets it! You don’t need to keep punishing him!
Minho’s chest heaved. “Baby b— Jeongin—”
The slip seemed to make Jeongin even angrier. “No!” he said, raising a hand to jab his finger in Minho’s direction. “You— you are in the wrong! You are! I don’t know why you’re being like this—”
“I just— I can’t trust him,” Minho said, his lungs burning, voice thin.
“That’s your problem!” Jeongin shot back, like— like the others had done, like nothing Minho thought or felt mattered. Trivial and small and irrational, their Minho. Violent and overbearing. “You need to get over that, but you’re making it my problem— you’re making it his problem.” Jeongin’s face was strange in the red light of the room, Minho’s vision spotty. “Hasn’t it been enough? Haven’t you done enough? What do you want from him? To be meek and sit in a corner of Hyunjin’s room from now on? That’s not fair! He’s my friend and I want to spend time with him. You don’t have the right to forbid that!”
Again, that feeling of being trapped, slowly crushed to death. He could not stand Jeongin’s anger, but the thought of capitulating and just— letting Felix roam free, sit in closed rooms alone with Jeongin—
“I— I can’t—” he said, too short of breath to finish, lightheaded like he’d been on the stairs.
Jeongin misunderstood the words. “Is it so terrible to admit maybe you were wrong and to let this go?” he pressed. “To fucking apologize? To him? To me?” He flung a hand out, moving in his anger, so upset he halfway turned from Minho now to rant into the space around them. “You’d rather just— double down, enjoy the feeling of throwing your weight around against someone who can’t fucking fight back? Because he can’t, hyung! All he can do is take it, he’s terrified of you. And you don’t even care!”
“Jeongin,” Minho said, pushing the word out with the last of the air in his lungs. It was so quiet, barely there, lost under Jeongin’s words.
“That’s the worst of it— you don’t care,” Jeongin continued. He’d stepped toward the left hand wall and now he pivoted sharply, stalking the other way, pacing back and forth. He glanced over Minho for the briefest moment as he did it, but he didn’t seem to really see him as he asked, “What happened? You’ve never been someone who is cruel for the sake of it, why have you picked now to start that?” Again, he turned the other way, a blur to Minho’s eyes, red and indistinct. “You said you were scared, is that why? You have to make sure he’s scared back, as some petty revenge?”
Please, Minho wanted to say, dizzy with it, but he couldn’t get his mouth to work. He desperately did not want to be here, not just in the room but here, in this body of his. With his pounding heart and swimming head and the sick lurching of his stomach. He was instinctively pulling back from his physical self, losing track of his limbs, becoming nothing. Sinking inside of himself. Not for the first time, he wished he could just stop existing.
“Well, he is scared! He’s plenty scared!” Jeongin was saying, still keeping up with that pacing motion, like a panther behind the bars of a cage. Minho heard him as if from far off, a constant hum reinforcing that Minho was bad bad fucked up hate hate hate angry no no please— “You almost broke his arm, Hyunjin-hyung says he can’t even sleep on that side, his shoulder is still so painful.”
There was water in Minho’s lungs.
“Does that make you happy?” Jeongin blurred past, light reflecting in a streak off his eyes. “Hurting him the way that man hurt me— did it make you feel better?”
Large hands holding him down, his nails clawing against them. Please, I can’t breathe.
“You didn’t even stop when I begged you to, it was like— like I was back here again—”
You deserve this.
“How could you do that?” Jeongin stopped his pacing, and then, at last, there was silence.
Minho still could not breathe, the darkness impossible to see through properly. In his mind’s eye he could only see the warped image of his father above him, blurry through the bathwater. He swayed, a little, just small motions as he fought to stay upright, his vision swimming with black spots and tears.
“Hyung?” Jeongin’s voice, distant and muffled, far gentler than it had been before, a little breathless.
There was sound coming from Minho, he realised. A rasping, damp kind of breathing, like the air was something physically scraping through him. The moment had taken on that sort of unreality to it that Minho associated with— his time in solitary, after he’d been pushed to the brink of when he thought he would go mad if they made him stay another minute, and then he had stayed for days beyond.
Or those times on the floor of his childhood bedroom, fully clothed and sopping wet, where he would drift untethered until dawn came.
I can’t do this here, Minho thought weakly, but it wasn’t connected to him right now. He was unable to muster up his usual horror over the idea of coming to pieces where someone else could see. Where Jeongin could see.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said again, and then Minho could see him, watched him materialise out of the darkness as he rushed forward with obvious alarm on his features. He put his hands on Minho’s heaving chest, bracing, like he thought Minho needed the support. “Hyung.”
“Please,” Minho whimpered, and with that the tears spilled over, warm trails down his cheeks. “I can’t— just— whatever you— want me to say— just tell me—”
Jeongin’s eyes darted over his face, voice pitched with panic as he repeated, “Hyung.”
“I can’t take this,” Minho sobbed. He was panting like a run down animal, beginning to shiver with it all. “I can’t. Baby boy, please.” Begging and crying like a child, when he’d been trained so much better, when he knew better. It only made it worse, the inevitable second round. But he needed it all to stop. He needed it to stop. He’d been punished, he’d been punished, it should be enough, let it be enough.
“Okay,” Jeongin said, wide eyed, and Minho almost went to his knees from the sheer force of his relief. It was over, it was over. “Okay, ah, hyung, ah—” Jeongin lifted a hand up, as if to touch Minho’s face, but Minho saw the motion and flinched. Jeongin’s hand stuttered and then retreated. Minho mourned the loss of that touch — his flinch was mostly instinctive. “Okay— hyung, hyung, stop crying? You—” Jeongin’s face crumpled a little now, tears welling in his eyes, distress on every feature. “Come here, come, sit.”
He took Minho by the upper arm, gentle and sweet, and with this other hand he pulled out the computer chair, swivelling it for Minho, who collapsed into it. As soon as he’d done so, Minho leaned forward and put his head between his knees, breathing deeply to try to get himself under control.
A touch came, light and tentative, on Minho’s back, and Minho flinched again, like an animal, like a dog. He was coming back to himself enough now that shame was beginning to stir in him. Was beginning to clog up his throat more than the tears were.
Jeongin immediately drew his hand away, because he was good and kind and wouldn’t want to upset Minho further. Not even now, when he had been so angry.
“You can touch me,” Minho said, more of a gasp than he would have liked, but his chest was still hitching. He shouldn’t, really, ask for Jeongin’s touch, but he desperately needed it, that grounding power Jeongin had on him. And this felt— okay, maybe. Better his back, covered in a shirt, than his teary face. He could allow himself this.
Any guilt he had over asking for comfort vanished when Jeongin’s hand returned, a gentle pressure rubbing circles along Minho’s spine. “Oh, hyung, oh,” Jeongin softly said, a soothing, understanding lilt to the words.
Minho squeezed his eyes shut, hands clenching hard in the denim covering his calves. He forced himself to breathe evenly, to feel everything — the shaking of his hands and the prickling of sweat over his skin, the way his heart was pounding, how tears dripped off the end of his nose. It was like trying to jam himself back into an exoskeleton he had shed, but he had to do it.
It was fine, it was okay. He was— safe, there was nothing happening to him. This was normal human shit, wasn’t it? An argument, a disagreement. Jeongin did not know, could not know, what he was to Minho: the way he needed Jeongin’s affection and smiles the way a plant needed sunlight and water. He had not been depriving Minho of it with malicious intent, he had simply been— upset with Minho. It was not a deliberate punishment. His anger was a knife to Minho, but that was Minho’s fault, not Jeongin’s. It was Minho’s own weakness, that had turned this into something else, something more extreme. His inability to just be fucking steady, be normal, to react to things the same way ordinary people did, the way humans should.
He was not five years old and sitting on the cold concrete floor of their balcony, watching through the metal railing as cars went by on the street below, searching for the one that belonged to his mother, wondering what he could say to her to make it better, to make her come back. He was not eight years old, sitting in a hospital bed and still coughing up water, hearing his father out in the hallway tell a policeman, he fell asleep in the tub. He was not fourteen, alone in a tiny, windowless cell, begging through the food slot, let me out, please, please, I can’t do this any longer, to guards who had not listened.
He was grown, and he’d just cried all over a boy who had done nothing more than disagree with him. What a pathetic little creature he was, unable to untangle himself from the past. To move past things he’d brought on himself anyway.
Slowly, Minho sat back up. He wiped, efficiently, at his face, but there was too much moisture to properly clean up with just his fingers. “Sorry,” he said stiffly, the word coming out thick and damp. His chest still hitched occasionally.
“No,” Jeongin said emphatically, coming around to kneel in front of Minho. He braced one hand on the arm of the chair, the other coming to hold Minho’s ankle. There was nothing on his lovely features now but concern, that wide eyed care he so often shared with Minho. The sight of it almost undid Minho again. “Hyung, no, don’t apologise.” He squeezed Minho’s ankle and looked away, down, something like shame coming over his face. “I was being a jerk,” he mumbled. “I— I’m mad at you, and you’re not being fair, but I said some things I shouldn’t have.” He looked up again, at Minho, eyes sparkling and beseeching. “I’m sorry, I don’t— want to hurt you like that.”
Of course Minho knew that. It had not been about what Jeongin had said— though what had he said, that had not been a raw, scorching assessment of Minho’s character? It was an unpleasant thing to acknowledge, but Minho had always known what he was. “Was it untrue?” he asked softly. Jeongin stared up at him, confusion notching his brow. “Was any of what you said— untrue?”
Jeongin turned thoughtful, biting his bottom lip as he gave Minho consideration he did not deserve. “Not exactly,” he finally said slowly. Before Minho could say, Well, then, Jeongin continued almost urgently, “I just— hyung, you’ve been like a stranger these last few days. I hardly recognise you. You’ve never been like this before.”
“Cruel, you mean,” Minho said, and Jeongin nodded. From this angle, he looked small again, like he had done years ago. Staring up at Minho, with those eyes that never wavered nor flinched. “Baby boy—” Minho stopped when he remembered Jeongin had said not to call him that, but Jeongin didn’t react, was simply waiting, so Minho continued, “I am cruel.”
“Not like this,” Jeongin insisted. “Never like this. And you know it, you know what I mean.”
Do I? Minho thought, so tired. “No, baby boy,” he said, almost a sigh. “You’ve always seen a light in me that isn’t there.”
Jeongin’s expression shifted into something new, a cousin to anger, and for a moment Minho thought no please please— but then the look settled very recognisably into stubbornness. Jeongin stood, stepped away, to a space of the room that was empty, between where Minho sat in front of the computer and the pool table. He watched Jeongin just stand there for a long moment, before Jeongin said, softly, “The night that man came in— I was sitting here.” He looked over his shoulder at Minho. “Do you remember, we still had the rows of computers, there was a desk here.”
Minho whispered, “Baby boy.”
“My back was to the door,” Jeongin continued, like he was telling an ordinary story. He turned so he was facing the correct way, which meant he was now facing Minho. “I didn’t see him come in, didn’t hear him.”
Minho knew all of this. They’d heard the story from Jeongin, once he’d been— patched up enough to tell it. Exhausted from pain and out of it from medication, held in Chan’s arms like Chan never wanted to let him go.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said gently, face soft. “Will you come here?”
Minho did not want to. He wanted to crawl into a hole and stop being a person, for a while. But he got up anyway, went to Jeongin’s side where he’d been beckoned. The shame was still heavy in him, and now he could hear his father’s voice in his head: Don’t use crocodile tears to try and get out of what you deserve.
Jeongin turned away from Minho as he approached, a slow swivel, showing Minho the bare nape of his neck, the shadows of his spine and shoulder blades beneath his shirt. Minho, in his exhaustion, had the vaguely delirious thought that he wanted to kiss that nape, feel the short hair there tickle his nose. Jeongin would be warm, his skin giving and smooth. He wanted it like it was a physical ache.
Then Jeongin was bringing his arm around, placing his wrist just over his tailbone, and he said, “Will you twist my arm up behind my back?”
Minho inhaled sharply, taking a half step away. Everything in him, every part, screeched violent denial at that mere idea.
Jeongin peered over his shoulder at him, very calm, steady. Steady in a way that Minho simply was not right now. “It’s okay, hyung,” he murmured. “Please?”
It was not okay. Minho’s fingers had gone almost numb again, but he grabbed Jeongin’s wrist gingerly, feeling the delicate bones shift under his fingers. Unlike with Felix, they were standing in the middle of an open room so Minho was, at the least, not pushing Jeongin against any surface. He, very carefully, pulled Jeongin’s arm up a bit, the motion easy still.
“A little higher,” Jeongin said.
“Jeongin.” It was a meek plea. But Minho obeyed, until he could feel the resistance of it, Jeongin’s joints beginning to strain. Even this much would be— uncomfortable, maybe even painful for Jeongin.
Jeongin leaned back suddenly, and the new angle caused Minho’s hold on him to pull higher, closer to his body, the strain obvious. Minho quickly adjusted to accommodate it, though Jeongin made no sound one way or the other. He simply came back, and then, slowly, leaned his head on Minho’s shoulder, the hard back of his skull resting at the end of Minho’s collarbone.
“He held me like this,” Jeongin whispered, spoken into the quiet between them, “and he put his hand over my mouth, to keep me there, to keep my screams quiet.” He did not, thankfully, seem like he was going to ask Minho to mimic that motion. Minho did not think he could have done it; this was already more than what he’d ever thought he could do.
They stood there for long seconds, silent, just breathing. Minho hated it, everything about it, the way it felt— worse, because it was so close. An intimate sort of violence. Minho feeling the strain in Jeongin’s bones every time he inhaled and it shifted his position. Jeongin’s hair tickling Minho’s cheek. The living warmth between their bodies. He couldn’t stand this. He could never imagine hurting Jeongin this way, of putting strength into the hold he now had, feeling Jeongin’s bones give way under his hands.
“Are you cruel, hyung?” Jeongin whispered. “Are you?”
Minho was starting to float again, but in a different way than before. Dazed and yet so thoroughly in his body, aware of every nerve ending. “This isn’t— fair,” he managed to choke out.
Jeongin raised his head, stepped away, and Minho let go of his wrist as he moved, so Jeongin didn’t pull anything. “Fair?” Jeongin asked, turning around and meeting Minho’s eyes again.
“I would never want to hurt you,” Minho said, earnest and burning with it. “Everything is different, with you.”
In the low light, it was hard to tell, but Jeongin seemed to blush, his gaze dropping. “Hyung,” he mumbled, and Minho thought fuck fuck fuck, but Jeongin did not linger on it. “You wouldn’t do this to any of the others either, though, would you?” he said, still quiet, feet shuffling a little. “And you never— you’re brutal, when you kill, but it’s a means to an end, you don’t— play with them. You don’t enjoy their suffering.” He looked up at Minho again, eyes wide and trusting. “Right?”
Minho nodded shortly, not needing to think about it much. He did not enjoy causing suffering— it was a by-product, an unfortunately consequence of the brutality, and he didn’t try to prolong it. Even with the man who had hurt Jeongin, Minho’s revenge, so to speak, had been quick enough.
“I saw something in your eyes that night,” Jeongin admitted. “When you were holding Felix-hyung against the wall. You— looked like you were enjoying it. Hurting him. Like this.” He hadn’t gone far, and he came closer again, close enough that if Minho wanted, he could draw Jeongin in against his body. Feel the warmth of Jeongin against his front. “I don’t understand,” Jeongin said softly, matching Minho’s earlier earnestness. “It’s not like you. Can’t you see?”
Minho, rather than immediately disagreeing, thought back on that night. There were so many factors to it, things he was worried that if he gave voice to, they would expose— too much of himself. He had shown Jeongin far too much already tonight. The gut wrenching fear he’d felt, the way running up those stairs had been literally living out a nightmare, one he’d had so, so often. How could he begin to explain the sheer level of desperation he’d experienced, the absolute terror of it all.
Yes, he’d enjoyed hurting Felix, because he’d thought— good. This traitor that came to hurt them, to hurt what Minho held most dear — did he not deserve to feel at least some of the pain he would have inflicted on Minho? There’d been a vindictive kind of triumph, in pinning Felix to that wall, in knowing that he hadn’t succeeded. That Minho had managed to outrun the nightmare.
He understood, a little better now, how from Jeongin’s eyes, it had been another kind of nightmare.
“He ran between us,” Minho muttered.
Jeongin tilted his head to the side, said, “What?”
Minho shrunk in on himself just a little, saying more quietly, “When he tried to run. I was scared he was about to grab you.”
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, barely more than a gasp.
“I understand why it upset you,” Minho said, husky with residual tears. “But I was just scared, Jeongin. I was scared and angry, I thought he was a traitor, I thought he’d come here to hurt us. To hurt you.”
Jeongin swayed forward, reaching between their bodies to gather Minho’s hands up, which had been fisted at his sides. “You’re going to split your scabs open again,” he murmured, and Minho let out a shaky exhale, like he’d been struck. He watched his own hands, unbidden, open like flowers under Jeongin’s gentle fingers, coaxing them into going lax. “I never doubted Felix-hyung,” Jeongin said, his eyes still on their hands as he stroked fingertips across Minho’s palms, light and sending little thrills of sensation through Minho. He felt hypnotised by the slow, repeating patterns Jeongin drew across his skin. “I guess it’s hard for me to see from the point of view of someone who— totally believed he was a traitor. In my eyes you were tormenting an innocent man— but that isn’t what you were doing at all. Not from what you believed to be true.”
“Yes,” Minho whispered, lost to everything in this moment that was not Jeongin, his own overwhelming adoration. The intimacy of the moment had shifted into something— dangerous. More so than before. Dangerous because like this, in the dimness, with the warmth coming off Jeongin’s body, and the softness of his skin against Minho’s roughened palms, Minho could almost pretend they were lovers.
Jeongin raised his eyes, gentle reproach in his gaze, and Minho stared at him with longing so intense it felt like it could sweep him out to sea. He wished things were different, wished he was different. Wished that this was possible.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, the same reproach in his gaze now lacing his tone, “he is innocent. And even if I can maybe understand your actions at first, I can’t— I can’t be okay with forbidding me to spend time with him. Or threatening to kill him. Not now. Now that we know the whole truth.”
“I can’t— trust him,” Minho said weakly, tiredly. Jeongin looked like he was going to argue and Minho quickly said, “I can’t. I can’t, Jeongin. Not like you do, not like— the others do. I can’t take that risk. You’re too—” He cut himself off, cursing himself internally, but Jeongin was waiting, listening intently, like he wanted to understand. Minho had to explain it. “You’re too important, too valuable, for me to be willing to just— trust a stranger. Worse, to trust a son of Lee Jaerim. I just— I can’t. I have to protect you.” More intently, the words raw and a little fierce, he said, “I have to.”
Jeongin stared up at him, lips parted, eyes large and stunned. I’ve given away too much, Minho thought, a little panicked with it. He knows, he knows—.
“Hyung, I— that isn’t—” Jeongin stammered, and again Minho thought he could see the darkness of a blush diffused across his cheeks. “You can’t live like this. It’s not fair on yourself and it’s not fair on Felix-hyung either.”
Minho was so relieved Jeongin hadn’t seemed to hear the deeper implications of his words that it took him a moment to process what had actually been said, to formulate a reply. “I know Felix is probably telling us the whole truth of it now,” he said slowly. He could admit it now, in this quiet space. “The pieces— make sense. I know this rationally. But I can’t—” He put a hand over his sternum, pressing, where his heart was fluttering, beginning to race at the thought of leaving Jeongin alone with Felix again.
“Okay, okay,” Jeongin said, fast and concerned, like he was worried Minho was going to spiral again. Then softer, a little more intensely, Jeongin again said, “Okay.” He thought for a moment, brow furrowed with the effort, and brought one of his hands up to idly chew his nail. Minho was wondering whether he should say something about that when the hand dropped and Jeongin said, “Let’s— make a deal?”
“A deal?”
Jeongin nodded, and it was cute, his hair bouncing a little. “I won’t be alone with Felix-hyung without telling you — barring if we happen to end up in the kitchen together or something,” he said. “But I won’t bring him here, to watch television with me, unless I tell you first. And you can— join us, if you feel uncomfortable letting us be alone. Does that work?”
Minho, who would rather Felix leave and never return, knew this was probably the best offer he was going to get. “Yes,” he said, because it did feel better, at least. A gentle uncoiling from around his ribcage, like he could breathe somewhat again. He paused. “What do you want from me in return?”
Jeongin smiled, something teasing and closed-lipped. “Kindness towards Felix-hyung,” he said sweetly, and his smile split to show teeth when Minho’s mouth twisted sourly. “Hyung,” he said, cajoling, “you said you can recognise that he’s being truthful. Which means he isn’t a traitor. He’s just— a boy born to a bad man. All you see is an enemy, when you hear he’s the Magpie’s son. But you don’t stop and think about what that has meant for him.” His smile dimmed, and he dropped his gaze. “I went through some terrible things at that group home,” he whispered, and Minho fought not to react physically to the words, “but I wasn’t there very long. Felix-hyung was stuck in that house with his father for two decades. He’s gone through profound abuse, you’re tormenting a boy who’s been tormented enough.”
Minho closed his eyes. The world was unkind, did Felix deserve softness because of what he’d endured? There was a gut reaction in him that said, So what? when he thought of Felix being abused by his father. Wasn’t everyone knocked around as kids, after all? Why was it Minho’s duty of care to step around that? Minho hadn’t been given softness, hadn’t been given grace and understanding. His life had been a long thread of pain, learning to endure it. It had been that way ever since he was small. Was that just not what life was?
But that was an old bitterness. He could recognise, now, as he had been unable to recognise when he had first come here all those years ago, that just because he’d had that experience, it did not mean everyone else should be dragged over the same glass shards. Other people were not built like him, did not deserve it, as he had done.
He wished someone had protected him, though, the way Jeongin was protecting Felix now. Someone to speak for him, someone to say, enough, enough.
“I can,” Minho said haltingly, wetting his lips, “be civil, to him.” He took a breath, then added, “And I can— apologise to him.”
Jeongin smiled at him properly now: not his radiant, sunshine smile, but something— wondering, like Jeongin had opened his eyes to a glowing, sunset sky. “Thank you, hyung,” he said. “Thank you.”
Minho nodded, all his energy leaving him in a rush, and he’d had none really to start with. Running on fumes for miles. He glanced at the door. “I should—” he gestured toward it, but couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t find any words to say. He should patrol, but he wasn't sure he physically could. He should eat, but the thought of having to cook was overwhelming. He should sleep, but his room was too much like those prison cells right now, a place to be trapped inside of.
Jeongin touched his arm. Minho almost flinched again but he somehow managed to stop himself. “I'm going to watch something,” Jeongin said. “Come with me? I don't expect you to watch it too — you look exhausted, hyung.” That touch slid around, until Jeongin had hold of him. “Come nap, you can have the big couch.”
Minho should protest, but Jeongin was tugging on his arm, an insistent pull. And Minho let himself be drawn into motion, into the promise of rest at last.
Jeongin ushered him into the television room and then got him to sit down with gentle pushes, his hands light as butterflies. It was nice to be off his feet, he could admit it, and the couch in here was well used but soft, softer than the one Seungmin had in his workshop, which had been worn down to hard lumpiness. Minho felt like he could melt into this one. He never usually sat in here.
Jeongin picked up a bottle of water from the other couch, half full, and handed it to Minho. “You need to drink some water, or you’ll get a headache from all that crying.”
Minho had had a headache before the crying had even started. He could admit that it was significantly worse now. So he raised the bottle to his lips, hesitating only a fraction of a second as he realised Jeongin must have been the one to have drunk from it before. It was an immature, stupid thing to get a thrill out of, his stomach twisting in shame as he drank. Jeongin didn’t watch him, puttering around the room — turning the tv on, tossing cushions around until he had them where he wanted them. He only turned back to Minho right as Minho was finishing off the water, and then he whisked the empty bottle away. There was something small and wounded in Minho that was enjoying the fussing, though he knew it was a weakness to allow it. He was too tired to try and act as he knew he should.
“Alright,” Jeongin said, looking down at him with his hands on his hips. “Lay down?”
Minho heaved a heavy sigh but he did so, pillowing his head on the arm of the couch, bringing his feet up onto the other end. He didn’t take his sneakers off — there was no way he ever would, but Jeongin didn’t comment or complain about it. Minho didn’t close his eyes.
Jeongin grabbed a thin, folded up blanket out of the basket in the corner of the room and draped it across Minho, looking very pleased with himself as he did.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, a light note of protest in his voice. “I'm only going to be here for ten minutes.”
“Sure.” Jeongin barely looked at him as he said it, fussing with the edges of the blanket.
Minho watched him quietly for a long few seconds, eyelids feeling so heavy. “Why are you always so good to me, even though I constantly cut you?” he asked, when the question had begun to feel too heavy on his tongue to hold inside. He would never understand why Jeongin hadn’t just gotten fed up. Really, he couldn’t understand why Jeongin had even offered him friendship in the first place, all those years ago, kind words and ready smiles when Minho was still determined to be mean to him. Determined that Jeongin should be made to learn all the ways in which the world could be cold.
Jeongin dropped to his knees beside the couch, up by Minho’s head. Minho’s question had caused his face to take on serious lines. “You don’t,” he said simply. “You don’t cut me. Not the way you’re thinking. Sometimes you’re— a little rough. But that’s understandable. After everything that has happened to you.”
“There’s nothing that has happened to me,” Minho said dully, “that wasn’t my own fault.” His stints in prison, he’d done that to himself, picking fights and then later picking this life. Sometimes it felt disproportionate but— the universe was nothing if not unfeeling, unforgiving, and ultimately even if Minho had suffered, he’d brought it upon his own head.
Jeongin reached a hand up, toward Minho’s face, and he didn’t flinch this time, so Jeongin settled his hand on Minho’s hair. He pet, gently, smoothing his hand over Minho’s hair, and Minho’s eyes drifted shut, lashes fluttering. The last time he was touched like this was definitely his mother, a sense memory he still had — though maybe it was something he’d imagined, had been imagining so long it had taken on the air of a memory.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, a tentative lilt to his voice, like he wanted to ask something he was unsure about. Minho made a little prompting noise, to let Jeongin know he could ask anything he wanted. “How old were you, the first time you were locked up?”
Minho was not sure what he had been expecting, but that had not been it. Jeongin did not usually ask him about his past — the last time he’d brought it up at all, he’d been drunk. Normally Minho might recoil from talking about it, but right now he was beginning to edge into that space between wakefulness and sleep, where reality grew indistinct.
“Got thrown into juvie when I was twelve,” he mumbled. Jeongin’s fingers were carding through his hair now, nails lightly scratching at his scalp, and it felt so nice. Minho was so warm.
“Oh, hyung,” Jeongin said, sadness thick in his voice. “You were so small. It must have been awful.”
“I deserved it,” Minho said, honest and hoping it might soothe Jeongin a little. “Been picking fights. Smashed a kid’s nose in.” Minho had come up behind him with one of those hard-backed, thick textbooks and smashed it into the back of the other boy’s head with such force it had given him a concussion, his face slamming down into the desk. His father, in the principal’s office and later the police station, had not seemed surprised, and he’d certainly not protested Minho being taken into custody. He’d always known, what Minho was. He’d tried to fix it. Nothing had worked.
Jeongin’s voice was far away as he asked, “What’d he do?”
“Mmm?” Minho hummed, fading out.
An extra little scritch, at the nape of Minho’s neck. “The kid,” Jeongin said. “Why did you do it?”
The boy had been bragging about kicking a cat to death, laughing as his friends crowded around. And Minho’s temper had risen up like a boiling tide, dimming the edges of his vision. It was always like that, even now, this sudden surge of rage that carried him away, shot adrenaline through his body, made him brutal. It had scared him more, when he was young, the abruptness, the way he could not stop it. It had scared the other kids too, the ones with sense, and the teachers as well. Until everyone had begun to give him a wide berth, like fish swimming in a wide arc to avoid a predator.
“Angry,” Minho slurred. “Couldn’t control it, then.” Somewhere along the way he’d opted to stop trying to control it, and instead decided to utilise that rage, hone it. Which spoke enough to his character, he rather thought.
“Hyung.” Another one of those loaded pauses, and Minho wanted to open his eyes to see what Jeongin’s face was doing, but he found his eyelids too heavy. Jeongin said, tripping over the words, “Your— parents—”
“My father tried.” No amount of cold water from a rushing tap had been able to douse the flames of Minho’s temper.
Jeongin’s thumb swiped over Minho’s temple, the downy hairs near his ear. “And your mother?” he said, so gentle.
Minho curled in on himself a little. “She left,” he whispered. “My fault.”
Again, a long pause. When Jeongin spoke, the words were so quiet Minho barely heard them. “I don’t believe that.” For all their softness, they weren’t wispy; there was an intensity there that burned.
Minho sighed, turning his face into the softness of the couch under his head. Normally he might argue, but his thoughts were slow and sluggish with exhaustion, turning to silence now.
A gentle, sweeping touch across his forehead, pushing his hair back. “I’m sorry I said what I did.” The voice was indistinct and hazy, the words sliding over Minho like water over stones. “I should have more faith in you. I know you.” Closer, softer. “I know you into your soul.”
Minho breathed deeply, fallen into slumber, and Jeongin, after a long moment, took his hand away.
——
Chan was someone used to operating on very little sleep. He thought it had started after his brother died, the way his body fought sleep like it was trying to fight off an attacker. He’d gone to bed in a world in which his brother was alive and woke up in one where he was dead, not that he had known that at the time, and ever since then there had been something inside him that said: no, no, I can’t bear to lose something while I’m unaware of it happening.
He’d almost done that with Jeongin, too. Slept upstairs peacefully as Jeongin was attacked, woken only by his screams as he was almost beaten to death. How much worse had the insomnia been after that, even with Jeongin in his bed, curled up against him, the bruises and swelling lingering on his sleeping face? Awful, his body unable to settle for weeks, imagining he could hear those screams every time he started to drift off.
It had felt a little like that last night, and the night before. He had slept so badly in the immediate aftermath of everything collapsing at his feet that he’d assumed, perhaps naively, that last night he would have crashed, worn out by all the crying and the exhaustion, and instead he had— been awake, tossing and turning through the night. That empty space next to him had been too large, too cold. A sucking blankness in the bed with him that he couldn’t take his mind off.
Even as someone used to this, that didn’t make it easier to live with, and he had gotten out of bed with a dull headache in his forehead, radiating behind his eyes, that got worse and worse as the day stretched on and on. Throwing himself into work as a distraction from everything really hadn’t helped matters, and now, late enough at night that Jeongin was likely already asleep, Chan thought about another night of no sleep and almost started to cry again.
He couldn’t do it. He simply could not.
There was an easy solution, of course, and he stood for a moment outside of Hyunjin’s bedroom feeling a horrible sense of deja vu. He had stood like this just the night before with a very different feeling inside of him, but in some ways the sense of humiliation was the same. To have to knock on the door and open it and have to once again chew his way through humble pie because of all the myriad ways that he had fucked up.
He raised a hand and rapped his knuckles against it. Instead of hearing a welcome call, though, after a moment the door just opened and Hyunjin stood there, looking back at him. His hair was held back from his forehead with a hairband and there was something shiny on his face, one of the skincare products that he used. Chan had never quite understood the point of any of it, but Hyunjin seemed to like buying and trying out different things like this.
He scowled the second he saw that it was Chan outside of his room. “Oh,” he said. “What do you want.”
Chan took a moment to just look at him. Truthfully, he had no idea how to fix this anger that he could still see bubbling under Hyunjin’s surface. How did you make it up to someone who held a grudge like Hyunjin, who could remember slights from years ago and bring them up at a moment’s notice, even though he misplaced headphones and socks and earrings in this house all the time, items lost to whichever vacuum of space that existed only to disappear Hyunjin’s belongings?
Hyunjin, who could still remember all the faces of the men who had hurt him, their features burned into his memory.
How did Chan make this up to him. It seemed impossible, because he couldn’t take it back, what had happened, and he knew, too, the horror of it for Hyunjin. There was a bond between Hyunjin and Felix that even Chan, even if he had wanted to, would never quite manage to get between. He’d seen that yesterday, when Hyunjin had threatened to leave if they threw Felix out.
They’d raised him well, this loyal and fierce boy. Chan would have to work out how to fix it, if for no other reason than he loved Hyunjin too much to not do so.
“Can I talk to Felix, please?” he asked, very politely.
Hyunjin eyeballed him, a beady little look, but then he stepped back and let Chan come forward, into the room properly, stepping through the doorway. Hyunjin’s room always smelled like something so completely Hyunjin: the chemical overtones of paint, an underlying floral scent, and tonight something else, something— clean smelling, pleasant to the nose, possibly the skin care products open in a row on Hyunjin’s desk.
Felix was sitting on the bed, cross-legged, facing the door. He was looking right at Chan as Chan entered the room, those eyes blinking at him, and Chan took a single look at him and then stuttered to a stop, almost tripping over his own feet at the sight of him.
“You dyed your hair,” he said blankly, the words stumbling out of his mouth in his shock.
Felix nodded, lifting a hand to touch the curling ends of it where it curved under his left ear. His hair was a little fluffy and he had another hairband in his hands, and Chan got the feeling that he’d just tugged it off quickly, maybe once he’d heard Chan’s voice outside. It was now a dark brown, warm against his skin tone, covering up all the blond perfectly, his dark roots blending much more easily into it. Something about it made his freckles seem even more obvious, each one delicate and pretty.
It was a sense of true despair that Chan was feeling, standing there just inside Hyunjin’s bedroom, looking at Felix’s face. He was beautiful, his Felix. It struck him over and over again, the shock, the disbelief, that he could have ever thought of killing him.
“Yes, he dyed his hair,” Hyunjin snapped. “What do you want from him?”
Why, Chan wanted to ask, but it wasn’t worth asking anything of Hyunjin, that much was obvious. So instead he just turned to Felix and said, “Would you come and sleep with me?”
It was Hyunjin, though, who again answered. “Uh, what the fuck,” he said, before Felix could do anything more than just blink at Chan. “No? Hyung, get the fuck out of here, what is wrong with you?”
“Not like that,” Chan said, very tired, so tired. “I mean literally just to sleep. I’ve barely slept these past few nights and I just— I would like Felix there. I think it’ll help.”
Hyunjin sneered at him. The look on his face was so reminiscent of how he had looked the day before that Chan had to hold in a slight flinch. It was a look that told Chan that whatever came out of Hyunjin’s mouth next would be both accurate and painful, a lashing truth against Chan’s skin. Luckily, whatever that was never came, because Felix said, voice so gentle, “Okay, hyung.”
Hyunjin whirled on him. “Lix,” he said. “Come on, you can’t—”
“Please, Hyunjin,” Felix said. Much like the night before, his voice somehow cut through Hyunjin’s without his needing to raise it at all.
“But you don’t have to do what he says,” Hyunjin said.
“I want to go,” Felix said. “I want to — it’ll be good, for me too, I think.”
Chan tried, for a moment, to not let his relief be too obvious on his face, too used to hiding all of his emotions from the people around him, from letting on that he was human in any way. Then, after that initial instinct, he let them see it — let Felix see the way his shoulders slumped, let Hyunjin see the naked, raw emotion on his face. Hyunjin had probably seen more of that over the past couple of days than he’d seen the last five years, and seeing it now seemed to go some way towards him holding his tongue.
He grumbled, though, low and under his breath as Felix slid off the edge of the bed and got to his feet. The only distinct part of his complaint was when he said, “But I was going to do your skincare,” and Felix said, patting his shoulder as he passed, “I’ll come and get it done tomorrow morning, okay?”
That didn’t seem to placate Hyunjin at all. He was giving Chan a baleful little look as if to say, how dare you steal my angel, a similar look he had given Chan once or twice before all of this, when Chan had come and stolen Felix off to bed for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, when he and Hyunjin were more likely to be hanging out together. But this look was— different, just different enough. Nothing playful about it, nothing amused in it. A real annoyance, a real anger, at Chan so easily getting his way.
“I’m sorry,” Chan said quietly to him. “Thank you, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin’s face twisted, a genuine disgust on his features. “Please get out of my fucking room,” he said.
Chan did as he was told, following Felix out of Hyunjin’s room, out into the silent hallway, brightly lit in a way that hurt Chan’s eyes right now, made the headache behind his forehead pulse in a sickening way. Hyunjin closed the door after them, almost a slam. Felix looked at the closed door and then sighed, just a little, wearily. He didn’t look worried that Hyunjin was mad at him; instead, he looked tiredly exasperated.
Then he looked at Chan, their eyes meeting. Every time Chan looked at him there was an urge inside him to— get to his knees again, to beg for something that had maybe already been granted, but which he felt needed to be asked for again and again, until the weight of his sins had been worn smooth like a stone in the bottom of a riverbed. How could he be forgiven already, when he had not done nearly enough to earn it?
He’d thought, in the past, that Felix was too kind, too good, for someone who had done such important work for Lee Jaerim. It was astonishing that a boy like this could be that person’s son.
Felix said nothing. Chan knew that this was the price to be paid for everything that had come to pass these last two days, but he hated, hated, this awkwardness between them, the way the words seemed to simply— not come. Even before they had become a couple, it had not been like this. Conversation had been stilted sometimes but it had been there, and the last few weeks it had been like a dream, the way they had been able to talk to each other. Easy, comfortable, two people connecting in a way that Chan hadn’t known was possible.
Could they get that back? He wasn’t sure. It terrified him to think that the answer could be no.
“Thank you,” he said eventually, the words feeling wrong in his mouth but he didn’t know what else to say. “I really— I know— thank you.”
Felix nodded. Chan didn’t say anything else, didn’t embarrass himself anymore. He just led the way down the hall once again, listening to Felix walk behind him, and held open his bedroom door for Felix to enter. Felix padded in, socked feet quiet. He was still wearing some of Hyunjin’s clothes, even though Chan had told him he was welcome to get some of his own. This wasn’t all that surprising though, because even with his own wardrobe provided, Felix seemed to prefer wearing other people’s stuff. Or perhaps he had just not felt comfortable coming into Chan’s room alone, even after Chan had told him it was okay.
Chan stepped in behind him, closed the door, much more quietly than Hyunjin had. When Felix’s eyes were on him like this, it was like being pinned down somehow. His eyes so big and dark. The brown hair was shocking every time Chan looked at him, such a sudden shift from what he had known for these past months. Chan would have thought that darker hair, a more natural looking shade, would have made Felix look— less ethereal, perhaps, less like some woodland creature come here to lead Chan down the road of destruction. But it didn’t. Somehow, it almost made it worse. How lovely his perfectly-formed mouth looked now, that small nose, the delicate narrowness of his face.
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” he asked.
Felix shook his head. “Let’s just go to sleep?” he suggested. “You look tired, hyung.”
Chan shut his eyes for a moment; another flash of vulnerability that he might not otherwise have left anyone see, not even Felix. When he opened them, Felix had turned away, unzipping the hoodie that hung off his narrow shoulders to reveal a pale blue t-shirt that did much the same. He folded the hoodie up and set it on top of Chan’s dresser. Then he started to push his sweatpants down over his narrow hips.
Chan had been watching him, but at that he took his eyes away and started on his own clothes. To be standing in silence in this room undressing in this way together was— bizarre. Nothing but the rustle of their clothing, the sound of Felix’s soft breaths. Chan’s breathing felt like it was far, far too loud, as he changed from his sweater into a t-shirt, pulled his sweatpant off, left in his boxers. He hesitated, for a moment, over whether to dig some shorts out from a drawer, an extra layer to wear, but this much should hopefully be okay.
He glanced back at Felix, who was standing closer to the bed, looking at Chan. There was a slight frown on his face, that notch between his eyebrows, which cleared when he realised Chan was looking in his direction. Still, though, he didn’t move to climb up onto the bed until Chan, his heart feeling a little like it was in his throat, pulled back the covers on the side that he had been sleeping on these past few weeks, and slid underneath, half-sitting up.
Felix did the same, laying fully on his side of the bed, the duvet pulled up to his chin. He was looking at Chan still, his hair feathered out against the pillow, dark strands instead of blond, his eyes blinking slowly. Chan felt the unravelling inside him so he flicked off the light quickly, plunging the room into darkness, the sight of those eyes gone now.
When he lay down, though, it was— not better, to have Felix in here. He’d thought that the empty sucking feeling was torture but to lay here like this, the two of them so close and yet not touching in any way, was a new agony. He could not think of anything but the inches of space between their bodies, the awareness of which spread through his entire body like pins and needles.
He could not do this. He could not bear it.
He turned onto his side, shifting carefully, and stretched out an arm across the space between them. “Felix,” he whispered.
A moment later he had the warm weight of Felix’s body in his arms, Felix moving so fast it was as if he had expected it — or like he had thrown himself there, like the sound of Chan’s voice had unlocked something inside him. Chan tugged him even closer, one arm pillowing Felix’s head, that hand in Felix’s hair, the other hooked around his waist, keeping them flushed together. No more space, no more distance, as Felix’s hands clutched desperately at Chan’s back.
He’d almost lost this. He’d almost destroyed this, willfully and stupidly. Felix was breathing in a way that suggested he was trying to not cry, his breath puffing hot and moist against the hollow of Chan’s throat. Chan did not bother to stop himself, didn’t fight the tears that trickled down his cheek and against his pillow, into the softness of Felix’s hair. He let Felix hear them, let Felix know them.
“Ah, hyung,” Felix said, in a way that suggested he, too, had lost his battle with his tears; a moment later, Chan felt the dampness of them against his neck.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. It seemed to be the only thing Chan could say nowadays.
“Don’t apologise. It’s—” Felix didn’t finish. His voice was thick with his tears, and for a few moments he tucked his face further into Chan’s neck and was quiet. When he spoke again, it was straight into Chan’s skin. “You always hold it back. You hide. I don’t want you to do that with me.”
Chan had to gulp for air, feeling like he could not get enough into his lungs around the way he was still crying. He wanted Felix closer, and he tried to hold him tighter, but it was impossible— they were already as close as they could be. He maybe was even hurting Felix with how tight he was holding him, but Felix didn’t complain. He just clutched back.
It took a little time before he could start to get a grip on himself, but he didn’t try to rush it like he would have once, embarrassed by the show of the emotion. If Felix didn’t want Chan to hide, then he wasn’t going to hide. He was going to try, just like he had earlier, standing in Hyunjin’s room, to be honest with his emotions. Felix, after all, had not stopped crying either; Chan could allow himself this.
He ran a hand down Felix’s back, gently, trying to soothe him a little, feeling the shaking of his spine, his shoulders. Through the thin material of the t-shirt, Chan could feel the bumps of Felix’s scars. It was not a new sensation, to do that, but it brought it back in a sickening flash, what he had heard about them. What he had been faced with while he was sat at the kitchen table. It was not that he had forgotten, he did not think he possibly could, but it was more like it had been buried, for a time, under everything else.
“Felix,” he said, very quietly. “Hyunjin said—”
He stopped, not sure how to word it. Felix shifted against him, so that he could move back on the bed. Not pulling away, but giving himself space to breathe and talk. “Yes?”
Chan took a deep breath. “Hyunjin said that the scars on your back are from— your father.” Felix went very stiff in his arms. Chan wasn’t sure if it was the reminder of the scars themselves, the memories of how they were made, or it was the reminder of who his father was. “That he gave them to you with— with a belt. I didn’t— I don’t know—”
He broke off, a little frustrated with himself. He didn’t know what, exactly, he wanted to say, and so he resorted to silence. In the quiet, now, Felix’s inhalation was obviously shuddering. He had relaxed only a little again. “Yes,” he said. “He gave them to me.”
“All of them?” Chan asked.
“Yes,” said Felix.
Chan closed his eyes. He had known that would be the answer, had known it in his heart, but he had hoped that it was different. Or was that— perverse of him, maybe? To wish that instead of a singular source of pain for Felix, it had instead been multiple? When he thought of it that way, it horrified him. He regretted bringing the entire subject up, almost, because words were still failing him.
“He never bothered to hide what he did to me,” Felix continued, after a short silence, like he had been waiting for Chan to say something else and it had not come. “Never limited it to parts of the body nobody would see. He never did it in front of his men, because I was supposed to take over one day, and he wouldn’t want that— undermined. But he didn’t need to hide the bruises because there was nobody who would stop him, nobody who could help me. Even at school, teachers just ignored it.”
Chan felt— faint, his chest aching, his limbs tingling in horrified sorrow. How obvious it was now, the real picture of it. Felix, the sweetness of him, the kindness, the playful, caring boy, kept under the thumb of a man who wanted cruelty, an heir moulded in his image. What kind of living hell had Felix been going through, an entire lifetime of it, without any respite, anyone who could help him?
Chan had seen Jeongin’s suffering and taken him away from it, given him, as much as he could, a life that was free of pain, of further heartache. Nobody had done that for Felix. Nobody had even tried to help him.
Felix whispered, “When you kissed them—”
Chan could not help it— he made a noise, almost pained, bitten off only at the last second. Felix fell instantly quiet, something wary about it, like he was afraid that he had gone too far. Chan stroked his hand back up Felix’s spine so that he could cup the back of Felix’s head, his fingers in his hair. “Sorry,” he whispered. “Go on, please.”
There was a beat and then: “When you kissed them, it felt so good, hyung. Healing. Like you were giving me a good memory to override all the bad ones.” There was a note in Felix’s voice that sounded like he thought he was giving over a secret. Something that he had been keeping hidden in his heart. “When I think about them now, I don’t think about— how I got them. I just think about how good it felt when you kissed them.”
Chan almost started to cry again. The sadness, guilt, relief inside of him was too much for a single person to contain, surely. “I’m glad,” he said, the words hitching around those threatened tears. “Felix, I’m so glad.”
There was silence again. Longer this time, although they both knew the conversation was not over. When Felix spoke up this time, he sounded more tired. Not in a bad way, not like he had sounded yesterday, but just like he was maybe closer to sleep at this point. “When you told me about what happened to your brother,” he said, “I thought— I’d planned to tell you, I really did. After the job.” He sounded a little desperate, like he was afraid Chan didn’t believe him still, maybe. Chan stroked his hair, not wanting Felix to worry about that at all. “But then you told me about your brother, and I thought, I can’t tell him. I can never tell him. It was so selfish of me, hyung, I know, but—”
“It wasn’t.” It remained the one thing that stung, the one thing that felt, even now, a little violating. To have not known, exactly, who he was taking to bed, even if he did know Felix’s true soul. But it was not selfish, Chan thought, in the context of it all, for Felix to want to protect himself.
“It was,” Felix said, voice firmer, perhaps the firmest it had been this entire time; he clearly was not willing to let Chan interrupt again. “But your anger, your hatred of that man, meant that I felt— closer to you, in some ways. Because you understood, hyung, what it was, to lose— something, someone, because of him.” His voice dropped to almost a whisper again. “The only good times, in my life, were with my sisters. And he took Narae away from me. When I heard about your brother, I realised how connected we were. It was comforting, even if you would never know how.”
Yes, Chan could see that, could understand that feeling. He’d accused Felix of making it up, spinning a story, but Felix hadn’t: he’d watched his sister die in front of his eyes, killed by their own father. At least Chan had never seen that, never had to watch that, although there was another, separate torture to having never found his brother’s body. To have never been able to give his brother a funeral, to not have a place to go to mourn. To have been deprived of that by the actions of the father of the man he held, the man that Chan loved.
Chan loved him. How he loved him.
“I know now,” Chan said. “Felix, I know now.”
“Yeah,” Felix said. He sounded choked up, a bit, like the tears were still highly imminent. He tucked his head back into Chan’s throat. It was not like he was hiding, but more like he was trying to push himself into Chan’s body. Like he was trying to climb inside. If he could do that, maybe there would have been no misunderstandings between them. No secrets, no lies.
It didn’t matter now. Neither of them could hide now. There could be no more hiding at all, between the two of them. Not now, not ever.
Notes:
we recently made a twitter account for our fic stuff, so if you're interested in that, you can follow us there!
Chapter 17
Notes:
thank god ao3 came back online because i was starting to get a little worried there
Chapter Text
There was a hand on Jeongin’s shoulder, heavy and warm. It shook him gently, a familiar voice saying, “Baby boy.”
Jeongin shifted, feeling a little stiffer than he might have if he’d been sleeping in his bed. Which, he realised, as awareness came to him slow as molasses, he was not. “Mmm?” he chirped, his eyes opened narrowly against the glare of the overhead. Minho was above him, not quite blocking those lights out, red creases from sleep criss-crossing across the scars on the left side of his face. His hair was sticking up on one side, his face puffy, mouth looking a little more full than usual.
It was cute, it was lovely. Jeongin felt like he’d been given some kind of gift, getting to see this; Minho was always perfectly presentable whenever he left his room. Jeongin smiled at him, feeling sleepy and so good. “Hyung!” he said, stretching his arms over his head, pointing his toes. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in slipped off his body and onto the floor. He groaned at his shoulders popping, and then slumped back against the couch and asked, “What time is it?”
One of Minho’s eyes was squinted almost shut against the brightness of the room, giving him the appearance of a disgruntled cat. “Four in the morning,” he said tersely.
“Oh!” Jeongin said, delighted all over again, his smile widening even more. Minho did not seem pleased about it, but Jeongin certainly was. He’d wanted Minho to rest, and though he’d ended up sleeping more than Jeongin had anticipated, Jeongin wasn’t about to complain, even if it had meant he’d had to sleep with Minho in the television room, his frame crammed onto the smaller couch.
It had been— soft and almost intimate, watching Minho sleep. A look behind the veil, a glimpse of a tantalising future. Jeongin had never seen it before, but he’d wondered, thought about it so often, and then there Minho was, curled up on the couch, face smoothed of all expression, breathing deeply. Jeongin had felt, of all emotions, protective. And sorrowful, that he’d caused Minho such upset, that he’d doubted him. That he’d reacted with anger, lashing out with it, instead of digging deeper to understand. Minho was so often not what he seemed on the surface.
Was it any wonder, then, that once Jeongin’s movie had finished, and the clock was creeping toward ten at night, that Jeongin had not wanted to wake him? Minho had so desperately and obviously needed the rest, Jeongin could not bring himself to shake him awake and chase him to his room. But at that point, Jeongin had started to nod off himself. He hadn’t wanted to wake Minho up, but he also did not want to leave him here alone, to turn the light off and know Minho would wake in the end to a tiny, empty room, possibly disoriented. He’d known, too, that Minho would not like the idea of having been asleep and alone in an unlocked room. Too vulnerable.
And perhaps there’d been, inside Jeongin, that usual sense of— possessive gratification, of being someone that Minho trusted enough to sleep like this in front of. Even tired as he had been, Jeongin had known that if it had been anyone else in this room with him, Minho would not have allowed himself that respite. And so Jeongin hadn’t wanted to cause it to end prematurely. He’d wanted to bask in it a little longer.
So Jeongin had closed the door to the room as quietly as possible, making not a single sound. He’d left the television on but muted it, and grabbed another blanket for himself, content to nap with Minho until he awoke naturally. He’d been expecting another hour or two at most. They’d get up around midnight and blearily stumble to their rooms, and hopefully Minho would return to sleep.
But Minho had been even more tired than Jeongin had thought, if he’d only just woken up, almost so late into the night as to be considered morning. It was nearly the time he naturally woke up anyway, the time that Jeongin had trained his internal clock to also wake him up at.
Jeongin felt a little smug, truthfully. He was certainly proud of himself, trying to keep it off his face so that Minho didn’t notice or ask about it. He’d managed to wrangle Minho into a good nine hours of undisturbed sleep. Even if Minho looked a bit ruffled about it, Jeongin wasn’t going to be sorry.
“Baby boy, why didn’t you wake me up?” Minho groused. He grabbed Jeongin’s upper arm and hoisted him up into a sitting position, the hold firm but gentle in that way that Minho so often was with Jeongin. Sometimes, when Minho had hold of him like this, Jeongin liked to imagine that firmness getting harder and harder, until Minho’s fingers were not just grasping him but gripping him. Leaving bruises. But Minho never touched him like that.
“Because I wanted you to rest,” Jeongin said with a laugh that cracked around a yawn. He rubbed at his eyes with the palm of his hand roughly and said, “Ohh, I’m sleepy.”
Minho huffed. “Come on, it’s cold in here, you should be in bed.”
“My shoes,” Jeongin mumbled, patting his socked feet around on the floor. He couldn’t keep his eyes open properly. They kept drifting back shut, eyelids too heavy, sleep too appealing.
Minho bent, balling up the fallen blanket and putting it aside to reveal Jeongin’s battered sneakers. He grabbed Jeongin’s ankle, guiding first one foot, then the other, into his shoes. Jeongin let himself bask in the warmth of Minho’s care, feeling a little undeserving, truthfully.
“Hyung,” he said, mouth somewhat unwieldy in his sleepiness, lips smacking a little. Minho straightened back up, stepping away, space between their bodies again. “Do you feel better, hyung?” Jeongin asked as he got to his own feet, swaying gently. “You were so tired.”
A touch, light as a whisper, on Jeongin’s lower back, guiding him out of the room. “Yes,” Minho said, voice low as Jeongin focused hard on not tripping over his own feet on the carpet in the hallway. “I feel better.”
“Good,” Jeongin said as he was gently ushered into the PC room. “That’s good.”
It had been fully dark in the hallway, once they’d turned the lights off in the television room, but now that he was back here, in this dim room with its red lights, the memory of Minho’s tears came rushing back to him. It was just too much. He stopped and spun, grabbing both of Minho’s forearms urgently. “Hyung, I’m sorry,” he said, as Minho blinked down at him, his hands coming up to carefully cup Jeongin’s elbows. “I’m sorry I was mean to you.”
He’d never seen Minho cry before, and it had been shocking and awful and heartbreaking, like it had been tearing strips off Jeongin’s heart as he saw it. So had what Minho said as he’d wept, as he’d begged. A glimpse, perhaps, at all the pain and broken edges Minho hid beneath his titanium exterior, which Jeongin had spent so long trying to work his way under, work his way past. Those tears, those words, were proof that his hyung was human, as if Jeongin hadn’t seen those bloody knuckles, the dark circles under his eyes. As if Jeongin wasn’t keenly aware of it already.
There had also been something— odd, something just a bit strange about the entire interaction. Something that Jeongin could not put his finger on, but which he had turned over in his head as he’d watched his movie last night, but without coming up with anything. Minho loved Jeongin and didn’t want him to be angry at him, that Jeongin could understand. Maybe he could even understand how it might drive Minho, in his exhaustion, to tears. But Jeongin just got the feeling there was something more there, something he was missing.
He was way too tired right now to piece through it, but he would definitely file it away for later examination.
“Don’t be sorry, baby boy,” Minho said, voice still a little sleep-husky. “You weren’t mean.”
“I was,” Jeongin insisted, aware that in his tiredness he was maybe being a little childishly obstinate. But he needed Minho to understand, to feel his sincerity. “I made you cry. I’m sorry.”
Minho shook his head. “I just needed sleep,” he said, rueful. “I really— needed sleep.” The corners of Minho’s mouth were curled up, just a little, like he thought Jeongin was being cute. “I do feel a lot better now.”
“Still,” Jeongin replied, “I’m sorry.” He looked at Minho through his lashes, not trying to be coy but knowing that it was that all the same. “Forgive me?”
“Baby boy,” Minho said, fondly exasperated, “I’m not even upset with you.” His eyes were so warm, his head tilted a little to the side as his gaze roved over Jeongin’s face.
Jeongin made a little noise of dissent, shaking his hands which in turn caused Minho to shake a little. He let it happen, without a word, without trying to stop Jeongin. “Hyung,” Jeongin whined, bottom lip pouting out. He needed Minho to accept the apology, needed it to have been made right.
Minho smiled then, quickly repressed, and Jeongin fought down a gasp. He wanted to see that smile properly. “You weren’t mean,” Minho said, trying still to smooth his expression over. His face was soft and fond, but his voice was earnest, edging on serious. Like he wanted Jeongin to hear his sincerity, too. “You were upset. We misunderstood each other.” His voice dropped, face tipping forward a little like he was telling Jeongin a secret as he said, “Let’s try to meet in the middle next time, mm?”
Jeongin beamed at him, feeling— love, so much love. Potent and warm, thick in his veins. He could tell he was blushing and didn’t care. Perhaps that was the tiredness in him, or perhaps it was just that playful spark in Minho that Jeongin so rarely got to see. “Mmm!” he agreed, nodding enthusiastically. Next time, he’d do better. They’d do better.
Minho huffed out a laugh through his nose, pulling away just enough to disengage Jeongin’s hold on him. But then he came back, shockingly close, and put his hand on Jeongin’s lower back again. Truthfully, Jeongin knew that the warmth of that hand could not be felt through the material of his sweater, but he imagined it so anyway.
“Come on, sleepy baby,” Minho murmured. “Let’s get you back up to the apartment.”
He led Jeongin through the room, without taking his hand away for a moment. Like this, Jeongin was almost— almost under his arm, almost walking tucked into Minho’s side. He’d have that, one day, certain of it down to the core of him, but this was nice too. It could be enough, for now; it was so much more than he’d ever really had before. Or at least, that he could remember — perhaps they’d walked like this when Minho had led him home after Jeongin had gotten drunk at Maniac.
They went through the door to the stairwell, the air unpleasantly cold on Jeongin’s sleep-warm skin. That was the first thing Jeongin noticed, shivering with it, and then the second thing was—
“Changbin-hyung?” Jeongin said, mouth a little unwieldy around it in his surprise.
Changbin had frozen as soon as the PC room door had opened, one foot paused on a stair. He looked sleep-rumpled too, his hair a curly mess around his head, sweatpants linty and shirt creased. Like Minho, he had pinkish marks across his cheek from where it had been pressed into a pillow.
There was a long beat of silence, all of them just looking at each other, before Jeongin said, “Hyung, it’s four in the morning?”
Changbin slowly lowered his foot back down onto the landing, running a hand through his mussed hair. “Yeah, I uh— I had a nightmare,” he said, looking sheepish and face flushing a little. “I wanted to check the doors.”
That spent a spark of sadness through Jeongin. “Oh, hyung,” he said, mouth downturning. What had Changbin had a nightmare about, he wondered. Jeongin had never actually heard Changbin have a nightmare, but he knew Changbin did have them. Sometimes, back before Jeongin had shifted his sleep schedule forward, Changbin would come and knock on his bedroom door late at night, just to check up on him. I had a nightmare, he would say, giving Jeongin a weak smile.
One time Jeongin had been in the bathroom and come out to find Changbin standing outside Hyunjin’s bedroom door, a hand pressed to it, but not willing to go inside. He hadn’t knocked, hadn’t actually disturbed Hyunjin. I had a nightmare, he’d said, voice very soft, and horribly bleak, when Jeongin had asked him about it. Jeongin had never wanted to know what that nightmare had been about.
“Everything alright?” Minho asked, voice very flat. His hand had dropped away from Jeongin the moment they’d entered the stairwell, and Jeongin could feel Minho had moved away from him a little. Cold air where there had moments ago been a body. Come back, he wanted to say, but could not.
“Yeah, of course, it was just a dream,” Changbin said, then cleared his throat. There was something— not quite suspicion, not that far, but something like it, on his face, as he looked between Jeongin and Minho. “What are you two doing down here?”
Jeongin made his eyes go wide, blinking innocently. “We fell asleep watching a movie!”
This was not unheard of for Jeongin, but Minho was not the type, and he could see the scepticism on Changbin’s face as he glanced at Minho. Jeongin peeked over at Minho as well, and in the cold, unsettlingly yellow light of the stairwell he could see that Minho’s face was blank, but his ears were red.
“Right,” Changbin said, a little slowly.
“I’m going to bed,” Minho said, almost a declaration. It was like a guillotine blade falling across the conversation, and Jeongin bit back a smile. Minho’s ears were still red. It was always cute, when Minho just stopped a conversation and walked out because he was flustered. “Make sure baby boy gets tucked in?”
Now Jeongin was the one turning pink, and Changbin just stammered out, “Uh— sure—” before Minho had already turned and headed down the stairs.
“Sleep well, hyung,” Jeongin called after him softly. Minho didn’t pause, but Jeongin didn’t hold it against him. He would have been more surprised if Minho had paused, or looked back, especially now that Changbin was here.
He hoped Minho did actually rest more.
Changbin was waiting for him. When Jeongin looked at him, Changbin motioned for Jeongin to lead the way, so Jeongin did so, heading up to the apartment, hearing Changbin’s quiet footsteps behind him the whole way. They had all learned to move quietly, at some point, but with Changbin it always had felt a bit like a contradiction. He was just such a presence, emotionally and physically. When they’d lived in the old place, especially after Hyunjin had come, it had sometimes felt like a relief when Changbin spent time at his group home, because there were moments it felt like he simply filled the room with his energy. But he’d never been clumsy, not like Jeongin was; there was grace to him that was different from Hyunjin’s or Minho’s, but there all the same.
It wasn’t until they were in the apartment, shoes off and passing through the kitchen, that Changbin whispered, “Jeongin-ah.”
“Yeah, hyung?” Jeongin said, voice pitched to match Changbin’s. He rubbed his eyes sleepily, not even entirely in affectation. He was genuinely still very tired.
The light over the stove was on, but none of the others were, the room dim and blue, one side of Changbin’s face lit in low yellow. “Minho-hyung doesn’t fall asleep watching movies,” he said carefully. Jeongin forced his face to remain curious and nothing more. “What really happened?”
Jeongin could lie again, but he didn't think it would serve much purpose. He’d only lied down in the stairwell because he hadn’t wanted to embarrass Minho like that. “We had another argument about Felix-hyung,” he explained, soft still. “Minho-hyung’s been really stressed, and he— I think he had a panic attack?” Changbin blinked, eyes going a little wide. “He started breathing all shallow and crying and shaking—”
“Crying?” Changbin echoed, a little louder, and the both of them winced, waiting to hear shifting from the bedrooms; noises like that were likely to wake Chan, if no one else. When none came, Changbin’s voice was again a whisper as he asked, “You made Minho-hyung cry?”
Now Jeongin knew he was blushing, felt the way his face went hot with shame. He saw again, in his mind’s eye, Minho’s face streaked with tears, heard the tremor in his voice. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said, a little stiffly.
“Aw, Jeongin, I didn’t mean it like that,” Changbin said, rubbing a hand over his face. When it dropped, he looked tired too, and something else, something— something Jeongin couldn’t place. Perhaps an expression he’d never seen on Changbin’s face before, which seemed remarkable, after all their years together.
Jeongin shuffled on his feet a little, restless and longing for his own room, his own bed. He wished he could just walk out of conversations he’d become done with, like Minho did. It would make things so much easier, Jeongin thought. He knew that he should not, knew that he deserved some of Changbin’s judgement in this. Even knowing Minho felt better now, not just from the rest but also having gotten all that pent-up emotion out of his system, Jeongin still felt guilty for those tears.
He also felt— privileged, almost, as sick as it maybe was. To be someone Minho could cry in front of, when he clearly did so with no one else.
He trusts me, Jeongin wanted to say. He loves me. I want to be that oasis for him, that shelter.
When he continued to not speak, Changbin nervously sought to fill in the silence. “You know— it’s just—” he stuttered. “Minho-hyung really cares about you. Like— of us all. It’s you, he cares for you the most.”
Jeongin looked at Changbin— really, properly now, tendrils of suspicion beginning to unfurl in him. It might be nothing, the words as innocuous as Hyunjin’s had been the night they’d gone to the club. Everyone knows you’re his favourite. But the way Changbin was speaking, careful and halting, was like he was thinking twice about each word before he said it aloud. The way he had looked between Jeongin and Minho on the stairs. That expression right now that Jeongin could not parse on his face.
“I know,” Jeongin said, forcing his voice to maintain a levelness that would give nothing away, one way or another.
“That’s all I meant,” Changbin said, fast and earnest in a way that made Jeongin wonder if maybe Changbin just didn’t want Jeongin to be upset with him. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad. I just meant— if you’re mad at him, he’ll take it especially hard. So you should— be a little— you should— try—”
Halting and fumbling, Changbin was turning a little flushed in the dim light. He was a person without artifice, unused to crafting sentences like Felix crafted his explosives, mindful and delicate.
How long have you known Minho-hyung is in love with me? Jeongin wanted to ask, but he did not want to bare Minho in such a way. Not even to Changbin, this lovely hyung who was, despite his obvious discomposure, trying his best to warn Jeongin to be gentle with Minho.
“I know how Minho-hyung feels about me,” Jeongin said, putting Changbin out of his misery. He watched Changbin sway back a little, blinking. “I try to be careful,” he continued, still in that flat, cautious tone, “but sometimes he acts like an ass and I have the right to be upset, don’t I?” He could feel his cheeks turning a little warm, and so he looked over Changbin’s shoulder rather than into his eyes. Changbin opened his mouth, maybe to answer, maybe just to make a confused gurgle, and before he could, Jeongin bowled on quickly. “I’m trying, hyung, to walk the line. Trust me when I say I learned a lesson last night. I don’t want to drive him to that point again.”
Changbin, by this point, was looking at Jeongin like he’d grown an extra head. “Oh,” he said, toneless. “You—” He cut himself off, looking more unsure now than at any point in the conversation prior. “Jeongin-ah,” he said slowly, “do... are you...”
Jeongin turned his face away, staring down the darkened hallway. “You know,” he said softly, hands clutched together in front of himself, hidden away so that Changbin could not see them tremble just a little bit, “I’m clumsy but not that clumsy. If I wanted to, I could learn to cook for myself.”
A long pause. “Oh,” Changbin said again, and this time it was a little faint.
Jeongin was definitely blushing now. “Goodnight, hyung,” he said, trying to be firm, wanting to seem— confident, since he wouldn’t be able to appear aloof. He wished, more than anything, the others could see him as the young man he was, not the little boy he had been. Right now, he did not want questions — he simply wanted to be heard, and believed. Understood. Felix had believed him in that way, and he wanted Changbin to do the same. “I hope you don’t have any more nightmares.”
He made himself take a step, then another, and another, until the darkness of the hallway had enveloped him, and it was only right before he’d closed his bedroom door that he heard Changbin very quietly say, “Goodnight, Jeongin.”
——
Felix woke alone; not unusual, not at all, but perhaps a little disappointing all the same. Not that he expected Chan to stay with him — judging by the narrow band of sunshine coming through the gap in the curtains, it was mid-morning, which meant that Chan would have been up for a couple of hours, probably.
He lay on his side, his face pressed into the pillow. Breathing in the smell of him and Chan mingled there — Chan’s body wash, the shampoo that Hyunjin had given Felix for his blond hair. He probably didn’t need to use that anymore. It was such a familiar scent at this point, but smelling it like this made tears spring to Felix’s eyes. He had to push himself upright so that he didn’t lose himself in the emotions pulsing through him.
He had just about gained control over himself when he looked over at the side table and saw a note from Chan there. Familiar, so familiar, the same thing that had happened almost every morning for the past few weeks and it was something he had been sure was lost to him. But he was here, experiencing it again, and when he plucked the note up to read it with his shaking hands, it was in Chan’s handwriting, just a small note letting him know that he’d gone down to his office to work.
He’d signed it with his usual x under his name. Felix looked at that mark for a length of time that he would never admit to out loud.
Eventually, though, he made himself get up off the bed. He’d wanted to talk to Chan this morning, and had hoped to catch him before Chan left the bedroom, but that had always been something of a fool’s hope. Chan had perfected the art of not waking him up, and Felix had grown used to a laziness that he would never have been allowed in his father’s house. He would need to go see Chan instead.
He found the sweatpants he had taken off the night before and pulled them on, and then, with a feeling of slight daring, he found a long-sleeved shirt that he’d borrowed from Chan before to wear. His toothbrush was still in the bathroom, and he brushed his teeth and combed his hair and then slipped out of the bedroom.
On his way down the hallway, he slid a note of his own under Hyunjin’s door. It was still slightly too early for Hyunjin to be awake, he knew, although he’d be up soon enough, and he’d probably come looking for Felix, one way or another. Maybe it was cruel to let Hyunjin wake up and simply not know where he could find Felix, to have to send him through the entire house to track him down. Hyunjin would worry like that, Felix knew. He didn’t want that.
As he let himself out of the apartment, he realised his hands were shaking. There was a feeling inside of him, stepping out of the door into the grey concrete stairwell, that was like the first time he had stepped outside after his almost-kidnapping. Like even this enclosed space was too big, too much, too overwhelming.
But he made himself go down the stairs, steady and consistent, one step at a time, until he’d made it down to the third floor. He supposed it was courage that was what let him do it, was what gave him the strength to enter the PC room and then into the hallway that Minho had dragged him through. But just like when Chan had told him he was brave for being willing to go on the hotel job, he wasn’t sure that courage was the right word. It felt just the same as the rest of his life had felt like: there was no other option but to make himself do it.
He focused on his destination and before long he found himself outside Chan’s office door. He lifted his hand and rapped his knuckles against the door. He rarely disturbed Chan in his office — in fact, he was not sure he ever had done — and was not sure of the protocol for it, so he waited after he knocked until he heard Chan’s voice call out a welcome.
He pulled open the door and stepped inside, Chan looking up from his desk to see who it was. He clearly hadn’t expected it to be Felix, his mouth dropping open a little. “Lix,” he said, and then visibly winced.
Felix didn’t call him out on the use of the nickname. Chan hadn’t used it during any of their conversations the past couple of days, not even last night, when they had been curled up together in bed. Truthfully, hearing it made another piece of the fractured mess inside Felix feel like it slid back into place, like there was a return of some kind of normality.
“Hello, hyung,” he said, still in the doorway. “Can I come in?”
Chan nodded, emphatically enough that his hair, curly today, bounced a little against his forehead. “Yes, of course,” he said.
Felix had asked but if it was courage that had been fueling him, it failed him a little bit now. He’d been trying to not do it, but his eyes felt dragged to the spot on the floor where he had lay on his knees. He watched it hit Chan, the— deja vu, in a sense, of Chan sitting behind his desk, Felix at the door, although at least he was on his feet this time, and relatively in control of the situation. But it was hard to be in here all the same, this room where Chan, looking down at him, had sentenced him to death. Even having forgiven Chan, even barely blaming for it at all, this was— hard. It was hard to be in this room.
He fought the urge to hide his shaking hands like he had done with Minho yesterday. Chan should be allowed to see them. Not as punishment, not to make him feel bad, but just to let them be open with each other.
Chan got up out of his desk chair, almost in a rush, like he couldn’t bear to sit there, like he too was feeling, too strongly, the echoes of the last time they had been together like this. “Lix,” he said, fast, but soothing in a way, “we don’t have to talk here, we can go upstairs, if you want?”
Felix shook his head. No, not upstairs, not after he had worked so hard to get down here. He made himself step inside the room and pulled the door shut behind himself. “It’s okay,” he said.
Chan came around the desk, motioning to the couch, saying, “Let’s sit here, okay? We can sit together here.”
Felix nodded and walked to the couch, sitting at one end, Chan only taking his own seat once Felix had done so. There was too much space between them, Chan sitting what he probably thought was a respectful distance away, but it felt like it had last night, before he had reached a hand across, like the inches between their bodies were a niggling pain in Felix’s chest. Last night Chan had been the one to reach out, and so Felix was brave once more, and he shuffled across the couch a little until their knees were just touching.
A moment later Chan turned one of his hands up, loose but there, and Felix took it, letting their fingers tangle together. It felt so good that it almost brought tears to his eyes. The familiar weight and warmth of it, and then the feeling of Chan’s pulse against his, the knowledge that Chan’s heart was racing just as fast as Felix’s own.
“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?” Chan asked gently. His thumb brushed, briefly, over the back of Felix’s hand.
Felix nodded again. “I wanted to talk to you about my sister,” he said. “Not Narae, not my younger sister. About my noona.”
“Ah,” said Chan. “She still lives with your— Lee Jaerim, yes?”
Felix was not sure how he felt about Chan course-correcting like that in the middle of the sentence. He was not sure if Chan had done it to avoid bringing it up again, that Felix was Lee Jaerim’s son, or if it was because of how many times Felix had insisted that he was not that man’s son. But did it make a difference, really, what the reason was, when Chan was looking at Felix with those steady eyes, not shying away from the conversation, not cutting it off before it could start.
It was miracle enough that Chan was willing to listen to him in the first place, never mind about a topic such as this.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s the only one still living with him, and I don’t know what he’s told her about what happened to Narae or to me, but I know that she’s not loyal to him. None of us were, none of us could— we could never be loyal to him.”
He knew it down to his bones: his sisters and he were aligned on this, connected in this way. Their father commanded no respect in them, no loyalty, no trust or care of duty. They had toed the line he laid for them as a method of survival, doing what they were told only to keep themselves from feeling his wrath.
Until he had strangled Narae, he had never actually laid a hand on his daughters, not like he had with Felix. It had been a strain of paternalistic misogyny, perhaps, how he had never hit them or even really threatened them, but he hadn’t needed to do it. He had, somehow, through the years, managed to imprint something in all their heads, that while he would not hurt them, he would, and could, hurt Felix.
It had turned out that if you defy me, I will beat your brother instead was a particularly effective tool at keeping children in line.
Chan looked a little like he wasn’t sure where this conversation was going. He was still just looking at Felix. When he spoke, his voice was still gentle. “Jisung said something like that,” he said. “I don’t— I believe you, that she isn’t loyal either.”
“She’s not,” Felix said. “But she lives with him, and if we do what we said we might do, steal his records and leak them in some way, she’s going to be in incredible danger, hyung. The men who will come for my father aren’t going to care that his daughter has nothing to do with his business, that she’s not connected in any way. They’re just going to kill her too.”
Kill her, and perhaps make her suffer while they were at it. The kinds of things the men that his father was screwing over could do to his sister made Felix feel faint, made him feel nauseous. When his plan had been to come clean about who he was after the job was over, he had hoped that something could be worked out, something which could help to rescue his sister before anything could happen to her. Now the secret was already out, so maybe he didn’t have to wait.
Chan’s expression had slid into something grimmer. “I see,” he said. “Are you— do you want to call the job off then? Or is it that you don’t want us to leak the information we steal?”
He sounded confused, like he wasn’t sure what Felix was trying to get at here. But more than that, he sounded willing to, like if Felix said he wanted to stop the job out of fear for his sister, he would actually seriously contemplate doing it. It made Felix ache inside. If Chan continued to wonder how Felix could forgive him for what had happened, it was because Felix knew, deep down, that this was the truth of Chan: this kindness, this care; this purposefully done approach to his duty in this world.
Felix shook his head though. “No,” he said. “Not that, I want — I want the job to go ahead, I need it to go ahead. But I’d like to warn my noona, if I can? If I can warn her that something like this might happen, she’ll be able to make her own escape plan. We used to— we’d talk about that, together, when my dad was away. How we could get out, some day, if we could.”
Would the guilt of it ever end, for Felix? To have been the one who did escape, in his way, who was no longer living in that house, under the thumb of that man? It should not have been him who got out, he had always known. It should have been his sisters, he should have done whatever he could to free them. Narae wouldn’t have had to die if he had tried harder.
It would have killed him too, eventually, of course. His father going too far one night, perhaps, or Felix’s body simply giving up on him, or something worse, maybe. Some nights he had laid in his bed looking at his ceiling and felt the suffocating reality of his situation come over him like a blanket, like one of the shirts that he had to wear every single day, the collar too tight around his throat, choking him every way he moved. Those nights he had looked at a future like this — the pain, the stress, the knowledge that he was helping an evil man inflict pain upon the world — and felt a coldness grow stronger and stronger inside of himself, spreading its ice further each time, and he’d known that once that ice covered him, it would be so unbearable that he wouldn’t be able to live with it anymore.
He would spend those nights staring at the curtain rail above his bed and tell himself, not until your sisters are safe, over and over. But now one of them was dead, and he was the one who was free. He didn’t want to lose Jisoo too.
“You want to get in contact with her?” Chan asked. He still sounded a little confused, not like he was going to refuse but like he was having trouble keeping up with the conversation. Felix didn’t really blame him for that. There’d been a lot for Chan to take in, these last couple of days, and he had looked so exhausted when he had come to collect Felix the night before. A single night of sleep, which Felix didn’t think had been particularly good anyway, judging by how early Chan had left the bedroom, was unlikely to have made much of a difference.
“If I can?” Felix squeezed Chan’s hand a little harder. Chan, almost like a reflex, covered it with his other hand. “I'd like to— email her, or text her, if that’s possible? I know her phone number, we memorised the numbers just in case.”
“I’m not sure,” Chan said slowly. “It’s very likely that someone is monitoring that kind of stuff, Felix.”
“They will be,” Felix said. “They’ll be waiting for me to contact her, it’s why I never tried before I came here. And I didn’t want to risk anything before, when— when you guys didn’t know. But other than you guys, she’s the only one who knows who Felix is. My dad never knew this name, and nobody we work with did, because it was only used at our academy. If I can contact her as Felix, she’ll know who that is, and nobody else will.”
Chan was silent for a while, clearly thinking it through. Felix let him, didn’t push him. He didn’t have much hope of this working out for him, but he had to try, because if he didn’t ask, if he didn’t bring this up, and Jisoo died, he’d literally never be able to forgive himself. He’d be part of the reason both of his sisters died.
“It could work,” Chan said eventually. “I’ll— I need to talk to Minho, and probably Seungmin, before I can give you an answer, though, Felix. I don’t know enough about how this could work to know if it’s something we could feasibly do.”
Felix nodded. He’d expected that, and he was fairly certain that Minho, at least, would say no to the entire thing, but maybe Seungmin could help with another solution. At least he had tried. “Thank you, hyung,” he said.
Chan gave him a look — something sweet, something molten in a way, but not sexual at all. He looked at Felix, in that moment, like he was seeing Felix for the first time all over again but there was nothing bad in it this time, not like he’d looked at Felix on the floor of the office. “Felix,” he said gently. “Thank you for trusting me with this. I know it can’t be easy, to ask this of me, but I want— I don’t want you to be afraid to come to me for help.”
Felix almost slumped. He wanted to melt into Chan’s side, the way he would have done even just a few days ago, but he didn’t quite dare, not yet. He had been scared, even though he had known he had to do it. Scared that Chan would dismiss him, get angry at him, or think that Felix was finding another way to betray them.
“She’s my only sister left, hyung,” Felix said, almost a whisper. “I don’t want to lose her too.”
Chan nodded. Then, after a moment of looking at Felix’s face, he lifted a hand away from where they’d been tangled in Felix’s lap, moving deliberately, and tucked a loose piece of hair behind Felix’s ear. The tears came to Felix’s eyes so quickly that it surprised even him, and he knew that Chan had seen them before Felix was able to blink them away. It was just such a familiar feeling, the way Chan always, always, brushed that piece of hair back — not like he thought it was bothering Felix, because it never was, but like it was obscuring Chan’s view of Felix’s face and he wanted to see.
“I know,” Chan said, quietly, seriously. “I understand. Leave it with me, okay, Lix? Leave it with me.”
Felix closed his eyes. “Okay, hyung,” he whispered. “I’ll trust you with this.”
He felt a few seconds later Chan’s mouth against his forehead. They didn’t speak again for a long, long time.
——
Chan was still sitting with Felix when Changbin arrived, knocking once and then letting himself in, the same way he usually did. At the sound of that knock, Felix jerked a little, obviously startled by the sound. It felt a little bit, even to Chan, like he was breaking through the surface of something, as he looked at the door and saw Changbin standing there, looking at them, expression surprised.
“Ah,” he said, his face changing a moment later to genuine regret. “Sorry, hyung, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No,” said Chan. He had to clear his throat. He was still holding Felix’s hand, their skin very warm together now, and he didn’t really want to let go, his thumb still stroking slightly. It was gratifying that, even though Felix had drawn a little bit away at the sight of Changbin there, he hadn’t taken his hand away. “No, it’s okay. Is it— time for the meeting?”
Changbin nodded. He still looked sorry, but it wasn’t his fault that Chan had completely lost track of time, lost in the silence that had settled between him and Felix. Chan had not wanted to break it with careless words and it had seemed like Felix felt the same way, just content to exist together. Chan had work that he probably should be getting on with, especially since he had lost the last few days, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to care.
It was not more important than this: Felix, in this office, with him, as relaxed as he could be, and at the very least, no longer scared of Chan or what Chan might do.
Slowly, Felix detangled their hands, and Chan let him go, although it felt strange, now, to not have the weight of it. Even so, it didn’t seem that Felix really wanted to move, and it wasn’t until Changbin actually came into the room and went to Chan’s desk to dig out a phone charger from one of the drawers that Felix got to his feet.
“I’ll go, hyung,” he said, looking down at Chan. Although he’d spent last night in Chan’s room, he was wearing one of Hyunjin’s sweaters again, the sleeves too long, his hands vanishing inside them now that he was standing. “I’ll— see you again tonight?”
Chan wanted to snag his hand again. He would have done, before, even if they’d disappeared into his sleeves, even if they’d literally just finished holding hands. But he didn’t, he just nodded and said, “I’d like that, Felix. But it’s your call, everything is— your call now.”
Felix nodded. He didn’t look convinced — or no, it was something different on his face, something more like he was agreeing without actually agreeing. He didn’t say anything else, he just left the room, shutting the door very, very softly behind him.
After he left, there was a long silence between them, as Changbin plugged his phone in and then straightened slowly. Chan expected reproach, perhaps, or Changbin’s judgement; Felix’s words had made it clear that they had spent the night together, and Chan had not spoken about this with Changbin. He had just forged ahead with it, which was probably his problem in the beginning too, but there was a desperation involved here. A desperation to fix things with Felix, or at least to start fixing things, that meant he had moved a little faster than perhaps he had meant to.
But Changbin didn’t say anything about that. He just said, “He’s still scared of me.”
Chan looked at him, surprised by the words at first and then, after a moment, saddened by them. Because it made sense, now, why Felix had waited until Changbin had come completely into the room before he’d tried to leave. Changbin looked back, his expression so solemn as to be almost grim, running a hand through his hair. His hair too was fluffy today, and Changbin was much more consistent than Chan in making sure his was styled flat. A sure sign, Chan thought, of how hard this was being on Changbin.
“It’s understandable,” Changbin continued, when Chan didn’t say anything. “I get why, it just— I wish he didn’t have to. You’re not the only one, hyung, who regrets what happened.”
What was there to say? Nothing, really. There so often was no need for words, between him and Changbin. It had been Changbin who had followed him from their time working for the old team, Changbin who had trusted in Chan’s vision for his own business. Changbin who he had trusted with Jeongin in turn, this younger brother that Chan had not let anyone else know about. They understood each other, him and Changbin.
It was Changbin that Chan always turned to, when he was struggling with a situation. Changbin who gave Chan the answer, a path forward through the murk that was life. He should have known, the moment Changbin spoke of mercy for Felix, that Minho’s solution was not the right one.
Chan moved back to behind his desk, sitting in that desk chair with an odd feeling of discomfort. He’d sat here these past couple of days and just felt like it was a bad fit, suddenly, like he did not belong here the way he had before. A single mistake did not make a bad leader, he knew, but this was such a mistake that he felt like the singular nature of it didn’t figure into it. He would get over it, he knew, and he owed it to Jun, if no one else, to keep on this path, but there was a part of him that just was not sure anymore if he was capable of it.
The sound of someone in the hallway, footsteps familiar enough to be Hyunjin’s. Chan was not like Minho, who knew a person’s step in an instant, but he knew what Jeongin’s footsteps sounded like, and he knew what Hyunjin’s sounded like, when he chose to make noise.
There was a knock on the door. When Chan called out a welcome, Hyunjin flounced in, not looking at either of them as he sat on the couch, almost throwing himself down onto it. He took his time getting settled, pulling the blanket over his lap, and only then looked up at them. He’d already had an annoyed expression on his face, and now it turned into an outright scowl.
“Where’s Minho-hyung,” he said.
“He’ll be here,” Chan said mildly. “You’re actually a little early.”
Hyunjin huffed under his breath and then turned away from them again. He had one leg crossed over the other under the blanket and he was tapping his fingers against his knee, some staccato kind of rhythm that Chan didn’t recognise. Usually, when Hyunjin was in a grumpy mood, Chan felt nothing but soft amusement, fondness for him that went down to his bone marrow. But this was not Hyunjin in a grumpy mood, for all he was being dramatic about it, and Chan didn’t feel anything but weary regret for what was happening.
Changbin didn’t even say anything either, and he was the one most likely to needle Hyunjin when he was in a mood, trying to get at least a smile out of him. But Changbin said nothing, and just stood behind Chan. Like that, Chan couldn’t even see what his face was doing, and it was perhaps one of the few times that he felt like he should know.
“I just passed Lix on the stairs,” Hyunjin said suddenly. “He said he came down here to talk to you, hyung. I hope you weren’t a dick to him.”
Chan didn’t rise to the bait. “I wasn’t,” he said, still calmly. “Did he seem upset when you saw him?”
Hyunjin’s scowl, impossibly, got darker. “No,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. He has a habit of letting things go that he shouldn’t.”
Chan accepted the jab without a flinch. He got the feeling that it was making Hyunjin even angrier that he wasn’t responding in a similar way, that he wasn’t getting angry in turn or asserting his authority. It wouldn’t have made a difference, with Hyunjin, but that was probably the point — if Chan lost his temper or started throwing his weight around, Hyunjin could flounce back out, safe in the knowledge that that was behaviour he, rightfully, didn’t have to put up with.
So Chan didn’t do that. Chan just sat quietly, as Hyunjin looked back away from him and Changbin, and continued tapping on his knee. It was a relief when Minho finally arrived, which was not something Chan thought he would be thinking these past couple of days.
Minho let himself in the room, looked at the way Hyunjin had his nose turned up in the air, and very visibly rolled his eyes. It was probably good that Hyunjin wasn’t looking at him, because he probably would have lost his mind if he’d seen that, and considering the mood Minho had been in for yesterday’s meeting, it probably wouldn’t end well. Luckily, Minho didn’t actually say anything other than, “Hello, hyung,” as he took a seat.
“Can we get this over with?” Hyunjin asked, before Chan could respond to Minho. “What did you pull me down here for?”
Minho looked at Chan with a single raised eyebrow, sardonic but not overly amused. He didn’t know, Chan thought, about why Hyunjin was in such a mood, but he could probably guess at it. Chan just sighed. “It’s about the prep trip to Blackbird’s,” he said.
A touch of the superiority fell off Hyunjin’s face. He frowned, looking a little confused. “The prep trip?” he said. “I didn’t— we’re still doing that?”
“As of right now, yes,” Chan said, “which means that you and Jisung are going to need to go in there to check things out, like we originally planned.”
Hyunjin looked at him, properly now, much more seriously than before, like he had been reminded that this was a business meeting and he, like Chan, like Changbin and Minho, had a job to do too. Whatever his personal feelings were right now, he would have to set them aside in favour of professionalism, and Chan knew that Hyunjin knew that.
It had been hard, in the beginning, to switch from Hyunjin, the person he cared for, a younger brother in everything but name, to Hyunjin, his employee who he sent on jobs. Honestly, they hadn’t wanted to send him on anything at all; like Jeongin, there had been a desire to keep Hyunjin safe, to shelter him from this line of work if they could. Compounding that had been the fact that Hyunjin could not fight and was not very good with a gun, either. He seemed to view guns as something as a necessary evil — training him on shooting had mostly been Hyunjin standing around with the gun dangling from his fingers, a bored expression on his face, and then him shooting roughly at where they directed him. Good enough, they’d decided, and stopped torturing him with it.
Then had come a job that had required someone stealthy and quiet, someone able to sneak in through the upper window of a house and collect a hard drive. It had been Changbin who brought Hyunjin up. We’re unlikely to find anyone quieter than Hyunjin, he’d pointed out, and he’s tall enough we’d barely need to give him a boost up to the window.
Hyunjin had been more than good at it, he’d excelled, and so they had been able to fit a new niche into their line up: a thief, one with quiet footsteps and, by this point, a wide knowledge of all the ways to break into something. They needed him on the Blackbird job, no doubt about that.
“Right,” Hyunjin said. “Right, yes, the— checking the layout, the private rooms. Yes, I remember.”
Chan nodded. “We’ve been discussing it,” he said, motioning to Changbin and Minho, “for a while now, actually, and obviously you and Jisung are going to have to go in under cover. We need to get up to the second floor, which means appearing wealthy enough for the tables up there, and our best bet is for you to pose as a rich socialite and for Jisung to be there as your bodyguard. That way we can at least keep him armed.”
“Plus,” Minho said, “you’re better at poker than Jisung is.”
Hyunjin nodded, with just a slight little shake of his hair, almost a head toss. Hyunjin was shockingly good at poker, as they’d discovered one night after a group dinner, when Jisung had produced a pack of cards and asked if anyone played. Changbin had explained the game to Hyunjin and Jeongin, and they’d played for toothpicks, from the tub that nobody could remember buying that lived in a drawer in the kitchen.
Despite having only just heard how to play the game, Hyunjin had wiped the floor with them. He had a perfect poker face, and had seemed to instinctively know how to keep track of the cards in play. The only person who had come close to giving him a run for his money had been Seungmin, but considering they wouldn’t get Seungmin into Blackbird’s unless it was under pain of death, they couldn’t exactly send him.
Jeongin, it had come to a surprise to nobody at all, had been woeful at the game. Even with Changbin explaining again, and then Minho trying to help him, he’d folded early and then taken himself off to bed. But even if that hadn’t been the case, they weren’t going to send Jeongin into the building. They had another job for him.
“But,” said Chan, as delicately as he could, “the problem, Hyunjin, is that right now you’re very— recognisable. People might not know your face, but they know that there’s a member of my team with hair like yours. And if we send you into Blackbird’s with your hair that colour, you might not get recognised right away, but if they review the tapes, they might recognise you then.”
Hyunjin had gone very still on the couch, looking between their faces. His hair was loose today, falling to his shoulders, dark-blood-red and shiny. The colour had been a shock, the first time Chan had seen it, replacing the golden blond that Hyunjin had spent many, many hours perfecting. Hyunjin liked this colour, which was what made this ask so difficult.
“What are you saying,” Hyunjin said.
“We need you to dye your hair,” Minho said, bluntly. Chan winced slightly, but kept his eyes on Hyunjin, who already looked outraged, his mouth dropping open slightly, although he must have guessed that something like this was coming in the conversation, because he didn’t look surprised. “Dark, something that nobody is going to blink at.”
“You want me to dye my hair,” Hyunjin repeated. That outrage in his face was alive in his voice too. He didn’t bother arguing with Minho, he simply rounded on Chan. The weakest link, Chan thought, and then wanted to scrub his own skin off a little bit at the sense of echoing deja vu inside his head. “Hyung, you can’t be serious right now!”
“I’m afraid I am, Hyunjin,” said Chan, as apologetically as he could manage. “We need you to go into Blackbird’s for this prep trip, and you can’t go in there with your hair like that. We need you to blend in.”
“I just bleached my roots and redid the red two days ago,” Hyunjin said. “Why didn’t you tell me this was going to happen before I wasted all that time! And the money!”
“I’ll reimburse you,” Chan said. Hyunjin spluttered a little; that clearly wasn’t the point but there was nothing else Chan could do about the situation. They could not let Hyunjin go into that building with his hair this colour. If someone spotted him there, it would be a disaster. Dangerous not only for Hyunjin, and Jisung in turn, but it would put an end to the entire job, if someone spotted a member of his team there.
Their options were limited, as such. Chan himself could not possibly go, and Changbin was known to work for him. Minho, too, had made a name for himself before he came here, which had been good in some ways, since it had raised Chan’s capital in the industry once it was known that Minho was signed on permanently here, but it did mean that he was recogniseable. He’d worked with other teams in the past, some of whom he’d found out now worked for Lee Jaerim, or for teams connected to him. Minho could not go sauntering into Lee Jaerim’s biggest business and expect nobody to bat an eyelid at it.
Hyunjin was, beyond the hair, fairly anonymous. Jisung had been a nobody before he came to them, and even now was limited in their more public-facing roles. They were the best bet for this, and it made sense, besides; they were the ones carrying out that part of the job in the first place.
“We’re not going for about another week,” Changbin said, a placating note in his voice that was unlikely to placate Hyunjin at all. “So you can have your red hair for a little longer.”
“A week,” Hyunjin repeated, scathingly. Really scathingly, too, not at all like he normally spoke to Changbin. “That doesn’t mean anything. A single week isn’t going to make up for the hassle of the entire thing.”
“I’ll reimburse you,” Chan repeated, and before Hyunjin could start shouting like he looked like he might, he added, “I know we’re asking a lot here, Hyunjin. I know how time consuming and expensive your hair is. But if we’re going to do this job, then you and Jisung need to visit Blackbird’s beforehand, and you need to dye your hair for that.”
“It is too dangerous for you otherwise,” Minho put in.
Hyunjin didn’t start shouting. He didn’t seem to lose his temper like Chan was afraid he might. Instead, after a moment of glaring at them all very potently, he simply slumped back into the couch, arms folded across his chest, scowling a little but mostly just looking resigned to his fate. He looked tired, too. Worn down, maybe, and Chan recognised that expression, that look on Hyunjin’s face. He saw it sometimes, when Hyunjin was struggling, when things from his past came creeping up on him. In the past, Chan had been able to pull Hyunjin aside, get him to talk, get him to share the heaviness of it so that Chan could help him with the burden in some way.
He had so completely fucked this up. He barely knew where to begin fixing it.
“Fine,” Hyunjin said, after a few seconds of sullen silence. “Fine, I’ll do it. I have to do it, I know. But this sucks, hyung. This just— really sucks.”
“I know,” said Chan softly. “I know, Hyunjin. I’m sorry.”
Hyunjin gave him a look, something heavy, unreadable for a moment before it settled into tired exasperation. “I know you are, hyung,” he said. He flung the blanket back off his legs and hauled himself up to his feet in one movement, looking around at them. “Can I go?”
“Yes, you can go,” Chan said.
He expected Hyunjin to flounce back out of the room the way he had first come in but he didn’t. He left relatively quietly, but quickly, like he simply wanted to be away from them. Chan could not blame him in the slightest for that. Once he was gone, Minho raised an eyebrow at Chan and Changbin and said, “He put up considerably less fight than I expected.”
“Hyunjin can be reasonable, when he wants to be,” Changbin said. He sounded off, a new tiredness in his voice now, and after a moment he added, “Hyung, can I go too? I need to talk to Hyunjin about something.”
Chan turned to look at him, and found Changbin looking back at him with a pinched expression; he seemed to be chewing the inside of his mouth, an unusual thing for Changbin. Chan just nodded at him, and without another word Changbin strode out of the room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders tense.
Minho looked like he was going to follow but Chan said, “Ah, Minho, can you— wait a moment? I want to ask you about something.”
Minho settled back into his place, looking at Chan with that blank, expectant look he often had in meetings like this. It often gave Chan a slightly uncomfortable feeling of looking at someone waiting to be— programmed, perhaps, although that was the wrong word, because Minho wasn’t robotic necessarily. But it was like Minho was just waiting for instructions to be relayed and then he would go out and complete them, as efficiently as possible.
“It’s about Felix,” Chan said slowly, and watched as that blank look immediately changed. Minho’s eyes narrowed, his mouth pursed, a look that said he knew whatever Chan said next was not going to be something he liked or wanted. Which was almost certainly true, so Chan couldn’t really blame him for it.
“What about him,” Minho said.
“I was talking to him earlier,” Chan said, “before our meeting, and he— his older sister is still alive, and living with Lee Jaerim. If we complete this job, and expose him for what he is, then it puts her in terrible danger.”
“Does he want us to rescue her or something,” Minho said. If Hyunjin had sounded scathing before, it was nothing compared to Minho right now. His voice was blistering with it.
“He’d like to warn her,” Chan said, not reacting to the interruption. “He’d like to get in contact with her, if he can, and warn her of what is going to happen, so that she can make her own plans to get away if at all possible.”
Minho looked at him like he thought Chan had maybe lost the entire plot finally. “Hyung—”
“I know, Minho,” said Chan. “I know, okay? But if Seungmin can set something secure up, then Felix said he has a way of contacting her that won’t tip off anyone monitoring her communications. We can keep it vague, so that even she doesn’t know exactly what will go down, but—”
“You want to let Felix, the son of the Magpie,” Minho said, “contact his sister who still lives with the man, to warn her that something is going to happen to her father.”
It sounded— insane, when Minho said it like that. Chan knew it sounded insane, he knew it was taking a horrible risk. But the risk lay with what Felix’s sister might do; there could be no more doubt as to why Felix wanted to do it. “He came to us to ask permission,” Chan said. “He came to me to ask permission, after everything that’s happened. He wants to protect his sister, Minho. She’s his only family left, and she’s innocent. She’s innocent, just like Felix is.”
Did Minho get that, now? Probably not. Chan didn’t think Minho would ever be able to fully get it: an enemy was an enemy until it was dead, after all. Minho might not want to kill Felix anymore but there were probably still those lingering, niggling doubts in his mind. That was how Minho was, how he was built. Chan couldn’t even blame him for it, could not possibly put any of it on Minho, when he had found such comfort in Minho’s decisive, unblinking violence in the past. It had protected Jeongin’s life, had protected Seungmin too; it had protected them more often on jobs.
It was not Minho’s fault that Felix had not been what Minho had feared. And it was not Minho’s fault that he struggled to wrap his head around the lies not being a cover for something nefarious but instead for self-protection. Minho was not someone given over to lying for such things.
After a few moments, Minho threw an exasperated hand in the air. “Fine,” he said. “Okay. He can contact her.”
The permission surprised Chan so much that he was opening his mouth for a further argument before the words actually sunk in properly. “Huh,” he said, and then shut his mouth again, looking at Minho, who looked back at him. He could not have explained why, since Minho’s face hadn’t changed, but Chan would have sworn to there being something slightly amused in Minho, possibly at Chan’s reaction.
“I expected more of a fight,” Chan admitted. “You— did something change?”
Minho shrugged, one shouldered. “Honestly, hyung,” he said, “I got some fucking sleep. Ate some actual food.”
The realisation came to Chan like a thunderbolt. “You hadn’t slept at all, had you,” he said. “I thought you might have slept in the hallway, or the night after at least, but you hadn’t.”
“Nope,” said Minho. “I’m not happy about this, hyung, do not get me wrong, I’m not happy at all, but it is much easier to be rational about it now.”
Chan sat back in his chair. Of course, of course, he should have seen it yesterday in their meeting, but he had been preoccupied and tired himself, feeling so much like a joint whose cartilage had worn away, just grinding himself to paste. No wonder Minho had been in a foul mood, he always was when he got even just less sleep than normal on a regular day, never mind like this.
“Christ, Minho,” he said. “You can’t be doing that.”
“I know,” Minho said, with a little dismissive wave of his hand. “I know, I have to remain sharp, it was seriously fucking up my ability to focus doing that. I wouldn’t have been any use to you if you’d needed me like that.”
“No,” said Chan, as gently as he could manage when the exasperation inside him was so strong. “Minho, you can’t be doing that because it’s not good for you. You didn’t sleep or eat for two days, that’s unhealthy. If I’d known, I would have sent you off to bed myself.”
Minho looked a little stiff, sitting there. He always was, when someone tried fussing over him, like he thought it wasn’t required, or perhaps like he simply had never experienced it enough before. “I need to— look after everyone,” he said.
“Yeah, well, who is going to look after you, huh?” Chan could feel the frown on his face, looking at Minho. He’d been way too distracted by his own nonsense, if he’d missed something like that. But it made sense, when he thought about it, the tense, fractured way Minho had responded to everything in yesterday’s meeting. The way he had been taking everything so very personally. “You can’t do that, Minho, I need you to not do that.”
Minho, after a long few moments of just looking at Chan with something a little like confusion on his face, nodded. Chan was too used to not having to worry about Minho — he was the next oldest, the most experienced of them all when it came to life in general; he knew his way around the world in a way that even Chan did not fully, and he wore his self-sufficiency like a medal on his chest. But that didn’t mean he didn’t need someone to tell him: enough.
“If Felix did contact her,” Chan said, after there had been silence between them, Minho just blinking at Chan, “I assume you’d want to be there for that.”
“Yes, I want to be involved,” Minho said. “I don’t want Felix and Kim Seungmin working without some kind of oversight.”
Was it worth it to point out, once again, that there were no doubts as to Seungmin’s loyalty? No, probably not. Minho had said it with the air of someone protesting for the sake of protest. Someone who had been made to compromise in one area and so was wielding his power in another. Chan didn’t bother to tell him that he’d wanted Minho involved from the very beginning, and that Seungmin was unlikely to make any fuss about it. Let Minho had a minor victory here, where Chan could not possibly give him any elsewhere.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s no problem. I’ll let Felix know, ask Seungmin to get something set up, and I’ll let you know when that’s in motion.”
Minho nodded. “Is that everything?”
“Yeah, that’s everything,” Chan said, and sat still and quiet until Minho had closed the office door behind him almost silently. Only then did Chan let himself press his palm across his eyes, which were aching a little bit. He’d slept better himself, last night, but not enough, not good enough, and the siren call of work had brought him down here too early. Perhaps tonight he could snatch more, if Felix did decide to come to him. Perhaps not.
At least he had some good news for Felix. At least he had— something to offer him. It was not enough, not nearly enough, but perhaps it could be a start.
——
Changbin caught Hyunjin on the stairs. For a moment, when he called Hyunjin’s name, he thought Hyunjin might not stop, might not even acknowledge that Changbin had called for him, but after a couple more moments he did stop, right on the stairs, and whirled around to glare down at Changbin.
“Go away, hyung,” he said, very bluntly. Nastily, too, that same nasty way he had spoken to Changbin in the meeting just now. Hyunjin had never spoken to Changbin like that, not once in the five years that Hyunjin had been living with them. Even when he was mad at Changbin, he didn’t talk to him like that.
“I need to talk to you,” Changbin said, instead of doing what he was told.
Hyunjin huffed, and tossed his hair back over his shoulder with an impatient little flick of his head. “Maybe I don’t want to talk to you,” he said.
Changbin looked at him for a moment. Chan had told him about what had happened in his office, how Hyunjin had come down, all guns blazing, his words hard-hitting ammunition. Hyunjin was good with that, although usually it was directed at people outside of their team, or perhaps only at Jisung, when Hyunjin was feeling particularly mouthy or irritated at him. Changbin had no doubt that parts of this conversation were going to go similarly, and he felt like he needed to brace himself for it. He wasn’t sure he really could.
“Please,” he said. “Hyunjin, just hear me out.”
Hyunjin folded his arms across his chest, still glaring, his mouth pressed into a flat white line now. It took another few moments of silence, of Changbin standing there under the heat of that glare without buckling, before Hyunjin said, “Fine! Fine. You have one minute, hyung, so you better make it count.”
Was it wrong, to be— not amused by it, but charmed all the same, the same way he always was when Hyunjin was a brat like this. Demanding and sassy, sure of himself and what he wanted, what he deserved. How different he was now from the boy that Changbin had first met, the one small and silent in the corner of the couch, cringing away from this new male presence in the room. How different he was even from the boy that Changbin had known for most of that first year, the one who could not have said boo to a goose, who would cry at the drop of a hat, who had held Changbin’s hand whenever they went out, clingy and quiet.
Changbin loved him, more than could be put into words, but it was astonishing how easy it was to hurt someone you loved without even trying.
“I was not going to let them hurt Felix,” he said. Bluntness was the only thing that could work here, when Hyunjin was in this kind of mood. Blunt, straight-forward truth. “Not ever. I would not have let that happen.”
Hyunjin raised an eyebrow at him. His mouth now pursed, scepticism dripping from him. “Hyung, don’t treat me like an idiot,” he said. “Lix told me that you wanted to ransom him.”
“It was an option I brought up,” Changbin said, keeping his voice neutral, not giving Hyunjin anything to latch onto. “To point out that there were more available than simply killing him outright. I was trying to get Chan-hyung to think.”
Chan hadn’t been thinking, that much had been obvious. The news had hit him hard, hit him right where he was weakest, and in his shock he had not been capable of measured, rational thought. In many ways, Minho, in his own anger, had been like a devil on Chan’s shoulder, leading him to a path, however accidentally, that Chan would regret. Changbin had known Chan would regret it, had known that if they took that particular path, the one from which there could be no coming back from, Chan would regret it the moment it happened.
“I was trying to get us all to think,” he added, when Hyunjin continued to just look at him. “But I wasn’t going to let them hurt Felix.”
“You did though,” Hyunjin said. His voice was flat. Was any of this getting through? “You let Minho-hyung hurt him. His shoulder — it’s still sensitive. It still hurts.”
Changbin fought down a wince. Yes, he imagined it was, with the way Minho had wrenched Felix’s arm up behind his back like he had. And Hyunjin was right, he hadn’t helped Felix in that moment, hadn’t stepped in to stop Minho from hurting him, restraining him in that way.
“You’re right,” Changbin said. “And I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry for how I reacted when I first heard the news. Because I wasn’t thinking either, not like I should have been, because I was scared, for— I was scared for you, for all of you. But killing him, outright like that? Without hearing his story, without talking to you? No, Hyunjin. There was absolutely no way that I was going to allow that to happen.”
It had been a little bit like a horror movie, or perhaps just a train wreck in slow motion, standing there, listening to Chan’s voice, knowing that he would have to step forward and be a voice of reason in a room where all reason seemed to have fled. He hadn’t trusted Felix, hadn’t been willing, in the slightest, to compromise their safety by allowing him free, but to kill him right there and then would have been insanity.
He’d begun to calm down, had been the thing. The panic that had gripped him all the way home, the fear that, in many ways, felt like a leftover fear from when he had come home and found Seungmin cut and bruised, had begun to taper off, as he stood in that room and looked down at the sobbing boy on the floor. And it had been Minho’s words, his we can send his body to his father, that had jolted Changbin completely out of his shock and into this reality.
No, he had thought, and he had been able to open his mouth to try to begin tempering the emotions in the room.
“Jeongin stopped it before I could,” Changbin said. “But I promise you. I promise you, Hyunjin, on my grandmother’s ashes, that I would not have let them hurt Felix.”
Hyunjin— straightened up. The haughty, annoyed expression on his face had dropped away completely, replaced with a shock that Changbin didn’t usually see. Now he looked younger, perhaps a little bit more like the boy Changbin had known years ago. It had always been easier to accept Hyunjin growing up than it was with Jeongin, probably because Hyunjin had already been older when Changbin had met him, but it was always surprising to remember, every once in a while that Hyunjin was only about a year younger than Changbin. He never quite seemed that old, and right now he didn’t seem that old in the slightest.
“Hyung,” he said.
“I understand why you’re angry at me,” Changbin said. “And I understand why you’re angry with Chan-hyung. What happened was— awful, it was wrong, Hyunjin, it was just wrong. But I need you to know this, at least. Let it put your mind to rest, maybe. Because Felix was not going to die like that.”
Hyunjin looked at him for a bit. Changbin let him, stood still for that gaze. He let Hyunjin see how serious he was, how earnest he was, and eventually Hyunjin nodded, just a very shallow dip of his head. He came down one step, slowly, and then another, and another, until he was standing just a step away from Changbin. Then he put his arms around Changbin and hugged him, hard and tight.
Did he feel the way the tension in Changbin fled out of him? Probably, with how close he was hugging Changbin, with how close Changbin was hugging him back, his arms flying up to hold Hyunjin in turn. When was the last time they had hugged like this? A long time ago, at the very least; the closest they had come recently had been after Hyunjin had hurt his mouth. Hyunjin just was no longer in the habit of comfort such as this. He liked to keep his own space.
Changbin took his chance then, hugging Hyunjin for as long as he could. He let Hyunjin go though, when he felt the change in Hyunjin’s body language, the shifting of his legs, his spine under Changbin’s hands, that signalled that he had had enough. He dropped his arms away, and let Hyunjin take a couple of steps back, back up the stairs. He looked— tired now, but not necessarily in a bad way. He looked a little bit like Changbin felt. Like a tension had been released.
“Thank you, hyung,” Hyunjin said. “I just— maybe I should have guessed that. You don’t usually act like that, it unsettled me to think that you could.”
“No,” said Changbin. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. So don’t worry about that. And— can you tell Felix that I’m sorry, too? For not stopping Minho-hyung, and for scaring him? I would do it in person but he’s scared of me, I think, and I don’t want to make him uncomfortable.”
Hyunjin nodded. “I’ll tell him,” he said. “He’ll— he’ll forgive you, hyung. If he can forgive Chan-hyung, he can forgive you.”
It was said with a small amount of bitterness, which Changbin both expected and couldn’t entirely blame him for. Maybe Changbin should remind him to treat Chan with respect, that whatever his personal feelings about the situation, Chan was still their leader. In another team, perhaps that would have been Changbin’s role. But here, like this, he couldn’t do it, and so instead of calling Hyunjin out, he just let Hyunjin turn and head up the stairs to the apartment.
He stood there for long enough that he heard, echoing and faint, the sound of the keypad to the apartment door. Only then did he turn in the opposite direction and make his way down the stairs. He had yet to tell Seungmin about running into Minho and Jeongin on the stairs that morning. He didn’t think Seungmin would find it particularly funny, but perhaps he’d get a kick out of hearing about Changbin’s stumbles. He liked it when he could laugh at Changbin, after all, and he deserved some laughter right now.
——
It had been Jeongin who came to find Jisung in his room, knocking gently on the door and asking, a little shyly, if Jisung wanted to come and shoot with him. “I know it’s kind of weird right now,” he said, scuffing his foot a little against the concrete of the stairwell, “but I’d like to continue with my training, if I can. But only if you want to, hyung.”
Jisung hadn’t needed to be asked a second time. He’d started to feel a little trapped in his room, although he knew that wasn’t the case. It was simply that there was still an atmosphere in the house, something that permeated through the rooms and left him just slightly on edge the entire time. But spending time with Jeongin was always nice, and if Jeongin needed a distraction from the bullshit of the past few days, then Jisung was happy to provide.
“Fuck yes,” he’d said, and let Jeongin lead the way downstairs.
The thing was, training with Jeongin had, in Jisung’s opinion, always been something to enjoy, something to look forward to, even. Sparring with Changbin was good, it kept up his skills, and shooting alone was something he liked to do mostly because when he trained alone, nobody saw him mess up. It was part of why he had taken their shotgun out to the woods in the middle of nowhere to train with; at least that way nobody had almost seen him fall over when he shot it the first time.
But training with Jeongin was always fun. He was, at the heart of him, simply a good kid: enthusiastic about whatever he was being taught, quick to pick up new things, and very grateful to have been shown them. He was also able to laugh at himself, not overly embarrassed when he made mistakes. Jisung knew that he usually trained with Minho when it came to fighting, and wondered if the same things held true there, too, because Jisung kind of thought that if he messed up sparring in front of Minho, it might make him shrivel up into a dried out raisin of a human being.
Most of the time, their training sessions ended with laughter, and so it was even now, Jeongin giggling slightly as Jisung made an over-the-top fuss over how many times he had riddled a cork mannequin with bullets. “You killed him!” he said, clutching at the semi-destroyed torso. “Look at him, you gutted him.”
“You were the one who told me to unload on him!” Jeongin said, as he took his gun back to the gun safe to be locked up. He favoured that handgun, Jisung had noticed, a heavier gun than Jisung would have maybe expected from him. “I just did what I was told.”
“A murderer,” Jisung said, as he hauled the mannequin back over to the back of the room where it could join its brethren. Standing there like that, pieces of cork still drifting slowly to the ground, it looked particularly pathetic. Jisung turned back to Jeongin, who had just closed the safe again, and clapped his hands. “Right,” he said. “Lunch?”
Jisung went to get them take-out, from a Chinese restaurant a couple of blocks away, while Jeongin went upstairs to wash up. When Jisung got back to the apartment, Jeongin was in the kitchen, setting out chopsticks and spoons, a can of diet coke in front of his usual spot, a can of regular coke in front of Jisung’s old seat, the one that had been given to Felix. Jisung set the bag of food down on the table and then wordlessly moved his place to the one opposite Jeongin, where Minho usually sat. If Minho came in and got mad about it, so be it. Jisung preferred that than Felix potentially thinking Jisung had stolen his seat.
Jeongin and Jisung often did this after they had trained together, getting food and eating in the kitchen, easy and comfortable. Jisung had been the one to first invite Jeongin to eat with him, trying to use it as a way to get to know him better. Chan and Changbin had felt too far away for it, Minho had still been furious that they’d let Jisung stay, Hyunjin had not been able to stand being in the same room as him. Seungmin had been something of a mystery to him, locked away in his workroom downstairs, not quite distrustful of Jisung but obviously not overly inclined towards friendship.
So Jisung had turned to Jeongin, who had taken his overtures of friendship with open arms, very happy to eat with him, providing Jisung was the one to either fetch or make the food. I’m not allowed in the kitchen, he’d said cheerfully, and since Jisung’s cooking skills did not much extend past ramen or scrambled eggs, that meant that they usually got takeout.
Down the hallway was the sound of the shower, a faint backdrop as Jisung, opening his fried rice, said, “You’re doing well, you know? You’ve always been good at shooting but you’re still managing to improve.”
Jeongin, already a mouthful into his jjajangmyeon, looked up at him, eyes a little surprised. He swallowed, which made Jisung wince a little, because Jeongin had a habit of taking way too much into his mouth, and said, “Really?”
“Yeah, of course,” Jisung said. “And you’ve been doing really well in our sparring sessions too. Minho-hyung was asking me about it, you know, a few days ago, before— well, before all of this.”
Jeongin blinked at him, his eyes suddenly wide. “Oh,” he said, his voice dropping a little in volume, much softer now. “What— what did you tell him?”
“That you’re doing great, of course,” Jisung said, waving his chopsticks in emphasis. “You pick things up very quickly, Jeongin-ah, and you listen well. Those are good traits to have, especially in this field of work, especially on jobs.”
Jeongin poked at his jjajangmyeon with his chopsticks, looking away from Jisung now. “And what did Minho-hyung say when you told him that?”
What had Minho said? Nothing much, really. He’d had the look of someone who had bitten into a lemon, having experienced it many times before: sour but not unexpected at all. Jisung hadn’t blamed him for that, after he’d heard about all the back and forth over whether Jeongin should be allowed on the job at all.
“He thanked me,” he told Jeongin. “Asked me to keep him updated.”
Jeongin nodded, still poking at his food. He looked a little disappointed, like he’d expected something more. Jisung, personally, felt like neutrality from Minho was as good as could be expected, because neutral meant not terrible, but it was probably different, with Jeongin. Their relationship had always been different, from the moment Jisung had arrived, and it was something that Jisung looked at with something like awe. He got along well with Minho now but when he had first arrived, the difference between the man who had ranted angrily about Jisung being allowed to stay and the one who had Jisung had, later that week, caught in the kitchen making homemade gamjatang for Jeongin, had seemed as far as the distance between the earth and the moon.
What did you want him to say, Jisung was about to ask, when a door clicked open down the hallway. Not the bathroom — the shower had turned off but now there was the sound of the blow dryer, muffled by the door. It was Felix who came into the room, wearing a pair of pale pink slippers that Jisung had never seen before, their soles not quite slapping as he walked because he was mostly shuffling.
“Oh,” he said, stuttering to a halt just inside the living area. “Hello.”
“Hello, hyung,” said Jeongin. His voice was much softer, talking to Felix, and his smile, too, a gentle thing that he’d probably have no need to give Jisung ever. “Are you hungry? Come and eat with us.”
Felix shrank back a little into the hallway he’d just come from. Looking at him like this, wearing a black zip-up jacket that must have belonged to Chan, it was near impossible to have ever thought that he was some agent for the enemy, working to destroy them. Jisung knew that that was what probably would have made Felix a perfect agent, but it seemed laughable to think it. He looked small, and painfully uncertain of himself.
“It’s okay, Jeongin,” he said quietly. “It’s your food.”
Jeongin, however had already gotten to his feet to go and fetch a bowl for Felix. “It’s okay, hyung, we have plenty of food.”
“Jeongin—” said Felix.
His eyes had flickered to Jisung, though, as he spoke, and that uncertain look on his face increased. More than that, he looked wary, now, as he looked at Jisung, like he wasn’t sure what to expect from him. He was scared, Jisung realised suddenly, scared of coming to sit with the two of them. He could be sure of what Jeongin felt for him, because Jeongin’s support had been obvious and strong this entire time. Jisung had mostly kept his distance. He wasn’t all that close to Felix, he hadn’t felt like it was his place to get involved in any of this.
But he couldn’t stand that look. He couldn’t stand the thought that Felix was afraid of him in any way.
“Come and join us,” Jisung said, waving with his chopsticks over his rice, the jjajangmyeon, the tangsuyuk and the two portions of dumplings he’d ordered on a whim. “We’ve got plenty, like Jeongin said, come and join us.”
Felix stood for another moment, his hands balled up in front of him, before he nodded and slowly shuffled over to the table, where he took his seat silently. Jisung and Jeongin separated out the food, a little bit of everything into the bowl Jeongin had brought over. It was a substantial meal, in the end, and when Jeongin set it down in front of Felix, Felix looked at it silently for a long few seconds and then said, without looking up, “Thank you, Jeongin, Jisung.”
“Of course, hyung,” said Jeongin cheerfully as he sat back down to start inhaling his noodles.
It took another beat before Felix picked up his disposable chopsticks and started to actually eat. Jisung watched him out of the corner of his eye as he ate his own food, seeing the way Felix’s head was still bent over the bowl for a while, his movements slow. His hand holding the chopsticks shook a little bit.
This felt more like the Felix of the first couple of weeks, the one who had not taken more than his minimum share, who had existed on cereal for breakfast and whatever got shared for dinner, before Hyunjin had found out and read him the riot act over it. It was kind of awful to see it again, if understandable.
Jisung wanted to say something. Something like — I get it, I understand. I know how it feels, to jump at every noise. To be afraid of the door slamming, to be that afraid of someone’s anger. He hadn’t known he shared this experience with Felix. It felt odd to be connected to him like this.
Perhaps the thing that had surprised him most about himself the past few days had been the way that the constant anger and tension had— not affected him as much as he’d expected. He had found himself deeply uncomfortable, but not scared like he would once have been, and he supposed that, in itself, was a sign of his progress. But all the same, he was ready for it to be— done. Because every time he was in a room with people who seemed determined to make their anger with each other obvious, it made him feel a little bit like he was ten years old again, still trying to learn what it was that set his step-father off, not yet realising that there was no formula he could follow to stop from being hurt.
He didn’t know what to say though. So instead he just continued talking to Jeongin about their training schedule as he ate, and let Felix exist in silence.
Jisung had just finished eating — Jeongin, of course, had finished a good couple of minutes earlier, with the way he ate — and was sipping his soda when another door opened down the hall. The bathroom, he assumed, because the hair dryer had switched off a bit ago and there had been silence. He’d known, as soon as he’d heard that hair dryer, that it would be Hyunjin in there, and sure enough it was Hyunjin who emerged into the room, wearing sweatpants and a knit sweater.
He’d dyed his hair.
“Holy shit,” Jeongin said.
“Oh wow,” Felix said, the words almost blurting out of him.
Jisung, for his part, choked on his mouthful of soda and had to cover his mouth with a hand as he coughed and spluttered. It burned the back of his throat as he tried to get himself under control, everyone’s eyes on him now. Hyunjin’s too, watching him with an odd, unreadable expression as Jeongin, grinning, passed Jisung a napkin.
Jisung could not stop looking at him, even as he mopped at his chin with the napkin. His hair was black, now, something very dark to cover up all that red. He hadn’t bothered to style it, so it just hung loose around his face, just brushing his shoulders, and in the light of the kitchen, it was so shiny, gleaming as he stood there. Jisung had never seen him with dark hair like this — he’d only ever seen the blond, and then the red. He hadn’t even thought to contemplate a dark haired Hyunjin, and maybe that was just as well, maybe that had been an act of self-preservation, because this was— stunning. He probably could not have done it justice even in his imagination. .
How was that possible? How could he have spent two years knowing Hyunjin was beautiful, never once quite getting used to the sight of him, and yet there was still somehow room to be shocked anew, to have his breath knocked out of him with a single glance?
“Hyunjin, you look gorgeous,” Felix said.
The shock of hearing Felix so openly comment on Hyunjin’s looks caused Jisung to actually be able to drag his eyes away from Hyunjin, if only to give Felix a goggling little stare. Jisung was fairly certain that the last time he had heard someone even mention what Hyunjin looked like, it had been Jisung himself in that disastrous first meeting. He didn’t think he’d heard it since.
They had all, as a rule, learned to never bring such things up. Chan and Changbin, and probably Jeongin too, had known from the beginning to not comment on Hyunjin’s beauty, and the others had learned along the way, although Jisung suspected that Minho and Seungmin were probably the type to just never bring it up in the first place. It was probably only Jisung who had needed a talking to. But nobody wanted to make Hyunjin uncomfortable, and everyone knew how much he hated to have his looks focused on.
Jisung had heard it in his voice, after he got hit. They called me pretty. Jisung hadn’t been kidding when he said he should have maybe killed them. His anger, hearing that tone in Hyunjin’s voice, had been almost overwhelming.
Apparently nobody had told Felix about this unspoken rule, though, and perhaps it didn’t matter, because Hyunjin didn’t seem upset by Felix’s words. Instead, he rolled his eyes a little as he took the few steps closer to the table. “We already knew I was gorgeous,” he said, as he ran a hand across Felix’s hair. They matched more, now, although Felix’s hair was much lighter in colour, and somehow they looked even better as a pair than they had before. Two pretty people together, Felix leaning into the touch.
“More gorgeous, then,” Felix said, like it was nothing, like it had never even crossed his mind that it would upset Hyunjin. Hyunjin just stroked Felix’s hair again and then took Seungmin’s seat, next to Jeongin, kitty-corner to Jisung, who kind of wished he hadn’t. He couldn’t avoid looking at him now, couldn’t look at the others around the table without seeing Hyunjin and his new hair and—
“Why did you dye your hair, hyung?” Jeongin asked, as he slid some of the leftover dumplings to Hyunjin.
“For the trip to Blackbird’s,” Hyunjin said. He seemed a little bit shy about the attention, maybe, something in his posture a little smaller than usual. He picked at the dumplings with his fingers for a moment but didn’t lift one to his mouth. “The hyungs said my hair would stand out too much so I needed to dye it.”
He did not look or sound happy about it, at all, which of course he wouldn’t be. Jisung had bleached his hair once in high school and it had taken hours to get to the kind of sandy-blond he had wanted. Hyunjin’s hair, under the red, had been even more blond than that, similar to Felix’s look before he, too, had put something darker over the top, and his roots had required regular topping up. He’d literally just kicked Jisung out of his bedroom to do the whole process a few days ago.
But Hyunjin was pouting, just a little bit, as he poked at the dumplings, and it was putting his mouth on display in a way that Jisung really probably could not handle. He hadn’t realised how much the red hair had always distracted him from that mouth, kept him from spending too much time lingering on it. He had to force his gaze away, the guilt prickling in his stomach.
“Oh,” said Jeongin. “I didn’t— we’re still doing the prep trip? To Blackbird’s?”
“I guess we are,” Hyunjin said. “I don’t think they’ve finalised anything yet but they said we’ll be going next week.” Hyunjin lifted one of the dumplings and held it to Felix’s closed lips; Felix jerked back a little, looking surprised. “Here,” Hyunjin said. “Eat this.”
Felix looked at the dumpling and then back at Hyunjin and smiled, brighter, a real smile, and opened his mouth so Hyunjin could feed him. Jisung watched it, that feeling in his chest again, the one he’d grown used to these past couple of months. It felt worse, today, when he was looking at a Hyunjin who looked like this, beautiful in this so very real way.
“I haven’t seen you with black hair in so long,” Jeongin said. He leaned over to hold out a piece of tangsuyuk to Hyunjin, who took it with a great delicacy between his fingers. “Do you like it?”
“No,” Hyunjin said grumpily, before popping the food in his mouth.
Jeongin and Felix laughed a little, probably charmed by the way he had sounded, the way he seemed completely put out. Jisung might have laughed too, or at least smiled, but he was not really able to focus. Hyunjin was chewing the tangsuyuk, his mouth working, and with the hair it was just— a lot. This was a lot.
Felix looked at Hyunjin and then looked at Jisung, smiling. “Jisung, what do you think?” he asked. “Isn’t he pretty like this?”
Jisung was going to have a heart attack, he really was. He looked at Felix, who looked innocently back at him — because of course he was innocent, he didn’t know, he had no way to know what it was that had passed between him and Hyunjin two years ago. If he did know, he would never have asked Jisung that question.
Hyunjin, also, looked across at Jisung, an odd expression on his face, before he looked away again, focusing back on Felix.
Jisung felt something cold settle into his chest. It made sense, for Hyunjin to look at him like that, something akin to how he had looked the first few months they knew each other, when he had been afraid, so afraid, that Jisung would say something awful again. Jisung knew better, now.
But it made sense. For Hyunjin to have that apprehension.
He had no idea what to say. Yes, of course Hyunjin was pretty like this. Hyunjin was pretty in every way, every time, but this was particularly so. The dark hair suited him perfectly, softening every single part of his features. Jisung would not go so far as to say it made Hyunjin look more approachable, though. There was something about Hyunjin that always stopped things from going that far.
But without the red, everything was far less sharp, more blunt around the edges. It was so beautiful that Jisung was not sure he could bear to look at him on a day to day basis.
The silence stretched on, Jisung feeling very much like a deer caught in headlights. Felix blinked expectantly at him. Jeongin said, in a sing-song voice, “Ohh, Jisung-hyung doesn’t like it.”
“No!” Jisung blurted out, an entirely new form of panic rushing through him now. “No, that’s not it!”
Hyunjin, though, was already tipping his nose up, the way he always did when Jisung had said something he found disappointing, or embarrassing. There was always something— perversely appealing, about that look on Hyunjin’s face, to Jisung, even when he was aware that Hyunjin had it on his face because of something stupid Jisung had done. Maybe it was just that it was close enough to amusement that Jisung’s stupid brain got a burst of dopamine from it.
“Well, of course he doesn’t like it,” Hyunjin said. “He’s got no fucking taste.”
“Hyung, you just said you didn’t like it either,” Jeongin said, amused.
“That’s not it,” Jisung said. His voice was a little too loud, a little too rushed, but he couldn’t help it. “I like it, Hyunjin, I really really do, you look good. You always look good.”
Hyunjin blinked at him. Then, surprisingly, he went a little pink, before looking away again. Ah, fuck, Jisung thought, but he couldn’t work out how he had embarrassed Hyunjin — or, he could, he’d known it was a mistake to comment on Hyunjin’s looks at all, he didn’t have the leeway that Felix and Jeongin had, but he had been stuck between a rock and a hard place here.
“Oh,” Jeongin said, in a perfect shit-eating tone, the kind of thing that Jisung, once upon a time, would never have expected from him, “so you mean, even though the hair is so-so, he looks good?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Jisung said, fully in despair now. He would have kicked Jeongin under the table if he could have figured out the angle for it. “It’s not bad at all, it looks really great, it’s so shiny and pretty! Honestly I like this better than the red hair!”
He had to snap his own mouth shut to stop the rambling. It had been too loud, too fast, and the embarrassment was— considerable. This would have been awful anyway but he was aware, as he spoke, that he was making how he felt horribly obvious. Horrible, because of all people, Hyunjin and Felix were the last two he wanted to figure it out. Hyunjin for the obvious reason but Felix because— Jisung didn’t want him to feel uncomfortable.
“Ohhh,” said Felix, leaning over and taking Hyunjin’s hand in his. He was copying Jeongin’s sing-song tone perfectly. “Jisung didn’t like the red hair.”
Jisung looked at him helplessly, not sure what to do with a Felix who joined in on teasing him. Surely that was a touch too far? Lix-yah, he wanted to ask, what did I ever do to you?
Hyunjin was bright red, sitting there with his blush hot on his skin. When he had blushed with the red hair, it had been cute in part because of the way the colour on his skin clashed so completely with the colour of his hair. Now, with the dark hair, the blush just looked— becoming, utterly becoming, and it seemed to heighten that softening effect, so that looking at him, Jisung wanted, a little bit, to get up and touch his cheek, feel the heat of his skin himself.
After a moment, Hyunjin tossed his head, clearly trying for his usual haughty style but very much not hitting it. “So you think my hair isn’t pretty now,” he said to Jeongin.
There was a dark, threatening note in his voice. Jeongin didn’t even blink at it. “No, it’s not that,” he said. “I don’t know, hyung, it’s like— the red was nice, but it was the centre of your look. When you had it, that was what drew the eye? But like this, with the black, it doesn’t distract from your face, it enhances your looks rather than overshadowing them. You look really very handsome like this.”
There was a beat of surprised silence. Basically nobody had expected Jeongin to actually give a genuine compliment, least of all Hyunjin, who said, “Oh,” in a small voice, and then looked, again, inexplicably, at Jisung.
Their eyes met, snagged; Jisung felt pinned by that look. He wished, so badly, that he could have said words like Jeongin had, that he could have used his words to compliment Hyunjin so nicely, so sweetly, rather than his panicked half-finished thoughts of earlier. But that had been bad enough; he knew that if he had tried to say anything along the lines of what Jeongin had said, it would not have come out earnest but factual, like Jeongin had managed. It would have come out— lovesick, too much, heart-wrenchingly overwrought.
He was vaguely aware of Felix saying, “Aw, Jeongin, that was lovely,” but most of his attention was focused entirely on the way Hyunjin was still, now, looking at him. His mouth was a little open, his lips parted in a pretty way, and still that lingering blush was splashed across his face. He was looking at Jisung with an expression that Jisung had no hope of deciphering, something wide-eyed, something strange. He didn’t know if he should apologise, didn’t know if he had made Hyunjin uncomfortable — he’d never really seen a look like that on Hyunjin’s face before.
He was so fucking beautiful it felt like being in a dream, that Jisung should get to look at him like this. He felt— breathless.
The sound of the keypad outside made him jump in his seat. That would have been embarrassing enough, except that he jostled Felix with his elbow as he did so, so he couldn’t even play it off. His heart was beating so hard it felt like it was going to give up inside his chest. It was a relief to wrench his eyes from Hyunjin, especially when he could feel it, now, against his skin, the way he was blushing too.
Changbin barrelled into the room, kicking off his shoes as he tripped inside. “Did you all order food without— Hyunjin!” he said, stopping dead in the middle of the room when he noticed Hyunjin sitting at the table. “Oh, wow, that looks better than expected, you actually look really good.”
Jeongin snorted with laughter. Hyunjin said, “Excuse me? What the fuck is that supposed to mean, hyung, do you maybe want to elaborate? Maybe fucking think before you try speaking next time?”
Changbin just laughed. He never was upset when Hyunjin spoke like that to him, although that was probably because there was always something in Hyunjin’s voice in moments like this, when he was talking to Changbin, that tempered any bitchiness. A fondness, perhaps, or a latent affection, that softened the edges just enough. No matter how he tried to hide it, Jisung thought, it really was true that Hyunjin loved Changbin.
“We weren’t expecting you to do it today,” Changbin said, as he came to the kitchen table, picked up Jeongin’s abandoned chopsticks, and started helping himself to the leftover food. “You had a little bit of time.”
Hyunjin shrugged. “I wanted to get it over with,” he said. “Compliment me again but this time make it seem sincere, hmm?”
Changbin laughed again. Before he could say anything, Jisung pushed to his feet, suddenly not sure he could actually be in this room any longer. Not if Changbin was about to start complimenting Hyunjin, not if there was a risk that Jisung would get pulled back into it. There was a line here, somewhere, murky to him right now but once he stepped over it, it would no longer be murky, it would be clear and stark in the sand. But he would have already stumbled over it, clumsy and inept, and he wouldn’t be able to go back.
He couldn’t bear to upset Hyunjin with that stumbling. It was better to simply leave, now.
“Sorry,” he said, shoving his leftover rice in Changbin’s direction. “Just remembered— something I have to do, here, hyung, you can have this.”
“What?” Changbin asked, even as he took the bowl. “Uh, okay, but—”
Jisung left before anyone could stop him, before anyone could say anything else. Before Jeongin could tease him again, before any of them could tell Changbin about what had happened, before Changbin could maybe join in. There had been nothing malicious about the teasing, he knew that much, and he maybe should have expected something like that, but it was still a relief, to get out into the stairwell, where there was nothing but silence and cool air.
He was still blushing, just a little bit. He was willing to bet it didn’t look as pretty on his face as it did on Hyunjin’s.
——
Hyunjin almost shoved Felix ahead of him into his room, Felix tripping inside and then flopping sideways onto the bed as Hyunjin yanked the door shut behind them. As soon as that door clicked shut, Felix burst into the laughter that Hyunjin knew he had been restraining from the moment Hyunjin had said, after Changbin had sat at the table to talk to Jeongin, Lix, let’s talk.
Hyunjin stood over him, looming as best as he could, and said, “You little minx!” He waved his fist in the air, as threatening as he could be when they both knew that he wasn’t going to harm a hair on Felix’s head. “Terrible, rotten brat!”
Felix was giggling so hard that for a moment he had to break off gasping for air. He was curled up on his side, holding his stomach, looking up at Hyunjin with bright eyes. Even with the embarrassment still pulsing through him, Hyunjin couldn’t help but feel real, honest relief at seeing Felix laughing like this. He had been so genuinely afraid that he might never see this kind of Felix again.
Was it worth the embarrassment to get a Felix who seemed so genuinely happy? Yes, honestly. Hyunjin would take almost anything if it meant Felix could be happy again.
Felix just kept giggling as Hyunjin eventually gave up on trying to intimidate him into stopping, which was never going to work because it was clear the attempt was just making Felix laugh harder. Instead, Hyunjin flopped down next to him, on his bed looking up at the ceiling. Inside him was a strange mix of warm affection and a feeling like his stomach was turning into a raisin.
“Did you see,” Felix said, still giggling weakly, “the way he choked on his drink when you walked in?”
Hyunjin let out a little shriek, and sat up to seize one of the pillows at the head of the bed so that he could try to smother Felix with it. “Shut up!” he said, as he held the pillow down over Felix’s head, Felix laughing even harder now. “Please! Oh my god! Shut up!”
Because yes, he had seen it; how could he have missed it. And he had seen, too, the way Jisung had, for a brief second, been unable to keep that spark of hot interest off his face. He was usually so good at that, enough so that sometimes Hyunjin wondered if maybe he had it wrong, that for all he thought Jisung had feelings for him, maybe he wasn’t as attracted to Hyunjin as he thought. An odd case of wishful hoping for something that had always terrified him utterly with other people.
But Hyunjin had seen it, in that moment, and he'd had to work hard to keep from reacting. He wanted to see it again, wanted Jisung to look at him like he was someone— beautiful. When had that happened, he wondered. When had he gone from finding it unbearable for anyone to acknowledge that he was good looking, to wishing that he had recorded Jisung’s voice when he had said, you always look good, so that he could replay it over and over again when he was curled up in bed alone at night?
Eventually he threw the pillow aside and flopped back down and didn’t protest or move when Felix shuffled on the bed in order to curl right up against him. Instead, Hyunjin worked his arm under Felix’s shoulder so he could tug him even closer, let Felix rest his head against Hyunjin’s chest. He was still laughing a little, just brief hitches of breath, as he settled down against Hyunjin, his body warm and heavy against him.
“You are such a brat,” he said, splaying his hand against Felix’s back.
“Yeah,” said Felix, sounding very pleased with himself. He slung his arm over Hyunjin’s waist, one of his legs tangling between Hyunjin’s. Since getting to know Felix, Hyunjin had grown very accustomed to cuddling, but there hadn’t been a lot of this, these past couple of days. Hyunjin might have thought that Felix just hadn’t been in the mood for it, but he knew better than that. He knew Felix, knew how much he craved that kind of physical touch. Instead, he’d thought that Felix was— holding back, somehow. Trying to avoid overstepping a boundary that didn’t even exist.
Hyunjin, gently, kissed the top of Felix’s head. Felix relaxed even further into him, clearly so happy to be held like this. It hit Hyunjin again, the sheer relief to have him here, to have him safe here. It had been so difficult last night to simply let him leave for Chan’s room, to watch him walk out and not know what would be said, what would be done to him out there.
He hadn’t been afraid for Felix’s physical safety, not anymore. If nothing else, he thought he trusted Chan to not harm him; he felt like he had to, or else he would go mad. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t the potential for emotional harm, for damage to be done with careless words. Or, maybe worse, an implicit kind of pressure that made Hyunjin sick to think about. He had almost laughed when Chan had said, all that time ago, that he was worried that Felix would sleep with him in order to feel like he had a secure place here. Now Hyunjin was worried he was seeing that exact scenario play out.
He didn’t want that. He’d do almost anything in his power to stop Felix from feeling like he had to do that.
But Felix seemed okay today, and like he had actually rested, too, which— pleased Hyunjin, a bit, to know that he had gotten some sleep. He had been so tired yesterday, so clearly worn out, but he was brighter, the circles under his eyes less pronounced. That was good, it was good.
“Hyunjin?” said Felix, murmuring it out. He was drawing little patterns on Hyunjin’s arm now with the hand that had gone across Hyunjin’s waist.
“What,” said Hyunjin.
There was another little burst of silence. Not like Felix didn’t have more to say, but like he was trying to think of the words, maybe, or like he was wondering whether to say it. Eventually, he said, still just as quiet, “Jisung really likes you, Hyunjin. You know that, right?”
Hyunjin waited for the instinctual surge of panic the words usually brought about in him, and did not feel it. There was something there, some kind of fear, but it was almost easy to ignore. Was it simply that he already knew that? That Felix was just expressing something aloud that Hyunjin had already realised, and had, somehow, processed?
Strangely, now, rather than scaring him, Felix’s question just made Hyunjin feel flustered. Like Felix had pulled something into the air and was confronting him with it and Hyunjin hadn’t really thought of a way to explain it yet. His blush was back on his face, not as hot as it had been in the living room, but there all the same. He could feel it.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know that. You think I don’t see it?”
Because he did see it. He had seen it, curled up in the front seat of a car with his blood-stained gloves tucked into his bag. He had seen it as Jisung carefully, gently cleaned the cut on his mouth, distressed for Hyunjin’s pain. And he had seen it two days ago, too, in the hallway outside the apartment door, the look in Jisung’s eyes as he had wiped away Hyunjin’s tears.
“Then…why?” Felix asked, the words half-lost against Hyunjin’s chest where he had turned his face into the material of Hyunjin’s sweater.
Why? Because Jisung wasn’t the problem, Jisung had never been the problem, not really. Because Jisung’s care for him made Hyunjin feel both like he was sinking into a warm bath and like someone had replaced his nerves with strung-tight wires and sent them twanging. Jisung’s desire for him might terrify him but worse was his own desire for Jisung, the way in which his body craved the closeness, the touches that Jisung was so careful to not give.
It felt like he was being betrayed by his own self. How could he want so much and yet be so scared of it? How could he want Jisung’s hands to touch his bare skin, and yet the thought of it made his limbs locked up automatically? The way Jisung had looked at him had been— strange, perhaps, a form of desire that Hyunjin didn’t quite recognise. He never could quite get a handle on the form it took on Jisung’s face, so different to how Hyunjin had seen it on other people. But it had been want, he had seen that, and Hyunjin had felt like he was alive, fully and completely, his blood rushing in every part of him.
And yet, at the same time, there had been the phantom presence of a mattress against his back. When would the bright joy of Jisung’s want of him overshadow the fear of where it might lead?
“Because I’m not ready,” he said eventually.
Other people may have asked, When will you be ready?, or told him, That’s not fair to Jisung. But not Felix, who just moved his head in a nod, his hair brushing Hyunjin’s chin. Just as well, because Hyunjin already knew it was unfair to Jisung. He’d always known it, even when the problem was only that he kept Jisung at arm’s length instead of letting them be friends.
“Do you want me to stop teasing you?” Felix asked. “About Jisung, I mean?”
That question made Hyunjin hesitate. Before Felix, the answer would have been yes, stop, no more. It would have been unthinkable for someone to know about his feelings for Jisung and to be teased about them, to have someone look at him in the playful way Felix had in the kitchen and make a joke out of it. It would have felt like dying, a little bit. An excruciating death, to be the butt of a joke like that.
And it had been embarrassing, in the kitchen, but it was Felix, and the joke had not been Hyunjin, his humour had not been purely directed at Hyunjin. It had not been a joke that Hyunjin was not a part of. He was just being Felix. He was just— being Hyunjin’s friend. And that was easier to handle, and it was sometimes a relief, too, to know that there was someone in this world, someone around him, who understood how he felt but who was not going to make Hyunjin do something about it.
Well— there was Seungmin, too, now. Seungmin who had called him out on this secret, who had seen through Hyunjin in some way. Hyunjin had made it too obvious, perhaps, or maybe it was just that Seungmin saw too much anyway. He had spent that night working on a painting until his heart had calmed down enough that he had been able to sleep
The one saving grace of it had been that it was Seungmin. He knew how to keep secrets, as they’d all seen, and more than that: he did not care. Seungmin, of all people, was not going to run to Jisung to tell him how Hyunjin may or may not feel about him. Seungmin had no interest in romance, or sex, or personal entanglements of any kind. Hyunjin sometimes thought Seungmin didn’t care about anything that couldn’t be contained in his magical computers.
He took so long to answer that Felix eventually sat upright to look down at his face. His hair covered some of his face, so that most of what Hyunjin saw for a moment was his chin, his mouth, a smattering of his freckles. Then Felix shook his hair back and Hyunjin could see his eyes, round and earnest, as he said, “I’ll stop, if you want me to, Hyunjin.”
That sweet earnestness was enough to make up Hyunjin’s mind. He shook his head, not bothering to sit up himself. He didn’t really want to move. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. But just— try to not go overboard? Especially in front of Jisung?”
Because as nice as it had been to have a memory of Jisung saying, you look good, the thought of Felix accidentally tipping Jisung off as to how Hyunjin felt really did make the panic feel like it was closing up Hyunjin’s throat. Jisung could not know yet, was not allowed to know yet. Hyunjin wasn’t ready to step down that path, not knowing where it would lead in the end. Not yet.
“Okay,” said Felix, simply. He smiled down at Hyunjin. What a miracle, to see that smile so easily. Felix lifted the hand not supporting his weight and brushed his fingers at Hyunjin’s forehead, brushing the hair there away out of Hyunjin’s eyes. “Ah,” he said on a sigh. “This hair really is beautiful on you, Hyunjin.”
“Careful,” Hyunjin drawled, letting his eyes drift shut a little, the soft touch of Felix’s fingers soothing. “Keep staring at me like that and maybe you’ll fall for me.”
Felix giggled a little, and tapped a finger against Hyunjin’s mouth, so fast that Hyunjin didn’t try to bite it. He just bared his teeth for a moment. “You don’t want me,” Felix said.
“Maybe not,” Hyunjin said, his eyes still closed. “But it would serve Chan-hyung right, wouldn’t it?”
Felix didn’t answer that. Hyunjin didn’t look to see what his reaction was, but he heard, after a pause, a small exhalation, not a sigh, nothing so pronounced as that. A few seconds after that, Felix settled down again against him in a cuddle, his body once more curling into Hyunjin’s, so close it was like he was trying to steal all of Hyunjin’s body weight. Their legs tangling, Felix’s arms holding him, Hyunjin’s arms quickly holding him back.
Thank whatever higher power was out there that he still had this. If they’d done nothing else for him in his miserable life, at least they’d granted him this.
There was a knock at his door, that pound of a fist that Hyunjin associated with Jeongin, and with a sigh, Hyunjin called him, “What is it, Jeongin?”
Felix didn’t move, as the door opened and Jeongin stuck his head inside, so Hyunjin didn’t move either. He saw the way Jeongin was looking at him, the slight smirk at his mouth. Hyunjin wasn’t sure if it was because he’d caught the two of them cuddling or something else, something more. Jeongin had joined in the teasing too, out there, and Hyunjin wasn’t sure if it was purely directed at Jisung or not.
Did Jeongin know too? Surely he would have said something, if he had, if for no other reason that Jeongin loved any reason to tease Hyunjin.
Jeongin didn’t talk to him, though. “Felix-hyung,” he said, “do you want to come and watch our drama together later?”
“Oh, um,” said Felix. He tried to sit up and Hyunjin tightened his hold to keep him there. Felix let out a little huff of breath but didn’t fight him. “I mean, I would love to, Jeongin, but Minho-hyung—”
“You don’t need to worry about Minho-hyung,” said Jeongin. “He and I talked last night. He knows how silly he’s been, he said he’d apologise to you.”
Hyunjin tilted his head so that he could look at Jeongin with a raised eyebrow. Jeongin had sounded smug at that, which was understandable, because as far as Hyunjin was concerned, he’d performed a fucking miracle. “He’s going to apologise to Lix?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Jeongin. “But he’ll probably join us, so I understand if it makes you feel uncomfortable, Felix-hyung.”
This time, when Felix tried to sit up, he managed to fight his way out of Hyunjin’s hold. He gave Jeongin a long look that Hyunjin, oddly, couldn’t quite parse, and saw Jeongin looking back in much the same way. For a moment, Hyunjin felt like he was on the outside of this conversation, completely on the outside, with no way inside it. It made him feel a little cold, and he was just about to ask what the hell was up when Felix smiled, a pretty little quirk of his mouth. “Okay, Jeongin,” he said. “That sounds really good.”
“Yay!” said Jeongin, and he disappeared, pulling the door shut behind him with a bang that was decidedly a slam. Hyunjin winced; Felix did the same as he lay back down.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Hyunjin murmured, stroking a hand through Felix’s hair. Felix leaned so obviously into the touch that Hyunjin felt like something finally made sense in the world, even though everything else seemed to have gone cuckoo. Felix made a non-committal noise. “Well, if Minho-hyung is a dick, you can just get up and leave. Don’t think you have to just sit there and put up with it, angel.”
Felix huffed a little laugh against Hyunjin’s neck. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I think Jeongin has everything under control.”
——
Seungmin had had a relatively peaceful day in his workroom, working on his various projects undisturbed by anyone. No drama, nobody wanting to talk to him or yell at him or bother him. He had been remarkably productive in that time, in a way that was making him think wistfully of the time just after they’d finished the workroom and it had been designated his domain. For a few months, most of the others hadn’t felt comfortable bothering him in here. Even Chan had been remarkably polite when he had come to ask Seungmin for one thing or another.
Of course, it was probably better to have things the way they were. Better to be part of the team rather than simply the tech gremlin hiding away in the basement, so to speak. But he did have to admit, things got done faster this way.
All good things, of course, must come to an end, and so eventually he heard the sound of footsteps right outside the door just before it opened, slowly as if whoever it was didn’t want to disturb him unnecessarily. He looked up from the delicate piece of wiring he was doing and found that it was Changbin who had entered, standing in the doorway looking at him with a soft look that made Seungmin want to climb the walls a little bit.
“What,” he said, almost a snap.
Did it say more about Seungmin or Changbin that Changbin seemed to take that as a welcome into the room? He smiled and stepped inside and let the door close behind him, controlling the swing with his hand so that it just gently clicked shut. He could be taught, this boyfriend of Seungmin’s.
“Are you busy?” Changbin asked, and then before Seungmin could ask him if he was dropped on his head as a child, added, “I know the answer is yes, always, but are you actually busy?”
Seungmin scowled at him. “No,” he said. “What is it?”
Changbin came over to the workbench. He was wearing loose, very casual clothing and he appeared to have showered this morning and not bothered styling his hair. Seungmin very, very rarely got to see Changbin’s hair like this, frizzy around his face. The first time he’d seen it, a few months into being here, it had been so shocking that if it hadn’t been for the distinctive muscles, he would have questioned who the stranger was. He wondered if the way he felt, seeing that hair, was the way Changbin felt when he saw Seungmin in his glasses: like his heart was too warm to be held in his chest without searing him on the inside.
“It’s nothing bad,” Changbin said, as he took a stool, the one right next to the one Seungmin was sitting on. He was close enough that Seungmin could feel some of his warmth; Changbin ran hot, where Seungmin ran cold, which Changbin said was because Seungmin didn’t have enough padding on his bones. So be it, there wasn’t much Seungmin could do about that. “And I’m going to preface this by saying that I gave an excuse and nothing bad happened.”
There were the faintest stirrings of dread in Seungmin’s stomach. Faint only in that if it were something bad, if something actually upsetting had happened, Changbin would not sound this honestly cheerful about it. He sounded almost like he wanted to laugh — or maybe like he was anticipating Seungmin’s amusement. “What did you do,” Seungmin said.
“Nothing,” Changbin said. “Except I sure was caught on the stairs this morning when I was sneaking back up at 4am.”
The words made Seungmin tense up for a moment, but even that felt— instinctive. The older fear of being caught out, of everyone knowing his business. In any case, after that pulse of panic came the exasperation, some of it fond but most of it just exasperated. “That would have been embarrassing for you,” he said, turning back to his wiring and letting a drop of hot solder fall onto the circuit board. “Imagine getting caught out doing the walk of shame. Humiliating.”
He could feel Changbin’s eyes on him, not hot or heated or even heavy, just very very present. He was cataloguing that reaction, Seungmin knew, taking it in. Seeing what it was that Seungmin was and was not saying. It was difficult to sit there and let Changbin do that, knowing all the ways that Changbin saw him, all the ways that Changbin understood him. Even now, he still wasn’t quite used to the vulnerability involved in being known in such a way.
“Luckily,” Changbin said, “I was able to think fast and get out of it.”
Seungmin flicked him an unimpressed little look. “You’ve never thought fast in your life,” he said.
Changbin didn’t even have the decency to glare at him. He just gave Seungmin this look like he thought Seungmin was very cute trying to bait him but he wasn’t going to fall for it. “I thought fast enough,” he said.
Seungmin sighed. Truthfully, he was not quite as calm about it as he was making out, and he thought that Changbin probably saw that, too. Even if the overwhelming fear of it had mostly gone, that didn’t mean that he wanted to be caught out like this: suddenly, without warning. If nothing else, he’d seen how badly it could go when secrets came out when one wasn’t in control of the narrative. The stakes were not quite the same, of course, but there were stakes, all the same: there was a very good chance that Chan was not going to be overly happy with Changbin having kept such a secret from him.
Maybe Seungmin should feel guilty for insisting that it be kept a secret in the first place, knowing that it was not quite fair to Changbin. But he didn’t, not really, he could not scrounge up any such guilt. It was his, and he wanted to keep it like that for just a little bit longer.
“Who was it that caught you?” he asked, when Changbin didn’t say anything else, and just kept watching Seungmin work.
“Yes, well, that would be the interesting part,” Changbin said. “It was Minho-hyung and Jeongin coming out of the third floor together.”
Seungmin paused for a moment, and then reached over and turned his equipment off. He set everything carefully in its place and then turned to look properly at Changbin, who looked back at him like none of that reaction quite surprised him. “At four in the morning,” Seungmin said flatly.
“Yeah,” said Changbin. He had lost that slightly playful note in his voice, the one that had let Seungmin know that there really was nothing to worry about before. Now he looked serious, sounded serious. “Jeongin tried to claim that they had just fallen asleep in front of a movie, but obviously that was bullshit, and when I called him out on that in the kitchen, he said that he and Minho-hyung had argued, and that Minho-hyung had had a panic attack of some kind.”
Seungmin didn’t say anything. Was it surprising, to think of Minho having a panic attack? Yes, because he was someone who held himself like his spine was made of steel. No, because Seungmin had seen his prison records. Yes, because Seungmin had never seen a single hint of such a thing from him. No — the only surprise was that he had let anyone, perhaps especially Jeongin, see it.
“He said—” Changbin sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. It was fluffier after that and Seungmin kind of wanted to smooth it back down for him. “He said some stuff that made me realise that you’re right. I do think Jeongin likes Minho-hyung back. And I don’t really like that they were hidden away together on the third floor in the middle of the night like that. There was something off about the way they were acting together.”
“You’re acting as though you think they were fucking or something up there,” Seungmin said, rolling his eyes. Changbin, though, just kept giving him that serious look. “Hyung, come on.”
“Can you check for me?” Changbin asked. “Can you find the footage from last night so we can be sure of what happened?”
The words annoyed Seungmin almost to the point of anger. The look on Changbin’s face, one which made it clear that he expected Seungmin to immediately and willingly do it, tipped the scales. “No,” he said. The bite in his voice made Changbin blink. “No, I’m not going to help you violate their privacy like that. Neither of them.”
If it hadn’t been for the genuine anger in Seungmin’s voice, he had no doubt that Changbin would have given him another one of those you’re cute when you’re obstinate looks. But the anger was there, and Changbin had heard it, and so he sounded just that bit unsure when he said, “But Seungmin, if they were messing around down there—”
“But what,” interrupted Seungmin. “If they were, you get to see something you’re not supposed to see. If they weren’t, and Jeongin was telling the truth about what happened, then you still get to see something you’re not supposed to see. Minho-hyung wouldn’t want anyone seeing him like that. You know that as well as I do.”
“I just want to make sure that Jeongin wasn’t put under any pressure or—”
“No,” said Seungmin. He got up off the stool, unable to sit there for a moment longer, listening to the way Changbin was talking, like he was being perfectly reasonable in this. “No, hyung. That’s not what you want. Do not try to make out like there’s some kind of safety issue here for Jeongin. What you want is to be overbearing, just like Chan-hyung was. Did Jeongin give you any reason to assume that whatever happened in that room wasn’t okay with him? Did he seem upset, or unsettled, or anything along those lines?”
“Well,” Changbin said, a little more heated now, “no, he didn’t, but Seungmin—”
“Hyung,” said Seungmin. He stood in the workroom and he hid his shaking hands in his sleeves and he kept his feet planted. He would not back down on this. He was sick of this. “Both Minho-hyung and Jeongin have a right to privacy in their personal affairs. Just like we do, just like we’ve been enjoying this entire time.”
Changbin had been in the middle of getting off his stool too, frowning, but at that, he stopped, frozen in motion. He looked at Seungmin with a kind of blank confusion, like Seungmin’s words had hit him in a way that he had not expected to be hit. It was obvious that that concept had simply never occurred to him before.
His voice was a lot softer, and a lot more uncertain, when he said, “I’m just worried about him.”
“Then talk to him about it,” Seungmin snapped, “like the adult he is. Because I am not going to indulge you with this, hyung. I’m just not. You’re not being rational about this, any more than Chan-hyung is.”
Truthfully he was furious to be even having this conversation with him in the first place, even though he had— he’d suspected, somewhere along the lines, that this kind of thing would happen. Changbin had told him that it was not Seungmin’s problem to solve, but of course Changbin would see the need to inject himself into it. It was Jeongin, it was his baby.
“And I get it, you know, I get it,” he added, when Changbin just kept looking at him in that frozen way. “it’s Jeongin. You want to protect him. But you’re trying to protect him from Minho-hyung, and just— get real. Like, honestly, get real. You cannot look me in the eyes and tell me you believe that he would hurt a single hair on Jeongin’s head.”
The fight went out of Changbin; he deflated totally, his shoulders slumping as he turned around and leaned a hand against the workbench. He didn’t look back at Seungmin, who watched the way Changbin’s shoulders rose and fell quickly as he breathed, and didn’t say anything further. He had seen Changbin get it, seen the understanding finally penetrate through the fog of protective brother, and now it was just a case of Changbin coming to terms with it.
There was silence for a long time. Seungmin, eventually, came over to the table, and stood next to Changbin, who was still hunched over it, giving no outward indication that he’d noticed Seungmin nearing. It wasn’t until Seungmin put a hand, very tentatively, against Changbin’s upper back, that Changbin said, “He deserves the same privacy that we have.”
“Yes,” said Seungmin softly. “And he’ll tell you about what’s going on when he’s ready to do so.”
Changbin took a deep breath. When he straightened up, he finally looked at Seungmin, giving him a very weak smile. He looked almost sheepish. “I’ve been an idiot,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Seungmin bluntly. “You really have been. But I guess it’s okay, it was only in front of me. I knew you were an idiot.”
Changbin didn’t even react to the insult. He just looked at Seungmin for a long moment and then said, “Is it okay to kiss you?”
“If you must,” Seungmin said, but he was already leaning in, their mouths meeting far more gently than Seungmin might have guessed. But he didn’t want to deepen things, and Changbin seemed happy with this chaste thing, just the warmth of their breath between them, Seungmin’s hand still on Changbin’s back. He felt, under his fingers, the muscles in Changbin’s back slowly unlock.
“Thank you,” Changbin said, once they’d pulled apart. “Seungmin. Thank you.”
Seungmin just nodded. He didn’t move, didn’t feel the need to move. It was not possible, he knew, for Minho and Jeongin to keep whatever was going on between them as a secret for very long, not when there were so many eyes in this household keeping watch on them. Seungmin had had this space for so long because nobody had known to even look for it. That was not something he took for granted.
Changbin quirked a smile at him, his own hand coming up to cup Seungmin’s hip gently. “I’ve never had you be actually angry at me,” he said. “That was new.”
“What are you talking about,” Seungmin said. “I was angry at you the night Felix arrived with that fucking USB.”
“Oh,” said Changbin, his thumb stroking Seungmin’s hip; Seungmin felt a kind of relief at that easy touch that he was not going to look too hard at. “Yes, I remember. I took my punishment well, didn’t I?”
Seungmin fought down the shiver that the memory brought about in him, but Changbin had maybe felt some of it anyway. The oddest sensation of feeling his back flat against his closed bedroom door, the tangle of his pyjama pants around his ankles. “You complained about your knees for two days afterwards,” he said. “Like an old man.”
“Baby, your floor is concrete,” Changbin said, and when Seungmin laughed a little, Changbin darted in and kissed him again, harder but no less loving, no less caring. He’d thought it the night before, this is unsustainable, but maybe that wasn’t a scary thought. Maybe he could start to let go of this private space between them.
——
Minho was trying to read in his bedroom when his phone buzzed on the floor beside his mattress, the screen lighting up. He’d snatched it up before he’d even registered who it was from, his usual habit when so few people texted him and when they did, it was usually some kind of emergency. But it wasn’t, it was just Jeongin.
hyung!! felix-hyung and i are going to watch our show in the tv room, we’re going downstairs now
Minho read the words once, then twice, and then made himself—breathe. Breathe through the instinctive fear, through that spike of panic that had come so suddenly. The part of him that wanted to jump up off his bed and go racing downstairs and burst into that room had, for a brief second, gripped the controls. Yesterday, before he had slept, he might have even let that part of him take over.
But it was not yesterday. It was today, and today there was a more rational part of him that was firmly behind the steering wheel. A part that didn’t feel like a wounded, panting animal, backed into a corner with no recourse but to lash out. Today, he was capable of texting back, ok.
Jeongin’s response was instant. come and join us if you want!!!
Minho did not particularly want to but he certainly planned on doing so. He took a few moments to mark his page in his book, set it down carefully in the pile he had taken it from, and then got to his feet. He took the stairs up to the third floor slowly, making himself be— civilised, he thought might be the word. An ill-fitting word, when applied to Minho, but he could be it, or at least do his best impression of it.
It was quiet in the stairwell but when he let himself into the PC room, the door to the hallway was hanging open and he could already hear the faint sounds of conversation — the drama, he assumed, because it was not Jeongin nor Felix’s voice. The door to the television room was hanging open too, the light from inside the room spilling out into the darkened hallway.
The sight of that ajar door made Minho feel like there was already a loosening of a tension in his shoulders. It should not have mattered, not really, because it was a small room with only a single entrance and exit anyway, but it did matter. He had told Jeongin that he didn’t want him and Felix alone in an enclosed space and so Jeongin had left the door open. A nod, however small, at a compromise. And it helped, it did, to know that an escape was easier for Jeongin than it otherwise might have been.
He breathed, for a moment, beside that slightly open door, and then he gently knocked. “It’s me,” he said, trying to sound neutral. When he pushed the door open further and stepped inside, Jeongin and Felix were already sitting together on one of the couches. Both were looking at him, Jeongin calm and pleasant, Felix a little wide eyed, body language curled in on himself. He didn’t seem surprised to see Minho though, which meant Jeongin had likely told him that Minho would be coming down.
“Hello, hyung,” Jeongin said, straightening up a little from his slouch while Felix leaned more heavily against Jeongin’s side. He looked like a wary fawn hiding behind a stag. “Are you going to watch the drama with us?”
“Yes,” Minho said, but he didn’t sit. The other two watched him with different flavours of expectation. Minho, not really used to feeling embarrassed or shy in this way, spent a long few seconds frozen, his jaw stuck on what he wanted to say. “I’d like— to check Felix for weapons,” he finally managed to grind out, knowing it was stupid — Felix wasn’t armed, he never was — but unable to move past the need to do it all the same. “Please.”
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, but it was exasperated rather than annoyed, at least. Felix, though, looked at Minho for a moment and then, wordless, got to his feet, socked against the awful carpet in the room. He shuffled closer to Minho, eyes downcast, hands held by his side but his fingers twisting just a bit in the material of his pyjama pants. Jeongin huffed a little.
Minho put his hands on Felix’s shoulders, light and gentle, and Felix did not flinch. He did tremble, just a little, as Minho swept his hands down his arms, and then back up. I won’t hurt you, Minho wanted to tell him, but he didn’t, because it would be an even more foolish thing to say on so many levels. He simply worked his way over Felix’s body, hands moving quickly across Felix’s chest, finding the slim lines of his waist underneath the oversized hoodie he was wearing. He was small, smaller than Jeongin. Waifish. Minho knelt as he patted down Felix’s legs, down to his ankles, face to face with Felix’s fuzzy yellow socks.
All he found the whole way over was skinny boy, no weapons.
“Done,” Minho whispered, standing again, and Felix watched him with wary eyes, dark circles lilac under his freckles. What had it cost Felix, to come down here with Jeongin, knowing Minho would be here too. How much courage had it taken. Was it hypocritical of Minho to be impressed by that, when he was most of the reason why Felix needed to be scared? Felix was standing almost on the spot of carpet that Minho had flung him down on, and Minho wondered if Felix knew that. Probably. It was probably not something that was easily forgotten on either end.
“Felix,” Minho said, knowing he had to do this — he’d promised Jeongin. It didn’t make it any easier. He felt like he was clawing the words out of his own chest, each one clinging desperately to stay inside. “I’m sorry, for— hurting you. For scaring you.” It was all he could, in good conscience, say sorry for.
Felix’s eyes widened, genuine surprise coming over his face. Yesterday Minho had told Felix with cold smugness he’d never apologise, and they had both known that he had meant it, and here he was now, eating those words. He could feel the way his own ears were burning, the humiliation of it.
“Oh,” said Felix, a little faint. “Thank you.”
Minho blinked. Was that really it, he wondered. No gloating, no smugness in turn. He’d expected Felix to throw it in his face, what he’d said before. And then he’d expected questions— why he’d changed his tune, standing here with red ears mumbling out apologies. What a good dog you are, Felix might’ve said, when he’d found out Jeongin had asked Minho to say sorry.
It’s what Minho would have done, if he’d been in Felix’s place.
But there was none of that. After a beat, Jeongin leaned forward from where he was still sitting down on the couch and snagged Felix’s wrist. “Hyung, come sit,” he whined, and Felix did, stilted but not quite as obviously nervous as he’d been before. Minho watched it happen, still not particularly happy at how close they were sitting but knowing there was nothing to be done about it. Felix had no weapon, Felix was no weapon. Minho had to let this be.
As Felix was getting settled down, Jeongin looked up and made eye contact with Minho. Thank you, he mouthed, giving Minho a smile, soft and warm and too much.
Now Minho’s ears were really red. He could feel the heat of them. It had always been, since he was young, the one sign of his emotions that he’d never been able to disguise or stop. He threw himself down onto the smaller couch, the one he’d woken up this morning to find Jeongin sleeping on.
The television had been on but muted, and now the volume came back as Jeongin fiddled with the remote, a saccharine opening theme to the drama blaring out. Minho fought back a wince, but allowed his eyes to squint in judgemental displeasure, sitting straight-backed and upright on the couch.
Jeongin paid him no mind, really — he was beaming at the television, its light reflected across his dimpled face. Felix was more subdued, and as the opening theme rounded to a close and the episode began, he kept casting Minho little glances. There was nothing smug about them; mostly he looked confused, like he thought Minho might’ve been switched with a more amiable clone. While not true, there was something to be said for being well rested and fed.
This morning, after Minho had said goodbye to Jeongin on the stairs — after he had dealt with Changbin’s sceptical, slightly judging eyes — he had thought that he would not get back to sleep. He had gone to his room anyway, for lack of anywhere else to go at that time in the morning, and lay down on his bed, for lack of anything better to actually do, and somehow passed out again. He had woken just before nine in the morning with a considerable sense of disorientation.
He’d felt capable, finally, of cooking for himself, so he had taken himself up to the kitchen and made breakfast. Eating for the first time in two days had been interesting— his hunger had been something of a theoretical thing, in many ways, in that he knew he was hungry but even after all his sleep some of the physical sensations had been missing. He had made his usual portion size and consumed it in about a third of the time he usually did. It had been with a wordless feeling of clarity that he had gotten back up and made more food and eaten until his brain felt like it was actually ticking forward.
He had not quite realised how that brain energy had been missing. It was strangely easy to feel like one was working at full power when one was doing nothing of the sort. A lesson he would try to internalise for the future.
Eventually Felix stopped glancing at him and settled down against Jeongin’s side, his hand interlaced with one of Jeongin’s. He was a cuddly little thing, not just with Hyunjin. He seemed to seek out this kind of touch constantly, in a way that Minho couldn’t fully wrap his head around. And despite the way Felix was no longer looking at him, but was instead watching the television along with Jeongin, Minho got the impression Felix was still very aware of Minho’s presence in the room — as Minho was his — but as the minutes ticked on things felt more— peaceful.
Minho tried to watch the drama too, but he could not follow along with the nonsensical plot. And neither could he simply zone out totally, like he maybe would have done if it were just him in the room, lulled into it by the almost white-noise sound of the show; he was not relaxed enough for it. Instead, he found his attention shifting from Felix to Jeongin, who was still smiling but much more idly now, his free hand raised to his mouth so he could chew at one of his nails distractedly.
At least Jeongin was happy, Minho thought as he watched a fingertip press past Jeongin’s damp bottom lip. The embarrassment of it all was made more bearable by the fact that Jeongin had been pleased by his— good behaviour. Maybe later, if they got a moment alone, Jeongin would smile at him again, tell Minho thanks again, heartfelt, sincere — a longer thanks, maybe. Looking at Minho in that way he did when he was happy in Minho’s presence, a pleasure that Minho would never take for granted. The idea caused Minho to blush for warmer reasons than before.
Stop looking at his mouth, Minho scolded himself, as he watched Jeongin switch fingers, dragging wetness across his lips. Stop being so damn obvious.
He’d already stepped over that line far too much lately. Chan knew, and now Changbin— he’d half-expected to get yanked aside by Changbin at some point today. To be grilled about what, exactly, he and Jeongin had been up to in the middle of the night on the third floor. He hated the idea that those who loved Jeongin, who wanted to protect him, had now zeroed in on Minho as a threat to that safety.
But Changbin had done no such thing, and thankfully, neither had Chan, which meant Changbin had not told him what he’d seen. Minho had no illusions about that — if Chan knew, there was no way Minho would not have been thoroughly dressed down. When Chan had asked to talk to him after the meeting, he’d dreaded that to be the reason why.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, his voice cutting through the plunking piano of the drama’s soundtrack. Jeongin’s head turned to him, but his hand stayed up by his mouth, fingertips shining with spit. “Take your fingers out of your mouth.”
He’d managed to say it levelly, like he wasn’t wishing he could slip his fingers into Jeongin’s mouth himself, feel the satin slickness of his tongue. He was vaguely impressed with himself.
Jeongin smiled, sheepish. “Sorry,” he said, dropping his hand to his lap and wiping it off on his sweatpants.
“Ew, Jeongin,” Felix mumbled, and Jeongin reached out and wiped his fingers on Felix’s pyjama bottoms instead. It made Felix squeal out a prolonged cry of noooooo as he scooted away to the other end of the couch.
Jeongin was laughing, both dimples showing on his cheeks, looking young and happy. He looked at Minho and asked, “Hyung, why are you staring at me chewing my nails instead of watching the show?”
Minho focused his entire being on not turning even a little pink. “Because this drama makes no fucking sense, baby boy.”
“It would make sense if you’d seen the first thirty episodes,” Jeongin said, voice as saccharine as the soundtrack.
“Thirty?” Minho echoed in vague horror. The episodes were an hour long apiece. They had been watching this nonsense for thirty hours already?
Felix, voice small and maybe a little put upon, said, “There’s a hundred and two.”
Minho blinked at him, just once, and then raised an eyebrow at Jeongin, who laughed again, in that way he always did when he saw the— humour in Minho’s reactions, the humour that the others often missed. “It’s a good drama!” he said, as Felix shuffled back over to him, a little tentative, as if he were afraid that Jeongin might wipe his saliva-covered fingers against him again.
“You say that about every drama you watch, baby boy,” said Minho, very dryly. “Statistically, it cannot be true.”
“Well, it’s a good job that I never went to middle school and don’t know anything about statistics, then,” said Jeongin. He stuck his tongue out at Minho, just a little bit, more like he was poking his tongue between his teeth than anything; it made Minho think of a cat. Minho sighed at him.
Felix settled back against Jeongin’s side. Earlier, he had looked warily at Minho as he did it, the action both like he was desperate for the comfort Jeongin brought and like he was afraid of Minho’s potentially violent reaction. Now he just slumped there like it was comfortable for him, and only gave one quick look at Minho after he had done it. Minho did not react.
Felix lifted his head up to whisper something into Jeongin’s ear, too quiet for Minho to hear. But whatever it was it made Jeongin glance quickly at Minho and then away again, cheeks blushing prettily. “Don’t,” Jeongin muttered, still pink. Felix rested his head on Jeongin’s shoulder, and now, he was a little smug, lips curved slightly.
What, Minho wanted to ask, but couldn’t. He looked at Jeongin, that lingering blush on his cheeks. The high cheekbones, the complete lack of baby fat left on Jeongin’s face, the sharp brightness of his eyes — all of these physical reminders of how Jeongin had grown these last couple of years. All of them things that Minho had both stopped himself looking at too hard and committed to memory somewhere along the line.
It had never quite hit Minho before the last few weeks that this growth had happened internally too. Jeongin was a crybaby still, yes, and prone to thinking he should get his way because he had always done so in the past, but— the Jeongin who had stood his ground last night for his Felix-hyung, the Jeongin who had insisted that he was good enough and old enough to come on the job— this was a Jeongin that Minho both recognised and did not. The shape of him had been there in the child all along, but this kind of thing— it terrified Minho, frankly.
The depth of his longing scared him. The knowledge that this time together was, by necessity, thundering closer to an end petrified him. There was only so much time left that he could allow himself the softness of Jeongin’s company, allow himself to be this hyung. Only a limited number of times left that he would say baby boy and see Jeongin’s face turn to him.
He could not waste them.
Jeongin must have noticed Minho’s eyes on him, because he looked away from the screen — Minho could not possibly have said what was happening, only that it was once again loud — and caught Minho’s eye. He smiled, head tilted to the side as if questioning why Minho was looking at him.
Minho shook his head. Then carefully, telegraphing every movement, he slipped his feet out of his sneakers and tucked them up onto the couch. It felt wrong, utterly odd, to be sitting in only his socked feet, but Jeongin looked at his sneakers and then up at Minho with a shocked expression, and then he beamed, a radiant, lovely smile directed fully at Minho.
That’s why, Minho wanted to say, but couldn’t. That’s why I look at you.
Chapter 18
Notes:
this was the chapter that actually almost ruined christmas, in that i wrote 3k of it at work on the friday before without realising my shitty work computer wasn't connected to the internet, so it didn't sync before i shut the machine down. and then we spent all christmas weekend stressed that we'd lost the entire scene but it was FINE it was there on monday and there was much relief.
this chapter has undergone less editing than usual due to some stuff, so we ask for your understanding on that front ♥
Chapter Text
Chan had forgotten to close the curtains. He didn’t usually do that, but he had come up to bed late last night and found Felix already asleep, curled up under the covers, in that small position he favoured when Chan wasn’t in the bed with him yet. Chan hadn’t expected to see him here— it was the first time in the week since he had almost ruined everything that he had worked late, and Felix had been coming to his room only after he knew that Chan was there. So it had been surprising, looking at that dark head of hair, and Chan had stood there for a long, long time just watching him, before he had mindlessly brushed his teeth and stripped to his underwear and got into bed beside him.
But he’d forgotten to close the curtains, and so had Felix, apparently, because the room was full of early morning sunlight when Chan opened his eyes. It was earlier than he would have liked, after such a late night the night before, but that was probably thanks to the light in the room. That was why he always closed the curtains. But maybe it was okay, to wake with the yellowing light of morning, a warm beam of it falling directly over where his and Felix’s legs were tangled together under the covers.
It was only their legs that were tangled, though. Perhaps Felix’s feet had been cold in the night and he had looked instinctively for the warmth of Chan’s body. He was laying close, facing Chan but not quite touching him, the duvet covering him up to the chin. His face was perfectly smoothed out in sleep, his mouth a little parted, his breath coming evenly.
It was still strange to see his hair this colour. Chan was still getting used to it. Even after a week, he would find himself looking instinctively for the blond, coming into a room that he knew Felix was in and being surprised to not see him until his brain engaged and he did see him. Worse had been Hyunjin, who gave Chan’s brain a moment of who the FUCK— every time he saw him.
But Chan was adapting to it. Felix’s brown hair was feathered over his forehead, covering some of his face as he lay on his side. Chan wanted to tuck it back behind his ear so that he could look at Felix’s face properly, but he didn’t want to wake Felix. He didn’t want to wake him at all, not when Felix was sleeping so peacefully. No sign of strain on that face, no sign of worry or fear.
That was what he deserved. That was what he was owed.
Besides, maybe Chan didn’t need to actually see Felix’s face. How much time had he spent, added up, watching Felix as he slept? Hours, probably, by this point, although less in this past week. He hadn’t really let himself linger, not like he had done before. He almost always woke up before Felix, though, mostly because he slept less than a normal human being should, and that had given him plenty of time to do this: to memorise the slopes and falls of Felix’s face, so that even with the hair obscuring it, he could tell the exact line of Felix’s jaw, the placement of those freckles.
He wasn’t sure how long he lay there, watching Felix sleep. He didn’t feel perfectly awake himself. If he had been, probably he wouldn’t have let himself rest here like this; he would have gotten up, dressed for the day, which promised to be long and stressful. A week of putting everything together, of wrangling everyone into knowing the plan, in getting Hyunjin and Jisung prepared. A week of him and Changbin and Minho convincing themselves that they could let Jeongin do something small on this trip, and then walking him through it step-by-step, Minho quizzing him like it was a full job he was doing alone and not just a small, easy thing.
A week of trying to give Hyunjin his space, hoping that with time, they could move past what had happened. A week of spending as much time with Felix as he could without overwhelming him, without overstepping. A week of talking in bed together, really talking. Chan felt almost greedy for the knowledge of Felix as he actually was, for the small parts of Felix that he had felt like he needed to hide.
Tell me, he’d murmured, whenever Felix had mentioned something from before he came to them, something that related to his father or his sisters or the work he had done. Tell me, I want to know. And so Felix had done so, and every time Chan had known so much more completely how good and right and true his Felix was.
Felix stirred a little, making a small noise under his breath before one hand came up to rub at his nose. His eyes were still closed, and when that hand fell still again, Chan wondered if Felix was going to sleep once more. He didn’t; instead, after another couple of seconds, Felix opened his eyes in a slow, languid motion. He was facing away from the window, but he still kept his eyes half-closed against the light until he saw that Chan was awake, and watching him, and then his eyes opened wider, looking back.
Chan did brush that hair back from Felix’s face then, his knuckles dragging gently against the soft skin of Felix’s cheek as he did it. Felix let him, without a word, his eyes still wide, his mouth still a little open. “Hello,” Chan murmured, voice low, letting his hand cup the side of Felix’s head, his thumb rubbing against Felix’s temple in that way he knew Felix liked.
“Hello,” Felix whispered. His eyes closed again. His eyelashes were so dark against his cheeks, and Chan was close enough that he could count each one if he wanted to. He was close enough to kiss those eyelids, if he wanted to. He didn’t move, other than to keep his thumb moving in that slow, soothing motion.
Before, lingering like this in bed together had been something Chan rarely did because it had always led to him rolling Felix onto his back, feeling Felix’s hands grasp for him, even as his body was pliant and sleepy. His voice gasping out Chan’s name, begging for him, until Chan kissed him silent. Did Felix feel that presence here this morning? The memory of it, the lingering ghost.
They hadn’t even kissed this week. It had felt like too much, like an overstep, a liberty Chan would be taking. He was not sure how accurate that was, only that it was the worry that lived inside of him, and he was constantly going back and forth over how true it was.
But something about the look on Felix’s face as Chan touched him was making Chan feel like there was an itch under his skin that was impossible to get at. A desire to be closer, perhaps, but it was something else. Something he had been missing this week, maybe, as he kept himself at this distance, kept himself from touching too much. Something he had forgotten, in the midst of all the chaos.
He took his hand away and didn’t miss the slight sound of protest, immediately cut off, that Felix let out. His eyes opened again, but he looked at Chan with no complaint in his eyes, as if he was perfectly willing to let Chan go, even though he didn’t want to. And that was something else Chan had forgotten, had he not? Something else he had been overlooking. The ways in which Felix tried to not take for himself.
“Here,” he said quietly, as he sat up just a bit, so that he could free both his hands. He shuffled a little closer on the bed, one of his hands sliding down Felix’s arm and across his side, a careful piece of contact. Felix didn’t say a word, didn’t object to it, although Chan saw on his face that he was confused, unsure of what was happening. As pliant in this as he was in most things, he simply let Chan pull the oversized t-shirt he was wearing (not one of Chan’s; perhaps Hyunjin’s) over his head until, like Chan himself was, he lay shirtless against the sheets.
Chan dropped the shirt over the side of the bed. He had no idea what Felix was thinking, looking up at Chan with those wide eyes, still just blinking slowly. Chan lay back down on his side, and put his arm around Felix’s waist so that he could tug Felix in against him, his hand splayed against Felix’s spine, the other arm pillowing Felix’s head, his hand sliding into Felix’s hair so he could tuck his head into Chan’s shoulder.
Their skin was pressed up against each other now, their bare chests touching with nothing between them. Nothing except the heat of their bodies. The moment they touched like this, Felix’s arms wound their way around Chan, a hand clutching at Chan’s shoulder, the other pressing his fingertips into the meat of Chan’s back.
Chan couldn’t see his face but he didn’t need to. They were as close as two people could get outside of sex and this, in so many ways, felt more intimate than that. The two of them in silence together. Felix was holding him so close that it felt like he was maybe trying to fuse his way into Chan’s body, and so Chan tightened his arms around him, held him just as tight, returning that— fervour. That desperate need.
Yes, he thought, closing his eyes against the prickling of the tears. Yes, this is what I was missing.
“Hyung,” said Felix. He was not crying, Chan would have been able to feel it, but there was something broken in his voice all the same. He was trembling, now, hard enough that Chan felt that, a shaking all through Felix’s body.
“I know,” Chan said. “I love you. I love you.”
Felix gasped a little. He tucked his head impossibly further into Chan. His fingers gripping at Chan’s back and shoulder were holding so hard that Chan could feel the pin-pricks of his blunt fingernails. He was trembling to the point that Chan wondered if, if he let go, Felix might simply shake apart into pieces. But Chan was not going to let go, he would never let go again. He would hold them both together until his dying breath.
He had learned his lesson. He would never take this second chance for granted.
——
Changbin rolled out of bed at a time that would have horrified his grandmother, who would putter around their little apartment for hours before Changbin dragged his sorry behind out to go to middle school. Sometimes she’d tutted about how lax the youth were getting, with their late school times, which had made Changbin smile at her. He’d never bothered to point out that an 8:30am start time was hardly late.
He’d slept in his room last night, and so he’d enjoyed a long stretch of a solid ten hours where nothing and nobody had disturbed him. No alarm going off at 4am so that he could haul himself up to the fourth floor and pretend like he’d been there all along. Just blissful, uninterrupted sleep.
Of course, it came with drawbacks. He’d gone to bed alone, woken up alone, without Seungmin’s lanky body sprawled across him. It surprised him, still, the way in which they had both so easily adapted to sharing such a small bed, how easy it was to fall asleep like that. Seungmin had never actually been in Changbin’s bed, he’d never even been in Changbin’s bedroom, but even so, Changbin felt the absence of him. The sheer space that seemed to be afforded to him. Which was nonsense, because even up here, Changbin had a twin bed that was barely big enough for a man with his kind of shoulders.
When they’d first moved in here, Changbin had happily taken the smallest of the bedrooms. Chan had been given the master bedroom as a matter of course and there had been some rumblings of Jeongin getting the smallest room by virtue of being the youngest, but Changbin had taken it for himself, and let Jeongin have a room large enough to actually fit things into it. Changbin’s room had his bed, and the built-in wardrobes, and a set of drawers that he’d bought himself that weren’t even fully filled up. At least in Jeongin’s room they’d been able to fit a desk.
It didn’t matter that the room was small, though, because Changbin spent very little time in it. It was a place for him to sleep, and a place for him to get dressed, and that had always been that. In some ways, the smallness of the space made the privacy feel even more pronounced. He had shared a single bedroom with his grandmother until she had died, and then been shunted off to a group home where he’d shared a room with five other boys. Even when he’d stayed at Chan’s place, he’d been on the couch of the living room or, once Hyunjin arrived, on the floor.
All he’d needed, in the end, was a room where he could shut the door after himself and be— alone. That had been enough, for him.
He dressed quickly, in whatever clothes he first grabbed out of his drawers. They didn’t matter, not for a day like today. He would shower later, wrangle his hair into place, dress in clothing that wouldn’t get him side-eyed on the street. For now he just let himself out of his room and padded down the hallway in his slippers, intent on finding some kind of food.
The only person in the kitchen was Jeongin, sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl in front of him — leftover bibimbap, from the looks of things. Jeongin had probably been awake long enough that this counted as lunch for him, at this time of the day, just before noon, and Changbin stopped just inside the kitchen to watch him eat.
He’d never been able to work out if Jeongin’s eating habits were innate in him or sprung from his time in various foster homes and then the group home Chan had whisked him away from. Certainly nobody here had ever taken food away from him, even when they hadn’t really had enough to go around. If fact, Jeongin had always eaten even if it meant Chan and Changbin went without — more than once, Changbin had caught Chan handing his portion over to Jeongin, and had to scold him about it.
Fascinating, then, to watch the way Jeongin shovelled food into his mouth like he thought every meal was possibly his last.
Jeongin caught sight of him and said something around his mouthful of food that was probably hello hyung. Changbin fought down his smile and said, “Hello, Jeongin, don’t talk with your mouth full.”
He said it with the exact cadence he’d picked up from Chan over the years: playful and very fond and a little resigned to the fact that the words would go unheeded, the same way similar reminders of don’t chew on your fingers and don’t let your stuff laying around had always gone unheeded.
Jeongin waved him off. Changbin came into the room properly, going to the counter to start up the coffee machine and then poking around the fridge to find something for him to eat himself. He found some leftover pasta that he didn’t remember anyone ordering, which according to the date written in Minho’s messy handwriting, was almost ready to be thrown away. He pulled it out, dumped it into a bowl, and set it going in the microwave.
“Jeongin,” he said, as the whirr of the microwave filled the previous silence between them. “Are you ready for tonight?”
Jeongin paused shoving food into his mouth in order to look up at him, blinking. “Yeah, hyung, I’m ready.”
“Remember you need to wait until you get the signal before you head to the casino,” Changbin said. “If you try to get in too early, it’ll throw off the timing.”
“Yes, hyung,” said Jeongin, his spoon digging back into his food but not lifting to his face. “I know.”
“Do you remember the route?” Changbin asked. He started digging his phone out of his pocket, saying, “Let me pull up the map on my phone, so you can—”
“Argh, hyung!” said Jeongin. There was a pile of individually sealed wet wipes in the middle of the table, collected from various restaurants over time, and he picked one up and threw it at Changbin. It missed completely but that wasn’t the point. “I know! Don’t bug me about it when I’m trying to eat!”
“I’m just trying to make sure you know what you’re doing!” Changbin protested.
“Minho-hyung is going to grill me about it all later,” Jeongin said, grumpy and put-upon. “Let me eat my food in peace, please.”
“What a brat you are,” Changbin told him, but he was smiling, and Jeongin just rolled his eyes and started back on his food. The microwave pinged behind Changbin, so he took his coffee which had finished dripping out of the machine, and brought everything to the table, taking Minho’s usual seat opposite Jeongin.
Minho’s seat opposite Jeongin. Another thing he’d never really thought about but which he’d become very aware of in the past few weeks, with the knowledge of Minho’s feelings for Jeongin. The arrangement had not been done for that reason — Minho had taken this seat because of its proximity to Chan, Changbin knew — but it was another example of the ways in which Minho and Jeongin seemed to be— connected, perhaps was the word Changbin would have to use.
He hadn’t spoken to Jeongin about the night he had met him and Minho on the stairs. He wanted to, desperately, but every time he thought about bringing it up, he remembered Seungmin’s voice in his head, the angry, frustrated way he had said, Minho-hyung and Jeongin have a right to privacy in their personal affairs. Just like he and Seungmin had had all this time. Just like they all deserved.
Besides, Seungmin was right. Minho would not harm a hair on Jeongin’s head. He’d known that, he had, but it had gotten lost amongst all the noise. The things that concerned him about a potential relationship between Minho and Jeongin — Minho’s intensity, his fierce protection of his privacy and space, his sheer wealth of experience against Jeongin’s naivety — none of them mattered in the face of that knowledge.
He softens himself for Jeongin. Well, then let Changbin trust in that. Trust that it would be enough, in the end, for everything to not blow up in their faces. Trust that he could keep himself gentle enough that Jeongin would not get hurt.
In any case, he was certain now that Jeongin had been telling the truth about what happened that night on the third floor, as wild as it seemed for Minho to have cried in front of him. Their relationship had not changed, and Changbin, well-versed in a secret relationship by this stage, knew that Jeongin, at the very least, would not be able to hide it enough. He was not that good of an actor.
There was the sound of a door opened down in the hallway, the shuffling of feet; a familiar sound. “Good morning, Hyunjin,” called Changbin brightly, leaning back in his seat to project his voice.
“Mrhgh,” said Hyunjin’s voice, and then there was the slam of the bathroom door.
Changbin turned back to the table and caught Jeongin’s eye, and then Jeongin giggled a little before he got to his feet holding his cleaned out bowl. Once or twice, back before they’d even moved to the old apartment, when Chan and Jeongin were still living in that awful one room, they’d caught Jeongin licking the plate after he’d finished the food they’d made or brought to him. Changbin was glad that that habit had stopped, for many, many reasons.
“Jeongin-ah,” Changbin said, before Jeongin could leave the table to wash up. “You know that you can talk to me about anything, right? Anything at all.”
Jeongin blinked at him again. For a moment he just looked surprised but then that expression flickered. Was it Changbin’s imagination that he seemed to get closed off? Maybe. Perhaps it was his imagination too that told him that Jeongin knew exactly what Changbin was trying to get at. For all that Jeongin’s face seemed less animated all of a sudden, his eyes were just as warm as he looked at Changbin.
“I know that, hyung,” he said, and his voice was soft.
“Anything at all,” Changbin said. Jeongin got it but he didn’t get it. How Changbin hated the idea that Jeongin had kept this secret from him, from them all, it seemed, since Seungmin had only realised the truth of it after he’d found out Minho’s secret first. How long had this been true, how long had Jeongin felt this way, while Changbin had no idea? “I just— I wanted you to know that.”
Jeongin nodded. “I do know that,” he said. “I know I can talk to you about anything I want.”
Changbin nodded back. The wording, he thought, had been deliberate; Jeongin would talk to him only if he wanted to. And Jeongin was stubborn, stubborn as a mule, so Changbin would not convince him otherwise, so this would have to be enough.
“Thank you, hyung,” Jeongin added, and then he smiled at Changbin, the kind of smile that Changbin thought only Jeongin could do: full force, the kind of smile that made anyone who saw it want to smile back, instinctively and full of care. How sweet their Jeongin was, how full of love he was in his way. What they wouldn’t all do to protect him.
“Go and get sorted out,” Changbin told him, as they heard the shower turn on down the hallway. “Maybe take a nap later, hmm? It’ll be a late night.”
Jeongin rolled his eyes again at him. “I’m not a child,” he said.
No, Changbin thought, as he watched Jeongin carry his bowl to the sink and start cleaning it. You’re not, and that’s the whole problem.
——
The workroom was not as— loud as it had been, the night Felix had gone on the heist to the hotel, the night he had finally snapped under his desire for Chan. Perhaps it was the nature of the job they were pulling for the night, perhaps instead it was just that Hyunjin and Jisung weren’t downstairs yet, and they could be loud in their respective ways. But there was a kind of atmosphere over the top of them all, like a thin blanket muffling sound a little.
Perhaps it was just that Seungmin was so obviously grumpy about having to leave not only his workshop, but also the building, that it was permeating through the room like a fog. Despite the fact that he was not going to be leaving the van, really, he was dressed more completely than Felix had ever seen before; he hadn’t even been aware that Seungmin owned a pair of jeans.
“Are you going somewhere special?” Changbin had asked, after he’d come into the room and saw Seungmin standing by the workbench, next to Felix on a stool, tall and skinny in his jeans and hoodie, a laptop open in front of them.
“My mother taught me to dress well when I left the house so I wouldn’t be embarrassed if I got into an accident,” Seungmin had said. He’d nudged Felix a little, just gently out of the way, and put the laptop to sleep before closing the lid.
“I thought that rule was about underwear,” Changbin had said, as he took a seat at the table too, next to Jeongin, who had been stuck in something of a movement loop, where he kept raising a hand up to his face and then lowering it to tap out a rhythm on the table instead. “Like, you should wear your best underwear for if they have to cut you out of your clothes. Did she teach you that one too?”
“I’m sure you’d love to know, hyung,” Seungmin had said dryly, and then gave Changbin the laptop and told him to make himself useful and go put it in the van. Changbin had disappeared out the back and then come back and they were still waiting for Hyunjin and Jisung to appear.
Felix had migrated from the table to the couch, driven there mostly by the way Minho had been pacing the workroom behind him. He knew that Minho wasn’t doing it on purpose, not to intimidate Felix — he’d paced a little behind Jeongin too, clearly just antsy about what they were about to do — but Felix hadn’t liked it all the same, the feeling of Minho prowling behind him. It had made him so anxious that his hands had started shaking and so he’d moved here, where he could see the entire room at once. Where nobody could be behind him.
He watched them all: Chan talking to Jeongin quietly, his eyes flicking to Felix every so often, almost like it was unconscious on his part; Changbin watching Minho pace, looking a little amused by it, his own posture loose and relaxed; and Seungmin, at his computers, stabbing at his keyboard a little harder than was probably necessary. Other than Chan’s quick little glances, nobody was paying attention to Felix.
That was nice, that felt good. Nice to be invisible, finally, after the past week or so. To be someone who could fade into the background again, a fixture in the room, like wallpaper or something like that. Nobody was interested in what he was doing, so he pulled the blanket Seungmin had left on the couch over his knees and slumped a little into the corner of the armrest.
“Oh, here’s Hyunjin,” said Seungmin, and sure enough a moment later there was a clatter of footsteps in the hallway and the door was pushed open and Hyunjin stepped inside, his shoes clicking on the concrete floor.
All of the noise in the room dropped in an instant. There was a silence so complete that a person a mile away could hear the pin drop as they all stared at Hyunjin in that doorway. Even Minho had stopped moving to look at him, and Changbin’s mouth had fully dropped open.
“Wow,” said Felix, breathing it out a little. “You really are beautiful, Hyunjin.”
They knew that already, of course they knew that. Felix had even said so, just last week, when Hyunjin had first dyed his hair. But like this, it was— beyond anything Felix had seen from him before. He was dressed in the suit that he and Changbin had gone to the Lotte to buy, the two of them posing like rich young things as they browsed the luxury clothing floor, buying what they needed on Chan’s credit card.
One of the sales assistants in Louis Vuitton gushed about my handsome boyfriend, Hyunjin had said to Felix after the trip, looking grossed out. Never been so offended.
Felix hadn’t seen the final get up until now, as Hyunjin stood there looking back at them. He was wearing a burgundy blazer, a deep colour that matched his skin tone well, with a silky shirt underneath, that looked like it would feel wonderful to touch, never mind wear. It was a shade of almost-black, and Hyunjin had left the first couple of buttons undone, so that it gaped just slightly to below his collarbones, revealing a flash of pale, smooth skin every time he moved.
The pants that they’d matched the blazer with were a couple shades darker, a clever choice, Felix thought, because it broke the colour up a bit, so that Hyunjin didn’t just look like a long streak of burgundy. There were a pair of oxfords on his feet, black and shiny, and obviously expensive at a first glance. Everything was obviously expensive, and Hyunjin wore it like he was made for it, like he had been wearing things like this his entire life. With his dark hair slicked back just a little bit off his face, he was so handsome that it was almost painful to look at him.
He looked otherworldly. Not a creature of flesh and blood like the rest of them but something different, something— more.
He looked between them all, the way everyone was simply staring, and then blushed hotly, lifting his hands to cover up his face. “Don’t look at me like that!” he whined. “Stop looking at me!”
Seungmin snorted, and the spell over them all broke. Jeongin started to laugh a little as Hyunjin peered at them through his spread fingers, the blush visible all down his neck now. “What’s wrong?” Jeongin asked teasingly. “I thought you liked it when people looked at you.”
“Shut up, you brat,” Hyunjin told him. He let his hands drop away from his face but he was still blushing furiously, which, while diminishing that not-human sense of awe he had inspired, did not actually affect how beautiful he looked. He just looked human, now, and even more so when he stomped his way to the couch; there was absolutely nothing elegant about that stomp.
“I’m glad the suit ended up being worth it,” Changbin said, as Hyunjin threw himself down into the space next to Felix, looking entirely like a grumpy child, albeit one dressed incredibly well. “I could not believe how much just the jacket cost.”
“That’s just how much good clothing costs,” Hyunjin said, very snottily. “You wouldn’t know, hyung.”
“Yeah, well,” said Chan, as he stood up from his stool to go over to Seungmin at his computer. “My credit card bill sure fucking knows, now.”
Felix smiled, and put the edge of his blanket over Hyunjin’s legs, who just huffed under his breath at the comment without looking at Chan. Even that was a decided improvement over the start of the week, although it was still— bad. Hyunjin, being Hyunjin, was making his ongoing displeasure very well known, and making it everyone else’s problem to work around too. Outside of legitimate work related things, Hyunjin had been maintaining a very chilly level of silence. He had even, once or twice, acted like of course Felix would be coming to sleep in his own room with him, tugging on Felix’s arm gently until Felix would kiss his cheek and then untangle them so he could go sleep in Chan’s room, Chan’s bed.
Felix got it, he did. If there was anything he understood about this whole mess, it was Hyunjin’s feelings, his anger, his sense of betrayal. In some ways, he felt like Hyunjin had more of a claim to those emotions than Felix did himself, although he knew Hyunjin didn’t see it that way; Hyunjin was clinging to this in part because he felt like Felix had let it all go too quickly.
Felix knew he would have to talk to him about it. If nothing else, he was growing sick of being the one in the middle. Chan seemed to be taking a wait and see approach, which Felix got the sense had worked in the past, for lesser offences. Felix had the vague understanding that this was how they’d always dealt with things, when there were arguments and disagreements: brush it under the rug, let things settle naturally, because they all spent so much time together, living in each other’s pockets, that any ruffled feathers were smoothed over eventually.
He’d never had something like that before. He thought maybe that was how things could work for a family; he had no useful experience there. But he knew, too, that it wasn’t going to work in this situation. Hyunjin was being too stubborn about it, too determined to hold onto this. And so Felix would probably have to talk to him about it at some point.
Not right now. He could put that little nightmare task off for a little bit longer.
He took Hyunjin’s hand and threaded their fingers together, taking pleasure in the warmth of it. Hyunjin looked away from where he’d been squinting at Seungmin setting up another laptop on the workbench and then back at him. “What?” he asked.
Felix shrugged. “Nothing,” he said.
Hyunjin squinted at him now, just for a brief few moments. Then he stuck his other arm in Felix’s face and said, “Here, feel this, isn’t it so nice?”
Felix felt first the sleeve of the jacket, which did feel nice, and then the sleeve of the shirt underneath, which felt amazing, exactly as good as he’d thought it would. It was so endearing, to sit here on the couch, next to Hyunjin looking so handsome like this, whilst at the same time Hyunjin could not stop stroking his own arm because he liked the feeling of the material, or shifting his feet because the shoes were pinching him a little bit.
There was the sound of other footsteps outside the door, and they all looked up just as Jisung came into the room. Hyunjin’s hand squeezed Felix’s hard for a moment, almost like a spasm. Felix didn’t blame him.
Jisung saw them all looking at him, and after a moment of looking back, he grinned and struck a little pose. He, too, was wearing a suit, a black one, and while it was clearly not as expensive as Hyunjin’s, it still looked like it had cost money, and it was cut perfectly to his measurements. If Felix hadn’t known better, he’d have wondered if Jisung’s jacket had shoulder pads, his shoulders appeared so broad compared to where the garment tapered down to his waist.
He was wearing it with a crisp white shirt and a thin black tie, the perfect image of a bodyguard. He’d slicked his hair back too, the way he had worn it for their trip to Maniac, but the effect felt so different. At Maniac, it had made him look young, stylish. With this suit on, he looked a little dangerous in a way that Felix would not have previously thought Jisung was capable of looking.
He also looked incredibly handsome. The way Hyunjin had gone very stiff was very understandable, in Felix’s opinion.
Changbin wolf-whistled at him, the sound loud enough that it almost echoed in the room. “Who is that handsome fella!” he crowed, as Seungmin picked up a screwdriver from the table and threatened to throw it at him for making so much noise.
Jisung grinned and came further into the room, blowing Changbin a theatrical kiss as he did so. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I’ll be signing autographs at three.” Which was when he saw Hyunjin and promptly walked into the corner of the worktable.
Felix had to bite the inside of his mouth to stop himself from snorting. It was obviously what had happened; everyone had seen it. Everyone had heard it, the thud of Jisung smacked into the table and almost bouncing back off. It must have hurt — Felix would have placed money on there being a bruise — but Jisung didn’t seem to have noticed at all. He just stood there, his mouth dropped open as he looked at Hyunjin, a hand absently rubbing at his hip.
Felix slid his eyes across to Hyunjin. Hyunjin was simply looking back at Jisung, without moving. His ears, showing with his hair slicked back, were red.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, the amusement bright in his voice, “are you okay?”
“Huh?” asked Jisung. Then he seemed to catch himself, startling and jerking his head away from looking at Hyunjin to look at Jeongin. Where Hyunjin’s ears were red, Jisung’s entire face had flared with colour. “Um, yeah, Jeongin, I’m fine. No damage done!”
It was weird, to Felix, the way in which nobody commented further. Nobody teased, nobody brought it up. He was kind of used to it, by now, but part of him would have expected it. There’d certainly been a lot of teasing of Chan, even before he and Felix got together; once they had, the teasing had been almost gleeful. But with Jisung, and his obvious, glaring feelings for Hyunjin, nobody said a word.
Hyunjin’s eyes were still fixed on Jisung, who had finally moved away to the table and over to Changbin, who was holding his holster for him to take. Felix pinched Hyunjin’s thigh, not too hard but certainly hard enough to get Hyunjin’s attention. Hyunjin jumped and stifled a noise, before he turned to glare at Felix.
“He was going to notice if you kept looking at him like that,” Felix murmured, before Hyunjin could say anything to him. Hyunjin scowled at him for a few seconds longer and then slumped a little into Felix.
“Shut up,” he muttered.
“Not that I blame you,” Felix said, still in a low undertone, only for Hyunjin’s ears. “His waist is so tiny? It’s even smaller than mine is.”
“Shut up!” said Hyunjin, a little louder. “I know! I am so fucking aware of that.”
“I’m just saying,” Felix said, trying to keep the grin off his face. “I’m a taken man but, you know, if I weren’t spoken for—”
He waggled his eyebrows at Hyunjin. Hyunjin blinked at him for a moment and then burst into shocked but delighted laughter, throwing his head back hard enough that he hit it off the wall behind them. The thunk of it hitting seemed to make him laugh harder, and it set Felix off too, slumping into giggles even as his hand came up to cup gently around the back of Hyunjin’s head to check he was okay.
Felix looked up around the room, to see if anyone had noticed the sound, surprised just a bit that Changbin hadn’t flown over to check up on Hyunjin, but he was discussing something with Minho in a low voice, pointing at something that Seungmin was showing them on a screen. Chan was looking over, though, watching the two of them laugh together with a look on his face that made Felix squirm in his seat. Too soft, too sweet, too much; their eyes met and snagged and then Felix had to be the one to look away, for fear that he might do something a little reckless. For fear that he might jump up off this couch and throw himself across the room and beg to be held again.
Jisung was looking at them too. Felix had no idea what expression he would have thought to see on Jisung’s face — awe, perhaps, something like the way he had looked when he’d first seen Hyunjin — but he was instead watching them with a look that Felix found utterly unreadable. No, Felix realised, some of the laughter dying in his chest, he was not watching them, he was watching Hyunjin, and what little Felix could parse of that expression was just— bleak. It reminded Felix of the way Jisung had looked at the end of the night at Maniac, in the parking lot, shivering as Hyunjin laid into him about being cold.
Then Jisung’s eyes shifted a little and they caught Felix’s, and the smile was back, Jisung grinning at Felix before giving him a quick wink and turning to listen to what Changbin was now saying to him. The quick shift, the sheer depth of difference in the two emotions, left Felix feeling unsettled, not sure how to react. His hand was still cupped against Hyunjin’s head. Hyunjin was still laughing just a bit, weak as he let his head rest in Felix’s careful hold.
What a mess, Felix thought, but he didn’t know how to fix any of what was happening with Hyunjin and Jisung without very purposefully stepping over Hyunjin’s boundaries, so he wasn’t going to do that. He had pushed enough, and it seemed like the soft approach was serving better anyway.
“Okay,” said Minho, his voice cutting through any other chatter in the room. He sounded grim, but it was hard to tell if it was because there was something to be grim about or if he was just being Minho. “I think it’s time that we headed out.”
“Right,” said Chan. “Changbin, can you get the van started?”
Changbin left the room, and after a moment, Minho followed him. That seemed to start the mass exodus, Jeongin and Seungmin walking out together, Seungmin with another laptop in his arms, Jeongin chattering at him about some video game it seemed they were both interested in. Jisung slipped out next without a word. Hyunjin climbed to his feet, his shoes clacking a little on the floor with every step, and then turned and held his hands out to Felix.
Felix didn’t need his help, but he didn’t say that. He pushed the blanket to the side, put his hands in Hyunjin’s, and let Hyunjin tug him to his feet. Hyunjin ran a lot colder than Chan did, his fingers cold where they held Felix’s, but it was nice all the same. “Are you ready, angel?” Hyunjin asked quietly.
“Are you?” Felix asked, squeezing their hands together.
Hyunjin shrugged. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” he said.
Outside, Changbin had the van running, Minho in the passenger seat, his voice muffled as he said something. Jisung stood beside the rental car that they'd procured for him and Hyunjin, the driver’s seat door opened as he waited for them. Hyunjin, when he caught sight of Jisung waiting there for him, made a little clicking sound with his tongue that had Felix wanting to giggle all over again.
The outside door beeped shut behind them. “Good luck, Hyunjin,” said Chan’s voice. They both looked over their shoulders at him. He stood looking back, his hands in his pockets, smiling softly — smiling hopefully, Felix thought. Hyunjin, though, just narrowed his eyes back at him, and the smile flickered, and Chan added, “Text me when you two arrive.”
“Fine,” said Hyunjin. He let go of Felix’s hand in favour of flouncing his way to the rental car. Jisung watched him approach in that way Felix had noticed, sometimes, like he was trying to not be caught looking, or maybe even like he was trying to literally not look but couldn’t help it. Hyunjin climbed into the back seat, slamming the door shut after him. After a moment, Jisung followed suit in the front.
Felix felt a touch to his lower back and instinctively leaned into it, and felt Chan’s hand flatten and press a little harder. “Let’s go before Minho starts yelling at us,” Chan murmured to him, and then when Felix breathed out a laugh, Chan’s soft smile returned.
He began to guide Felix around the back of the van, as Jisung pulled the car out of the parking lot. Felix didn’t need that hand on his back to help him, but he absolutely was not going to complain about it; neither did he need the way Chan held his elbow as Felix climbed in the back of the open van, but Felix accepted it all the same. Seungmin had already taken his place, sitting on one of the little stools they had back here for him and Felix, and Felix had to squeeze around him to get to his designated seat, the one furthest from the door, tucked between the partition and Seungmin himself.
Chan took his place on the built in bench that they’d left free, and then Jeongin climbed in last — last one in because he was to be the first one out. He shut the door after himself, and then Changbin started up the engine, the floor vibrating to life under Felix’s rickety stool.
Blackbird’s was on the other side of the river from Chan’s base of operations, a wealthier, more-upscale district compared to the university area that Maniac was in. It wasn’t a long journey, but it was an odd feeling, to be in the back of this van, shut in with no windows, feeling nothing but the swaying of the vehicle as they drove. To be going somewhere and to not be able to see anything outside, a passenger with no vision.
That was good though, Felix thought. It meant he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of Blackbird’s itself, wouldn’t have to look out the window and see that gilded building that he’d spent so much awful time in.
Every time they went over a speed bump, or took a corner a little too sharply, Seungmin grumbled under his breath. The laptops and screens had been secured well enough but Seungmin still seemed nervous about it, or maybe he was just nervous about— the job, being out in the world. He was tense, his body a stiff line as they drove.
Felix looked over at where Chan and Jeongin were sitting on the bench, and caught Chan’s eye. He was looking back, had already been looking in Felix’s direction, which, while not overly surprising, still made some of Felix’s own tension ease out of him. He hadn’t realised just how tense he was until that moment.
Chan smiled at him, but before Felix could smile back, Jeongin said something and Chan turned his attention back to attend to him, their soft words lost under the sound of the van moving. Felix looked away too, to the computers set up in front of Seungmin, his own screen set up just in case they needed it. But mostly Felix’s role here today was simply to guide Seungmin through the system, teach him how he could get in, so that he could do it alone on the day of the job, while Felix focused on the vault.
In the reflective screens of the turned off laptops, he looked— smudged, tinged blue. Hyunjin had fussed this past week that he’d lost weight again, but Felix didn’t think that was true. He looked back at Chan, found him still talking to Jeongin, and just— watched him. The plushness of his mouth, the way his eyes creased as he smiled, the broad bones of his hands as he gestured with them.
When Chan looked up and caught him looking, Felix didn’t bother pretending like he hadn’t been, although he could feel the slight blush on his face. He just smiled, shyer than Chan’s earlier look. Chan so obviously melted at the look that Felix felt his mouth twitch with laughter. He wished they could be close enough that he could reach out and hold Chan’s hand.
The van bumped up onto the curb outside, a bouncing jolt that made Seungmin curse loudly, before it stopped completely. There was a rap of knuckles on the partition and then Changbin’s voice calling through the grate between them and the front seats, “Hyung, Jeongin, we’re here.”
“Okay,” said Chan. He looked at Jeongin, who was already moving to jump out of the back of the van. There was an air around Jeongin that was at once nervous and excited, and it was at odds with the way Chan was looking at him, like he felt slightly like he was sending a rabbit to meet a lion. Felix, for his part, knew that while Jeongin’s part was easy enough on paper, in reality Felix wasn’t sure he’d be brave enough to do it himself.
“Jeongin,” said Chan, as Jeongin pushed open the door, letting the cold night air rush in, replacing the slightly moist air that had developed in the back of the van, too many bodies sitting together. “Good luck, be careful.”
“I will, hyung,” said Jeongin. He sounded serious, looked serious; he looked, in that moment with the lights on the street outside backlit against him, like the grown-up that Felix knew Jeongin was always trying to get the others to see him as. And then the moment broke; he hopped out of the van and slammed the doors after him.
A pause, before Chan sighed, a barely there noise, and then the van lurched back off the curb and headed to their final destination.
——
It had crossed properly from autumn to winter, and was correspondingly cold. Jeongin was not used to temperatures like this, he hardly ever went outside anyway, and certainly wasn’t in the habit of waiting around, stagnant, as his ears steadily began to sting. His breath was faintly visibly as he exhaled, catching the light of the streetlamps. At least it wasn’t snowing, but it had done so a few nights ago — small, half-melted piles of snow sat in the gutters, gone from the streets and sidewalks by this point. It would get colder still, and then the snow would begin to actually stick.
Jeongin shoved his fingers into the pockets of his padded vest; he hadn’t wanted to wear an entire puffy coat, as it would hinder his movement if something went awry and he needed to defend himself. But the hoodie under the vest was not really cutting it in the cold night air. He wished he’d worn an extra layer. Or a scarf, he grumpily thought, as a breeze picked up and chilled the nape of his neck.
I really am a baby, he thought, vaguely mutinous about it. He leaned up against the glass wall of the convenience store they’d dropped him off in front of, trying to shelter a little from the wind. They needed time to park the van, and for Seungmin and Felix to begin— whatever it was they needed to do. In the meantime, Jeongin just had to hope he didn’t get shooed off for loitering. He kind of wanted to wait inside the convenience store, buy a chocolate bar. But he didn’t move.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. He drew it out and saw a single text message from Chan, who was in Jeongin’s phone as a wolf emoji and nothing more. Go, it simply said.
No admonishments to be careful, or reminders of his task, which was well enough, because Jeongin had heard enough of that from both Chan and Minho and Changbin and even Jisung in the days leading up to this. He pocketed his phone and pushed off from the wall, sauntering at an easy pace the one and half blocks to Blackbird’s, thrumming with— not excitement, but not nerves either. He had to count, to make sure his pace remained steady.
They had left him down a smaller side street, two lanes, so that when he reached Blackbird’s, it was the back of the building he approached, three stories high and oddly monotonous in appearance from this side. Quieter here but not totally silent, other businesses, restaurants mostly, lit up and filled with people. Many places out here were open, if not for 24 hours, but at least through the night. The perils of being next door to one of the more popular casinos in the city.
Jeongin tried to catalogue as much as he could. There was a back exit out of the casino, and beside it there were flimsy plastic chairs, upturned buckets acting as footrests or tables. Three casino employees were there, looking cold in their uniforms as they smoked. Two waiters, perhaps, and one bulkier guy who looked more like some kind of security. Other people milled on the street in small groups, mostly men, and from there also mostly middle aged. Business men types. Jeongin hadn’t expected to stand out as much as he did.
He slipped around the side of the casino, and no one seemed to really note his passing, not even the casino employees. The trick to not looking suspicious is to not be suspicious, Hyunjin had said, and then huffed when Jeongin stared blankly back at him because that was unhelpful advice if he’d ever heard it. I mean, Hyunjin tried again, if you look skittish and like you’re doing something wrong, people will notice. If you just hold your head up and act like you’re supposed to be there, you blend in much better even if there’s something about your appearance that doesn’t fit.
Jeongin straightened his posture, but at this point there was no one there to see it. Except the CCTV, he supposed, and who knew who would look at that later. Seungmin and the others were likely watching him right now, trying to pick him out of a mess of pixels. It was terribly dark back here, no lights at all, Jeongin using the overflow from the streets to see by.
He was glad to find this alleyway empty, just wide enough for a car to fit through. More snow piled in the corners here, a little dirty, cigarette stubs and other small litter peppered around. Around the scent of winter, crisp and damp, the smell of cigarette smoke lingered even here.
About midway between the back street and the main street in front, Blackbird’s had a side door. Judging from the smell and trash, this was another place employees took their breaks. It was quiet here, but in a muffled way; voices floated over, the sound of cars rushing past, the sort of dull cacophony of the casino itself bleeding through the walls.
Jeongin wished he had some kind of in-ear, but they’d worried about him getting caught, and having a wire would immediately tip anyone off that Jeongin was more than what he appeared. That didn’t stop the small, unsure part of him that really just wanted to hear Minho’s voice right now, saying, Alright, baby boy, go ahead. Because he didn’t know if this was going to work, he didn’t know who was on the other side of the door. He supposed if things weren’t going to plan, the others would be buzzing his phone with carefully coded messages, and as of now it was silent.
The side door was metal, flanked in windows that had wrought iron bars across them for security. The upper level windows were free of such security measures, but down here on the ground floor they clearly weren’t being charitable in their estimations of the local clientele. On the door was a keypad, wired in to the main security system. It was closed, latched. Now or never, while the coast was clear.
Jeongin grabbed the handle, waited, and then the keypad’s buttons lit up blue without him having to touch it. After another beat the door chimed, the lock sliding back audibly, and Jeongin turned the knob and pulled the door open.
Warm air rushed over him, and light, white and utilitarian, from the prim, laminated hallway beyond. Jeongin blinked, eyes struggling to adjust after the darkness of the alley.
That was it. Jeongin let out a shaky sigh, still holding the door handle. That was the extent of his duties tonight. They’d needed to make sure, before sending Hyunjin and Jisung in, that in an emergency Seungmin and Felix could actually remotely lock or unlock the doors. Felix had said it should be doable, but Minho hadn’t wanted to test a should in the heat of a problem. Better to test it before.
Jeongin was supposed to let go now, let the door swing shut, and continue along the alleyway out into the main street and make his way to where the van was waiting. That was what he was supposed to do.
He paused. What if they check the security footage later, he wondered. Wouldn’t that be really strange, to see a young man go up to the door, open it, and then just walk away? He hadn’t thought of that before, but standing here, now, with the bright hallway light spilling across him like a spotlight, it seemed very worrisome indeed. The whole reason they’d picked him for this part of the job was out of concern for the security footage; Changbin or Minho or any of the others risked being recognised, it had needed to be Jeongin.
There was a camera at the end of the hall, above another door, a little black dome staring at him.
Jeongin stepped over the threshold, his phone immediately buzzing in his pocket as he did. He ignored it, let the door swing slowly shut behind him, cutting off the cold air. It chimed again as it automatically locked.
Now what, he wondered. There was another hallway branching off to the left, in addition to the door at the end, and another door to his right. The sounds coming from the direction of the hallway were decidedly— kitchenish, he thought. The clinking of dishes and cutlery. There was a small in-house restaurant that served mostly small morsels, in addition to the two bars on each floor. Marching into the kitchen was not an option. But he didn't know what lay beyond these other doors. He should have studied the blueprints.
His phone had not stopped buzzing; it had been the rhythmic buzzing of a phone call, and now it was the incessant bzzt bzzt of texts arriving one after the other.
Behind him the door chimed again. Jeongin turned, thinking it must be Seungmin unlocking it remotely, a pointed instruction to leave. But then the door was being pulled open, and the security guard Jeongin had seen round the back of the building was stepping through. He smelled thickly of smoke, unpleasant, and he stopped short as he caught sight of Jeongin, blinking.
Jeongin could not fight him. It would be stupid to try. To his understanding the guards here were all armed, and Jeongin was very much not. The man also was significantly taller than him, broader too.
He didn’t panic, there was no fear. The problem was, there wasn’t anything else either, Jeongin’s brain just a stifled mush of static as he and the guard stared at one another. He knew he probably looked— caught out. Maybe he could work with that.
“You— you do not work here,” the guard said, his blank surprised melting off and turning to hostile suspicion. He came forward fast, like he thought Jeongin was going to skitter away, and in a flash his hand had lashed out and grabbed Jeongin’s hood, wrapping it around his hand and making the collar of the hoodie pull tight to Jeongin’s neck. Jeongin didn’t fight it, let the man reel him in roughly, though it was hard to deny the urge to squirm away. His heart was going at a strong gallop, he could feel his blood rushing through him. “How’d you get in?”
“I— the door was unlatched,” Jeongin said, holding his hands curled up against his chest, like a kitten that had been caught by the scruff. He made his voice small, a little shaky, eyes big. He wanted to look— young, and as nonthreatening as possible. “I wanted to— play the slot machines.”
The guard squinted at him, not letting him go. Jeongin tried to swallow against the hoodie pressing into his throat. “This isn’t the front door,” the guard said, his tone still gruff but with less hostility. “Are you even old enough to be here?”
“Yes,” Jeongin lied, because he figured a youth who’d been caught trying to sneak into a casino would say that. He made sure his delivery was obviously false.
The guard made a disbelieving noise. He yanked Jeongin back toward the door— the door outside, thankfully. “Try sneaking in again, and I’ll break your nose,” he said, wrenching the door open and shoving Jeongin through it hard. Jeongin genuinely lost his balance, sprawling across the pavement; he tried to catch himself but his palm slid and scraped on the ground, his elbow and hip taking a lot of the fall.
The door was closing again, taking the light with it, and as it went he heard the guard shout, “Who the fuck didn’t latch the door properly—” before it shut and blocked out most of the sound.
Jeongin breathed, found he was shaking. He pushed himself into a sitting position, rubbing his hands together a little to get the small rocks and particles off his palm. It was too dark to see now, after the brightness of the hallway, but he’d be surprised if he wasn’t bleeding.
His phone had fallen silent and still. Jeongin got to his feet, a little sore, but not truly harmed. He was able to walk in a normal gait through the alley and out onto the main street. The wind was harsh out here, where it had the space to sweep through, and Jeongin let the sting of his ears distract from the stinging of his palm, his likely skinned elbow in his hoodie.
The van was parked four blocks away, in a narrowish alleyway just at the fringes of what their signal allowed. Things were a little quieter here, more of the restaurants closed, bakeries with darkened windows. On the second and third floors there was a gym, a dentist’s office. Everything shut for the night. A carefully picked location where no one would see them.
The back doors of the van opened as Jeongin approached, flung open by Minho, an irate expression across his face. “Get in here,” he growled, hauling Jeongin into the van by his upper arms, hands fisted in the loose material of his hoodie. Once all of Jeongin’s limbs were inside Minho shut the doors again.
Already Chan’s hands were on him — really Jeongin had been deposited practically into Chan’s lap. The van wasn’t exactly spacious with so many people and all the equipment in it.
“Are you okay?” Chan was asking, brow crumpled in consternation.
Minho loomed over him; Jeongin must have taken his spot on the narrow bench, so now all Minho could do was stand, hunched over to accommodate the low roof of the van. Closer to the front, there was a plank of wood acting as a desk, and Felix and Seungmin both sat in front of it, their faces illuminated by the glowing monitors. They were on a pair of spindly, short stools that Jeongin thought were normally used as stepping stools, rather than things to sit on. The bench he and Chan were currently occupying was another piece of wood, barely long enough to seat the two of them.
“Yeah,” Jeongin said in answer to Chan’s query, a little breathy, not realising how tight his chest had been all along that walk back. He felt like he could finally breathe, though the inside of the van was warm and a little humid. “I’m okay.”
“What were you thinking,” Minho snapped. “That was so stupid.” He braced a hand beside Jeongin’s head, probably having trouble with how far he was having to bend. With his other hand he snatched Jeongin’s wrist, holding his palm up to the lights.
Jeongin’s palm wasn’t too bad, a few scrapes, a couple small flaps of loose skin. He’d gotten worse on the playground as a child. There was grit in the cuts though, ugly and mixing with the droplets of blood.
Minho made a low noise in his chest. “I’m going to kill that man.”
Jeongin’s heart was beginning to pound again. He wrestled his hand back, pulling it into the sleeve of his hoodie. “I’m fine,” he said, as Minho’s intense gaze moved up to his face, eyes glittery.
“Minho, calm down,” Chan said, already sounding tired. Then he looked at Jeongin, their faces close, shoulders and arms pressed together. Quietly, he said, “You disobeyed.” It was a very gentle reprimand. “You were not supposed to go inside.”
Jeongin deflated a bit. He thought maybe he should be more annoyed at the— verbal wrist slap, so to speak, and certainly more embarrassed at receiving it here like this. But the adrenaline was washing out of him and he mostly felt drained and maybe even a little latently anxious. “I just— I thought it would look more suspicious if I just opened the door and walked away? Like wouldn’t that be more weird than a dumb kid trying to sneak in?” he said.
The corners of Chan’s lips went tight. “Maybe,” he said, “but that wasn’t your call to make on your own.”
“Yeah, give us a warning next time!” Changbin called back from his position all the way up in the driver’s seat. “That way we know to bring a straight jacket for Minho-hyung!”
Minho huffed out a breath and moved away, knocking against Chan’s knees as he went to instead kneel between Seungmin and Felix, one hand braced on each of their stools. The lights of the screens cast his scars into sharp relief.
“We thought we might have to stage a rescue,” Chan explained tightly and Jeongin blushed. He’d had the flickering thought, as that guard had held him, that at any moment Minho might burst in and make a mess and then they’d have to abandon the job. That would have been awful.
Out of the corner of his mouth, Seungmin muttered, “Understatement.”
Felix leaned back, peering around Seungmin and Minho to look at Jeongin and Chan. “It should be fine,” he said in his deep voice. Jeongin wasn’t sure who he was trying to reassure. “They’ll fob the blame off on one of the kitchen staff probably, I imagine there have been instances in the past where someone left something unlatched.”
“Yeah,” Chan sighed out, running a hand through his hair, which already looked like he’d been rubbing at it with a wool sweater. “It worked out okay, thankfully. I think we’re ready to give Jisung and Hyunjin the go.”
Seungmin typed quickly on his keyboard, sending a message to Jisung, waiting in their fancy rental car several blocks away. Like Jeongin, neither Jisung nor Hyunjin could wear a wire tonight. Too risky.
Chan picked Jeongin’s hand up, a little more gentle than Minho had done. But unlike Minho, Chan pushed the sleeve of Jeongin’s hoodie up, and up, until his forearm and elbow were exposed. Long scrapes ran down the side of his forearm, and his elbow was properly skinned, more blood than Jeongin would have expected, enough that it had smeared and dripped a little. Jeongin blinked, and Chan sighed again.
“Jeongin-ah,” he said, sad with it. “We don’t have a first aid kit with us.”
“I’ll clean it when I get home,” Jeongin said in a small voice. Beyond Chan, Minho was looking over at him, eyes settled on Jeongin’s messy elbow, stiff and alert like a creature in the woods that had scented blood on the wind.
“They’re moving,” Seungmin said, eyes trained on the monitors. He clicked around — switching CCTVs, keeping track as the car made its way toward the casino.
Chan let Jeongin go, leaning forward to also watch the monitors; Jeongin was fine, and so the job would roll on. At least it stopped the fussing.
Minho was still staring at him. He did not look any different from usual, and yet there was a decidedly ruffled quality to him. Sorry, Jeongin mouthed at him, tugging his hoodie sleeve back down to cover his arm.
Minho’s face quickly went from fierce to— something Jeongin didn’t have words for, an aching softness, that let Jeongin know he’d been forgiven before he even had to ask. Then Minho was shaking his head, as if trying to clear it, and he turned fully back to the monitors.
Repressing a sigh, Jeongin scoot forward and over as best he could, gaze fixing on the grainy pixels that depicted the front of the casino, and the car with his friends in it that had just come into view.
——
Jisung pulled the car up to the front of Blackbird’s and stopped where there was the sign for the valet parking. The car in front of them, slowly being rolled off to the parking garage to the side of the casino, was a Lamborghini. Jisung got the sense that it wasn’t rented like their car was.
He didn’t get out right away, although a man in a dark suit had stepped up to the driver’s window expectantly. Instead he looked in the rearview mirror, at where Hyunjin was sitting, one leg crossed over the other, his fingers tapping a little on his knee. When their eyes met in the mirror, it was almost painful for Jisung.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Hyunjin had been frowning a little bit. It was perhaps the most nervous Jisung had ever seen him on a job, but that made sense, because Hyunjin’s role on jobs did not usually include this. Hyunjin was the quiet footsteps in the dark, the shadow slipping in through an open window so fast that you questioned if you’d seen anything. He did not do undercover work, and he certainly did not usually go sauntering in the gilded front doors of the place they were planning to plunder in a few weeks.
Jisung’s question, though, seemed to have knocked him out of it. His face smoothed out completely. “Yes,” he said, a touch of scorn in his voice, as if to say, how could you ask me that. It made Jisung smile to hear it, so familiar at this point. Reassuring, in a way, to hear that Hyunjin had his game head on.
He got out of the car and stepped onto the pavement, brightly lit by a mix of the streetlamps and the lights glaring from the front of Blackbird’s. The valet murmured a welcome to him, which Jisung forced himself to ignore, and instead he went to the passenger side to pull the back door open for Hyunjin, just stopping himself from adding an over the top flourish to it. Just like Hyunjin, he was playing a role tonight too.
When Hyunjin stepped out, there was absolutely no trace of that nervous man in the backseat, or the quiet boy that Jisung had watched sketch silently for hours in the living room, which he sometimes thought was the truest version of Hyunjin. Instead, the Hyunjin who stepped out of the car was head to toe the perfect image of a rich brat, his head held high in the air, the suit hanging off him like he had been born to wear it. Like he wore that kind of thing all the time, a perfectly ordinary thing to don, and not at all like he’d been in sweatpants a few hours earlier that Jisung knew cost ten thousand won because he’d seen them in streetside stores in the student district before.
He didn’t look at the valet climbing into the car. He didn’t look at Jisung, standing next to him, who had his hands held in front of him vaguely in the style of bodyguards that he’d seen around. Instead, Hyunjin looked up at the front facade of Blackbirds, silent for a few seconds, and then he sneered a little.
Jisung understood the sentiment. At first glance, Jisung would have thought that Blackbird’s was a hotel, albeit a very small one — only three storeys, after all, but it had that look about it, the one that was rife in this area of the city, where things built within the last twenty years were designed to look like they had been standing here for decades longer, a fake history to go with the sense of luxury they endeavoured to portray. Probably most of them were luxurious; Jisung wouldn’t know, because he’d never been into such places. It was still hard sometimes to believe he could afford to.
Even so, Blackbird’s stood out amongst the buildings beside it — one of which was the parking garage, and on the other side was a fairly regular looking office building, the one from which Jisung and Hyunjin would make their way over during the job. It was about the size of Maniac, or perhaps a little smaller; it was hard to tell when the buildings were such different shapes. The first two floors of Blackbird’s were bigger than the third, jutting out like an underbite, with windows running the length of the second floor. These were panelled in gold; the huge double-doors at the front of the building guarded by two burly men in suits were panelled in gold; the name in cursive above the door, the lettering huge and unmissable, was in gold. It was a little too much.
Hyunjin pursed his lips for a moment and then glanced at Jisung. “Come on then,” he said, already starting forward.
Jisung followed after him. Despite how fast Hyunjin had moved, Jisung managed to keep up, shadowing him closely as Hyunjin sauntered to the front doors where the door staff were waiting. Unlike Maniac, there wasn’t a line of people waiting to get into Blackbird’s, which either had something to do with the time of the night or perhaps just the clientele that frequented this place. Probably the latter, because when Hyunjin got to the doors and the guard asked for his ID, he was exceedingly polite about it.
Hyunjin reached into his jacket and handed over the resident card that Seungmin had created for him, one with a picture of his new hair and a completely fake name. It had been something of a rush job, something Seungmin had complained mildly about, but in that way he had sometimes where it was like he was complaining just to make sure he got his weekly hours in. Jisung handed his own fake ID over, one of many he had on rotation at this point. This one aged him up two years more than Hyunjin, and he’d thought, for a moment in the car, of making Hyunjin call him hyung. Then he’d dismissed the thought hurriedly.
The guards barely glanced at the IDs longer than it took to confirm they were old enough to enter, and then waved them through. Hyunjin took his card back with a little toss of his head, his body language making it clear that even the few seconds that had taken was longer than he’d liked to be held up, and strode through the front doors in a purposeful, confident way.
Jisung’s first impression of Blackbird’s on the inside was simply: loud. He’d never been to a casino before, mostly because if he was going to go out, he’d prefer to not lose his life savings in the process, but he’d had some idea of what it would be like, if just from movies or television shows. Nothing could have prepared him for the sound of it, though. Maniac could be loud, but that was just from the music. This sound came from so many sources that it made him wince a little bit, overwhelmed.
Hyunjin had paused just inside the doors, looking over the room with a bored expression on his face. He glanced over his shoulder at Jisung and said, pitched so probably only Jisung could hear, “Fucking hell, this place is gaudy.”
It was. The outside had been bad enough, the inside was a thousand times worse. On this level, everything was one open space, so that everyone could mill about freely. The carpet, which seemed to stretch through most of the room, was a sickly mix of red and brown and gold-yellow, a swirling pattern that was almost uniform but not exactly, in a way that was unsettling. The machines were mostly in the back, rows and rows of them, flashing various coloured lights, everything pinging and chiming as they were played. They weren’t here for those, which was just as well, because they seemed migraine-inducing.
Ahead of them and to the left were the tables, made of some kind of dark wood that Jisung doubted was real mahogany, all of them manned by dealers: blackjack, roulette, a few tables all playing various poker games. Down the far left was a long bar, the same dark wood as the tables and inlaid with gold in every possible place, the bartenders of which were all wearing a uniform that was just a step lower than a full-blown suit like Jisung was wearing: black slacks, a pressed white shirt, a slim black tie. The dealers at the table were wearing basically the same, although they all had black vests to go with it.
Most of the second floor had been cut away so that the ceiling was far, far above them. There was a giant chandelier hanging down from that ceiling, dripping with glittering glass. What remained of the second floor that they could see was a balcony level, jutting out over the main floor, with a couple of people standing by the balustrade drinking what looked like champagne as they watched the floor down below. In the wall to their right was a set of propped open double doors, beyond which Jisung knew was the large stairwell, cordoned off by a red rope, guarded by two men who were very obviously armed: Jisung could not see the guns, but the way they stood made it clear.
Hyunjin looked from Jisung to those open double doors, and then back into the room itself. Then he started weaving his way through the crowd without looking at Jisung once.
Jisung stuck close to him, not letting anyone get between them. Truthfully, this role that he’d been given was hardly a difficult one for him. Every time he and Hyunjin were on a job together, he felt like this, the need to follow behind, to be there just in case Hyunjin needed him. To protect him however he could. This formalised that, in a way, turning it from something Jisung was simply born to do into a job duty, but that was just the show of it.
When they’d first been briefed on this, Changbin had said, laughing, nobody would believe that you were the socialite and Hyunjin was your bodyguard, Jisung, and Jisung had laughed too, and agreed, but the reality was that he didn’t even know if he could have pretended anything other than this way of things. He would have forgotten himself, somewhere along the line. He’d have ruined the whole thing because he couldn’t switch that protective instinct off.
As far as Jisung knew, Hyunjin had never stepped foot in a casino either, but it would have been very difficult to tell from watching him move through the room. He ignored the machines entirely and headed for one of the poker tables, which had a couple of empty seats around it. He slung himself into a seat, every part of his body language insouciant but elegant, his eyes scanning the cards on the table, the game already in progress. One of his arms hung over the back of his chair, his legs folded over each other.
His other hand reached inside his jacket and pulled out a wad of cash, not looking at the amount at all as he held it out to Jisung over his shoulder. “Go get me my shit,” he said.
Jisung took the money off him and tucked it into his jacket for safety. Then without a word, he left the table to go find the cashier’s cage, which he’d looked for on the way in. It was over by the side of the room, near the bar, and he made his way there quickly, not wanting to leave Hyunjin alone for longer than necessary.
The cash that Hyunjin had casually handed over turned out to be close to three million won, an amount that the cashier exchanging it for chips didn’t even blink at. Probably just as well, because Jisung had seen the amount of cash that Hyunjin had secreted away in his inner pocket and felt vaguely faint. Sure, they often got paid that much for a single job, and sometimes in cash, too, but that was in locked briefcases or that one time it had been in a literal duffel bag. Not usually carried on Hyunjin’s person.
He took the chips back to the table, where Hyunjin was already being dealt into a new game, the dealer taking the cash he had put down on the side of the table and replacing it with other chips. Jisung hadn’t known that was an option, but Hyunjin clearly had; he had done his research, then, proper research. He was like that, he never did anything half-heartedly, and so he looked perfectly calm and confident as he took the extra chips from Jisung and lifted his cards up.
Jisung stood behind and slightly to the side, so that he could still see the side of Hyunjin’s face, silent, as still as he could be. Possibly he should be paying attention to the game, but his attention was so divided that he lost track of what was going on fairly quickly. He’d only ever played poker for fun, first in high school with his friends and then with the rest of the team. What was going on here was far more intense than that.
Truthfully, it was hard to take his eyes off Hyunjin. Well, no, that was— not true. It was actually kind of difficult to look at Hyunjin, sitting at that table in his expensive suit, loose-limbed as he scanned his cards. The bored expression was back on his face, the expression that he wore sometimes when he spoke to Jisung, the one which made Jisung want desperately to— make him laugh, or impress him in some way. To see if he could get the look to break a little bit, although he never had.
It was a particularly cold type of beauty, when Hyunjin looked like this. His eyes slightly hooded as he watched the game, his mouth a little pursed. That mouth, that mouth; Jisung tried to keep his eyes averted but it was so difficult, when he was looking at Hyunjin from his angle. With his hair pushed back in this way, it was impossible to avoid that mouth, impossible to avoid seeing the full shock of Hyunjin’s face.
For all that Hyunjin looked like the game was dull, hiding a fake yawn behind the back of his hand at one point, Jisung could see the way he was not taking his eyes off the table for a second. Everyone else at the table probably just saw a bored rich kid but Jisung alone could see the intent way Hyunjin watched, the way his eyes were sharp as he kept track of the cards played. He was winning, too, the pile of chips in front of him growing and growing as the time passed. Even that looked like it was nothing to him. Like he had expected nothing less, the arrogance in him oozing out.
I want to crawl under that table and hold his cock in my mouth, Jisung thought, an intrusive thought that was there before he could think to stop it happening. It was so genuinely shocking that for a few moments he was unable to get the image out of his head: that horrible carpet against his knees, his head pillowed against Hyunjin’s thigh, the rich material of Hyunjin’s pants between him and Hyunjin’s skin, the hot weight of Hyunjin against his tongue.
Then he remembered— where he was, and who, exactly, he was thinking such a thought about, and he had to pinch the inside of his own wrist and twist to stop it from continuing. Even the horror of thinking such things about Hyunjin, who was sitting right there, wasn’t enough to completely cool the heat rushing through Jisung. The image had been too potent, too alive.
He could feel, almost, the sensation of Hyunjin’s hand in his hair— except Hyunjin wouldn’t, he wouldn’t play with Jisung’s hair, not when he was playing poker like this. He would not pay attention to Jisung at all. That thought made Jisung fully shiver.
Stop stop stop, he thought, almost chanting it to himself, as he pinched his skin harder, needing the sting of it to rid him of that mental image. He was more than a little hard, standing there in this public place, where anyone could see him. Where any moment, Hyunjin could turn around and see him, standing here with this flush on his skin.
That realisation did something to cut through the arousal, enough so that after a few more moments, he let go of his wrist, the skin pulsing a little with the pain. He had probably almost broken the skin, he had been nipping himself so hard with his fingernails; almost certainly he had bruised himself. Nobody was looking at him, though, and it didn’t seem like much had happened while he was standing there, distracted by his own horny brain. They had not even finished playing the hand they were on.
His phone hadn’t buzzed in his pocket either, which hopefully meant that Seungmin, and everyone else watching him on the cameras, hadn’t noticed him being a fucking freak either.
It was hard to shake the feeling though. As time passed, and as Hyunjin’s winnings increased, the bored expression on his face became more and more pronounced. He was piling his chips up in front of him with an idle hand as he waited for the other players at the table to figure out their move, his long artist fingers stacking them slowly. Jisung felt a little mesmerised by the movements. There was a thought there, a thought that he always kept locked down so hard but which was certainly closer to the surface now.
I want him to—
Hyunjin snorted suddenly, as the dealer announced him the winner of yet another game, and tossed his cards down on the table with an impatient flick. “This is so boring,” he said, loudly and snottily, apparently mostly to the air. “I thought there’d be something challenging here at the very least.”
The people around the table who he had just wiped the floor with gave him nasty glares. Jisung stepped a little closer to him, adjusting his posture so that at the very least, his shoulders were displayed to their best. The dealer, however, looked unperturbed by any of it. Instead, as he passed the winnings over, he looked at Hyunjin carefully, clearly taking in the designer, tailored suit, the refined beauty, the heavy expensive watch that showed on Hyunjin’s wrist as he moved his hands. Then his eyes flicked to Jisung, the obvious bodyguard, ready and watching.
“If you would like something a little more challenging,” he said, very politely to Hyunjin, “perhaps you would like to join one of our more exclusive tables?”
Hyunjin rolled his eyes a little bit. “Would we be playing for more than pocket money?” he asked, scathingly.
Jisung looked at the chips in front of Hyunjin. He’d almost certainly doubled what he had put down originally, which was, as far as Jisung was concerned, a considerable sum. Judging by the looks of the other people at the table, they agreed. The dealer just smiled.
“You certainly will, sir,” he said.
Hyunjin tapped his fingers against the dark edge of the table for a moment and then he said, “Well, if it’ll be more interesting than this, I’m willing to give it a shot.”
The dealer nodded, and motioned with his hand to someone standing near the roulette table. This man was taller, older, and dressed in the same uniform as the dealer except that he was wearing a suit jacket with it. He conversed with the dealer for a moment and then turned, smiling, to Hyunjin. “Good evening, sir, I’m the manager for this section,” he said. “If you could follow me?”
Hyunjin pushed up from the table, and followed the man back through the casino. It was busier now, much busier, like in the hour Hyunjin had been playing poker the place had suddenly come to life. It made it a little harder to stick as close to Hyunjin as Jisung would have liked, but he was not particularly afraid to shoulder aside some people to make sure of it, and they made it to the doorway to the stairwell without a hitch.
The manager spoke to the guard, who nodded and then undid the cordon to let them through. Beyond those open doors was a wide set of stairs, carpeted in that same ugly carpet, with gold stair rods that were probably meant to look classy. They climbed the stairs silently, Hyunjin with that same arrogant elegance he had been moving all night, Jisung with a posture that he knew suggested he thought someone was about to jump out and try to shank Hyunjin in the middle of the stairs.
There was another set of closed double doors at the top of the stairs. The manager knocked, and they were pulled open to reveal a room that looked like a cross between a hotel lobby and airport security. Jisung had never flown before but he’d seen it enough in media that there was no other image that sprung to mind.
Immediately in front of them was a tall metal detector, with a guard standing behind it. This guard was obviously armed, and was not even pretending to hide it: the gun hung at his hip in easy reach. Beyond that was a reception desk, with a very pretty and well-dressed woman standing behind it who bowed lower than a normal worker would when she saw that people had come in. She did not say anything at all once she had straightened up.
To the right of her desk was another set of double doors, presumably out into the main second floor. Behind the desk was another set of stairs, again cordoned off and this time guarded by two men. Their guns were considerably bigger than the one tucked into the holster of the guard at the metal detector.
In front of the detector was a table, with a gold coloured tray on it. The manager picked it up. “If you gentlemen could remove any metal on your person and place it in this tray,” he said, in an easy, deferring manner that probably appealed to the rich people who came here but set Jisung’s teeth on edge. “And then you may step through our security detector.”
Hyunjin pursed his lips again, making a show of his reluctance. Then he started to undo the strap on his watch with an air of being inconvenienced. He dropped it into the tray and then waved a nonchalant hand over his shoulder at Jisung. “He has something,” he said airily. “What is it that you have, hyung?”
That hyung almost threw Jisung harder than the intrusive cockwarming thought had earlier. It took a beat before he was able to pull a sardonic smile onto his face as he half-rolled his eyes at the security guard and said, “A Glock 17.”
The idea of someone bringing a gun into Maniac would have put the place on lockdown. Here, the manager just said, “I’m afraid that will need to be placed in our secure locker before you can be allowed through to our private area. If you could place it on the table here?”
Jisung wondered how many people tried to argue with him about that. No doubt if he tried, they would both find themselves removed from the premises without hesitation. So he did as he was asked, and placed it on the table, and was given a small token with a number on it that he was told he could return for his property. There was something so funny to Jisung about the idea of a coat check for guns that he had to bite the inside of his mouth to stop himself smiling too much.
They passed through the metal detector without any trouble, and once they were through, the reception smiled at them. Her hair was so perfectly coiffed in a twist at the back of her head that Jisung could only assume they had professional hair stylists on staff for it. “Good evening, sirs,” she said.
“Kyunghee, could you get these gentlemen set up in the private poker room?” the manager asked.
She nodded. The manager nodded back and then went back down the stairs. Kyunghee looked between Hyunjin and Jisung and said, “Will both of you be playing?”
“Just me,” Hyunjin said. There was another hand waved in Jisung’s direction. “He won’t be.”
“Of course,” she said. She typed something on a computer just out of sight, not losing an inch of her perfect posture, and then nodded again, and came out from behind the reception desk. She was dressed in a black pencil skirt and a chiffon blouse and the highest heels Jisung had ever seen outside of red carpet photos. How do you stand all night in those? Jisung wanted to ask.
“Please follow me,” she said, and then pushed open the doors and stepped through.
The doors opened directly onto the balcony area that could be seen from the first floor, and it turned out to be a lounge area, with a bar along the opposite wall and various tables and couches set out through the space. There were very few people in here, just a couple of men in suits sitting on some low chairs over by the balcony, and two very well dressed women standing by one of the higher tables.
It was considerably nicer than anything on the floor below; for one thing, the carpet had been discontinued and had been replaced by tile that was either marble or made to look like it. Kyunghee’s high heels clicked against it as she walked, distracting little taps. There was still an abundance of gold, though, even up here. The tables were dark wood with gold inlays, and the chairs had gold curving around the ends of their armrests, but were otherwise upholstered in a tasteful cream. Up here, things just seemed— far more classy, and actually nice, like somewhere Jisung could actually stand to be in. He wasn’t sure the same could be said for Hyunjin, who still had a sneer on his face. Jisung didn’t know if it were real or feigned.
They were led straight through the lounge to a large open doorway on the wall opposite the stretch of balcony balustrade. This turned out to lead into a hallway, one which looked like the inside of a hotel more than anything else, the walls panelled in pale wood. She took them to the left, her pace unhurried but brisk.
There were a lot of doors back here. Jisung had the vague memory of the layout of the place from the blueprints, but he couldn’t say what all the rooms were. It didn’t matter, because Kyunghee led them right to the one they wanted, the one at the end of the hallway. Jisung was, honestly, a little shocked it had worked out so well.
Hyunjin’s shoulders were a bit more tense up here, possibly in the face of this continued act, or possibly with the knowledge of how much money they were about to lose. Jisung wanted to put his hand against the base of Hyunjin’s spine, wanted to reach out and squeeze Hyunjin’s fingers, a comforting gesture. I’m here, he wanted to say, but couldn’t without being overhead. I’ll look after you.
But there was no time for any of that. The door to the poker room was opened and they were let inside.
——
There absolutely was not enough space in the van for Minho to be back here, but he’d forced himself in here nonetheless. He’d come back here to watch Jeongin’s progress initially, and he was glad he’d done it, because if he’d been in the front when Chan had said, voice high with panic, why is he going inside, Minho might have simply got out the van and went running.
After he’d yanked the cause of his earlier heart attack into the car and made sure that he was okay, he’d gone back to his previous spot: kneeling on the floor between Felix and Seungmin’s stools, watching their screens. If it had been Changbin back here, Minho might have put a hand on his shoulder or back for balance, but as it was, he just knelt there, as close as he could be without actually touching either of them.
The image on the screen wasn’t particularly good, fuzzy with static in the way that most security camera footage was. Minho had paid close attention to everything Seungmin and Felix had done together but most of it had gone completely over his head. He knew enough to understand that whatever security system Felix had set up originally, it was very secure, and it had taken a little bit of time before Felix had been able to work his way through it without tripping any alarms.
Chan had spent almost the entirety of Hyunjin’s games downstairs fussing over Jeongin’s skinned elbow, tutting about how it must be painful. Changbin had passed a tissue back, for Chan to dab at the blood with, and Jeongin had taken it with a kind of patience that Minho would not have been able to even pretend at.
They’d both fallen silent though when Seungmin had murmured, they’re going upstairs, and Jeongin had slipped off his seat on the bench next to Chan and come down on the floor, also, on Seungmin’s other side, kneeling between him and Chan. With how small the van was, this put him close to Minho, close enough that every so often, as they shifted position, their arms brushed. It was a small mercy that Jeongin was still wearing his jacket, and Minho a sweatshirt.
On the screen, Hyunjin sat at the poker table, the cards he held and the expression on his face not readable on their fuzzy feed but his body language screamed of a kind of arrogant idleness that set Minho’s teeth on edge just looking at him. He was doing an extremely good job of pretending to be a rich waste of space, which— perhaps Hyunjin would like to be such a thing, but he wasn’t, really, and Minho didn’t particularly enjoy watching him pretend.
Jisung had migrated to the window, standing half-facing where Hyunjin sat, half-facing the glass. His role in this was simple on the surface: the room they were in was mirrored exactly a floor above, and it was the perfect place for him and Hyunjin to make their escapes the night of the job itself. The window opened up into the alley between the casino and the parking garage, shielded from the eyes of anyone on the streets at the front and the back.
In theory, that was, it was perfect. In reality, they hadn’t really known what to expect, what they had to work with — if there’d even be a window large enough to fit them both through. Luckily, there was, and Felix had done something extra to get them into the video footage of the third floor so that they could check out the room up there. It seemed to be a meeting room, with a conference table about the size of the one Hyunjin was sitting at, and plenty of chairs. Seungmin had taken screenshots, to show Jisung later.
Jisung touched the windowsill. He stood with his shoulders back, spine straight, and that touch appeared casual, as he leaned against it, possibly testing the strength of the wood, possibly looking out at the drop to the ground below. At the table, Hyunjin appeared to be starting another round; he reached into his jacket and pulled out yet another wad of cash.
“Christ,” Seungmin muttered. “How much money is Hyunjin planning on losing?”
“Preferably all of it,” Chan said, “and you probably don’t want to know how much I gave him.”
A necessary evil, but not one even Minho, who felt an apathy to money beyond that which he needed for survival, liked very much. Chan had been adamant that he could absorb the cost of the venture, and Minho was trusting him with that, but this job that Felix had set them on had better pay dividends in the end.
He caught, out of the corner of his eye, Jeongin’s hand raising to his mouth. He’d been chewing on his thumbnail as they’d watched Hyunjin and Jisung go up to the second floor, through the metal detector and then through the lounge, and Minho had just— put up with it, tried to keep his attention on what was happening on the screen, in case Jisung and Hyunjin needed help. And Jeongin had eventually stopped, taking his hand away and letting it rest again Seungmin’s back as he leaned in closer to watch.
But, Minho saw, with a quick darting look in Jeongin’s direction, he was doing it again — no, worse, he wasn’t chewing on the edge of his thumb, he had his first two fingers pressed past his lips, his mouth parted around them. Even in that brief look, Minho saw the flash of the white of his teeth. He had to wrench his gaze away, look back at the screens like he was supposed to be.
Nothing was happening there though, just Hyunjin losing more and more money. This was uncomfortable reminiscent of being in the television room with Jeongin and Felix, unable to concentrate on that drama, except this time he had a job to do, and more than that— Chan was sitting with them, just off to the side, looking in their direction because he too was watching the computer screens.
The reminder that Chan was right there worked to at least keep his physical gaze looking forward, but he was not able to pay attention. It was an awful distraction in his peripheral vision. At this angle, he couldn’t see what Jeongin was doing, but he didn’t need to, because he’d spent those long minutes watching him in the television room, as he bit at those same fingers. The shining spit against his skin, the way his fingertips had dragged against his bottom lip. He was doing that now, Minho knew, and it was like an itch in his brain, the knowledge of it, and it was near impossible to keep his eyes on those fuzzy images now.
What would it actually be like, to replace Jeongin’s fingers with his own, to slide them in more? Not just the fingertips, pulling Jeongin’s lip in that way, but pushing them in further, past the first knuckle, the second. At what point would Jeongin gag on them, what would it feel like to have Jeongin’s tongue curled around them? He chanced another look, a flickering of his eyes at Jeongin, and saw, for a moment, the pink of Jeongin’s inner lip—
He snapped. He turned to Jeongin and wrapped his hand around Jeongin’s wrist so that he could pull those fingers out of his mouth. He wasn’t quite as gentle with it as he maybe could have been, or would have been if the arousal wasn’t thumping hard in his blood; the bones of Jeongin’s wrist were hard under his tight hold, and he felt Jeongin startled at the touch. But Minho just firmly pulled his hand away and said, his teeth slightly gritted, “Stop. Chewing. On your fingers.”
Jeongin looked at him. His eyes were very wide, blinking faster than usual as he stared at Minho. His mouth was still slightly parted, his bottom lip shiny with spit, for a long moment, before he closed it in order to swallow. He was starting to blush, pretty-pink across his cheeks and nose, sweeping under his hairline so Minho could see the redness of his ears.
Minho had hoped that by yanking those fingers away from Jeongin’s mouth, it would cool the fire under his skin, but Jeongin’s reaction, somehow, had made it worse. Minho would have expected Jeongin to whine, pull his wrist out of the hold, or else get sheepish about being caught yet again. But instead Jeongin just looked at him, silent and blushing.
Chan laughed under his breath. The sound of it almost made Minho jump, just managing to rein his reaction in. “Don’t snap at him just because you’re mad about his little stunt, Minho,” Chan said. His tone was easy, amused more than anything. Minho’s heartbeat was going about a thousand miles an hour in his chest.
He let go of Jeongin’s wrist like it had burned him, and turned back to the computer screens without a sound. He had to shift on his knees a little bit so that his jeans weren’t pulled so tight over his crotch, just in case. The air of the van had been too hot this entire time, all of them cramped in here, but now it felt like it was sitting against his skin, like he couldn’t breathe around it, and he was excruciatingly aware of Chan. He waited, with his shoulders tense and feeling like they were slowly creeping up to his ears, for Chan to say something else to him. To get mad at him for what he’d done, for touching Jeongin in that way.
His hand felt like it was tingling, like the warmth of Jeongin’s skin was lingering. His breathing felt just a bit too loud. He was a little surprised that the pounding of his heart wasn’t audible too.
“Is everything okay?” Chan asked.
He was talking to Seungmin, now, who was frowning at the screen in front of him. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Felix, can you— is this right?”
Felix leaned over to where Seungmin was pointing. Minho gave himself a little shake, trying to focus on what was on the screen, although he didn’t understand what he was looking at one bit. He, too, leaned in, if only to make his presence known, but Felix was already murmuring, “I think so, let me—”
Seungmin shuffled his stool out of the way so Felix could get at his keyboard. After a few tense moments, Minho said, teeth gritted, “Explain.”
“It’s nothing,” Seungmin said, his voice serious, without any of the bite he usually had when they were on a job and Minho was haranguing him about something. Seungmin had been like that, this past week, treating Minho with a kind of respect that set Minho’s teeth so on edge he thought it was almost worse than if Seungmin had simply tried to dismiss what had happened like it didn’t matter. But instead Seungmin had met Minho’s simmering anger with a sense of legitimate regret, and Minho, frankly, didn’t know how to handle it when it came to Seungmin.
“It’s not nothing,” Minho said, “tell me what—”
“Is there a problem with Hyunjin and Jisung?” Chan asked, their voices overlapping.
“No, it’s fine, hyung,” said Felix, a little absently as he typed. “I guess my dad got someone to try to get into my systems and they messed something up, but it’s fine, we just need to work around it. It’s not a problem, I’ve already sorted it out.”
“Oh, I see,” Seungmin said, leaning back into Felix, and then they were murmuring again together, too much jargon for Minho to understand. Minho hated this, the not understanding, but just like with the bombs, he could not get good at this kind of thing overnight, no matter how he applied himself. He had to trust their experts, as galling as that was.
Jeongin shuffled on his knees so that his view of the screens wasn’t obstructed, and it brought him closer to Minho, their arms pressed together fully now. Minho gritted his teeth, didn’t move away because there was nowhere for him to fucking go. What a hell this was. What a deep fucking agony.
——
The game was not going in Hyunjin’s favour. This was mostly on purpose, since he’d been throwing some pretty good hands deliberately, but that still didn’t mean he felt particularly good about it. If nothing else, the amount of money he was set to lose here made his eyes water a little bit. He was about to throw away more sitting at this table than they’d spent on his entire outfit, and it was a struggle to keep his bored expression on his face as he watched that money go down the drain.
Still, he was, in the end, just following orders. Chan had told him to lose once they got upstairs, to let himself lose all the money he made downstairs and then some, because a rich young kid losing at a high stakes table was not going to raise any eyebrows, but a rich young kid winning big on his first time here? That was certainly going to draw attention.
He would have to quit soon, though. If he stuck around for much longer, he wouldn’t just be draining a little bit out of Chan’s coffers, he’d be running the risk of bankrupting them all.
He was alone at his side of the table, sitting with his legs folded, his body loose and calm. The other men around the room — and it was all men, sitting at the table playing, he’d noted — were not. One of them seemed to have a bodyguard too, one which stuck much closer than Jisung did, but the rest of them had women gathered around them, girlfriends or wives or— neither of those things.
A couple of those women, paid escorts hired by the club, Hyunjin assumed, had tried sidling up to him once or twice as he played. One of them had even gone so far as to pull a chair over and sit beside him. He couldn’t blame them for trying, but even if he’d been interested in women, which he was not, they were a distraction at best.
Something about them, too, had made his head feel— buzzy. Bad, the way it felt like he knew these women but also didn’t. They looked at him and saw a beautiful man in a very expensive suit, a target, money to be made, with no idea of the fraud underneath. No idea that he, too, had been like them once upon a time, or at least something similar. Do you have a choice, he wanted to ask, but the question was unlikely to land well and he wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be. What could he do, if the answer was no?
So instead he had been polite, had even let one of them touch his arm once or twice without knocking her away, but so obviously disinterested that eventually they’d wandered off to find better targets. He’d wished them all the luck in the world, except that now he heard one of them say, somewhere behind him, “Handsome boy, why don’t you come and sit down with me?”
“Ah,” said Jisung’s voice, very light. “I can’t, I’m afraid.”
Hyunjin twisted his head to look at them: Jisung still by the window, but facing the room now; a pretty young woman beside him, smiling at him, her hand on his arm. For a moment, Hyunjin was back in Maniac, watching another pretty girl touch Jisung’s bare arm, feeling sick with the awful knowledge that Jisung would go home with her. He hadn’t, then, and he wasn’t going to sit with this woman now, but he was smiling at her, a small, regretful thing, and Hyunjin couldn’t work out if it was his version of Hyunjin’s cool civility or if he was, truly, regretful that he couldn’t spend time with her.
The Hyunjin back in Maniac hadn’t been able to do anything about it. The Hyunjin sitting here, cards in hand and poker chips in front of him, said, bluntly, loudly enough to be heard, “He’s on the clock, which means he’s not here for you.”
Jisung’s eyes snapped to Hyunjin’s face and he took an immediate step to the side, putting enough distance between him and the woman that her hand fell away. She looked a little surprised, probably because when she had spoken to Hyunjin earlier, he had not replied with that particular unpleasant tone in his voice. He had to resist the urge to say something even snottier to her; it was not her fault, after all, that he was jealous and nasty with it.
Hyunjin turned back to the game and tossed his cards down with an irritated snap of his hand. “I’m done here,” he announced, already pushing to his feet. “I want a drink.”
He ignored the heckles from the other players around the table as he strode out of the room, the shouted remarks about how he was a sore loser, how little money he had put up. He was sure Chan would not agree with them on that front. He didn’t check to make sure that Jisung was following up until he was halfway across the lounge to the bar, at which point he stopped dead.
Jisung, somehow, didn’t run up the back of him, which was impressive because when Hyunjin did turn to him, Jisung was right behind him. He must have scrambled to follow him out of the room, because Hyunjin had had a considerable head start on him. But Jisung was there, looking at him, serious and focused. Not thinking about that woman back there, but instead looking only at Hyunjin.
Childish, to be pleased about it, but Hyunjin had long accepted that he was a child at heart.
“I’m going to go look out of the balcony,” he said, waving a hand in that direction. “Get me a drink?”
He’d meant to word it as an order but something about the way Jisung had been looking at him, that patient, steady look, turned it into a request. His voice came out softer, quieter; for a moment it felt like he had fallen a little bit out of the roles they had been playing. Jisung nodded, and turned immediately to the bar.
Hyunjin hadn’t told him what he wanted, but it was probably okay. Jisung knew his preferences at this point. He did as he said he would do and went over to the balcony edge, leaning against the dark wood balustrade. Closer up like this, the chandelier hanging down from the ceiling really was ugly, a monstrosity of gold and too-white bulbs. Hyunjin doubted it was made of real gold anyway, and it hurt his eyes to look at.
So he didn’t look at it. Instead he looked down, at the casino floor, all the people milling around. It was busier now than it had been when they’d arrived, the noise louder but more diffused when he was above it. It was easier, up here, without the constant threat of someone bumping him, or brushing against him. He could appreciate the buzz of it better, the low level thrum of activity. The sounds of the dealers at the table calling the stakes or the results, people yelling or cheering, the sheer noise, under it all, of the slot machines pinging.
The sound might have been more bearable but the decor certainly wasn’t. Hyunjin wasn’t sure where Lee Jaerim had gotten his inspiration, but it wasn’t a place that Hyunjin wanted to visit any time soon. If he hadn’t know Lee Jaerim was a sociopath before, he’d know it now, looking at this place, and he had half a mind, once they got back home, to sit Felix down and make sure he hadn’t inherited any similar decorating senses.
“Hyunjin,” said Jisung quietly from beside him. “Here.”
Hyunjin glanced at him, found Jisung holding a thin glass filled with something fizzy and pink. It looked like a champagne glass but whatever was inside wasn’t champagne — or not just champagne, Hyunjin supposed. There were what looked like raspberries in the bottom. Hyunjin took it and asked, “What’s this?”
Jisung grinned at him, for possibly the first time that night. Don’t look at me like that, Hyunjin wanted to snap at him; at the same time he wanted to whisper, yes, yes, keep looking at me like that. “Do you need to know the name?” Jisung asked, leaning his side against the balustrade next to Hyunjin. “You won’t remember it anyway. Just try it.”
Hyunjin gave him an unimpressed side-look but he did as he was told and took a small sip. It was good, a little tart — definitely champagne, he thought, although he wasn’t sure what it was mixed with. He took another mouthful, let himself savour it in his mouth before he swallowed, and then he turned his attention back to the floor.
It was easier up here to get a view of what the layout was like, as opposed to viewing it on a blueprint. Coming down through here the night they did the job would be a dire-circumstances kind of deal, a worst-case bid for freedom, and Hyunjin hoped beyond hope that they didn’t have to do it, because trying to fight their way through the main floor would be a nightmare. Too many people, too many guards, too many tables to have to try to weave around on their way to the only exit out the front, that gilded, crowded front door.
“Hyunjin-ah,” Jisung said, very quietly. Hyunjin made a small noise of acknowledgement as he took another sip of his drink. “I wanted to apologise, for what happened a few days ago.”
Hyunjin looked at him properly now, frowning, confused. “What?” he asked.
“In the kitchen, with Felix and Jeongin?” Jisung said. “I made you uncomfortable, by calling you pretty, I think. Or— not calling you pretty? Honestly, I wasn’t sure which it was, but I made you uncomfortable, I know, so I wanted to say sorry.”
Christ. Hyunjin looked at him a moment and then had to knock the rest of his drink back before he could say anything. It fizzed in his nose a little, which was better than the burning in his throat he sometimes got from alcohol. “Jisung,” he said, exasperated, “you’re doing this now? Here?”
“I didn’t think I’d get another chance!” Jisung protested, but quietly, clearly trying to not let their conversation be overheard. “If I didn’t apologise now, when would I get another chance?”
We live together, Hyunjin wanted to tell him, but he didn’t. Sometimes it surprised him just how stupid Jisung was for someone who was smart and witty and resourceful. The fond amusement in Hyunjin was almost impossible to suppress, it was so strong inside him, warm inside his blood. He just liked Jisung, he liked him so much, and he wished that it was easier to show it, or perhaps that it felt less dangerous to say it aloud somehow.
In a different life, he’d have been brave enough.
“I wasn’t uncomfortable,” he said. “You didn’t make me uncomfortable, Jisung. I wasn’t upset at all.”
“Oh,” said Jisung. He looked genuinely dumbfounded by this news. Had he really spent the last few days agonising over apologising about this to Hyunjin? “I just— I know you don’t like it when people, um, call you— things like that.” Hyunjin raised an eyebrow at him. “Pretty, I mean,” Jisung finished, sounding a little defeated.
He was right, was the worst part: Hyunjin didn’t like it when most people called him pretty, or beautiful, or commented on his face or body in any way at all, honestly. But that was with strangers, people he didn’t know — he couldn’t know their intentions, couldn’t know what they wanted from him, or with him.
It was different with Jisung. Maybe not at the start, not when they had first met, but now he knew Jisung, knew him well, and he knew how Jisung was with his words. It was more than that, though— it was not that Hyunjin simply didn’t mind Jisung saying those things, he wanted it, craved it. He wanted to hear what it sounded like when Jisung called him beautiful, wanted to know how Jisung’s voice sounded when he praised the way Hyunjin looked. It flustered him, yes, and aggravated him, but he needed it all the same.
Standing here in this expensive suit, in this place, the cold glass in his hand, the sounds of all the people below — he felt a little bit like he was living that different life he’d always wanted. He was not Hyunjin, the scared child desperate for connection, wading through a confusing trip-wired brain. He was Hyunjin, spoiled and confident and beautiful enough that Jisung, who had been clearly trying to not stare at him all night, kept looking at him all the same.
This Hyunjin knew what he wanted. This Hyunjin had the confidence to try and take it, too.
“But you do think I’m pretty, don’t you,” Hyunjin said, as he turned to lean his back against the balcony railing, supported on his elbows. He saw, just for a moment, the flicker of Jisung’s eyes down and back up the length of his body, before he gave Hyunjin a very wide-eyed and unsure look. “You think the hair is pretty,” Hyunjin said, taking a little pity on him.
“Oh,” Jisung said. He looked a little bit like a man who was being forced to walk across a minefield: knowing he needed to walk forward but terrified that the ground might explode under his feet. Once again Hyunjin felt a pulse of regret, guilt, for making it so that Jisung struggled so hard to talk to him. “Yes, I mean, yeah the hair looks very pretty.”
Hyunjin would take it. “Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he was blushing or not; he hoped not. The person he was right now wouldn’t blush, wasn’t flustered by compliments out of Jisung’s mouth. He gestured with the empty glass in his hand. “Would you—?”
Jisung took the glass without a word and went to the bar to get Hyunjin another one. Hyunjin shouldn’t, really, and he probably wouldn’t drink it, but this way he got to just look at Jisung for a bit, from the back, the clean lines of his body in his suit. Jisung’s suit might not be as obscenely expensive as Hyunjin’s but it didn’t need to be, when he had that body, everything tailored to fit him.
He’d almost thrown a tantrum when Jisung had come through the door of the workroom in this outfit, his hair slicked back to show his undercut, Hyunjin’s absolute favourite look on him. He’d had an urge to tell Jisung to go and change, because there was no way on earth it was okay to expect Hyunjin to just go around looking at Jisung looking like this. But of course he hadn’t been able to do that, so he was stuck here now, with something thrumming terrifyingly in his blood that he thought might be desire.
Jisung turned back around, another glass in his hand, and Hyunjin averted his eyes as he made his way back over, so that Jisung wouldn’t know that Hyunjin had been staring. “Here you are,” Jisung said cheerfully, passing the glass over, like it was nothing, like he didn’t mind being a glorified servant for Hyunjin. Maybe he didn’t; he never, ever complained when Hyunjin bossed him around normally, either.
“Thank you,” Hyunjin said. He let himself take one sip, for courage, and for the way he thought he saw Jisung look at his mouth against the edge of the glass. “I like your hair too, you know,” he said, his voice a little lower, pitched just for Jisung. “With the undercut. It makes you look really hot.”
He expected Jisung to preen a little, or to laugh and thank Hyunjin for the compliment. He’d seen Jisung do that with other people, joking it off a little bit. Jisung did nothing of those things; instead, his mouth fell open a little, a definite gape, and then a blush spread across his face, gunfire-rapid. One moment he looked normal and the next he was red to the roots of his slicked back hair.
It was a better reaction than anything Hyunjin could have hoped for. Lately it felt like Jisung had been making him blush so much with his words, sweet and heart-felt, with no idea of what they did to Hyunjin’s heart. It felt good to turn the tables a little bit, to see Jisung blushing and lost for words as he stood there looking at Hyunjin.
It made Hyunjin feel— powerful. Like he was in control, and anything that he said wouldn’t be used to hurt him, or even to push things in a direction he didn’t want to go. He could say this to Jisung, here, like this, and it would be okay, he thought.
A smirk spread, honeyed and slow, across Hyunjin’s face. “Ah,” he said, still in that low undertone. He settled back against the balustrade a little more loosely. “Did you like that?”
Jisung blinked at him, a couple of quick flutters of his eyelashes. Hyunjin really had struck him dumb, a feat he had not ever thought was possible. If there was something Jisung had always seemed capable of, it was talking. But right now he just stood there in silence, staring at Hyunjin, looking like he was not at all sure what was going on, but not necessarily like he was complaining.
The silence went on for so long that Hyunjin’s smirk broke into something more like a smile, gently curled, at the sight of Jisung just standing there. “Ohh,” he said, a little pityingly, a little mockingly, “is your single brain cell malfunctioning?”
Jisung said, voice hoarse, “You’ve never smiled at me before.”
The smile dropped off Hyunjin’s face without him meaning for it to happen. He felt a little like Jisung had— not hit him, but like there had been some sharp movement at his face that had made him flinch while being in no actual danger. A shock, the words a shock. He had not ever thought that that was something that Jisung would keep track of, that he would notice it to the extent that a single smile in his direction would cause him to sound like that — more than surprised, something deeper, something far more raw than that.
The hoarseness of his voice, the emotion in it, had sent something shivering inside Hyunjin.
He had to look away, now, and so he turned around to lean forward against the balcony, his head hanging down a little. Not confident, now, feeling more like— himself, the Hyunjin who woke up some mornings and couldn’t bear to be looked at. The Hyunjin that spent the summers pulling on long-sleeved things because knowing that Jisung would look at him and see his bare skin scared and excited him in such equal measures that it felt like being ripped apart. That was Hyunjin, the real Hyunjin, and he was back in this room with them.
“Never where you’ve seen it,” he whispered, and heard Jisung inhale sharply next to him. Hyunjin’s heart thudded in his chest, the nausea rising up inside him; the words could not be taken back, and Jisung was going to say something, was going to ask what that meant, and Hyunjin— how could he explain it, how could he put it into words? The Hyunjin that he was again didn’t have that capacity.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He had never felt so grateful to feel it. He fumbled for it, snatching it out and turning slightly away from Jisung to read the message. It was from Chan: ready to leave, short and concise, and exactly the words Hyunjin had needed to hear at that point in time.
“Come on,” he said, without looking the slightest bit in Jisung’s direction. “It’s time to go.”
It was so much harder to pull that snobbish, bratty persona back on now that it had so thoroughly broken down, like Hyunjin had tried to redress himself in this suit after it had been laundered and found that now it was too short on the wrists, too tight across his shoulders. But he had no other choice than to wear it, and he must have managed it well enough, because nobody seemed to bat an eyelid at him as they collected Jisung’s gun from the front desk and made their way down the stairs and out of the front doors, stepping out into the brisk coldness of the street.
It was busy outside, although still nothing like the area around Maniac. Most of the businesses still open up and down the road were cafes, filled with couples from what Hyunjin could see looking across the road at those open opposite. There was a line now of people waiting to get into Blackbird’s, just a handful but a line nonetheless, mostly young men dressed like they’d headed over here after drinks after work. It was so much quieter out here, even with all the people, that it was a balm to Hyunjin’s nerves.
Jisung handed their ticket to the valet, who disappeared to go fetch their car from the parking garage. Hyunjin, somehow, had forgotten about this part, the wait for the car to be brought around; in his defence, he’d never once visited somewhere that had something as bougie as valet parking. He hadn’t factored in needing to just— stand and wait.
He could feel Jisung’s eyes on him, staring at him. Hyunjin was used to ignoring Jisung but not like this, never like this; it felt like a struggle, to keep from looking back, even though he knew that if he did, Jisung would ask him. He’d ask, why did you say that, or why don’t you let me see you smile, and Hyunjin didn’t have an answer. Not one he could give. What the fuck had he been thinking, saying that to Jisung.
Don’t talk to me, he thought desperately, like if he thought hard enough in Jisung’s direction he could plant the thought in Jisung’s brain. He’d been made brave and now was utterly the opposite. Please don’t ask me, please no, no—
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, almost fumbling it to the ground in his haste, and turned slightly away from Jisung as he thumbed it open. He was trying desperately for that casual aloofness he’d been able to affect in Blackbird’s, that pretence like he had more important things to worry about than Jisung, like Jisung was of little importance. Easy, once. Much harder, now.
should we just go straight home? he texted Chan.
The answer was yes, he knew it was yes, but he kept his eyes on his phone until the response came, a sardonic little reply of, yes, no detours, like Chan thought they might swing through the Starbucks drive thru on the way home. He looked at that message until his phone screen blinked off, and only then did he tuck it reluctantly back into his pocket.
“Everything alright?” Jisung asked, softly. His voice sounded so close that Hyunjin almost jumped, and when he turned to look he saw that Jisung had come closer a couple of steps, so that his voice wouldn’t travel as they spoke. Hyunjin nearly took a step back just out of instinct.
“Yeah,” he said. His voice did not come out quite steady, and he hated it. “We just need to go straight home.”
“Ah,” said Jisung. He was too close; he was still a step or two away, but that was too close, with his dark eyes and dark hair, his mouth slightly parted as he eyed Hyunjin. He looked uncertain, his mouth working for a moment, before he took a deep breath, his shoulders settling back, and Hyunjin knew before Jisung started to speak that he was going to ask. “Hyunjin, you—”
“Do you think we can do this?” Hyunjin blurted out, speaking right over the top of Jisung, too loud to be ignored.
Jisung blinked at him. “What?”
“Do you think we can do this?” Hyunjin repeated, voice much lower now. “The job, I mean.”
Just like Hyunjin knew he would, Jisung didn’t bother finishing his own question, he just focused immediately on Hyunjin’s. Hyunjin might have felt bad at that, the vague manipulation, taking advantage of the way Jisung always did that, but he couldn’t find anything inside himself other than sheer relief. The longer he could put off that conversation, the less likely it was that Jisung would bring it up.
Jisung looked at him in that way he did, sometimes, serious as the grave. He had looked at Hyunjin like that the day that man had broken in and hurt Seungmin, Jisung standing between Hyunjin and the door, his body a bulwark between Hyunjin and danger. “Yes,” he said, sounding very firm. “We can do it. You can do it.”
“It—” Hyunjin needed to look away from Jisung’s face, he could not manage it. “It’s more dangerous than a lot of what we’ve been on before, Jisung.”
“I know,” said Jisung. “But even so, we can do it. And whatever happens, Hyunjin, I’ll keep you safe. I will keep you safe.”
It would have felt less breathtaking if Jisung had simply walked up to him and socked him in the solar plexus. The sincerity in Jisung’s voice in moments like this was always so overwhelming, coming from someone prone to joking in awkward situations, to using humour and levity to smooth things over. But he sounded deadly serious, and Hyunjin— how could he do anything other than trust in him like this?
“Sir,” said a voice from behind him. Hyunjin couldn’t help it: he nearly jumped out of his fucking skin. He whirled to find the valet standing there, their rental car pulled neatly around for them. The valet held the keys out for him. “Your car.”
Hyunjin took the keys and immediately handed them off to Jisung, almost flinging them at him for fear that their hands might brush. Jisung had pulled the mask back on, much more smoothly than Hyunjin was managing with his, and with a lopsided smile, he unlocked the car doors and then went to the back passenger seat and pulled it open with a little flourish.
“After you,” he said.
Hyunjin pressed his lips together. It was a relief to get into the back, the smooth cool leather of the seats, the slightly sterile smell of a rented car. When Jisung shut the door, all the sound of the street shut off completely. With it came the removal of all those eyes, all those people looking at him and expecting the act he’d had to put on. There was the start of a pounding pressure behind his eyes.
Jisung got into the front, a brief blip of sound and then blessed silence again. The distance between them, now, like this, felt like miles: Jisung at the driver’s seat, Hyunjin back here, slumped against the seat, letting his head hang back against the headrest. He saw, for a moment, Jisung looking at him in the rear view mirror; he wasn’t sure if Jisung was checking up on him, or if he wanted to speak. But Hyunjin knew it, now. That distance was too much. Jisung wouldn’t ask.
And he didn’t. Instead he said, “Put your seatbelt on.” His voice was too soft for it to be an order. It was too full of care. Hyunjin almost wanted to refuse, like a petulant child, just because the sound of Jisung’s voice had sent that awful churning of butterflies through his stomach once again. But he wasn’t a child, and so he fastened his seatbelt with a click, and only then did Jisung start to drive them home.
——
Seungmin watched the rented Porsche pull away from the gilded front of Blackbird’s and felt a loosening in all his muscles. He could not relax fully, not yet; he was still out in the world and thus there could be no true safety. But he was relieved, nonetheless, that Jisung and Hyunjin had made it through their task unscathed. That they could all now go home.
“Pack it in,” Chan said, which really meant Minho needed to move. Which he did, opening the side door of the van and hopping out, getting into the passenger seat beside Changbin instead. Jeongin opted to remain on the floor, but in the interest of not falling over he settled down with his legs criss-crossed. Seungmin scooted his little stool back so he could lean against the wall of the van, holding the edges of his seat slightly to hopefully keep from sliding off if Changbin took a turn too hard.
Once all the doors were shut they were off, Changbin pulling out of their little side street and joining the main traffic on the road. The feeling of the van moving underneath him eased something in his chest, but not enough, not nearly enough. He closed his eyes, breathed. Tracked in his mind, judging on the swaying of the van, where they were on their route home, a little map behind his eyelids.
Nobody spoke for a while. He wondered if they were feeling some of the same things he was, letting their own tension bleed out. Eventually, quietly, Felix asked, “How long’s it been since you left the house?” Seungmin didn’t have to open his eyes to know that the question was addressed to him.
Chan gave a low whistle. “Oh, it’s been at least a year? Something like that.”
“Ten months and sixteen days,” Seungmin said through clenched teeth. He hadn’t left since the Song Labs job, where they’d needed him on site to get into a database. It had been awful, and he’d stayed inside since. Stepping outside every once in a while to bid Changbin goodbye or squint balefully at the sun didn’t count.
A touch came, lightly on his wrist bone, that then curled around gently. “You did really well,” Felix said, his deep voice rumbling alongside the humming of the van’s engine.
With anyone else, Seungmin night have suspected them of being patronising, but not Felix. He knew Felix meant it genuinely, kindly. “Thanks,” he said, short but not sharp.
There was a brief pause. Then Chan said, “What did you think? How was it?”
Seungmin wasn’t sure which of them he was talking to, but it was Felix who replied. “I think it was fine,” he said, sounding thoughtful. Seungmin squinted an eye open to see Felix had his thinking-pout on, full lips on display. “Seungmin seems to have the hang of the system, and what they added since I left wasn’t much of an issue, not for me, and it wouldn’t be for him either. Provided they don’t change anything drastically from now until we run the job, I think we’ll be okay?”
“Say that again but with more confidence,” Minho called back through the grate, and from his spot on the floor Jeongin snorted lightly. Felix looked a little flustered in a skittish way; nervous over Minho’s tone, but also clearly somewhat reassured by Jeongin’s reaction. Minho, Seungmin knew, had a bit of a dry sense of humour that often went over people’s heads.
Seungmin slid a little knowing look at Jeongin, who did not notice at all. It had been— not a challenge, Seungmin wouldn’t go that far — but something like it, maybe, to not rewind that footage from the other night and see if Jeongin and Minho had gotten up to something on the third floor. But it would make him a hypocrite of the worst sort if he did, and more than that, he had genuinely meant it when he said Minho and Jeongin deserved privacy. He would not want to violate them in that way.
But he was curious. Which was a bit unusual, because since when was he nosy? Since when did he care about the business of other people? On other teams, in the past, he could have walked in on two people fucking and not given a shit about it.
It was just another reminder that he was invested in this team, perhaps overly so. He cared for these people in a way that he had once thought he would never care for a person again. And apparently, with that, came the desire to actually know things about them.
Chan was looking at Seungmin, he could see the paleness of Chan’s face turned toward him in his peripheral vision. “Seungmin?” he asked. “What do you think?”
“I can do it,” he said, confident in that at least. He could do this. It was stressful even on this test run and it would be worse on the actual job, when so much more was at stake, and Seungmin wasn’t looking forward to it in the slightest. There were going to be a lot of panic attacks from here until then and the job itself was likely to shave a decade off his lifespan from the stress — but he could do it. He would do it.
“There’s the confidence you wanted, Minho-hyung,” Changbin said from the driver’s seat. Seungmin could hear the grin in his voice. He wished he could see it. He wished he could throw a shoe at Changbin’s head.
Silence fell again after that, blessedly. It gave Seungmin a chance to try and stop the shaking of his hands before they got home, where someone might notice. Someone other than Changbin, who would notice Seungmin’s lips being a single shade too pale and would read him like a book, see all his fear and the crashing adrenaline. There was nothing he could do about that.
It had been so long. Ten months of no contact with the outside world, other than what he saw through his video feeds. It was always like this, when he left, the trembling hands, the fear that he could not quite put into words. Agoraphobia, Changbin had once softly suggested, late at night, when it was just the two of them in Seungmin’s little bedroom, which was probably what it was, but Seungmin didn’t like having a clinical name for whatever went on inside his head. It made it feel a little too clean cut.
He was grateful for the closed in walls of the van, this windowless space. It had made it so much easier to focus on his job, when he hadn’t been confronted with the fact that he was outside, parked in an open street. It was hard to even explain the fear, what it was, exactly, that he was afraid of. A fear of being found — from whom? He didn’t know. Fear of the eyes on him, of being seen; a deep, abiding certainty that he was being looked at.
He’d been looked at, at the trial. And afterwards, too, walking out with his mom in the suit he’d last worn to a funeral and would wear again, three months later, to his own father’s burial. They’d taken photos of him, on the steps of the courthouse, their cameras flashing and clicking, a quick tiktiktiktik that sometimes still played in his head when he was trying to sleep. And they’d come to the funeral, too, taken photos of him while he stood at the open grave into which they were lowering his father’s coffin.
It hadn’t mattered that he was a minor, and therefore they hadn’t been able to use the photographs. The fact that they had taken them at all had been enough. Don’t look at me, he had insisted of the world, and when they would not comply, he had taken himself off to rot in dark little rooms alone.
Another little touch to his wrist, one which made him jump a little; Felix again, his voice as soft as before as he said, “Seungmin, we’re home.”
Seungmin looked up, just in time for Jeongin to push open the back of the van. They had stopped not because of any traffic lights but because they were home, the view outside that of their back parking lot. He heard the front doors opening and closing, as Changbin and Minho got out, but it took him a few moments before he could make himself climb out of the back behind Chan.
He was trapping Felix in here with him. But Felix didn’t say anything, he just sat in silence until Seungmin made himself get up and duck outside.
Jisung and Hyunjin were already back, Jisung talking to Chan as he tossed the rental car keys up and down in his hand. As soon as Felix clambered out the back, Hyunjin was on him, an arm slung across his shoulder, tugging him towards the back door, already saying something about how your father has shitty taste, Lix—
The computers needed removing, but that could be done later, when Seungmin could rope someone into helping him with it. He shut the van doors, taking his time, and when he turned around, everyone had disappeared into the house, except for Changbin, locking the front doors of the van. Had he lingered, waiting for Seungmin, or was he just the last one, the way he so often was, finishing up all the little details that fell under his purview?
Seungmin didn’t know. He began to walk, his limbs stiff and robotic, for the back door, and felt, almost expected, Changbin step up next to him. Seungmin couldn’t look at him. His entire attention was on that door, at the prospect of being inside those walls, solid and concrete and safe.
He felt, as comforting in this moment as a cool cloth against a feverish forehead, Changbin’s hand come to a rest against his lower back. It was a gentle touch, one that could be snatched away at a moment’s notice, and Seungmin wondered what it would be like if Changbin didn’t have to do that. Would he let himself press properly, let Seungmin really feel it?
“You did good,” Changbin murmured, voice so soft even though there was no one around them. “You did a good job.”
“Don’t be condescending,” Seungmin muttered, but— he let Changbin usher him into the house without making him take his hand away. It was only once they were both through the door and in that grey hallway that Seungmin stepped away, and Changbin’s hand dropped to his side. The two of them pulling on those masks.
He’d thought it was a weakness, once, to need comfort from another person. He wasn’t so sure about that now.
——
In spite of everything that had happened with Felix, the security breach and all its corresponding anxiety, there was still a deep comfort to coming home, Minho found. A feeling of security that he could not take for granted when the door to the workshop closed behind them all and everything within him eased just a little bit.
It would not be his for too much longer, he thought, watching as Jeongin flopped back onto Seungmin’s lumpy couch. The job loomed ever closer. So he would appreciate this while he had it.
“Alright,” Chan said, opting to stand beside the workbench rather than sit, his hands braced on the wood. With no small amount of dramatics, Seungmin threw himself into his desk chair, where he seemed to deflate. Minho almost felt a little pity for him, but could not quite scrounge it up. His irritation with Seungmin at this point felt like an old bruise, one that he kept prodding every so often just to remind himself of the pain. “Hyunjin, Jisung, what are your thoughts?”
Hyunjin had been in the process of removing his outer jacket, folding the burgundy garment gingerly and placing it over his arm. The silk shirt draped over his body like liquid, and adjacent to him, Jisung was so busy staring at Hyunjin he hadn’t even seemed to have heard what Chan had said.
The silence went on a beat too long, and then Hyunjin’s gaze rose from where he’d been fussing over his jacket, eyebrows raising as he realised everyone was looking at them and Jisung hadn’t spoken. “Oh,” Hyunjin said, glancing askance at Jisung, who quickly looked away, already pink. Christ. “It was all like Felix said, pretty much. No surprises. I think coming in from the roof and then leaving out a window really is our best option — even if we managed to do everything we needed to do on the third floor undetected, it’d be impossible to come up or down through the second floor without raising an alarm.”
Changbin crossed his arms over his chest, the motion pulling the fabric of his shirt very tight. Sardonically, Minho wondered if he might burst a seam, and he might have commented on it if not for the fact that, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jeongin once again idly raise his hand to his mouth.
“We’ll need to make sure to get some proper repelling gear then,” Changbin was saying, as Minho’s focus slowly narrowed down to Jeongin’s fingertip poking at his own bottom lip. He wasn’t close enough right now to stop him, and Jeongin wasn’t even looking at him, was paying attention to the conversation, as Minho should have been. “And probably practise with it, to be honest.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, that’ll be great, you gonna have us swinging out from the PC room? I’m sure no one will notice that,” Hyunjin said, dry and drawling in that way he got sometimes.
Changbin huffed and Felix turned to Chan, placing a hand on his arm. Softly, he asked, “Do you have an empty warehouse or something? Somewhere they could practise?”
Minho had the tip of his tongue between his teeth, the pinch of it almost painful. He needed to tell Jeongin to stop. He could not tell Jeongin to stop.
“Yeah, I’ll make some calls,” Chan said, giving Hyunjin a warm, almost soppy sort of smile that Hyunjin simply squinted at. “Changbin’s right, you’ll definitely need practice, but we can’t exactly be doing it on the street.” He looked to Jisung, smile going a bit less soppy but no less warm. “Anything stand out to you, Jisung?”
Jeongin, at last, seemed to sense Minho’s gaze on him. He looked over, and minutely, Minho shook his head, staring pointedly at Jeongin’s mouth.
“Not really. Mostly just that stealth is going to be really paramount,” Jisung was saying, as a grin spread slow as syrup across Jeongin’s face. “The camera feeds being looped upstairs is going to make or break us, otherwise Hyunjin and I are getting arrested. I’m not getting in a shootout with all that armed security.”
Minho watched, heart thumping and ears heated, as Jeongin, instead of removing his fingers from his mouth, pressed them in further. Less nibbling at the nails, now, and more just sucking lightly on his fingertips.
“The cameras won’t be an issue,” Seungmin’s nasally voice drolled. “Neither will the doors.”
Jeongin’s tongue pressed to the pad of his fingertips, pink and shiny, visible between his fingers. He was still grinning, the line of his upper teeth white and sharp, dimples deep in his cheeks.
“I think then the next issue is getting onto the roof in the first place,” Jisung said. His voice sounded remarkably far away.
Minho was hardening in his jeans, a sweet flush of warmth. Impossible to resist, impossible to deny.
Changbin swayed over, nudging Minho with his elbow. Covert, nothing the others would notice. But he cleared his throat a little as he did it, which let Minho know it hadn’t been an accident. A warning, a reminder to Minho where he was. Who he was with.
“I think Minho’s still working on that?” Chan said, turning now towards Minho, whose face snapped to look at him. He knew that guilt was written all over his features. He worked to wipe it clean.
They were all looking at him now. Minho wondered if they could see the way the vein in his neck was jumping, the light sheen of sweat at his temples. He’d barely been keeping track of the conversation.
“Yeah,” he said, a little softly, and then took a steadying breath. At his side, Changbin’s eyes were a bit too knowing. Even the shame of that didn’t quell Minho’s body. “I’ve got a few ideas, I’ll run them by you soon.”
Chan nodded, looking at Minho like— like he’d noticed Minho was acting a little weird, but blessedly not why. “Alright, good,” he said, and then he was looking out at the room at large, smiling again. “Minho’s gonna want reports, so. Jisung and Hyunjin, you need to write up everything you noticed in Blackbird’s, even the small details matter. Jeongin, too. Anything you saw along the street, noticed outside, or—” Chan gave Jeongin a reproving little look. “Anything you noticed for your brief stint inside.”
“I have to write a report?” Jeongin echoed. Minho chanced a glance at him — his hands were both in his lap, now.
He wasn’t doing it on purpose, Minho thought, desperate almost. He was just trying to annoy me.
The knowledge of it made no difference. He could feel his pounding heartbeat between his legs.
It had been such a long fucking day.
“Yep,” Hyunjin said, as Jeongin made an indignant little noise. He grinned, sharklike in his expensive suit. “Welcome to doing jobs.”
“What is this, an office?” Jeongin groaned. Jisung laughed.
Minho, mechanically, turned to Chan, looking at him over the workbench. “I’m going to bed,” he said, voice almost robotic with how he was trying to keep anything from bleeding into it.
Chan was unphased. “Sure thing,” he said. At his side, Felix had nudged in closer, head resting against Chan’s shoulder. “Are you still up to going with Changbin in the morning to drop the rental off?”
Minho was already heading for the door. “Yes.”
“Ah, why me?” Changbin complained from behind him. “Why can’t Jisung go?”
“I risked life and limb today!” Jisung countered. “I deserve to sleep in.”
“You stood around and looked intimidating. Here, I’ll rock, paper, scissors you for it.”
The workroom door closed behind Minho right as Changbin was yelling, “Yah! You did it late—” It cut Changbin off mid sentence like someone had pressed a mute button.
Minho took the stairs quickly, but not like he was rushing. Every moment felt— tight, controlled. Rigid, almost. There was something to him, right now, that felt as if, were he to let go even a little, he would spring apart. Like a rubber band drawn back too far, or a toy wound up too tightly.
He wanted to throttle Jeongin. The image of Jeongin being flung down onto asphalt, open and defenceless, was seared into his retinas even with how grainy the image had been. He wanted Jeongin on the floor again, wanted to press him down into the concrete of the stairwell— but not to hurt him. Minho wanted to take hold of his skinny ankles and drag him like some kind of beast into his dark bedroom, Jeongin as pliant and lax about it as he could get, his hands open and palms up.
Minho unlocked his bedroom door and stepped inside, not bothering to turn the lights on. Faintly, the streetlights from outside illuminated the general shape of things, the little hills of his books, the smooth plane of his bed, neatly made.
He’d drag Jeongin there, if he could. Strip him bare and bring the covers over him, keep him warm, keep him safe. Tucked away and his. Never to be touched again by anything in the world. Except Minho.
Who, really, was one of the main things Jeongin needed protecting from.
Minho yanked his shirt over his head, one handedly undoing the buckle on his belt. The air in his room was cool, but it did little to dampen the heat skittering over his skin unpleasantly. Heat from frustration, from agitation. From arousal, if he was being honest.
He stalked to his makeshift bathroom, shoving aside the plastic curtain. He turned the shower on, standing aside to let the water heat up as he shoved his jeans and boxer-briefs over his hips. His cock was halfway to hardness already, flushing warm and heavy, and he gathered up his clothing and tossed it angrily into the laundry basket wedged in the corner.
Minho wasn’t normally this easily worked up— or rather, he could usually divert course without much issue. But it had been getting worse and worse lately, every little flash of thigh or belly from Jeongin plucking at his gaze. The bare nape of his neck, the slim lines of his wrists. A sign, maybe, that Minho needed to go out and find someone to work out the energy on — but he hadn’t had the time these days and he was reluctant to leave the house, even if it would only be for a handful of hours.
He stepped under the spray of the shower, steam beginning to curl in the air. The hot water soaked into his hair, ran in rivulets down his face and body, an echo of a touch he craved.
He closed his eyes and thought of the last person he’d let take him home. A different club from Maniac, one that favoured blue lighting and screeching music. It had been fairly early, but still packed with people, warm and humid. A long day, capped off with a light sparring session with Jeongin— and Minho had needed to get out of the house.
It was never hard for him to pick people up, especially not in the gay clubs, which he tended to favour. Not even with the scar. Sometimes he thought the scar actually helped, appealing to a certain sort of person. He didn’t like to analyse it. None of that mattered in the end. He never went home with the same person twice, no matter how many numbers were covertly slipped to him by damp and sated partners.
That particular night he’d turned a few people down, his eyes set on a stranger across the club, a young man in an oversized t-shirt and baggy jeans, his frame slim under all the fabric. Not the usual sort of club attire, and from the back his hair had been a little messy, soft and freshly washed. He looked like he’d been dragged out for a night of fun last minute by his friends.
The resemblance was so striking that as Minho had approached he’d thought for a flicker that when the man turned around it would be Jeongin. An illusion that was totally shattered when he did — the boy had wide doe eyes and a full upper lip, gentle rounded jaw. Nothing at all like Jeongin's sharp fox eyes, his angular bone structure.
Minho had pressed him against a wall anyway, had followed after the other man had breathlessly whispered into his mouth, I live just up the road.
And then it hadn’t mattered what his face looked like, because he’d had long fingers and a mop of thick black hair and when Minho had turned him over onto his belly in the darkness the illusion had been enough. The pale expanse of his bare back, the dip of his spine, the curve of his waist— it could have been Jeongin. And Minho had bent and pressed heated, open mouthed kisses to the other man’s nape, reached around and covered his mouth when the moan that came out wasn’t Jeongin’s pretty voice.
The guilt always came later, but in the heat of it, with desire clouding his mind and his cock sensitive and hard, it was difficult to remember the feeling of shame.
Minho took himself in hand, fully hard now, and gave himself a slow pump, blowing out a shaky breath as water dripped over his downturned face.
He thought of Jeongin, of his mouth, that lovely, lovely mouth. A lip pulled between his teeth in anxious thought, or the stretch of them when he smiled. The shine of saliva over his lips when he pulled fingers out of his mouth, resting them against that plush bottom lip.
Minho thumbed the head of his cock, precome getting washed away before it could linger. This wouldn’t take long, he knew, as he began to stroke himself in earnest. It wasn’t a night for lingering, and Minho didn’t think he could even if he wanted to. He closed his eyes against the image of his own hand moving over his cock, and instead imagined he was sinking into the heat of Jeongin’s lithe body, his hips moving in small thrusts into the circle of his hand.
It wouldn’t be like this if they went to bed, small restrained movements. He wanted to fuck Jeongin hard, fuck him sore, the space between their bodies messy with sweat and lube, Jeongin slick between the legs with it. He wouldn’t want to roll Jeongin over — not the first few times, at least. He’d want him on his back, would want to see Jeongin fall apart, watch the tears come rolling down his cheeks as Minho shoved fingers into his mouth, gagged him on them. He’d be warm around Minho’s fingers and warm around his cock, squirming and whimpering as Minho took him. Minho would press his fingertips down on the softness of Jeongin’s tongue, muffle his noises, finally, finally feeling the silken heat of him for himself, the inside of his lovely body, pink and slick.
And after Jeongin came Minho would pull his fingers out just to gather up Jeongin’s come from where it had splattered on his belly, his chest, and then return those fingers to Jeongin’s mouth, make him clean up his own mess.
“Fuck,” Minho hissed, stomach muscles quivering with tension, hand a blur on his cock as he came imagining Jeongin’s dark eyes looking at him over a mouth smeared with his own come.
Afterwards Minho just breathed, the sound of it a little ragged. He took his hand off his rapidly softening cock, his come swirling down towards the drain.
And now, the guilt. The guilt because Jeongin would be horrified and embarrassed, if he ever found out his hyung was thinking about laying him on his back. The guilt because Minho didn’t want to fuck Jeongin like a lover should, no, he wanted Jeongin’s tears, Jeongin’s pleading, Jeongin sore and aching, his legs clamped tight as a bowstring around Minho’s hips.
Minho covered his face with his hands for long moment, and then straightened his spine, shoving his wet hair out of his face, raising himself up out of the shower’s spray.
After the job he’d leave. After the job he’d have a place of his own to bring pretty boys with pale skin and dark hair and long legs and fuck them in a way he could never allow himself with who he actually wanted.
——
“Ah,” Jeongin gasped, hips moving in a stuttering rhythm as he jerked himself off. He hadn’t even bothered to strip, he’d closed his bedroom door and flopped back onto his bed and shoved his jeans halfway down his thighs and it had been enough.
He’d barely been able to get out of that meeting fast enough once Minho had gone. Chan had wanted to fuss over his stupid arm and Jeongin would have maybe been sympathetic to his concern if it wasn’t for the fact that his dick had been rapidly on its way to aching rock hardness. And Jeongin had needed to get the fuck out of there.
He thought of Minho. Minho in the van, growling an order at him, his grip on Jeongin so so so fucking close to what Jeongin wanted. Minho in the workroom, watching with raw desire splashed over his face as Jeongin closed his lips around his own fingers. Minho fucking running away from the meeting, movements stilted just enough that Jeongin knew he was in his bedroom right now, fisting his own cock.
Is he imagining me? Jeongin wondered. Maybe me on my knees, his cock down my throat. Or his fingers in my mouth—
Jeongin wanted it so badly.
“Fuck,” he whimpered, “hyung—”
He pressed the balled up shirt in his free hand to his face a bit more firmly, more to muffle himself at this point than what its original purpose was. It hardly smelled like Minho anymore, nothing like when Jeongin had first snuck it out of the dirty laundry a year ago.
For a while there in the beginning it had gotten Jeongin off so fast as to almost be embarrassing. Minho’s scent making the fantasy that much more real, Jeongin’s vivid imagination taking it from there.
But now the shirt mostly smelled a little stale and like Jeongin’s air freshener, just a hint of Minho lingering.
Jeongin made a frustrated little noise and tossed the shirt aside so it landed on the floor where he’d kick it back under the bed later. He was getting close, his hand moving quickly, precome slicking the way. With a frantic kind of desperation he shoved his own fingers into his mouth, pressed them to the back of his tongue. He wished they were Minho’s; Minho’s fingers in his mouth, gagging him. Minho’s cock thick and unyielding between his legs, splitting Jeongin open until Jeongin was so sore he wouldn’t be able to walk or sit or think without remembering.
Minho’s come inside him, sticky and slick and so fucking hot.
Baby boy, Minho would moan into his ear as he filled him. My baby boy.
Jeongin cried out around his fingers and came.
Chapter 19
Notes:
just a quick note: we're taking a hiatus to work on the next 5 chapters, as we've unfortunately caught up with ourselves 😬 the next chapter will be up once we're finished writing those, so there's currently no ETA but if you're wanting updates, you can follow us on twitter!
for this incredibly long chapter:
chapter specific tags: unprotected sex, overstimulation, degrading language/mild humiliation play (words used: slut, whore), under negotiated kink, dom/sub dynamics
EDIT MAY 12TH, 2023: We've nearly finished the next four chapters and have decided that is good enough, so we will be posting chapter 20 on Friday, May 19th in the early afternoon EST.
Chapter Text
Hyunjin was painting when Felix came into his room, not bothering to knock or wait. It maybe should have upset Hyunjin, or bothered him in some way, but it never had, not with Felix, not even after Felix had moved out, in a manner of speaking. It just felt so perfectly natural that Felix would treat this space as his own, not like some kind of private sanctum that belonged only to Hyunjin.
Would Hyunjin feel as comfortable if it were someone else, at this point? Perhaps. He wasn’t sure he wanted to experiment to find out.
He turned on his stool as Felix closed the door softly behind him, moving his paintbrush to the pot of water on his desk before the paint could dry in the bristles. “Lix,” he said, motioning for him to come closer. “Come and tell me what you think of this.”
Felix did as he was bid, coming up to where Hyunjin was sitting and leaning against him, hip almost to Hyunjin’s shoulder. Hyunjin snaked his arm around Felix’s waist, holding him there, as Felix looked at the painting — a landscape he was doing, the city from a rooftop, a mashup of memories more than anything real. It was different from his usual thing, the flowers, things from reference pictures. A challenge. He liked doing those, with his art.
Sometimes, when people looked at his art, they gave instant praise, the words falling from their mouth so quickly that Hyunjin knew they hadn’t really taken it in. Changbin was like that sometimes, but Hyunjin knew that that, at least, came from a place of love, so he could forgive it.
Felix didn’t do that. He looked at Hyunjin’s work in progress in silence for a long few seconds, clearly taking it in, and then said, “It’s really beautiful, Hyunjin. It looks like it would be relaxing to be there.”
Hyunjin nodded slowly. Yes, that was it, he thought. The thought of such a thing, this unhindered view of a city as far as he could see, was relaxing to him. Freedom was the sky, the space, the sound of distant cars and people without the filter of walls around him. Maybe he could take this up onto the roof of this building somehow, paint the rest of it up there. He’d have to warn Changbin first, though. So he didn’t question where or why Hyunjin had gone.
Felix stood against him a little longer. Hyunjin let the silence settle, enjoying this while he could, because there was something about Felix right now, a thoughtful air, that Hyunjin had seen before. The air he had when he wanted to say something, when he had something he wanted to tell or discuss with Hyunjin, but he was still gathering his words. He struggled, sometimes, with saying these things coherently. Hyunjin didn’t mind if he didn’t bother, Hyunjin would understand him anyway.
“Can we talk?” Felix asked eventually.
“Of course, angel,” Hyunjin said. He stripped off the gloves he wore when painting, as Felix moved away from him to go sit on the edge of the bed. He seemed perfectly calm and composed, which kept Hyunjin relaxed too, because the words had sent a spike of anxiety through him. But Felix didn’t look like whatever he wanted to discuss was actually bothering him in any way. He even smiled at Hyunjin when Hyunjin sat down next to him, and immediately reached out to hold Hyunjin’s hand.
Hyunjin let him take it, the way he always did, Felix’s hand so much smaller and so much warmer in his own. Hyunjin had always known that he ran cold, was able to feel it in his own hands and feet, the constant coldness, but it wasn’t until he started holding hands regularly with Felix that he registered just how cold he was sometimes. The contrast between them, the way Felix’s hand in his made him want to clutch harder, sometimes.
There was another short silence and then Felix said, “How long are you going to keep being angry with Chan-hyung?”
Hyunjin blinked at him. It was, he thought, something of a complicated question with a very simple answer. “However long I feel like it,” he said. That was always how it went, surely. He would get over it when he felt like getting over it.
Felix, though, just sighed, before giving him a smile, remarkably weak. Hyunjin didn’t like that smile; he didn’t like when Felix’s smile was watered down in this way, tense and unsure of himself. “Well,” Felix said, “can that maybe be sooner rather than later?”
Hyunjin didn’t say anything. He didn’t do any of the things he wanted to, when asked such a thing, like scowl or protest, tell Felix no. And oh, he wanted to. But instead he kept his face blank and said, “You want me to forgive him.”
“Yes,” said Felix. He shifted their hands so that their fingers were properly laced together, as if he was afraid that Hyunjin might tug himself free. “It’s been three weeks, Hyunjin. Isn’t it about time that you forgave him?”
Hyunjin held himself stiff and silent, biting his tongue physically, to stop himself from opening his mouth and letting something spill out that he didn’t want to say. Look, he wanted to tell himself, look, I’m learning, but he wasn’t sure if it was some kind of progress generally or if it was just because it was always easier to be gentle with Felix.
“Angel,” he said, once he felt like he had his mouth under control. “He was going to kill you.”
“And he’s sorry for it,” Felix said. There was a kind of patience in his voice that probably would have shamed Hyunjin to hear if it weren’t for the subject matter of the conversation. “He’s apologised, multiple times, and he’s working so hard to make up for what happened. But Hyunjin, it’s not like I was innocent in all of it. I knew— I knew how he felt about my father. I still chose to sleep with him. Is it any surprise that he reacted badly?”
“There is reacting badly,” Hyunjin said, as evenly as he could, “and there’s ordering your death.”
“So you can never forgive him?” Felix asked. Maybe it would have made Hyunjin feel better if Felix was angry with him, or if he sounded agitated by the conversation. But instead he sounded as even as Hyunjin did, or maybe it was worse than that — he sounded gentle but tired, a little bit like he was resigned to Hyunjin not coming around. Maybe he had a right to feel that way, because hearing Felix use that voice did make Hyunjin kind of want to dig his heels in deeper. He’d never felt this kind of petulance with Felix before. “Even though I have? And I was the one it happened to?”
You shouldn’t have, Hyunjin wanted to tell him. And that was probably why Hyunjin was still clinging onto this grudge, this anger that he wrapped around himself almost fresh every morning — because Felix had forgiven so easily, because Felix was too nice, too forgiving, because Felix loved Chan and was loved in return and that was enough for him.
Was it wrong of Hyunjin, if that wasn’t enough for him? He could see, after all, the ways in which Chan was trying. It felt, in some ways, like those two or three days were a blip, a falsehood, because Chan had been doting on Felix ever since in much the same way he always had done — worse, perhaps. It was like any time his attention was pulled away from work, he was lavishing it on Felix.
The uncharitable part of Hyunjin said it was the result of a guilty conscience, and maybe it was. The rational part of him said — well, that’s just Chan, isn’t it? That was just what Chan was like. He adored Felix.
He was silent for long enough that Felix eventually sighed again. He shifted on the bed so that he could lay his head against Hyunjin’s shoulder, so that they were no longer looking at each other. “It’s hard for me, Hyunjin,” he said, so softly it was almost a murmur. “It’s hard, to be caught in the middle of you two like this. I don’t want to keep being pulled in two directions. I love you both, and I don’t want you to keep being so angry at Chan-hyung on my behalf. I don’t need it, Hyunjin. I forgive him.”
Hyunjin bit his tongue hard enough that he was surprised he didn’t taste blood. Eventually he said, “You’re too nice, Felix.”
“I know you think so,” Felix said. “Maybe it’s true. Or maybe this is just me being selfish, for once, the way you want me to be sometimes. I’ve spent so many years, Hyunjin, being miserable, and Chan-hyung is something good in my life. I don’t want— a mistake to ruin that. And I don’t want it to ruin things for you, either.”
Hyunjin closed his eyes. A mistake? He supposed it would be considered that. It was simply that it was a mistake that seemed to cut so much deeper than anything else, so much harder than anything done by accident. It had not been an accident, Chan opening his mouth and ordering Felix’s death, as much as it had been a mistake. Hyunjin found it much easier to forgive accidents.
What had happened had happened to Felix, that was true. Hyunjin was not a part of it, not really, except that— he felt like he was a part of it, because it had been him who had pushed Felix and Chan together, and it had been him who had said, long ago, he’s my protector, wanting Felix to see, wanting Felix to feel that same sense of bone-deep safety with Chan that Hyunjin always had. For a while, Hyunjin thought that maybe Felix did feel it, did understand it, and so it did feel personal, for Hyunjin, that Chan had taken that safety and shattered it as easily as a glass hitting the ground.
But Felix was right — how much longer could Hyunjin be angry with Chan for this? Some days it felt like it could be forever, that streak of righteous anger in him burning hot. But then other days it felt like reaching for his anger was like stretching a muscle too far, an ache inside of him because he didn’t want to be angry, not like this, not with Chan. It was exhausting. It was, like Felix had said, hard.
“Urgh,” he said eventually. “Fine. Fine! You win, angel. I’ll play nice with Chan-hyung.”
If it were anyone else, if it were Hyunjin himself, they’d look smug to have gotten their way. Not Felix, of course not Felix — he just beamed at Hyunjin, his eyes warm and bright. “Thank you, Hyunjin,” he said. “I really do appreciate it.”
Hyunjin grumbled under his breath, not with any words, just making his performative discontent known. It was much like his embarrassment a couple of weeks ago; he could swallow his words, make peace with his anger, if it meant Felix looked that happy about it. That smile was like pure sunshine.
The grumbling cut off suddenly when Felix leaned in and kissed his cheek, a dry press of lips to Hyunjin’s skin. Hyunjin spluttered a little at that but didn’t push Felix away, just sat still as Felix sat back, still smiling at him. Softer now, sweeter, perhaps a little playful. “Brat,” Hyunjin mumbled.
“So you’ve said,” Felix chirped. He got to his feet, touching Hyunjin’s shoulder gently as he went. A reassuring touch. “I’m going to go take a shower. You should go get some food, Hyunjin, it’s almost one o’clock.”
Hyunjin blinked at him, and then checked his phone, which had been sitting face down on his desk next to his mug of water for his brushes. “Huh,” he said. “I guess I should eat something.”
After Felix had slipped back out of the room, leaving the door slightly ajar in what was certainly a pointed message for Hyunjin to not forget about food again, Hyunjin took a few moments to tidy up his things. He probably wouldn’t come back to this painting today, not after that conversation with Felix. It required a certain mindset, and he was definitely no longer in it.
He padded down the hallway and into the kitchen completely silently in his socks, thick and fluffy. He paused just inside the room, juddering a little to a stop — Jisung was in there, sitting at the kitchen table, eating ramen from one of the pots, looking down at something on his phone, so that all Hyunjin could see of his face was what peeked through the fall of his hair, soft like it had been freshly washed that day.
A moment, in which Hyunjin waited for that feeling of latent irritation to come at the sight of Jisung there, and instead felt only— the clench of something in his stomach, the easing of the tension in his shoulders. The spark of something he supposed must be happiness in his chest, to suddenly come across Jisung out here, where once, perhaps not even that long ago, it would have just pissed him off.
It did still piss him off, though. Not so much Jisung being there, but Hyunjin’s own reaction. Much like his anger at Chan, he wanted to keep that irritation, wrap it around himself as a safety blanket, but it was gone. He was left holding only rags that could not form a proper shape.
He came further into the room. He got remarkably close to the table before Jisung registered his presence and lifted his head. He did a very visible, very comical double take. “Hyunjin,” he said, in a voice that had just enough confusion in it that Hyunjin raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” he said dryly. “Who else would I be?”
Jisung smiled, and turned his phone screen off, shoving it off to the side in favour of picking up his chopsticks. “I’m not going to lie, dude,” he said, digging into his noodles. “I’m still getting used to the new hair. Every time I see it, I’m just like, who the fuck is that.”
This tickled Hyunjin enough, since he had been having something of the same reaction every time he caught sight of himself in a mirror, that he let himself smile, just a touch. It was only a small thing, but Jisung fumbled with his chopsticks anyway at the sight, almost dropping them into the pot. His eyes were very wide as he looked at Hyunjin across the table.
This was a new development, over the past two weeks since they had gone to Blackbird’s, Hyunjin letting himself smile, just slightly, at certain things that Jisung said. This was partly because he had already done it once before, and the sky had not fallen down, and it was both easier to allow himself to have it, and harder to stop it than it had been. Before, he used to turn his face away, make sure that Jisung did not see it, but there had been a couple of times recently where Hyunjin simply hadn’t had time for that. The smile had come on too quickly.
Partly he was doing it because Jisung had almost this exact same reaction every time: fumbling whatever he was holding, staring in slack-jawed shock, his ears or cheeks stained red. It was like being back in Blackbird’s every time, the smallest dose of the Hyunjin that he had pretended to be. Looking at Jisung in these moments, there was a sensation inside of himself that he could not possibly put into words, something that whispered, more, more, make him blush more. He’d never experienced something like this before.
He watched Jisung for a long moment, Jisung looking back, and then he said, very casually, “Ah, yeah, right, my ugly hair.”
This reaction was not as instantaneous as the reaction to the smile had been; it looked like it took Jisung a moment for the words to register. When they did, his expression morphed into one of dramatic despair, as he did let his chopsticks drop into his pot now.
“That’s not what I said, Hyunjin-ah!” he wailed, doing a little wriggly movement with his body that Hyunjin supposed could be considered cute. “I never said it was ugly! I like it!”
Hyunjin bit down the urge to laugh; that would be a considerable step too far. He went to the kitchen area, started looking in cupboards for something he might want to eat. “Yes, I know that,” he said, very breezily. “You already told me it was pretty.”
“It is pretty,” Jisung said. Hyunjin’s hand, closing one of the cupboard doors, jerked a little and he shut the door much harder than he wanted to. Luckily Jisung didn’t seem to notice, because he was already saying, “It’s not boring either! Stop putting Jeongin’s words in my mouth.”
“Okay, okay,” Hyunjin said, turning to roll his eyes at him over his shoulder. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.”
If Changbin had said that, Jisung probably would have said, how did you know I'm wearing panties. With Hyunjin, he just looked at him with that blush still across his face and then picked up his chopsticks to start picking at his food again. Hyunjin rolled his eyes one more time and went back to poking in the cupboards.
After a few more seconds of that, though, Jisung said, “What are you doing?”
“Looking for something to eat,” Hyunjin said with a sigh, as he knocked another door shut. His hunger was present in his body but it felt far away, lost still under the dampening effect that working on his art brought out. Times like this, it was very hard to figure out both what he wanted to eat and also to actually make it.
“Um,” said Jisung. “Do you want to share with me?” Hyunjin turned around to face him; now it was his turn to blink. Jisung looked back at him, surprisingly steadily for someone who had been so flustered less than a minute ago. He motioned to the pot in front of him. “I made two packets because I was hungry but that appears to have been ambitious of me. You can share with me, if you want.”
Two months ago, Hyunjin would have scoffed and refused on principle; even just a few weeks ago, he might have said no. Today, he stood in silence for just long enough that he saw Jisung visibly squirm, and then he said, “Sure, let me get a bowl.”
That appeared to have shocked Jisung back into silence, because he didn’t say anything as Hyunjin got a bowl and some chopsticks of his own and took a seat at the table, opposite Jisung. Jisung had been sitting in Seungmin’s chair, which meant Hyunjin was in Felix’s chair — or Jisung’s, he supposed, originally. The one that Hyunjin had so casually and, he could admit, callously, given away.
At the time he had told himself that it was okay, because Jisung wouldn’t mind, Jisung never minded these things. He’d known that wasn’t true. Now he thought, what a bitch you can be.
Jisung pushed the pot of noodles further into the middle of the table. He was smiling at Hyunjin, not his usual grin, boyish and handsome, but something softer. It was almost sweet, that smile, as he looked at Hyunjin, not saying anything, just smiling. Hyunjin kept his face blank as he transferred some of the ramen into his bowl.
“You didn’t even put an egg in this,” he said, scathingly, when Jisung just kept smiling at him.
“Sorry,” said Jisung, his usual easy tone. “I’ll be sure to add two next time, to make up for it.”
Next time, next time. It was the first time they had eaten together, just the two of them, without anyone else around. No one else around to distract Hyunjin from the way Jisung’s cheeks bunched out when he ate, no one he could fuss over or use as an excuse for amusement. Only this, the two of them at the table, a shared pot of ramen between them.
“Mm,” he said. “Make sure you don’t forget.”
——
Jeongin scrolled aimlessly through his phone as he lay curled up on his side in his bed, wrapped up in his covers, feet tucked up to keep them warm. It was Jisung who had shown him social media for the first time, getting him set up with an Instagram account just so Jeongin could look at pictures and videos. Jisung, of course, had deleted all of his stuff after he’d joined, but Jeongin had been grateful for his help. He didn’t have his picture on there, he didn’t even follow anyone; he just liked looking at the pictures.
He’d been laying there for a while, watching half a video before scrolling past to the next one, ever since he’d woken up from his morning nap. He did this quite often, but more so in the winter, when even with the underfloor heating turned on, there was still a chill in the air when he rolled out of bed at 6am to go eat breakfast with Minho. He’d eat, soaking in their shared quiet time together, and then once Minho left to go do whatever it was that he needed to do so early in the morning, Jeongin usually took himself back off to bed for a couple more hours.
Nobody knew he did this, especially not Minho. They probably all just thought he was hanging out in his room. But it was cold, and he was weak, and so most days he dozed and then did something like this, laying in bed playing with his phone or his DS, until he needed to get up and do something.
Today there wasn’t anything he had to do, so he’d kind of settled himself into a nice, lazy day, except he heard, now, from the kitchen, the sound of Minho’s voice. Not the words, but the cadence of it, recogniseable to him like nothing else was at this point. The realisation that Minho was in the kitchen again made him sit up before he had the conscious thought to do so.
He clambered off his bed, grateful that the floor was warm even if the air hitting his body was not. He’d been wearing a pair of basketball shorts and an old t-shirt, a white thing that had been worn almost to the point of translucence after years of going through their washing machine. For breakfast he had pulled on a hoodie, worn a pair of slippers, but he didn’t bother now, as he let himself out of his bedroom and into the hallway.
Minho was in the kitchen, standing next to the table as he talked to Jisung, who was washing dishes at the sink, a small bowl covered in soap suds in his hands. “You guys won’t be gone too long though, right?” Jisung was saying, looking over his shoulder at Minho.
“No,” said Minho, but he wasn’t looking at Jisung anymore. He’d stopped looking at Jisung the moment Jeongin had arrived in the room, just like he always did when Jeongin was in the same space as him. His eyes snapping over, his eyes focusing. The first time Jeongin had noticed it happening, it had made him feel shy and flustered. Now it just made him feel unashamedly smug.
“Hello Minho-hyung, Jisung-hyung,” he said cheerfully as he came properly into the room, his feet slapping a little on the wooden flooring. It was cold enough in here, in this outfit, that he felt goosebumps break out over his arms, his nipples going hard and pebbled on his chest. He didn’t need to look down at himself to know they were visible in his t-shirt, which was part of why he hadn’t bothered changing in the first place.
“Hello, Jeongin,” said Jisung, matching his cheerful tone perfectly.
Minho’s eyes were still on him, staring at him with that intensity that Jeongin rarely got to see so openly. Jeongin watched as that gaze flickered up and down his body, and then focused back on his face. Then it shuttered, going back to something that Jeongin saw more often — the purposeful dampening of whatever it was that Minho was feeling. “Baby boy,” he said.
He was dressed to go out; he was going with Chan and Changbin to pick up the guns that Hyunjae had finally received, which had apparently required somewhat nicer clothing than he usually wore. He was wearing slim black slacks and a tucked in button-down, thin pale grey stripes on white. It would have looked disconcertingly formal if it weren’t for the fact that the sleeves were rolled up, and the shirt had an embroidered black cat on the left breast. The little cat even had its pink tongue sticking out.
Jeongin padded over to him, smiling. Minho watched him approach without a single word, without taking his eyes away from Jeongin, and he didn’t stop Jeongin as he came up very close and tugged playfully on the side of his shirt. Not trying to untuck it, but hinting at that, maybe. “This shirt is really cute, hyung,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Minho let him tug for a few seconds before he took hold of Jeongin’s wrist, his fingers firm but gentle, and pulled his hand away. “It’s new,” he said, his voice that softer version it was when he didn’t want Jeongin to think he was upset with something.
Despite having moved Jeongin’s hand away, Minho didn’t let go of him for another few seconds, his touch lingering. Jeongin didn’t react, just stood there smiling, until Minho took his hand away and let Jeongin’s wrist fall to his side. Then Minho took a careful step back, putting more distance between their bodies.
It was not the first time Jeongin had thought this, but the realisation came to him once again, that Minho craved exactly the kind of touch that he seemed determined to deny himself. When they sparred, Minho never let himself linger, his hands on Jeongin efficient and brisk. But sometimes, sometimes when Jeongin least expected it, Minho would be like this, his hands warm on Jeongin, pausing in their hold, like for a short time Minho forgot himself, lost in the pleasure of even such brief things.
He always let go eventually, though. One day he wouldn’t feel the need to, not with Jeongin.
“You should have put your hoodie back on, baby boy,” Minho said. “You’ll get cold like that.”
Jeongin hummed under his breath. He shifted his weight a little, onto his back foot, his hips cocked in a way he’d seen people do in the pictures on the internet, knowing as he did it that his nipples were certainly visible through the thin material of his t-shirt. He watched Minho’s eyes flicker across his body again, more obviously slower than before, a definite up-and-down that he was not sure Minho fully realised he was doing to begin with. It was obvious when he caught himself doing it, because his jaw visibly tightened, like someone had taken a tuning key to the wires holding it shut.
“You’ll take a coat with you, won’t you, hyung?” Jeongin asked, instead of going to get his hoodie or making any move like he was going to cover up. “It’ll be colder for you, outside.” Minho nodded without answering. His eyes were fixed on Jeongin’s face now. His eyes were always so intense, especially now, without even that subtle softness that he usually had looking at Jeongin. Right now, that look in his eyes was heated, hidden behind a blank expression that would have covered it up so well with someone who didn’t know what to look for.
Jeongin knew what to look for. He’d made a study of looking for it. And he was seeing it now, standing exposed in his t-shirt and shorts in the middle of the living room. He didn’t bother fighting down the shiver that came over him, knowing that it would just be taken as him being cold, feeling the way his nipples tightened as a result. He had to remind himself that Jisung was right there in the room with them, finishing up his dishes, the sound of the rushing water from the tap a backdrop to this conversation.
He’d thought the shiver might send another one of those hot looks up and down his body, but instead Minho blinked a couple of times, and when his eyelids opened again, his eyes were dark but not so heated. “Baby boy,” he said. “Go put something warmer on.”
Jeongin pouted a little at him. “I’m going to go shower after you leave, hyung,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“Hmm,” said Minho, that disbelieving sound, sceptical and a little condescending. That sound had played a role in many of Jeongin’s sexual fantasies, although, to be honest, by this stage there was very little about Minho that Jeongin hadn’t factored in while jerking off.
The sound of the tap shut off. Jisung laid the spoon he’d been washing in the drying rack and turned to face them, smiling. Jeongin straightened up from his somewhat suggestive slouch before Jisung could clock it, but truthfully he didn’t think Jisung would clock it. There was sometimes a simplicity to how Jisung viewed the world around him, an easy-going acceptance of what he was seeing without feeling any need to delve in deeper. This was probably why he was considered such an asset on jobs: he could take orders and carry them out without getting bogged down in the whys of it all.
This was countered by the fact that Jisung wanted to know everything there was to know about the world outside of what he was perceiving in the moment. All those documentaries, the videos he watched. Jeongin had once seen Jisung’s search history, which had included things like tardigrades temperature survival range and family tree of archduke franz ferdinand. Jeongin’s search history, by comparison, was between him and whichever deity happened to exist.
Minho looked away from Jeongin to Jisung, drying his hands on a towel. “I’m serious, Jisung,” Minho said, picking up the thread of the conversation that Jeongin had first interrupted. “Don’t go out, not even to the convenience store, not while we’re gone.”
“I know, hyung,” said Jisung, very patiently. He sounded so patient, in fact, that this was obviously something Minho had reiterated a few times already.
“While we’re gone, you need to make sure everything is fine,” Minho continued, like Jisung had not said anything. “Don’t let the others go out, either, not even Hyunjin.”
“Sure, hyung,” said Jisung. He met Jeongin’s eye, the two of them exchanging one quick look of almost-amusement, before Jisung added, “I’ll make sure he knows, okay?”
He didn’t point out what Minho already knew, which was that if Hyunjin wanted to go out, an edict from Minho via Jisung was unlikely to make any kind of difference — Hyunjin would go out. But they knew Minho knew that, and that this was more about soothing Minho’s anxiety over leaving the house than anything else.
Minho turned to Jeongin. “You too,” he said. “No going out until we’re all back.”
Jeongin smiled at him, knowing that the fondness on his face would be obvious to any kind of observer. But it was just like Minho, to care so much about the people here, to worry about them all even when he wasn’t in the house. “Where would I go, hyung,” he said. “I’m just watching a drama today.”
Minho nodded, but he didn’t look convinced that either of them would follow his instructions. He’d never believe Jeongin if Jeongin told him so, but sometimes Minho was just— cute. Predictable in odd ways, unpredictable in others, all of it cute and funny to Jeongin, who collected all of the information he picked up about Minho like a dragon hoarding treasure.
“I’m going to go,” he said. “We’ll be back in the evening. Call if anyone needs anything, if anything goes wrong. Okay?” Twin nods, Jisung and Jeongin bobbing their heads. “Okay.”
He looked like he was still reluctant to leave, pausing at the door right before he went out of the apartment. Jeongin gave him a sunny little wave; Jisung gave him a salute so solemn it cycled all the way back around to irreverence. Minho squinted at him, and then let the front door swing shut after him.
Both Jisung and Jeongin stood, for a few more seconds, not looking at each other, waiting until they could be sure Minho wouldn’t overhear anything. Then Jeongin turned his face in Jisung’s direction and their eyes met and he collapsed into giggles.
Jisung started laughing too, but he seemed to find Jeongin’s amusement funnier than Minho’s somewhat over the top protectiveness. “What,” Jisung said, grinning at Jeongin, “why are you laughing? You’re under house arrest and you’re laughing about it.”
Jeongin struggled to compose himself, and just about managed it. “Why are you laughing,” he asked Jisung, the smile still stretched wide on his face. “You’re the one who has to tell Hyunjin he’s not allowed outside for the next five hours.”
Jisung winced, and pushed a hand through his hair. He chewed the inside of his mouth thoughtfully for a few moments and then snapped his fingers. “Oh, I know,” he said, “I’ll get Felix to do it.” And then he grinned again as Jeongin collapsed back into laughter.
——
It had been a while since Chan had visited Hyunjae’s warehouse. It was out of the way enough that it never made much sense for Chan to make the trek over, when there was every possibility that something would crop up that required his attention, at Maniac or with another client. The last time he’d been here was probably about eight months ago, when he’d had enough obvious time in his schedule to make an appearance.
He’d made the time today, ensuring no other appointments were made, and arranging this visit to happen on a Tuesday, when Maniac was closed to the public and the only thing happening was a supply delivery. They’d done enough of those that his general manager could handle any problems that arose. There were few emergencies when it came to their supply deliveries.
It was important that he come here himself. Important that he show his face, after what had happened last time. And he’d taken Changbin and Minho with him as a sense of— closure, he supposed. The two of them had been here last time, and now they were back again.
It was cold, now, and Chan wasn’t sure if it was colder here at the warehouse than back at the house, or if that was just his imagination, but he pulled his coat closer around him as he got out of the back seat of the car. It was always odd, being ferried places like that, sitting in the back feeling disconnected from whoever was in the front. If it had been up to him, he would have been with Changbin in the front, and Minho in the back, but whenever he tried to do something like that, Minho always reacted like Chan was being unreasonable in some way.
Hyunjae usually met them at the door but today one of his workers was there, a kid probably around Hyunjin or Jisung’s age, his hands stuffed into the back pockets of his jeans as he watched them all get out of the car. Chan recognised him vaguely, but it had been such a long time since he was here that he had no hope of putting a name to the face. Luckily, that was what Changbin was for.
“Sunwoo-yah, hello,” he said, very cheerfully, leading the way to the door. “Where’s Hyunjae-hyung?”
“He had to take a call,” Sunwoo said. His hair was a little too long and looked like it was in danger of poking him in the eyes at any given moment. “He’s in his office. He asked me to take you along.”
“We know the way,” Minho said, a little too dismissively.
Sunwoo looked at him. There was something about his face which suggested he was neither easily intimidated nor easily impressed. Not even Minho’s scars seemed to particularly phase him. “He asked me to take you along,” he repeated.
“Why don’t you lead the way then,” Chan said, before Minho could say anything more. After all, it made sense, to have someone take them there, in a warehouse full of things that Hyunjae probably didn’t want them looking at; as straightforward as the journey was, visitors were understandably not welcome to simply wander at will. He gave Minho a little quelling look over his shoulder, and followed Sunwoo into the building.
Hyunjae’s office door was closed, but Sunwoo didn’t even bother knocking before he just pushed it open. “Hyung, Chris is here,” he announced, standing in the doorway in a way that blocked Chan from seeing anything around him. “Do you need me to make coffee or something for them?”
“No, I’ll spare them that particular horror,” said Hyunjae’s voice, dryly. “Let them in.”
Sunwoo stepped to the side, motioning for Chan to come into the room. Hyunjae was behind his desk, but he stood when he saw Chan, and leaned over the surface with a hand outstretched for Chan to shake. Chan did so, Hyunjae’s handshake solid and firm, but his eyes a little reserved, missing some of the usual warmth that they had when Chan came to see him.
“Chris,” he said, as he let Chan’s hand go. “It’s good to see you, it’s been a while.”
“It has,” Chan agreed. “Thank you for agreeing to see us on short notice.”
“Not at all,” said Hyunjae. Definitely reserved, his voice a little less friendly, in a way that Chan couldn’t quite place. “Changbin, Minho, it’s good to see you too.”
Minho just grunted. Changbin, generally the more civilised of the two, said, “Hello, hyung.”
Hyunjae motioned to the seats in front of his desk. “Sit down, sit.”
Chan sat, looking around the office as surreptitiously as he could. He was always a little jealous of Hyunjae’s office, which by all rights should be depressing and yet was so tastefully decorated that Chan thought if he had a space like this, he might never bother with his bedroom again. Just fit a pull-out futon in here and call it a day. His own office back home felt remarkably dark and dim in comparison, but he had no real talent for interior design and thus didn’t know how to fix it.
But perhaps it was better not to. That way he actually left his office.
Changbin took the other seat, unusual in meetings but usually Chan was the one with his back to the wall and Changbin got to lurk dangerously. In meetings like this, with clients or contacts they liked, that wasn’t the best approach. Besides which, Minho had taken up position against the back wall, right next to the door, and he was plenty intimidating on his own.
“Go and get Chris’s order ready,” Hyunjin said to Sunwoo, still lingering in the doorway, his hands back in his pockets.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Sunwoo said, but he disappeared out of the room all the same, closing the door behind himself surprisingly gently considering his disdainful tone of voice.
“Brat,” said Hyunjae, taking his seat behind his desk, running a hand through his hair. “I’d get rid of him but my partner adores him.” Chan blinked; he wasn’t aware Hyunjae had a business partner, but he wasn’t going to pry into that. “Anyway. Your guns.”
“Our guns,” Chan echoed.
There was something incredibly off about Hyunjae’s body language, and it seemed to be getting worse. His words were stilted, too, nothing at all like the casual way he usually spoke to Chan. Chan heard and saw it with a slight sinking sensation in his stomach, a feeling that he could not shake. He’d wanted to come out here to renew this connection in person, to show Hyunjae that whatever had happened last time wasn’t a sign of dysfunction in his operation. He was a little concerned it was too late.
“They came in mostly at the price I told you,” Hyunjae said. He fished around on his desk and pulled out a piece of paper, which he handed to Chan. It was as close to an invoice as they ever got from Hyunjae, a breakdown of the costs coded so that everything looked like normal office supplies. Computers instead of guns, reams of paper instead of bullets. “Ammunition for the semis ended up being a little more expensive than anticipated, so I threw in a couple of free boxes of your usual stuff.”
Chan nodded, scanning the paper, although he was mostly just checking that the prices weren’t ridiculously different from what Hyunjae had originally quoted them. It was a little more expensive, but nothing that would break the bank. They had, frankly, spent more money on Hyunjin’s little trip to Blackbird’s than what they were going to be wiring Hyunjae for this.
He sensed Minho moving behind him, although he only let out a slight tap of his shoe against the floor as he stepped forward. Chan was already turning to pass the invoice over his shoulder before Minho could ask for it, knowing without needing it said that Minho would want to check it over himself. Minho took it, almost a little snatch, before retreating back to the far wall.
There was a short silence as Minho read, a silence that Chan would normally fill up with conversation — asking about the guns, perhaps, or about Hyunjae’s business, if he had anything interesting in the warehouse up for offer. But Hyunjae wasn’t looking at him, even now, and was shuffling some papers on his desk into a neater pile.
It was going to be awful trying to find a new weapons dealer. Chan wasn’t even sure there was another one in this city that he could stomach.
“This seems fine,” Minho said gruffly, stepping forward to pass the invoice back to Chan, who took it, folded it neatly in half, and then slid it into his inside pocket.
“Once we’ve checked the guns over, I’ll get the payment sent to you,” he told Hyunjae. Hyunjae nodded, looking at him properly for what felt like the first time since Chan had walked in. His eyes serious, the line of his mouth— sad, somehow.
“Right,” he said, and then, even more slowly, he said, “Listen. I hope I didn’t— make things difficult for Yongbok, with what happened last time. I didn’t want— that.”
Chan, for some reason, had not expected Hyunjae to bring it up. He sat there, in the unusually comfortable seat, and wasn’t really sure what to do with his body, wasn’t sure how to react. He’d thought they’d get through this meeting without bringing up the elephant in the room — except he didn’t think of it as an elephant in the room, because he hadn’t been ignoring it. In their line of work, that sort of stuff had to be wiped from people’s memories, deliberately forgotten.
But of course Hyunjae would bring it up. Especially as, judging by the uncertain way he had said the words, it was very clear that he thought they had killed Felix. Chan could see it on his face, the look of a man waiting to be given unpleasant news, news that he did not want to hear one little bit. Had Hyunjae spent these last three weeks under that impression? Three weeks thinking his words had gotten someone killed?
“Uh,” said Changbin, when it was clear that Chan wasn’t going to be able to say anything. “Well, things were a little— uh, hectic for a bit but it settled down.”
That clearly didn’t reassure Hyunjae at all. “He’s a good kid,” he said, intensely seriously now. “Nothing at all like his father. I didn’t get to explain last time, but he’s— he’s not like the Magpie.”
What do you know about him, Chan wanted to ask. How do you know him, enough to say such a thing about him. Felix had called him Hyunjae-hyung, had been comfortable enough doing that, and doing it casually too. Chan felt almost greedy for the information, to know how Felix appeared in the eyes of someone who had only ever known him as the son of Lee Jaerim. They could not have spent time together, just whenever they had met in the course of Lee Jaerim’s business with Hyunjae, so how could he know these things?
But of course he would know these things. Felix’s goodness, his brightness, radiated out from him. Chan bet that was all the more pronounced, if placed next to Lee Jaerim.
“He is a good kid,” Changbin agreed. His voice was very pointed, now, like he, too, had finally understood what was fueling this line of conversation for Hyunjae. “We’ve all been enjoying the fruits of his baking skills too.”
Chan watched most of the tension in Hyunjae bleed out in a moment, at that precise use of the present tense. For a moment, before he got a grip on himself, he looked utterly relieved. Then the expression smoothed out a bit, and he sat up straighter in his seat. His gaze moved to Chan, who sat as still and silent as he had been the entire time, not quite trusting what would come out of his mouth if he opened it to speak.
Hyunjae’s eyes went calculating. Chan recognised it only because he saw a similar look in Hyunjin’s eyes right before he said something designed to make his target splutter. “Yeah,” said Hyunjae, very breezily, not looking away from Chan for a moment. “And he’s real fucking pretty, isn’t he.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Anyway,” Hyunjae said, still in that breezy voice, like he hadn’t just sent Chan’s heart pounding, looking away and at Changbin instead, “that silencer for the new toy for Jisung was weirdly difficult to get hold of, so you’d better take care of it, since I don’t know if I could get a new one anytime soon.”
“Sure, we’ll look after it,” said Changbin, about a gun that was almost certainly getting abandoned on a rooftop.
Chan kept his breathing steady, let nothing show on his face whatsoever. Because of course, he should have known — what had set this all off in the first place was that damn group photo on Changbin’s phone, the one where he sat, smiling widely, with Felix tucked carefully and closely under his arm. Of course Hyunjae had looked at that photo and put it together, one way or another.
How embarrassing. How humiliating. His ears were red, he could feel them, no matter how he tried to keep his expression from changing, but luckily Hyunjae was still not looking at him. He was talking to Changbin about the payment, about what to do if there was any problem with the guns, how they should check them over before you take them on any kind of adventure.
“Sure thing, hyung,” said Changbin cheerfully. “Can we see the guns now?”
Hyunjae gave a quick, glancing look at Chan, and then smiled. A real smile, the kind he usually gave, and his voice was back to that same friendly warmth it usually was. Even embarrassed as he was, Chan felt something ease at that. “Sure,” said Hyunjae. “Let’s go take a look.”
——
Jisung was taking out a day’s worth of restless energy on a punching bag when there was the sound of echoing footsteps on the stairs leading down to the basement and the door opened. Changbin came in first, holding a gun case in his arms, larger than the usual ones they got from Hyunjae. Behind him was Minho, holding a long case that must hold the new sniper rifle that Jisung would be using.
He abandoned his workout immediately. He’d been a little salty about getting left out of the trip to Hyunjae’s, to such an extent that even his earlier little moment with Hyunjin hadn’t been able to fully distract him from. The pleasure of that had carried him all the way up until an hour or so after the others had left, and then when the house had fallen quiet, he’d found himself annoyed. Especially after he hadn’t gotten to go last time, even though he knew the reason the people who were going were going because they’d been the ones to go last time. But still, going to Hyunjae’s was one of the best parts of this job. Sometimes when Jisung went, Hyunjae let him play with the really expensive stuff that Chan would never have a use for.
Now, seeing the guns actually arrive, he forgot all about how grumpy he’d been. “Ooh!” he said, stripping the wraps off his hands and dropping them to the floor. “Is everything here?”
“Yes,” said Changbin, grunting as he put his box on the metal table. Minho followed suit, the longer case barely fitting across it. Chan had come in now, carrying the case of ammunition. As strong as he was, he seemed to be struggling a little with the weight of it.
Jisung bounded over to him to help take some of the weight, cheerfully helping him over to the table with the others. “Thanks, Jisung,” said Chan, once everything was safe.
“No problem,” Jisung said, a little absently; he was eyeing the box that Minho was still standing in front of, wondering if he could get away with gently nudging him out of the way so he could see the new rifle. Now that he’d stopped working out, the cold air of the basement was beginning to settle against his sweaty skin, goosebumps breaking out on his mostly bare arms. He’d had a hoodie, one he’d taken off to just wear the tank top underneath, and now he was starting to wish he’d brought it over with him.
He, luckily, did not have to edge Minho away from the table. Minho took a step back and looked at Chan, that blank expectant look he often levelled Chan’s way. It wasn’t robotic, exactly, but he did sometimes look like he was waiting for an order to be plugged into him. “I’m going to go check up on everything,” he said. “Make sure nothing happened while we were gone.”
“Nothing did happen,” Jisung muttered, but Minho just ignored him, which wasn’t surprising. Chan nodded at him that he could leave, and Minho did so without another word, letting the door to the basement room swing shut behind him.
As soon as he was gone, Jisung leapt on the rifle box, clicking open the snaps on the side and flinging it open. “My baby,” he sighed, looking down at the disassembled parts in the box, shiny and black.
Chan snorted. “Don’t get too attached to it,” he said, as he helped Changbin open the other box, where four M16s lay, vaguely malevolent in their foam casing. “You’ll get to use it once, most probably.”
“Don’t say that where she can hear you,” Jisung said. He had already started to pull the parts out, his hands figuring out the assembly before his brain really engaged with it. If Jeongin had the skill with shooting the guns themselves, Jisung was the one who had the actual affinity with the weapons. He hadn’t been the best at shooting them, when he’d first started his training with Changbin, prone to getting hit by the recoil a little too hard, his nerves flinching sometimes with the sound of it. He’d tensed up a lot when he was in the process of pulling triggers.
That hadn’t mattered. Guns may not have been an extension of himself but they were a part of him. He’d worked at understanding them, at being good with them, honing these skills until he knew, instinctively, how to shoot, how to put them together, how to take them apart and how to do the upkeep. He’d called guns his first love, except, well, he’d met Hyunjin before he’d had one put in his hands. But they were something along those lines.
“You can’t even shoot that one in here,” Changbin said. “What’s the point in putting it together?”
“So I can see what she looks like,” Jisung said. He could already tell, though, that the gun wasn’t going to be as nice as his bolt-action gun, but considering this one was meant to be disposable, he wasn’t too bothered about that.
He liked these long distance guns the best of all the ones he had shot. He couldn’t really explain why. He didn’t think it was the distance from the target, because he wasn’t afraid to get up close and personal with his fighting and shooting. He thought maybe it was the game of it, of the way he had to take so many things into consideration: the angle, the wind speed, the movement of the target. His brain managed to do these calculations in a matter of moments, and he loved the feeling when he got it right.
Maybe it was just that shooting long distance usually required him to sit still for a period of time. He wasn’t used to that, outside of laying in bed.
Chan and Changbin put the M16s in the gun safe, the two of them hunched over there talking quietly as Jisung worked on the rifle. The ammunition went into the safe they had for that. Jisung had just finished assembling the Remington when Chan brought one of the M16s over, not loaded, and held it out to Jisung.
“Here,” he said. “What do you think about this?”
Jisung set the rifle down and took the semi-automatic. He’d never handled one of these before. They didn’t usually need this kind of thing on the jobs that they pulled — there were guns in this city, if one knew where to look, but the difficulty and expense of getting them into the country meant that most people just went with what was easiest. Handguns, simple, small things, but which got the job done, provided the job was killing people.
They’d be killing a lot of people on this job, Jisung knew, particularly those on the vault part of it. They’d need guns like this.
It was lighter than he’d expected. He’d have to shoot it to make sure, but it made him wonder what the kickback would be like. He turned it over in his hands, thoughtful as he looked at it, felt the weight of it in his hands. Minho had shot one of these before, Jisung had heard, but Changbin had not. Jeongin had never even held something of this size, they’d only ever let him shoot with one of their handguns.
Jisung’s hands itched to try it out.
“Do we have enough ammo for me to be playing with?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at Chan.
“Playing, no,” Chan said. “Training, yes.”
Jisung nodded. He’d meant them as the same thing, although he got the distinction in Chan’s eyes. But for Jisung, it was always about playing, about learning what made a gun tick, how to wield and use it. “It would go a lot easier if Minho-hyung would agree to train us,” he said.
“I know,” Chan said. He shrugged, as if to say, what can you do. Minho had not outright refused to train them on these guns, but he had been non-committal enough and vague about what he knew of them that his reluctance had been obvious. Jisung wasn’t sure what the cause of it was, and they all knew that Chan could have just ordered Minho to teach them, but there was likely some reason he didn’t want to.
Probably, Jisung thought privately, Minho just didn’t think his experience was good enough for it. He was not the type to act as an expert without having actual expertise.
“I think they’ll be good enough for the job,” Jisung said, handing the gun back to Changbin. “The gun itself is light-weight, I think the ammo is going to be the heavy thing. You guys are going to need plenty of it, if the numbers of guards Felix gave was accurate.”
It probably was not fully accurate, not now, not almost nine months after he’d last had access to the information. If the Magpie wasn’t an idiot, he’d have changed his set up in some way by now, not necessarily just because of the loose thread that Felix posed. Security stuff like that needed to be changed every six months, just like the way Seungmin always nagged him into changing the passwords on his electronics every six months.
“I might see if Hyunjae can get more of it for us before the job itself,” Chan said, musingly. Then he did something with his body that made his spine audibly pop; he winced, and so did Jisung. “Well, I’m going to go head upstairs. Do either of you need me?”
Two nos in echoing sing-song, which made Chan smile. He left with a cheery wave in Jisung’s direction, and as the door swung shut after him, Changbin straightened from where he’d been hunched over making sure the safes were properly shut.
He looked at the door, as if to make sure Chan had really left, and then said, with a grin at Jisung, “Hyunjae-hyung called him out on liking Felix’s pretty face.”
Jisung laughed, because it was meant to be something that he laughed at, and if there was anyone who deserved to be called out for something like that, it was Chan. Jisung had missed a lot of it in the beginning, too distracted by whatever was going on between Felix and Hyunjin, but he could see it, especially these last few weeks, just how head-over-heels Chan was for Felix.
It made him uncomfortable though. To know Hyunjin was seeing it. And to know, on some level, that he probably looked just as stupid when he looked at Hyunjin. The only piece of luck he had was that nobody seemed interested in mocking him for it.
He stretched, heard part of his own spine pop a little. “Do you want to spar with me, hyung?” he asked. “You’ll have to change first.”
“Nah,” said Changbin, “I’m turning in for the evening. I’m going to go check up on a couple of things. Make sure you lock the door after you leave, okay?”
Jisung gave him a little salute. He didn’t bother watching Changbin leave, he just went back to the mat under the punching bag, wrapped his hands up again. By this point, he was fully cold again, shivering in his tank top. An old thing, with stretched out arm holes, bought too big in the first place. It showed some of the scarring on his back, and sometimes he thought— Felix had scarring there too, given in similar circumstances. Did he know that Jisung was like him in that sense? Would he recognise what they were, if Jisung wore this top up to the apartment where Felix was likely to see it?
He’d spent so much time being uselessly jealous of all the things that Felix seemed to have that Jisung was lacking that he’d never really thought about how it would feel to have something connecting them together.
He shook the thought off, lifted his hands, and went back to his routine.
——
Minho, like the good guard dog he was, did not allow himself to immediately beeline to the third floor, where he knew Jeongin was theoretically holed up. No, instead he first poked his head into the workroom, where Seungmin was sitting in his desk chair, an ugly mottled blanket around his shoulders. He did not look around until Minho spoke.
“Everything quiet while we were gone?” Minho asked.
Seungmin gave him a baleful little squint over his shoulder that felt a lot more normal than the way he’d been tiptoeing around Minho up until a few days ago. “Do you really think I’d have waited until you got done hauling your illegal firearms into the basement before I came out and told you there’d been an incident,” Seungmin asked flatly.
“I don’t pretend to know how your raisin brain works,” Minho said simply, and closed the door again before Seungmin could reply.
He paused for a moment with his hand on the door handle, sighing out a long breath slowly. He hadn’t thought anything would happen, not really, but there’d been a thread of relief in him when they’d pulled up earlier and the building had— been there. Not a blackened smudge, no alarms blaring.
It’s fine, he thought as he ascended the stairs. Everyone is fine.
He checked his bedroom door — locked — and then unlocked it so that he could hang his coat up in his wardrobe. He had been glad of it, up at the warehouse, but wearing it had also brought a kind of warmth that went beyond just the physical covering. He was trying to ignore that it was because Jeongin had wanted him to wear it, that Jeongin cared that he was warm. He’d been trying to forget that ever since the night Jeongin got drunk at Maniac.
Everything in the room was as he’d left it. He let himself back out, locked the door again. Next door, Jisung’s room was unlocked, but that was not unusual. Jisung didn’t seem to much care who went into his bedroom; there was probably something to be said for that level of trust in the people who lived here. Minho didn’t know. It was untidy in there, clothes strewn all over the floor, but otherwise empty.
When Minho headed up higher, he bypassed the third floor entirely — he knew once he saw Jeongin, he would become sidetracked. So he went all the way to the apartment on the fourth floor and let himself in.
Immediately, he was assailed with the scent of chocolate, overly sweet and cloying. It was a familiar scent, by this stage, and a familiar scene in front of him, though Minho hadn’t seen it in weeks, not since before they’d last visited Hyunjae.
Felix was baking, a bowl of deep brown mix in his arms, while at the table Hyunjin was doodling in a journal, small sketches and some words, maybe poetry. Minho knew he dabbled in that a little, though unlike with his artwork, Hyunjin never shared that.
As soon as he came into the room they both turned, Felix smiling a little, a careful thing but not much different than how he’d been before the incident, while Hyunjin immediately snapped his journal shut, eyes narrowing. His gaze zeroed in on the ground, where Minho was wearing the sleek black sneakers he’d worn out to Hyunjae’s, rather than his soft house sneakers.
Minho stepped beyond the entryway, into the kitchen, just to see Hyunjin’s mouth pinch a bit.
“How did it go?” Felix asked, putting his bowl down on the counter with a clink of the glass. He’d been shockingly civil to Minho, never seeking him out but clearly trying to not shy away either. Minho had to give him some credit, he thought. There was a streak of bravery in him that did not seem to be undermined by recklessness.
“Fine,” Minho said, still not completely comfortable discussing business with Felix, though he was trying to get over that. It was for Felix’s job, after all, and Chan was likely keeping him totally in the loop anyway. Minho preferred to avoid thinking about their bedroom talk, though. “Hyung and Changbin went to the basement to comb over the guns with Jisung. How did things fare here?”
Felix plucked the wooden spoon out of the cookie dough, covered in chocolate. “It was quiet, we ate leftovers,” he said, which would sound like an inconsequential detail except it told Minho none of them left to get food, they’d stayed in like he asked. He wondered if there’d been an argument on Hyunjin’s part; he had a silly habit of wanting to do the exact thing he was told he could not.
Minho hummed, light and under his breath, and then without another word, turned to leave. As he went he heard Felix say, “Here.” And then the sound of Hyunjin spluttering. “To get that look off your face.”
When Minho glanced back as the door was shutting, he saw Hyunjin’s mouth smeared with chocolate, Felix next to him still holding the spoon and grinning. Sometimes, Hyunjin and Jeongin would play-fight, with words more so than physically. But it was rare and not quite the same. Felix’s dynamic with Hyunjin was— often gratifying to witness. The way he could punt Hyunjin into place with nary a ruffled feather.
Minho was adjusting to him. Trying, as Jeongin had asked, to really see Felix for what he was. He’d managed it eventually with Jisung, he supposed he would get there with Felix too.
The stairwell was empty as Minho descended, finally making his way to the third floor, Jeongin nestled at its centre like the most valuable kind of pearl. As soon as he opened the door to the PC room, he could faintly hear the sound of the television. The hallway door was wide open, and beyond it, Minho could see the door to the television room was cracked slightly, light in flickering colours coming through the gap. The door to Chan’s office was closed.
Minho approached carefully, mindful of his foot placement, the distribution of his weight. He didn’t make a sound as he neared the television room, very lightly pushing the door open the slightest bit more, so he could peer inside. He let himself linger there, in the doorway, just looking.
Jeongin was on the couch opposite the television, his face in profile. He’d slipped his shoes off and had his feet tucked up onto the couch, legs curled under him. In his usual bad habit, his hand was up to his mouth, teeth chewing at his nails as he stared at the nonsense happening on screen. The woman in the drama was very distraught about someone or other being her cousin. Jeongin seemed riveted; his poor cuticles were probably in tatters.
“We’re going to have to tape mittens over your hands at this rate,” Minho said at a normal volume, pushing the door open a bit further.
Jeongin startled, his face snapping around, hand dropping to his lap. “Hyung!” he said when he caught sight of Minho, a smile immediately bursting to life across his face. Like Minho had been gone at sea for months, and not merely on a supply run for a few hours. He shifted on the couch, rising up on his knees and turning bodily towards Minho before settling back down. “You’re back! Did it all go okay?”
“Yes, it went fine, baby boy,” Minho said, unable to hold in a small smile at Jeongin’s endearing enthusiasm. “You can probably start practising with the new gun tomorrow morning.”
“Mm!” Jeongin said with a nod, still smiling. He glanced at the television, just a quick flicker, like he was still trying to pay attention to the— plot. If it could be called that. “That sounds good, hyung.”
Minho hummed, raising an eyebrow at the television screen. “You’re watching your drama? Without poor Felix?” he asked as he made his way into the room proper and flopped down next to Jeongin on the couch heavily, him on one end and Jeongin on the other. “Did you decide to have mercy on him?”
Jeongin squinted at him, turning his nose in the air. “It’s a different drama,” he sniffed, a playful kind of disdain in his tone.
“Is it,” Minho said flatly, not a question at all. The woman on screen was now crying in a car. She looked like the same lead in the drama they’d been watching before.
“Yes!” Jeongin said, wriggling as he settled back into the couch. He pointedly turned to watch the television. In a mutinous kind of mutter, he said, “Aren’t you supposed to have great observational skills? I should tell Chan-hyung you need to be demoted. How are you the one planning jobs.”
Minho grinned. What a delight Jeongin could be. “I guess we should watch something I can follow along a little better, then,” he said, snatching the remote up off the couch cushion between them and changing the channel.
Jeongin’s face whipped in his direction, and in mingled dismay and outrage he cried, “Hyung!” Immediately he got back onto his knees on the cushions, swiping at the remote but Minho pressed himself against the arm of the couch on his side and continued to flip through the channels: music show repeat, some sort of talk show, something with a horrendous laugh track. Then Jeongin seized his wrist and yanked, though against Minho’s strength, it did little.
“Hey,” Minho complained as Jeongin tried, with great determination but ultimately to no avail, to prise his fingers off the remote. “Is that any way to treat your hyung? I’m older, I’ve had a long day, and I get to decide what to watch.”
Jeongin, his knee digging into Minho’s thigh, looked at Minho’s face, meeting his eyes. He was— very close, face cutely bunched into a scowl. “But my drama!” he wailed at Minho, sounding so heartfully pathetic Minho couldn’t help but laugh a little, smile spreading wide across his face. That just made Jeongin’s scowl deepen, and he gave a shriek as he renewed his efforts to pry the remote out of Minho’s fingers. It was ineffective— Minho held fast.
“If you’d paid better attention during our sparring lessons,” he said, a little taunting, “then this would be easier for you right now.”
Jeongin gasped on a sharp inhale, and said, with pointed vehemence, “Oh.”
Then he leaned down and sank his teeth into Minho’s wrist. Minho yelped, more in shock than over the pain, and his fingers reflexively loosened on the remote, allowing Jeongin to finally seize it from him. He immediately began to flip backwards through the channels again, and in the pause Minho got his bearings back.
He surged up, and Jeongin gave another short shriek that melted into an oof as Minho elbowed him in the chest. Not hard, but angled just right so that Jeongin recoiled and fell back against the cushions. Minho followed him, shoving at Jeongin, boxing him down against the couch, one hand pressing on Jeongin’s chest to pin him, his other snatching at the remote.
Jeongin outstretched his arm above his head, flailing the remote around— he really should have paid better attention in those lessons. Minho had surely taught him better than this, though in the end Jeongin also was just— less bulky, less refined musculature than Minho. He was stronger than he’d been when he was younger, Minho could feel the strength in him as he struggled against the hand Minho had holding him down, but it wasn’t enough.
Minho was still breathing hard though, by the time he managed to pluck the remote from Jeongin’s hand. Their struggled fumbling had hit multiple buttons, and the television screen was just static, now. “Aha,” Minho said triumphantly, panting with it as he looked down at Jeongin in renewed smugness. And then he stopped.
He was between Jeongin’s legs, Jeongin’s thighs a cradle around his hips. Minho was— bent over him, Jeongin on his back, his hair fanned out around him, eyes a little wide as he stared up at Minho’s face. Under Minho’s palm on his sternum, he was breathing hard too, cheeks flushed pink, heart pounding. Minho could feel it.
He was so lovely, this thrumming, living thing, and Minho so wanted— everything. Every part of him, wanted Jeongin to wrap his legs properly around him, to lower himself down—
“Hyung?” Jeongin said softly, a note of unsurety in his voice. His hands were held limp and open by his own shoulders. A surrender.
What am I doing, Minho thought, almost vicious at himself with it. Jeongin trusted him and he— he—
Minho ripped himself away. He fell back, wedging himself into the opposite corner of the couch, trying to catch his breath as his heart fluttered madly like a bird in his ribcage. His face felt warm, and he hoped he wasn’t blushing, worked to make his posture something casual.
Say something, his brain screamed at him. Laugh it off, be cutting, anything. But all Minho could do was sit there and breathe. He couldn’t feel his own fingertips, gaze unfocused on the fuzzy television.
Jeongin— hadn’t moved. He was laying across the rest of the cushions right where Minho had left him, breathing just as heavily as Minho, if not more so. His socked feet were pressed against Minho’s thigh.
“Okay,” Jeongin whispered, tone surprisingly grim. Minho glanced at him, but Jeongin was just staring at the ceiling, mouth set in a hard line. Again, he quietly said, “Okay.”
Minho barely had a moment to wonder if Jeongin was talking to him or just to himself, before Jeongin surged up with a determined look on his face. If he went for the remote, Minho would’ve just fucking handed it to him, but Jeongin’s movements weren’t the flailing frenzy of before, and he didn’t go for Minho’s hands at all. No, he— he crawled across the couch and then swung his leg over Minho’s thighs, straddling him. Minho sucked in a shocked breath at the feeling of Jeongin’s weight on his legs, warm and heavy, unexpected and so long coveted.
Above him, Jeongin’s face was haloed in the light, expression calm and set. Minho could not read it at all, strange on Jeongin’s features, a shocking intensity in his eyes. He didn’t know what he should do, how he should be acting, what could save this moment, how he could brush his own reaction off.
Because Minho had frozen, in a way that was not— subtle, not normal. His mind had gone to static just as the television had, panic hitting every part of him like a wave crushing him to the sand. And before he could even try to get his bearings Jeongin was moving again, his hands coming up to settle, shockingly large, on Minho’s shoulders. Minho’s hands, by contrast, were held uselessly in the air, hovering. He had never, in his life, been so uncertain as to what to do with them. The remote dropped from his nerveless fingers, falling onto the couch where Jeongin didn’t so much as glance at it.
No, Jeongin was looking down at Minho, his face suddenly so close that Minho could feel the brush of his breath.
“Jeongin,” he gasped hoarsely. All the words he could think up to try to bring this back to a place where Minho might be able to find footing were small and feeble.
Jeongin huffed out a sigh, half frustrated, half fond. “Oh, Minho-hyung,” he said softly, his hands closing around the fabric of Minho’s shirt collar; holding him in place, he realised. Because in the next moment Jeongin leaned forward, closing the distance between them. And Minho had nowhere to go as Jeongin kissed him, a firm press of his mouth against Minho’s suddenly slack one. His lips were warm, his hair soft where it touched Minho’s forehead.
Minho’s entire body jerked without him meaning to, a stuttering gasp falling between them. Like Jeongin had pressed a white hot brand to his skin instead of a kiss, searing and agonising.
Minho was going to fucking die, his heart was going to give out. He couldn’t breathe.
This was a dream. This had to be a dream. It was like Jeongin had, in the space of ten seconds, turned Minho’s brain entirely off like he’d found a switch that Minho had been searching for for years. He could not think. Something almost like numbness, warm and sweet, was washing through him, rendering his thoughts much quieter. His fingers kept flexing, curling up and then straightening out. Jeongin’s mouth moved against his with a shockingly wet sound, loud in the quiet of the room. Minho hadn’t even closed the door when he came in. He had never expected this to happen.
Jeongin bit at his bottom lip, then sucked it between his teeth, an exploratory air around it. Minho felt like he was being devoured. He breathed unsteadily through it, let Jeongin lick into him, let Jeongin move his head so that they could press even closer together. The touch of Jeongin’s tongue to his made Minho feel— faint.
Please, he thought, then, no.
Under the pleasure of Jeongin’s body against his, their chests pressed flush, his mouth, damp and affectionate, the faint, artificial sweetness of the cherry candies Jeongin favoured lingering on his tongue— under that hazy numbness, muffled, there was something urgent and screaming — the knowledge that this was Jeongin. Jeongin’s lips sliding slick against his. Lovely sweet Jeongin, who Minho had never wanted to taint like this, never wanted to stain with— with himself.
You’re smearing blood on him.
This wasn’t a dream. It was real. Jeongin was in his lap, kissing him. He could not fathom it, could not understand it, but it was happening, and it— could not. It could not.
It was like a bucket of ice water getting dumped over Minho’s head. All of a sudden he was in his body again, solid and firm and flawed and true, that pleasurable hazy fog being ripped away and leaving him feeling skinned. No no no—
He pushed Jeongin away — a lightning fast motion, wedging his hands quickly against Jeongin’s chest and shoving him hard. Too hard. Harder than he’d ever handled Jeongin in the past.
Jeongin went tumbling off his lap and then some. He cried out, a little, “Ah!” of surprise, his body hitting the carpeted floor with a painful sounding thump.
Minho gasped, twitched — he wanted to kneel, to help Jeongin up.
He did not move. He could not touch Jeongin again. He could never touch him again.
Jeongin lay on the floor for a moment, slumped, curved in on himself. His head hung down. Minho could not see his face from this angle, Jeongin’s hair blocking his eyes. Then Jeongin got his hands under himself and pushed up into a sitting position, his legs curled off to one side still. He blinked up at Minho, hair falling back, mouth parted and a little— fuller, than it had been before. Pinked. His eyes were wide, and gone was that placid, unknowable creature that had first crawled into Minho’s lap. The Jeongin curled up on that floor, staring up at Minho still sitting on the couch, was one Minho knew well. A little small, a little unsure, confused and looking to his hyung for guidance.
Minho was going to throw up.
Had he been so obvious in his wants, his heated gaze lingering just too long a few too many times, that Jeongin had noticed? Of course he had, he thought with disgust at himself. He had grown too comfortable, too fucking brazen. And Jeongin was so sweet and so good and he loved Minho so much, in his way, and he saw too much into Minho, cut through him to the marrow, sometimes, it felt. Had he sensed how Minho had desperately craved this, was acting now to try and— and help Minho?
Minho had always feared this. Jeongin, doing anything, whatever he could, for someone he cared about. Minho had never wanted that, never wanted it this way.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, his eyes so glittery behind his fringe, feathery and falling over his face. Messy. From kissing Minho, from his tumble.
He didn’t get up from the floor. Where Minho had tossed him. He looked like Felix had, in some ways, when Minho had flung him down at Chan’s feet. Like a pretty, broken doll. He was still leaning sideways onto his hands, the lines of his wrists almost dainty.
Minho’s breathing was ragged and loud, panting like an animal that had been run down, cornered.
Jeongin reached out, touched Minho’s knee lightly through his slacks. “Hyung.”
Minho bolted.
It was all he could think to do. It was over, it was done — Jeongin knew. He knew and he was offering Minho his body and Minho could not could not could not.
He rushed for the open door. He would leave. He would run, now, tonight. The job— the job, the job, it would wait. Minho would have to tell Chan. That the promise was broken. Jeongin had kissed him. He had to leave. He had to—
Touch, tangling around his ankles. Minho fell forward. The sound of him hitting the floor was even louder than when Jeongin had hit it.
He managed to fling his arms out in time to keep from slapping his entire face on the floor — carpeted or no, that would have probably broken his nose. As it was, the momentum still caused his forehead to bounce off the carpet, the impact on his chest knocking the wind out of him a little. The blow dazed him, breaking up his panicked, looping thoughts.
“Ah?” he mumbled into the carpet.
There were hands on him now, not exactly gentle, shoving his shoulder, forcing him to roll until he was on his back. Minho again found himself looking up at Jeongin’s face, though this time he could read the expression there — anger.
“You foot swept me,” Minho said thickly, maybe a little confused.
“You tried to run,” Jeongin said, like an answer to a question. “You always run, you always run away.” Some of the upset on his face was reflected in his voice now. “You shut down and run and frankly, hyung, I’m really fucking sick of it.”
Minho gaped at him, more confused than he had ever been in his life. “Jeongin,” he said, trying to sound at least a little more steady than he was feeling. He moved to sit up, getting his elbows under himself to prop himself up, and then Jeongin’s hands were on his shoulders again as he swung his leg over Minho’s hips, straddling him again, pressing him down.
“No,” Jeongin said, moving quickly, putting his weight into his hands. When Minho did not recline fully again, Jeongin’s face twisted into a scowl and more emphatically he said, “No! I don’t want to be Jeongin. I want to be baby boy! I want to be your baby boy! Don’t you get it, don’t you fucking see? You always pull away.” Abruptly his scowl turned a little— sadder, and some of the weight came off his hands as he sat back; he was sitting on Minho’s lower stomach more so than his hips, which was not as comfortable but felt safer. Softer, he said, “You always push me away.”
Minho opened his mouth, almost calling him Jeongin again but catching himself. “Baby boy,” he said, careful. So careful. He held himself very still, laid out on his back on the fucking floor of the television room, propped up on his elbows, Jeongin on top of him. His head spun if he thought about it too much, so he tried not to, tried to focus on this: Jeongin above him, eyes sad and mouth stubborn. “I’m sorry. Are you hurt?”
“No,” Jeongin said, his face transforming into something closer to what Minho knew of him. A little irate, a little put upon. “I’m a person, not a plate. You can’t break me.”
And that was ridiculous, because Minho could very much do exactly that. “I— baby boy, I need you to explain,” he said, strained. It was all he could say. He did not understand. The urge to remove Jeongin from his person and simply run out into the cold night was still— strong inside him. He fought it because— he sensed Jeongin would simply chase him down if he tried to flee, would not let him escape so easily.
But Minho himself had no words. He never thought he’d ever have to talk about this with Jeongin.
“Explain?” Jeongin repeated, head cocking to one side. “Explain what?”
“You kissed me,” Minho said, the words— insane, absolute fucking insanity. Delivered so flat and factual but the truth of them feeling surreal.
Jeongin seemed a little surprised, like a world in which the two of them kissed was not completely out of the order of the universe. “Do I need to explain that?” he asked slowly. He stared down at Minho, and Minho stared back. It was not easy eye contact to hold, not as Jeongin’s words began to fully sink in. Jeongin leaned forward, and as he came down Minho leaned back, so their faces did not get any nearer, until Minho was laying fully on the floor again and he had nowhere else to go. Jeongin stopped too, his hands now on the floor on either side of Minho’s head, face very close. “Hyung,” Jeongin said, a little fond, a little pitying.
Minho’s heart was beginning to race again, a light, fluttery feeling rather than a deep drum beat. In his throat, anxious and frantic. His world was rearranging itself, puzzle pieces settling into a strange new format. He thought of this morning, Jeongin’s hips cocked forward, his nipples hard and obvious in his shirt. He thought of their eyes meeting across the workroom, Jeongin dipping his fingers into his mouth.
He thought about Jeongin at Maniac, asking him to dance. About the shorts in winter, flashing his slim, pale thighs. The early mornings, the late nights, Jeongin panting on the training mat, Jeongin’s hand curling around his elbow.
Jeongin. Always, always there.
“You’ve been— flirting with me,” Minho whispered — gasped, really, mouth feeling like it belonged to someone else.
Again, that same tone, like Minho was only just now catching onto a running joke. “Are you really only just now noticing?” Jeongin asked. When Minho just stared up at him, his emotions raw on his face — fear, longing — Jeongin softened. “I haven’t wanted to pressure you, you’ve always been— hesitant. But hyung, surely you can see, now?” He lifted one of his hands, tracing along Minho’s collarbone under his shirt. Minho felt like all his nerve-endings had suddenly been rerouted to that touch, the back and forth of it. “Surely I’ve been at least a little obvious. Or did you think all of it was— nothing.”
“I thought I was projecting,” Minho said, honest before he could think better of it, before he fully realised the implications of his words. “You’re sweet to everyone.”
Jeongin, who’d been watching the movement of his own fingers, looked at Minho’s face again, his eyes dark and hooded. “I am very much not sweet to the others the way I am sweet for you,” he murmured.
Minho closed his eyes, breathed out shakily. Fuck. How had he missed this?
How could he stop something that had grown out of control before he’d even noticed it had taken root.
I haven’t wanted to pressure you. It was almost laughable. The idea that Jeongin had been tiptoeing around Minho, around his delicate sensibilities, like Jeongin was the one who would do terrible, irreversible damage to Minho if he acted on his desires. And not the other way around.
Touch. Jeongin’s lips, achingly tender, pressing to the corner of Minho’s mouth, over his scars. Minho turned his head away, breathing heavily through clenched teeth. “No,” he gritted out, eyes squeezed shut.
Jeongin stilled against him, stiffened. Minho could feel it in Jeongin’s legs, his thigh muscles, bracketing Minho’s hips. Could feel it in the way Jeongin’s breath, against his face, suddenly stopped. Minho could not look at him.
Jeongin wants me. He thought it with elation, with horror. All those aching nights and clawing dreams and here Jeongin was, delivering himself right into Minho’s lap, literally. Impossible, incomprehensible. And yet real, somehow.
Minho was shaking. He was going to do something unforgivable. “You need to let me leave,” he managed to say.
Jeongin put a little more weight down on him in answer. He was not heavy enough for that to matter, should Minho choose to throw him off. “Why, so you can hide in your room?” Jeongin asked, breath fluttering across Minho’s cheek. “So you can keep pretending you don’t want me?”
The shock of hearing those words spoken aloud caused Minho to twitch, a flinch of movement. He was trying so hard to hold onto his— everything. His thoughts, his resolve, his words. It all felt in danger of coming apart.
Then, blessedly, Jeongin was pulling away. The shadow moved over Minho’s closed lids, and he felt the loss of Jeongin’s warmth. Jeongin’s hands came to rest, lightly, over Minho’s ribcage. “You do— want me, don’t you?” Jeongin asked. There was a vulnerability in those words, a slight quake, that had Minho opening his eyes to see— Jeongin, above him, suddenly a little unsure. His elbows tucked in and knees pressing against Minho’s sides as they tried to close, a little.
Minho swallowed thickly. The directness of the question, the undeniable answer, made him want to squirm. He should lie, but he didn’t think doing so would be fair. “Yes,” he said in a whisper. A shameful confession. This secret he’d held tight for so long, a misplaced filthy desire. “I never wanted you to know.”
The simple, raw truth of that — he’d worked for years to hide this, to protect Jeongin, who Minho loved so much, more than anything. He’d wanted Jeongin to stay unmarred by this, to live without knowing his hyung, who he trusted— wanted him. To look back on their time together and to never have to think, Minho-hyung wanted to fuck me all along. It was unbearable to Minho.
Wretchedness washed through him, cold to the core of his soul. “Fuck,” Minho said, the corners of his mouth downturning, voice wavering just a little as he said, “Baby boy, I’m—”
“Don’t,” Jeongin said, shockingly venomous. His fingertips dug into Minho’s ribs. Minho fell silent. “Don’t you dare fucking say you’re sorry for wanting me, when I want you too. When I want you just as much. When I’ve wanted you for longer.”
Minho’s breath stuttered in his chest, heat coming just as quickly as that cold shame had. And he let it chase the iciness out, because it was so much nicer, the foggy, warm image of it. Of Jeongin’s desire, Jeongin’s wants. How long, he wanted to ask. How long, and how do you want me, and do you wake up hard after dreaming about me, and would you let me—
You were looking at him like you wanted to take him apart.
The words, in Chan’s voice, echoing through his head. His stomach dropped sickeningly, the reminder of it like a punch to the gut. That was what Chan had said to him, and yet here, again, Minho was contemplating the exact thing he had said he would never do. Had he learned nothing? He had promised Chan all those weeks ago that he would not touch Jeongin, that he would keep his hands away, these thoughts, these desires; Chan had seen through him and even he, who trusted Minho with so much, had told him not to. And it was a promise Minho needed to keep, a vow that he owed to Chan.
What is wrong with me, he thought, suddenly furious with himself, disgusted. Jeongin had climbed into his lap and kissed him and all that Minho had built up through the years had simply fractured under it. Was this truly all he was? This evil inside him, this fucking animal prowling under his skin. There was no denying what he was, barely human. A creature of base instinct and little more.
“You can’t,” Minho said harshly — more harshly than he’d intended. Words for himself, as much as they were for Jeongin. “We can’t.” I can’t.
There was anger coming over Jeongin’s face, a shocking shrewdness in his eyes. “Why not?” he demanded. A mocking tone Minho was not sure he’d ever heard from Jeongin permeated his voice as he said, “Because I’m too young? Because I’m a baby? Because I’m too naive to understand—”
“Because I’m too fucked up for you!” Minho shot back. He needed Jeongin to hear it, even as in his heart he desperately wanted it to not matter. But it did. It did matter. This was real, not some fantasy, not pretend. Not one of Jeongin’s dramas, the pained hero redeemed and an ending tied in a neat bow. Minho jerked his chin towards the staticky television. “Because you think life is like that. But it’s not. That’s not what relationships are like and it’s not what I’m like.”
“Your vision of yourself is as warped as a fun house mirror,” Jeongin practically snarled, nostrils flared and eyes narrowed into slits.
Minho propped himself up on his elbows. “No, Jeongin, it’s not,” he said, letting the heat of desire turn into— anger, maybe. Though he could never be truly angry at Jeongin. Frustration, then. “You do not know what I am like when—”
He bit the rest of the words off. Images came to him — dark rooms and dim alleys, tears licked from pretty cheeks, salty on his tongue. The crack of a belt and the ache of overstimulation. Begging voices and scratches down his back.
Jeongin's chest was heaving a little more than normal. “When?” he prompted, low and dangerous.
“When I am not trying to be careful,” Minho finished, the only way he knew how without— saying things he did not wish to. “And make no mistake, I am always careful with you. But there are some situations where— control is a harder thing to keep hold of.”
“I’m not asking you to be careful with me,” Jeongin said, with all the confidence of someone who had no idea they were baiting a tiger. Minho wanted to shake him.
“I would have to be,” he said, gritting his teeth so hard his jaw was beginning to ache. “You have no fucking idea what you’re asking for.” Jeongin, who was used to getting everything he wanted. Jeongin, who did not like pain, did not like waiting, did not like crying. Jeongin who was shy and Jeongin who was wide eyed and Jeongin who loved with soft smiles and gentle hands.
Jeongin who was stuck here all the time and was as wound up as tightly as a spring-loaded toy. Jeongin, who wanted to get off and had picked Minho because Minho was attractive and Minho was sweet to him, cooking with ready motions and sparring with cautious blows.
I don’t fuck like that, Minho thought. That isn’t my nature.
Another voice in his head was whispering, You could try though. He wanted Jeongin enough, so fucking much, that maybe he could try, maybe he should try. If it got Jeongin underneath him. Minho could fuck him missionary in the dark, slow and cautious, his tongue pressed between his teeth to keep all the words locked in.
He’d mess it up. Surely, he would mess it up. And that would be— awful. The thought of Jeongin crying — not in pleasure-pain, but because Minho had hurt him for real, in some capacity. In an intimate, vulnerable way. No.
“I do know,” Jeongin was saying. “I do know what I’m asking for.”
“Do you?” Minho growled, teeth bared. He pushed himself up, leaning on his hands, and it forced Jeongin to sway back just a little. “Do you?”
Jeongin visibly swallowed, his hands fisting. But he did not waver. “I’m asking you to fuck me,” he said.
Minho grabbed him — one hand on Jeongin’s left shoulder, the other wrapping around his right thigh. And then he lifted, pressing up with his hips so he could get his legs under both of their bodies. Jeongin yelped in surprise as he tipped backwards, as Minho shifted their positions and suddenly it was Jeongin with his back on the carpet. Minho followed, above Jeongin now, his hands gathering up Jeongin’s wrists, pinning them to the floor on either side of Jeongin’s shoulders in one smooth, fast motion. He settled his body over Jeongin’s, pressing, a little too much of his weight, his hips canting forward roughly, Jeongin’s legs forced open around his hips.
Minho could feel Jeongin struggling to breathe with Minho on top of him, could see the shock all over his features from so close. Their noses brushed. “You want this?” Minho practically snarled, feeling Jeongin’s wrist bones grind under his grip.
He expected Jeongin to freeze, to struggle, to jerk his face away. At the very least, to flinch. Minho would let him go, would roll off the second he did any of that; he had no interest in— an unwilling partner. He just needed Jeongin to understand. He needed— he needed Jeongin to fear him, to hate him, if that was what it took to keep him away. No matter how much it would break Minho, he needed to keep Jeongin safe. It was as pivotal to living as breathing, for him.
But Jeongin did not flinch away. Instead there was a sort of— loosening, an unfurling, like a flower under the dawn sunlight. He relaxed under Minho’s hands, his socked toes sliding up Minho’s thighs to come to a rest beside Minho’s hips, his legs a cradle around Minho’s body. His back arched, just a little, with the movement, pressing their stomachs flush, canting their hips together. Minho could feel that Jeongin was halfway hard, his cock pressing against Minho’s through the fabric of their pants.
Minho— stilled.
“Hyung,” Jeongin murmured, husky and flushed. His lashes were heavy over his irises. “I know what I’m asking. It’s why I’m asking you.”
Minho felt those words like a punch, like they knocked all the breath out of him. Again, the sensation of his world simply— rearranging itself, so monumental it felt like the very fabric of reality would tear. But from one blink to the next, everything was the same.
He sat up, quick but still fluid, his hands sliding along Jeongin’s forearms before he lifted them up, unsure again where exactly to put them. He didn’t get up, though— he considered it. Once again wondering if he shouldn’t just run. There was a weakness in him though, a terrible rotten part of his soul, that had seen all that had just occurred and reacted like a shark scenting blood in the water.
A part of him that wanted to see this through.
So Minho did not rise; he sat back on his haunches, Jeongin laying where he’d been tossed, his legs still spread around Minho’s hips. This view was almost worse than when Minho was right in Jeongin’s face. Jeongin looked like some kind of pagan offering, skin unmarred and hair soft. Fresh and young and untouched.
Untouched.
The thought struck him like a shock to the heart. “You’ve never fucked anyone before,” he said, a little— wondering. A little horrified. He’d known this — or he would have, if he’d ever bothered to think about it before, but he decidedly hadn’t. Jeongin’s experience or lack thereof hadn’t mattered in any real sense because Minho had never planned on actually taking him to bed. But suddenly he found himself faced with the reality of it, unable to no longer simply speculate.
Jeongin went very pink, some of his more characteristic shyness coming back to him. But he didn’t try to lie, or disseminate. “No,” he said, “I haven’t.”
This knowledge did not please any part of Minho except that prowling animal part of him, the exact part of him that he knew he could not allow to come out at any point if this did go forward. The thought of being anyone’s first lover was an uncomfortable one, even more so when it came to Jeongin. How could Jeongin’s first experience be with someone who had bloody claws for hands and did not always know how to put them away safely? He had known that Jeongin deserved better than what the nasty hidden parts of Minho wanted to do to him, but this just confirmed that— however this went, Minho had to tread as carefully as he was capable of doing.
“Jeongin,” he said, and watched Jeongin’s eyes snap up to his at the use of his name, “why on earth not?”
Minho spoke the words and then realised how foolish they were — who would Jeongin explore with? Hyunjin, unlikely. Jisung, possible, Minho supposed. Seungmin— laughable. But Jeongin was lovely enough, and he’d had nights at the club where Changbin, rather than Minho, was playing chaperone. He didn’t think Changbin would let Jeongin slip away into the bathroom with a stranger, but he didn’t— know. He’d deliberately never asked about those nights, beyond to ascertain Jeongin was well and whole.
Jeongin did not say any of that.
“Because I wanted it to be you,” was what Jeongin mumbled, unable to retain that eye contact. He let his head fall to the side, throwing his arm over his face, like hiding would make him disappear.
The words were straight out of one of Minho’s fantasies. It was like being struck over the head. “You’ve wanted me to be your first,” Minho repeated, flat with shock. From behind his arm Jeongin nodded, and Minho had the distinct thought that he needed to go somewhere and sit with his head between his knees for a very long time.
He did not know what to say, mouth suddenly feeling so dry. The rational part of his brain that was insisting he could not be Jeongin’s first was fighting viciously with the possessive, dark part of Minho’s mind that wanted, desperately, to claim this for itself. To be the first person to bring Jeongin this specific aspect of physical pleasure, to be the first person to watch Jeongin come, to hear the noises he would make.
After a few moments of gritting his teeth, Minho managed to force out, “I— I shouldn’t be your first, baby boy.”
That arm came down a little, Jeongin peeking at him from over the top of it. “Do you— dislike it?” he asked, voice small. “That I’m a virgin.”
Minho felt like he accidentally skipped to the middle of a book and missed the entire beginning. How did I get here he thought, dazedly. “Baby boy, it’s not that,” he said, a little strained. He did not want Jeongin to think he was the problem, in any of this. It was Minho. It had always been Minho.
Jeongin sat up, struggling for it a little, the positioning awkward. He didn’t pull away, so once he was upright, his legs were still splayed around Minho’s thighs, knees bent. It couldn’t have been comfortable. “This is my body,” Jeongin said, soft but intent. His cheeks were still pink. “My body. Mine. I can give it to who I want.”
“You shouldn’t give it to— me,” Minho made himself say. “You shouldn’t trust me with it.” He grit his teeth for a moment, against what needed to come next. “You’ve seen,” he said, barely moving his lips with it. “What I can do. What I’ve done.”
Jeongin, of all people, knew what Minho was capable of. Emotionally, he knew, had been cut on Minho’s sharp edges enough. And physically, too. Minho had torn someone apart in front of him, rendered flesh and bone into pulp.
But instead of recoiling as he should, Jeongin simply tilted his head to the side and very seriously asked, “Are you going to hurt me like that?”
Never, Minho thought, nearly vicious with it. “No,” he said, unintentionally sharp about it in his fervour. Jeongin didn’t flinch — he almost looked a little smug. Minho huffed, a sort of urgency nipping at the fringes of his mind. Just because Minho would not, ever, raise a hand to Jeongin, or be cruel with intent, did not mean he would not inflict damage. He would not mean to, but he just— was not built for softness. “That’s not— the point.”
“What is the point, then,” Jeongin murmured, leaning forward, touching Minho’s upper arms. His eyes had dropped to Minho’s mouth.
Minho did not know how to make him listen, did not know how to explain. But it felt, suddenly, so important, for Jeongin to understand. But where to even begin, how to articulate these things Minho just— knew to be true, about himself, about what he did and did not deserve.
Creatures like me shouldn’t touch things as untainted as you. In an olden world, Minho would have his hands sliced off for attempting it, and it would be a just punishment.
“I’m wrong, Jeongin,” Minho said softly, and Jeongin’s eyes snapped back up to his. “I’m built wrong.”
Minho’s hands had been resting in his lap, for lack of knowing where else to put them. Jeongin reached down, plucked one of Minho’s hands up, brought it between their bodies where he pressed his own against it, palm to palm. “I’ve seen what you can do, yes,” Jeongin whispered, his gaze dropped down, watching as his other hand traced lightly across the back of Minho’s hand, the veins and bones of it. Minho fought against the way he wanted to shiver. “I’ve seen you batter a man to death.” His eyes flicked back up, though his fingers continued their almost reverent tracing. Voice dropping down again, so soft, Jeongin said, “I still want these fingers inside me.”
Minho— twitched, his hand jerking in Jeongin’s hold. He gasped, too, couldn’t help it. Jeongin looked a little tentative, eyes wide and dark, but the words had been firm, sincerely meant. Already Minho was thinking of old fantasies, of sliding his fingers into Jeongin’s mouth, or between his legs. Into the soft, silken heat of his body. His fingertips could feel it now, a phantom ghost of sensation.
This felt like some kind of trap, some kind of test, like the deities were tempting Minho with his deepest desires so they could weigh the worth of his soul. And he was failing.
Minho exhaled, the air shuddering out of him, like he was a malfunctioning machine. He extricated himself from Jeongin, pulling his hand back, leaning away so he could stand. Jeongin watched him, that nervous, vulnerable expression back on his face. Like he expected rejection, its humiliating sting.
Minho bent, holding his hand out. “Come on, baby boy, off the floor,” he said, warm and affectionate, trying to let Jeongin know he hadn’t overstepped.
Jeongin took his hand, let himself be drawn up to his feet. Neither of them let go, once he was standing. “Are you going to leave me?” Jeongin asked, voice small.
“I should,” Minho said hoarsely. They were standing so close their foreheads were almost brushing. “God knows I fucking should.”
Silence fell over them, the two of them breathing into the same space. Minho needed to let go, but he could not make his body obey. He struggled with it, the knowledge so deep in him, soaked through, that he should walk away.
And it was eclipsed, so simply, so easily, by the sensation of Jeongin’s warm hand in his. What was wrong with him could not be fixed, he thought grimly. And that was all the more reason to stop.
“I see the way you look at me sometimes,” Jeongin said, soft and rasping, intimate. “When it’s too much, when you just can’t hide it. I see—” He cut himself off, biting his bottom lip, closing his eyes for a few beats. What do you see, Minho wanted to ask. Did Jeongin see his hunger, the raking desire. Did he recognise it, for what it was. Jeongin did not complete the thought, started another instead. “You scratch and you claw and you fight so hard,” he murmured. “You lock yourself away in your room, you hold yourself apart. You’re so— you do so much for us, for me. You work yourself raw, and you never take anything back.” He came a little closer, their toes bumping. “Don’t you think you deserve something good?” he whispered, the air fanning over Minho’s mouth. “Aren’t you tired of denying yourself?”
Yes, the animal in Minho cried. He wanted something good, wanted to fucking drown himself in it. He wanted to lose himself in Jeongin, carry him into the darkness like his own personal fallen star. Use him to keep the shadows away, to keep Minho warm. A pretty little thing under Minho’s sheets, bare and his. Did he not deserve it? After all the suffering and cold cutting him sharp as a knife, was he not fucking owed this?
“No,” Minho whispered, “I don’t deserve it.”
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, mouth twisting, eyes a little sad, for some reason. His hand tightened on Minho’s momentarily and then he brought Minho’s hand down, splaying it against his ribcage, just above his waist. He held it there, Minho feeling him breathe. “Hyung,” he said again. “You’re allowed this. You’re allowed me.”
Minho felt hysterical. He wasn’t allowed Jeongin, was the thing. He wasn’t.
Their noses brushed. Minho had begun to tremble with the force of holding himself still. He didn’t know which way he would go, if he loosened his hold on himself. Jeongin breathed deeply and steadily under Minho’s palm, and Minho desperately mimicked his timing, trying to keep himself from coming apart. He brought his other hand up, pressing it against Jeongin’s other side, feeling the living motion of him, the faint thrum of his heart.
“I want it,” Jeongin murmured. “I want to be something good for you.”
"Baby boy," Minho whispered, almost a plea. Jeongin did not know the extent of how this offer was shredding through him. “I am not good for you. You don’t— don’t understand— I’d never ask this of you—”
Jeongin again took Minho’s face in both his hands. “I’m not a lamb going to slaughter, this isn’t just for your sake. I want this too, I wouldn’t let anyone touch me, if I didn’t want it,” Jeongin promised, so deathly serious that he, at least, quelled that particular fear in Minho’s heart. Emphatically, he reiterated, “I want you.” His cheeks went a little pink but he didn’t flinch under Minho’s wide, unwavering gaze. Stubborn. So stubborn, so certain of being right. Like he'd been in the aftermath of finding out Felix’s true identity. Determined to argue it with Minho until one of them admitted defeat. “No one else. I’ve never wanted anyone else.”
Minho did not know how to fight against this. He did not know if he even could. Dully, he said, “Baby boy, there’s so many better people.” It was hard to get the words out, but he had to say them, even as every part of him screamed violence at the thought of Jeongin with someone else. Out of everyone in this world, Minho knew himself better than anyone, knew his own value like nobody else could. And that value was low. “So many people who could, maybe, deserve this.” Deserve you, your goodness, your sunshine warmth. “I don’t, sweetheart. I don’t.”
“That isn’t true— it isn’t,” Jeongin said, cutting when Minho was about to counter. His hands gripped Minho’s face, forcing him to meet his eyes. Minho’s hands on his ribs slid down to his waist, a little limp. “And even if it was— I don’t care. None of it matters.” Jeongin searched his face, his eyes, begging Minho to listen, to hear him. The way he always heard Minho. “That snarl in your head, the things you’ve done,” he continued softly, “everything outside of this room. None of it — none of it — matters.”
Minho stared at him, feeling the wideness of his own eyes. How could— none of it—
Jeongin’s hands on his cheeks went a bit gentler, as he read Minho, seeing into the soul of him as always. There was— emotion there, in Jeongin’s eyes. Affection. A raw sort of thing. His thumbs swiped softly over Minho’s cheeks. “I’ve wanted you for so long,” he murmured, tender with it. He came closer still, his body again brushing against Minho’s. “It’s just us here,” he said, voice a bare whisper now. “Just us. This is for us. Everything else— it doesn’t matter. Put it aside.” There was a pleading edge to his words now, the first time Minho had heard it, really. A desperation Jeongin had been hiding under the stubbornness.
“I—” Minho gasped, miserable with it. He loved Jeongin so much, he could not stand this. “I—”
Jeongin nudged forward, pressed his lips chastely to the corner of Minho’s mouth. “Be with me tonight,” he said against Minho’s scars, “please.”
The words hurt. Tonight. Jeongin was asking for his body, but Minho could not give him his body cleanly. There would be too much of himself in the act. Jeongin did not know the extent to which Minho desired him, did not know the depths of his affection, his craving for possession. It would be best if he could continue not knowing, if Minho could give Jeongin his body, as Jeongin so obviously desired, without burdening him with anything else.
He was not sure he could. He was very sure he shouldn’t.
“Baby boy,” Minho said unsteadily. There was a pleading note to his own voice now.
Jeongin pulled back to look Minho in the eyes. “I don’t care about the blood on your hands,” he said, still cupping Minho’s face, his chest brushing against Minho’s with every breath he took. “I don’t care about your rough edges. I don’t care about these.” One hand lifted but only so he could trace fingertips meaningfully along Minho’s scars, over his cheekbone and eyelid. “You’re— my hyung. My Minho-hyung.” Jeongin lips curled at the corners, just slightly, a shy sweet thing. “I trust you. I want you.”
Minho fought back a laugh. He fought back a sob.
A better person, a more righteous person than Minho, would be able to tell Jeongin no. There was not a single good reason to go forward with this, and so many reasons not to. Chan’s anger once he discovered the betrayal, Minho’s deeply imbedded corruption, Jeongin’s inevitable disillusionment— but Minho was not a better person. He never had been.
He could see it, in his mind’s eye — the next several hours unfurling like a tapestry, the pure fucking unadulterated bliss of it. Of finally taking what he’d wanted for so long, what he’d denied himself for so long. Had Minho ever felt anything like what that kiss had felt like before in his miserable little life, he wondered. And that was just a taste of what would come. He’d thought he’d known what happiness was— or more, he’d thought that he had found the only level of happiness that a person such as him was allowed to have. And yet here, now, as Jeongin swiped his thumbs over the crests of Minho’s cheekbones, so gentle, like he was handling something infinitely precious, Minho realised that he hadn’t known at all. This was happiness.
He knew he could not return to that paler imitation. Not now that he’d tasted this. He knew, too, with only the vaguest sense of disgust at himself now, that he was standing here, going through the motions of arguing— but he was not going to walk away. He was never going to walk away. He was too selfish for that, he was too hungry for that, Jeongin filling up all his grasping, empty parts. He wanted Jeongin too badly, had wanted him for too long.
Minho had thought it earlier, that he was unsure if he could fight against this; and now he knew, he could not.
“Fuck,” Minho bit out, his hands spasming against Jeongin’s waist. His fingers curled in, catching Jeongin’s shirt, fisting the material as if that would steady him. Push him away. It was a last second, desperate thought. Like the neural fireworks of a dying brain. “Fuck,” Minho said again, nearly growling it out, and then he wrenched Jeongin forward and kissed him.
Jeongin melted against him, immediately clutching at Minho’s back, mouth dropping open unhesitatingly as Minho swept his tongue past his teeth. Willing, Minho’s animal brain hummed. Willing and wanting. Everything Minho had always wanted.
Minho pulled back as quickly as he’d begun, and Jeongin blinked dazedly at him. “Are you sure?” Minho asked, desperate and breathy. He searched Jeongin’s face for the answer he needed. “Fuck, baby boy, are you sure?”
Jeongin’s eyelashes fluttered a little. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, hyung, I’m sure.”
The silence hung between them for a long moment, before Minho nodded, making the inevitable selfish decision. “Alright, baby boy,” Minho said, and then he took a step back, another, letting Jeongin go, putting space between them. Jeongin watched him, eyes already a bit glassy. He made a soft, wounded noise, like the separation hurt. Minho wanted to drink that sound, wanted to drag Jeongin away into a dark corner and consume him, piece by piece. The knowledge that Jeongin would let him made him feel drunk.
Minho sat on the couch, slow, deliberate. And then he leaned back, holding a hand out again. Jeongin came forward as if in a trance, and he climbed back into Minho’s lap. Minho gripped him close, harder than he maybe should have, fingertips digging into the lean muscles of Jeongin’s back through his thin shirt. They were pressed so closely together, front to front, Jeongin looping his arms over Minho’s shoulders, over the back of the couch. Jeongin was hardening again, Minho could feel it pressing against his lower stomach.
He bent his head to Jeongin’s once more, his hand sliding up Jeongin’s spine, coming to cradle the back of Jeongin’s neck, tilting Jeongin’s head into the kiss. Jeongin’s lips were already parted before Minho had even sealed his own over them, and Minho licked into him, not letting Jeongin set the pace at all, too fast, too rough. Jeongin moaned into his mouth, and Minho thought he should taste sugar on his tongue, it was such a sweet sound.
Minho wanted him to make that sound again. He wanted— wanted Jeongin to feel as good as he made Minho feel, wanted to know the feeling of Jeongin’s pulse against his lips, to hear Jeongin’s voice break in pleasure. His blood surged in his veins, a dull roar in his ears.
Jeongin wriggled against him, restless little motions as Minho licked into his mouth. One of Jeongin's hands slid into Minho’s hair, not pulling nor tugging, his thumb moving back and forth against Minho’s temple. And then Jeongin shifted his weight and pressed his hips down into Minho’s, a squirming grind of movement, and Minho jerked back, inhaling swiftly in a hiss. He grabbed Jeongin’s hips, holding him still.
“Wait,” Minho gasped out, overwhelmed, and Jeongin, to Minho’s absolute shock, made a frankly obscene, frustrated little noise, struggling against Minho’s grip, grinding his hips down in spite of it.
Minho felt his eyes go glassy for a bright, blinding flicker, a low groan escaping him. Blood was rushing to his cock in a way that Jeongin would soon be able to notice.
“Baby boy,” Minho panted, his voice embarrassingly raspy. The words were meant as a reprimand, and Minho was shocked to his core when Jeongin’s response to them was to moan thickly against Minho’s cheek. It sent molten heat through Minho, his heart ticking up a notch. He screwed his eyes shut, tried to steady his breathing. “You’re going to bring someone in here,” he managed to grit out. “Making all this noise—”
“I don’t care,” Jeongin groaned, sitting back a bit, breath feathering over Minho’s face. Minho opened his eyes to look at him. It was a mistake. There was a flush across the bridge of Jeongin’s nose, his cheeks. His breath was a hitching, gasping thing. Minho stared at him, the brightness in his eyes, the redness of his mouth. “I don’t care if they know I’m yours. I don’t care.”
Yours. Time seemed to stop. Mine. Minho’s own breathing stuttered. He didn’t say anything, could not even think of anything to say. Jeongin’s eyes slid shut in a flutter of lashes and he kissed the corner of Minho’s mouth again, then just above the curve of his jaw, a little damp, very warm.
“Hyung,” he said, in a quiet whimper. “Hyung, please.” His thighs clenched and unclenched around Minho’s hips, small, desperate motions. Minho knew what he was asking for, but he hadn’t expected to do it— here. Now.
Again, that thrumming urgency buried deep in the back of his mind. Are you really going to do this? He could barely hear it now. It no longer seemed to matter at all, not in the face of this: Jeongin, bare against him. Jeongin’s face further flushed in pleasure, gasping Minho’s name. Jeongin’s body slick and hot around his cock, willing and pliant.
He was going to do this. He was going to lay Jeongin down and climb on top of him and fuck him like he was so sweetly asking to be fucked. He would take Jeongin’s body, as the offering it was, indulge himself in this gift that should never have been placed in his bloody hands. Give his own in turn. Jeongin had made his choice, and Minho would let him have it, for as long as he desired. Tonight, tomorrow. Until Jeongin decided Minho was not worth the effort. Or until he grew bored. He could have whatever pieces of Minho he desired.
It was like a final piece clicking into place — something broke in Minho. But it wasn’t a bad break, like ceramic smashing on a tiled floor, but instead more like the tentative, gentle rip of a cocoon. It didn’t hurt. But he felt it. Something simply changed in him. Something irrevocable.
Minho let his hands on Jeongin’s hips go lax.
Jeongin’s body moved against his like a wave, like an insurmountable tide. Minho couldn’t help canting his hips, just slightly, as Jeongin brought his own hips down to meet them. For now he held himself back from sliding his hand between Jeongin’s legs, from letting Jeongin rut against his palm, from feeling the heat of his cock against his fingers. But that was all the self-restraint Minho could muster at the moment. Let Jeongin ride him, let Jeongin feel some of Minho’s desperation. Let him work himself up, and up. Minho wanted to drink it in, lap up his desire like it was a honeyed pool.
“Hyung,” Jeongin whispered, high and breathy into Minho’s ear. His lips brushed over the shell of it with the words.
“I’m here, baby boy,” Minho murmured, eyes heavy-lidded as he turned his face, searching. Jeongin understood what he wanted, meeting Minho’s mouth with his own, lips parted. Minho let his eyes close. I’m here.
——
Seungmin stepped down from the side of the van and went to his workbench where there was a small stack of wet wipes that he’d taken from the kitchen last time he had been up there. He opened one of them and then cleaned his hands with it, feeling a little fastidious about it today.
He’d gotten Changbin to bring the van back inside the workroom a couple of days after the trip to Blackbird’s. There were adjustments he needed to make to the set up, and he’d tried to make himself go back outside to work on them. It was easier, after all, if the van stayed out in the back parking lot, not taking up most of the space in the workroom. But after that trip out, even just going outside to somewhere that was technically still their property, was a little too much. He’d be better, by the time the actual job rolled around, but in the immediate aftermath, he’d needed— things done this way.
He’d asked Changbin to bring it inside, and Changbin had done it without any questions.
He tossed the wet wipe down onto the bench next to the remnants of a gutted out harddrive, before turning to his desk, which, frankly, needed to be cleaned off at this point — there was a half-drunk take out cup of coffee which had been sitting there for the past three days, along with multiple empty energy drink cans. As he walked over, he did a quick scan of the camera feeds, more of a habit than anything. He’d heard, faintly through the walls, the sounds of their eldest trio returning, their footsteps and voices. His eyes moved over the monitors quickly, and then— snagged.
A moment later he was at his desk, palms braced against the surface, feeling— honestly, he had no fucking idea what he was feeling. There, somewhat grainy, taking up almost a quarter of the screen, was the image of Minho and Jeongin making out. Jeongin, it appeared, had climbed into Minho’s lap at some point, and even through the static of the camera feed, the— energy of the situation was clear.
It was not surprising but it was shocking, for some reason, watching Jeongin’s hands slide into Minho’s hair, holding him in place. For a moment, Seungmin floundered, not sure if he should interrupt or get involved, and then, even more unsure as to how he would do that. There was a brief, almost delirious thought of blasting a siren across the intercom system; the thought was so ridiculous that it knocked him clean out of his indecision.
Jeongin, it was very clear, more than had things under control. That was enough for Seungmin to feel comfortable leaving them be. But still— the television room was a bit much.
“Fucking hell,” he said, right as he heard the door to the workroom open behind him. He reached out and smacked that monitor off, before whoever it was could see what he had seen.
“Fucking hell?” echoed Changbin’s voice from behind him, sounding very amused.
Seungmin turned to look at him, and felt, for a moment, like he’d just taken an electric shock to the spine, like his hair should be standing on end. Holy Christ, he thought, he went out in public like that. The irritation was so strong inside of him that he knew it must be showing on his face. Changbin knew how to read it, too; a tiny, smug smile came over his face as he stepped further into the room and let the door swing shut behind him.
“Did you buy that in the junior section?” Seungmin asked, as scathingly as he could possibly make it.
Changbin just smiled wider at him. He was wearing a pair of dark grey slacks that at least fit him. His shirt, on the other hand, very much did not. It was white, and pulled so tight across his chest and shoulders that Seungmin was genuinely surprised it was holding up. The sleeves were practically moulded to Changbin’s biceps. It was, all in all, completely obscene, and Seungmin could not believe Changbin had gone to a client meeting in it.
“It fit me perfectly last year,” Changbin said. He gave a little shrug. Seungmin watched, part-horrified, part-aroused, as the material shifted against the muscle underneath.
“Hyung,” he said, “do you understand how the passage of time works at all?”
“Well, see,” Changbin said, in that teasing way he had when he thought Seungmin was being very cute about something — or when he was about to say something that was guaranteed to make Seungmin blush. Seungmin felt like he needed to brace himself when he heard that tone of voice. “I figured I was done growing.”
That set up was a little too easy. Seungmin had no compunctions against taking such low hanging fruit. “You were,” he said. “Upwards.”
Changbin laughed, a full-bodied sound, something Seungmin loved to hear, and then took a few more steps into the room. His intention on kissing Seungmin was obvious, and it warmed a part of Seungmin that so often felt deeply cold. Nonetheless, he held out a hand to make Changbin stop in his tracks and said, “No, no. Stand right there and flex, please.”
Changbin was still laughing at him, like he thought Seungmin was joking. “Do you want me to go downstairs and fetch the dumbbells too?” he asked. “Want me to show you my workout routine?”
“No,” said Seungmin, his tone pitched so that his opinion of Changbin’s idiocy was clear. Besides, he didn’t need Changbin to show him his workout routine, he’d watched him run through it on the monitors enough to know it by heart now. “I’m trying to see how well those poor buttons on your shirt hold up.”
“Ah, baby,” Changbin said, and this time his voice had dipped into something much lower, something that threatened to send a shiver down Seungmin’s spine, “if you want me to strip, you just have to ask. I’ll happily do it.”
“No, hyung,” said Seungmin, a little exasperated. “I specifically want to see if you can bust a seam. I think that would be very funny. Come on, try.”
Changbin, grinning like he still just thought Seungmin was being cute and flirty in some way, did as he was told: he arched his back as he flexed his pecs, his chest on full display. One of the buttons on the shirt immediately pinged off and went flying across the room, where it would no doubt be lost forever, or at least until the next time Seungmin vacuumed.
Seungmin snorted, hand brought up to his mouth as if to smother it, but then Changbin turned his gaping, shocked expression from the side of the room the button had been flung off to onto Seungmin, his eyes very wide, mouth hanging open, and Seungmin promptly lost it. He could not help it, the laughter had him immediately.
He hunched over with the force of it, as Changbin whined, “That was my best shirt! Now I have to go and buy a whole new one. Stop laughing at me, Kim Seungmin.”
Seungmin could not, although he did get himself under control enough that he could sit back up, tears in his eyes, Changbin’s pouting face a little blurry in his sight. Changbin came closer, and even though he was clearly trying to keep that pout on his face, the sight of Seungmin laughing was having an effect. The softening of Changbin’s features as he looked at Seungmin was obvious even when Seungmin couldn’t see him fully.
“It wasn’t that funny,” Changbin said, but as Seungmin wiped the tears away, Changbin was smiling at him, like he understood, at least, why Seungmin had found it so funny. Or maybe he was just happy to see Seungmin happy. Who knew what went through Seo Changbin’s sick and sappy mind. “What were you cursing at your computer about?”
Urgh, thought Seungmin, the rest of the laughter fading almost immediately at the reminder of what he had seen. He would have to tell Changbin at some point, he knew, but not tonight, not like this. He had no guarantee that Changbin wouldn’t go storming off upstairs to interrupt or confront Minho about it. You’re welcome, Jeongin, Seungmin thought mutinously.
“Nothing we need to worry about,” he said out loud. Then, because he knew that the best way to get Changbin’s mind off something was to provide an immediate distraction, he pointed imperiously at his bedroom door. “Get in there,” he said.
Changbin looked at the door, then back at Seungmin’s face. Whatever he was seeing there made a honey-sweet smile spread across his face; a man could drown, gasping and hurting, in a smile like that. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Seungmin made sure his alerts for the night were set up, and then followed Changbin into the room. The door had barely shut behind him before he started shoving his sweatpants down over his hips, letting them slide over his knees and puddle on the floor. There was something wild building in his chest, in the base of his throat. He did not usually make his desire so obvious so early on.
Changbin had turned to watch him. He looked at Seungmin standing there in his hoodie and boxer shorts the same way he sometimes looked at Seungmin’s fully naked body, like there was something erotic about Seungmin’s knees. He lifted his hands and started to undo his shirt, but he had only gotten the top two undone — the third having disappeared in the workroom — before Seungmin put his hands on his chest and stopped him going further.
Always nice, to touch Changbin’s chest. Highly impressive work on Changbin’s part. He let his hands drift across Changbin’s pecs, the material of his shirt crisp under his palms, and momentarily got completely distracted from what he wanted to say. He almost had to shake himself to remember. “No,” he said.
Changbin raised an eyebrow. “No?” he echoed.
“No,” said Seungmin, his hands going over Changbin’s shoulders now, as he stepped out of his sweatpants on the floor and a little closer to the body warmth radiating off Changbin. “No, I am going to be naked, and you are going to fuck me like this. Exactly like this.”
Changbin stared at him, looking almost as shocked as when he’d popped the button. Then his hands came up to rest, heavy and solid, on Seungmin’s waist, pressing through the thick material of the hoodie, and he yanked Seungmin right up against him. “Yes, sir,” he said.
——
Felix was removing the cookies from the oven and setting them on the baking racks when the door to the apartment beeped open. This time it was Chan who stepped inside, looking every inch the perfect business man that he had not looked when Felix had first met him: expensive looking deep-green collared shirt, slim slacks, nice dress shoes that he took off in the entryway without needing to be told by Hyunjin. He had a long black coat slung over his arm, and he was a sight for Felix’s sore eyes.
Chan, as soon as he registered who was in the room, smiled at Felix, his softest smile, looking like he was thinking the same thing that Felix was. Chan looked at him sometimes like Felix was the first sip of water after being lost in the desert. To be fair, when his eyes shifted over to Hyunjin, sitting at the table, they lost none of that warmth. He looked somewhat less soppily in love though, at least.
“You’re baking,” he said, coming into the room and slinging his coat over the arm of one of the couches. His footsteps in his black socks made barely any sound. “Wow, it smells so good.”
The next moment Felix was engulfed in his arms, a tight hug that had him instantly clinging back. He was probably getting flour on the front of Chan’s nice clothing, but that didn’t matter, not when he was being hugged like this. He knew why, too, Chan was holding him so closely; it had been, at this point, over three weeks since Felix had baked. Three weeks where he had ignored the kitchen except for when he needed to eat, three weeks in which the smell of vanilla or chocolate hadn’t filled the entire apartment.
It was filled with it now. Chan was right, it did smell good.
“I’m still here, you know,” Hyunjin complained from somewhere behind Chan, but there was no bite in his voice. Chan snorted with laughter in Felix’s ear and then pulled back, not very far, just far enough that it was more of an embrace than the clutching, desperate thing it had been for a few seconds.
Chan tucked that one piece of hair back behind Felix’s ear that he always did, his fingers brushing Felix’s temple. “Can I have one of them?” he asked.
“They have to cool for thirty minutes,” Felix said. “But why don’t you go change and then maybe I’ll think about letting you have one early.”
Chan smiled, a playful little thing, a particular mood to it that Felix wasn’t sure he’d seen for these last few weeks. “I’m sure I can make it worth your while,” he said.
“I am still here,” Hyunjin said, louder than before.
Felix laughed, and fully detangled himself from Chan’s arms this time, stepping back and turning to the side to continue moving the cookies over. Chan put a hand on Felix’s waist and looked over at Hyunjin, who had closed his notebook again when Chan had come into the room. Felix was well acquainted with the contents of Hyunjin’s sketchbooks but not even he had seen what was inside this particular notebook.
“Lix and I were going to watch a movie downstairs after I got back,” Chan said, his thumb rubbing a little circle through the material of Felix’s sweatshirt. “Is it okay if I steal your angel for the rest of the night?”
Hyunjin scowled. He always got grumpy, usually playfully, sometimes not, when Chan asked for this, when he interrupted the time that Hyunjin and Felix were spending together to ask for Felix’s company. In the past, it was for sex, Chan whisking Felix away for a pleasure soaked hour or two. That kind of thing still had not happened over these past couple of weeks, although there had been some kissing, Chan pressing Felix into the mattress, his hands so solid and firm on Felix’s waist.
Hyunjin had probably gotten used to not dealing with these interruptions at this point. He looked very much like he wanted to tell Chan to go step on lego. But before he could, he caught Felix’s eye, saw the slightly pleading look that Felix was giving him, and deflated a little.
“Sure,” he said. He sounded so civil and calm that Felix saw Chan actually blink in surprise. “Knock yourself out. But I get him tomorrow.”
“I’m not a toy you have to share with your sibling,” Felix said, but Chan was already smiling and saying, deal, before heading out of the kitchen to his room to go and change like Felix had told him to. Felix watched where he had disappeared to for a few more seconds, feeling oddly flustered by the exchange in a way he couldn’t explain, sure he was blushing a little.
Hyunjin was squinting at him when Felix looked back over, so Felix said, as sincerely as he could possibly make it, “Thank you, Hyunjin.”
“Yes, yes,” Hyunjin said. He was collecting up his things, his pencils and notebook. “I’m going to go paint in my room, so I hope you and Chan-hyung have fun with your movie. You’d better let Chan-hyung have one of those cookies early because I’m going to eat them all as revenge.”
“Okay,” said Felix cheerfully. “They should be fully cooled in about thirty minutes so you can have some then if you want. Can you put the rest away in a tupperware if you don’t eat them all?”
“Don’t push your luck,” Hyunjin said, which Felix took to mean he would do it, and he, too, disappeared, leaving Felix to finish sorting out the cookies. It was a repetitive process, scraping them off the baking paper and then letting them rest on the racks, over and over again. He finished before Chan had come back out of his bedroom, and had enough time to take off his apron and wash his hands before he heard the bedroom door open and close.
Chan had changed into sweatpants and a hoodie, both of them black, both of them clearly old. Most of Chan’s clothes outside of things he wore for actual business seemed to be like this, old things that he was just wearing until they literally fell apart on him. He held out a hand for Felix to take, and Felix took it without hesitation. “Come on,” Chan said.
Chan held his hand the entire way down the stairs, their fingers interlocked, their skin warm together. Felix liked it when Chan did this, this one connection between them but it was something tight, something that couldn’t be easily broken. He liked it so much, which was funny sometimes, because he didn’t think Chan thought about it at all, really; he was just holding Felix’s hand the way he liked best.
They could have watched something upstairs, on the television screwed into the living room wall that went unused almost all of the time, but there was a distinct lack of privacy in doing that. Felix wanted— privacy, for things like this, these pseudo-dates that were supposed to be building the intimacy back up between them. A lot of their relationship before had felt very public to the eyes of the others; the meltdown of three weeks ago had been very public indeed. Felix wanted something— private, something the others couldn’t just stumble across. Not to mention, the television downstairs was significantly bigger.
“Jeongin’s probably watching some drama,” Chan said, as they let themselves into the PC room. “Hopefully he doesn’t mind if I throw him out for this.”
Jeongin probably would mind, especially if he was in the middle of an episode, but he’d acquiesce in the end, just like Hyunjin had done. Once upon a time, Felix might have even offered to let Jeongin stay and watch the movie with them, but not today, not like this. So Felix just squeezed Chan’s hand, smiling, and trailed after him through the room and into the hallway that led to the television room.
The door to said room was open, was the first thing his brain registered; the second was the sound of a moan, cut-off; a recognisable sound, although it was Jeongin’s voice, and Felix had certainly never heard a noise like that come out of Jeongin’s mouth before. Chan juddered to a stop, halfway down the hallway, frowning, his body language very stiff suddenly.
Felix, who had put two and two together and hopefully had the right answer, said, “Ah, hyung, maybe we should—”
But Chan was already moving again, faster this time, almost stomping his way to the door. He was moving so decisively that Felix almost got the sense that he knew what he was going to find in there, although Felix didn’t know how he possibly could. Felix wanted to tug Chan back, stop him going into that room, but ultimately, he didn’t and Chan threw the door open and stepped inside.
Jeongin was in the television room. Unfortunately, he was in Minho’s lap, and they were kissing, both of them so deep into it that neither paid attention when the door was shoved open. Jeongin’s hands were in Minho’s hair, knees spread around Minho’s thighs, and even from this angle Felix could see that he was squirming against Minho, who had both hands splayed across Jeongin’s hips.
Oh no, thought Felix.
“What the fuck,” Chan exploded.
The sound of his voice was so loud, and so sudden, that Felix flinched away from him, instinctively, his hand spasming in Chan’s. He lifted his other hand and pressed it over his suddenly racing heart. It made Minho flinch too, his hands flexing against Jeongin’s hips as he wrenched his mouth away. He didn’t make Jeongin get up, though, and Jeongin just sat back against Minho’s thighs like it was a perfectly normal place for him to be.
Jeongin twisted and turned to look at them, standing in the doorway. His mouth was very swollen, and very red. “Hello, hyung,” he said, in a reasonable facsimile of his usual brightness. It was undercut somewhat by the breathiness of his voice.
“What the fuck are you doing!” Chan yelled, so loud his voice echoed in the small room. Felix stared at him, not sure what was going on, knowing that he didn’t like it one little bit, but Chan was looking at Jeongin and Minho and was not paying attention to him at all. “Lee Minho, you fucking asshole, I told you not to put your hands on him!”
Minho, underneath Jeongin, was looking at Chan with an expression on his face that Felix had never seen on Minho before: something wider eyed than usual, none of his usual calm blankness or intense anger there. He was clearly trying to pull some form of blankness on and was not quite managing it fully.
Felix was so busy trying to parse Minho’s expression that it took a few moments for Chan’s words to filter through. What, he thought, confused as hell.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, face settling into a frown that was part anger and part confusion, as he shifted like he was going to move off Minho’s lap but didn’t quite do so.
Chan ignored him completely. “You promised me you would leave him alone, you promised me you’d never do something like this!” Chan shouted at Minho. “You gave me your word and I trusted you, I trusted you, and— this is what I get? Everything I did for you over the past five years, taking you in, giving you a home so you didn’t get thrown back into prison — this is how that gets repaid? You disloyal, lying—”
“Stop!” Jeongin yelled. He was looking at Chan like he had no idea who Chan was, a disbelieving sort of fury. His right hand was held palm out like he could physically block Chan’s words from hitting Minho.
Felix expected Minho to— lose his temper in turn, say something, do something, in response to the words. There’d been enough said about Minho for Felix to know that shouting at Minho was not something that was casually done; it ran the risk of triggering his temper a little too much for the comfort of most of the others. But Minho was not reacting at all. Instead, he seemed to be— diminishing somehow, sinking back into the couch as Chan yelled, his hands lifting from Jeongin’s hips and falling to the cushions of the couch.
Felix took the chance to detangle his fingers from Chan and then stepped forward so he could press his hand against Chan’s heaving chest, palm flat and firm. “Calm down,” he said. “Hyung, you need to calm down.”
Chan took hold of that hand again and pulled it away from his chest, very gently. His hold on Felix was so gentle, in fact, despite the anger in his voice, that it actually made Felix a little mad. Because it meant Chan was not, in fact, so out of his mind with rage that the words he was flinging at Minho could be anything other than a very decisive choice.
He dropped Felix’s hand and side stepped away, so Felix was no longer standing in front of him. He did not even look at Felix. His gaze had, not once, wavered from Minho at all. Locked on and expectant. “Well?” he demanded, face reddened. Minho gave him nothing, just sitting there staring back silently, his eyes glittering but not with tears. Finally, Chan roared, “Say something, you shithead!”
Minho, very quietly, said, “I don’t know what to say.”
The words, somehow, made Chan even more obviously angry. Felix did not understand what was going on here at all, or what Chan wanted, other than to just scream. “You don’t know what to say?” Chan shot back, so loud it was almost painful. “How about sorry? Huh? How about that? You sick bastard, you fucking animal, how about you control yourself—”
“I kissed him,” Jeongin spat, voice low and poisonous. Felix was glad he spoke up; Minho looked like every word Chan was lobbing his way was a physical lash. Worse, he was taking each hit like he thought he deserved it.
Jeongin finished his earlier motions and got partially to his feet, his right foot on the ground, left knee still braced on the couch. It was like he was squaring up, nearly blocking Minho from their view. He’d left one hand braced on Minho’s shoulder, his thumb swiping back and forth gently. Comforting.
Chan looked between them, not mollified at all by Jeongin’s words. He made a huffing sort of noise, rearing back just a little, upper lip curled in disgust. “Yeah, that’s great,” he sneered. “You just gonna sit there and let my fucking baby brother defend you?”
“No,” Minho said, almost a whisper. He shifted, like he might try to get up too, but Jeongin visibly exerted pressure on his shoulder, keeping him sitting.
“He doesn’t need to answer to you, he hasn’t done anything wrong, what the fuck, hyung,” Jeongin said, shockingly level, all things considered.
Chan shook his head shortly, pointing at Jeongin and saying in a more moderate tone, “You stay out of this.” Jeongin gasped softly in very obvious outrage, but Chan’s attention was back on Minho. “He knows what he’s done,” Chan said, jabbing his finger at Minho now, who dropped eye contact, looking down at his lap. “Yeah, go on, look all fucking contrite, I’m not falling for it again.”
“I knew you’d be angry,” Minho mumbled. He looked up again, past Jeongin, to Chan, looming a few strides away. “I’m sorry for that,” he whispered. “But I can’t say sorry for anything else; it would be a lie.” There was a wince of pain, mostly concealed, on his face.
Chan’s mouth dropped open, just a bit, and then he was laughing, more air than sound. “You’re something else, wow,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “I brought you in here, I trusted— I trusted that you weren’t just the mindless rabid dog that everyone — everyone — told me you were. You’d be eating trash on the streets if it weren’t for me, you’d probably be dead if it weren’t for me. And that’s what I get?”
Minho visibly swallowed, his hands on the couch cushions curling into fists. It would’ve made Felix nervous, but aside from the fact that he kind of thought maybe Minho was entitled to punching Chan in the face right now, he could tell Minho was strained— but not angry.
Jeongin noticed the shift too. He leaned down and kissed the corner of Minho’s mouth, soft despite the way he had just been looking at Chan. All the tension left Minho’s frame, like a puppet with its strings cut, tipping his face up into the kiss. His eyes went a little glazed, thoughts visibly stilling. Jeongin had found Minho’s off switch. It would’ve been sweet, if not for the circumstances.
Jeongin straightened and turned his glare back on Chan. Minho’s face downturned, his hair hiding his eyes. “Are you done?” Jeongin asked, voice like tiny pointed slivers of ice.
“No— no, I’m not!” Chan spluttered, seemingly set off balance by that little display. He gestured around Jeongin at Minho. “He’s a lying asshole and he can’t just—”
“Shut the fuck up,” snapped Jeongin. The shock of hearing it from Jeongin’s mouth cut Chan’s words off more than the actual interruption. “What fucking lie, did you— you said he promised you to stay away from me,” Jeongin said, words slow with a dawning realisation. He was looking at Chan like he’d never seen him before, like he was seeing someone completely new. “You— you talked about this with him? You made him promise.”
Chan did not reply, lips pressing together tightly, and Felix looked askance at him in vague horror.
Jeongin turned to Minho, his hand tightening on Minho’s shoulder as he said, “He made you promise?” And Minho did not reply, seemed to still be— spacing out, perhaps, or just lightly dissociating, Felix thought grimly. Jeongin grabbed Minho by the chin, not rough but decidedly firm. He forced Minho’s face up, made him meet his eyes. “He made you promise not to touch me,” Jeongin asked, flat with controlled rage.
“Yes,” Minho whispered.
Jeongin dropped his hand from Minho’s face, stepping away from the couch and facing Chan fully now. “You—” he hissed, his hands balling into fists at his side. He looked more angry than Felix had ever seen, more angry than Felix had known him to be capable of. “How dare you.”
“You don’t understand,” Chan said tightly. “You’re too young to understand. But he gets it.” Chan jerked his chin towards Minho, who was still staring up at Jeongin, face not moving from where Jeongin had put him. “You think I had to force that promise out of him? He agreed he was too fucked up for you!”
“He isn’t,” Jeongin said, firm and sure. “He really isn’t.”
“Jeongin,” Minho said, a little pained, a little like he— did not agree.
Jeongin glanced at him, face and voice gentling as he said, “You’re not.”
“You have no idea what you’re getting into, and this—” Chan pointed at the two of them, “—right here, just proves it.”
“What am I getting into?” Jeongin shot back, whirling on Chan, his hand flinging out. “A relationship with someone who has only ever been fucking good to me? You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything at all. I’m almost twenty, and if I want to kiss someone, or fuck someone, then that is my choice.”
Minho gaped up at Jeongin, while Chan went a bit white. “You can’t— not with him,” Chan said, hoarse.
“Yes, with him,” said Jeongin. He bent, snatching Minho’s hand up and tugging him to his feet. Minho went meekly. “I’m sick of this conversation, so it’s over,” Jeongin said, dragging Minho past Chan to the door.
“You can’t— where are you going?” Chan asked, voice a little raised and tone confused, like he wasn’t sure how he’d lost hold of the situation.
“My room,” Jeongin said simply.
“Your—” Chan blustered. “Why?”
Jeongin shot him a distinctly unimpressed look over his shoulder. “It really should be obvious, hyung.”
They vanished around the doorframe. Chan’s confusion at Jeongin’s entire reaction seemed to have rendered him motionless for a few seconds but then he stuttered into motion, following after them, voice raised as he said, “Lee Minho, if you have any sense of decency left, you’ll come back here—”
Felix got in front of him and jammed himself into the doorframe, holding onto either side, as solid as he could make himself. Not particularly solid, not up against Chan’s strength, but it made his point, and Chan did stop, the confusion not fading from his eyes as he looked at Felix. “Lix,” he said.
“Stop,” Felix said. “You can’t go after them.”
“I have to,” Chan said. Was it a little condescending? Felix couldn’t tell. “They’re going to—”
“I know,” interrupted Felix. “That’s why you can’t.”
He was shaking as he held onto the doorframe. Not fear, there was no fear inside of him — or not a real fear, nothing more than the embers of something that always came when people shouted in his presence. He was not afraid of Chan though, and what a strange thought that maybe should have been, after everything that had happened, but that night, those days, felt like such an anomaly. This felt more like how it should be, to stand here and know that no matter what he did or said, Chan’s anger would never be something Felix needed to be afraid of again.
No, Felix was not afraid. He was angry.
“Hyung, what on earth is going on,” he said. He had to work hard to keep his voice as normal as possible; as it was, it came out a little lower than usual, a little rougher. “Did you— did you really make Minho-hyung promise to stay away from Jeongin?”
Chan gave him a look of sheer confusion, a look that said quite clearly that he didn’t understand why Felix was asking such a question. “I did. Lix, let me through, please.”
“No,” said Felix, a little snappy. “Calm down and use your brain for once, hyung.” He wasn’t sure if it was the tone or the words that made Chan startle, blinking rapidly at Felix a few times. “Explain to me what happened,” Felix told him. “How— how could you do that?”
The disappointment, the upset, was clear in his voice. When Chan spoke, he was almost spluttering, like he understood this question, and this tone of voice, even less than the previous one. “How could I— Felix, I’m asking him to not fuck someone, not— ordering him to chew off his own leg or something. How hard is it to keep your dick in your pants?”
A moment where Felix wrestled with himself. Then he raised one, very pointed, eyebrow.
“Oh, don’t—” Chan said, still spluttering a little, but sounding like he was, somehow, on more solid ground. Felix did not see how. “That’s different. You’re you. And Jeongin is Jeongin.”
“What does that even mean,” Felix said flatly.
Chan turned away from Felix, still braced in the doorframe, and started to pace the length of the television room. Up and down, up and down, but in slightly erratic pathways, different each time. “I never prepared Jeongin for the real world,” Chan said, something about the words just as erratic as his movements. Felix watched him, silent, but not moving at all. “I’ve coddled him. It was— intentionally done. I wanted him to think the world was all blue skies and sunshine, because when he was little— it wasn’t.”
His voice had dipped into something grim, and Felix didn’t need to ask to know what Chan was talking about. He didn’t need to be reminded of that story. The image Chan had painted had stuck with him all these months, the thought of those industrial dryers. Of a young Jeongin, face stinging from the slap of a bigger hand.
“It wasn’t,” Chan repeated. “And now he’s grown up happy and— wide-eyed. I wanted that for him. I didn’t have that.” He spun on his heel so that he was looking at Felix. “You didn’t have that.”
No, Felix hadn’t had that. He’d had wealth and prestige and when he thought about how little Chan and Jeongin had had for so many years, he knew that despite everything, there was a privilege there. But he’d known, from a young age, that the world was not kind nor fair nor just. He’d lost his mother young, and with it had gone any promise of comfort or kindness. Life had been a long stretch of promised bleakness.
I don’t know how you can be so nice with a father like that, Hyunjin had said bluntly to him one afternoon, before Chan had ever found out, and Felix, even now, didn’t know how much of it was something inherent in himself, and how much of it was his own desire to be kind in a world that had given him so little in return.
Still. None of that went anywhere to explaining what the hell Chan was talking about. “You’re not explaining yourself well,” Felix told him.
“You heard what Jeongin said,” Chan said, with a short, jabbing gesture aimed mostly at the ceiling, as if to point to where Jeongin probably was right now. He mimicked Jeongin’s words, not mockingly but certainly like he thought they were naive. “Getting into a relationship with someone who is always good to me. He doesn’t understand, Felix! Minho doesn’t do relationships, not the way Jeongin is expecting. He thinks they’re— getting together romantically.”
“Maybe they are,” Felix said softly. “Maybe you’re not seeing this clearly.”
It would be easier, he reflected, with absolutely no amusement, if he could just tell Chan what it was that he knew. If he could tell him that Jeongin had already spoken to him about this, that Jeongin was already in love with Minho. But that was certainly not his secret to tell, and he knew, listening to Chan, that it would not make the situation any better. He suspected it would probably just make things worse.
Chan shook his head, a jerky movement. “Minho— he doesn’t do love, or relationships,” he said. “He’s always told me that he’s never been interested, nor ever will be, in love. He’s been derisive of it the few times I’ve asked him.”
Felix chewed the inside of his mouth for a few seconds, turning that over in his mind, before eventually saying, “So you think he’s going to break Jeongin’s heart.”
“Yes,” said Chan, with devastating surety. “But it’s more than that. I don’t— I don’t know if Jeongin would be interested in Minho, the way that he is, if he wasn’t probably— projecting hard onto him. I’m worried he’s sleeping with Minho because he’s concocted some—” His gesture towards the television was just as jerky as his headshake; his words were coming out so fast they were almost tripping over each other. “Some star-crossed love story in his head. A romance. And this is the scene where they get together and it’s magical. But it isn’t, Felix. It isn’t.”
Felix’s voice was even quieter now. He let go of the doorframe and stepped forward, feeling something soften inside him at the way Chan was speaking. “Hyung.”
“Minho isn’t like Jeongin,” Chan continued, words still rushing, like he was trying to get it all out before Felix could properly interrupt. “Jeongin is going to take Minho sleeping with him as a reciprocation of his feelings. But Minho does not love Jeongin. Not like that, he cares, I know he does, he cares for Jeongin, but it isn’t— romantic love.” Another shove of his hand through his hair. “Minho attends to his sexual needs the same way he— eats, and exercises. It’s a bodily requirement that he fulfils, like keeping a car tuned up. And I don’t know— I don’t know if Jeongin would consent to sleeping with Minho, if he knew the truth of things.”
Felix hummed under his breath for a moment. “I knew a girl in high school whose boyfriend told her he loved her, to get her to sleep with him.” He’d heard all about it, tucked away in his corner desk, watching her sob with her friends. He’d never said anything, he’d barely known her name truthfully, but his heart had ached for her all the same. “That’s what you’re worried about. But I don’t think Minho would lie to Jeongin like that.”
“He wouldn’t have to,” said Chan. “Jeongin has concocted the lie already. Minho might not even— realise where Jeongin’s coming at this from. That’s why I need to talk to him—”
He moved towards the door again. Felix took that step backwards and just as firmly as before jammed himself in the frame. “Uh-uh,” he said, as Chan stopped dead. His confusion at Felix stopping him this time was much stronger than before, and Felix felt the anger bubble back up in him. “All you did earlier was hurl undeserved insults at him. If you want to talk to him, you can do it tomorrow after you’ve calmed down. And apologised,” he added.
Chan gaped at him for a long few seconds before he said, a little too loud, “Apologise? To him? He lied to me. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have needed to yell at him in the first place. He wasn’t even sorry!”
“You had no right to demand that promise from him to begin with,” Felix said, far more patiently than he felt Chan deserved.
It was obvious, at this point, that Chan felt like everyone apart from him was being absolutely unreasonable. Felix’s continual refusal to move seemed to have him reeling in some way. “I didn’t have to demand it,” he said. “Minho agreed with me, when I first warned him off. He agreed that he was not— compatible with Jeongin in this way. He knows this will end up hurting Jeongin in the end, and he’s choosing to do it anyway.”
That made Felix pause, worrying his bottom lip as he looked at Chan. Minho was not a man to be ordered about in ways he would inherently oppose. Felix had seen enough from him to know that Minho did not easily capitulate to things that he did not agree with; how strange for him to have done it in this case then. And it was true that Felix did not know Minho well, but he knew this: Minho would never make a promise that he did not intend to keep.
Jeongin knew Minho better. Jeongin was convinced that Minho loved him back, enough so that he had been bluntly upfront about it with Felix. What Felix had seen from Minho did suggest some kind of softer feeling for Jeongin, something that was, once Felix had started looking for it, remarkably visible in Minho’s eyes. But Felix didn’t know to what extent that emotion went. Was it true, like Minho had apparently told Chan himself, that he was not capable of loving someone? Was it Jeongin that was fooling himself?
Felix could not make sense of the pieces in front of him, but then, he did not really need to. It was, all of it, besides the point.
“I understand why you’re worried,” he said, as gently as he could manage. “And even why you’re angry. You feel betrayed. But hyung,” he continued, trying to get Chan to see, “it’s Jeongin’s choice to make.”
Chan ran his hand through his hair once again. By this point, it was standing straight up in the air. “I can’t just stand back and let this happen, Felix,” he said. “He’s— Jeongin is in over his head here.”
“Maybe he is,” Felix said. “Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe he will regret it. But heartbreak is normal. It’s human. It’s a part of life, hyung.”
The words came out soft, but truthful. It was the truest thing Felix thought he knew, certainly the truth of his life so far. Heartbreak after his mother died, heartbreak after his sister was killed. The heartbreak of what had happened between him and Chan just three weeks ago. Felix did not believe that life was only suffering — even in his father’s house, there had been happiness to have, in small, snatched bursts. But there was enough of it that someone could not be protected forever from it.
Chan’s chest was heaving, his breathing oddly laboured. “So, what?” he said, his voice kind of shuddering as he spoke. “I’m supposed to just go to my office, or my bedroom, and sit there while—” He broke off, choked up. He clearly believed what he was saying, and it terrified him. Felix had never heard that kind of fear in Chan’s voice before.
When Chan continued, it still sounded like the words were a struggle. “Jeongin has never— I gave him a very, very stilted version of the birds and the bees talk when he was fourteen.” Felix, despite himself, got momentarily distracted by the idea of that: Chan trying to talk to a small teen Jeongin about sex, fumbling his way through it. He had to shove the image from his mind, because it was unbelievably cute, and he was determined to be mad at Chan in this moment, even if— even if the fear in Chan right then made him want to touch him in comfort. “And I expected that he might come around asking again when he got a little older— or that he’d— find someone and I’d see it coming and would be able to talk to him again. To explain more.”
“He’s nearly twenty years old,” Felix pointed out. “I’m sure he understands the logistics.”
“I don’t— know that he understands it beyond the logistics,” Chan said, slightly rough. “Jeongin is so sheltered, and Minho is too— he’s very experienced. He’s very— they’re not well matched.”
Something about Chan’s particular tone, the way he was stumbling around the actual point, set the exasperation running through Felix again. He wanted to point out that Jeongin most certainly had access to the internet, but that was a less pressing point. “Hyung,” he said. “Have you had sex with Minho-hyung?”
The question so obviously shocked Chan that he looked like he choked on his own spit for a moment. “What?” he spluttered. “No!”
Felix had not thought so. “Then how do you know what he’s like in bed?” he asked.
“Lix,” said Chan. The look he levelled at Felix was his own version of exasperated. “What do you think he’s like?”
Felix, it had to be said, had not really thought about it, not even after Jeongin had confessed his feelings to him. But it didn’t take much thought to come to a conclusion. “Intense,” he said, after a brief pause, picking the word carefully.
“At best,” Chan said. He gave Felix a dark look, which— yes, Felix knew. He understood what it was that Chan was really getting at. Minho’s likely proclivities in the bedroom were as obvious as the scar on his face. It was there in the way he held his body, the way he moved, the way he spoke. It was not something Felix would want for himself, per se, but then, he was not Jeongin.
“Hyung,” he said. “No one who wants to fuck someone like Minho-hyung would go into that without— knowing the type of person Minho is. That’s part of the appeal.”
Chan looked at him like he had just started speaking an entirely different language. Did he really not get it? Possibly — he seemed very convinced that Jeongin had no concept of these things. Felix sighed.
“Jeongin,” Felix said, “is a brat. If nothing else, I do have faith that he will vocalise when he wants something, and when he does not.” He let his voice drop to something quieter, but no less firm. “And Minho-hyung might be capable of many things, but I do not think he is— the kind of man who would not listen to the word no, in this context.”
“This morning I would have said he would never break an oath to me,” Chan said, a vicious bite to the words. “But I don’t know what Lee Minho is capable of, anymore.”
Felix stared at him. “Hyung. What a terrible thing to think of him.”
Chan— slumped. He looked wretched, but only a little part of it was shame for his words. Mostly it was just fear, Felix knew. Fear for Jeongin. His hands kept clenching and unclenching at his sides, the tilt of his shoulders lost. He swallowed thickly, the sound very loud in the room. “Jeongin’s my little brother,” he said, hoarse and quiet.
“I know,” said Felix, gentling his voice now. “But if you run upstairs and interrupt them right now, you will destroy your relationship with him. Do you hear what I’m saying right now? Jeongin will never forgive you if you do that.”
A long pause, before Chan said, “Yeah. Yeah, I hear you.” He was still visibly upset, the anguish obvious on his features. He rubbed at his face, almost as though he was trying to hide. It made Felix feel awful. He hated being angry, didn’t like speaking sharply to anyone. He knew that it annoyed Hyunjin, that it was something that Hyunjin viewed as Felix being nothing more than a doormat, but it was just that it didn’t feel good.
“I know Minho isn’t— he wouldn’t— I just—” Chan huffed out a frustrated breath. “He’s going to hurt Jeongin. In some capacity, it’s inevitable. And he knows it. He knows. Even if he tries not to, he’s like a shard of glass. He cuts without trying.”
Felix, finally, stepped out of the doorway. He came forward, until he was standing in front of Chan, and could reach out to take his hands. Chan was shaking, and although he held himself stiffly, his hands clung to Felix like they were a lifeline. “I know it’s not what you want to hear,” Felix told him, “but there’s nothing you can do. No, hyung, let me— you’ve protected him since he was a child, but he’s not a child anymore, and you cannot protect him from every potential hurt that exists in the world.” Chan looked a little bit like he did not believe that. Felix squeezed his hands. “I think you should go to your office, try to work on something, maybe? And I’ll go upstairs and keep an ear out, in case— anything happens, okay?”
Chan pressed his lips together tightly, making them turn white. He looked anguished, like this had taken something out of him that could possibly not be put back. Felix stood by everything he’d said tonight, but this talk about Minho being a bit too rough, a bit too much, had also made him just that bit nervous. He understood, he thought, Chan’s worry. Jeongin— had not talked about this aspect of things with Felix. He had only ever spoken about his feelings, and Felix did not know for sure if Jeongin knew what, exactly, he was getting into.
He didn’t think Minho would tread on a boundary deliberately, and felt confident he would stop, if he did. Minho was not cruel, and his care for Jeongin was obvious; Felix had clocked it from the earliest days, that softness in Minho so very obvious compared to his rougher care or respect for the others. But hurt could be inflicted accidentally all the same. Minho not meaning it would not stop it from happening.
It took a while before Chan eventually nodded, his body language that of defeat. He looked very tired. He squeezed Felix’s hands lightly, and then detangled them, letting go without a word. Felix did the same, took a step back so Chan could know that he was free to go. He thought that Chan might say something to him, even just goodnight, but he didn’t say anything as he left the room, turning right out of the doorway.
Felix stood still until he heard the office door open and then shut, quieter than he expected. Then he scrubbed both hands over his face, roughly, frustration and sadness in every part of him. Oh, Jeongin, he thought, a little grimly. I hope you know what you’re doing.
——
Minho followed Jeongin up the stairs and into the fourth floor apartment, docile and silent. Tamed, Minho’s brain supplied, and he shook it off. If only. No one had ever managed to properly do that.
Jeongin’s hand in his was warm, holding on firmly, so sure of himself. “Shoes,” he said quietly as they paused in the entryway, toeing his own worn sneakers off.
Minho’s heart was pounding rabbit-fast. He’d never taken his shoes off in the apartment. He knew why Jeongin wanted him to take his shoes off now, when he’d never before cared. There was no point denying the request, but as he slipped his feet out of his sneakers, it felt like a very conscious— acquiescence, to more than just wandering around the apartment in his socks.
He could not wear shoes in Jeongin’s bed, after all. His hand spasmed in Jeongin’s as he had the thought, and then he pressed it down, tried to calm himself.
Jeongin led him down the hall. Every nerve in Minho’s body was attuned to that small point of contact between them, their palms pressed together, fingers entwined.
He had not been in Jeongin’s room in— a while. It was no more tidy nor messy than it had been last time. The space was so decidedly Jeongin’s, though, that Minho felt like the room had sort of transported him elsewhere, once he stepped inside. It smelled like Jeongin, an overwhelming sense.
Jeongin shut the door behind them and locked it in one deft motion. Then he let go of Minho’s hand so he could lean back against the door, slumping almost. Like the lock wouldn’t be enough, like he had to use his body to keep the door sealed. His head thunked back against the wood, and he sighed heavily, eyes fluttering shut.
“Baby boy,” Minho murmured. He did not like seeing Jeongin so— heavy. Carrying things he should not.
Jeongin opened his eyes, his head still tipped back. “Are you okay?” he asked, and Minho’s heart skipped a beat. He could feel his ears tinging red, the heat of them. What had he ever done to deserve Jeongin’s care like this.
Minho considered the question, taking stock of himself. “Yes,” he said, after a few moments, and shockingly, he found it true. He’d accepted the knowledge that this was going to shatter his relationship with Chan the moment he let Jeongin climb back into his lap. Minho was no fool, had not deluded himself on that front. He had known exactly what Chan’s reaction would be, and he’d dreaded it — but now it was past. Chan had been trying to dissuade him but in some ways his raging had had the opposite effect. Minho no longer had to worry about it, brace for it. Their friendship was ruined. There could be no going back.
So Minho might as well grind those fragments into dust. Finish what he had begun. Give Jeongin what he wanted.
“Are you?” he asked, quiet, soft. Strikingly soft, for him.
Jeongin sighed again. “Yeah,” he said, pushing off from the door. “I knew he might give us a hard time. I didn’t know he’d already decided he wasn’t going to allow it, though.” He sneered that word, and a scowl came over his face, obstinate and cute somehow. “And if I think too hard about that — or what he said to you — I can feel myself getting really fucking mad,” he added darkly, glaring a hole in his floor, like he had x-ray vision and could see Chan at this very moment. “So I’m not going to think about it right now.”
Minho felt so fond over the idea of Jeongin’s anger on his behalf. Touched. It was not necessary at all. Minho deserved everything Chan had said to him. Disloyal, Chan had called him. A liar. That dripping disdain in Chan’s voice earlier, the way he had spoken to Minho like he was something on the bottom of Chan’s shoe — Minho would not soon forget it. He had spoken to Minho like the prison guards had spoken to him, and Minho knew— that was his due. That was what he deserved, for what he had done, the promise he had broken to Chan.
You’d probably be dead if it weren’t for me. There was an awful ring of truth for those words. But did it follow then, that Minho owed Chan mindless obedience? He had Minho’s loyalty, even now. After all that Chan had just hurled at him, Minho would still take a bullet for him. He was Chan’s man through and through, would be until he died. Or until Chan cut him loose.
The problem was, while Minho owed Chan his life, he owed Jeongin his soul. This boy who had healed so much of Minho’s heart, brought his days over the threshold from surviving into actually living. Jeongin, whose smile held a sunrise, who was Minho’s home, more than these walls could ever be.
Did he not owe Jeongin too? Surely he did. He owed it to Jeongin to listen, to actually hear his words. The respect of believing him, of letting Jeongin dictate his own agency. Minho had been so caught up in what he owed to Chan, but now he knew— he owed Jeongin too. And he’d been trying to pay homage to that by protecting him. Jeongin had dictated differently, and Minho could see it now, in his mind’s eye, Jeongin’s upset, his hurt, if Minho abandoned him here, left in spite of everything Jeongin had told him. Denying him now would be a betrayal in its own right.
Chan would never be able to see that.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, in that tone of voice that always reminded Minho of the chirp of a bird. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Minho paused, weighed his responses. Jeongin was looking at him so seriously, eyes a little sad. “Kiss me and I’ll be better,” Minho murmured, and watched that sadness evaporate, replaced by a shocked kind of desire.
Jeongin stepped forward, wrapping his arms around Minho’s middle, holding tightly. As soon as Jeongin’s lips met his Minho could feel the tension in his own body, his stuff shoulders and spine, simply melt away, like chocolate on warm fingertips. Yes, he thought as he tilted his face, mouth sliding against Jeongin’s. He held Jeongin in turn, pressing his palms to the flat lines of his back. Yes, you’re worth anything. You’re worth everything.
If being with Jeongin meant that Chan would remain angry at him for the rest of his life, then Minho would accept that. He had weathered worse hurts, he thought, although it did hurt, more than he had expected it to. But Minho was used to being in pain, he could stand something like this, if it were for Jeongin. If it meant he could have— this.
Jeongin was sweet against him, without the frantic heat of before. He pulled away, but only enough so that his lips were barely brushing Minho’s. He pressed kisses down — on Minho’s bottom lip, then his top, over the notch there. He moved to the corner of Minho’s mouth, drifting along the groove of his scarred cheek, leaving a trail of damp warmth behind. So very cute, his baby boy. Lavishing affection on a wound long-since healed.
“The other side needs attention too,” Minho murmured as Jeongin reached the indentation over Minho’s cheekbone. “You’re playing favourites.”
Jeongin huffed out a surprised little laugh against his skin. “Hyung!” he giggled. But he switched sides, pressing a firm kiss into the softness of Minho’s unmarked cheek, before his arms tightened around Minho and he tucked his face into Minho’s neck. He said quietly, like it was a secret, “I’m glad you’re here.”
Minho could hear what Jeongin wasn’t saying. That he was thankful Minho had stopped running. That Minho wasn’t putting Chan’s word above Jeongin’s in this. A small part of him preened under the praise, the knowledge that he was making Jeongin happy. But there was still something in Minho that was despairing, kicking and screaming about what a fucking monster he was for this. His betrayal to Chan, what he was about to do to Jeongin, when he’d spent so long holding off from it. A deep seated disappointment in himself, that he was giving in.
Selfish, it hissed at him.
Minho lowered his head and this time when he kissed Jeongin, it was firm, a little rough. Jeongin gave a contented little sigh, his mouth dropping open readily when Minho licked at him. It caused everything in Minho to shudder to a halt. All his racing thoughts— fuck, all his thoughts in general. Just gone. There was nothing outside of Jeongin, in this moment.
No turning back, he reminded himself. No turning back. And if he was sending himself to hell, then he was going to enjoy the descent.
Jeongin’s tongue met his, experimental little swipes, the sound of it filthy. This time around, that sort of tentativeness made sudden sense to Minho. He pulled back, eyes roving over Jeongin’s face.
Jeongin looked back at him, eyes heavy-lidded. His mouth was dropped open, just a little. “Baby boy,” Minho murmured, watched as Jeongin’s eyes tracked the movement of his lips. “You said you’ve never fucked anyone before, does that mean this is the first time you’ve kissed someone too?”
Jeongin nodded, a shallow little dip of his head. “Yes,” he said, very softly.
The thought made something dark rise up in Minho — something possessive, something both like and unlike the violence he knew lived inside him. It did not surprise him, to feel it, because he had felt it too in the nightclub, watching Jeongin laugh at whatever that other man had said, tipsy and beautiful. No one else, purred the animal deep inside him, had kissed Jeongin’s mouth; nobody else knew what he tasted like.
“Saving that for me too?” Minho said, voice edging a little too closely to— something he would have to keep tightly leashed, tonight. He worked to pull it back.
“Maybe,” Jeongin mumbled, fingertips plucking at the back of Minho’s shirt. Embarrassed, maybe. He smiled, just a little, just enough that his dimples made an appearance. It was almost an apologetic smile. Minho wanted to kiss his dimple, the deeper one in his left cheek. “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
Minho gave into the urge and did kiss that dimple like he had wanted to, feeling the way Jeongin tried to turn into it. “Don’t think too hard about it,” he said, husky, as their lips brushed. He skimmed a hand down Jeongin’s side, relishing the way he shivered. So sensitive. “Just feel.”
“Okay,” Jeongin whispered, trusting in Minho to guide him, to make this good. Minho was loath to disappoint him.
He slid a hand up along Jeongin’s spine, settling it on the back of Jeongin’s neck, running his thumb through the downy hairs at Jeongin’s nape. Jeongin was easy to move, as Minho tilted his head, drew him closer. Just feel, Minho had said, and Jeongin clearly was. He watched Minho from a breath away, eyes heavy-lidded.
Minho couldn’t help teasing him a little, touching Jeongin’s nose with his, their lips nearly meeting. He felt the way Jeongin tried to sway forward, and used his hand on Jeongin’s nape to keep him still. He brushed his lips over Jeongin’s, once, twice, a ghost of a touch, until Jeongin was panting, little puffs of air.
He moved his hand, touching Jeongin’s jaw, pressing a fingertip to Jeongin’s bottom lip, dragging it down. “Tongue, baby boy,” he said, and Jeongin took a moment, but then he poked the tip of his tongue out between his teeth. Minho wrapped his lips around it, sucking lightly, and Jeongin’s mouth dropped open, sealing over Minho’s, a moan shuddering out of him. He clutched Minho nearer, pressing his tongue deeper into Minho’s mouth. Minho let him — this would be a night for Jeongin to explore what felt good to him.
That got put to the test, a little, as Jeongin nudged him backwards, Minho taking small steps across the floor, until the backs of his legs hit the bed. Minho reigned in the shiver that threatened to run through him. The part of him that had sung with vicious pleasure at being Jeongin’s first kiss wanted to push Jeongin down onto the bed, climb on top of him and make him forget everything but Minho’s name in his mouth. The part of him that, on good days, felt like it did a decent impression of a human being, was reminding him that he could not.
Jeongin’s hands slid around, and Minho thought he was about to try to push Minho onto the bed, but instead his unsteady fingers began pulling Minho’s shirt out from where it was tucked into his slacks. “Impatient,” Minho said into Jeongin’s mouth, and Jeongin nipped at his bottom lip, which— Minho deeply enjoyed. The slight spark of pain, of brattiness. He took hold of Jeongin’s hands, drew them away, and Jeongin fell back a step, all hazy eyes and flushed cheeks. “If you want to get to it,” Minho said, maybe a little bracingly. He would not allow Jeongin to rush this, but neither did he want to wait and lose his nerve. “Then take your shirt off and get on the bed.”
He side-stepped out from between Jeongin and the bed, giving Jeongin the space to follow the order. Jeongin blinked at him, just once, looking like hadn’t expected that, but then scrambled to obey. He pulled his t-shirt up over his head, either not bothering to make a show of it or not knowing how. It didn’t matter. The sight of his stomach, his chest, the pale skin of him, made something shake a little loose in Minho.
He had known, in a theoretical way, what Jeongin’s body would look like. He had felt it, sometimes, when they trained: the line of Jeongin’s waist, the slimness of his body. And he had seen, too, Jeongin’s arms in t-shirts, his legs in shorts. None of that could prepare him for the reality of it, for the lithe strength of his shoulders, the darkness of his nipples, the thin line of hair below his navel. If Minho hadn’t already known that the soft, weak boy he’d met all of those years ago was gone, seeing him like this would have confirmed it.
Minho took a moment to breathe, to calm himself, to quell the hungry parts of him that only wanted to take and take. He watched as Jeongin scrambled up on the bed, sitting there shirtless, looking a little shy now, watching Minho watch him. He could not— be himself. With his past partners, those people he had picked up at clubs or bars with the express purpose of fucking, he had not had to care. They had wanted what he wanted, and he had known that he would not see them again; he had not had to hold back. But this was Jeongin. Jeongin, who had never done this before. He had asked for this, but that did not mean he was ready for— everything. Minho owed him care.
“Hyung?” Jeongin asked, when Minho just kept looking at him. He was blushing now, turning red under Minho’s gaze. He was fidgeting, too, his fingers picking at his bedsheets.
Slowly, Minho lifted his hands to his own shirt and undid it, button by button. Jeongin watched him, eyes tracking every movement, following as each one was undone and Minho’s hands moved down his body. Minho pretended he didn’t see it, slipped his shirt from his shoulders, and folded it up, taking his time. He turned his back to put it on Jeongin’s desk and heard Jeongin make a slight noise — not quite a gasp, too light for that, but along those lines. He paused for a moment, and let Jeongin look.
When he turned back, Jeongin was biting his bottom lip, the brief flash of his teeth visible. Minho undid his belt buckle with one hand, sliding the belt off, and then looped it in his hands. A memory, of the way this belt sounded when it hit flesh, flashed through his mind. He imagined a pretty red welt across Jeongin’s thigh.
Jeongin was still watching him, silent. Minho put the belt down on Jeongin’s desk atop his own shirt, and then crossed to the bed in three steps and climbed onto it, a slow crawl to where Jeongin was sitting. As he got closer, Jeongin sat back, going down to his elbows, like he knew Minho was going to push him down there and wanted it already, so that when Minho reached him, he could crawl onto Jeongin’s body, pushing Jeongin further down onto his back by the shoulder, a steady pressure. A mimicry of how Jeongin had tried to push him down earlier. He felt — like a predator, bloodlust high in his veins. But it was different, to his usual violence, different to how he usually felt, as he looked at Jeongin’s wide-eyed face beneath him, the blown out pupils in Jeongin’s dark eyes. This was not the urge to maim — this was the urge to bite.
He settled on top of Jeongin’s body, one knee between Jeongin’s spread thighs, one elbow holding him up. His other hand he ran through Jeongin’s hair, watching as Jeongin’s eyes slid shut. “Ah, baby boy,” Minho sighed, before he lowered his head and kissed him again.
Jeongin arched into the kiss, whimpering a little into Minho’s mouth. He put a hand to Minho’s side, his touch somewhat tentative at first, like he was expecting Minho to tell him no, or throw him off. Truthfully, Minho almost did, had to hold back an instinctive little jerk. He was not in the habit of touching his partners more than necessary, of letting them touch him back, and besides which— it was Jeongin, his touch warm against Minho’s bare skin. How Minho had wanted that touch, craved it for so long, knowing he could never have it. And now it was there, Jeongin’s hands sliding up his bare back, holding Minho closer.
Minho kissed him slow and steady, kept it slow even as Jeongin began to move underneath him, trying to press his hips up into Minho’s thigh. Minho shifted it away, took away even the hint of friction. Jeongin, he knew, was not patient, had never had to be patient. He was too used to being given everything he so much as expressed a desire for, and Minho was not usually an exception to that. He spoiled Jeongin too, in his own way. But here, like this, Jeongin would learn to wait.
He lifted his head. Jeongin’s mouth was red, a little wet, open as he panted, looking at Minho with dazed eyes, flushed across his cheeks and nose. Minho could not resist giving him another kiss, licking into that open mouth for a long stretch of time. When he once again broke off, Jeongin whimpered again.
“Baby boy,” he murmured, and felt Jeongin wriggle a little on the bed. “If I’m going to fuck you, then we’ll need some stuff first.”
He should have thought of it earlier, he knew, and it wasn’t even that it had slipped his mind. It was simply that he never brought anyone back here, would not even think to do so, and did not keep anything in his own room. He was used to buying it on the way to whichever apartment or hotel room his partner took him to. He had resigned himself to having to get up and go out to a convenience store to grab what he needed, and was just wishing he’d thought to do so before taking his shirt off when Jeongin said, “Ahh? Oh, I have lube.”
Minho— paused. “You have lube,” he repeated.
“Yes,” Jeongin said. He was still wriggling a little, just impatient little movements. “In my bottom drawer.”
Minho processed that. “Do you have condoms?” he asked.
Jeongin ran his hand down Minho’s back, with the briefest hint of nails, before it came to a rest against his hip. “No,” he said, his most mullish, bratty tone of voice, the tone that Minho should not find so endearing and yet always did. “I don’t want to use condoms.”
Minho rolled his eyes a little, saw as Jeongin noticed it. “You may be a virgin, baby boy,” he said, “but I certainly am not.”
Something passed across Jeongin’s face at that, something almost like a scowl, there and then gone again. Minho was trying to parse it when Jeongin said, firmly, “I don’t want to use condoms.”
What a spoiled little thing he was. He said it like he fully expected his own way, like he could simply demand that Minho fuck him bare and that Minho would do it — and the worst part was, he was right. Minho was clean, had always insisted on condoms in the past, and he was not about to climb off the bed just to go buy condoms if he didn’t need them. But there was something to the principle of the matter. Minho almost told him, you can’t trust like this with anyone else, but he did not want to think about Jeongin doing this with anyone else.
He pressed a hand to Jeongin’s sternum, holding him down. Jeongin went still with a breathy little noise, blinking up at him. Minho pushed a little firmer, a clear order to stay still, before he moved over to the side of the bed and reached down to the third drawer. This, it turned out, was where Jeongin kept a collection of what looked like sleep shirts, old things, worn soft. Minho rummaged carefully through them, trying to not disturb them too much, and found the small bottle of lube about halfway through the stack.
He pulled it out and looked at it in his hand. Part of him wanted to know where the hell Jeongin had gotten it from since, as far as Minho was aware, he never went anywhere alone. How had he managed to buy this? The more pressing thing, though, was the fact that the bottle was both clearly open and clearly used.
He lay back down over Jeongin’s body, holding the lube so Jeongin could see it. “You use this, baby boy?” he asked, his voice gone a little rougher now. “You finger yourself?”
Jeongin somehow went even redder than before, blushing all over his face. When he spoke, though, he sounded like he was trying very hard to not be embarrassed. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
Minho thought about asking him to show Minho how he did it, of making Jeongin lay on the bed and work himself open as Minho watched. But that was an instinct for another day, perhaps, something to keep in mind for later. He didn’t want to overwhelm Jeongin, didn’t want to push him too far. He also suspected that left to his own devices, Jeongin did not take the time with himself that Minho knew he would need for this, the time that Minho planned on taking. He needed to make sure it was done thoroughly.
He put the lube down on the bed beside them. When he put his hand back to Jeongin’s chest, he let his thumb stroke the skin there again, right over where Jeongin’s heart was under his rib cage. Jeongin shuddered at the touch, his nipples hard. Minho bent over him, fit his teeth around one of them, his tongue flicking lightly. Jeongin said, “Ohh,” a low moan of a sound, trying once again to grind up into Minho’s thigh.
Minho kept up that slow lick of tongue across Jeongin’s nipple as his hands dropped to the waistband of Jeongin’s sweatpants. He slid them down over Jeongin’s hips, Jeongin lifting them up off the bed slightly to give him room for it. How different it felt, than when Jeongin had been drunk and Minho had helped him take off those jeans. He took his mouth from Jeongin’s chest so that he could tug the sweatpants down Jeongin’s legs and off his feet and drop them over the side of the bed.
Jeongin was wearing boxers again today, pale blue, tented where his cock was hard and straining against the material. There was a damp spot against the front, darker blue. He put his hand to it, pressing against Jeongin’s erection, wondering how wet he was underneath, feeling breathless and fighting not to show it. Jeongin choked something out, fucked his hips up into Minho’s hand, rubbing his cock there in a jerky motion. When Minho lifted his hand back off, Jeongin said, “Hyung,” like he was being wronged in some way.
Minho ignored him. He pulled the boxers down and off, dropping them with the sweatpants, and only then did he allow himself to look at Jeongin fully.
It felt like a dream, somehow, a surreal sense of unreality, to be kneeling on Jeongin’s bed and to have Jeongin spread out naked in front of him. His cock was wet, leaking precome against his lower stomach. Jeongin squirmed a little under his gaze, clearly wanting to cover up somehow, but Minho took hold of the hand that tried and pulled it away. “Let me look at you,” he said. His voice was very rough now.
Jeongin whined, turned his face away. Minho just looked at him, long seconds of absorbing it: Jeongin’s pale thighs, the hard length of his cock, the flat planes of his stomach. How beautiful he was, how Minho wanted him. He craved every inch of flesh along Jeongin’s body.
He moved closer, swung one leg over Jeongin’s hips, holding himself up away from Jeongin’s cock. Jeongin’s eyes snapped back to his, one of his hands resting by the pillow, the other lifting off the mattress as if to touch. Minho took that wrist, brought Jeongin’s hand to the front of his slacks. “You do it, baby boy,” he murmured, pressing Jeongin’s palm to the bulge of his own cock, hard inside his pants. “Take me out.”
Jeongin swallowed. He didn’t move right away, just kept his hand cupped around Minho’s cock, like he was feeling the weight of him. Then he brought his other hand up and slowly undid the button, unzipped the zipper. Minho held himself still, kept perfectly quiet, so the only sound in the room now was Jeongin’s breathing, a little ragged, too loud. He pulled Minho’s jeans down a little, then reached into his underwear and brought out Minho’s cock.
Jeongin’s eyes widened as he looked. “Ahh,” he said, more breathy than he had been so far. Minho just watched his face, did not react to Jeongin running his hand up the length of him and then back down. Jeongin was biting his bottom lip again, his eyelashes lowered a little as he watched himself stroke Minho’s cock. One day, Minho thought, he was going to fuck that mouth, slide the head of his cock over Jeongin’s bottom lip, let Jeongin take him that way. But that, too, would be some other day.
He pulled Jeongin’s hands away from him, set them firmly down on the bed. Then he pushed his slacks down to his knees and carefully worked them off his legs, aware of Jeongin’s gaze on him the entire time. Once he was naked, his pants disposed of, he retrieved the lube and said, “Spread your legs for me.”
Jeongin made a questioning ahh noise but he did it, hesitatingly, his feet and knees spread apart. Minho ran a hand up his calf, and then moved so he was kneeling between Jeongin’s knees. “Here,” he said, moving Jeongin’s leg until he had one foot on the mattress, his knee bent. The other Minho shifted further out, until Jeongin was open for his gaze. “Good,” Minho said, once Jeongin was arranged to his liking. “Good.”
Jeongin covered his face with both hands, whining a little. Minho smiled at him, letting his face relax into it when Jeongin couldn’t see it, and then snapped open the lube bottle. Jeongin twitched at the sound, his face still covered, but with that twitch of his body came— a definite squirm of movement, the leg against the mattress pushing just a little further out. He really did want this, Minho thought, feeling almost drugged with it.
Minho spread the lube over his fingers, trying to warm it just a little. He put three fingers to Jeongin’s entrance, smearing the lube over the furl of him, and Jeongin said, “Oh,” in a high pitched way, half-tensing like he thought Minho was about to try to push those three fingers inside him. As if Minho would ever do that.
Instead, he pressed the tip of his middle finger inside, a shallow tease. Jeongin sighed, relaxed into it, but Minho kept it just that tip, pushed just slightly inside. “When you fuck yourself with your fingers,” he said softly, watching Jeongin shift his hips to try to cause that finger to slip further in, “how many fingers can you take?”
“Two,” Jeongin said, a little drawn out with a whine, “sometimes three.”
“Hmm,” Minho said. Finally, finally he pushed his finger into Jeongin, feeling Jeongin’s body open to the intrusion so easily. “Is that because you can’t take more or because you simply lack the patience? Because I’m considerably bigger than even two of your fingers, baby boy.”
“I can take it,” Jeongin gasped. Minho made a sceptical little noise, watched Jeongin’s eyes snap to his. He looked — stubborn, the way he so often did when told he could not or should not do something. “I can take it.”
Well, they’d see about that. Minho planned to make sure he could — he had no doubt that Jeongin’s problem had always been that he lacked the patience for it when he’d done this on his own, but if there was one thing Minho had, it was patience. He was not interested in rushing this, in moving too fast and hurting Jeongin. It had been true every time he did this, but as with everything else, he felt it more with Jeongin.
He pressed a second finger a little in, like he had with the tip of the first one, testing to see how Jeongin’s body would take it. Even just this much was obviously more of a stretch, and he took his time with it, watching Jeongin’s face as he pushed that second finger in along the first. Jeongin had his eyes closed but he didn’t seem to be in pain — his mouth had dropped open again, breath coming in shallow pants.
“Look at me,” he said. Jeongin’s eyes opened again, a little flutter of his eyelashes, and when he looked at Minho his eyes were bright, almost feverish. He was— beautiful, his skin flushed down his chest, his cock dripping against his stomach. Minho moved his fingers slowly, spreading them just a little, his other hand holding Jeongin’s thigh down and opened wide. Jeongin had started to press into his fingers now, rocking his hips as best as he could against the bed. Minho could have pinned him down, stopped him moving, but he liked this, the clear sign of Jeongin wanting it, enjoying it.
He pressed his fingers further in, carefully searching, and saw it on Jeongin’s face, the sudden shock of pleasure, as every nerve ending came alight. He arched again, hands suddenly scrambling at the bedsheets, clutching them hard. “There,” Minho murmured, moving his fingers against that spot again, again, Jeongin choking out hyung, hyung as he did it.
There was something in Jeongin’s face that made Minho wonder if he’d ever managed to stimulate himself like this, with his own fingers. It was a continued surprise, like the pleasure of it took him back every time Minho pressed against it. “Oh,” he moaned, as Minho’s hand rocked with his body, “oh, hyung, Minho-hyung, that feels— oh, fuck—”
“Feels good?” Minho asked. He moved his fingers slightly away, then mostly out, the two of them sliding easy now. He’d half-expected Jeongin to protest but instead he just lay against the bed, breathing hard. Perhaps happy for the respite. Minho squeezed his thigh a little, felt the muscle shift under his fingers. “It felt good?”
“Yes,” Jeongin said in a breathless moan. “Ah, hyung— oh—”
He jerked a little on the bed. Minho had poured more lube directly against his skin, spilling it over his own fingers, not caring that it wasn’t particularly warmed up this time. It slid down Jeongin’s skin, shiny between his legs, as Minho pushed the tip of his index finger into him now, that same tease to begin with. Jeongin pushed into it, a movement that felt almost instinctive, and this time Minho did press him down, hold him still, not wanting to go too hard like this.
“So impatient,” he said, fingers held still now, waiting for Jeongin to calm a little. Jeongin whined at him, the muscles in his thigh flexing, but Minho held him down. “I don’t want to hurt you, baby boy,” he said.
Jeongin grumbled something incoherent but he settled, going still against the bed. Minho waited another beat and then pushed those three fingers in, a tighter fit now. He watched Jeongin breathe around the stretch of it, but still his face didn’t show any signs of distress or pain, so Minho kept to his steady press in. When he pressed against Jeongin’s prostate again, Jeongin said, “Oh shit fuck.”
Minho felt alive with the knowledge of Jeongin’s pleasure at his hands. He still could not quite believe that he was here, opening Jeongin up like this. With those three fingers he worked him open carefully, stretching him out, not caring when Jeongin started to say, “Hyung, please, please, I need— oh please please—”
“Not yet,” Minho said, utterly implacable, and Jeongin made a noise that was not quite a sob, but almost. The knee that Minho wasn’t holding down had slid down onto the bed, Jeongin’s foot no longer holding it upright. He writhed a little, both of his hands now clutching the pillow under his head, as Minho fucked him open with his fingers.
By the time Minho pulled his fingers out of his body, Jeongin was chanting please please please in a barely there voice. His cock was so wet now, and Minho ran his lubed up fingers through that precome, used the mix of it to slick up his own cock. It felt so good to touch himself, and he took a moment, stroking up and down the length of his cock with his hand, watching as Jeongin’s eyes drifted hazily to it and then— stuck, half-lidded as he watched.
“Hyung,” he said, one of his hands leaving his pillow and reaching out to Minho. Minho took his hand, put it to his cock again. Jeongin touched him, fingers trailing down, then back up, and then down. “Hyung,” he said again.
“You want me to fuck you now, baby boy?” Minho asked. Jeongin nodded, shyly, back to being shy now, even with his fingers still on Minho’s cock. “Okay,” Minho said, and took his hand away, putting it against the bed. Jeongin’s fingers flexed, and he hooked two of them back into the sheets. Minho hooked a hand under the knee of the leg that had once been bent up and now lay flat, and pushed it so that Jeongin’s legs were even more open, spread wider around Minho’s hips as he moved closer to Jeongin’s body.
He’d anticipated the way Jeongin went a little tense when Minho lined his cock up with his entrance and started to push it in as carefully as he had used his fingers. It was an unconscious tension against the intrusion and Minho once again remembered he’s a virgin. He ran a hand up Jeongin’s side, slow and steadying, and waited until that tension left Jeongin again and he was able to slide slowly, slowly in. Jeongin seemed to be holding his breath throughout, and as he felt Minho move further inside him, he let it out in a long, shuddering exhale, his legs instinctively bending up towards his chest a little.
Minho couldn’t speak for a second, overwhelmed by the feeling of it, Jeongin still tight around him despite the easy slide home. Jeongin was sweet under him, his lashes fluttering, and Minho flicked his gaze down, to where his cock disappeared inside Jeongin’s body, and then had to look away again because of the way it made his stomach clench, the air in his lungs overwarm. He leaned half over Jeongin’s body, braced on one hand, searching Jeongin’s face for any sign of discomfort.
“You good, baby boy?” he asked, voice rough. “You like it?”
“Yeah,” moaned Jeongin, one of his hands clutching at Minho’s wrist braced next to his side. “Ah, hyung, it’s good, I’m good.”
“Good,” said Minho. He pushed Jeongin’s bangs back with a hand, then sat back, holding Jeongin by the hips, holding him down. He slid almost out again, Jeongin whimpering at the feeling of Minho’s cock moving inside of him. Then he fucked back in, a sharp, hard thrust; then he did it again; then again.
“Oh fuck,” Jeongin said then, as Minho repeated the movement: that steady pull out, that hard fuck in. “Oh fuck, hyung, Minho-hyung, this— I— oh—”
His voice broke on a high cry, his spine arching, as Minho shifted his angle just slightly and finally hit where he wanted to be. For a long minute it seemed that now it was Jeongin’s turn to be beyond words, reduced to incoherent gasping as Minho kept fucking him in that same steady rhythm. The long line of his neck glistened with sweat.
There was a feeling in Minho that was an almost-cousin to the feeling he had in a fight, when the violence rose up and washed away everything else. The need to repeat, repeat, to keep going. But when he fought, when he killed, it was like he was washed away too, nothing but the violence left; here, he did not think he had ever been so present in his body in his life. It was easy to keep that hard pace, his entire being focused on it.
Jeongin’s body was hot around him, every thrust knocking a moan from his throat. He kept trying to say Minho’s name, only to give up halfway through the word. Minho, meanwhile, had his teeth grit, half-afraid of what might come out if he opened it and let himself speak. He felt in control of this, he thought, as he moved inside Jeongin. Of the brutal movement of his hips, his muscles barely feeling the strain of it. He did not feel entirely in control of his mouth.
Minho worked to empty all his thoughts, to forget that part of himself, and to instead become nothing but his body, overwhelming enough. The prickle and slide of sweat on his skin, the slick friction on his cock; the shivering rasp of Jeongin’s panting gasps, different and better than what Minho had imagined; the way Jeongin’s stomach muscles kept rhythmically clenching as he worked his hips up in little rolls, meeting Minho’s thrusts. How fucking beautiful he was like this, the lithe muscles of his arms straining as he grasped at the sheets. Minho felt half-mad looking at him, like he had slipped away to some delusion. He’d had hallucinations, sometimes, when they kept him in solitary for too long, imagining the touch of a hand against his forehead, someone hugging him. Once or twice they’d been of his mother, what little he remembered of her face. This, somehow, felt like that, like he’d suddenly wake up and he would not be here, fucking Jeongin like he’d dreamed of doing for years, but instead on the floor of some cell without room to move.
There was something too visceral about this though, both in the way that fucking was, and something new besides that. Something particular to Jeongin, something about the way he said Minho’s name, the way he writhed on the bed as the minutes ticked by and Minho kept to that same rhythm, not breaking, not stuttering. The feeling of him around Minho’s cock was almost too good, an edge of something that Minho could not quite name. It had been a while since he had done this, but even so — it did not usually feel this good.
“H-hyung,” Jeongin managed, after Minho had been fucking him for a length of time that even he had lost track of, “hyung, fuck, god—” He reached up, grabbed at one of Minho’s shoulders with his hand, only managed to catch the top of his arm, where he clung, nails digging into Minho’s skin. His hair was sticking to his face with sweat, dark against his skin. When he spoke again, his voice was a shaky, breathy gasp. “Are you — oh, oh — are you a-always so good at this?”
That tickled Minho, perhaps more than it should have done. He smirked at Jeongin, saw the way Jeongin’s eyes half-blinked closed at it. “I don’t know, baby boy,” he said. “How good is it? Why don’t you tell me?”
Honestly, he had some idea. He’d never had any complaints in the past, far from it, which was something he’d set out to make sure of. And he only had to look at Jeongin to see — he looked debauched, his cock swollen-red, twitching with each thrust of Minho’s cock inside him.
Perhaps some of that showed on his face, because Jeongin said, “You know, you must— must know.”
“Mm,” Minho murmured, sliding his hands up Jeongin’s body from his hips to his ribs, bending further over him. This shifted the angle again, Jeongin’s hips lifting slightly off the bed now; Jeongin moaned loud enough the entire building probably could fucking hear. “I want to hear you say it.”
Jeongin almost sobbed. It took a long few seconds before he could answer, and when he did, he sounded slightly drunk, his words slurring together. “I— I didn’t know it could feel this good,” he said. “Ahh, hyung, hyung, please—”
“Mm, that’s it,” Minho said, as he felt Jeongin straining to fuck down onto his cock. “Good, baby boy. Good. Little whore.”
Fuck, he thought, and had one second of absolutely free-fall panic before Jeongin choked around the syllables of hyung! and came untouched, hips still grinding up into Minho’s cock as he did so, his body clenching hard. Minho went still inside him, genuinely taken by surprise, watching Jeongin’s face, his mouth prettily open, his eyes rolled back. Minho wanted to bite his throat. He had not expected Jeongin to do that, and, he thought, Jeongin probably not expected to either; Minho knew him well enough to know that he would have warned Minho if he was close enough for that.
He sat back without pulling out, kept his cock inside Jeongin’s body, and waited for Jeongin to recover. When he did, he slumped down limply on the bed, giving Minho a sheepish look. He was blushing, not just flushed from the sex. “I’m— sorry,” he said, confirming Minho’s suspicions as he added, “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Well,” Minho said carefully, feeling properly out of step for the first time since they’d walked in the doorway, “it is your first time, baby boy. It’s bound to be overwhelming.”
Jeongin shook his head, his hair fanning out against the pillow. “No,” he said, very softly. “It wasn’t— it wasn’t that. It was because— because you called me—”
He didn’t seem like he could say it. There was something pulsing through Minho anyway, something raw and wild. “Because I called you a little whore,” he said, as soft as Jeongin had been. “Was that why?”
Jeongin nodded this time, bright red. He didn’t speak at all, but he didn’t need to. Minho had felt it, the way the shiver ran through him when Minho said the words again.
The wild feeling inside Minho increased, that purring animal from earlier suddenly unleashed inside him. “Do you like it when I’m mean to you, baby boy?” he asked, his voice a rough, jagged thing in his chest. “Is that it?”
Jeongin’s eyes shut in a long, slow blink, his teeth sinking into his bottom lip again. It would be bitten raw by the end of this, and Minho hadn’t even had a chance to do it himself. “Hyung,” Jeongin whispered.
“Do you want me to be cruel?” Minho moved his hips in a shallow little movement, grinding his cock into Jeongin’s limp body. “Answer me, baby boy. I’ll be cruel to you if you ask me to be.”
“Yes,” Jeongin said, gasping as Minho moved inside him again. “Yes, I want that — ah, ah, I want it, be mean to me, please—”
This cannot be real, Minho thought, as he slid back almost out of Jeongin and then fucked back in again, resuming that same pace as before. The surprise was evident on Jeongin’s face, the way he clutched at the sheets, as if shocked to find himself getting fucked again. “Hyung,” he said, “I— but I already—”
“I noticed,” Minho cut in, letting his eyes dip to glance meaningfully at Jeongin’s come, streaked across his own chest. His voice was— colder now, unleashed to be what if often was, when he took people to bed. What he’d been trying to keep in check this whole time, finally unfurling out of his mouth. “But a pretty whore like you should have no trouble getting hard again.”
Jeongin made a small noise, squirming lightly. “I don’t— don’t know that I can,” Jeongin said, breathless.
Minho stopped. Stared at Jeongin, tilted his head slightly to the side as he surveyed him clinically. He felt it again, that shiver that vibrated through Jeongin’s entire body. It was true, somehow, true that Jeongin liked it when Minho was cruel and cold like this. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, dripping with condescension. “You will.”
He watched the breath shudder out of Jeongin, one long exhale. Minho took him by the hips, a little harder than before, a grip Jeongin would really feel, holding him where Minho wanted him. When he started to fuck Jeongin again, it was easier to keep his rhythm now that he had Jeongin pinned, that slow slide out even better than before. Jeongin seemed like he could do nothing but gasp for a long few minutes, each thrust almost rendering him breathless; sensitive, now, after he had already come, all of his nerves clearly jangling.
He’d never tried this before, then — never brought himself off and then gone again. Of course not, why would he — Minho knew already how impatient Jeongin was. Once would be enough for him, after all. Not enough for Minho, who had seen now how Jeongin looked, how he sounded, when he came, and wanted to see it again like an itch under his skin, aggravating. He would see it again tonight.
“You take my cock so well, don’t you,” he said, letting his grip on his mouth go now that Jeongin had asked for it. “I didn’t know that you would, I didn’t know you were a slut like this, baby boy."
Jeongin stared at him like— there was no fear there on his face, no disgust nor dislike. There wasn’t even any surprise. He looked— enthralled, his pupils blown wide with arousal. He was beautiful, the most beautiful thing Minho had ever seen, and he wanted this, wanted the way Minho’s words were dripping out of him, cold, unfeeling, cruel. Minho felt a little dizzy.
“Hyung,” Jeongin moaned, his knees tight around Minho’s sides, moving with him, as Minho started to fuck him even harder, a brutal pace that he hadn’t felt he could try earlier. “Ah— hyung— I can’t, I can’t— don’t— don’t stop.”
Minho had no intention of it. It felt too good, Jeongin’s body clenched around his cock, his skin hot and slick beneath his hands. “You like that?” he murmured. “You like the way hyung’s cock feels inside of you?”
He was a little surprised that Jeongin answered him. “Yes,” he said, a gasping thing. “Yes, I do, ahh, hyung, please—”
Minho really could not believe this was happening. Jeongin had both hands gripped in the bedsheets, his eyes closed now, head tipped back on the pillow he was resting against. Minho watched as each thrust sent a shudder of overstimulation up Jeongin’s spine. Like this, he thought, it was like Jeongin was somehow nothing more than a— toy, in Minho’s hands, an instrument whose strings Minho was plucking.
He felt untethered, now, in a good way, a way that it normally didn't feel like. The blood singing inside him, the way his body moved — usually this meant violence, this meant something he could not take back. Not this, not Jeongin sobbing his name underneath him, starting to now once again try to fuck down on Minho’s cock. This time, Minho didn’t let him; he kept Jeongin pinned, held him down with all the strength he could spare. This was what Jeongin had asked for, after all; he had asked for Minho’s cruelty.
Sweat pooled in the hollows of Jeongin’s collarbone, beaded slowly down his hairline. Minho bent over him for a moment, Jeongin moaning at the way that pushed Minho’s cock into him at an entirely new angle, and licked at that sweat on Jeongin’s temple, tasting the salt of it. Jeongin made a little sobbing noise and when Minho lifted his head back up slightly, Jeongin turned his head blindly in his direction, mouth dropped open. What a needy thing, Minho thought. What a perfect needy thing.
“You want me to kiss you, baby boy?” he murmured, stilling his hips, his cock filling Jeongin up. Jeongin nodded shallowly. “Ask me nicely,” Minho told him.
“Please,” Jeongin whispered immediately. “Please, kiss me, please, kiss—”
Minho caught his mouth halfway through the word, Jeongin’s bottom lip between his. It was a fierce kiss, nothing at all like their kisses from earlier. Minho brought a hand up and fisted it in Jeongin’s hair, yanked his head to the right angle, made him take it, noting the way the tug made one of Jeongin’s hands suddenly scrabble frantically at his shoulders, the edges of his bitten up nails scratching a little. He ground his cock into Jeongin once, twice, licking into Jeongin’s mouth. Then he pulled back, dragging Jeongin’s bottom lip between his teeth as he did so, biting slightly harder than he would have done earlier. Then he licked at Jeongin’s chin, just once.
He sat back up. Jeongin was panting, his eyes still closed. His hand fell away from Minho’s back back to the bed, but it didn’t clench into the sheets like his other one was still doing. It just lay there limply as Minho took him by the thighs this time and started to use his body again.
Jeongin had realised, at some point, that Minho was not going to let him move, was not going to let him fuck onto his cock, and so he had learned to simply take it. He was back to wordless moaning, wordless whining, his body as limp as his hand on the bed by the time Minho noticed the way his cock was hard again. It had taken less time than Minho had expected.
“Ah, what a good slut,” he crooned, voice dripping with cold amusement. Jeongin’s eyes shot open, his pupils blown so wide his irises were almost indistinguishable. “Getting hard for me, like I told you to. You’re not usually this obedient, baby boy.” Jeongin clenched around him at the words, and Minho sucked in a breath through his teeth, hissing. “Mm, felt that,” he said, upper lip raising into something between a smirk and a snarl.
Jeongin’s cock, curved up towards his stomach, twitched, even as he turned his face away, embarrassment thick on his features. “Hyung,” he said. He was breathless but there was something in his voice which resonated deeply inside Minho, something he couldn’t quite place. Was this what Jeongin had wanted, been aching for, when he’d lain beneath Minho on the floor of the television room. I know what I’m asking for. Had it been this? Minho had not even thought to consider the possibility that Jeongin might desire it at all; he hoped he was delivering.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, low, quiet. “Do you want to come again?” Jeongin whined, like he wasn’t sure, despite his cock leaking against his stomach. “You looked so pretty earlier, coming on my cock like that. So tell me, do you want to come again?”
“Yes,” Jeongin whispered.
“Mm,” said Minho. He bent over Jeongin once more, just a little, just enough to really look him in the eyes. He kept his voice perfectly detached, as if it meant nothing to him, as he said, “I’ll let you, if you tell me what a pretty slut you are.”
Jeongin was still looking at him like that, like this was everything he had wanted, like there was nothing wrong with the words coming out of Minho’s mouth, nothing wrong with the way he was being handled. There were, however, tears in his eyes, his chest heaving. He mouthed something.
“Tell me,” Minho said. “Tell me that you’re a pretty slut, and I’ll let you come.” He fucked into Jeongin especially hard, watching Jeongin almost give himself whiplash with the way his head fell back on a moan. “It shouldn’t be hard for you, baby boy, not when you’re so good at being one.”
“I— I—” Jeongin broke off, still shuddering with every thrust of Minho’s cock. “I, god, fuck—”
Minho dipped his voice back to absolute coldness. “Tell me, baby boy.”
Jeongin gasped for air. Then he said, “I’m a slut, hyung, please, I’m— pretty, ah—”
Minho had a moment of— shock, honestly, that a lightning bolt didn’t reach from the skies and strike him down at that. Those words, falling out of Jeongin’s mouth, made everything take on yet another layer of unreality. Jeongin was still trying to gasp out the words properly. “Good,” Minho said. “That’s enough, sweetheart, that’s good enough for me.”
Jeongin made a noise that might have contained the syllables for thank you inside it, and then he reached for his own cock. Ah, naive, Minho thought, charmed by it. So naive.
He knocked Jeongin’s hands away roughly, Jeongin looking at him with something like shock, something like wary confusion. “Ah, ah,” Minho said. “Sluts don’t get to touch themselves.”
Jeongin arched up off the bed at that, a full body squirm that ended with him falling flat again, limp. “Minho-hyung,” he said, the dam breaking on his tears, one then two sliding down his face, mixing in with the sweat still beading down. “Hyung, I want it, please, please, ah, ah, I’ll do it but you need to—”
Minho snarled at him. “I don’t need to do anything,” he said, even as he did reach down and wrapped his fingers around the oversensitive head of Jeongin’s cock, rough. Jeongin made a noise that was mostly a yelp, his legs clenching around Minho’s hips. “Is this what you wanted?” Minho asked him as he used the palm of his hand in a cupping, twisting motion over the head, too fast, too much. Jeongin’s skin was so hot here, precome pulsing out of him, slick. “You wanted me to touch you here?”
Jeongin was full on sobbing now, writhing like he didn’t know whether he wanted to buck into the touch or twist out of Minho’s hold. The stimulation was clearly overwhelming; he wouldn’t be able to come like this, not in this way. The pleasure inside Minho was reaching a zenith too. He could go for longer, could keep fucking Jeongin for longer, but the urge to come, the desire for it, was making itself known.
“I thought you said you couldn’t get hard again,” he said, still moving his hand over Jeongin’s cockhead. “But look at you now, you’re dripping all over my fingers. So wet for me, hmm?”
Jeongin seemed to be completely past the capacity for speech now, every sound out of him a sobbing moan that somewhat echoed around the room, his voice breaking a little on it. There was a dark pleasure in driving Jeongin, of all people, to that loudness. Minho took mercy on him, finally, letting go of his cock momentarily and then taking him properly in hand, fingers curled down the length of him. Jeongin almost shrieked at him.
“Come on,” Minho said, hand moving faster even as he kept fucking Jeongin hard. “Come for me, come again for me, baby boy, my darling little slut, let me see you.”
“Hyung, Minho-hyung,” Jeongin gasped, and then he did come, Minho’s hand stroking him through it. Minho got to watch properly this time, not taken by surprise: Jeongin’s eyes screwed shut, his mouth dropped open, the long stretch of his throat exposed. The way he clenched hot and tight around Minho’s cock, so tight Minho almost couldn’t move. Mine, mine, Minho’s stupid brain thought, and he had to squash it immediately.
Minho was leaning over Jeongin even before Jeongin had flopped back on the bed bonelessly. His hands moved from Jeongin’s thigh and cock up to his waist, gripping him hard as he kept fucking him, an even more punishing pace than before. He was chasing his own pleasure now, letting himself have it, undone by the way Jeongin had looked and felt. He thought Jeongin might have stopped breathing entirely for a long minute, Minho’s cock punching it out of him.
For his part, Minho seemed to have tipped from stable to on edge at a remarkable speed, but perhaps that was not surprising, perhaps it made sense. It had always been different, with Jeongin, he had always felt so much more with him. He bent down further, put his mouth to Jeongin’s neck, then moved down to his shoulder, where, at the very least, nobody tomorrow would be able to see it if he— sucked a little at the skin.
He planned on doing that, planned on setting his open mouth against Jeongin’s salt-sweat skin, but instead he fastened his teeth into the meat of Jeongin’s shoulder, a bite that was— hard, but not too bad, not violent the way he wanted to, the way his instincts were screaming.
“Oh, ohh,” Jeongin whined, as Minho kept fucking him, as he tipped over into definite overstimulation now, twitching with it all along his body as Minho held him there. “Oh, yes, harder, bite me harder, hyung, please, oh—”
He broke off with a cry as Minho did just that, sank his teeth so deep that he was surprised to not taste the tang of blood against his tongue. He came like that, still thrusting into Jeonging’s limp, unresisting body, biting Jeongin hard enough to satisfy that animal inside him, the one which thought about that bite mark the next day and fell into purring silence at the idea.
There was nothing but the sound of their breathing after that. Minho took his teeth from Jeongin’s shoulder, pressed his tongue into the indents they’d left, soothing. Then he turned his face so that it was pressed into the side of Jeongin’s neck, breathed in the scent of him. Jeongin brought both his arms up around him, almost holding him except he didn’t seem to have the strength for it properly. Even so, it was more than Minho had ever had, as close to cuddling as he’d ever experienced. He did not ever linger like this. He was never this entwined with someone when he came.
When he did lift his head, Jeongin’s face was tear-stained but he was smiling, just a little, looking tired. His legs were still locked around Minho’s hips, Minho buried inside him. “Hyung,” he said. One of his hands came around to touch Minho’s face, similar to how he had done when he was drunk — a soft, wondering touch, one Minho almost flinched from despite the past hour. The touch trailed over the line of Minho’s cheekbone, before he cupped Minho’s jaw with his palm.
Minho kissed him again; how could he not. Then he very carefully pulled out, sitting back on the bed so he could look at Jeongin’s face properly as he did so, waiting for discomfort or something— else. It didn’t come. “Baby boy,” he said, so softly. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Jeongin said, a barely there whisper, as his smile widened. His head lolled a little on the pillow. He was soaked with sweat, shining with it in the lamplight, chest still moving quickly. Minho watched his throat move as he swallowed. He was the most beautiful thing Minho had ever seen, would ever see, flushed from pleasure, eyes dark and clear. “I’m so good.”
Minho heard those words, the sincerity thick in Jeongin’s voice, the undeniable joy on his face— and smiled, unable to stop it. Jeongin’s smile flickered, something in his eyes Minho couldn’t define, and he just stared up at Minho for a long moment. And then he raised his arms up, out, in a clear demand for an embrace.
“We’re gross, sweetheart,” Minho murmured, that smile still on his face, resonating in his voice. He could hear it. “We need to clean up.”
Jeongin stretched his arms out further, pouting artfully, and made a very pathetic little noise that was entirely put upon, a fact which did not matter at all to Minho, who could deny him nothing. He lowered himself down, laying on his back on the bed, and then he worked an arm under Jeongin’s shoulders and rolled him over, so he was pressed all along Minho’s side. Jeongin did not seem to care that Minho was as sweaty as he was. He curled up against Minho, his head on Minho’s shoulder, hand coming up to rest on Minho’s sternum.
It felt— good. Shockingly good, the length of Jeongin bare and orgasm-warm against him. Minho trailed his fingertips over Jeongin’s spine, dragging through the cooling sweat. He wanted to kiss Jeongin’s hair, already tickling his chin, and realised he— could. He could. So he did, pressing his lips to the crown of Jeongin’s head, the roots of his hair damp.
Jeongin wriggled a little, hooking his leg over Minho’s thigh, his toes pressing between Minho’s calves. He raised his head, scooting up just enough to kiss the underside of Minho’s jaw. Sweet. So sweet. His baby boy. His lovely baby boy.
“Hyung,” Jeongin whispered, slow and sated. His eyes blinked slowly. “Did you like it?”
Minho dragged his hand down along Jeongin’s side, felt the way goosebumps rose in their wake. “You were perfect,” Minho said, so quiet, maybe a little too truthfully, and Jeongin tucked his face down against his neck. Minho could feel him smiling against his skin.
Jeongin’s fingertip traced shapes across Minho’s chest, idle, sleepy. It was a movement that was steadily slowing. He would sleep soon. Minho would clean them both up, after he drifted off. It would be easier to move then.
Jeongin murmured against his shoulder, “Are you as happy as I am?”
Minho caught Jeongin’s hand, stilled it, pressed it against his chest. “Mmm,” Minho hummed. He held Jeongin closer, tighter, and felt Jeongin sigh, felt him go utterly lax in his arms. Laying like this— it was so nice Minho felt like he was floating, suffused with a cloud of warm contentment. Happiness. Yes. That was what this was. He’d never known it like this before.
He rolled, just a little, just enough that Jeongin fell back a bit, his head lolling against Minho’s shoulder. Asleep. His lips were parted, his breathing evening out, deepening. Minho pressed a kiss to his cheek, the side of his nose. “Yes, baby boy,” he whispered as Jeongin breathed, little puffs of air falling across Minho’s face. Minho brushed his sweaty hair off his forehead, watching Jeongin’s eyelashes quiver. “Yes, I think I am as happy as you.”
Chapter 20
Notes:
HELLO WE ARE BACK IT HAS BEEN 84 YEARS. thank you so so much for your patience during the hiatus. we hopefully will not need to take another one but it might be necessary in the future so we ask for your understanding 🙏 for now though we will be resuming the every-two-weeks update schedule.
if you don’t follow us on tooter here’s a couple things you might have missed:
1) I made a floor plan of the building they live in. Is it perfect? No. Are there things I forgot? Yes. Can I imagine an apple in my head? I sure thought so but this potentially proved me wrong. I hope it is of some help conceptualizing the space anyway.
2) I also made a fun little scar reference for Minho. Please understand what Jeongin is going through at this time.
3) On a similar note, here is some lovely fanart of tboyl Minho made by a reader 🥹
4) Also, not a twitter thing, but we posted the seungbin smut from chapter 19 if you didn’t already see it!
And now onto the porn tags and content warnings of the chapter oh boy strap in for the whiplash
chapter specific tags: unprotected sex, degrading language/mild humiliation play (words used: slut), dom/sub dynamics, spitting into someone else’s mouth, belly bulge (mild???), a little slapping as a treat, references to biting
content warnings: mentions of suicidal ideation, references to hyunjin’s trauma and past and all that entails both in and out of his own pov.
i think that is it. ENJOY [vanishes in a swoop of my cape]
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Jeongin woke in Minho’s arms, and for a long moment was so content he did not realise he wasn’t still in a dream. Minho’s skin against his, warm and bare; the slow, intimate movement of his breathing. This moment alone was worth all those years of waiting.
Without opening his eyes Jeongin cuddled nearer, felt Minho’s arms around him tighten, a little. He wasn’t surprised Minho was already awake; Jeongin suspected he had a hair trigger for that sort of thing.
One of Minho’s hands began to glide up and down Jeongin’s spine, a soothing, gentle motion. Jeongin opened his eyes, found Minho was watching him from a handspan away, gaze heavy-lidded. His face was a little puffy from sleep, which was good, because it meant he had slept. Minho wasn’t in the habit of being vulnerable with people, physically or emotionally. That time in the television room had been something of a shocking anomaly. Jeongin had been a little worried he’d keep vigil all night.
“Hi,” Jeongin said, a smile spreading across his face. He was just so happy.
The corner of Minho’s mouth quirked. Just a little, just enough. It was a strikingly soft expression, and Jeongin’s smile grew wider, happiness filling him so much he thought he might burst. “Good morning, baby boy,” Minho murmured, eyes tracing over Jeongin’s face like a caress. “You’re in a good mood.”
“Of course,” Jeongin said, sunny. “You stayed.”
“I did,” Minho agreed. His face tipped a little, nudging into the pillow, but his eyes never wavered. “How do you feel, physically?”
Warm, was Jeongin’s first thought, but he knew Minho wanted something a little deeper. So he didn’t reply immediately, choosing instead to roll away, onto his back, where he had the room to stretch, to really feel his body. He brought his arms over his head, arching his back and pointing his toes under the blanket. There was a lovely soreness in his muscles, he could feel it when he tensed them, pressing his head back against the pillow, eyes falling shut. Ghosts of Minho’s touch were everywhere, from his hands, his mouth. Fingerprints on Jeongin’s skin. Every twinge and bruised spot was a treasure, these clear sensations of Minho having been inside him.
God, if Jeongin had known sex was going to feel so good, he would have moved in on Minho sooner.
“Mmm,” he said, halfway to being a moan. “Nice, I feel nice.” He brought his arms back down under the covers with him, letting his eyes open again, head lolling to the side so he could look at Minho once more.
The way Minho was staring at him now was as golden and molten as the morning sunlight. It made Jeongin’s heart stutter, heat swooping low in his belly. He rolled onto his side so they were facing one another again, but not touching now, his hands curled up to his chest, a whisper away from Minho’s.
Softly, Jeongin added, “It was worth the wait.”
Minho blinked once, slow, feline. “The wait,” he echoed lowly.
“Mn,” Jeongin hummed, feeling a smile creep back onto his face. “I told you, I’ve wanted you for longer than you’ve wanted me.”
“You don’t know that,” Minho said, the words flat but his eyes sparkling, engaged.
Jeongin’s smile widened. “I do.”
Minho’s gaze dropped to Jeongin’s mouth for a flicker, the slight curve of his own mouth warm. “How long,” he asked, a lilt of challenge there, almost masking the curiosity.
“Since I was sixteen,” Jeongin said, his smile turning a little rueful. “Before that too, really, but it only became— solid, after you killed that man for me.”
He watched as Minho absorbed that, as he worked to smother his shocked reaction. All traces of playfulness and challenge had evaporated off his features. “Oh,” he said, quiet, and he dropped eye contact.
Jeongin scooted closer, still not touching, but pressing his face near enough that Minho couldn’t avoid looking at him. “I always told you that you make me feel safe,” Jeongin said, gentle with it. “That I trust you. That I’m not afraid of you.”
Minho swallowed, Jeongin watching the way his throat moved with it. “So you want more,” Minho said, a bit haltingly. “Than just the one night.”
Now it was Jeongin’s turn to feel surprised, but unlike Minho, he didn’t even try to keep the emotion off his face. “Yes,” he said, steady and sure.
There was something in Minho’s eyes that Jeongin couldn’t read, some hesitant thing. “I hurt you,” Minho said quietly, gaze sliding off Jeongin’s face again, but this time with purpose.
Jeongin made an inquisitive noise, searching for what Minho was looking at. It was not difficult to find. On Jeongin’s shoulder was a bruise in the shape of Minho’s teeth, shockingly dark. Purple and black. Jeongin had been on such a pitch of pleasure when it had happened he hadn’t realised how hard Minho had bitten him.
“Ah,” Jeongin breathed, “that’s pretty.” It was, to his eyes. He’d wanted to be bruised. More than this. He’d often fantasised about looking in the mirror and seeing Minho’s mark on him after a night together, his pale skin peppered with purpling bruises.
Jeongin reached up to touch the mark and Minho stopped him, grabbing his wrist. “Don't touch it, baby boy,” he said, a little terse.
“But I like it,” Jeongin protested, meeting Minho’s eyes again so he would see Jeongin was being truthful. “I really do.” There was still that unsure note to Minho’s expression, like— like he was afraid he’d done something wrong, and Jeongin was going to scold him, or worse. He’d been holding back, last night, even after Jeongin had encouraged him to be rougher. Reining himself in, perhaps because he thought Jeongin didn’t want all of what Minho could give him. All of what Minho wanted to give him.
“You like it,” Minho repeated, like the words were some kind of riddle to be parsed through, and not a simple statement.
“Yes,” Jeongin said, and then, “Stop thinking about this so hard.”
Minho’s eyes narrowed at him, and Jeongin stared back, as innocent as he could be when he was still slick and sticky between the legs with come and lube.
“You don’t think it’s pretty?” Jeongin asked, sweet, and watched as shame and desire flickered behind Minho’s gaze in equal measures. “Hyung,” he said, “I wanted bruises. I was hoping for them— around my wrists or arms, from you holding too tight, holding me down.”
Minho gave a slow, thoughtful blink, his fringe feathered over his eyes as he stared at Jeongin across the pillow. “You want me to— hold you down?” he echoed carefully.
How could Jeongin not. Minho had that air around him, that specific sort of sensual intensity. He was just so— capable, physically. Something about the purposeful way he moved, the understated strength of his grace, made Jeongin feel like prey, something to be hunted. Made him feel— like he could understand the religious devotion of times long past, of wanting to be the one tied up and left among trees as old as the earth itself, waiting for the wolves to come, an offering left for the gods.
Take me, something in Jeongin whispered every time Minho was near. This bone deep desire in him to bare the long line of his throat, his soft belly, to teeth and claws. A desire to be consumed.
“I want you to hold me down, yes,” Jeongin affirmed in a whisper, and then began to feel stirrings of shyness under Minho’s heightened attention. It was only the fact that last night Jeongin had felt— an edge of something, a desire in Minho that he’d gripped hard to restrain, that gave Jeongin the courage to add, “I want you to hit me too, and— other things, maybe." He’d lost his nerve a little, at the end there, but he’d said enough that Minho was looking at him like he’d never seen him before. It wasn’t a judgemental look though, it was more like he was— processing. The same look of thoughtful shock that had come over his face when he’d pinned Jeongin down on the television room floor and Jeongin hadn’t flinched, or when he’d called Jeongin a whore and Jeongin had come.
“Yesterday—” Minho began, a little rough, and then he stopped, wet his lips. “I wasn’t sure you fully— how do you know about these things?”
Wasn’t that just a loaded question, because really, for a long time, Jeongin hadn’t. He’d had these sort of nebulous desires, unformed: all he’d known was that he’d watch Minho cutting vegetables, the strength in his tendons, and he’d wanted Minho to hurt him. Wanted to feel his physicality in a way that had sort of unnerved him, for a while. Especially when Jeongin really didn’t like pain, he didn’t like to be beaten up, or bloody. So he’d been unable to understand why the idea of Minho backhanding him sent heat between his legs.
And then there was Hyunjin. Hyunjin, who never talked to Jeongin about what he’d gone through, but Jeongin, through the years, had overheard snippets of conversations between Hyunjin and Chan, and had also simply— grown up, become more aware of the world. Of the terrible ways bad people hurt others. And then guilt had been added to the confusion, because he really— shouldn’t want to be held down, hurt. It seemed awful of Jeongin, to want something that had so wounded someone he loved.
But he hadn’t been able to stop, not when it was Minho. And he couldn’t talk to anyone about it, fuck, the idea was mortifying and shameful. He loved the others and he trusted them with so much but not with this.
In the end he’d done what most teenagers would do in his position— used the internet and watched a lot of porn. Some of it had been too much, way too much— anything with blood turned Jeongin’s stomach. But he’d realised that what he wanted was actually pretty common, and that it was different, doing it with someone you knew and wanted and trusted, than with someone you didn’t. That was a key point, he’d realised. The consent of it, on both sides.
After that, he’d stopped feeling so guilty. After that, he’d let himself explore it, a little. And he’d thought Minho would want these things too, maybe. The heat in his eyes sometimes— Jeongin could envision Minho slamming him against a wall. But maybe he’d been projecting this whole time.
Jeongin tucked his face down, looking up at Minho through his lashes. “Is it bad?” he asked. “Should I not— have these thoughts?”
“You’re fine, baby boy,” Minho said, so fast it sounded automatic, and Jeongin almost laughed. How sweet Minho was, even though he’d never think of himself that way. In a more normal tone, he added, “I just didn’t expect it of you.”
No, none of them would, Jeongin thought wryly. He was their baby, innocent and chaste. Nevermind that he’d hit puberty like the rest of the population and then been made to look, daily, at Minho in t-shirts that were just that little bit too tight across his chest. Jeongin, at the end of the day, was only human. A creature of flesh and blood, at the mercy of the chemicals in his brain like everyone else.
Minho was staring down at him, but his eyes were unfocused, the gears of his mind clearly turning, turning. Finally, he refocused and said simply, “Pain, huh?”
Jeongin could only nod, feeling the wideness of his own eyes, the warmth of his cheeks. His heart was beginning to beat very quickly, because— it might be happening. Minho wasn’t shying away, he was— was hashing this out.
Again in that simple tone, Minho said, “You want me to hit you?”
Jeongin nodded, quicker this time, breath coming out through his parted lips in little pants.
“Like, on the ass?” Minho asked, a very forced neutrality to both the question and his expression. Being careful, even now. Likely not wanting to push Jeongin toward something he maybe didn’t want, but fuck, Jeongin wanted to know what Minho wanted. He wanted to know what, exactly, Minho was hiding from him.
“I want you to slap me across the face while you’re fucking me,” Jeongin said, managing to get it out without stammering, bolstered by the desire spreading warm and heady through him at the idea that he might actually get it. “And— you did this last night, but I like it when you call me names. Use me. I want you to use me like I’m a toy.”
Minho’s eyes went wide for the barest flicker, and a hint of colour came to his cheeks. The sight of it made Jeongin’s stomach swoop with want. They weren’t touching, were merely laying on their sides facing one another, close under the blankets. Jeongin, quite keenly, felt the absence of it, but there was a delicious sort of anticipation to it. So close, so close but not touching. Not yet.
Quietly, dazed maybe, Minho mumbled, “What was the other thing?”
“Mm?” Jeongin blinked, unsure what Minho was talking about. His brain was not entirely up to speed right now, his blood being diverted between his legs instead.
Minho huffed out a noise that might have been a laugh. Jeongin, who normally did not particularly like being found cute unless it could be used to his advantage, did actually like that Minho seemed to think he was cute. Minho was so seldom soft for anything at all, that it made Jeongin feel like he was being allowed access to something special.
“You said you wanted me to hit you and maybe some other stuff, baby boy,” Minho explained, pointedly slow. “Define this— other stuff.”
Jeongin felt himself go red. He’d been thinking of something specific when he’d said that, but he could say any number of things. There really was so very much to pick from, truthfully. Years left to do nothing but fantasise had left him with a list as long as his own leg of things he wanted to try. Things that would be less embarrassing to ask for, maybe.
He waffled over whether to lie or not for too long. Minho’s eyes sharpened, and he said, sternly, “Tell me, baby boy.”
The order had Jeongin’s mouth opening like he’d been put under a spell. “I saw a video once where— the guy— he spit— in the other person's mouth,” Jeongin gasped out, unable to stop from stumbling over the words.
And like— gross, it had been gross. He didn’t like watching other people do it. But then he’d thought of Minho doing it to him, and— yes. He wanted Minho to spit in his mouth. He wanted Minho to come in his mouth too, but blowjobs were a simple thing and Jeongin knew they’d get to that. He wasn’t sure if this wasn’t a bit much.
“You want me to spit in your mouth?” Minho repeated, like it was nothing at all.
Jeongin met his eyes, took in the loveliness of his face in the warm morning light. He just— looked so soft, so like everything Jeongin had always wanted, hoped for. “I really do,” Jeongin whispered.
Another long, thoughtful silence. Minho gauging him, searching for something. Then he shifted, propping himself on his elbow so Jeongin had to look up at him. “Open your mouth, baby boy,” Minho murmured, and Jeongin’s cock twitched, a pulse of precome slipping out.
Jeongin rolled onto his back and Minho followed, leaning over him but still not touching. This was— Jeongin wanted to beg, but he didn’t need to, Minho was going to give it to him, so after one last wide-eyed look up at him, Jeongin let his eyes close and his mouth drop open.
Finally, touch. Minho’s strong fingers grasping his jaw, like he needed to hold Jeongin still. He didn’t. Jeongin was not going anywhere. He knew Minho’s face was close to his because of the shifting shadows beyond his closed eyelids, and it was all the warning he got. Minho was quiet about it, but he did it, the saliva hitting Jeongin’s tongue and sliding down, warm and tasteless. He moaned, completely involuntary, his legs dropping open. His whole body was awash with heat.
Minho used his grip on Jeongin’s jaw to press his mouth closed. “Swallow,” he ordered, and Jeongin heard his voice as if from very far away. He felt like he was floating, suffused with a strange, potent pleasure.
He swallowed.
“Good,” Minho said, echoing around the edges, and Jeongin bit back a sob, cock twitching again. Minho’s hand slipped from his jaw, trailing down Jeongin’s throat and chest and stomach until his fingertips were ghosting over Jeongin’s hard cock. Jeongin thrusted up, a sharp movement, and Minho pulled his hand away. “Are you close already? Ah, baby boy.”
Jeongin blushed hard, the humiliation of it just making him want it all the more. “Need you,” he said, his voice thready, brain steadily going to static. All he knew was he wanted Minho, against him, on top of him, inside him. That desperation was the only thing piercing through the fog of him. “Please?” he tried, and liked how it sounded. “Please.”
“Mm,” Minho hummed, settling against Jeongin’s side, leaning over him. Jeongin grabbed at him, fingernails digging into the muscles of Minho’s back. Minho was so warm and alive under his hands, so fucking real, and Jeongin didn’t know how to deal with that. All he could do was pull at Minho, make small, needy little noises as Minho bent and pressed kisses over Jeongin’s flushed face. “Baby boy,” Minho crooned, and Jeongin turned his face so their lips brushed. “What do you need.”
“You,” Jeongin said immediately. That was really the crux of it. Minho. Just Minho. “Anything. Whatever you want.”
Softly, tenderly, Minho murmured, “What a darling little slut you are.”
Jeongin gasped softly, squirming against the sheets, and tipped his face up to catch Minho’s mouth in a kiss but Minho pulled away. If he didn’t give Jeongin something in the next few seconds then Jeongin was pretty sure he was going to die. His cock ached already.
Minho stared down at him from so close, mildly fond but with that aloofness that made Jeongin feel wild. “So sweet, so perfect for me. Everything I could want.” Minho’s hand, suddenly, was hot and heavy on Jeongin’s inner thigh, sliding down. “Legs already spread, and— ah, yes—” Jeongin keened as Minho pressed two fingers inside of him, stretching him where he was sore and tender. “Still slick, still open,” Minho said, pumping his fingers. Like this, Jeongin felt deliciously helpless, a toy Minho was playing with. “You should have showered, last night. Or did you like the idea of keeping my come inside you?”
He did like that idea, very much. “Want you to fuck me using your come as lube,” Jeongin slurred, the words falling out of his mouth unfiltered.
And oh, Minho shivered. Jeongin loved that, loved the idea of getting a rise out of him, the idea of Minho wanting him just as much as he wanted Minho. “Fucking Christ, baby boy,” Minho muttered, a little breathless.
And then, damn him, he pulled away fully, taking the blanket with him.
“We need a little more than that—” Minho was saying as he went, and Jeongin swiped at him, trying to claw him back on top of him, whining loudly. Minho shot him a quick look of cool disdain and said sharply, “Don’t be a brat about it.” For emphasis he delivered a quick, stinging slap to Jeongin’s thigh.
Jeongin quieted, watching Minho as he grabbed the lube bottle off the nightstand where he’d left it. He was so gorgeous, a focused kind of strength in every part of him. The delicate bones of his face were a striking contrast to the solidity of his body. Through the years Minho had been surprisingly modest about showing what lay under his clothing, and Jeongin’s imagination had not overshot the beauty of the reality.
The skin where Minho had struck him was pulsing, just a bit. Jeongin was inclined to think he didn’t mind it. But he still gave Minho a wide-eyed look as Minho came back to settle between Jeongin’s spread legs, sniffling a little in affectation.
Minho ignored him in favour of squirting some of the lube onto his fingers. He rubbed his thumb through it slowly, warming it up, and while he did so there was a thoughtfulness to the motions. Jeongin wished he would hurry up, panting as he watched the lube spread over Minho’s fingers, shiny in the light. He was going to have them inside him again, sparking fire along his spine—
Jeongin couldn’t say what shifted, but he could tell Minho had seen his thoughts through to the end and come to some kind of decision. Minho came into motion, leaned down over Jeongin so their faces were level, bracing his clean hand on the bed by Jeongin’s shoulder. Jeongin was little more than a creature of urgent desire right now, but he met Minho’s gaze, sensed Minho needed him to.
“I’m going to be a bit rougher this time,” Minho said, intent, and Jeongin’s toes curled, his legs tightening reflexively around Minho’s hips. He could not have put into words how much that thought excited him even if his life depended on it. Minho continued seriously, “You can tell me to stop. Whenever, always. And I’ll stop.”
Jeongin stared up at him, his sombre face, those intense eyes. What a good man Minho was. Jeongin trusted him absolutely, did not think he would ever feel any safer with someone than he felt with Minho.
“Do you understand?” Minho asked him gently, and Jeongin, hazy, could scarcely parse through the question. His attention was caught on the way the light shining in through the window was making a halo of Minho’s hair, on how he wasn’t sure he had ever felt more content, than in this moment. “Jeongin,” Minho said, a little louder, and Jeongin worked to bring himself back into the moment. “You will tell me to stop, if I cross a line. Do you understand.”
“Yes,” Jeongin whispered. “I will. I promise.” He wet his lips, and said again, more intently, “I promise.”
Minho stared at him for another long beat, and then he leaned down and kissed him.
——
Felix woke with the kind of sticky reluctance that came from waking too early after not nearly enough sleep. It felt a little bit like consciousness was hazy for a long few minutes before he kept his eyes open long enough to recognise that yes, he was awake, and no, he would not be falling back asleep.
Beside him, the bed was cold. He’d stayed awake for a long time the night before, waiting for Chan to come to bed, and fallen asleep before it had happened. Chan had not, as far as Felix could tell, come to bed at all. It would have woken him, if he had, because Felix always woke when Chan came into the room, his body too trained after all those years to wake when someone came into a room with him. Chan had not appeared once.
Felix lay there, blinking the gritty tiredness from his eyes, and wondered: had Chan slept on his couch in his office, hunched into the too small space, legs tucked up under the thin blanket kept down there. The image maybe should have made him feel sorry for Chan, or touched him with how pathetic it seemed. Instead, it just kind of pissed him off.
Stupid, stubborn idiot, he thought, as he half-flung himself out of bed, up on his feet in a matter of seconds. I hope he did sleep, I hope he didn’t just stay up all night working.
He stomped his way through getting dressed, knowing as he did so that he was acting very much like a toddler who hadn’t had a nap recently. It was silly, and more than a little ridiculous, but part of him was relishing it all the same. He’d never been able to act like this before he came here, and wasn't he owed a little ridiculousness of his own, after the last few weeks? Wasn’t he allowed to be irritated, for once in his life, by the stupidity of everything around him?
The hallway outside was quiet and dark, the kitchen much the same. It appeared— untouched, was perhaps the word he would have used, which was not the usual thing. Usually, by this point in the morning, Minho and Jeongin had had their breakfast time together, and while Felix never saw it happen, there was always some evidence of it — dishes left to dry in the rack, the scent of the food still lingering in the air, a dish towel or the like out of place on the counter. There was none of that, this morning.
No, Felix thought wearily, standing in his slippers in that slightly chilly kitchen, lit only by the pale winter sunlight coming through the windows. They definitely hadn’t been out to have breakfast yet.
He moved to the cupboards, pulling things out almost on autopilot until he had assembled, without quite realising it, everything for making pancakes. It had been a little surprising, the first time he had actually felt comfortable properly poking around in the kitchen, to discover that it was more well-stocked than he had first thought during his initial introduction by Jisung. Most of what was contained there turned out to belong to Minho, who was the only one to cook more than basic meals, but most of even that still seemed to be fairly common use.
He was still not paying full attention to his movements, as he started to mix up the batter, bowl clutched in his arms, the metal of the whisk cold in his fingers from where he’d found it in a drawer. Most of him still felt like it was buzzing slightly, mostly tiredness, but still that irritation, keeping him just off-kilter enough.
He was just pouring the first part of the batter into the frying pan when he heard, from down the hallway, the sound of— a moan, rising suddenly out of nothing, cutting through the sound of the spitting oil in the pan. Felix’s hand jerked a little and he poured more than he meant to before he caught himself and set his mixing bowl down on the counter.
Even the sound of the pancake batter cooking wasn’t enough to drown out the noises coming from down the hallway. Jeongin’s voice, not especially loud but certainly loud enough to be heard through the walls, through his door. Felix had known the walls in this apartment were rather thin, but either they were thinner than he’d thought or Jeongin was louder than Felix realised.
Good for him, I guess, he thought. There was a part of him that was almost a little jealous. Ever since his true identity had been revealed and he and Chan had been working on building their relationship back up, it felt like Chan barely touched him. They shared a bed but there’d been nothing more than kissing, and certainly nothing along the lines of what Jeongin was getting up to. Felix missed it. He missed that particular closeness, that particular intimacy, but he hadn’t worked out how to ask for it yet. He was just shy enough about it that his horny side couldn’t quite take over.
Most of him, though, was just kind of glad that Chan hadn’t bothered coming up to bed after all last night, if this was how audible the sex was going to be.
He had two stacked plates of pancakes and still more batter left in the bowl when he heard the sound of a door opening. Not Jeongin’s, that was for certain, and sure enough it was Hyunjin who came into the room, moving faster than he usually did, his eyes wide in his pretty face. He was wearing a hoodie and pyjama bottoms in a dark blue check pattern, and he looked at Felix standing at the stove with the pancakes, and then over his shoulder at the hallway from which the sound of Jeongin’s moans were still audible.
“Felix,” he hissed, almost tripping in his haste at getting close enough that he could press himself against Felix’s side. “Do you hear that?”
Yes, Felix could hear that. He could hear it very well, and it was beginning to mortify him, because it was coming to him slowly but surely that if he could hear Jeongin, then no doubt everyone had been able to hear him all those weeks that Chan had taken him off to bed in the middle of the day. He should have known it already, considering how thin the walls of the apartment were, but somehow he’d never quite realised it.
“Yeah,” he said, very tiredly. “Do you want some pancakes?”
Hyunjin looked at the pancakes, then back at the hallway, then focused on Felix’s face. “Lix,” he said, still in that hiss, as if afraid of being overheard. “That’s Jeongin and Minho-hyung.”
Felix sighed. “I know,” he said. “Do you want some pancakes?”
Hyunjin gaped at him a little bit. Felix decided to take sympathy on him, as much as he could, and simply started plating up some of the pancakes he’d made, the ones that were still warm enough to be nice to eat. When he put the plate in Hyunjin’s hands and ushered him towards the table, Hyunjin didn’t even protest. He seemed so confused by it all that he just let himself be sat in his usual seat.
It wasn’t until Felix sat down next to him and handed him a fork and a squeezy bottle of syrup that Hyunjin said, “What do you mean, you know? That’s Jeongin and Minho-hyung having sex.”
“How do you know it’s Minho-hyung in there,” Felix said, instead of answering the question. He was curious but mostly he was just stalling, because he didn’t want to tell Hyunjin anything about last night, and he knew that he would have to. But it was a valid question, he thought, because while Jeongin’s voice was obvious and recognisable, Minho was either not making a sound or talking just quietly enough that they couldn’t hear him at all.
“I heard them, last night,” Hyunjin said. He had the fork held in his hands but he hadn’t made any move to eat. He hadn’t even picked up the syrup bottle to smother them in sweetness like he usually did when someone made pancakes, or waffles. He was looking down at his plate, not at Felix. “I um. I came into the kitchen to get a snack and I heard them. Minho-hyung, too, talking to Jeongin. They were— it sounded like they were having sex but I thought I must have been mistaken because literally what the fuck, Lix?”
Felix reached out and squeezed Hyunjin’s hand around the fork. He looked so much like he simply had no idea how to process any of what was happening, and Felix did not blame him. It had been very clear that Hyunjin had no idea how Jeongin felt about Minho, if for no other reason than Hyunjin had never once used it as a source of teasing, and this was probably a lot to wrap his head around.
“Chan-hyung and I walked in on them making out in the television room last night,” he told Hyunjin, and watched as Hyunjin’s face snapped up to his, his eyes wide. “It didn’t go well. Honestly, it was a complete shitshow.”
“This is the craziest thing I have ever heard,” Hyunjin said. Despite the vaguely wild look in his eyes, his voice was so serious that it made Felix feel like smiling for the first time this morning. “How in the fuck are Minho-hyung and Jeongin having sex? Do you think this has been going on for long? Oh god, do you think they’ve done it in the television room before or something? Felix, I watch stuff in there.”
It would have been funny, except for the way that Hyunjin sounded genuinely freaked out about the concept. And maybe Felix could see why, the general shape of it. Hyunjin who had been slightly off-balance just by the scent of come in the air, who would probably feel it was a kind of violation, to have been in a room where sex had happened without his knowledge.
“No,” Felix said, his hand still covering Hyunjin’s. “No, last night was the first time, don’t worry.”
“I don’t understand,” Hyunjin said, before wincing as from down the hallway echoed yet another moan, this one a little more— desperate, perhaps, than before. “I mean, if Jeongin wanted to get laid, I could have— we could have gone to Maniac, or something, we could have found someone who wasn’t Minho-hyung—”
“My understanding,” Felix said, with as much tact and delicacy as he felt capable of wielding right now, “is that it is specifically Minho-hyung that Jeongin wanted.”
Hyunjin gaped at him. For a long, long moment there was only this, their eyes meeting over this table, the sounds of pleasure drifting from down the hallway. Felix definitely, by this point, knew that everyone must have been able to hear him every time he let Chan fuck him, and he wanted, very badly, to open a window and climb out and simply let himself go splat on the pavement below.
“Sure!” said Hyunjin, very high pitched, after almost too much time had passed for that particular thread of the conversation to continue. “Okay! That makes sense, you know, Minho-hyung’s hot, I guess, if that’s what you’re into!” He did not sound like that was what he, personally, was into, he sounded like the idea of sleeping with Minho was as appealing as climbing naked into a bath of crabs. “But why the fuck is Minho-hyung wanting to sleep with Jeongin for? Like, it’s Jeongin.”
Felix wasn’t sure how to parse the meaning of that. He couldn’t work out if Hyunjin meant it the same way that Chan would have meant it, after last night: he’s Jeongin, he’s just a child, he’s a baby, he deserves more. But it seemed more likely, knowing Hyunjin, that he meant it more like, he’s Jeongin, he’s a gremlin who dropped a glass of milk on the kitchen floor literally yesterday.
“Hyunjin,” he said, as gently as he could, as gentle as he’d tried to be this entire conversation. He hadn’t thought, when he’d started this conversation, that Hyunjin would be so completely thrown off by it, but of course he would be. “Hyunjin, they like each other. Both of them— like Chan-hyung and I. Like— like you and Jisung do.”
Hyunjin’s voice went even more high pitched. “Are you crazy right now?”
Before Felix could respond there was a new sound from down the hallway — Jeongin’s voice sobbing slightly now, the cadence very obvious, and words, too: oh god, oh god, oh please. The moaning had been mostly easy to ignore by this point, something akin to background noise, but this was hard to block out. Those words were desperate, those words were pleading.
Felix felt himself blush, hearing them.
Hyunjin didn’t. Hyunjin’s head whipped around at the sound of those words, in Jeongin’s sobbing, broken voice, his face suddenly pale as milk. Felix’s hand slid from the back of Hyunjin’s to around his wrist, and even just there he could feel the tension in Hyunjin’s body, the way he held himself very still against his chair. As if he was locking every muscle in his body in that moment.
“Hyunjin?” Felix asked.
“Why does he sound like that?” Hyunjin asked. The wildness in his eyes from earlier was in his voice now, something panicked and awful. “He sounds— like he’s in pain. Why— Minho-hyung is hurting him, why is he hurting him?”
Felix held onto his wrist, his thumb rubbing as soothingly as he could. It was probably just as well that Hyunjin wasn’t looking at him, was still looking in the direction of the hallway, because Felix didn’t think he could keep the pity from his face even if he tried. And he knew, he knew how much Hyunjin hated it when anyone, even Felix, pitied him but— god.
“He’s not in pain,” Felix said softly. “Hyunjin, that’s not— it’s not pain.”
Hyunjin did look at him now, clearly disbelieving. “It is,” he said. “Why— he’s crying, what could it be if not pain?”
Felix looked a little helplessly at him. He knew that he had to explain this to Hyunjin, but he felt a little bit at a loss as to how to go about it. He could remember the way Hyunjin had whispered, it always hurt, for me, the words so awfully heartbreaking that whenever Felix remembered them it felt like his stomach was being dipped in ice.
“It’s pleasure, Hyunjin,” Felix told him. “Minho-hyung isn’t hurting Jeongin, it’s just— it feels good, for Jeongin.”
Felix wouldn’t lie to Hyunjin, and he knew that Hyunjin knew that, and he could see the warring parts of Hyunjin fighting behind his eyes. The part that wanted to trust Felix, believe in him and what he was saying, versus the part of him that couldn’t believe it at all. The part of Hyunjin that had never experienced pleasure like that at the hands of another person; the part of Hyunjin that only knew the pain of it.
“I don’t—” Hyunjin looked back at the hallway, and then at Felix again, his eyes focusing on Felix’s face. “Lix, I don’t—”
Jeongin cried out suddenly, a loud, high sound that shifted halfway into a moan, and then— hyung, please, please, spoken shudderingly around sobs, Jeongin obviously crying properly now. Hyunjin was out of his chair in an instant, on his feet and a couple of steps through the kitchen before even he seemed to register that he was moving.
Felix scrambled up too, and got his hands on Hyunjin’s chest to hold him in place. Hyunjin had already stuttered to a stop, though, so pale now that Felix was a little worried he might throw up or something. “Hyunjin, sit down,” Felix said, pushing gently, trying to get Hyunjin to take his seat again. “Please, you don’t have to interrupt them, I promise you Jeongin isn’t in pain.”
“He’s asking Minho-hyung to stop,” Hyunjin said, sounding and looking utterly wretched.
“He’s not,” Felix said. Underneath the need to look after Hyunjin, the need to reassure him, was the pink-cheeked embarrassment at what he was overhearing. Hyunjin might have the wrong end of the stick, but Felix certainly didn’t, and whilst he’d known, on some level, that Minho was likely to be intense in bed, it was another thing to listen to Jeongin sob like that and know that he’d been right.
There’d been times when Chan, who was sweet and as gentle as possible in bed, had brought Felix to the point of tears as he fucked him. God only knew what Jeongin was going through right then.
“He doesn’t want Minho-hyung to stop,” Felix said. “Listen to what he’s actually saying, Hyunjin, and what he’s not saying. He’s not asking Minho-hyung to stop, he’s not saying no, he’s not even saying wait. It’s okay, Hyunjin. He’s okay.”
Hyunjin was almost shaking, a slight trembling of his limbs where Felix was holding him. “No, no, it’s—” He looked from Felix’s face to the hallway again. Things had gone mostly quiet again, both of them either no longer talking or talking softly enough to not be picked up. “Lix, that’s— that’s not what—”
“It is,” Felix said, very firmly. “I need you to trust me, Hyunjin. Jeongin is not in pain and Minho-hyung is not hurting him. Do you want to sit down or do you want to go downstairs, we can go downstairs and get out of the apartment if you want.”
Hyunjin stood for a few more seconds, looking down the hallway. What was he thinking, Felix wondered, what was he hearing in Jeongin’s sobs that resonated with him in the exact wrong way. Felix could— imagine, he could speculate, but he didn’t want to, not really, not when he thought that his brain could not necessarily understand it. There were things that imagination could not quite conceive in the right way.
He understood this, at least: it was no wonder Hyunjin had asked Felix if sex hurt for him, when the sound of Jeongin overwhelmed with pleasure registered only as torture, as pain. And Felix didn’t see the need for them to stay here, where Hyunjin might be tortured anew by it.
But after those seconds, Hyunjin let out a breath, the sound rushing out of him long and hard, and he slumped, most of the tension going out of him. His hand came up to cover the one that Felix had pressed to his chest. “You promise?” he asked, voice shaky. “Felix, you mean it?”
“I mean it,” said Felix, as firm and sure as he’d ever been in his life. “I promise you. Hyunjin, if I thought that Minho-hyung was hurting him, I’d be the first one in there making him stop. But he’s not.” Voice gentler now, he added, “Besides, Minho-hyung would never hurt Jeongin. You know that better than I do, don’t you? You know Minho-hyung.”
Hyunjin’s bottom lip wobbled a little. “I— yeah,” he said, taking a deep breath that was clearly of great effort, judging by the way it shuddered through him. He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing himself to maintain that steady pattern. His hand around Felix’s tightened a little. “I do, I know he would never—” He swallowed hard. “I know. I know.” Those words were sure, even stuttery as they were. A fact of life, a truth of the universe, that had been lost under the fear.
Felix stepped a bit nearer, their toes brushing. “Do you want to go downstairs? I’ll stay with you,” he said, trying to let his love, his care, for Hyunjin seep into every word.
A beat, and then Hyunjin shook his head, his hand letting Felix’s go and dropping back down to his side. “No,” he said, his eyes finally opening again. They were a little more red-rimmed than before, but no tears lingered, if there had ever been any. “No. I can— I can stay. I’m hungry? I want to eat your pancakes.”.
Felix smiled at him, close-lipped and as gentle as he could make it. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s sit down again then, alright?”
They sat, back in their regular seats, and for a few moments there Felix wondered if he might have to serve Hyunjin, because once they were seated Hyunjin just sort of— stared, at the space in front of them. But then Hyunjin juddered into movement, like a robot that had been lagging, and slowly began to collect things — a butter knife from the pile in the centre of the table, then his fork from where he dropped it earlier. He sped up, steadily, until his movements were something closer to normal, if a little stiff. By the time he was smothering the pancakes in syrup and breaking them into bite sized pieces, he looked almost back to his usual self. Almost. Felix could see the way his eyes kept darting to the hallway every so often, the way his fingers around the fork felt just a little too purposeful, like Hyunjin was having to remember how to— function.
At least, blessedly, things had fallen— not silent, but quieter. Muffled noises were still drifting from the bedrooms, but they weren’t easily distinguishable as moans nor sobs nor words.
Once Hyunjin began to actually eat, it seemed like his hunger came back to him. The sugar was probably helping. He worked his way slowly and steadily through one of the pancakes before he broke the long silence by saying, “I just don’t understand it, Minho-hyung and Jeongin.”
“I imagine you’re not the only one who will be shocked,” Felix said. Hyunjin was cutting up another pancake and Felix stole one of the pieces and ate it; he’d eaten one of them earlier, without any toppings, just straight from the heat after he’d made it, and although they were cold, they certainly were better with the syrup. Although possibly not with as much as Hyunjin put on them.
“What did you mean?” Hyunjin asked. “When you said it was a shitshow last night?”
In the need to look after and reassure Hyunjin, Felix had almost forgotten last night, but at the reminder his annoyance came flooding back to him. “Urgh!” he said, putting his fork down, and he sounded so obviously irritated that Hyunjin raised an eyebrow at him, focused, for the first time in a few minutes, completely on Felix. “Chan-hyung was so stupid.”
This time both of Hyunjin’s eyebrows shot into his hairline. “Angel,” he said, some slight humour creeping into his voice. “It must have been bad if it has you sounding like that.”
“Well, while it may be a shock to you to know that Jeongin and Minho-hyung like each other,” Felix said, “it was not a shock to Chan-hyung, because he apparently found out a while ago and warned Minho-hyung off. He made Minho-hyung promise to not touch Jeongin.”
Hyunjin made a noise in his throat, something which still sounded just a little hysterical. He motioned with his hand to the hallway, which was still quiet. “Well, clearly,” he said, “that didn’t stick.” He popped another morsel of pancake into his mouth, chewed, and then around it, said, “Why did Chan-hyung do that anyway?”
“I think he was worried about Minho-hyung being too— much, for Jeongin,” Felix explained, watching the way Hyunjin’s chewing slowed. “And I get that, to some extent, because Minho-hyung is older and more experienced. But Jeongin’s an adult, and it was also just— an overstep, on Chan-hyung’s part. It wasn’t his place.”
Hyunjin, a little surprisingly, just said, “Hmm.” He ate another piece of pancake, cheek bulging out.
“Do you disagree?” Felix asked, and Hyunjin swallowed, making to answer, but the vague murmurs from the hallway suddenly grew in volume, louder and louder. A long, hitching cry — Jeongin’s voice. It was so loud it was as if there was no door between them all.
Hyunjin’s chewing had stopped, and he stared at Felix, wide-eyed, fork hovering in the air. Felix’s face felt hot, ears prickling with warmth, as the sound went on so long as to be almost comical, if he weren’t absolutely mortified. He should have insisted they get out of the house. They could’ve taken the pancakes down to the workroom.
Finally the sound tapered down, very suddenly, breaking into smaller sobs that then too fell abruptly silent, as the best orgasm of Jeongin’s life evidently came to an end. Felix was no prude, and he didn’t want to boss Jeongin around the way Chan did, but this was a bit much even for him. He might have to pull Jeongin aside and request for a wee bit of awareness of the others in the house to be shown. Rich, probably, coming from him, but well.
Into the stark, renewed quiet, Hyunjin said in a mock-whisper, “I think Minho-hyung killed him.”
Felix blinked and then absolutely lost it, letting out a bark of laughter he quickly stifled by smacking a hand over his mouth. Hyunjin let his mouth curve into the tiniest smile, weak but there. His face was still a little pale. Felix tried to get himself under control, the giggles bubbling up again every time he tried to get them to stop. “Ah, Hyunjin,” he gasped, letting his hand fall onto the table, near Hyunjin’s, so he could take it if he wanted. “This is all so stupid.”
Hyunjin didn’t take his hand, simply nudged Felix’s sleeve with his fingertips. “If you say so, angel,” he said. He put his fork down. There was maybe a quarter of a pancake left.
“Finished?” Felix asked, and Hyunjin nodded. So is Jeongin, his brain quipped, and had to fight down another hysterical laugh. Felix pulled the plate to himself, and quickly shoved the leftover pancake into his mouth, the syrup turning it to glue in his mouth. Then he stood, taking the plate to the sink. “I need to finish making all this batter, I got a little overzealous.” He went back to the stove, turning the burner on. When he glanced over his shoulder, Hyunjin hadn’t moved, and Felix asked him, “Are you feeling okay?”
“I want to wait for Jeongin to come out,” Hyunjin said, which wasn’t an answer. He’d been staring blankly at the wall, but then his eyes snapped to Felix’s face, wide and shining. “Do you mind if I stay here?”
“Of course not,” Felix said, feeling the way sadness pulled at every one of his features. Hyunjin didn’t even seem to notice it really, his nail tracing along the table, into the grooves of the wood. Felix didn’t know what to say to him that he hadn’t already said. He didn’t know how to reassure this small, unsure version of his friend.
So he simply ladled more batter onto the hot pan, the sizzle of it sparking through the air, almost white noise. It might be a while, before Jeongin came out, he wanted to warn Hyunjin — it was possible, even likely, Minho and Jeongin would doze back off. But he sensed that wouldn’t matter; Hyunjin was going to sit there until he saw for himself that Jeongin was whole. And it wasn’t like Felix had anything better to do than keep his friend company. He should, maybe, go seek Chan out, ascertain whether his stubborn boyfriend had spent the night sleeping in his office lest he get— contaminated from being in the apartment while Immoral Sex was happening.
Felix heaved a heavy sigh, flipping the pancakes over to renewed sizzling. He knew Chan was legitimately upset, maybe even in pain, if he really did believe Jeongin was being— but he wasn’t being taken advantage of. Chan having very real emotions in response to this didn’t make those emotions right.
What a mess this all was.
It was after he’d plated the new pancakes and ladled more batter out that he began to hear, faintly, the sound of moaning again. Felix gripped the handle of the spatula hard, his nostrils flaring as he breathed, forcefully even. He was learning way too many things about his teammates this morning, and at the top on the list of things he’d never wanted to know, was Minho’s apparently very short refractory period, what the fuck.
“I hate this,” he whispered under his breath, poking at the cooking pancakes to make sure they weren’t sticking to the pan. Hyunjin didn’t hear him, but he’d definitely begun to catch the new sounds once again emanating from the hallway. When Felix looked, Hyunjin had rotated halfway around in his chair, his head swivelled in that direction.
It was like he sensed Felix’s eyes on him. He turned back, brow furrowed, and said, “Again?” The confusion and incredulity was so thick in his voice that Felix smiled a little.
“Apparently,” Felix said, tone as dry as a parched field.
Hyunjin’s frown deepened, shading his eyes. He still hadn’t regained his colour back, but he seemed to be thinking now, more than anything. Whatever was playing on his mind, he didn’t voice.
Thankfully, as Felix continued cooking, the— sounds, never really rose in volume. In fact, they were remarkably quiet, compared to before. Small mercies, Felix thought. Or just normal human stamina waning.
It was to his great surprise then, when about fifteen minutes later and just after he had scraped out the last of the batter from the giant blue bowl he’d been using, he heard a door down the hallway open. Hyunjin, who’d been slouched a little like his spine was made of steadily melting chocolate, suddenly sat up ramrod straight. Felix, slowly so he didn’t make much noise, set the bowl in the sink, where it took up most of the space. He’d been sure Jeongin would conk out until at least 2pm, after such a morning.
But no, Jeongin was currently being— led? Marched? Out of the hallway by Minho. Jeongin, barefoot, wearing an oversized shirt and pyjama bottoms, wobbled unsteadily forward as Minho guided him, his hand clamped just above Jeongin’s elbow.
Minho was wearing the same thing he’d worn yesterday, black slacks and a collared button-down, untucked now and the first couple buttons undone. He was barefoot too. Something about that, more than anything, had Felix’s face flaming anew.
Jeongin did not seem to notice Hyunjin or Felix staring at him. He seemed— dazed, was the best description Felix could summon. Out of it. Minho’s eyes swept over them as the two of them came into the room, but then he evidently simply dismissed their presence, turning his full attention back on Jeongin. He walked Jeongin to the table and sat him down in his usual seat, patting his head as he came towards Felix. Jeongin said nothing, just sort of blinked slowly.
“Good morning,” Minho said softly to Felix, nudging him gently out of the way so he could grab a plate, upon which he quickly piled four pancakes.
“Uhm, hi,” Felix said, as Minho breezed away. He put the pancakes in front of Jeongin and then went to the fridge, pawing around in it.
Felix, slowly, went back to the table, took his own seat again. Hyunjin’s eyes were wide as saucers, his lips gone pale. Jeongin was still just drifting. He had the look of someone who’d been thoroughly — if perfunctorily — wiped down. His hair was an absolute mess, and it was still residually damp with sweat, stuck to his face and neck in places.
Minho came back over, and beside Jeongin’s pancakes he put down a small bowl with a sprig of grapes in it, and a full glass of milk. He grabbed the syrup and drizzled it over Jeongin’s pancakes, then picked Jeongin’s hand up and put a fork in it. Jeongin blinked at it like it was some strange, foreign object.
“Eat, mm?” Minho murmured, using a knuckle under Jeongin’s chin to tilt his face up. He pressed a kiss to Jeongin’s forehead. Hyunjin made a tiny squeak of a noise. “I’ll be right back.”
“Mm, ‘kay,” Jeongin whispered, his eyes fluttering shut and face tilting up just that bit more. Felix felt something tense and unsure him completely deflate at that, like a pin had been taken to it. Jeongin was alright. He was in the afterglow, that lovely fuzzy state in the wake of an intense session. Felix had been a little worried, for a moment there, that it was something more sinister.
Minho left, going back down the hallway, to the bathroom. Felix heard the fan start up when the light was flicked on. As soon as the sound of the door latching rang over them, Hyunjin was sitting forward, his elbows resting on the table. “Jeongin-ah,” he said, a little too loudly, a little too jarring, “are you okay?”
Jeongin, who’d begun to uncoordinatedly carve into his stack of pancakes, looked over at Hyunjin. His eyes still had that kind of glazed, unfocused sheen to them. “Huh? Yeah,” Jeongin said, voice not quite as quiet as before, but still— dreamy, almost. Drunk. “I’m great. Why?”
Hyunjin made a noise, aborted in his throat. “Why?” he echoed, incredulous, “Because it sounded like you were being—” He cut himself off, that tremble returning to his bottom lip.
“Murdered,” Felix finished for him, forcing his face into placid lines. Jeongin’s heavy-lidded eyes swivelled to him, staring. “These walls are thin. You were basically screaming.”
“Oh,” Jeongin said, blinking, and then, “oh!” His face, already residually flushed, went red. “Ah, I’m sorry.”
The bathroom door opened, and then Minho came back into the kitchen. He was brushing his teeth, froth at the corners of his mouth. He came to stand next to Jeongin, who leaned into his side a little. Minho looked at the pancakes, which had been butchered a bit but not yet eaten, and then at Felix and Hyunjin. “Are you two minding your business?” Minho asked around the toothbrush. Hyunjin positively scowled, opening his mouth to respond, but before he could, Minho said, “No, of course you’re not. Let him eat in peace, he’s out of it.” Then he swanned out of the room again.
Jeongin, still red, immediately speared several layers of cut pancake up and shoved them into his mouth. “Sorry,” he said around his mouthful, avoiding their eyes. “About— the noise.” He hunched further over his plate, inhaling more food at a pace just shy of his usual voraciousness. His face, impossibly, turned even redder, and then he was mumbling out, “He’s really good at it.”
“Yeah,” Felix said on a huff that was halfway to a laugh, as Hyunjin sort of— slumped, hitting the backrest of his chair hard. Like he’d had that balloon of tension in him as well, and his was only just now popping. “I’d deduced that.”
Jeongin swallowed thickly, his pancakes already most of the way gone. He gulped down about half the glass of milk and then cleared his throat. “Where’s Chan-hyung?” he asked.
Felix lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Down in his office, I think,” Felix said. He glanced sideways at Hyunjin, found his colour looked slightly better, though there was still a cute, thoughtful frown on his brow.
Jeongin nodded, in a way that made it look like his head was just a bit too heavy, and he was having trouble holding it up. “I’m sorry if the two of you fought because of me,” he said tiredly, getting to work decimating the grapes now.
“Jeongin-ah,” Felix said, serious in a way that made Jeongin’s eyes snap to his, “that’s not your fault. You have every right to be upset. I love Chan-hyung, but I’m on your side, okay? We’ll get through to him.”
Jeongin smiled at him, closed-lipped but sweet all the same, his dimples appearing in his cheeks. “Thank you, hyung.”
Minho, silent as a cat, emerged out of the darkness of the hallway. His shirt was tucked into his slacks now, and he was wearing socks. Damp fingers had clearly been run through his hair in an attempt to tame it a little. This time, when Jeongin saw him he perked up a bit like usual, and said, “Hyung! There’s so many pancakes left.”
In the most shocking turn of events so far, Minho smiled down at Jeongin, fondness in every line of his expression and body. Oh, Felix thought. Well.
“I can see that, baby boy,” Minho said, looking at the pancakes on the table, and then the multiple plates piled high on the counters. His smile turned more into a bemused quirk of the mouth as his gaze passed over Felix.
“I stress cook,” Felix said, because he simply was not about to bring Minho up to task on the fact that he hadn’t had the forethought to put his hand over Jeongin’s mouth while he was fucking him. “You’re welcome to have some.”
“You should eat, hyung,” Jeongin said, grabbing the edge of Minho’s sleeve and tugging lightly.
Minho leaned down and— kissed Jeongin, full on the mouth. Hyunjin sucked in a sharp breath, his knee knocking into Felix’s thigh as he twitched. “I have to shower and do some work downstairs,” Minho said gently, and Jeongin pouted at him as he pulled away. Minho grabbed one of the cold pancakes from the plate on the table, bare of syrup, and took a bite of it. “I’ll come up for lunch, okay? You should go back to bed.”
Jeongin watched him leave the apartment with a soft sort of longing in his eyes and a pleased smile on his mouth. Hyunjin’s hand atop the table curled into a fist.
“Will you sleep a little more, Jeongin-ah?” Felix asked, pitching his voice just so. Trying so hard to be casual.
Jeongin shook his head, lifting his plate to shovel the remainder of his pancakes into his mouth, like some kind of snake. “I need to shower,” he said, cheeks bulging. He stood, wobbled a little, winced. “Thanks for the breakfast, hyung!”
He gave a jaunty little wave, and Felix tried not to notice the funny way he was walking as he left. Next to him, Hyunjin’s hand was still closed into a fist.
“Hey,” Felix said, tapping Hyunjin’s knuckle lightly. “You alright?”
Hyunjin pulled his hand away, down onto his lap. “No, but that’s nothing new,” he said, a little terse in a way that he normally wasn’t, with Felix. When he saw Felix tilt his head to the side, the hard line of his mouth softened a bit. “It’s nothing anyone else can help me with,” he said simply.
Felix wasn’t sure what to say, and while he sat there trying to figure it out, Hyunjin stood too. “You can stay, we don’t have to talk about it,” Felix said quickly.
But Hyunjin was already leaving. “I want to paint,” he said quietly. “Thank you for the food, angel.”
Felix watched him disappear into his room, feeling as he did so that he was making a mistake, like he should insist on being with Hyunjin. But that would be overstepping, in a way that even Felix wouldn’t think to do, and so he just let Hyunjin shut the bedroom door with a click.
The kitchen was incredibly quiet in the aftermath of everything that had taken place over the past hour. Felix pressed his lips together, surveying the mess of the kitchen he had made. Bowls with residual ingredients, the bigger bowl still with a layer of batter on it, the plates of pancakes that he’d have to put into tupperware containers for the fridge.
I stress cook, he’d told Minho, and now, he reflected very tiredly, he supposed he would have to stress clean.
——
It was cold on the roof, probably too cold to be sitting up here, even in his padded coat and with the blanket over his lap and the heat packs in his pockets that he kept sticking his hands into when they grew almost too stiff to hold his pencil. He wished he could have brought his electric blanket out but there was nowhere to plug it in up here, so he was just having to deal with the cold seat, the cold air, the biting wind that kept blowing through.
He didn’t like the cold, didn’t like to be cold. Sometimes he had sat in that empty room, naked with only a thin blanket to cover him, and watched with complete detachment as his hands grew blue and stiff, the feeling in his toes long since gone. There had been heating in those buildings, but they’d only used it on certain occasions, like when the temperature dipped far too low. Or when clients visited.
Not that summer was any better. Not with the way he tended to sweat.
He’d needed to be outside, though, with the blue open expanse of the sky all around him. It had not been enough to look at it through his window, not nearly enough, and so he had carried everything up. It hadn’t exactly been an easy task, and to begin with he’d planned on bringing his easel up there, work on his painting of the city skyline but he hadn’t been able to juggle it, and there was nowhere to set it up, besides, so he’d just brought his sketchbook. And now there was nothing trapping him. No walls between him and the world.
He was not drawing anything in particular. He was looking out at the world, over the roofs of the buildings around them, most of them the same size or smaller, and letting his hand move on autopilot. When he did this in his room, usually what came out were sketches of his flowers, memories of people he saw on the street, once or twice sketches of Felix as he read on Hyunjin’s bed. Those had always come out nice.
This was his way of letting his brain go quiet and still without it being bad, necessarily. There was a bad version of this, the way he felt when he was hurting, or sick, and he was surprised that he hadn’t gone there, exactly, after what had happened this morning. It had been there, he had felt it, and maybe it was still there, lurking in the background. It was ignorable, though, in the way most things were.
Some of the textbooks he’d read on trauma recovery had warned him to not chase the rabbit. And so he didn’t. He drew instead.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise, when, after an hour or so, he roused himself from his trance and looked down at the page and saw that he had been sketching Jisung. It was recognisably Jisung, too: a half-finished drawing of Jisung’s face when he laughed; a quick little thing of how his hands looked around a gun; a few sketches of his shoulders, like his brain had been trying to get the exact curve of his arms right. Those arms felt, sometimes, like the bane of Hyunjin’s entire existence.
Hyunjin looked down at the sketchbook, resisting the urge to slam it shut, to pretend he hadn’t done it. He made himself look instead, the truth of his heart exposed in black and white, in rough lines and shitty shading. Nobody ever looked at his sketchbooks without permission but he’d have to tear this page out, maybe, in case Felix asked to look at his drawings, like he sometimes did.
Or maybe Hyunjin could leave it in. Felix already knew, after all.
He sighed and put his pencil down on the green floor next to him, the sketchbook still open in his lap. It really was no wonder that he’d been drawing Jisung all this time. He had spent the morning listening to Jeongin have sex and then he had come up here and put pencil to paper and out had come Jisung. Embarrassing. Terrifying.
He could still hear, echoing in the dark back of his mind, Jeongin’s moaning, crying voice, the way he had shrieked that one time. He’d heard Felix and Chan having sex, almost everyone had at this point, but it had never made him feel the way it had made him feel listening to Jeongin. Felix, at least, had never sounded like Jeongin, had never sounded like he was being hurt. Because Jeongin had sounded like he was being hurt, and although first Felix, and then Jeongin himself, had reassured Hyunjin otherwise, it was near impossible to get rid of the idea in his head.
It’s pleasure, Felix had said, it feels good. And Jeongin had certainly looked like he’d had a good time, if a little shell-shocked about the whole thing. A visual reference to the term fucked stupid. Another piece of evidence in a slowly growing case file in Hyunjin’s mind that said sex can feel good??? doubt.
He couldn’t imagine it, even now he could not imagine it. To make it worse, there was a growing sense of terror, dampened enough under the lull that drawing brought him, that whatever it was Minho and Jeongin had been doing was something Jisung would expect of Hyunjin too. Not just Hyunjin on his bed, putting up with it, enduring through it in order to know how it felt to have Jisung’s hands on his bare skin. But something— more. Something that probably lived in Hyunjin’s memories, the ones he didn’t look at.
Stop, he thought, maybe a little desperately, that’s the fucking rabbit. It was hard to breathe for a long few seconds and once he managed to get it under control, managed to clear that panic away from himself, there was the thought of, I cannot believe Jeongin had sex.
It maybe wasn’t a particularly nice thought. Hyunjin had not quite made peace with his own inner voice being so nasty a lot of the time, and he wasn’t really proud of it here. But he was surprised, or— no, surprise was not it. It was disappointment, and a bone-deep, soul-sucking kind of envy.
He had known Jeongin since Jeongin was fourteen, young and skinny with those silver braces glinting in his mouth. Hyunjin hadn’t been able to see those braces the first time they met, not in the darkness of the night, not with the grey curtain of rain that had been falling around them. A kid, although even then Jeongin hadn’t especially liked being called that, but Hyunjin had been just a kid back then too. Physically older than Jeongin, sure, but not so much mentally, and while Hyunjin made a fuss about being the hyung now, taking advantage of the couple years between them, there’d been very little difference between them for the longest time.
They’d grown up together. Gone through the bulk of their teenage years together, side-by-side, Hyunjin holding Jeongin’s hand while Jeongin whined about him being clingy and pretended like he didn’t need it just as much as Hyunjin. But it felt like, at some point, Jeongin had let go and it turned out he really didn’t need Hyunjin like that anymore.
Hyunjin had blinked and Jeongin had grown up and left him behind.
He closed his eyes, pretending that the sting in them came purely from the wind suddenly gusting in his face. He’d been aware of it, all this time, but it was the first time he’d really thought that Jeongin was— surpassing him in some way. Overtaking him, running off over the horizon while Hyunjin was still stuck, sunken into the mud that had closed around his feet, keeping him rooted. He was working so hard on wriggling himself free but he hadn’t managed it yet and he had no idea when he would.
The fact that Jeongin had done it with Minho was something he really didn’t feel like he could look at head-on yet. Minho’s soft spot for Jeongin had been screamingly obvious over the past few years, but Hyunjin could still remember the way Minho had spoken to the two of them, when he’d first joined the team. Jeongin had never taken it to heart but Hyunjin hadn’t been able to help it. It had been the first time someone had spoken to him meanly since he’d turned up on Chan’s doorstep, and it had made him wary, set him on edge.
There had been none of that in the kitchen. Minho had been as intense as ever but his hands had been gentle, his care in bringing Jeongin food so obvious, the soft way he had spoken to Jeongin almost too intimate. And whenever Hyunjin thought about it, that ease and seeming affection between them, he felt like the jealousy was going to turn him inside out.
There was the sound of approaching footsteps and he looked to the side and saw Changbin coming up, already looking around as if to find where Hyunjin was. When their eyes met, Changbin smiled, the special kind he so often bestowed on Hyunjin, so soft with love that it sometimes made Hyunjin want to hide. “There you are,” he said.
“Here I am,” Hyunjin said. His voice rasped with disuse.
Changbin came over to Hyunjin’s spot. He was wrapped up too, thick padded coat, his boots on his feet. “Can I sit with you?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Hyunjin, which was when he realised that the sketchbook was still open in his lap. He slammed it shut, his heart racing so hard in his chest that it was almost painful. He hadn’t noticed Changbin looking at it, and truthfully Changbin wouldn’t have without permission, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have seen some of it all the same.
But if Changbin had seen any of the Jisung pictures, he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything about Hyunjin so obviously hiding something. He just settled on the floor next to Hyunjin and held out a hand. “It’s cold as balls up here,” he said.
That made Hyunjin laugh. Changbin always could make him laugh, even when Hyunjin didn’t necessarily want to. “Yeah,” he agreed, taking Changbin’s hand, warm from being inside. “It really is.”
They sat in silence for a long time. Changbin wasn’t often silent, so whenever he was, Hyunjin tended to not interrupt. This was one of those things that made him sound like a brat but it wasn’t, not really; it was just that when Changbin was silent like this, he was usually thinking about something, and Hyunjin didn’t like to disturb that.
After a few minutes, Changbin said, “Seungmin told me you came up here.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. Hyunjin knew what he was saying, what he was asking without asking in words. “I needed the space,” he said softly. “The— sky. That’s all.”
Changbin nodded. “You used to go on the roof in our old place too,” he said, very casually, too casually. “Hyung and I used to stop you, but we never actually asked why you did it. I guess we were worried—”
He stopped, swallowing a little bit. Hyunjin squeezed his hand, but didn’t turn to look at him. He didn’t think he could look at Changbin properly right now, not when sometimes it felt like the love and support that he, and Chan, and even Jeongin, had given him over the years was a debt he could never hope to repay. “It was never that,” he said. “Hyung, I’ve never wanted that, not since I’ve been with you.”
Changbin swallowed again, his throat clicking. Sometimes Hyunjin wanted to say to him, you all did so much to give me a life again, how could I repay that by throwing myself off the roof? but it was probably an awful thing to say to Changbin, too flippant, too— dismissive of his very real fears.
There was silence again. This time, Hyunjin was the one to break it, not sure what kind of reaction he would get. “Minho-hyung and Jeongin slept together last night,” he said.
Changbin sighed and said, “Yeah, I know. Seungmin told me that, too.”
There was something there, in his words, that made the back of Hyunjin’s brain perk up in confusion. Seungmin wasn’t the gossiping type, Hyunjin had tried before in the past to get information out of him and Seungmin had told him to fuck off each and every time. But that phrase, Seungmin told me, was dropping out of Changbin’s mouth more and more often recently, and Hyunjin hadn’t realised they were close at all.
He didn’t have the brain power to focus on that, though. “You don’t sound surprised,” he murmured, because it was true. There wasn’t even a lingering sense of confusion in Changbin’s voice. Hyunjin still felt like he was reeling and he’d learned about it last night, even.
Changbin didn’t say anything for a few moments, long enough that Hyunjin actually turned to look at him. Changbin was looking back, and quirked his mouth into something that was not quite a smile when their eyes met. “I knew they liked each other already,” he said.
That— Hyunjin would need a number of business days to process all of this. It was too much to take in, the idea that this budding relationship had been happening under his nose and he hadn’t seen it. How could he have seen it, when Jeongin was Jeongin and the idea of Minho liking anyone was so far-fetched that even now, even after the evidence Hyunjin had been presented with, Hyunjin still couldn’t wrap his head around it?
Jeongin liked Minho. Jeongin liked Minho enough to willingly go to bed with him, and had done so, and had been given something Hyunjin still couldn’t let himself have. Good for him, Hyunjin thought. I hate everything.
There was quiet again. Hyunjin couldn’t think of words to say that weren’t going to choke him as he said them. Or maybe it was that he couldn’t think of words to say that weren’t nasty and bitter, like he so often was. Changbin wouldn’t scold him for them, either, Changbin never scolded Hyunjin even when he was at his most awful. That made it worse, sometimes. The permission given to be a horrible human being, and Hyunjin felt like he took advantage of it much too often.
Changbin eventually squeezed his hand, shivering. “It’s too cold up here, Hyunjin-ah,” he said. “Come downstairs, huh? I’ll make us some hot chocolate.”
The tears stung Hyunjin’s eyes again. He couldn’t even pretend it was the wind. “Okay, hyung,” he said. “That’ll be nice, I think.”
——
When Chan finally dragged himself up to the apartment, still wearing the same clothes from the previous night, he found Hyunjin at the kitchen sink, washing a pair of mugs. It was not completely unheard of for Hyunjin to do the dishes, but it happened seldom enough that Chan blinked a little at his back.
The air smelled of chocolate, faint but sweet all the same. Hyunjin turned the water off, putting the mugs in the drying rack. When he turned around and saw Chan lingering by the table, he said, “Wow, hyung, you look like ass.”
Chan felt like ass. His back ached from sleeping on the couch in his office, if it could have been called sleeping at all. He was accustomed to nights sparse on rest but last night had been especially bad. His eyes were dry in a way that made his eyelids feel sandpapery, and his head throbbed because he’d been clenching his jaw all night. “Thanks,” he said, eyeing the coffee machine. Caffeine could fix many ills but he wasn’t sure it could fix this. His eyes slid back to Hyunjin, taking in the way he was just a little too pale, how the fingers of his right hand, resting on the countertop, were tapping lightly. That and the cocoa painted a clear picture. “You don’t look so great yourself.”
“Better than you,” Hyunjin said, without any real venom, pushing himself off from the way he’d been slouching against the counter.
“You alright?” Chan asked, because he was the leader, and even if he felt stretched so thin as to snap, he had to do this. For Hyunjin especially, he had to always be there.
Hyunjin came nearer, stopped by the table and gripped the back of Jeongin’s usual chair with both his hands, like he needed steadying. “Yeah,” he said, blowing out a sigh that made his cheeks puff out. “I think I just need— I don’t know what I need.” His voice wavered a little.
“Who were you drinking with?” Chan asked gently, because there’d been two mugs. Perhaps Jeongin; Chan could hear the shower running, but maybe he had only just gotten in, and left Hyunjin to clean up.
“Changbin-hyung,” Hyunjin replied, smiling thinly. That made sense too. “He could tell I was a bit off balance.”
Chan stepped a little closer to him, dropping his voice as he said, “Do you want to talk about it?” He needed food, needed— sugar, calories. But it could wait, if Hyunjin wanted to go down to his office.
Hyunjin shook his head, but before the motion was even done he said, “This morning, Minho-hyung and Jeongin— I could hear them. It set me off. The sound of it.”
Chan felt like an ice cube had been dropped into the pit of his stomach. That had been part of why Chan had delayed so much coming back up to the apartment. Bad enough to know it was happening, but he wasn't sure he could stomach having to sit here and listen. “I'm sorry,” he said honestly, because even if the sex had been, supposedly, consensual, Chan wasn’t sure that would make it any easier for Hyunjin to listen to. He’d tried through the weeks to keep Felix relatively quiet, to only moderate success. But Hyunjin hadn’t said anything about it, nor seemed too perturbed beyond the issue of getting his angel stolen away. He seemed upset, now. “If you told them to quiet down I’m sure—”
“It wasn't really about the volume of it,” Hyunjin interrupted, in that sharp, anxious way he had sometimes, like having to explain was in itself causing him distress. “It was more about the— type of sound? I don't know, when it was Felix, it never sounded like something I was familiar with.”
Like something he was familiar with. The thought was extremely unpalatable. “But this morning it did?” Chan said.
Hyunjin was scratching lightly at the wood of Jeongin's chair where he gripped it, unpleasant little scritch scritch scritch noises. “I don't know what sex is supposed to sound like,” he said, hollow and flat, staring out over the table to the empty living room. “Felix said it was fine. It's just— I used to have nightmares, sometimes.” His gaze flicked to Chan, eyes wide and dark and familiar, never changing, those eyes of his. “Where I was back in that place, but Jeongin was with me? Like he'd been taken too. And I couldn't— help him.”
Chan’s heart ached for him. He raised his hand, wanting to cover Hyunjin’s, comfort him, but he knew better. He put it on the back of Seungmin’s chair instead, near enough that Hyunjin could reach out, if he wanted. “Jeongin is safe,” Chan told him, even though he wasn’t sure that was the case any more. “You're safe.”
“I know,” Hyunjin said, his breathing very visible, shoulders going up and down. “I'm trying to divert my thoughts.” He smiled a cruel, knowing kind of smile. “Don't chase the rabbit, right?”
It was a sharp, painful reminder of all the work Hyunjin had put in through the years. The worst kind of shared knowledge between them. How Hyunjin had, effectively, re-learned to read by making his way through the books Chan would bring home, trying to help in some way, any way. Chan had read the books too, because he’d been so far out of his depth, and he hadn’t wanted to do, or say, the wrong thing. When Hyunjin had eventually stopped recounting what had happened to him in that terrible place, they’d begun talking about the books, about what trauma even was, about recovery. And then as time went on, Hyunjin had begun to buy the books himself, had come to Chan less and less.
Don’t chase the rabbit had seemingly helped, Hyunjin steadily refusing, more and more, to simply not think about it all. Chan wasn’t sure if it had been the best tactic, in the end. But he wasn’t Hyunjin, so he couldn’t say.
“Yeah,” Chan said, husky with the emotion of it. “If that’s what works, Hyunjin-ah. But you know you can always talk to me if you need, right? You don’t have to force yourself to hide from it.”
“Yeah, hyung, I know,” Hyunjin said, and it didn’t sound empty, like it had sometimes in the past. It sounded like he did know, like he believed it. “There’s not much to say, though. It just jostled something a little loose in me, I think, to hear him crying like that.”
Chan blinked, his eyebrows twitching into a frown. “Crying,” he repeated.
“Yeah,” Hyunjin said, shoulders rounding a little. He’d sensed Chan’s sudden, heightened scrutiny, and was watching him closely in turn now. “Crying and begging. It didn't sound the same, like when Felix does it. But he said it was alright. And Jeongin came out not long after, and he seemed— okay? I think.” He pulled his bottom lip between his teeth, biting into the plushness of it. He chewed it for a moment, eyes unwavering, before he let it go and said, “I heard you warned Minho-hyung off.”
It was impossible to help the way his lips pursed. Chan did not want to explain himself, not to Hyunjin, who Chan did not want to scare off talking about the ways in which even consensual sex could be a minefield.
“He isn’t me,” Hyunjin said, imploring more than he was argumentative. “Jeongin. He’s not me, you don’t need to protect him, the same way you think you do me.”
“Yeah, I do,” Chan said, flat and firm, a very solid shut down. He did not want to fight with Hyunjin, would not do so. He wasn’t sure he ever really had, could scarcely conceive of being angry at him at all. “Jeongin is still young, he’s still— naive. I don’t want him to cry during sex.”
Something came over Hyunjin’s face, his eyes widening just a bit, the pinkness leaving his cheeks. “Should I have stopped it?” he asked, the words falling out too quickly. “I was going to but Felix—”
“No, no,” Chan cut him off, not wanting Hyunjin to worry about that particular horror. He did not deserve that at all, to have guilt added to an already potent mix of hell. Hyunjin’s jaw snapped shut, but he didn’t look convinced. Chan worked to smile, just a curve of his mouth, forcing his body language to loosen. “Don’t worry about it, Hyunjin,” he said, perfectly even. “I’m going to talk to Jeongin about everything, and Minho too, alright? Don’t worry.”
Hyunjin nodded, slowly at first, but then a little faster, like he was physically shaking all his thoughts off. “Okay,” he whispered, stepping away from the table, his hands sliding off Jeongin’s chair. “I— I’m going to lay down.”
“Alright,” Chan said as Hyunjin passed him, not looking at Chan at all, focused in that way he got. An escape, an out. The desperate need to be alone.
Chan waited until he heard Hyunjin’s door open and then shut again before he scrubbed his hands over his eyes, and then through his hair. The shower had stopped, and now came the sound of the hair dryer, muffled through the bathroom door. Jeongin would come out here soon, and Chan didn’t know what he was going to say, or how.
And if he was at a loss for what to say to Jeongin, he really just had no clue how to handle Minho, what to say to him. He felt a little more capable of articulating some of the thoughts in his head, more so now than the previous night, when the shock of discovery had filled his head with nothing more than anger and the sharp pain of betrayal, from someone he’d liked to have considered a friend. Minho had held himself apart from all of them, but it had been a long time since Chan had viewed him as a simple employee. He’d have liked to think that Minho cared for him, cared for the team itself, that he thought of them as— if not family the way Chan tended to, then at least as friends.
He wasn’t so sure about that now. Beyond the anger and hurt still lingering, there was a decidedly thick confusion settling over Chan about the whole matter. Minho had had a hell of a reputation when he’d come to them, and Chan had always tried to see beyond that, to believe in Minho’s humanity. It hadn’t always been easy, but ultimately he’d come to see Minho as a hardworking, intelligent man who had a deep seated sort of paranoia that Chan put down to his time in prison. Volatile sometimes, maybe, but only when truly pushed. Not a rabid dog as Chan had been told; Minho was way too clever to be truly feral.
Had the way Chan ultimately allowed Felix to stay in spite of his origins finally wedged Minho just that bit too far? No matter how much Minho argued with Chan about an issue, he ultimately always deferred to Chan’s decision. Chan had wondered before, what it would look like when Minho finally simply refused to accept something Chan had decreed. He’d have thought it would end with Minho disobeying the order, or at worst, leaving for a time. But maybe the entire ordeal with Felix had soured Minho on Chan, on the team, so that he simply no longer cared about shitting where he ate. If he’d decided then that his time here was coming to a close anyway because he was unhappy with how things were being run, that might explain his sudden utter apathy at disobeying Chan’s wishes in such an intimate way.
Because that was the thing really throwing Chan off: the apathy. The way Minho had not risen to Chan’s anger, but instead had met it with an unbothered air that was in some ways more chilling. No apology given, because, apparently, in Minho’s eyes he felt nothing to be sorry for.
Had this been the man living with them all this time? Had Chan’s own naivete, his own want to see the good in people, blinded him to what Minho actually was? The thought was surprisingly painful. He cared for Minho, and he’d shown Minho exactly how much doing this would cut him. And Minho had done it anyway, without a hint of remorse.
It was making Chan reexamine all he’d thought he’d known about him, every loop of his thoughts more unpleasant than the last. If Minho had been able to cast aside Chan’s wishes so easily, what did that mean for Jeongin? Would Minho’s apathy turn on him too, once he’d used Jeongin as he’d desired, and suddenly his interest in him dissipated? How long would that last — what kind of man was Minho really. The kind who enjoyed taking what they shouldn’t, the thrill of it. It was a feeling that would quickly fade, once Jeongin had been fucked a few times and the shine of new and untouched wore off.
And then where would that leave Jeongin, who seemed to think Minho wanted him, and not just his body.
From down the hall, the blow dryer had shut off, and now there was the sound of a handle being turned, a door opening. Chan needed— food, he felt nauseated from the lack of sleep, wasn’t ready at all to handle any kind of conversation with his little brother. But that was just too bad, because Jeongin was shuffling into the room, wearing an outfit Chan had often seen on him — socks, sweatpants, and a sweatshirt that had once belonged to Changbin before Jeongin had pilfered it. It was way too big on his narrower frame, the shoulders falling over his upper arms causing the sleeves’ hems to swallow his hands, and the neckline was so large it drooped down almost to the top of Jeongin’s sternum, his collarbones visible. The effect had Jeongin looking far smaller than he actually was.
When he caught sight of Chan, still dithering beside the kitchen table, he did not stop, but he slowed, just for a beat, his eyes narrowing before he put his nose in the air and redirected his gaze back to the kitchen.
“Good morning,” Chan said, and Jeongin ignored him, pawing through a cabinet for a clean glass. They were running low; the rest were probably already sitting on Jeongin’s desk. Chan drifted into the kitchen proper, coming to stand beside the coffee machine. He put a hand on the counter next to it, implying intention, while watching Jeongin. He studied the stubborn set of Jeongin’s mouth a moment in profile before he said, “I’d like to talk about last night.”
Jeongin set the glass down on the counter with a solid noise. “Unless you’re going to apologise, I don’t really want to hear it,” he said, not once glancing at Chan as he turned and went to the drinks fridge.
“Jeongin-ah,” Chan said, and then snapped his mouth shut, unsure what should come after. He could not, in good conscience, apologise for meddling, nor could he recant his stance on the entire matter.
While he was still trying to figure out the words that would open up a line of conversation while also not being an untruth, Jeongin leaned down to reach into the bottom shelf of the fridge. The neckline on his sweatshirt slipped down, baring the slope of his shoulder. He twitched it back into place quickly, straightening with the bottle of apple juice in his other hand, but it had not been fast enough. Chan had seen, dark and distinct on Jeongin’s shoulder, two mottled crescent shapes.
Jeongin’s gaze flickered over Chan and his mouth grew pinched. But he said nothing, simply closed the fridge door and went back to his glass, waiting on the counter, while Chan gaped. “Was that a bite mark?” he asked, unable to keep the horror out of his voice.
Still no response from Jeongin. He was unscrewing the cap from the apple juice when Chan — not thinking better of it, not thinking at all — strode forward quickly and grabbed Jeongin’s upper arm in one hand, and with the other he hooked his fingers into the neckline of Jeongin’s shirt and yanked.
It was, unmistakably, a bite mark, deep and ugly, painful looking.
"What the fuck, hyung," Jeongin cried angrily, wrenching himself away and pulling his collar to rights once more.
Chan stared at him, feeling the wideness of his own eyes. "He bit you?"
Jeongin had that same look of anger that Chan had seen last night, something burning and awful on Jeongin’s features. What is he turning you into, what is he doing to you, Chan thought, icy dread and despair spreading from the pit of his stomach.
“You are so, so over the line,” Jeongin said lowly, the words trembling like Jeongin had had to fight not to scream them.
Chan felt something in him crack, fissure a little. “How?” he cried. “How am I over the line? Because I don’t want to stand aside and watch you get hurt?” He was worried, he was petrified; he loved Jeongin so much that the emotion had become a part of him, like his bones and his skin. It was not new, not new at all. How could it suddenly be unacceptable, when it had always been there. “I didn’t get us out of that hell of a group home just to watch you walk into a relationship with someone who’s going to leave bruises on you.”
Jeongin slammed his hand on the countertop, making his glass and the bottle rattle. “I’m not fucking nine years old anymore!” he shouted. Chan recoiled a little, more in surprise than anything. Jeongin didn’t usually have outbursts with real anger behind them. He, at worst, would get whiny when annoyed too much. “You’re not protecting me right now, you’re treating me like a child, and it’s so fucking demeaning.”
“You’re not a child,” Chan said, because that much was true. The Jeongin in front of him now was a young man, no longer the gap-toothed little boy with a perpetual smudge of some sort on his face. “But you’re young, and you’ve been sheltered, and I don’t think you have a proper grasp on how a real relationship is supposed to work.” Jeongin scoffed, throwing his hands up, and Chan pressed on, “You’re naive, Jeongin. And that makes you easy prey, because someone who has no basis for comparison will have trouble gauging what is and isn’t alright!”
“I’m not prey,” Jeongin spat. “I kissed him last night, I initiated— everything, last night.”
“Jeongin, even if that’s true—” Chan stuttered when Jeongin inhaled sharply, but then continued on resolutely, “Even if that is true, Minho made me a promise. He and I had already discussed why he couldn’t pursue you. He agreed the two of you weren’t compatible. The gap between you and him is bigger than you can understand.”
“It's the same age gap as between you and Felix-hyung,” Jeongin said in an undertone, that same sort of iciness in his voice from the previous night.
“I’m not just talking about him being older,” said Chan, because it went so, so much deeper than that. “You think you know him, you think you understand him, but you don’t. You can’t. Because the shit prison does to a person can’t be explained, it can’t be conveyed, and it can’t be properly imagined. It’s like war. It’s like— the first time you kill out of choice, and not because you have to. And you will never understand that, I made sure of it.”
He’d done a lot of awful things, to make sure of it. Trying desperately to hold onto some kind of moral code in a world that had no room for such things. The death of a part of himself, when he realised he could hold on to very little of that and survive. And he’d had to, he’d had to do more than that, he’d had Jeongin to provide for. That small, undersized child who’d needed him. So Chan had gotten his hands dirty, determined that Jeongin, at least, would live, even if Chan only ever managed to survive.
Chan felt out of breath, his chest heaving a little. He closed his mouth, grit his teeth, feeling the way the muscles in his jaw flexed.
Jeongin stared at him for a long moment. Some of the anger seemed to have left his frame. But he still opened his mouth and very seriously said, “I want him anyway.”
Chan swayed back a little, feeling the way confusion laid thickly on his face, knowing Jeongin could see the hurt in his eyes. “Why are you doing this,” he asked, soft now. “I don’t understand. You’ve never— I don’t understand.”
And he didn’t, was the real crux of it. Minho’s motives were baffling enough, but Jeongin’s? He’d never acted like this before; it felt like some kind of teenage rebellion, but Jeongin was on the cusp of being way too old for that. Chan could scarcely explain it. Jeongin knew, surely, that he was allowed to find— someone else. That he didn’t have to pick from the residents of the house if he wanted sex. Chan did not understand why he was so absolutely set on Minho to the point of outright defiance.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, still in that serious way. “I just don’t see how who I’m fucking is any of your business.”
That— hurt. How could it not be Chan’s business? How could he not care? “You’re my little brother— I raised you,” Chan said, swallowing hard. “Of course it’s my business. I fucking love you. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“He isn’t going to hurt me,” Jeongin said, immediate and firm. A promise he could not make.
“He already is,” Chan said, voice rising in volume as he gestured to Jeongin’s now-covered bruise. “Hyunjin said he heard you crying. Sex isn’t supposed to be like that. I've never bitten Felix so hard that he bruised, Jeongin.”
Jeongin shook his head slightly, staring off at the wall, his mouth pinched and nostrils flared. He had a hand resting on the counter beside his still-empty glass, his thoughts clearly swirling. Chan began to hope maybe he’d gotten through to him when Jeongin apparently came to some kind of conclusion. He looked at Chan again and said, “Minho-hyung hit me too. Slapped me straight across the face.”
Whatever Chan had been expecting to hear— that had not been it. He felt his face go sickly pale, the sudden wash of cold nauseating. “See,” he said, a little hoarse, “that’s exactly what I—”
“I asked him to do it,” Jeongin cut in, still maintaining that eye contact, head held high. “He didn’t pressure me, he didn’t even suggest it. The bite too. He was being careful, and I asked him to go harder.”
Chan stared at him, his thoughts a mess of white noise.
Jeongin did not flinch, he did not blush. He tilted his head, just a bit, as he watched Chan flounder. His face was a mask of calm. “You always said you were proud of me,” he continued, eyes unwavering. “Do you not think I could say no if I wanted? That I can’t enforce my own boundaries? What kind of person, exactly, did you think you’d raised me to be? Some meek little thing, too stupid to tell if I’m being abused?”
“No—” Chan said, half a gasp, unable to stop imagining Minho backhanding his little brother. Chan could still remember Jeongin as a child, cowering from him when he feared he would be punished. He did not like pain. “Jeongin, of course not— It’s not just about you—”
Jeongin exhaled, the sound almost like a laugh, but he wasn't smiling at all. “You know, you treating me like a child really pisses me off, but of all the things, your determination to see Minho as some kind of wild animal honestly upsets me more. He doesn’t deserve the ugly way you’ve painted him in your mind.”
“Jeongin—” Chan said, searching, desperately, for words when he could barely think at all. There was a tremble in his fingertips as he once again gestured to Jeongin’s shoulder. “I couldn’t do that, to Felix. Even if he asked. The thought kind of makes my stomach turn.” And it did, so did the thought of— hitting Felix. He’d almost hurt Felix once and the thought of even stepping on his toes now filled Chan with guilt. And to do it in bed, when Felix was at his most vulnerable? No, Chan could not do that. He could not find pleasure in that. “Whether you like it or not, Minho’s capacity to hurt you like that does say something about him.”
Again, Jeongin shook his head, but it was not thoughtful nor angry. It was— disappointed.
“You’re wrong,” was all he said. And then he was walking away, and Chan wanted to call out to him, stop him, feeling like something was slipping away from him. But he’d used up all his words, and Jeongin had heard them with the same kind of apathy Minho had.
Chan looked at the empty glass on the counter, the open apple juice beside it as the keypad chimed, Jeongin leaving the apartment entirely. Probably to go find Minho.
He fiddled with the cap of the bottle, chest feeling like it was full of lead. He did not know what to do.
——
Seungmin clicked onto the next file on his computer, tiredly watched as the video feed for the cameras outside came up, running through on quadruple speed. He didn’t need to do this, really, not now that the truth about Felix had been revealed, and there was no longer any question as to his loyalty. But it had become something of a habit, now, to let the videos play as he watched, or worked on something that took less brain power. He’d found himself— twitchy, when he’d stopped for a while.
There was nothing on this feed today. He let it play, blinking slowly, still waking up. Changbin had left in the early hours of the morning, which had woken Seungmin up, and it had taken him a little while to fall back asleep, cold without the warmth of Changbin’s body underneath him. He’d only dragged himself out of bed about half an hour earlier, and his giant mug of coffee had yet to properly kick in.
A man was just speeding past their front door on the footage when the door to the workroom burst open, the shove so hard that the door swung open enough to clang against the wall. Seungmin about jumped out of his skin; he literally almost fell out of his chair, as he turned around to find Jeongin standing in the doorway, flushed red and eyes wide in his face.
“Jeongin-ah,” Seungmin said, heart thudding hard in his chest. It was a deeply, deeply unpleasant feeling, nausea in his stomach and throat. “What the fuck.”
Jeongin came into the room like a man on a very particular mission, his eyes focused on Seungmin as the door slowly swung shut again behind him. “Hyung!” Jeongin said, way too loud, in a way Jeongin usually wasn’t, as he dragged one of the stools closer to Seungmin. He looked— furious, actually, his eyes alight with anger, none of which seemed directed at Seungmin. He didn’t actually sit down on the stool, just kind of loomed over Seungmin a bit. “You saw me and Minho-hyung. On the cameras, last night, yes? I know you backtrack the footage.”
This time Seungmin’s tiredness was not just physical, it was decidedly mental. “Yeah, I did,” he said, slumping into his chair. He didn’t bother mentioning that he hadn’t seen it backtracking but that he’d seen it happen all the same.
“Did you know,” Jeongin said, still much too loud, “that Chan-hyung made Minho-hyung promise to stay away from me?” Seungmin felt part of his stomach drop out. Of course Jeongin looked like this, sounded like this, if he’d finally found out about that. How did he know? Had Minho admitted it to him? It hadn’t seemed to matter so much last night, judging from what Seungmin had seen on the cameras. “I want to see that conversation. Do you know when it was? Did you see it happen? You see everything.”
“I don’t see everything,” Seungmin said. He hadn’t moved, watching Jeongin, this angry edge unsettling on his features. “I do try to give everyone some modicum of privacy. But I witnessed that conversation by virtue of the fact that they had it here in the workshop.”
Jeongin blinked at him and then deflated just a little bit. Seungmin wasn’t sure if that was because he hadn’t expected Seungmin’s words or if it was just the fact that Seungmin knew what he was talking about. “They did?” he asked. “When?”
“About a week before everyone found out about Felix,” Seungmin said.
Jeongin took that in, and then his expression— cleared a little, the expression of someone realising something suddenly. “Why—” he started, stopped, then pinned Seungmin with a remarkably steady look. “Why didn’t you tell me, hyung?”
Seungmin found himself fidgeting in his seat a little, running his thumb along the line of his other nails, back and forth. He’d always known the truth of this would come out, somewhere along the line, and while he’d known that there was nothing else he could have done about any of it, there was still some guilt there. He hated that he had been dragged into being a part of it.
“I thought about it,” he said finally, admitting it aloud. “But it was made very clear to me during the course of the conversation that Minho-hyung did not want you to find out about his feelings.” He added, ruefully, “He and I are similar in a lot of ways.” Jeongin’s eyebrow twitched, possibly at Seungmin admitting that, but Seungmin had always known the truth of it. Minho probably wouldn’t say it aloud but Seungmin could. “It felt kind of like I’d be violating him in some way, if I told you. I see a lot, hear a lot, on the cameras. Notice a lot. But none of those moments are for me, they aren’t mine to have or share. This was the same.” A pause, before he added, needing Jeongin to be very clear on this fact, “I did tell both him and Chan-hyung they were being stupid though.”
Jeongin still didn’t look happy, but he looked less like he was questioning Seungmin in this. He reached out and touched Seungmin’s shoulder, a very brief thing. Neither of them liked touching other people much, an area they connected on, but the touch went a long way to expressing, without words: he was not mad at Seungmin. It was almost embarrassingly relieving to know.
“I want to see it,” Jeongin said, after he took his hand back. “I deserve to see it. The footage. There’s no more secrets now.”
Seungmin, unfortunately, knew exactly when it had happened, and so he turned to his computer to start rummaging through the folders on his harddrive, working down to the archived date. He glanced at Jeongin over his shoulder once he reached the right folder and asked, hesitatingly, “Are you sure? It’s not— Chan-hyung’s best moment. Or Minho-hyung’s.”
Jeongin looked at him, steel in every part of his face. “Show me.”
Seungmin really didn’t want to. Nobody came out good in this conversation. But he felt like he owed Jeongin this, a little. It had become so clear over the past few weeks, once Seungmin had really known to look for it, that Jeongin had been holding something of a torch for Minho for— a long time. Probably since before Seungmin had even come to work with them. Chan warning Minho off had caused— problems with that. Seungmin had watched those happen in real time too.
He clicked the file, opened up the video, and scrolled through until they reached the part where Jeongin was bandaging up Minho’s hand. He heard Jeongin suck in a breath at the realisation of the exact timeline. Yeah, thought Seungmin, feeling sick in his stomach again, you see it now.
He fiddled with the volume, turning it up until they could both hear Jeongin on the recording, chattering away cheerfully, Minho’s responses quiet and short. When they reached the part where Jeongin skipped out of the room and was replaced by Chan, Seungmin had to push his chair away from his desk a little bit, turning his face from the screen. He didn’t really know where to look. The recording was awful, he knew from experience, but looking at Jeongin’s face as he watched was worse.
He found himself alternating, glancing at the monitor, then Jeongin, then away to the floor, and then starting over again, a looping pattern. From the speakers he heard Chan’s voice, I don’t think you realise the extent of the damage you could cause even unintentionally, and watched as Jeongin’s hands clenched at his side. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken, just stood stock still, his face set in unusually grim lines.
Jeongin has a face for smiling, Changbin had once said, so fond it was almost embarrassing. There was none of that on his face now. Seungmin had seen him annoyed, or scared, or even serious, but this kind of hardened grit— it was unusual. It was odd. It really didn’t suit him.
He’d heard himself over the speakers before now, interrupting the conversation, but he’d been fairly quiet on the audio. Now, though, he heard his voice rise, crackly through the static, serious and earnest and more nasally than it sounded to his own ears as he spoke. He’s not a wispy little lamb, he’s stubborn as shit and pretty fucking smart too.
“Oh,” said Jeongin, voice very small, his hands loosening at his sides for the first time. A faint blush spread pretty-pink across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, his eyes flicking to Seungmin’s for a moment.
Seungmin rubbed his thumb against the space between his eyes, feeling like he could sense a headache coming on. “This is excruciating,” he muttered, as his past self continued to argue on the recording: Maybe Jeongin would want Minho-hyung? He hadn’t known, then, just how on target he was with that one.
Then Minho’s voice, saying, He doesn’t, sharp and certain as steel. This time, the oh from Jeongin was more punched out, angry again.
The rest of the recording played out, that argument replaying the same way it had done back then, almost imprinted on Seungmin’s memory even now. Minho, once again, an echo of the past, promised to not touch Jeongin. Seungmin leaned over and hit pause, the screen freezing on their blurry images in the workroom, right where he and Jeongin were right now.
There was silence, long and heavy; Seungmin didn’t know what to say at all, and Jeongin seemed like he was lost in thought, staring into space. Then his gaze turned to Seungmin. “Thank you for showing me,” he said, serious but with a hint of his usual sweetness in his voice. “And thank you for sticking up for me, back then.”
Seungmin just about resisted the urge to squirm this time. He hated these kinds of conversation, all of this sentimental stuff. The reminder that he loved these people, that he loved Jeongin, standing beside him. It made him so uncomfortable, to know that these people were his family, undeniable in the privacy of his own brain. He had never wanted this to happen, had never thought it even could, and so he’d not stopped himself before it was too late. His one rule, and he’d broken it without realising it.
What was worse, excruciatingly so, was that even though they all teased him for being a cold bastard, uncaring and standoffish, they saw him. All of them. Not just Changbin, who had seen through the bullshit on the exterior most of all. They all saw him, they all knew him. Seungmin knew, in this moment, looking at Jeongin standing there, that Jeongin knew that Seungmin was his hyung. That he could come to Seungmin for things like this, make requests of Seungmin, treat Seungmin like a hyung, the way he could the others.
Seungmin was theirs as much as they were his. It was really agonising.
“Don’t be mad at Minho-hyung,” he said softly. He wasn’t sure why he felt this need to defend Minho, when Minho had never been anything more pleasant than a mild asshole to him, but he did. Maybe it was from that likeness between them. He understood, probably more than anyone else here, Minho’s need to curl up and shelter his heart from the world.
Jeongin’s face was still grim, but there was something fragile about it now. Something— young, younger than he had seemed when he’d first stormed into the room. “I am not mad at Minho-hyung,” he said. He didn’t say anything else, just turned and left the room, quieter than he’d entered it.
Seungmin sat back in his chair, scrubbing his hands over his face. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. He’d have to rewatch the footage from the television room from last night, he realised. He’d avoided it in his checks so far, not wanting to see something he shouldn’t, but whatever had gone down last night was— not what he thought, maybe.
He still had his hands over his face when he heard his computer ping. One of the alerts he’d set up. He lowered his hands and looked at his screen. He was so tired, so overwhelmed by what had just happened, that it took a few seconds for what he was looking at to actually sink in. When it finally did, it was close to the proverbial straw. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he snapped.
——
Jeongin made it to the landing between the first and second floors before he had to stop, hands reaching out instinctively to brace on the metal railing. It stripped all the warmth out of his palms, an icy shock to his system. He leaned on the railing and breathed, working to slow the erratic motion of his chest, calm his pounding heart.
He was shaking. He was angry. He was— he wasn’t even sure. Confused. Saddened.
He was so, so loved. And right now it felt like it was surrounding him, pressing, crushing, suffocating. Chan was right: when Jeongin was little, all he’d wanted was to be loved. But it had been a long time since he’d felt that particular deprivation. Like rain on a desert-turned-flower-field, Jeongin hadn’t been bereft of water for many years.
Was it surprising, to find out the extent to which Chan still saw that little boy in him? Not exactly. Chan had borne the burden of raising Jeongin, keeping him alive, keeping him whole. All he wanted, in the end, was to look after Jeongin.
The fact that Chan was approaching it from this angle almost made it worse. Because Jeongin could see his logic, could understand it from his eyes.
Jeongin is the type of person who would do anything, anything, for the people he loves. To make them happy. To keep them loving him too. Even if it was something he maybe didn’t want. It wouldn’t even take any coercing. He’s just— that type of person. He loves very hard, too hard, and all he wants is that returned.
The words kept bouncing through his head, round and round. The worst part was they were true— had been true. As a child, Jeongin would have destroyed himself trying to be loved, if Chan hadn’t pulled him out of that group home. And for a long while after that, Jeongin would have done anything, anything at all, to make sure Chan loved him. He’d been terrified so much, so often, when he was small. That he’d make one too many messes, have one too many accidents, and Chan would abandon him too.
Chan had seen it, Chan had noticed it. It wasn’t an untruth. But it was inaccurate to Jeongin as he was now. Yes, he loved hard, and yes, he’d do many things, to keep his family happy. But the implication— Jeongin would not let himself be touched, for anyone else’s satisfaction. He imagined what he would do if someone, any of them— Jisung or Changbin or whoever, tried to leverage such a thing over his head. Difficult, because he knew none of them ever would, but if they did— if they tried to guilt him into it, he wouldn’t have even the slightest hard time saying no. He wouldn’t feel bad at all. And if it ruined their relationship, oh well. It would hurt and he’d be upset but it wouldn’t change his mind. That would be on them, not on him.
And that was the core change, he supposed. Jeongin no longer felt unlovable. He no longer laid awake and wondered what, exactly, was wrong with him, what was he lacking. How could he try harder, be better.
He was grown. He could take a step back and see things from a level eye. He would not let himself ever feel inadequate again. He knew he wasn’t. He deserved to be loved.
The hard part was convincing Chan of this change. Convincing any of them, really — Jeongin had noted the way Seungmin hadn’t argued back after Chan had given that particular spiel. Neither had Minho. Like they believed it too.
In his mind’s eye he saw Minho in the television room, eyes a little wide, face a little too pale, rushing to say, I’d never ask this of you.
Ask it of him. Like it was a sacrifice. Jeongin spreading his legs to make Minho happy. He had clearly bought into the same image of him Chan had. A few differences here and there but the foundation of it the same. Jeongin, too good and too sweet to ever say no. To deny someone he loved anything.
He straightened, his hands sliding off the railing. Then he pressed his cold palms to his cheeks, warming his hands, cooling his flushed face. After another few moments of steady breathing, he dragged himself up to the second floor landing, where Jisung’s door was cracked, and Minho’s was not.
Jeongin could go up to the apartment. Minho had come down here to shower, maybe pick at some of their in-progress jobs. Jeongin was supposed to be upstairs eating and napping. He could try to resume that. Wait for Minho to finish whatever it was he was doing in his room, meet up with him when Minho came to the apartment to cook for them both.
Jeongin approached the door like he thought it was an animal that might run. When he knocked, it was very quiet, probably too quiet. There was no response. He put a little more strength into it when he knocked again, calling out, “Hyung? It’s me.”
It was difficult to hear Minho moving when there wasn’t a door separating them. With it there, he just had to wait, ears straining, before the door opened just enough for Minho to wedge himself into the gap, blocking Jeongin’s view as always. “Baby boy,” he said, his hair damp and hanging over his face, droplets clinging. He took Jeongin in with a quick flick of his eyes and then his brow furrowed. “What’s up? You alright?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay,” Jeongin said, trying to shake off some of that tension. Minho watched him, those sharp eyes of his, cheeks pinked from the shower. He was wearing a grey t-shirt and a pair of darker grey sweatpants, his battered sneakers already on his feet. Always prepared. “I— I just—” I wanted to talk sounded so ominous. He cast around for another way to say it, and realised he didn’t need to find an excuse like usual. He could be honest. “I wanted to be with you.”
Minho blinked, his cheeks going that bit pinker. “Ah, baby boy,” he said, running a hand through his hair, pushing the damp strands off his face. It made the sleeve of his t-shirt ride up, and Jeongin worked to not get distracted. “Give me a few minutes, okay? I’ll be right up.”
“No,” Jeongin said, breathier than he’d intended. “Let me come in? Your room has more privacy than mine.”
In the normal course of things, Minho would immediately say no. Now he looked like he wanted to say no, mouth twisting around the unspoken word, but he didn’t actually say it. Jeongin grabbed the edge of the door and pushed, lightly enough that Minho wouldn’t be moved if he didn’t allow it to happen. But he did allow it, his shoulder swaying back so the door could open. He didn’t look at Jeongin as Jeongin squeezed past him, his hand trailing, briefly, across Minho’s stomach as he went by. The fabric of his shirt, worn, and then Minho himself, softness over a more firm plane of muscle, felt for a flash before Jeongin was in the room proper and his hand fell away.
Behind him, he heard Minho quietly close the door, but he didn’t turn to look. This was— not what he had expected, when he’d imagined Minho’s room, over and over. It wasn’t even that it clashed with what he’d expected, because there wasn’t anything here to contradict what he’d imagined. The contradiction was simply that he’d imagined there was stuff here at all.
Minho had a queen-sized mattress wedged into a corner of the spacious room, the bed made but with papers strewn atop it. The tiled floors were scuffed and damaged, black and white check, garish, Jeongin recognised it from when they first moved into the building. It was the remnants of what had been in the hair salon before. It was a clean floor, but it looked messy, just by virtue of the fact that so much had been torn up from it, dragged across it.
The only other pieces of furniture were a metal filing cabinet and a wooden wardrobe, something Minho had likely assembled himself from one of those stores that sold furniture in boxes. At the far end of the room was an open archway door that had two shower curtains obscuring what was beyond it, likely whatever sort of bathroom had been cobbled together. The only sign of personality here was the piles and piles of books, shoved up against the walls, acting almost as a kind of nightstand next to the bed. Even the windows had newspaper glued over them, diluting the sunlight into something mottled.
This was where Minho spent so much of his time? The newspaper had been peeled back in a few places here and there, little peep holes out into the street below. It felt like an especially spacious jail cell.
Jeongin turned to look back at Minho, who was lingering by the door still, uneasiness obvious in his posture. “This room is depressing, hyung,” Jeongin said, as gently as he could.
“It’s fine,” Minho said, gruff. He looked away, ears pink as he mumbled, “Better with you in it.”
Now it was Jeongin’s turn to blush, the urge to go to Minho, kiss him, rising up in him so suddenly and strongly that he didn’t try to deny it. He never needed to deny it again.
So he took those three strides across the room and wrapped his arms around Minho’s neck, tangling a hand in the back of Minho’s hair the way he already knew Minho liked. His nails scratched over Minho’s scalp as he kissed him, hard and demanding. Minho’s hands came to rest against his back, so warm from his shower, the heat radiating off him in the cool air.
This was his, Jeongin thought as he nipped Minho’s bottom lip. It was his. No one was going to take this from him. Not even Chan.
Minho pulled away, just a little, his hands loosening, and Jeongin took the hint and settled back on his heels, putting a breath of space between them. His hands slid around Minho’s neck and over his collarbones to come to a rest on Minho’s chest, the swell of muscle there.
“Are you sure you’re alright, baby boy?” Minho asked, his lips reddened and eyes no less sharp than ever.
It was amazing, how well Minho could read him sometimes. “I fought with Chan-hyung,” Jeongin admitted in a mumble. “He saw the bite mark. And said some things.”
“Ah,” Minho said, like the very picture of delicacy and tact. One of his hands came around and settled on Jeongin’s shoulder, right atop where the bruise in the shape of his teeth was under Jeongin’s sweater. There was a twist of regret in his expression. “I’m sorry.”
Jeongin heard Chan’s voice, echoing, It’s also about— you. And what you’re like. He stared at Minho’s face, the scar tearing through his delicate features, the fierce slant of his brows, the way his eyes glinted, serious and cutting as a knife’s. If you were— gentler, less biting, then maybe, but— Minho, you know you’re—
He put his hand over Minho’s, pressed down, squeezed, felt the ache of the bruise. Minho’s hand under his spasmed, like he didn’t want to hurt Jeongin, like he wasn’t sure. “I’m not sorry,” Jeongin said in a fierce whisper.
Minho was so, so much more than he appeared. And it was not hard to see it, not at all. The firelight warmth in his irises, the flat humour in his voice, or the care and love in the lavender smudges under his eyes. He was not an open book, but he was knowable all the same, if one took even a moment to look beyond the surface.
Jeongin could understand, maybe, where Chan was coming from in regards to him. He was stuck in the past and it was maddening but it made sense. Jeongin could not, however, in any way justify or comprehend his treatment of Minho.
He stepped back from Minho, pacing away a few steps before whirling around again. “I made Seungmin-hyung show me the footage from your fight with Chan-hyung, when he made you promise to stay away from me,” he admitted, and watched as fear flickered over Minho’s face before his entire expression clamped down hard. I watched as every word caused a wound, as you grew smaller and smaller with each passing second. Chipping away. Was that why Minho had just had that reaction, Jeongin wondered. Because he didn’t want Jeongin to see his pain. “I’m— so fucking angry.”
Minho just stood there, his hands curled loosely into fists at his sides. Water shone in small, wet trails down his neck. “I’m sorry,” he said again, quieter than before. Meeker, maybe.
“Not at you,” Jeongin said quickly, a little harshly, “Not at you.” More softly, comforting, he repeated, “Not at you.”
Some tension in Minho eased, like he’d been— ready and braced, standing on a moving train, working to counter any shifts in gravity. And suddenly he didn’t need to anymore.
Jeongin watched him. “Why did you make that promise?” he whispered. “Why didn’t you tell Chan-hyung to mind his own fucking business, when I know how badly you wanted me.”
Minho swallowed, stepped forward, but not any nearer to Jeongin. It was the beginnings of a circle, coming around Jeongin’s right side. “Loyalty,” he said, the word rasping out of him. “That was part of it. But really I just never planned to touch you. I was set against it. The promise was just saying aloud something I’d already decided.”
“Did you believe what Chan-hyung said,” Jeongin asked, turning slowly to keep Minho in his line of sight, “that I’d sleep with you just to keep you happy?”
“I didn’t want to take advantage,” Minho said, stopping by the window, one of the rips in the newspaper. It was decidedly not an answer to the question Jeongin had asked, and Minho wasn’t looking at him now, a patch of sunlight over Minho’s face as he stared out the window. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
Jeongin had pieced out Chan’s reasonings, but Minho’s were a bit harder to grasp, a strange amalgamation of things that didn’t entirely make sense. Between last night, and this morning, and what he’d seen on the tape, the shape of it was coming into focus.
“You didn’t deserve what Chan-hyung said to you,” Jeongin said lowly, fierce with it. Minho’s eyes snapped to him, his head whipping around. “Not then, and not last night. It was so fucked up of him, to say that to you.”
Minho made a motion, something contradictory. “Jeongin—”
“It was,” Jeongin said, firm and placid against Minho’s turbulence. “He had no right at all to keep you from me, no right at all to act like he was doing me a favour, cutting you down.”
“He just wants what is best for you,” Minho whispered, shockingly imploring. His loyalty to Chan had not wavered, and more than that, he seemed to think everything Chan had said to him was his due. Was true.
“And you’re not that,” Jeongin finished for him.
“No, I’m not,” Minho said, as sure and solid about it as Jeongin was in his own beliefs.
Jeongin stared at him for a long moment, his mind feeling like it was— humming, almost, with all his thoughts. Everything Minho had said in the workroom with Chan, no matter how ridiculous— they both somehow believed it.
“And what about you?” Jeongin asked, stepping forward slowly, Minho watching him approach warily. “What about what’s good for you, hyung?” He came to a stop a pace away, too far to touch, but near enough now that he could meet Minho’s eyes better. Quietly, he asked again, “Why did you make that promise?”
Minho visibly hesitated. Jeongin wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t want to upset Jeongin, or if it was simply because he wasn’t even sure how to put it into words. Finally, Minho slowly said, “I don’t matter the way you matter.”
Jeongin— needed to hear that again. “What?”
“What is good for me doesn’t matter, in the face of what is bad for you,” Minho explained, still in that slow way, obviously struggling. He scuffed the toe of his sneaker against a chipped portion of tile, looking down at his feet. “I can survive it.” His voice was husky. “This life. This world. The solitude. Being— without what I want. I can take it.” He glanced back up at Jeongin, looking— young, of all things. Childlike, almost. “But I didn’t think you could survive me.”
Jeongin felt the full force of those words hit him, the way his expression grew stricken. “So that’s why you did it,” he said, a little numbly. “And why you’ve been holding back. In spite of everything I’ve said. What is it about you, exactly, that you think I can’t survive?”
“Baby boy,” Minho said on a sigh, shaking his head as he turned from both Jeongin and the window, stepping away and running a hand through his hair again. His other hand settled on his hip, head bowed, so Jeongin was looking at the curve of his spine, the muscles of his back through his shirt, for a long moment as Minho grappled with his words. “I’m a fucked up person,” he finally said hoarsely, straightening and turning just enough to look at Jeongin once again. “In ways you can’t understand, because you haven’t— lived the life I have. I don’t know how to be sweet, it’s not in my nature. And you need that, you deserve that. Chan-hyung said it— I look at you like I want to tear you apart, and I do, Jeongin. I want you like a wolf wants a fawn.”
It echoed back to Jeongin’s thoughts, the way Minho made him feel like prey, made him want to be prey. They were two sides of the same coin and he didn’t know why Minho couldn’t see that. “Like a wolf wants a fawn,” Jeongin repeated, like he was tasting the words, testing the feel of them in his mouth. He didn’t smile, but he knew Minho could see the spark in his eyes as he said, “You’re going to eat me?”
Minho’s face flamed red, his ears so vibrant they seemed likely to start steaming. Jeongin hadn’t really thought Minho would laugh, but he hadn’t expected the way Minho grew visibly frustrated. “No,” Minho said, huffing it out from behind his hands, having brought them up to scrub roughly over his face. He paced away and back in an impatient circle, saying, “No, no, I—” He hissed in a breath through clenched teeth, both hands shoved up into his hair, keeping it off his face, while he was bent a little, staring down at the floor. Then it was like something clicked into place, some kind of veneer sliding on, because he straightened, his hands falling down to his sides and his face schooled into— something like blankness, if blankness could cut. “I want to fucking consume you,” he said lowly, a hint of a growl in the words as he came forward with calm purpose.
Jeongin retreated back a little, his shoulder connecting with a newspaper-covered window. He would never be afraid of Minho in any real way, knew Minho would never cause him actual harm, but he was an intimidating figure all the same. He could only watch as Minho stopped in front of him, the little patch of bright golden sunlight falling over the left side of his face.
“This doesn’t end on the bed for me,” Minho murmured, his scars thrown into sharp relief by the light, his left iris turned into a warm pool of honey. “I don’t just want sex, I want you. I want you here, in this shitty room with me. I want to press bruises into you with my hands and my teeth— I want to fuck you until you’re so sore you can’t go again, and then I want to fuck you again. Until you can’t think of anything except me, until you’re crying and your voice breaks. I want you all the fucking time, I want you in my lap, I want you in my sight. I’m possessive, Jeongin. This—” Minho pressed his closed fist over his sternum, tapping it there. “Inside me, everything has a violent edge.” He moved his hand, uncurling the fist to instead touch fingertips to Jeongin’s jaw, leaning in a little as he whispered, “Even this.” His touch turned from a caress to something harder, gripping Jeongin’s jaw, making him gasp. Their noses brushed. “Sometimes especially this.” Jeongin felt the words against his lips. Then Minho let him go, like he’d been burned, and Jeongin swayed. Minho took several steps backwards, emotion bleeding into his expression. Guilt. “That’s why I made that promise.”
Jeongin could feel his heartbeat under his ribcage, could hear it dully, the blood rushing through his ears. Warmth settled between his legs, a steady gathering of heat; he was still sore from earlier, but his body didn’t care. Sore might just be the way he was, for the rest of his life.
He stood there, fingertips tingly, while Minho watched him, turned slightly away, as if shielding himself. Like he thought now would be the moment Jeongin baulked, the moment he condemned him, the moment he would say, This is too much, you’re too much, for me.
Minho was very quick to presume Jeongin could not possibly understand what he was, but Jeongin was also realising that Minho in turn did not fully realise all Jeongin was.
He did not speak — he did not yet know what to say. Not because he didn’t have the words, but because he had too many, and was unsure where to begin. Mostly he wanted Minho on top of him again, to hold him and protect him and let him find pleasure, in whatever way he needed to.
Slowly, Jeongin turned away from Minho, drifted to the large mattress on the floor, covered in shades of pale blue. He slipped his shoes off and then went to his knees on the bed, gathering up all the paperwork strewn over the blankets, settling his thoughts into order as he worked. “Do you understand,” Jeongin said, faux idle, as he piled all the manila folders and loose papers together, probably mixing them all up, “that keeping yourself from me, because you were convinced that you would hurt me, is in itself, kind?” He flicked a glance up to Minho, still standing exactly where he’d been before. “That a truly selfish, bad person, would not give a fuck?”
“That’s—” Minho stopped, looking a little confused, brow wrinkling.
“You’re possessive,” Jeongin murmured, almost a purr, lashes lowering as he resumed gathering up the papers. “You want to fuck me rough. You think I deserve better, whatever that means.” His pile now all collected, he set the entire bundle off to the side, on the floor right beside the bed. Then he sat in the middle of the mattress, legs curled under himself, staring up at Minho. “Did I miss anything?”
Minho no longer looked confused. His expression had gone shuttered, but in a dim, almost sad way. He came over to the bed, stepping out of his shoes and kneeling in front of Jeongin, his knees sinking into the softness of the mattress. “I wanted to keep you happy,” he said flatly, eyes empty.
Jeongin leaned forward, his fingertips bracing on the solidity of Minho’s thighs. A careful, experimental touch, one Minho did not flinch from, nor remove. “I understand a little better now,” Jeongin said, gentle and sweet. He kissed Minho softly, a light press of his lips to Minho’s. “Thank you, for explaining.”
Minho grunted in acknowledgement. He did not lean into the kiss, nor did it seem to pull him from whatever was going on in his head which was— unfortunate. Jeongin had enjoyed that power, for the twelve or so hours it had seemed to last. “It doesn’t matter now,” Minho said dully. “I broke the promise.” His gaze drifted over Jeongin’s shoulder, that empty, far away sort of look getting worse.
Jeongin squeezed his thighs; it was like squeezing rocks, but it made Minho look at him again. “You did,” Jeongin agreed, “and that doesn’t matter, because it was rooted in an untruth.” Minho’s eyes were no less bereft, but the distant quality to them was gone. He was, at least, listening. “I want you the way you want me. Well—” Jeongin smiled, a little ruefully. “I want you in a way that— matches the way you want me. It doesn’t scare me. Surely, after— everything, you can see that?”
Minho swallowed, his throat moving with it. “A little.” It was a whisper, a confused admission.
“It’s not bad of you, to want me like that. Any more than it is bad of me, to be wanted like that,” Jeongin said, knowing he sounded a little like he was trying to appeal to a scared woodland creature, but unable to help the tone. The logic was sound, he was right, he knew he was right. He traced fingertips over Minho’s thighs, coaxing. “It’s okay, hyung. Just because it’s me doesn’t make it not okay.”
That seemed to hit some kind of nerve. Minho sighed, his gaze, which had begun to be a little more— human, went shuttered again. Jeongin felt like another piece of the puzzle had just been revealed to him. “You don’t understand,” Minho said, but he didn’t sound upset. He sounded almost resigned.
Jeongin continued his light tracing along Minho’s thighs, idle patterns. “I think I do,” he said. Minho had low self worth — something Jeongin would have to combat the root of at some point, but not now — and along the way had convinced himself that he was a terrible person, and Jeongin was too good to taint, to touch. Even if Jeongin wanted what Minho wished to give him, it was still a sin, in Minho’s mind. To crave it. To dole it out.
It was an echo of what Chan had said earlier. That even if Jeongin was asking for it, Minho’s capacity to inflict it upon him was a negative reflection of him.
“Me wanting it isn’t bad, because it is accepting violence done onto me,” he murmured, leaning forward again, hands pressing on Minho’s thighs. “But you wanting it is bad, because it’s inflicting violence. And not only that but it’s inflicting it on me, specifically.” He tilted his head, nose brushing against Minho’s. “And I’m good and sweet and soft, and there’s something wrong with you for wanting that. Right?”
Minho’s eyes had gone wide, expression as shocked as if Jeongin had slapped him. “Jeongin,” he said, hoarse.
Jeongin had no idea how to argue with such a, frankly, ridiculous viewpoint. With Chan, he’d walked out rather than try, because ultimately it didn’t matter if Chan wanted to be a weird puritan about this. But Jeongin wasn’t going to walk away from Minho, because it did matter, if Minho hated himself for this, judged himself for this.
He didn’t know, though, the right words to convince Minho, to make him not just hear him but believe him. How could Jeongin contradict something that was just— so obviously wrong? Stating the truth over and over wouldn’t make Minho understand it, when he wholeheartedly believed otherwise. He was mixing up kink and an intense kind of personality with some sort of deep-seated moral failing and Jeongin really did not know how to get through to him. Time, perhaps. It would take time, to unwind that, untangle all the knots so Minho could be free of it.
Instead of letting the silence unspool for too long, Jeongin just huffed out a sigh and kissed Minho. Not the light touch of before, but something that conveyed his hunger, his own desire to consume. He curled a hand around the back of Minho’s neck, firm, and Minho let himself be bitten at, let Jeongin lick into his mouth.
He kept speaking of violence. But Minho had never raised a hand to Jeongin. Violence as a bedroom game hardly counted, really didn’t count at all when it was consensual. And outside the bedroom— Minho was not one for overt romantic gestures perhaps, but he was attentive to Jeongin’s needs, made sure he was fed and safe. He was good to Jeongin. Minho’s possessiveness was, perhaps, the one toxic trait, but Jeongin was a possessive, needy thing too. And he wanted to be with Minho, always. Every minute of every day, if he could. So let Minho be possessive, let him demand Jeongin’s time and heart and body.
Jeongin pulled back so he could look Minho in the eyes, keeping his hand on the back of Minho’s neck. There was a tortured kind of hunger in Minho’s expression. “Last night,” Jeongin said, shocked a little by the roughness of his own voice. “This morning. You let all this go, you set it aside, stayed in the moment with me. And it felt so good, didn’t it? You can let it go, hyung.”
He didn’t think it would be so easy, not a permanent solution, but Minho was trembling, breathing a little fast. Jeongin could, at the least, get Minho out of his head while they did this. Maybe one day Minho would forget to don his self-loathing along with his clothes once they left the bed.
Jeongin let Minho go, leaning back and shifting, pulling his legs out from under himself. Minho followed him, coming forward as Jeongin retreated, until Jeongin was on his back atop the bed, Minho over him, between his legs. Exactly where Jeongin would like to keep him. “You don’t need to think about anything, hyung,” Jeongin said, still with that huskiness to his voice. He liked the sound of it. He hoped Minho did too. “Just enjoy me. Whatever you want, whatever you need.” Minho had a hand braced beside Jeongin’s head, his face shadowed and intent. A drop of water fell from his hair and landed against Jeongin’s cheek. Jeongin squirmed a little, restless, his legs hitching up around Minho’s waist as he whispered, “You can keep me here forever.”
Minho stared down at him for a long moment, and in spite of the heat in his eyes, Jeongin was momentarily unsure if Minho was going to come with him, or if he was going to pull them back. Then Minho said, slow and with that flat humour, “Not forever — I have jobs to plan.” His head dropped down, and he nuzzled into Jeongin’s ear so he could murmur, “And you’d get very, very sore.”
Jeongin shivered, feeling the motion rock all along his body. “Hyung,” he whimpered, turning his face so his mouth was pressed to Minho’s unscarred cheek. His hands tangled in the front of Minho’s shirt, trying to drag his body down. “Ah, hyung. Fuck me, please?”
It wasn’t a solution, it wasn’t. But it was something, Jeongin thought, as Minho stripped them both down, as he used those calloused, warm hands to turn Jeongin over onto his stomach first, and then once Jeongin was tender and slick and panting, he gripped Jeongin’s hips and pulled him onto his hands and knees.
This room was bright. It was cold. Jeongin was embarrassed in this position. His arms gave way nearly as soon as Minho fucked into him, hips still held up by Minho’s strong hands. The pillow under Jeongin’s face smelled thickly of Minho, and Jeongin already felt drugged on it. His hands clutched it, face turning to the side so he could breathe, while Minho took him apart.
This wasn’t cruelty. Even when he thought he might drift into pieces, when it felt so good it was painful — when the pain was an ache close to ecstacy. When Minho was too much, went too hard, used him too rough. Jeongin had never felt so loved, so looked after. So treasured.
The angle was new and different, something he’d never felt before, not even with— himself. Impossible to mimic with his fingers, he’d have needed a toy. He could feel his eyes rolling back in his head, drooling a little on Minho’s pillow. His spine was a pretty curve, one of Minho’s hands broad and hot on his lower back, steadying. His mouth was mean — Pliant little slut — but he kept Jeongin centred, grounded.
Jeongin felt— full in a new way, like Minho’s cock was straining his skin. When Jeongin tipped his head down as best he could, he swore he could see it, see the outline of Minho’s cock in his belly as he fucked into him. He reached down, wanting to know if he’d be able to feel it moving inside him if he laid a hand on his stomach— and Minho grabbed his wrist, stopping him.
“No touching yourself,” he said, a clipped and simple admonishment.
“I wasn’t,” Jeongin gasped out, his voice thin and reedy. “I wasn’t, hyung—” Jeongin rotated his hand so it was him grabbing Minho’s wrist instead, Minho allowing him to bring their hands under his body. Jeongin pressed Minho’s hand to his lower stomach, laying his own atop it. “Can you feel it?”
Minho’s thrusts slowed a little, his hips canting deliberately and palm pressing more firmly. There was an unsteady note in his voice as he said, “Yeah.”
Jeongin had thought so, but the reality of it— “So deep,” he moaned, his head swimming, full of cotton wool. “So fucking deep.” Minho gave an especially hard thrust, the heel of his palm digging into Jeongin’s stomach. “Oh hyung—”
“Fuck,” Minho groaned, his body so warm against the backs of Jeongin’s thighs, the sting of their skin meeting over and over heating him even more.
Hearing Minho begin to come apart would undo Jeongin. He laced their fingers together and brought their hands to his mouth, pressing kisses to Minho’s knuckles and squeezing his eyes shut. He felt more than heard the way Minho gasped at that.
Jeongin would work, from now until forever if he had to, to convince Minho with his actions what he couldn’t with his words.
Notes:
The opening Minho/Jeongin smut scene has been posted in full here. Enjoy ♥
Chapter 21
Notes:
happy comeback day!! since we started writing this fic, skz have had three (3) whole comebacks. love that for us.
in case you missed it, we posted the full length version of the fade-to-black minjeong sex scene from the previous chapter. you can find that here 🥰
chapter specific warnings: typical minjeong behaviour, fic typical hyunjin trauma, second hand embarrassment. ohhhh the second hand embarrassment.
this chapter takes place during the same day as the previous one, just as a reference! chapters 20 and 21 were originally 1 chapter that we split, so this follows on from last chapter!
Chapter Text
Chan looked like shit when Changbin came into the office, the bags under his eyes considerable, his hair sticking up every which way. A man who had not slept, or slept on the couch in this room, which was too small for a grown man, even one as vertically challenged as Chan. Not that Changbin had room to be throwing rocks in that direction.
Seungmin slipped into the room after Changbin, brushing past him to go take one of the seats in front of the desk. He had his folder of printed out pictures in his arms, dressed in fleece pyjama bottoms and possibly the biggest hoodie Changbin had ever seen him in. They’d met on the stairs, legitimately by chance, and Seungmin had scowled the entire journey here, grumbling about being dragged upstairs when they could have just had the meeting in his workroom. They could have, that was true, but Chan didn’t seem like he was really up for a lot of moving around right now. He had the look of someone who had semi-collapsed into that chair and would need help getting up.
Seungmin had told him, last night, as he lay naked under the bed covers, stretched right across Changbin’s front, pressed skin to skin. Changbin had been stroking his fingers gently up and down Seungmin’s spine, halfway to sleep when Seungmin had said, quietly, “Earlier, when you asked what I was cursing at my computer about, it was because Jeongin and Minho-hyung were making out in the television room.”
Changbin had jerked so hard in surprise he’d almost sent Seungmin slithering to the floor and had to grab him before that could happen. Seungmin had given him that particular kind of unimpressed look that only Seungmin could do, flat and emotionless and much more potent than anything Hyunjin had ever managed. Changbin, clutching Seungmin to him, said, “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“So you couldn’t stop them,” Seungmin had said, and put his face into Changbin’s neck, his body curved in such a way that his feet weren’t sticking out the end of the bed. The conversation had been clearly over as far as he was concerned, and he’d gone to sleep not long after, but Changbin had been awake for a while, his thoughts rushing through his brain.
On the stairs earlier Seungmin had said, clipped and short, “Chan-hyung knows about Jeongin and Minho-hyung. He caught them last night. He’s not happy. Neither is Jeongin.” And neither was Seungmin, judging by the tone of his voice.
Changbin had wanted to ask more but they’d already basically reached the office and so he’d resolved to ask more about it later, but looking at Chan right now he thought he understood a little bit already. “Hey, hyung,” he said. “Do you need me to go get Jisung?”
“Rude,” said Jisung’s voice from the hallway, right before he pushed the door further open and came into the room. “I’m here, I’m on time, don’t disparage me when I can’t defend myself, hyung.”
Changbin rolled his eyes. “Big miracle, you’re on time to a meeting,” he said, as Jisung took the seat next to Seungmin. “Get out the fucking bunting.” Jisung flipped him off.
“Knock it off,” Chan said. He normally sounded exasperated by them, mildly chiding the banter, but there was a real edge to his voice today that clearly made Jisung falter, his hand dropping to his lap and twisting into his sweatpants. He gave Changbin an unsure look, so Changbin smiled at him, which didn’t seem to really reassure Jisung, probably because Changbin never usually smiled at him like that.
Seungmin was giving Chan a cool look, his eyebrows ever so slightly raised. Changbin wondered what Seungmin had seen on the camera feeds when he’d checked them this morning. What, exactly, he had meant by Chan not being happy. Changbin could guess. Chan was one of the most easy going people Changbin had ever met, rarely getting annoyed, never mind angry. When they’d worked for their old gangs, Chan had accepted the worst jobs, the disrespect, the cuffs around the head, with a smile that hadn’t even seemed put on. He’d had to talk Changbin down a fair number of times.
But when Chan got mad, he exploded. It had never been easy to fully tell when it would happen, either, because he kept himself so calm even when he was sleep-deprived, hungry, thirsty. But sometimes he got angry, ran his mouth in a way that was hard to come back from. The first time he and Changbin had fought about trying to go after Lee Jaerim, Chan had said something so nasty that Changbin, even knowing he would forgive Chan in the end, had refused to talk to him for two days.
It was Chan’s one huge flaw. They’d seen it with Felix; he imagined Minho had seen it last night.
Changbin said, trying to cover up the uncomfortable silence that had fallen, “Hyung, do you want me to go get coffee for you or something? You look like garbage.”
Chan looked at him. Changbin looked back, almost daring Chan to snap at him, but Chan just said, “No. The meeting will start soon.”
The meeting would start soon, but there was no sign of Minho. He’d seen the message that Changbin had sent to him, because it showed up as read in their chat, but he hadn’t replied, and now, as the minutes silently ticked by and the meeting time came and went, Changbin watched Chan grow more and more tense in his seat, while Seungmin got irritated and Jisung kept turning to look at the door as if that would cause Minho to come in sooner.
“Do you want me to go and get Minho-hyung,” Changbin said eventually.
Chan scowled. “No,” he said, almost snarling. “If he can’t respect—”
A knock on the door, and then Minho stepped inside. He was dressed in a t-shirt and sweatpants but the t-shirt was rumpled in the way of something that had been pulled on very quickly. His hair was damp, sticking up every which way like it had not been allowed to dry straight, and his mouth was red, a little swollen. He looked very much like a man who had been rolling around in bed with someone not too long ago. Changbin, looking at him, thought, Christ, he really is fucking Jeongin.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Minho said, very quietly, as he closed the door behind him. He didn’t offer an excuse or reason for the lateness, just shuffled slightly to the side out of the way of the door and then stood in that way he had: blank, expectant, waiting for whatever was to come.
“I’m glad you could join us,” Chan said, nastily sarcastic. Jisung’s eyebrows shot to his hairline but Minho didn’t react at all, not even a single facial twitch. He just kept looking at them all, waiting. Chan huffed out an annoyed breath and said, “Seungmin said he had an update for us.”
Seungmin pursed his mouth for a few seconds, not looking at any of them, before he said, “There are three things. The first thing is that I’ve sourced a warehouse for us so that Jisung and Hyunjin can practise dangling out of windows on rope.” He pulled a slip of paper out of his folder and gave it to Jisung, who looked it over. It seemed to contain an address, and below that was a greyscale photo of a large building. “That’s where it is. It’s just outside Yongin.”
“Not exactly close,” Jisung muttered.
“You wanted somewhere you could practise rappelling down the side of a building,” Seungmin retorted. “You can’t exactly do that in the middle of Seoul without someone seeing.”
Jisung pulled a face which seemed to say, fair enough. Chan held out his hand for the paper, looked at it, and then handed it back. “You and Hyunjin should go there soon to make sure you can get enough practise in before we do the job,” he said. “Changbin, you go with them, make sure they’re doing it safely.”
“I mean, I don’t know anything about it either,” Changbin said, trying for cheerful, “but sure, okay.”
“This sounds like so much fun,” Jisung said, matching Changbin’s tone in the fakest way possible.
“The second thing,” Seungmin said, a little louder as if to cut off any possible bickering between Jisung and Changbin — he even sent a little warning look in Changbin’s direction, which wasn’t really going to put Changbin off, honestly, he loved it when Seungmin looked at him like that — “is that when we visited Blackbird’s, Felix and I weren’t able to get any photos of the safe that the Magpie uses to keep the money in.”
“You took pictures of the safe room, though,” Minho said sharply, like he thought Seungmin or Felix had been lying about that. “The Magpie’s office.”
“We did,” Seungmin said, “but the safe itself is hidden behind a painting, and nobody moved it during the time we were there. Felix has only seen it once or twice, and obviously doesn’t know exactly what model it is, although he does know that it’s an analog dial type, and through his description we’ve been able to narrow it down to a handful of potential options. But we don’t know which one it is exactly, and so we have no way of letting Hyunjin practise on the actual model. He’d be going in there mostly blind in that regard.”
“I don’t like that,” Chan said, scrubbing at his hair. “We wouldn’t be able to know if he could actually crack it until the job is in progress.”
“Precisely,” Seungmin said. He had a way of speaking in meetings like this, so concise and to the point, and Changbin would never say this to him but sometimes he thought, he’d make a good lawyer. Not that Changbin really knew what lawyers were like; he’d only seen them on television, after all.
“So, what,” Jisung said, twisting his mouth as he looked between them. “What happens if we get in there and it turns out Hyunjin can’t open the thing? We just blow it up and hope that the vault covers us?”
“No,” Minho said. Where Seungmin was concise, Minho was almost always clipped in these meetings. “We might not get anything useful from the vault. At Blackbird’s we at least know there’s money. We need to know what kind of safe they have.”
“Well, I hope you know how we’re going to get that information,” Seungmin said, “because I have no—”
The door to the office swung open, cutting off his words. They all looked to see who it was but it was just Jeongin, stepping inside casually. He looked at Minho first, his smile very warm, and then at the others, but the warmth no longer reached his eyes. If Minho had looked rumpled, Jeongin looked positively dishevelled, and he was wearing a grey t-shirt that hung off his narrow shoulders. It absolutely did not belong to him.
“Jeongin,” said Chan, frowning, more in confusion than anything. “What is it, is something wrong? We’re having a meeting.”
“I know,” said Jeongin. “That’s why I’m here.”
He padded to the couch and sat down on it and settled the blanket over his lap. They all sort of blinked at him — except for Seungmin, who was very visibly rolling his eyes and turning back to Chan — but he just blinked back with a perfectly innocent expression, as if he interrupted and joined in meetings every single day.
“Baby boy, this isn’t an exciting meeting,” said Minho. His voice was odd, a mix of exasperation and incredible fondness. Changbin was used to there being some fondness in Minho’s voice when he spoke to or about Jeongin, but this was beyond that. Affection dripped from every single word.
“I’m not here because it’s exciting,” Jeongin said, smoothing the blanket. “Don’t mind me, just carry on.”
“As I was saying,” Seungmin said, drawing most of their attention — Chan frowned at Jeongin for a few more moments before he looked across at Seungmin, and Minho didn’t take his eyes off Jeongin at all. “I don’t know how to get the information of what kind of safe it is.”
Minho didn’t say anything, still looking at Jeongin, and then he pulled his gaze away and looked at Seungmin. “Does Felix know when they usually clear out the safe at the end of the night?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Seungmin. “Roughly four in the morning at the earliest, the latest being six.”
“Then you need to take the van over there for that time,” Minho said, like he was talking to someone very stupid, “and get a shot of the safe when they open it to take the money out.”
Seungmin scowled, probably at being spoken to like that, and Changbin knew that whatever came out of his mouth next was going to be unpleasant at best, but Chan was already saying, “Would that work, Seungmin?” A pause, before Seungmin nodded. “Great. Then, Minho, you and Seungmin go tomorrow to do that, we need to know this information as soon as possible.”
Both Minho and Seungmin looked at each other with a beady-eyed kind of distaste that made Changbin have to press his lips together to avoid smiling. If Seungmin caught him, he’d pay for it. But sometimes they were just so similar, their moods the same, their reactions the same. The worst part was that even their work styles were complementary, and Chan was probably right to send them out together, since they’d both be ruthlessly efficient about it all.
Seungmin though— it was going to be a struggle, leaving the house again. Changbin could see the tenseness in his shoulders. But he just said, “Okay,” shortly.
A pause before Minho said, “Fine.”
“Okay,” Chan said. He had not, even once, looked at Minho, even when he had been addressing him directly. He had kept his eyes on Seungmin the entire time, like he was trying to pretend, as much as possible, that Minho was not in the room. It was unclear how well that was going for him. For Changbin, he was trying to do as Jeongin had asked, don’t mind me, but he kept glancing over, where Jeongin was still curled up, looking at them all with an almost placid expression. Jisung kept looking at him too, clearly beyond confused. He was something of an elephant in the room.
“What’s the third thing,” Chan asked Seungmin.
“The third thing,” Seungmin said, “is this.” He opened his folder again and pulled out a few more printouts — photographs, which he lay on Chan’s desk, spread around so that they could all see them. It took Changbin a moment to figure out where, and what, he was looking at. “The building next door to Blackbird’s appears to have been sold to someone new and they’re in the process of converting the first two floors into a twenty-four hour coffee shop. I’ve also found records with city hall that suggest the third floor will be converted into office space. The coffee shop is set to open in two days, which means that by the time we do the job, it will be a place of business and not abandoned like we’d planned for.”
There was a long stretch of silence this time, all of them absorbing that. Minho strode forward, coming between the two chairs so that he could look at the photos. Chan leaned back in his seat away from him as he came, and at the angle he stood at, Changbin could only just see the way the scowl was back on his face. Minho either didn’t notice or was ignoring it, because he was just looking at the photographs.
“Fuck,” he said.
That about summed it up, in Changbin’s opinion. Jisung, looking between Minho and Chan, said, “What does this mean?”
“I don’t know,” Minho said. He was still shuffling through the photos, looking at the construction work, grainy on the page. “I’ll either need to figure out if you two can still get through this building up to the roof, with all the gear you’ll need for that, without someone noticing, or I’ll have to figure out how to get you two up through the ground floor of Blackbird’s after all.”
He sounded— grim. Neither of those were good options, and neither of them were, Changbin knew, entirely feasible. They’d been planning on the neighbouring building being totally empty, so that Hyunjin and Jisung could just sneak in and get up to the roof without being stopped. But that was certainly not possible if there was going to be an open business in the way. Even with the rifle disguised, they would likely get stopped by someone questioning why they were there before they could get high enough.
Going up through the ground floor was— a fool’s errand. They’d known that from very early on.
“Well, you’ll have to work it out quickly,” Chan said. His tone was snappish, something nasty in it. Impatient, in the way Chan so rarely was. “We don’t have time for you to mess around trying to figure it out.”
A beat of silence. Jisung was looking at Chan in utter shock, his shoulders curled in a little; he looked a little bit like he was instinctively trying to protect himself from a blow. Minho just glanced up at Chan and then murmured, “Of course. I’ll let you know once I’ve got something.”
Chan didn’t react to that at all. Instead he looked at Seungmin and said, “Let me know what kind of safe it is tomorrow, so that we can begin to see if we can find the same model. I won’t keep you any longer.”
Seungmin didn’t need to be told twice. He gathered up the photos and put them back in the folder and then, after a moment, held it out to Minho. Minho took it with a nod, the two of them eyeing each other, and then Seungmin left the room quietly.
“We’ll probably go to the warehouse tomorrow too,” Changbin said, “in the morning, before anyone else is really around.”
Chan nodded. “That sounds good,” he said, and then, “You can all go but Minho, you stay behind. I want to talk to you.”
Minho didn’t look at him. He was looking down at the folder in his hand, a completely blank expression on his face. There was something in his body language that made Changbin feel uncomfortably similar to how he had felt when it was Felix on the floor in here, although he’d never have placed Minho in that same category before.
He was debating on whether to insist on staying here for whatever this ‘talk’ was when Jeongin unfolded himself from the couch and got to his feet and said, “No.”
Minho’s head lifted a little. Chan raised an eyebrow at him. “No?” he echoed.
“No,” repeated Jeongin. He reached out and took Minho’s free hand, the one not holding the folder with the photographs. Minho looked at him properly, something surprised on his face too, but he didn’t pull away or stop it when Jeongin threaded their fingers together.
“What do you mean, no,” Chan said, annoyed exasperation in his voice. “Jeongin, you can’t just—”
“I mean, no,” Jeongin said. He gave Chan an extremely cold look, a sort of look that Changbin had not known Jeongin was capable of giving. It was very odd on his face. Looking at that expression, Changbin thought, I’ll have to get Seungmin to show me the footage of last night. Seungmin had said that Jeongin wasn’t happy but whatever was going on here seemed to go beyond that. “You’re not talking to him, and especially not alone. We have to go train with the new guns with Jisung-hyung.”
He looked at Jisung, who was mostly looking at where Minho and Jeongin’s hands were intertwined with an expression of utter bafflement on his face. When he realised Jeongin’s eyes were on him, he said, “Uh, sure?”
Jeongin nodded, then said, “See?” to Chan, before he pulled Minho to the door and then out of the room, ignoring Chan’s call of, Minho, get back here—. The door shut behind the two of them with a final-sounding click.
Jisung, looking unsure, looking at Chan like he didn’t know what was going on at all, said nothing. Changbin took pity on him, this boy who had not asked to be a part of this kind of mess when he’d climbed up their fire escape. “You can leave,” Changbin told him. “I need to talk to Chan-hyung alone, actually.”
Jisung looked at him and then scrambled out of the room with a haste that would, in normal circumstances, be funny. Once he was gone, Changbin came around the desk and took the seat Jisung had just left and said, “Hyung, what the fuck are you doing.”
Chan growled a little, an odd noise to come from him. “Changbin,” he said. “Minho is sleeping with Jeongin. Last night, they—”
“No, I know,” Changbin interrupted, cutting Chan off before he could get himself puffed up in anger again, and it worked, a little, Chan faltering as he looked at Changbin. “I know about that. That’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about making him promise to stay away from Jeongin in the first place. You should have known Jeongin would be furious when he found out about that.”
Chan gaped at him. “He wasn’t supposed to find out about it,” he eventually said hotly, “because Minho wasn’t supposed to touch him. And how the fuck do you know about that? Nobody else was supposed to know either.”
“Seungmin told me,” Changbin said. He said it without thinking and then watched Chan’s eyes narrow just a little, just enough to send the alarm bells ringing in Changbin’s mind. “What?”
“Seungmin tells you an awful lot of stuff,” Chan said. “Even stuff that is supposed to be a secret.”
“If you say so,” Changbin said, struggling for a neutral tone. “He was worried. He thought both you and Minho-hyung were making a big mistake.”
“Well, I certainly was,” Chan said bitterly. “It was a mistake to think Minho was a man of his word. Last night he didn’t even care, he didn’t even say sorry. Earlier—” He stopped for a moment, swallowing, and said, “Earlier, I saw a bite mark on Jeongin’s shoulder. Dark and bruised. He said that Minho slapped him too, when they were having sex.”
Something horrified fell into the pit of Changbin’s stomach at that, the mental image of anyone hitting Jeongin almost too much to bear. The thought of it being Minho, being someone who Jeongin trusted so much, was worse, and for a moment Changbin lost control of his facial expression. Chan saw that and said, pleadingly, “Changbin, I can’t let this happen. You understand, don’t you? We can’t— it’s Jeongin, he’s just a kid.”
The moment passed. The fear, the horror, mostly passed. “Was he upset?” Changbin asked.
“What?”
“Was he upset,” Changbin repeated. “Jeongin, earlier. When you saw the bite, when he told you about Minho hitting him. Was he upset about it?”
“No,” said Chan, sounding like he didn’t understand this line of questioning at all. “He said that he wanted it, which just proves my point, surely? He doesn’t know what is right here, Changbin. He doesn’t understand what’s healthy.”
Changbin looked at him, his hyung that he’d known for so many years. His brother in everything but the legal sense, in every way but blood. Changbin would follow Chan into the very pits of hell if Chan needed him to, asked him to. Changbin had done things in the name of Chan that kept him up at night, sometimes, brought him jerking awake from nightmares. The nights that happened when he was in bed with Seungmin, he found himself a little afraid to keep touching Seungmin, for fear that the blood that had drenched his hands in his dreams was real and he’d get it on Seungmin’s pale, pristine skin.
What would Changbin not do for Chan? Very little. But he couldn’t support Chan in this.
“Jeongin is young, in a lot of ways we never were able to be. But he isn’t a kid,” Changbin said. “He’s an adult. He can do what he wants. And I think you should stay out of it, hyung.”
He didn’t let Chan come back with a rebuttal. He got to his feet instead and strode out of the office, closing the door firmly behind him. His heart was beating too hard in his chest. Part of him had wanted to say, I understand, I get it, I feel the same way, I’m scared for him too, but it had been drowned out by Seungmin’s voice. Seungmin’s voice, telling him that Jeongin deserved to be treated like the adult that he was.
He took a shaky breath. He hoped Seungmin was proud of him, at least.
——
Jisung made it to the landing between the second and first floors before he stopped and said, “What the fuck,” out loud, his voice echoing a little bit in the empty space. It was like the reality of what he’d just seen had finally caught up to him, the way Jeongin had taken Minho’s hand without a hint of hesitation, and how Minho had let it happen. Minho, who could barely handle a friendly hand on the shoulder, had let it happen.
That would have been weird enough, but nobody else had reacted like it was the weirdest thing they had ever seen in their life. Chan had seemed mad, Changbin perfectly calm. Jisung had wanted to ask them, hello did you just SEE THAT but he knew that they had, and their reactions were what they were. The hand holding hadn’t shocked them.
He fumbled his phone out of his pocket, almost dropping it on the concrete floor but catching it just in time. When he opened it up, it was on his chat with Changbin, summoning him to the meeting, and he exited out of that one and into his messages with Hyunjin.
He’d been given Hyunjin’s phone number along with all the others once he’d finally, properly been integrated into the group, after his first small job with Changbin. He’d never once used it until a handful of weeks ago when Hyunjin had texted him, out of nowhere, to let him know that Jeongin had lost his phone but was looking for him. Jisung hadn’t even known Hyunjin had his phone number, and in his shock had done the first thing he could think of and sent a (he could admit, particularly stupid) meme.
what does this picture mean had been Hyunjin’s response, and Jisung had had to explain memes to him, torn the entire time between a fond amusement that was almost crippling and a heartsick sadness that he couldn’t put into words.
Since then they’d been texting a little bit more, Jisung checking if Hyunjin wanted anything when he was out, Hyunjin letting him know if there was leftover food upstairs. It was extremely precious to Jisung, but more precious was the way Hyunjin had been sending him, every so often, memes of his own, things he had apparently found on the internet somehow, either with no context or because he wanted Jisung to explain them to him. Every time it happened, Jisung felt somewhat flustered for the rest of the day.
He was trying to work up to sending Hyunjin memes he thought Hyunjin might find funny. Before he could do that, though, he had to figure out what Hyunjin found funny. And to do that, he had to get Hyunjin to laugh at something he said, and there was every chance that would never happen.
i just saw minho-hyung and jeongin holding hands??? he sent now and watched as a few seconds later the message was read. The response took a little longer to arrive.
hyunjin: oh yeah
hyunjin: they slept together last night
Jisung gaped at his phone and then looked up at the ceiling to squint at the camera Seungmin had installed in there. If this was a joke, and Seungmin was recording it for his own amusement or so Hyunjin could laugh about it later, Jisung would— well, honestly, he’d probably find it pretty funny too. But still!
jisung: ???????????????????
jisung: is that a joke
hyunjin: no?
hyunjin: you are so embarrassingly behind the times jisung
hyunjin: you’re like literally the last one to know
“Well, okay!” Jisung said out loud, not sure what the fuck was going on but willing to roll with it, if for no other reason than it didn’t even feel like the weirdest thing to have happened over the past few weeks. Felix, sweet and kind and funny in his way, turning out to be the heir to the Magpie had been somehow more shocking than this news. Which, actually—
Did it make sense to him, when he thought about it? His first reaction had been surprise, yes, but not quite shock. It had been very obvious from very early on that Minho had a soft spot for Jeongin, and that Jeongin looked up to Minho in a way that he didn’t look up to the others. That eventually leading to some kind of sexual relationship would have seemed like something of a stretch to Jisung, and still did, honestly, but it wasn’t as though there wasn’t something there.
It was still fucking weird though. It still felt a little bit like the building had been picked up and shaken around and then put down wrong, like the house in the Wizard of Oz.
He sent a crying face emoji back to Hyunjin and then put his phone back into his pocket, before he continued down the stairs. Seungmin’s workroom door was closed, as usual, and Jisung thought about poking his head inside and getting clarification that Hyunjin wasn’t, in fact, fucking with him, but Hyunjin wasn’t the type. He didn’t joke around with Jisung. It was one of the defining features of their relationship.
Instead he continued down to the basement, where Jeongin was standing near the table in front of the shooting range, one of the new guns in his hands, another on the table. Minho was there too, standing closer to the wall, arms folded across his chest, in that way that always made Jisung feel like he was about to get criticised for something. Minho never actually had criticised Jisung like that, but something about it always just felt like he was seconds away from snapping that Jisung’s posture was atrocious.
“Hyung!” said Jeongin. His voice was perhaps the brightest Jisung had ever heard it. “Hi! Are you excited about the guns?”
Jisung eyed him, then the guns, and then Jeongin again. If he hadn’t already heard the truth from Hyunjin, seeing Jeongin like this might have tipped him off somehow, because Jeongin looked a little bit like he was high. He looked very much like someone who had gotten good sex sometime in the last twenty-four hours, his smile radiant, his body language relaxed. He looked, in fact, like someone who had gotten the kind of sex that Jisung usually only got at the hands of pretty girls who owned strap-ons.
“Sure,” he said, because he was excited about the new guns, excited to play around with them, to really get to grips with them. He was not sure he was excited like Jeongin, but that may have been the orgasms talking. “Let me try them out first though, Jeongin-ah. Just in case there’s something wrong with them, okay?”
Jeongin pouted a little, but it wasn’t clear if it was because he thought Jisung was treating him like a baby or because he was that desperate to shoot the gun. He stepped back all the same, and let Jisung take the other gun. Jeongin had already gotten some of the magazines out, and Jisung picked one up, turning it over in his free hand.
He’d never worked with a gun like this before. He’d never used external magazines, only ones that got loaded into the gun, or, like with his sniper rifle, individual bullets that he loaded carefully. He’d looked up the night before how to load these guns, and he did it now, slowly, both to make sure he got it right and so Jeongin could watch him and see what he was doing.
Luckily, he didn’t fuck it up. Usually he wouldn’t have minded doing so, if it was just in front of Jeongin, and a gun that didn’t really matter. But this gun did matter, and Minho was there too, watching the two of them. Jisung had always kind of wanted to impress Minho, even from the very beginning. Minho not wanting him here hadn’t affected anything, because Chan and Changbin had insisted on giving him a chance, but Jisung had known that Minho could make things— difficult, if he never approved. That urge had never quite faded away. Minho was simply too competent at everything he did. Jisung was incredibly envious of that.
He showed Jeongin how to load his own gun, something Jeongin picked up quickly, the way he always did when it came to guns, and then he went to fetch them both their ear protectors, which was when Minho spoke up for the first time.
“No protectors,” he said. “Jisung, you can, if you want. But Jeongin won’t have them on the job, so he needs to get used to the sound.”
Jisung looked at Jeongin and then shrugged. Someone, possibly Minho, although who knew when he’d done it, had attached silencers to the guns anyway, so while it would still be pretty loud, it wouldn’t be deafening, hopefully. Minho was right, besides; they’d have no protection on the job, so Jeongin, at least, should practise without it.
The guns were heavier than their usual guns, and so Jisung had been expecting the recoil to be considerably more, to really feel it in his hands, juddering up his arms. But the kickback was not that strong, surprisingly so, and the first time he shot, he overcompensated with his stance, planting himself on the ground much harder than he needed to. The shot went wide, the bullet disappearing behind the stands and targets and embedding in the concrete wall.
“Huh,” he said, and heard Jeongin giggle somewhere behind him. Jisung looked at him over his shoulder, grinning a little. “Be careful,” he said. “The recoil is much lighter than you’d expect.”
“Okay,” said Jeongin, and stepped up next to him, lifting the gun up into an easy shooting stance. He always looked good like this. There was something about Jeongin’s limbs, the length of them, perhaps, the way he looked lanky without necessarily being all that tall, that always just gave off the impression of clumsy. Jisung had clocked him that way before he’d ever seen Jeongin knock something off a table or walk into a door. None of that was on display when Jeongin was shooting.
He pulled the trigger once. He didn’t seem surprised by the recoil like Jisung had been but he did say, “Oh!” as the echo of the shot faded from the room. He looked down at the rifle in his hands. “Wow, it’s really sensitive,” he said. “I barely touched the trigger.”
“Yeah,” said Jisung, who had noticed that too. “I guess it’s really important to make sure you have the safety on most of the time, huh.”
Jeongin nodded. His hair was sticking up at the back. Jisung, when he first saw that, upstairs in Chan’s office, had thought, aw, he just woke up from a nap. Now he added that to the way Jeongin was wearing a shirt that Jisung vaguely recalled Minho wearing before and thought, oh Christ they were having sex earlier. This was one of the weirdest days of Jisung’s life.
They fucked around with the guns for a few minutes, trying to figure out the best way to hold them, how to shoot them on target. It was harder than Jisung expected, and probably harder for Jeongin than anything else they’d done down here before, because he’d never had to get used to a totally new gun, only variants on the usual. Jeongin sometimes got frustrated about these things, but he was in such a good mood today that every time one of his shots went careening somewhere, he just kept giggling about it.
It was slow going, and they’d been doing a mediocre job for about ten minutes before Minho sighed from behind them. Jisung wasn’t sure if he’d timed it so it sounded perfectly between all the gunshots or not; it didn’t seem like something Minho would do, but it was timed just so. “Alright,” he said.
Jisung looked back at him and found Minho coming closer, his hands no longer folded across his chest. “Alright?” Jeongin repeated, also looking back at Minho.
“I’ll help,” Minho said. “It seems like it’ll go faster. Here, Jisung,” he added, and Jisung snapped to attention, just resisting the urge to salute. That probably wouldn’t go down too well. “Your shoulders are too high, it’s a little heavier, you’re overcompensating.” He touched Jisung’s shoulder, a brief, impersonal push to get them to a lower position. Then he paused, clearly waiting for Jisung to shoot.
Jisung did, and noticed the difference immediately: for one, his shot was actually on target. “Wow!” he said. “Thanks, hyung.”
Minho grunted under his breath and then turned to Jeongin. “As for you, baby boy,” he said.
“Me?” Jeongin blinked at him, eyes big in his face, looking at Minho half over his shoulder. If it had been any day but today, if Jisung hadn’t known what he did now know about the relationship here, he would have not thought a single thing of that expression on Jeongin’s face. He would not have questioned it.
Now, looking at Jeongin, it was clear that he knew exactly what he was doing. That expression was deliberate. It was genuinely impressive to Jisung. He had not known Jeongin had it in him to be coy and seductive like that.
Minho went to Jeongin, standing behind him, much closer than he had to Jisung, his hands coming up to cup Jeongin’s elbows gently. “You’re standing weird, baby boy,” he said, voice a low murmur, far more intimate than how he had spoken to Jisung. “Here, your stance should be more like this.”
He nudged Jeongin into place, Jeongin going easily, then took his hands away but didn’t step back. He looked like he was waiting for Jeongin to shoot, but Jeongin didn’t. Instead, he twisted around so he could press his mouth, very softly, to the corner of Minho’s mouth. “Thank you, hyung,” he said, a similar murmur of sound.
Minho’s face did— something. Jisung swore he heard the Windows shut down music go through Minho’s head, his expression going completely offline for a second. Jisung had never seen him look like that. He felt very much like he was witnessing something he should not be witnessing.
Then the moment passed, Minho’s expression clearing. “Baby boy,” he said. It was almost a snap, but not quite, almost terse but not quite. It was the kind of tone that reminded Jisung, once again, of girls with their hands in his hair, holding his face to a pillow. Jeongin visibly shivered. “Take this seriously.”
Wow, thought Jisung. Okay!
“I’m taking it seriously,” Jeongin said, almost pouting at Minho. “I’m a professional.”
Minho’s lids lowered, a little. “Is wearing my dirty shirt to a meeting and practise professional?” he asked, tugging very primly at the hem of the grey shirt Jeongin was currently practically swimming in.
“You don’t like it?” Jeongin asked, blinking in affectation. Minho gave no reply, and Jeongin tilted his head. “I can shoot just as well regardless of what I’m wearing.”
Minho looked unmoved, so Jeongin moved forward a couple of steps, raised his gun into the exact stance that Minho had shown him, and then shot, three times. Each one hit a target, much closer to the centre than any of Jisung’s shots. Jeongin gave Minho another look over his shoulder, this one much less coy. “See?”
“Mm,” Minho said. “Good job.”
Jeongin beamed. Jisung very much wanted out of this room, actually. He’d never felt more like a third wheel, and he’d spent some time hanging out in the same room as Hyunjin and Felix before, the two of them cuddling on the couch as Jisung made ramen in the kitchen. He’d listened to Hyunjin whispering something to Felix, who had giggled at it, and even that didn’t make him feel as uncomfortable as standing here listening to that warmth in Minho’s voice, the way Jisung could very well imagine that voice used in other circumstances.
All that being said— Jisung got it. He’d never much wanted to actually sleep with Minho — he liked men, not caged tigers — but he could not say he did not get the appeal. Minho was handsome, and the scars only added to that, didn’t take away from it. He was strong and intense, and all of these were things that would have added up for Jisung, except for the fact that he’d spent the first three months scared shitless of Minho. That tended to put quite a damper on any urge to shit where he ate.
Well, and the fact that he was in love with Hyunjin, and had been at first sight. It was easier for his heart when the sex was anonymous.
Minho took up his position by the wall again, arms once more folded over his chest, looking at the two of them expectantly. Jisung glanced at him and then sidled up to Jeongin, not quite ready to get started again. There was a feeling inside him that felt a little bit like when he poked and prodded at Changbin, knowing as he did so that Changbin would eventually explode on him. A playful urge to push. To test boundaries, perhaps.
He knew perfectly well that Minho could hear him, but he made a show of secretiveness as he said to Jeongin, voice pitched quietly, “You really didn’t pick the easy option, did you, Jeongin-ah?”
Jeongin snorted, and nudged Jisung with his elbow. “You are throwing rocks from a glass house, hyung,” he said. And, well that was true enough. If there was anyone who had no room to talk in terms of making things difficult for himself with romantic choices, it was Jisung. He could not have made it more difficult for himself if he’d tried.
Jisung didn’t respond to that. “Come on,” he said, nudging Jeongin back. “Let’s show off for Minho-hyung.” And Jeongin laughed, at least, even if Jisung didn’t quite dare look back at Minho.
——
Felix had kept himself mostly busy today, flitting back and forth between different people, different tasks, to keep himself both out of the apartment for the most part and away from Chan, too. When he’d eventually retreated back to their bedroom, he’d been half-expecting Chan to spend another night in his office, another night as a martyr to— Felix didn’t even know what, he didn’t really understand where Chan’s head was on this whole thing. The thought of it annoyed him, but not quite enough to go down and drag Chan up himself. It was like it was a test, in some ways.
He needn’t have worried. He was changing into his sleep clothes when there was a light knock on the bedroom door and when it opened a second later, Chan stepped inside looking remarkably like a damp puppy: pathetic, sad, all big eyes and hangdog expression.
Stop that, he thought grumpily, even as something melted inside him at the sight.
“Hyung,” he said, soft.
“Lix,” said Chan. He looked exhausted, shadows deep under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept at all last night. “I—”
He trailed off. There was an expression in his eyes that Felix didn’t really like, something that reminded him of the expression he’d had when they first talked in this room after Chan had found out about Felix. Something desperate and on edge, a man who did not know what to do.
“Come to bed, hyung,” Felix said quietly, holding out his hand for Chan to take. “You need some sleep, we can talk more in the morning.”
“No,” said Chan, stepping forward to grip Felix’s outstretched hand, firm and shaky. His fingers were unusually cold. “No, I— Lix, can I ask for a favour? Can you do something for me? I’ll— we can sleep after that but I can’t sleep, I can’t, not until I know—”
“Hyung,” Felix interrupted, tilting his head to the side. A favour, he thought, feeling his brows draw down just a little. He brought their joined hands near his belly, putting his spare one overtop Chan’s to try and warm it. “What is it?”
“Can you talk to Jeongin for me,” Chan said, the words rushing out of him. Felix’s stomach sank, his hands going a little lax around Chan’s while Chan squeezed his harder. “I’m scared that he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Chan said, still fast, his eyes fevered. “That he doesn’t know— that he doesn’t know he can say no if he wants to. He keeps saying that he’s in control, that he’s asking for this stuff, but I don’t— I never talked to him about any of it before.”
He sounded genuinely distressed, every part of him clearly on some pitch of anxiety and worry. None of it put on, all of it very real. “Hyung,” said Felix gently. “He’s an adult, I’m sure he’s figured—”
“Felix, he said that Minho hit him. He said that Minho slapped him across the face,” Chan said. Felix blinked, unable to keep the surprise off his face. Chan seemed to read it, and he pressed on, “I just— I don’t know how to get through to him, because he got so mad at me earlier when I tried to talk to him, and nobody else seems to think there’s a problem with this, but Minho is hitting him and biting him, and I just— he’s not safe, I need him to know that he doesn’t have to do these things—”
He was close to hyperventilating before Felix reached out to cup his face, stopping the words as they blurted out of him. “Okay, hyung, okay,” he said, his thumb rubbing over Chan’s cheekbone. He thought for a moment, taking in Chan’s words. Then he nodded and said, “I’ll go talk to him, okay? I’ll go— speak with him.”
He didn’t want to, really, it felt like something of an overstep and also was bound to be exceedingly awkward. But he was very sure, now, that it was a necessity on multiple fronts.
Chan was working himself up into hysteria, a pitch of emotion that was only being fed by his exhaustion. And he would never settle, if Felix didn’t have some kind of— heart to heart, he supposed, with Jeongin. Chan loved his little brother so much, a fact that had been as obvious as the sun in the sky to Felix from day one, and his fear over what was happening was not feigned in any way.
And Jeongin— Felix did not doubt Jeongin’s autonomy in the same way Chan did. If Minho was involving pain in their bedroom forays, then Felix assumed Jeongin must have agreed. But Felix knew better than some that initial consent was not always— something that carried through. Sometimes partners got too rough, went over a line. When Felix had first been experimenting, sneaking around in clubs, he’d had a few experiences that had been less than pleasant. Afraid of being caught, or of— he wasn’t even sure now. Looking foolish, looking stupid. He’d not fully understood that he could, midway through a blowjob, change his mind, actually.
Minho was intelligent, and did not seem like he would be cavalier about such things; he didn’t seem like the type to be cavalier about anything, but things felt a bit— intense for such early days, and Felix was suddenly somewhat afraid that Jeongin was diving in headfirst and might get lost in the water.
So he would talk to Jeongin. To put this all to rest.
Chan was looking at him with such naked relief that it almost smothered the annoyance in Felix. But only almost. “Thank you, Lix,” he murmured. “Thank you.”
Out of the apartment again, his feet stuffed into his sneakers, Felix stomped his way down the stairs. His footsteps echoed on the concrete underfoot, hands in his pockets to try to keep them warm. The stairwell was icy cold, now that winter was firmly upon them, and it was especially bad after the sun had gone down. He was shivering a bit by the time he reached Minho’s bedroom door.
He knocked, a careful rap of his knuckles against the wood. He only had time to shift from one foot to the other a couple of times before the door opened to reveal Minho standing there, looking at him in that blank way he had, intimidating as hell. Sometimes Felix got the sense that Minho wasn’t even doing it on purpose, that that was just how his face was. Other times, he knew that Minho was doing it on purpose. Today it luckily seemed to be the former.
Minho didn’t say anything. He just looked at Felix standing on his doorstep until Felix said, very politely, “Hello, can I speak to Jeongin, please?”
From somewhere in the room, Jeongin said, “Felix-hyung?” in a tone of great surprise. A couple of seconds later, without saying anything, Minho leaned slightly to the side so Jeongin could stick his head around him to peer at Felix outside. There was something so easy about the way Minho had moved to make room for Jeongin, without seeming to need to think about it, that Felix felt his heart clench a little.
“Hi,” said Felix.
Jeongin blinked at him. “I thought Chan-hyung would be with you,” he said.
“No,” said Felix, unable to help the way his face twisted into something wry at that. “Just me. Though I am here at his request. He wants me to talk to you about some— stuff. If that’s okay.”
Jeongin got an expression on his face that Felix could only describe as dubious. “Stuff,” he repeated, very flatly.
“Yeah,” said Felix. He caught Jeongin’s gaze and, very deliberately, let Jeongin see him roll his eyes. “Stuff.”
Minho looked between the two of them and then spoke for the first time, his voice very even. “I’ll go to the workroom, baby boy,” he said. “You can talk here.”
Jeongin looked almost comically surprised at that. “Hyung, it’s okay,” he said. “Felix and I can go upstairs or something, you don’t have to—”
But Minho was already sliding past Felix, away from his bedroom and to where the stairs started to lead down to the first floor. Jeongin stared after him like he was utterly baffled. Felix was a little confused too. Hyunjin had mentioned, once or twice, that he’d never so much as seen the inside of Minho’s room, not since he’d moved in, and that was why he used Jisung’s little bathroom to dye his hair. Minho’s room was a very private space, and yet here he was, just letting Felix come inside.
“Hyung,” Jeongin called, taking a step out into the hallway, “hyung, are you sure?”
Minho stopped halfway down the stairs, turning to look at him. When he’d looked at Felix earlier, he’d been blank, no emotion, which was, on Minho’s face, an emotion in and of itself. When he looked at Jeongin, it was like a repeat of this morning, but more somehow. If Felix wasn’t seeing it with his own eyes, he would not have thought that Minho was capable of looking as fond as he did looking up at Jeongin like that.
“It’s okay, baby boy,” he said. “You can use my room.”
Jeongin didn’t invite Felix inside though until Minho had disappeared around the landing. Then Jeongin, stepping aside, said, “Come in, I guess.”
Felix came into a bedroom that could barely be described as such. It looked only slightly better than some of the hovels he’d found himself in during his time on the streets, sneaking his way into abandoned buildings and curling up in damp corners or on old mattresses left behind. A huge room, with nothing in it. It was not even that there was nothing with personality in it, it was just that it was almost entirely empty.
Jeongin shut the door behind them. Felix looked at him, knowing that his eyes were wide. “Christ,” he said. “This room?”
“I know,” Jeongin said. He was frowning, looking around the room himself, not motioning for Felix to go any further in. Although Felix wasn’t sure where there was to go. There was nowhere to sit, other than on the unmade bed, and he didn’t much want to sit down on the scratched up flooring. “It’s— I’m going to fix it. I can’t believe he let you in here like that. He really— today is the first time I’ve been in here.”
“Oh,” said Felix. He had no idea what to say about that, what to think about it. It was clearly not a sign that he was somehow trusted to the same level that Jeongin was, because Minho had made it obvious over the past few weeks that he was still watching Felix, carefully making sure that he didn’t have a chance to put a toe out of line. He might have found it upsetting except that he actually respected Minho more for making it so obvious. It actually took a little of the stress away, to simply know that he was being watched.
Jeongin was chewing the inside of his cheek, looking around the room for a few more seconds. Felix wondered if the fact that nobody other than Minho ever came in here meant that nobody else knew what the room actually looked like. When Felix had first moved into Chan’s room, it had had a sterile kind of feeling to it, but it had been decidedly a bedroom. Hyunjin’s room had struck him from the very beginning as the kind of space that could only be cultivated by someone at ease in the space. This was not that. This was the room of someone who was set to leave at a moment’s notice.
Felix recognised that. His own bedroom at his father’s house had looked like this, just— prettier, he supposed. But still empty and blank, with almost nothing he couldn’t bear to leave behind. The only things he’d had to treasure there were the few photos of his mother that he’d managed to hide, and the letter she’d written to him just before she passed away. He’d had to leave them behind anyway, in the end.
“It seems like you were right,” Felix said gently, as Jeongin continued to stand there with his mouth twisted, arms crossed defensively over his chest. When Jeongin looked at him, Felix elaborated, “About Minho-hyung caring for you.”
Some of that tension left Jeongin’s shoulders, but his eyes were wary. “He does,” Jeongin said, the set of his mouth going stubborn. “Chan-hyung doesn’t understand.”
“He’s worried,” Felix said, not matching Jeongin’s tone. “That’s all.”
“Did he tell you about the bite mark?” Jeongin demanded.
“He mentioned it,” Felix said evenly. Colour came, pink and diffused, to Jeongin’s cheeks. “And something about Minho-hyung hitting you.”
“I wanted it,” Jeongin said immediately. His body language was closing again. “Did he send you down here to try to convince me Minho-hyung is assaulting me,” he asked, a flatness there concealing anger underneath, but not very well. “Again.”
Felix sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. He wanted to understand Chan’s perspective, he really did. And he supposed part of Chan’s fear was just— Hyunjin. Having raised Hyunjin after what had happened to him, Chan’s eyes opened to the evil in the world, in a whole new way. Felix imagined the idea of Chan having to walk Jeongin back from that same kind of trauma was— nightmarish.
So Felix understood that. He did. But there were many steps between that and— whatever Jeongin and Minho were doing, even if they weren’t being safe. Which had not yet even been ascertained. The way Chan had spoken about Minho hitting Jeongin had made it very clear that he was not thinking of it as some kind of bedroom fun, not seeing it in the right context. Felix had no idea if it was a hangup specific to Minho and Jeongin or if Chan had a blind spot to the entire concept, if he viewed things like this as inherently problematic.
If it were the latter, then— well. Felix might have his work cut out for himself in the future.
“I’m sorry he said that,” Felix said, strained. A little resentful that he had to apologise on Chan’s behalf. That Jeongin was looking at Felix and seeing him, on some level, the same way he saw Chan right now. Someone intent on coddling Jeongin. Infantilizing him, almost. “He shouldn’t have. I understand why you’re angry. But I wouldn’t do that, not even if Chan-hyung asked me to. That’s not why I’m here.”
The anger in Jeongin had dissipated into something more like wary suspicion. His lips pouted out in a thoughtful purse. “Then why are you here,” he asked.
“Jeongin-ah,” Felix said, softly. He came forward so he could touch Jeongin’s upper arms, setting his small hands there against the warmth of Jeongin through his shirt. Jeongin’s crossed arms loosened, and he looked at Felix through his lashes, his face tucked down. Felix felt a little— parental, right now, which was silly, because Jeongin wasn’t that much younger than him. But Felix very much wanted to look after Jeongin. Maybe that was some— some supernatural charm of Jeongin’s. To inspire protectiveness. “I told you, I’m on your side.”
Jeongin’s shoulders fully slumped. “I thought—” he said, stopping to wet his lips a little nervously. “You said this morning that you were on my side, but I thought that might have changed, if Chan-hyung had spoken to you. He— he doesn’t get it.”
Felix pulled a face. No, Chan didn’t get it. “He doesn’t,” Felix said, his hands sliding down along Jeongin’s arms until he could hold his hands. Jeongin let him, let Felix curl his fingers around his longer ones. “I do, though. I get it. I’m not here to tell you what to do in bed. I just— I really want to put to rest that you’re safe. So I can go back upstairs and tell Chan-hyung honestly that everything is fine.”
With the hostility gone, Jeongin now looked decidedly shy. It wasn’t until it was gone from his face that Felix realised just how stubborn his expression had been. How defensive his body language had been. From the moment the conversation had started, Jeongin had looked a little bit like how he’d looked last night, standing in the television room defending Minho from Chan. Like he’d thought he’d have to defend Minho from Felix, or defend this relationship.
But he didn’t need to do that, not with Felix. Not when Felix knew how Jeongin felt, not when Felix knew how Minho felt too. Minho had apologised to Felix, after saying he would never do that very thing, just because Jeongin had asked him to. It went beyond a mere soft spot, beyond fondness.
“Minho-hyung would never hurt me,” Jeongin said, very intent.
That very much was not the point, as far as Felix was concerned. “Never on purpose,” Felix said, and something in Jeongin’s eyes flickered, uneasy. Felix squeezed his hands a little. “Sometimes things go beyond what we thought they’d be, in the heat of the moment. We say yes to one thing and our partner doesn’t know that doesn’t mean yes to something that goes a little further. It’s happened to me. Not with Chan-hyung. But it’s happened.”
“I’m sorry, hyung,” Jeongin said, serious and unwavering. “I’m sorry that happened to you. But if that happened with us— I’d say no, hyung. I’d just— I’d say no, and he’d stop.”
Felix felt himself smiling a little. The sensation that his heart was being lightly squeezed, now loosened. Good. “That’s what I was worried about,” he said, wanting to be as honest and clear as possible. “It might sound stupid, but I wasn’t sure if you knew you were allowed to do that. I don’t want to baby you, Jeongin, please don’t think that’s what I’m doing here. It’s just something that can feel good at the start and then stop feeling good and I wanted to make sure you know that you can say no.”
“I do know that,” Jeongin said, that same intent tone. “We’re not doing anything I don’t want.”
Felix hummed under his breath. “Did you talk to Minho-hyung about safewords?” he asked.
He was not expecting Jeongin to look surprised at that, but somehow he did, like the question itself was unusual. Felix was about to get concerned, but then Jeongin said, “Hyung, you know about safewords?”
That made Felix laugh out loud, head tipping back a little bit for a moment before he grinned at Jeongin. “I wasn’t actually raised under a rock, Jeongin,” he said. He’d learned about these kinds of things the same place Jeongin had, he imagined: the internet, trying to figure out what the hell all these weird little urges inside him came from. He’d ever done anything along the lines of what Jeongin was doing, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know the basics.
“Well, no,” Jeongin said, a little grumpily. “But I mean— it’s not like you’d need them with Chan-hyung, right?”
“Well, not so far,” Felix said, and when Jeongin looked like he was about to comment on that, his eyes wide, he added quickly, “That’s not the point. The point is, have you spoken to Minho-hyung about safewords? Or about— any of this? Limits and the like?”
A pause, while Jeongin clearly struggled with whether to let what Felix had said go or not, and then ultimately did so. “No,” he said. “I haven’t. I don’t need to, hyung. If I asked Minho-hyung to stop, or if I said no, he’d stop.”
“That’s good,” Felix said gently. “But you should still talk to him about actual safewords, Jeongin. You two need to be really clear on when and how you can revoke consent on this kind of thing. I know it’s important to your hyung, but it’s important to me, too.”
Jeongin didn’t say anything for a long, long minute. Then he heaved a heavy sigh, the kind of sigh of the truly put-upon. “Fine, I’ll talk to him about it,” he said, long-suffering.
“Okay,” agreed Felix. “That’s all I wanted. And I can go tell Chan-hyung that I spoke to you and that everything’s fine and maybe he can calm down a little bit.”
Jeongin rolled his eyes. “I hope he does, because—” His face darkened a little. “I’m going to start getting really pissed, if he keeps this up.”
“You’re not the only one.” Felix pulled one of his hands free so he could pat both of Jeongin’s. “I’ll get going now, so you can get back to your— biting or whatever.”
Jeongin let out a surprised-sounding giggle. It was cute, he was so good. Chan had raised him so well and he was refusing to see the extent of that. The way Jeongin was— grown.
Felix drew Jeongin into a tight hug, his arms up around Jeongin’s neck, Felix having to go up on his tiptoes for it. “Give him a few days,” Felix said into the collar of Jeongin’s shirt. “I think he just needs some sleep and time to come around. He loves you.”
“I love him too,” Jeongin said, muffled against Felix’s shoulder. “But that doesn’t make it okay.”
No, Felix reflected as he climbed the stairs back up to the apartment, having waved Jeongin goodbye at Minho’s bedroom door, it didn’t make it okay. But he did wonder if Jeongin had seen, as Felix had seen, that panic in Chan. The very real fear for Jeongin’s safety. He probably hadn’t, because that was what Chan was like; Felix knew it, by now, the ways in which Chan hid his emotions from the others. Easier to couch fear in concern, panic in an overbearing love.
When he let himself back into their bedroom, he wasn’t surprised to see Chan still awake. He was actually more surprised to see that Chan wasn’t pacing or something. Instead, Chan was just sitting on the bed, not changed out of the clothes he’d been wearing all day, apparently just waiting. He stood up when Felix came in. He looked so tired and overwrought.
“Well?” he said, just on the cusp of being demanding. “You talked to him?”
Felix didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Instead, he came forward, and stroked his hand through Chan’s hair, as soothing as he could make it. He needed to wash it, the texture rough against Felix’s fingers. Chan leaned into the touch, probably more of an instinct than anything else. “Yeah,” Felix said quietly, as he did it again, just for the pleasure of seeing Chan relax a little. “I talked to him. It’s all okay, hyung, I promise.”
“Did you— what did you tell him? Did you tell him that he doesn’t need to do this?”
Felix kept quiet again. He guided Chan down onto the bed and then stepped forward so he was between Chan’s knees, his hands tipping Chan’s head up to look at him. Chan went remarkably easily, more pliant under Felix’s hands than he would have expected, looking up at Felix pleadingly. Wanting Felix to tell him something that Felix couldn’t tell him.
“I talked to him about consent,” he said, “and about the importance of communication. I promise you, hyung, that Jeongin isn’t over his head. He’s very smart, and very stubborn. He won’t let himself be guided where he doesn’t want to be. You raised him really well, hyung.”
Chan closed his eyes for a few moments. Felix kind of wanted to lean down and kiss his eyelids. He kind of wanted to shake him at the same time. Don’t you see, he wanted to ask. Don’t you get where he gets this stubbornness from?
“But he’s still down there,” Chan whispered. “He didn’t come upstairs with you.”
“No,” said Felix. “He’s where he wants to be.”
Chan nodded, eyes still closed. He leaned forward and laid his forehead against Felix’s stomach, his hands coming around Felix to wrap around his waist. Felix’s hands dropped to Chan’s shoulders, where he could feel how tense he was, the fine tremors of someone holding themselves locked in place. In the quiet of the bedroom, Chan’s breathing was a little loud, a little ragged. Someone trying to not cry, perhaps.
“Hyung,” Felix said, once it seemed like Chan’s breathing was evening out a little. “Let’s go to bed?” And he felt Chan nod against him, but it took a long time before either of them moved.
——
Minho let himself into the workroom without bothering to knock, mostly because nobody knocked on that door but partly because he knew that fact annoyed Seungmin quite a lot. He’d never actually requested that they knock, and there wasn’t a sign up or anything, so Minho didn’t think he had a leg to stand on, but it still annoyed him that nobody ever did it. So Minho made sure to never knock.
When he went in, though, Seungmin didn’t seem to be there at first glance. Changbin was there, sitting at the workbench, with a laptop open in front of him and a few papers spread around. The lights were bright overhead, and he was chewing on the end of a pencil when he turned to look at Minho. “Hey, hyung,” he said.
“Hello,” said Minho. It wasn’t that he was surprised to see Changbin down here, because Changbin’s bedroom was the size of a shoebox and he usually either worked here or in the kitchen. It was that Seungmin not being in his workroom at this time of night was surprising. It was at least three hours before the usual time he went upstairs to get food. “Where’s Kim Seungmin?”
A clatter from the van tucked at the side of the room. Seungmin stepped out the back of it, a wrench in his hand, a smudge of something dark on his cheek. He was wearing those stupid dog slippers Jisung had gotten him; apparently it was cold enough for them. He blinked at Minho blankly and said, “Did you need me, hyung?”
“No,” said Minho. He walked around the table to the little mini-fridge by the couch, where Seungmin kept the drinks he stole from upstairs and leftovers that could be eaten cold. He took two bottles of water out of it and then turned to Seungmin, waving them in the air, and said, “I’m taking these.”
Seungmin rolled his eyes. He came over to the workbench and started cleaning his hands off with a rag. “You know there’s an entire collection of those upstairs,” he said. “You don’t need to take them out of my fridge.”
Minho shrugged. He did know that. Usually he wouldn’t even bother, he didn’t keep water in his bedroom overnight and just drank from the tap if he got thirsty, which he rarely did. But he wasn’t alone in that room anymore, and while it might have all been fine for him, the thought of Jeongin doing that filled him with an emotion that was extremely similar to distress.
He couldn’t let Jeongin drink out of the grotty taps. He couldn’t let Jeongin go to bed on that mattress on the floor without Minho trying to make it just that bit better. He’d seen the surprise on Jeongin’s face, heard it in his voice, when he’d let Felix into the room, and it made sense, since Minho had never let anyone, not even Jeongin, in there before today. If you’d asked Minho before today, he would have said Felix was never, ever stepping foot over that threshold.
That was before today. That was before he’d seen Jeongin in there, smiling at him in the inconsistent sunlight coming through those newspaper-covered windows. That was before the silence that he’d always found just a touch oppressive was filled with the sound of Jeongin’s moans, his gasps of pleasure, his sobbing calls of Minho’s name. The room had been utterly transformed by Jeongin’s presence in it.
Better with you in it. He had not been joking, had not been exaggerating. It was better with Jeongin in it, and it no longer felt like it was some hidden corner of the building for Minho to rot in. It was Jeongin’s space, now, and so Minho would let Jeongin do what he wished with it.
So he had needed water, but he could not have gone upstairs for it. There was too much of a chance that Chan would have been in the apartment. It was cowardly of him, shamefully so, but he did not want to get caught alone with Chan. He had been willing to wait behind earlier, after the meeting, even as his stomach had clenched at the words, but Jeongin had dragged him out and he hadn’t had to do it. He was not going to seek Chan out. He would go when he was summoned, but he would not walk into that conversation proactively.
“Hyung,” said Changbin, looking at him over the open lid of his laptop. “Is Jeongin staying in your room tonight?”
Minho went— still. He’d known that Changbin knew, just because he hadn’t blinked a single eyelid when Jeongin had grabbed his hand after the meeting. He’d stayed behind, too, after Minho had left, and if he hadn’t known, Minho had no doubt that Chan had told him about it.
Once the stress of finding out who Felix really was had begun to wane a little, Minho had almost started to wait for Changbin to seek him out, to warn him off just as Chan had done. He’d been prepared for it, for all the reasons Changbin would have for why he and Jeongin weren’t suited, all the ways it was wrong of Minho to want him, to love him in that way. Changbin loved Jeongin like an older brother; more, perhaps. He loved Jeongin the same way Chan did, a brother and a father and everything in between, protective and caring and everything Jeongin deserved.
It had never happened. Changbin had never spoken to him about the topic at all, not even once. Minho had come to eventually wonder if that was because Changbin, knowing that Chan had already extracted that promise out of Minho, figured that was enough. That if Minho had already given his word, then Changbin could trust him as Chan had said he could.
If that was the case, then Changbin had been mistaken in that trust, just like Chan had been.
Changbin looked at him expectantly. “Yes,” Minho said eventually.
Changbin nodded. “Okay,” he said. Then he smiled, a little lopsided, wry. “I expected him with you, he’s been attached at your hip all day, huh.”
“He’s talking to Felix,” Minho said, a little on autopilot at this point. “I came to get him some water.”
Changbin hummed under his breath. Minho felt a little frozen. He never usually struggled with speaking to Changbin, who outranked him but not in a way that really meant all that much in the grand scheme of things. It was more that they shared a common goal, a shared pact, of loyalty to Chan above all else. Well, almost above all else, for Minho. Perhaps that was where he fell short, compared to Changbin.
“He’s okay?” Changbin asked. His voice was very casual, more casual than it had been, in a way that was not casual in the slightest. “Everything is good?”
Minho felt it, then, the pointed interest. But Changbin still didn’t seem like he was mad, and the question seemed genuine besides. But it was there, the leading question, and just as it always did, it made Minho feel exposed, because he was starting to think that everyone in this house simply— knew. They’d always known what he was on some level and now they were seeing what he was on a more base, animal level, too. And they were watching Jeongin place himself in Minho’s hands, willingly and with enthusiasm.
He could not blame any of them for their concern.
He managed a nod, short and to the point. He wasn’t sure how to answer the question. Yes, Jeongin was good, he was safe in Minho’s room, where Minho could watch over him and look after him. No, Jeongin was not good, because he was in Minho’s bed, where Minho wanted to keep him forever, tucked away from everyone else. Jeongin had said earlier that Minho could do that, keep him there, and Minho had told him he could not, but that didn’t change the fact that he wanted to.
“That’s good,” said Changbin, like Minho had actually given him an answer instead of just freezing up next to the table, staring at him. Then he turned back to his computer and started typing something.
Minho breathed out through his mouth very carefully, controlled to avoid making too much noise. It was how he breathed sometimes on jobs, when he was trying to take someone by surprise. It took a few moments longer than normal to be able to move his head, but when he did, he found that Seungmin was watching him, his face in neutral lines, cleaning rag still held loosely in his hand.
“What,” said Minho flatly.
Seungmin just shrugged. Minho wondered what his conversation with Jeongin earlier had gone like, when he’d shown Jeongin that footage of his argument with Chan. There was part of him that was beyond irritated that Seungmin had shown it to Jeongin in the first place, that he’d shown Jeongin the context for what was now one of Minho’s biggest fuck-ups. A promise that he’d made to the man who he owed loyalty to, and then broken so soon afterwards. Another part of him was grateful, in an almost perverse way, that Seungmin was, in his own way, protective of Jeongin, cared for him so strongly.
That was what Jeongin deserved.
Seungmin tossed the rag down casually onto the workbench and asked, “What time do you want to go over to Blackbird’s in the morning?”
Minho tried to remember back to the meeting, the exact details of what had been said. Usually he had no problem with such a thing, every word imprinted into his memory, but something about Jeongin being there in the same room, about the panic that had spiked inside of him when Chan had told him to wait behind, had made some of it a little fuzzy for him.
“Felix said they open the safe any time between four and six?” he asked. Seungmin nodded wordlessly. “Then we’ll leave here at three, to make sure we get there and set up in time.”
Changbin, in the corner of Minho’s eye, pulled a face. Seungmin didn’t really react, he just said, “Okay, hyung,” and picked up a small screwdriver and, apparently finished with the conversation, went back to the van. They’d have to take it with them later, so they could have all the equipment, and Minho was not overly excited about driving the thing. He could do it, but vans were always more noticeable compared to cars, especially in the early hours of the morning.
He headed to the door, his water bottles held in his hands. Changbin looked up from his screen and said, “Goodnight, hyung. Can you say goodnight to Jeongin from me?”
Minho nodded, and then escaped into the empty hallway, his chest feeling— tight. He was not sure why. Perhaps just the constant reminders of how loved Jeongin was. Minho was not sure, in his entire life, if anyone had taken the time to ask someone else to wish him goodnight. Nobody had ever cared enough about him to do something like that.
And I’m good and sweet and soft, Jeongin had said earlier, almost sarcastically, like he thought such words applied to him were ridiculous. But couldn’t he see, how could he not see, how true they were? Everyone knew it, everyone saw it — Jeongin’s goodness radiated from him. It was truly the stuff of fantasy that Minho had been allowed to touch him the way he had this past day.
Felix was gone by the time he walked back into his bedroom, and Jeongin was sitting in bed, still wearing that grey t-shirt that Minho had left on the bedroom floor before the meeting. He’d been so flustered after he realised how late for the meeting he was about to be that he’d forgotten he’d had a shirt already and found a new one in a drawer. When Jeongin had walked into Chan’s office wearing his own shirt, Minho’s first reaction had been his heart thumping hard in his chest at the sight, with the thought of, Oh, he didn’t realise he picked up my shirt.
Then, a moment later, he’d thought, Oh, no, he did that on purpose. What a little brat. It had been like the realisation that Jeongin had been flirting with him all this time, a sudden shock to the system. If he’d been in the apartment and Jeongin had walked in wearing a t-shirt that had just been taken off Minho’s body, Minho would probably have not been able to resist whisking him off to bed over it. In the meeting, he had been so on edge about being in Chan’s presence that it had been all he could do to just keep his face straight.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin. It was crazy how bright his smile was when he saw Minho. “You’re back.”
Minho nodded. He shut the door behind him and came over to the bed and held out one of the water bottles. Jeongin took it with a blink that faded into a smaller smile, something shyer, close-lipped. He murmured a thank you, settling the bottle at the side of the pillow he appeared to have claimed as his own, the one closest to the wall. When he looked up at Minho again, that smile was so sweet it almost made Minho’s teeth ache.
“Changbin says goodnight,” he said. That made Jeongin grin again, a brief flashing thing, before he smothered it, his usual thing when it came to Changbin. Him and Hyunjin were like that, loving Changbin but teasing him with withheld affection. A family dynamic Minho could never quite get used to.
“Come to bed?” Jeongin said.
Although Minho had told Changbin that Jeongin was planning on staying in his room tonight, it was not until he heard those words out of Jeongin’s mouth that it fully sunk into Minho’s mind exactly what that meant. That Jeongin, just like last night, would rest in Minho’s arms, a wriggling weight seeking out Minho’s warmth. That Minho would fall asleep and wake up tomorrow — at 3am, albeit — and Jeongin would be there.
He could not think of anything to say. He went to his little bathroom and brushed his teeth, letting the routine of it calm his mind just enough that come to bed stopped playing in a loop in his head by the time he spat out the toothpaste into the sink and rinsed his mouth out. When he came out of the bathroom, Jeongin looked up from his phone and watched as Minho stepped out of his sweatpants, folding them neatly and setting them on a pile of books near the wardrobe for the morning. When Minho looked back at him, there was an expression on Jeongin’s face that Minho was beginning to recognise. An expression that still baffled him.
He turned off the light. The room plunged into darkness, except for the flashing blue and green of the signs on the building opposite theirs, dimmed only by the newspaper over the windows. Minho got down onto the bed, his eyes on Jeongin, on that beautiful face slowly coming back into focus as Minho’s eyes adjusted to the light.
“Baby boy,” he said, as Jeongin reached out to touch him. Minho dodged the fingers about to brush his cheek and instead took that hand in his own and let it drop to his lap. “What did Felix talk to you about?”
A beat, before Jeongin sighed a little. But he was still smiling, obvious even in the darkened room, so whatever it had been, it didn’t seem to have actually upset him. “He was checking in on me,” he said, and didn’t elaborate, although he did add, “Hyung, do you think we need safewords?”
Minho tilted his head to the side, looking at Jeongin, those dimples, his hair still slightly fluffy on the side where he’d been pushing against the pillow earlier in the day. He didn’t know if this question was coming from something Felix had said, or if it was something Jeongin himself had been wondering. “We can have safewords if you want, baby boy,” he said softly.
Jeongin’s gaze ran over Minho’s face, watching him carefully, searching for something, although what it was, Minho couldn’t say. “You know what they are, right, hyung?”
Minho almost smiled at that. “Yes, baby boy,” he said. “I know what they are.”
Jeongin’s eyes narrowed slightly, almost impossible to see in this lighting. “From experience?” he asked.
“Yes,” Minho said. “Sometimes they came up. It depended on the partner.” Sometimes he had gone home with someone and the sex had been intense, in the way that he seemed unable to dampen, but it had been just that, sex. Other times he had walked into someone’s apartment, or a hotel room, and it had become apparent very quickly that what was being asked of him was much more than the norm. When it was like that, he made sure he knew exactly when he needed to stop.
Jeongin was a little tense now, his head turned away. Minho squeezed his hand. “We can come up with some if you want, baby boy,” he said. “If it makes you feel safer. But we don’t really— need them.” Jeongin looked at him then, mouth open as if to protest, and Minho understood why. The things Jeongin had spoken about wanting just that morning were more than enough to necessitate them. “If you say no,” he said, before Jeongin could get a word out, “or if you ever tell me to stop, or tell me not to do something, then that’s it. I will stop. We don’t need safewords, baby boy, because stop is enough.”
Jeongin stared at him. Minho couldn’t parse his expression, not in the darkness, but it didn’t seem surprised, necessarily. It was true though, it had always been true. Minho did not want, in any way, an unwilling partner, and it had been the thing about trying to make a move on Jeongin that had so turned his stomach in the first place: the idea that Jeongin might not actually want him, but would allow Minho to fuck him anyway. It did not bear thinking about.
There were things out there, kinks that Minho knew— emulated that. Scenarios where Minho would pin Jeongin to the bed and fuck him despite Jeongin saying no, begging him to stop. Minho couldn’t do it. He was willing to try many things, for Jeongin, and most of what Jeongin had mentioned so far were not unappealing; quite the opposite, in fact. But this was perhaps Minho’s only hard no. If Jeongin ever said no, Minho would not touch him.
Jeongin was quiet for long enough that Minho almost asked if he was okay. But then Jeongin moved, shuffling closer on the bed so that he could kiss Minho. It was no soft press of his mouth, not like he had done earlier in front of Jisung. Jeongin kissed him like he was begging Minho without words to be devoured back. Like he wanted to be consumed, the way Minho wanted to consume.
Minho held him still and kissed him in a way he would not have thought possible before last night. Roughly, holding Jeongin in place for the onslaught of Minho’s mouth, drinking down the soft sounds that came out of Jeongin’s throat as Minho pulled him closer, pulled him into Minho’s lap. How could Minho have had him so many times today and yet still feel like the burning urge inside him was not even the slightest bit sated.
He pulled away, trying to recover himself a little bit. It felt very much like the moment Jeongin’s mouth was on his, on his skin, he lost something he clung to so carefully most of the time. Jeongin was melted against him, his arms around him, hands clutching at Minho’s back, his shoulders. His head tilted in a way that revealed the pale column of his throat and Minho kissed it before he could stop himself.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, voice high and gasping. “Fuck me again, please, please, fuck me again?”
Minho’s head spun. To be begged like that almost sent every rational thought out of his brain. Except that— “Ah, baby boy,” he said, mouth barely lifted from Jeongin’s skin. His teeth itched with the urge to bite into his throat. “I need to sleep. I have to be up in five hours.”
He couldn’t see Jeongin’s face, couldn’t see his reaction. But a moment later he found himself being pushed down onto the bed, onto his back. He could have resisted it, but he let himself be pushed, Jeongin’s hands remarkably gentle with it despite the frantic way he had spoken. Once he lay flat, Jeongin settled a little lower on him, thighs spread wide around Minho’s hips, his chest rising and falling quickly. In the pulsating, dampened light coming from outside, he didn’t look real. He looked like something out of one of Minho’s more lurid dreams.
He was visibly hard already in his boxer shorts. The power of youth, Minho reflected wryly.
Jeongin braced his hands on Minho’s chest and rocked his hips down into Minho’s. Minho didn’t react, even at the press of their cocks together, except to put his hands on Jeongin’s hips; Jeongin gasped, and then said, “I can do all the work, hyung, you can just relax if you want.”
“Little slut,” Minho said, fond beyond measure. What a brat, what a needy brat. Jeongin’s eyelids fluttered shut. “You really can’t do without it, can you?”
Jeongin shook his head without hesitation. He would be very sore by now, after how Minho had taken him apart earlier, and yet it didn’t seem to matter to him. It probably should have mattered to Minho, just like it should have mattered to him that he really did need to be up soon. But it didn’t. The animal was unleashed under his skin; he could not deny Jeongin anything he wished.
He rolled them over, rough with it, fast enough that Jeongin couldn’t catch his balance, and rutted his hips into Jeongin’s, just like he had done last night, trying to get Jeongin to see the error of his ways. Again, that unfurling, Jeongin going limp and pliant for him. He blinked up at Minho, his mouth swollen red. “Hyung, please,” he whispered, like he thought if he asked nicely enough, it would happen.
“Don’t worry,” Minho said, his voice warm and laced with promised violence. “Hyung will give you what you need, baby boy.”
——
The lights in the kitchen let out a quiet buzzing sound, something Hyunjin had first noticed the day they had moved into this place. It wasn’t something that irritated him, just something he’d noticed, perhaps because the lights at the old apartment had done the same thing but quieter, less obvious. He’d asked Changbin why the lights buzzed, and Changbin had fielded the question off to Chan, who had given Hyunjin an explanation that had been far too complicated and science-y for Hyunjin’s brain to understand. What little he remembered of elementary school science classes had not been enough of a basis for the science of electricity.
The lights buzzed now, overhead, a constant hum. He’d turned all the lights on in here, so that there could be few shadows in the room. It was too cold to go to the roof, and too late at night besides; even with his phone flashlight, he might trip on the stairs. His room had been too small, the walls closing in on him a little bit. This room, with all the lights, would have to do for now.
His fingers tapped lightly on the kitchen table. It was the kind of thing that usually earned a whine out of Jeongin, an admonition that Hyunjin was annoying him. But no one was in the room with him, and certainly not Jeongin. Jeongin hadn’t come back up tonight. Jeongin was, apparently, spending the night in Minho’s room.
A lurching feeling inside Hyunjin, like he was in a car that had gone over a bump in the road a little too fast. It had been happening all day, whenever he remembered, whenever he was reminded of Jeongin’s new— relationship with Minho. Every time he was reminded of those shouts and tears and moans.
He jumped as the keypad outside sounded, sudden and loud after the complete silence of the room — the buzzing lights notwithstanding. It was Jisung, singing a song under his breath as he came in and took his shoes off, apparently so focused on that task that he didn’t notice Hyunjin until he looked up and saw him sitting at the kitchen table. Then it was his turn to jump, his hand flying to his heart.
“God,” he said, a little breathless. “You scared me.”
“I was sitting right here,” Hyunjin said. He was a little amused by the reaction but not enough to cut through everything else. It felt like it was completely dampened under the weight of his fear and upset. “The lights are on. It’s not my fault you have the situational awareness of a goldfish.”
“I really wasn’t paying attention,” Jisung said, laughing, that way he had where he was laughing at himself but including Hyunjin in it, if he wanted to be. “I was too excited about the ramen I’m going to make.”
Hyunjin raised an eyebrow. “Is ramen exciting?” he asked. “You had some just last night.”
“Ah, but see,” Jisung said, “that was the shitty, cheap ramen Changbin-hyung buys. I went out earlier and got the good kind.” He came into the room properly, going to the kitchen, where he started pulling out what he needed for his meal. “And there’s nothing more exciting than Shin Black at midnight.”
He made no sense, which wasn’t anything new to Hyunjin, Jisung often came out with things that made very little sense to Hyunjin. Things that made Hyunjin think, he’s so smart and yet so stupid, the fondness inside him liquid and sloshing, filling his lungs until it was hard to breathe.
“If you say so,” Hyunjin said.
Jisung turned to him, holding up two packets of the ramen he liked best. Even without what Jisung had just said, Hyunjin had already known Jisung liked that brand best because he’d noticed how often Jisung ate it, watching Jisung when he knew he wouldn’t be caught. Squirrelling away details that he had no real use for, but things that made him feel pathetically triumphant; things that he knew about Jisung without needing to be told.
“Are you hungry?” Jisung asked, waving one of the ramen packets at him. “Would you like to eat with me? I’ll add two eggs this time, like I promised.”
“No,” said Hyunjin, without thinking about it, and watched the expression on Jisung’s face flicker, just a little. “I’m not hungry,” he added, to clarify, to make sure that Jisung didn’t— stop asking. “I ate earlier.”
He had, in a manner of speaking. He’d heated up some of Felix’s leftover pancakes and ate those during the mid-afternoon, but he wasn’t lying when he said that he wasn’t hungry. He hadn’t had an appetite all day and he couldn’t face the idea of eating even ramen, especially not the kind that Jisung favoured, which tended to be a little spicier than Hyunjin liked.
The clarification worked; Jisung’s smile came back and it didn’t feel like he was pulling it on like he sometimes did, a mask to hide the cuts that Hyunjin so often left on him. “Okay,” he said. “You don’t mind me eating, do you?”
Hyunjin shook his head. Jisung nodded and turned back to the stove, where he set his pot of water to boil. He didn’t talk more to Hyunjin as he worked on his food, his focus on his cooking, but he did start humming, at one point, because it was Jisung and he was incapable of being quiet for longer than five minutes at a time. It was a song that tickled the back of Hyunjin’s mind, something he’d heard long ago, perhaps, or something he’d heard once or twice in a store. Nothing he could put lyrics to but familiar in a vague way.
He had his back to Hyunjin, dressed in a hoodie that was much too big for him, somehow managing to obscure even those shoulders Jisung had. Hyunjin was torn between disappointment that he couldn’t surreptitiously watch those shoulders and an odd, off-balancing kind of delight at seeing Jisung look so small. Because he did look small, when he wore things like this, rare enough that Hyunjin tended to take notice.
He didn’t know what it was about Jisung that made Hyunjin get a shock every time he realised that Jisung was actually much smaller than him. Something about his presence, the way he held himself, all of it made Jisung seem taller, bigger in Hyunjin’s imagination. Sometimes Hyunjin thought about doing to Jisung what he sometimes did to Felix, flopping against his back with all of his weight and covering him with his body. Felix tended to just laugh and take it, or shrug him off. It wouldn’t feel the same, if he did it to Jisung. It could not possibly feel the same.
He was tapping his fingers again. Jisung had been a brief distraction but now his brain was back to that churning, whirring motion, the thoughts looping over and over. It wasn’t the same thing as the rabbit, because it was more like he couldn’t catch a single one of them for long enough to even follow them.
He should be used to it, by now, the uncertainty. The feeling that he knew so much about the world and yet so very little at the same time. He knew too much about the ways a person could be hurt by another, and probably much too little about the ways they could be treated kindly, but the past few years had gone a long way to balancing those books.
Yesterday Felix had asked him to forgive Chan for what had been, to Hyunjin, uncharacteristic unkindness. Today Felix was mad at Chan in turn. But Hyunjin no longer felt like he knew what to think, not when it came to this situation, not when it came to matters such as this. He’d heard, in Chan’s voice, when they spoke in the kitchen, all of the pain and concern and worry that Chan was carrying, and it had left Hyunjin feeling incredibly unsettled.
He’d wanted, all this time, for weeks now, to trust Felix’s words. Sex doesn’t hurt, he’d said, with conviction, and today, he’d insisted that Jeongin wasn’t crying because he was hurt, that he wasn’t crying because it was a bad thing. And Hyunjin had wanted, so badly, to believe him, to trust him, because Felix wouldn’t lie to him, not about this, not when he knew how important it was to Hyunjin.
But at the same time, he knew that Chan would never lie either. I don’t want him to cry during sex, Chan had said, which meant it was a bad thing, it was, because Chan only wanted good things for Jeongin, just like he only wanted good things for Hyunjin. Hyunjin had spent so long trusting Chan’s words, trusting Chan’s— authority in what was good for Hyunjin, what was soft and gentle and what would feel nice for Hyunjin to have, that it was near impossible now to reconcile Chan’s horror at Jeongin crying with Felix’s assurance that it wasn’t anything to worry about.
His head felt like it was spinning. It was too much to cope with, too much to hold inside, he needed to—
Jisung brought his pot of ramen over to the table and set it down with a small flourish that might have made Hyunjin smile in that small little way he’d been letting himself do. Instead, as Jisung lowered himself into Minho’s chair, something about it knocked the words loose from his mouth, and he blurted out, “Have you ever cried during sex?”
The moment the words were out, he felt the embarrassment wash through him sickeningly but he wouldn’t have been able to hold them back if he’d tried. He hadn’t tried, though, they’d fallen out of his mouth without a thought. Jisung seemed to lose his balance for a moment, almost falling the rest of the way into his seat, his eyes wide and fixed on Hyunjin, who knew he was blushing. He could feel the heat on his skin, the same way sometimes the heat seemed to radiate up from the tarmac in the middle of summer.
For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then Jisung looked around the room, almost like he thought someone was about to jump out with a camera and yell surprise. Hyunjin had seen videos like that online, and had always thought it seemed like a cruel thing to do to other people. Not the cruellest, but cruel nonetheless, and not something he’d do to anyone else. When it became clear that it was not a prank, Jisung looked back at Hyunjin and said, “Um. Sorry. Did I— you want to know if I've, uh, cried during sex before?”
This was a terrible idea. Except that Hyunjin needed to know, he wanted to know, something inside himself weeping over how confused and twisted up it was. He wouldn’t have wanted to ask Jisung, not really, but who else was there to ask? He didn’t want to ask Changbin because then he’d have to think about Changbin having sex, and he couldn’t ask Seungmin because he didn’t think Seungmin had ever had sex before. Jisung was the only option.
He managed a nod, a tiny little bob of his head. Jisung swallowed, looking at him, and then said, a little hoarse, “Well, yeah.”
Despite the way his voice sounded, the words themselves were remarkably casual, like he hadn’t really had to think about them once he’d processed the question. Like he had no idea the way those words had sent Hyunjin’s stomach plummeting somewhere around his toes. He was flushed red too, and looking at Hyunjin a little bit like this conversation had dazed him, obviously thrown off by such a question coming so suddenly from Hyunjin. But he was also looking at Hyunjin with a steadiness that let Hyunjin know that Jisung was taking it seriously. The way he always took conversations seriously, when it was with Hyunjin.
But still— “Was it a bad thing?” Hyunjin whispered, forcing the question out. “Or was it a good thing?”
A moment, before Jisung’s face softened. There it was, the pity, the sympathy that Hyunjin always so much hated. He so rarely got it from Jisung, but perhaps that was because he’d never been looking for it. He always avoided this topic with Jisung, for the most obvious reasons, and there was a part of him that was shocked he was capable of breaching it now. Progress, perhaps? But that pity on Jisung’s face almost sent him rocketing back to his room. He hated it.
“Don’t fucking pity me,” he said, a snap of words, harsh and heartfelt. “Don’t— that’s not what this is, don’t pity me.”
Jisung’s expression went blank, a careful smoothing of all emotion. It was not an easy thing to do, and Jisung had come to them already with the ability, this way of making his face into an empty mask. Hyunjin had seen that expression so much over the past couple of years, the way Jisung hid his reactions from Hyunjin, the way he never let Hyunjin see if his words had landed a blow. Hyunjin knew they must have, they always did. The regret was real, the guilt was real, but this, somehow, felt better than the pity. He could not stand that pity.
“It was a good thing,” Jisung said, after a beat of silence. His voice was very soft, but sincere. “It was a really good thing, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin had not realised he was holding himself so tensely until he stopped; when he relaxed, just a bit, he felt the strain in his shoulders and neck from where he’d locked up. There was once again that strange sensation of knowing that a person was telling him the truth and not being able to believe it all the same. A good thing, a really good thing, to have cried during sex.
“Is this—” Jisung started, and then stopped, pressing his lips together. Then he said it after all. “Is this because of Minho-hyung and Jeongin?” Hyunjin nodded, that same small motion. Jisung’s face did something, finally, not a smile but something close to it. “Ah.”
“Ah?” Hyunjin echoed. He was starting to feel tired now. Tired of himself, tired of talking about this, tired of sitting here having to think about Jisung and sex and pleasure in the same conversation. The pleasure was locked away for him, trapped behind the brambles that covered his entire mind, thick and growing almost faster than he could hack at them.
“Well, I did wonder,” Jisung said, clearly trying in his voice for his usual brand of playful humour. “Jeongin looked the happiest I think I’ve ever seen him earlier, and considering Minho-hyung’s— you know—” Hyunjin didn’t know, Hyunjin didn’t know anything. “Well, it makes sense. I bet Jeongin was feeling really good himself.”
Did it? Nothing made sense to Hyunjin, none of this, and he couldn’t quite keep track of the path the conversation had taken. “When you cried,” he said, trying to figure it out, trying to sound it out to himself, “when it was— a good thing. It was because it felt good? That’s what you meant?”
Jisung didn’t seem to even blink at the circular conversation. He didn’t have any of that pity on his face either. “Yeah,” he said. “It felt really good.”
Hyunjin might not be able to access any of this pleasure but that didn’t mean Jisung couldn’t; wasn’t that the point of it? Jisung would find pleasure in it, in touching Hyunjin, in fucking him, in using Hyunjin’s body like that. The image of it, though, felt so— abstract. That ghost of a mattress against Hyunjin’s back, the phantom stretch of his thighs, a feeling that was familiar but not recently so. When he thought of sex with Jisung like that, he couldn’t even really imagine Jisung’s face over him.
But now, in his head, there was an image: Jisung, on Hyunjin’s bed, his mouth open and red, his face damp with tears. Shirtless, his broad shoulders, pale skin, the muscles in his arms on display and Hyunjin could look and look and look, without fear, without worry, and Jisung was crying, reaching out for him, Hyunjin’s name in his mouth the same way Jeongin had said Minho’s name earlier.
For a moment, the image brought a feeling so shockingly unfamiliar that it took his breath away: desire, pulsing through him, hot and sharp, like nothing he’d ever felt before. Even those rare occasions when he’d managed to jerk off to completion, he’d never felt like this before. And then, just as quickly, came the realisation of what he was thinking about. The horror, of seeing something pleasurable in something that he knew, he knew, was anything but.
He shoved himself to his feet, the chair screeching on the floor. Jisung had been picking at his ramen and he looked up at the sound and whatever he saw on Hyunjin’s face made him say, “Fuck, Hyunjin, I’m sorry, if I made you uncomfortable—”
“No,” said Hyunjin. He forced his voice to be very calm. He could be collected, he could be rational. But the guilt and disgust was dripping through his entire body like drops of blood in a bucket of water. Sometimes he’d been given that, to clean his face off. Sometimes he’d still been crying. “You didn’t. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“I don’t mind,” Jisung said. “Hyunjin, you can ask these things, I don’t mind.”
I mind, Hyunjin thought, and shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said. He could never talk to Jisung about this kind of thing ever again, maybe. Not until he’d fixed all these broken parts inside of him. “Eat your ramen.”
“Hyunjin,” said Jisung, a little frantically. He reached out, across the table, and grabbed Hyunjin’s wrist, fingers wrapping tight. Hyunjin, who had been about to take a step back, froze in shock. It was not just that Jisung had never grabbed him like that, nobody touched him like this. Nobody held him in place at all.
After a moment, Jisung let go, his hand flying up into the air as if Hyunjin’s skin had burned his. “Ahh,” he said, just as frantic. “God, Hyunjin, I’m so sorry.”
Don’t apologise, Hyunjin wanted to yell. He wanted to scream like a child, wordless with rage and fury. He wanted to tell Jisung to put his hand back, touch him again, hold him tight just like that. It wasn’t bad, it had not felt bad when Jisung had done it, with his warm calloused fingers. He wanted to ask for it again, but he couldn’t work out how to, without being too much, without it meaning too much, and so instead, he simply— started to cry.
It was no slow build up of tears, one or two beading over before the flood. No, the flood was simply upon him, the tears flowing fast and strong as he brought his hands up to try to cover his face. “Ahh!” Jisung said again, even more frantic now. “Oh no, no, Hyunjin.” Beyond the gaps in Hyunjin’s fingers, he could make out Jisung, blurry through the tears, coming around the table to hover right next to him. But he still wasn’t touching Hyunjin. “What do I do? Should I go wake Chan-hyung?”
Hyunjin shook his head, his breath coming shuddering and shallow. The tears gave everything a weirdly unreal edge, so that he was able to say what he wanted as if it were Jeongin or Felix standing in front of him, the words coming out with a whine of desperate need. “Hug me,” he said through his sobs. He didn’t care anymore, didn’t care if Jisung saw through him. The sadness and confusion was too much to bear.
It took a moment but then Jisung did hug him, his arms coming up around Hyunjin. He was extremely tentative with it, enough space between their bodies that Hyunjin couldn’t really feel any of Jisung’s body heat, his hands petting Hyunjin on the back in awkward little pats. Hyunjin took a small, shuffling step forward, trying to get across what he needed without words, and Jisung seemed to get it, because he didn’t pull away, and actually tightened his hold around Hyunjin’s body.
“Don’t cry,” he was saying, almost blabbering in that way he had. “Don’t cry.” His hand petted higher up Hyunjin’s back, between his shoulder blades, and then he said, “Ahh, why are you so tall, you’re so tall, Hyunjin-ah.”
If Hyunjin was capable of it, he might have laughed at that, but he was too busy crying. He might have said, no you’re just short but he was too busy sobbing. So instead he just let his head droop down until it was resting on Jisung’s shoulder, his forehead to the curve of the bone. He wanted to put his face into Jisung’s neck but if he did that, he’d just get tears and mucus all over Jisung’s skin, and so he didn’t. Instead he just sobbed into Jisung’s stupid giant hoodie.
Jisung was quiet for a bit. His hands settled, less awkward as they rubbed Hyunjin’s back, up and down in a steady rhythm. He probably didn’t realise how soothing Hyunjin found that, the careful, grounding touch. Jisung held him but he didn’t hold him, his arms loose enough that Hyunjin could break out easily if he tried. Hyunjin knew it, down to his bones.
“How can I help?” Jisung murmured eventually, his voice close enough to Hyunjin’s ear that Hyunjin thought it would be too much, and instead he just had to hold back an odd shiver as best he could. “Hyunjin? What do you need?”
“I just don’t understand,” Hyunjin whispered, tilting his head so that the words could be audible. “Crying is a bad thing. Crying means sadness, it means hurt. It means pain. I don’t— I don’t want Jeongin to cry, like I used to cry.”
He’d cried in that place, sometimes. Not as much as people probably expected, he thought, not as much as they would think would be normal. He hadn’t had the tears to give, a lot of the time, because inside him was just a cold, numb space that didn’t leave room for emotions. The pain sent him there. But sometimes, after the initial pain had passed, he would find himself with tears on his face, the salt in his mouth. His body reacted where his mind could not.
He’d cried plenty afterwards. That had been pain, too. That had been because of the bad things, crying on the couch with his head in Jeongin’s lap. Crying in the bathroom of the modern art museum with Changbin’s arms around him because a security guard had yelled at him. Crying in his room just a couple of years ago, drunk and aching with misery, scared that there would be bruises on his arm where that man had grabbed him to get him to dance. He could still hear it, if he thought about it too hard, the sound of the man’s wrist snapping when Minho had pulled him off.
“Hyunjin,” said Jisung. If there’d been pity in his voice Hyunjin might have lost it again but there wasn’t, there was just that calm seriousness. “He wasn’t. I’m sure he wasn’t.”
“Felix said that too,” Hyunjin said, voice still heaving around his sobs, “but— Chan-hyung said— and I—”
“Hey, hey,” said Jisung. He pulled back, his hands gentle on Hyunjin’s upper arms, pulling Hyunjin up a little. Hyunjin didn’t want to go, he didn’t want to lift his head — but he had to, so he straightened just enough. His hands rested limply on Jisung’s waist. He’d never touched Jisung there. Tiredly he wondered if it were like he sometimes thought, if his hands would stretch most of the way around. This wasn’t the time to check.
“You know—” Jisung stopped, biting his lip for a moment, thinking his words through. “Haven’t you ever cried because of something good? Or just because something was— overwhelming? Like when you watch a heartwarming movie or those dog grooming videos, and you cry because they’re just so cute.”
Hyunjin couldn’t say that he could. Maybe once or twice he’d been tearful with Jeongin after watching some drama or another. But he understood what Jisung was trying to say to him, so he managed a weak nod, this shallow bob of his head.
“Right,” said Jisung, encouragingly. “So it’s like that.” His thumbs rubbed small circles against Hyunjin’s upper arms. Hyunjin wished he could hug him again. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Hyunjin wanted so badly to believe him. To trust in him. It was different from the desire to trust in Felix. That was like— it was not putting his trust in Felix to believe him on these things, because trusting Felix was a fact of the universe. Here, like this, with Jisung, Hyunjin wanted. He wanted to be able to trust Jisung.
“Then why did Chan-hyung look like it was a bad thing when I told him I heard it?” he asked tearfully.
Jisung chewed the inside of his mouth for a moment and then said, “He might think of it the same way you do. That it can’t be a good thing, but I’m telling you, it can. Chan-hyung isn’t all knowing, and—” He leaned around Hyunjin to peer at the hallway, telegraphing his movements in an over the top way. Then he half-covered his mouth as if afraid that Chan would hear them from his bedroom. “He isn’t always right.”
Hyunjin managed a little snort at that, just under his breath. “Don’t I know it,” he muttered. He bit his bottom lip for a moment. Jisung watched his face without a reaction. “You mean it, Jisung?” Hyunjin asked, knowing that he sounded desperate in a way that didn’t make sense. “Really?”
“Cross my heart,” Jisung said, doing the motion across his chest. “Crying can be good! The more of a blubbering mess I am when I come, the better.”
Hyunjin blinked. The words had been said so jovially, so casually, that for a moment he wondered if he’d heard them correctly. He had, he knew he had. And sure enough, after a few seconds Jisung went so red that he genuinely resembled a tomato, the colour taking over his entire face. “Ah!” he said, high-pitched, more high-pitched than Hyunjin had ever heard him before. “No! Forget I said that! Erase it from your mind!”
He waved his hands in front of Hyunjin’s face in a wiping motion, something between a windshield wiper on a car and a wizard doing a spell in a movie. He looked ridiculous, and besides, Hyunjin couldn’t just forget it. How could he forget something like that?
“You are so fucking weird, Han Jisung,” he said, after a few seconds of Jisung trying to mind wipe him. He wanted to tell Jisung to stop, wanted to ask Jisung to put his hands back, maybe on Hyunjin’s waist too, like Hyunjin had been holding Jisung’s in turn. He couldn’t do it. Asking for that hug in the first place had been too much, and he’d had the excuse of crying besides. So instead, he let go of Jisung, and brought his hands up to wipe at his face. Jisung watched him, not stepping away, but still very pink. Quiet, for once, his eyes back to being saucers in his face.
“Thank you,” Hyunjin said, wiping at his face still. “I’m sorry.”
“Hyunjin,” said Jisung. How Hyunjin really did like it when Jisung said his name like that, serious and sincere, even with the hint of embarrassment still there. “It’s— you don’t need to say sorry, it wasn’t too much. None of this made me uncomfortable.” He rubbed the side of his face, not taking his eyes off Hyunjin. It made Hyunjin feel— shy. It made him want to hold Jisung’s gaze for longer. “I just— I want you to be able to talk to me, about anything. I don’t judge, it’s not— it’s not pity, it’s—”
He struggled for a moment. Hyunjin saw Jisung so rarely struggle for words and it always happened in moments like this, the two of them alone and Jisung trying to tell Hyunjin something. Something that cut close to the bone for the two of them, and Hyunjin knew that Jisung didn’t realise it went both ways.
“I care, Hyunjin,” Jisung said eventually. “I care about you. I want to help, if I can. I want to be there for you. I’ll answer any questions you ever want to ask me, okay?”
Hyunjin was in severe danger of crying again, but not in that same hysterical way as before, when it felt like the sobs were being ripped out of him and he’d been unable to stop. This would be something slower, something much more painful, somehow. “You never ask anything,” he said, just more than a whisper. “You never want answers when I make demands, you never come to me for— anything. You never tell me to wait or to stop, you chauffeur me around and never, ever ask. Isn’t it exhausting?”
Aren’t I exhausting?
“No,” said Jisung, and his voice was so firm, so certain of himself, that it almost made Hyunjin flinch. “Like I said. I care about you. It’s not exhausting at all.” That was too much; Hyunjin felt his face crumple as the tears overtook him again. “Ahh, ah,” said Jisung, distressed by the sight all over again. He wiped at Hyunjin’s face, quick little flashes of his fingertips on Hyunjin’s cheeks. He kept snatching them back in between each swipe like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to touch or not. “Don’t cry again! I’ll fight your tear ducts!”
He really was ridiculous. Hyunjin couldn’t even manage a watery smile though. “Today’s just been bad,” he said, letting it spill out now. “It’s been bad for the— memories. And I’m overtired like some kind of fucking toddler. I just can’t sleep.” Last night he’d laid awake with his headphones in, blasting his music just in case he overheard something he didn’t want to hear, and now, this close to midnight, that lack of sleep was really starting to catch up to him. “And I have to be up early for the stupid rappelling thing.” His bottom lip wobbled; he had no doubt it looked stupid but Jisung just looked concerned. “And your ramen has gone all mushy by now and you were excited.”
“Hyunjin, babe,” Jisung said, “my ramen does not fucking matter.”
It did matter, a lot. In Hyunjin’s exhaustion, it mattered just as much as anything else. But his attention was no longer on the ramen, it was on— “Babe?”
Jisung hadn’t said it like he meant it in any particular way. He had said it so casually, it felt very much like the way Hyunjin called Felix babe. Jisung usually used dude, though, and in Hyunjin’s overwrought state, his brain had snagged on the word and he knew without needing to think about it that it would play on his mind for days and days. But it wasn’t a bad thing, maybe.
“Ah, sorry,” Jisung said, flushing red again. “I didn’t mean to—” He did the hand waving thing again in front of Hyunjin’s face, this one a little more flourishing in movement. “Forget I said—”
Hyunjin grabbed his wrist, not too hard but enough to stop his motions. “Stop that.” He huffed out a little laugh, breathy but there, mostly because of the ridiculousness of Jisung trying to hypnotise him like that. He was just such a dweeb sometimes, silly in a way that Hyunjin knew he could never be but— Jisung sometimes made him want to be. There was something about Jisung’s brand of silly that was relaxing to be around.
He let go after a moment. “You’re the strangest person I’ve ever met,” he told Jisung.
Jisung was blinking at him, looking a little out of it, the colour high on his skin again. But then he beamed, full-watt power right in Hyunjin’s face. Hyunjin almost took a step backwards. “The strangest?” Jisung repeated, as he lifted his hands up so that they were framing his face, like a flower. Hyunjin had seen girls do that on photos online sometimes, and had never understood why. “Not the nicest, the funniest?” He struck another pose, his head tilted to the left a little, a finger poking into his cheek. They were so squishy that his finger seemed to sink right in. Hyunjin didn’t know how a person could have cheeks like that without being part squirrel or something. “The cutest?” Jisung continued. This time he jutted his bottom lip out, moving his finger to press against that damp, plump lip. He arched his back in some ridiculous way that made his ass stick out, and forced one of his knees to bend. Hyunjin had seen that pose online too. “The most devilishly charming—”
I want to kiss him, Hyunjin thought.
“I am going to bed,” he announced, cutting Jisung off. He turned because he couldn’t look at Jisung’s face any longer, not when he looked that cute. Even put on, he was cute, even put on, Hyunjin wanted to smack his hand away and kiss him. “I’ll see you in a few hours,” he added, already walking away to the hallway. “Eat your ramen.”
“Okay, Hyunjin!” Jisung called after him, cheerful and not at all put out at Hyunjin’s abrupt departure. “Sleep well!”
Hyunjin slipped into his room and shut the door firmly behind him. There was a moment where he simply stood there, breathing in the smell of his paint and flowers and the scented candle he’d burned earlier in a failed attempt at calming down. Then he sank down onto the edge of his bed feeling like his legs had given out on him a bit.
He covered his face with a hand. Covered his smile with his hand, the smile that was stretching across his face, the one that felt like nothing less than a miracle. Even just ten minutes ago he wouldn’t have thought he could smile but— of course, of course. It was Jisung, because as much as sometimes Jisung made him feel like he was dragging the weight of his trauma around like a stone around his throat, other times Jisung made him feel like— air. Light, bubbling.
Maybe he was still a little hysterical. But Chan’s voice saying, I don’t want him to cry during sex had been replaced by the image of Jisung’s finger against his own mouth and his voice as he said, The more of a blubbering mess I am when I come, the better.
It was okay for Hyunjin to think about that, right? Not something bad, but something good, something that Jisung had admitted he liked. Something that Jisung liked in bed, something for Hyunjin to tuck away in the back of his mind. He could have the image, even if he couldn’t have the reality.
He flopped back onto his bed, still holding his hand over his face, blocking out the light overhead. “Fuck,” he whispered, still smiling. “Fuck, I want to kiss him.”
——
Seungmin stifled a yawn against the back of his hand as the van drove through the mostly empty streets of the city, the road lit only by the streetlights and the lights of buildings and occasionally the headlights of another car. Inside the van, everything was silent. Minho had not spoken a word to him since he had turned up in Seungmin’s workroom just after 3am and said, “Let’s go.”
Changbin had taken the van out to the back of the building before he had gone up to his room to bed, leaving Seungmin with only a kiss and a particularly daring grope of Seungmin’s ass. Daring, in Seungmin’s opinion, because it was not like Seungmin really had anything there to be worth groping. Seungmin had flipped him off and Changbin had laughed, and then Seungmin had stayed awake at his computer until it was time to leave.
Minho, it seemed, had gotten some sleep, but he still looked very tired. Alert enough to be driving, certainly, but tired all the same, yawning just as much as Seungmin was, the two of them probably setting each other off. At least that, the annoyance over the yawning, kept Seungmin from thinking too hard about the view outside the window from the passenger seat of the van, the open streets. He’d have liked to have travelled in the back of the van, enclosed and dark, just like he had last time, but when he’d made to climb in there, Minho had looked at him like he was actually crazy, and Seungmin had just gotten in the front.
He knew what Minho was like when he was tired. Seungmin didn’t feel like dealing with any of that.
He wished Changbin was with him. In the meeting he had almost requested it, almost opened his stupid mouth and said, Can Changbin-hyung not come with me instead. He’d have had no excuse for it, since it wasn’t like Changbin would be any more use than Minho was likely to be with this, and Chan had already said that Changbin had to go to the warehouse. But it would have made things so, so much easier if it were Changbin sitting in that driver’s seat.
Seungmin had only seen the back street they’d parked in last time in pictures, and it didn’t look any better in person than it had then. Minho pulled to a stop, pulled the handbrake up, and then turned, for the first time, to look at Seungmin. “Go on,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”
Seungmin checked the clock on the dashboard, and saw that they’d gotten there in barely thirty minutes. Even with a cushion for the time parameters Felix had given them, they had plenty of time. He didn’t try to argue though, as Minho looked at him expectantly. He just got out of the van and went around the back and climbed inside again.
It was cold out here tonight. He should have dug his padded coat out of the vacuum sealed bag he’d put it in a couple of years ago, tucked in the bottom of his drawers. He never went out usually in winter, never stepped outside when it was cold, or, heaven forbid, there was snow on the ground. That was the joy of being a recluse, of having the excuse. He could simply stay inside where none of that touched him more than what his space heater and blankets and fluffy slippers couldn’t stave off.
He set up the camera feeds in silence. It was easy enough to ignore everything physical around him when he was focused on the task at hand, and even though Felix had both talked and walked him through his own systems before, it was still not especially easy to do.
It was mind boggling sometimes, to think that the Felix who had spent most of the last few months submitting to Hyunjin’s fussing and baking them all cookies was the one who had made a system such as this. He didn’t even really seem to have any desire to keep up with those skills. It was like he’d arrived in their house and decided to forgo technology altogether.
Once he got into the feeds and got through to the camera in the corner of the office, he pushed his stool back until he could rest his back against the side of the van and pulled his arms into the body of his hoodie. Through the grate between the front seats and the back came Minho’s voice, a snappish grumble. “This better not take too long.”
“Yes, yes,” Seungmin said, “I know you’d rather be at home fucking Jeongin again.”
The words came out a lot more nasty than he’d meant them to, his own voice barbed in a way that Minho’s hadn’t been. He was not even sure where it had come from in himself. Maybe it was that it was cold, or that he was tired, or that he was out here, feeling exposed to the world even though he was literally closed into a van. Last time these metal walls had been soothing but tonight they didn’t quite feel the same.
There was silence from Minho. It felt a little— surprised. “Sorry,” Seungmin said, huddling down in his seat. “I didn’t mean it like that. I really didn’t.”
Silence again. Seungmin sighed a little, resigning himself to it. He hadn’t meant it like that, because it was not a nasty thought — he would rather be home, too, warm in bed, Changbin snoring in his ear, maybe, or Changbin on top of him, rutting into him, keeping him warm that way. He’d rather be almost anywhere rather than here.
But after a minute or so of absolute quiet, Minho said, “Jeongin said that you saw me and him on the cameras. In the television room.”
Seungmin’s face scrunched up without him consciously thinking about it. “Yeah,” he said. “I saw you two.”
Minho had a habit, especially when he was talking to Seungmin, of waiting a beat or two after every response before he spoke again. It was enough like Seungmin’s habit of saying the barest minimum that it annoyed him somehow. “Afterwards?” Minho asked. “When you were backtracking? Or did you see it— happen.”
“A bit of both,” Seungmin admitted. “I checked back the next day but I saw you kissing.”
Minho hummed under his breath. It was almost impossible to get a read on him like this, when Seungmin couldn’t see his face. He watched the screens, the empty office. It could have been a static picture for all anything was changing as the minutes ticked slowly by.
“You didn’t stop it,” Minho said eventually.
Seungmin looked over to the grate, frowning. Minho wouldn’t be able to see his expression but he needed to make it anyway. “No,” he said, his voice like he was talking to a particularly stupid child; he couldn’t help himself. “No, I didn’t come and stop it. Why the hell would I do that?”
“I don’t know, Kim Seungmin,” said Minho, matching the bite of his tone almost perfectly. “You tell me.”
“I told you,” Seungmin said, straightening up in his seat. “I told you, back when Chan-hyung made you make that ridiculous promise. I said that Jeongin probably liked you back and you two acted like I was an idiot for thinking so. Well, I was right. Why the fuck would I interrupt.”
“You—” Minho said, and then stopped himself from saying whatever he was going to say. Seungmin found that he was breathing a little more heavily than normal, the same way he had found himself breathing after that awful time with Chan in the workroom, after his argument with Changbin about the same thing. He wasn’t even really sure why he got so heated about all of this, except that— maybe he hated the loss of agency. The way people seemed so happy to look at Jeongin and strip his ability to make his own decisions away from him.
Hadn’t that always been the point of it, the point of why Chan had coddled him all these years? So that Jeongin could have choices, so that Jeongin wasn’t stuck the way the rest of them were. Trapped by the world, doing whatever they needed to do to survive. Seungmin had dreamed of being an engineer, of going to college and building something beneficial for the world. Childish dreams but then he’d been a child. Such things were to be expected.
If Jeongin’s choice was to be with Minho, at least it was something he was choosing. To deny him that rendered the last however many years pointless, in Seungmin’s opinion.
“Whatever you and Jeongin have,” Seungmin said, when it was clear Minho was not going to say anything more, “it’s none of my business. It’s not anyone’s business, other than you and Jeongin. And it’s certainly not Chan-hyung’s business.”
He almost added, you didn’t deserve what he said to you last night, but he held his tongue. It wouldn’t make any difference, the same way he hadn’t made any difference back then. He was too easy for Minho to dismiss, too easy for Minho to ignore in matters like this. Minho respected Seungmin for his talents in their area of work but he didn’t need anything else from him.
Minho sighed. “You don’t get it, Kim Seungmin.”
“I get it, hyung,” Seungmin said. “I just think it’s really stupid.”
That, somehow, miraculously, managed to eke out a tiny snort of laughter from Minho, almost too quiet to hear through the grate. Seungmin checked the camera feeds again but still there was nothing but empty office. The flooring was carpet, cream but patterned in a way that even through the static it was awful. If he looked at it for much longer, it was going to sear itself permanently on his brain.
“I know that you hate me, hyung, after what happened with Felix,” Seungmin said, as quiet as he could be whilst still being audible to Minho. “I know that. But—”
“Don’t be stupid,” Minho said, voice flat and hard. “I don’t hate you.”
“Hyung, don’t lie to me,” said Seungmin. He’d known it all along, the way that keeping that lie would change so many things about his dynamic in this group. He was lucky that the others had forgiven him, even if Minho didn’t ever. It didn’t matter to Seungmin. It was a bit like earlier with Jeongin. However much Seungmin put up a fuss, Jeongin could rely on him. And no matter how much Minho sniped and snarled at Seungmin, Seungmin would always know: if he called for help, Minho would come running to kill the threat that had hurt him.
“Don’t call me a liar,” Minho retorted. “I think you’re an idiot for what you did for Felix when you didn’t have any proof that he wasn’t going to try to kill us all in our beds. That’s not the same thing as hating you. He could have killed you in your bed, did you never think about that?”
“I didn’t know you cared, hyung,” Seungmin said.
“I’m going to kill you in your sleep,” Minho snarled. Seungmin just rolled his eyes and stayed quiet. After a minute, Minho said, “It was naive of you. Honestly, your logic still doesn’t make much sense to me. But—” He sighed. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Seungmin.”
Seungmin didn’t know either. It wasn’t even that he wanted Minho’s forgiveness, because that wasn’t something he wanted, really. He didn’t want Minho’s understanding, either. He had made the decision he had made, had done what he had done, and it was simply something to be lived with. If Minho never understood it, that was no skin off Seungmin’s back. Seungmin had been right, in the end, after all.
Seungmin shrugged, then shivered. It really was cold tonight. “I want you to say I was right about Jeongin,” he said.
Silence again, except for the rustle of Minho moving around in the front seat. For a moment, Seungmin thought he might actually be getting out of the front to come around back to hit him or something. But then Minho just said, “Jesus fucking Christ, what sort of an idiot doesn’t wear a coat in the middle of winter. There is something deeply wrong with you, Kim Seungmin.”
A moment later Seungmin felt the start of a warm stream of air come through from the front of the van. Minho had turned the heating on for the first time, and judging by how much was coming through to Seungmin, he was blasting it. Was it a peace offering of some kind, a way for Minho to acknowledge Seungmin’s words without saying so? Possibly. Seungmin didn’t care. He would take it.
He turned his attention to the computer screens and settled in for a long morning.
Chapter 22
Notes:
look ma! two hyunsung scenes!
chapter content warnings: panic attacks. minjeong do be fucking too, which is a given from here on out.
we just want to say thank you so much for your comments last chapter, we didn't get to reply to all of them but some of them were really lovely and insightful and we appreciate every single one so much
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If Hyunjin had known it was going to feel this goddamn awful to be awake so early, he probably would have just stayed up all night instead. What sort of a monster made a person get out of their warm, soft bed at five in the morning in the middle of winter? It bordered on torture. Someone should contact the Geneva convention about it.
“Hyung,” he whined, from where he was curled up on the back seat of the car, the hood of his padded coat pulled up over his head. “Hyung, it’s cold.”
Changbin in the front craned his head to look back at him; Jisung did the same, the two of them blinking at Hyunjin over the console as they idled at a red light. “The heating’s on,” Changbin said, smiling at him like he thought Hyunjin was cute or something. “You just need to give it a few minutes to properly get working.”
Hyunjin whined again. That didn’t help, that didn’t help at all, because he was cold now. Jisung was smiling now too, his expression somehow impossibly soft as he looked back at Hyunjin. Truthfully, that did warm Hyunjin up just a little bit, because being looked at like that by Jisung made him blush a little. He could tell he was pink across his cheeks. Luckily Changbin had already turned back to the road, because if he’d seen Hyunjin go pink like that, he might have asked him why.
Even the thought of Changbin working out how Hyunjin felt about Jisung made Hyunjin feel nauseated. He didn’t know how Changbin would react, what he might do, if he knew. Would he tease Hyunjin, like he did about so many other things? Would he take a leaf out of Chan’s book, and warn Jisung off? The two of them were protective of Hyunjin in much the same way they were of Jeongin, and sometimes it was worse, by nature of Hyunjin’s— past. He wasn’t naive, like Jeongin was, but he was— broken. He’d needed that protection through the years.
Changbin had missed it, this time, though, and Jisung was just looking at him still. Hyunjin was too tired to deal with that kind of look on Jisung’s face, the kind of look that made a small voice in Hyunjin’s head whisper, look, he loves you, he loves you.
“What,” he snapped.
Jisung’s smile widened into a grin. “Nothing,” he said.
“Then why are you looking back here,” Hyunjin said. “Didn’t your mother teach you it’s rude to stare?”
The words were out before he could think about them, and as soon as he said it, the shame was enough to make him curl up a little further on his seat. Jisung was terminally allergic to talking about himself a lot of the time but even Hyunjin had heard enough over the years to regret those words. He had no idea if Jisung’s mother had ever been a mother enough to teach him such things, but she’d certainly taught him other things.
Jisung, though, just kept grinning. “Sorry,” he said. “You just look cute, curled up like that. I didn’t know you could fit.”
Cute, cute, you just look cute, Hyunjin’s brain trilled at him, as he stared at Jisung, shocked beyond belief to have heard Jisung say such a thing without prompting or being tricked into it. Another little soundbyte for Hyunjin to add to a surprisingly growing collection. Jisung, somehow, didn’t seem to have realised what he’d said, because he turned back to the front of the car, saying something in an undertone to Changbin about the route the GPS was showing them.
Hyunjin pulled the hood of his coat further down over his face until it was blocking most of the light out. He wished he had a pillow to scream into. Or something he could bite, something he could enact violence upon, something to purge himself of the feeling inside himself. He didn’t know what to do with this feeling that had been coming on him more and more often recently. He felt a version of it every time his phone chimed with a message from Jisung.
He’d felt it last night, laying in his bed, trying to sleep because he knew he would have to get up early, but he hadn’t been able to for the longest time, because of that feeling. The part of him that had wanted to go down to Jisung’s bedroom and knock on the door and then, when Jisung opened it, just kiss him. He couldn’t do that, he couldn’t, even as he had the urge, the thought of it sent his heart racing in fear. But he’d wanted it all the same, and it had kept him awake.
And now he was here in this car, laid out on the back seat, as it trundled through the streets of Seoul. There were more cars on the road than Hyunjin would have expected — who the fuck got up and left the house at five in the morning if they weren’t being forced to — and Changbin was taking it relatively slowly anyway, following the speed limit and stopping at the yellow lights as if he were the most rule-abiding citizen on the planet.
Jisung looked back around at him, as they went up a ramp and suddenly their speed went up too; they must have hit the highway now. “Hey,” he said, his voice pitched low. “It’s going to be a while, you could take a nap.”
“Yeah,” said Changbin, glancing at him in the rear view mirror. “We’ll wake you up when we get there.”
Hyunjin blinked at Jisung, slowly, tiredly, still scowling a little but almost residual. It was warmer now, the heating truly kicking up a notch, and his body felt so heavy. His eyelids felt so heavy. Still, there was something stubborn inside him, something that heard Jisung’s soft, caring tone of voice and wanted to have a tantrum a little bit.
“I’ll stay awake,” he said.
He didn’t though; he drifted off about five minutes later, lulled there by the vibration of the car and the warmth, one moment blinking slowly at the back of Jisung’s head, and the next there was Changbin’s voice, soft and gentle as he murmured Hyunjin’s name. “We’re here,” he said, leaning in the open back door of the car, looking at where Hyunjin was curled up. “Hyunjin-ah, it’s time to wake up.”
It probably would have been easier for him to reach in, shake Hyunjin awake. But Changbin never did that, even if Jeongin had no qualms about it; even Chan had touched him once or twice while he was dozing, gentle touches to his shoulder, or ruffles of his hair. Changbin never did when Hyunjin was sleeping. He only ever woke Hyunjin up like this, with careful words, letting Hyunjin take as long as he needed to shake off the sticky grip of sleep.
Hyunjin made a little noise, mostly to let Changbin know that he was awake, but Changbin didn’t pull back or stand up, he just kept looking at Hyunjin. Smiling at him. Hyunjin squinted at him and rubbed at his face and said, “Go away.”
“Okay,” said Changbin, and disappeared to let Hyunjin return properly to the land of the living on his own.
When he managed to clamber out of the car and slam the door shut behind him, he found himself in the enclosed parking lot of a warehouse that looked far less obviously abandoned than he’d expected it to look. It was small, at least as far as his understanding of warehouses went, but tall enough, high enough, that it would still be highly dangerous if he happened to fall off the roof instead of rappelling down properly.
Changbin and Jisung were already pulling the equipment out of the back of the car, all the ropes and the clips that Seungmin had sourced for them. Hyunjin moved to help them, taking a length of rope, long and coiled up. Jisung, after he shut the trunk, said, “It really looks like Hyunjae’s place.”
“It does, a bit,” Changbin said. Hyunjin felt a spike of annoyance; of the three of them, he was the only one who’d never been to Hyunjae’s warehouse, the only one who had never even met the man. It made sense, since guns weren’t exactly his strong point, but sometimes it made him feel a little bit like he was still on the outskirts of the business. Still being protected in odd ways.
It looked like a normal warehouse to him. When they traipsed in, it was utterly empty, cleaned out of anything that had been stored inside, or any business that had happened there. It had a stale smell to it, a place left to simply exist, but it wasn’t all that dusty, so it couldn’t have been empty for all that long. Inside, the windows that stretched almost around the length of it, too high to reach from the ground, would probably let in a good amount of sunlight, if there was any sunlight to have. At this time of the morning, it was still pretty much pitch black, so Changbin had to flip the lights on.
Ugly lights, the yellow fluorescent kind that Hyunjin so hated. There was a walkway set up high, probably just higher than what would be a second floor on a normal building but lower than a third floor. Whatever this warehouse used to have in it, it must have been tall, to need the offices that high up off the ground. There was a staircase set up against the back wall, metal except for where it hit a concrete support beam, a shorter version of the ones holding that upper lofted level up. The staircase broke off there into a kind of landing.
Changbin pointed at it. “Seungmin said that’d be a good place to practise first.”
Jisung, looking around at the space, gave a slight whistle, which echoed. “Seungmin really found the perfect space for this,” he said.
“Yeah, he was searching for a while,” Changbin said. “He said he didn’t want your first attempt to be from a literal rooftop.”
No, Hyunjin wouldn’t have wanted that either, especially since they weren’t going to be able to bring harnesses with them. That was the part that was likely to be hardest for them both: they had to do this the old way, the traditional way, without harnesses or any safety fallbacks. It was, ostensibly, mostly a time issue. Maybe Hyunjin would be able to crack the safe in three minutes and they’d be in and out of Blackbird’s within ten — but that would be a miracle and a fluke. And they couldn’t rely on that kind of time schedule. They had to be ready to slap a rope into place and slide down. No room to fiddle with harnesses, and no space in their backpacks for them either.
So instead they had industrial strength clips and lengths of rope, long enough to reach the ground from the roof of this warehouse, which, Seungmin had said, would be long enough to get them from the third floor of Blackbird’s.
Jisung had, apparently, already tied the lengths of rope onto the clips, tied in an odd looking knot that Hyunjin would just have to hope was secure. He handed Hyunjin one of them and said, cheerfully, “I watched a bunch of videos on this last night, and the good news is that it’s supposedly very easy to do.”
“And what’s the bad news,” Hyunjin said.
“Extremely high chance of rope burn,” Jisung said, still just as cheerful. “Most videos said it was uncomfortable, which I think was code for hurts like a bitch.”
Great, thought Hyunjin, but he followed Jisung up the metal stairs, their footsteps clanging and echoing. Changbin stayed on the floor, moving over to the support beam, looking up at them, looking very small from this angle, even though they were barely eight feet from the ground. Jisung leaned over the bannister and waved down at him like a young bride waving her husband off to war. Changbin flipped him off.
Jisung turned back to Hyunjin. “Here,” he said. “I’ll set your rope up.”
“I can do it,” Hyunjin said. “It just clips onto the railing, right?”
“We’ll probably have to fix it in a loop for today,” Jisung said. He stepped up to the railing and started doing just that, hooking the rope inside the carabiner clip so that it stayed in a loop around the metal. He did it so slowly that Hyunjin knew he was doing it so Hyunjin could watch if he needed to, which was both sweet and slightly irritating. It was hardly rocket science, but maybe sometimes Hyunjin liked the way Jisung looked after him. “Seungmin said the window we’ll be going out of at Blackbird’s has one of the fire escape hooks, the room on the second floor certainly had one. So we’ll use that on the day, but for now I want to make sure it’s secure on here.”
Hyunjin hooked his own rope into a loop around the railing, and then next Jisung showed him how to fit the rope around his body, something else he’d learned from his video watching: through his legs, up over his opposite shoulder, the rope then held in his right hand. Even just standing, Hyunjin could tell it was going to be unpleasant. There was something about the placement of the rope, between his legs, that made his brain itch in a slightly bad way.
“I’ll go first,” Jisung said. He leaned over the railing one more time, and Hyunjin watched him wince for a moment, before he climbed over it in a lumbering kind of way and then perched on the edge, one hand holding the railing, and the other getting his rope back into the proper position. It looked precarious but not like Jisung was in any danger of falling, and it was the work of a moment for the rope to be around him.
“Okay,” he said. “Wish me luck.” Hyunjin just blinked at him. “Right.”
It didn’t look like it should have worked, as Jisung let the rope slide around his body, his feet moving down the pillar slowly, like he was simply walking down the side of a building. Hyunjin watched him, watching the way he held the rope, the careful way he fed it through his hands.
Jisung was less than halfway down when he shifted his footing and then a moment later yelped in pain. Hyunjin watched his face spasm, and then Jisung simply— let go of the rope for a moment. Just that moment was enough, and he basically fell the rest of the way, the rope slipping against his body. The height was such that he was unlikely to be hurt by the fall, but Hyunjin’s heart still leapt into his throat as he watched Jisung flail a little.
Changbin caught him, not quite a proper catch but enough that Jisung didn’t break a bone, just stumbled a little as the momentum was broken. “Fuck,” he said, very breathlessly.
“You okay?” Changbin asked, holding him upright. Usually with Jisung, Changbin’s brand of affection, if it could be called that, was rough and irreverent, but right then his hands were careful, his voice genuinely concerned.
“Yeah,” said Jisung, and then, as if to prove just how okay he was, he pretended to swoon in Changbin’s arms, angling his body in such a way that Changbin couldn’t easily drop him onto the concrete flooring. “My hero!” he said in a tittering little voice.
Changbin didn’t drop him, but he did shove him away, Jisung stumbling off to the side. He laughed and then said, “God, fuck,” as he rubbed at his inner thigh. At least, that seemed to be where he was rubbing from where Hyunjin was watching, and he looked away as fast as possible because— he didn’t need to think about Jisung’s inner thighs right now.
“What the hell happened,” Changbin said. “You looked like you had the hang of it.”
“Yeah, I did,” Jisung said. “And then the rope pinched my fucking balls.” There was a beat of silence and then Changbin snorted and then cracked up. “Yeah, yeah,” Jisung said. “Laugh it up, hyung. God, that hurt like hell.”
Hyunjin was torn between the urge to smile and the urge to sink into a tiny little ball and rock back and forth. On the one hand, it was funny, the idea of it, the knowledge of what, exactly, had caused that spasm on Jisung’s face. On the other hand— there was a kind of self-preservation in imagining Jisung as one of those dolls for children, all smoothed out genitals, blank and unthreatening. The reminder that he had balls was just too much at not even 7am.
“Hyunjin-ah!” Jisung called up. Hyunjin risked a look over the railing at him, and found Jisung waving up at him. “Be careful!”
Hyunjin glared down at him. Sometimes — most days, in fact — he had the thought of, and now why the fuck am I in love with this man. All the people in the world he could have fallen in love with and he had to choose Han Jisung. He could have chosen Felix, sweet and quirky in his way; he could have chosen Changbin, or Seungmin, or even Minho. Instead he’d chosen Jisung.
Actually, choice hadn’t even come into it. Probably the one saving grace of it all.
He climbed over the railing and wound the rope around himself in the way that Jisung had taught him. He was still wearing his thick padded coat, which was probably bunching weirdly between his legs with how the rope was, but it was cold in the warehouse and he figured it would give him extra protection against the rope burn Jisung had mentioned. Even knowing that Jisung had just managed it — up to a point, at least — the rope around his body didn’t make him feel secure. A person, he thought, shouldn’t be able to do something like this just with a rope.
He began his descent. He realised, quite quickly, his mistake in wearing his coat for this. Jisung had managed to keep his progress slow and steady, practically a stroll up until his accident. Something about the material of Hyunjin’s coat meant that the rope slipped against his body, the friction not what it should have been. He didn’t fall, but he descended faster than he’d have liked, and he felt it, every moment, the lack of control that he should have had.
He was glad to feel his feet hit the ground, Changbin’s hands steadying him. He was breathing fast, faster than he’d realised, and sweating too. “You’re okay,” Changbin said. “You’re okay.”
“I know,” Hyunjin snapped, the babying— irritating in that moment. He was fine, he, at least, hadn’t fallen, but it wasn’t good enough. He stepped to the side and unzipped his coat and tossed it aside, annoyed enough that he didn’t care it was getting dusty from the floor right now. Then he looked at Jisung, blinking back at him, and said, “Let’s go again.”
They practised for close to an hour inside, the two of them climbing the staircase and letting themselves back down. They took it slow to begin with, learning to control the speed of their descent, the speed of the rope moving through their gloved hands. It was, as the videos had said, uncomfortable. It was painful, too, even with the gloves, and the thick clothing they were wearing to counteract the cold air. Hyunjin had no doubt he’d be waking up tomorrow morning aching all over.
After they’d managed to get down slowly without much trouble, they increased the speed, seeing how fast they could take it without totally losing control. Hyunjin fell, at one point, from a much lower height than Jisung, at least, his speed just that bit too fast in the moment. He heard Jisung, still at the top of the stairs, yelp his name, right before Changbin caught and steadied him at the bottom.
“I’m okay,” Hyunjin said. It had barely even been scary; one moment he’d felt the rope slip out of his hand and the next he was on the ground, Changbin’s hand hooked under his elbow. “I’m fine.”
Changbin didn’t look like he was all that convinced but he let go when Hyunjin stepped out of his hold, not really wanting to be touched in that moment. He was frowning, and said, “Maybe we should take a break.”
“No,” Hyunjin said. “I want to go again. I almost had it right.”
And so they practised, until eventually they decided to make their way up to the rooftop proper, to practise from up there. By the time they stepped outside, it was light, although the dawn was watery and pale, the sun not quite strong enough to break through the slight cloud cover overhead. It was still so, so cold. Hyunjin really fucking hated winter.
There was an external staircase around the side of the warehouse, the same kind of metal as the one inside, clanking against the side of the building as Hyunjin and Jisung climbed it in their heavy shoes. The warehouse roof was clearly built to have people up here, because there was a railing that ran the entire length of it, just inside of a thicker stone ledge that separated it from the sheer drop down. It was a lot colder up here, with the wind whipping past their faces. It almost made Hyunjin wish he’d been able to wear his coat after all, but he couldn’t, he knew he couldn’t, and so instead he just stood there shivering as Jisung hooked the ropes through their loops on the railings.
Jisung made sure the loop was secure and then he tossed the lengths of the rope over the side. He leaned over the railing for a moment, to check that the rope reached the ground with length to spare, and then he stepped back quite sharply, almost bumping into Hyunjin. When he looked at Hyunjin, his face was very pale.
“Are you okay?” Hyunjin asked. Jisung looked, suddenly, like he was going to pass out or something.
“Yeah!” said Jisung, a little squeaky with it before he cleared his throat. “Yeah, I’m fine. Uh, do you want to go first or should I?”
Hyunjin thought for a moment and said, “You go first, I want to see you do it first.”
The truth was that even though Hyunjin had his excellent balance, Jisung was much better at this, possibly something to do with his centre of gravity, possibly something to do with him having actual muscles in his arms. He moved faster than Hyunjin, kept control better than Hyunjin. Hyunjin had been watching him carefully once he’d realised that, and he wanted to see how Jisung handled the longer distance before Hyunjin dangled over that edge.
Jisung nodded slowly. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I can— do that. I’ll go first.”
But when he stepped up to the railing again, he didn’t make any move to climb over it. He reached out and took hold of it and then paused, looking out at the pale light of the morning dawn. Out here, there wasn’t really anything much to see, but neither was there much to block the view; normally Hyunjin would have been delighted about that except that it was still much too early in the morning and the view hadn’t really been his focus. He looked out now to see what Jisung was looking at, but it didn’t seem to even be anything.
“Jisung?” he asked.
Jisung seemed to startle. “Right,” he said. “Yeah, I’m going to—”
He moved very suddenly, hauling himself over the railing and then standing on the ledge, facing the drop. The movement stopped as suddenly as it started, Jisung going still against that railing, his hands clutching at it. He didn’t pick up the rope or do anything else, he just stood there in silence, looking down at the ground below him, every line of his body very, very tense.
It hit Hyunjin suddenly. “Jisung,” he said, maybe a little amused. “Are you scared?”
Jisung didn’t turn his gaze away from the ground. He very clearly did not want to look away. He swallowed, and said, voice very small, “Please don’t make fun of me.”
Any amusement Hyunjin was feeling went out of his body in a rush. He’d thought it would be like all the other times there’d been something embarrassing for Jisung, the way he was always so happy to be the joke, to laugh at himself and let Hyunjin laugh at him. But whatever that was, this wasn’t that, and Hyunjin just said, “I won’t. Do you want to come back over here? I can go first, if you want.”
His voice came out similar to how he sometimes spoke to Felix, or like how he’d spoken to Jeongin in those weeks after he’d been attacked, when Jeongin had been scared of his own shadow. Soft, quiet, a kind of tone that he wouldn’t have otherwise thought himself capable of; the kind of tone he associated with Chan. He’d never used this voice with Jisung. He’d never had cause for it.
Jisung was silent for a while, long enough that Hyunjin thought about simply trying to pull him back himself. But then Jisung let out a long, gusty breath, and said, “No, I can do it. I can do it.” He finally ripped his gaze away from the drop and looked over his shoulder at Hyunjin. The leather of his gloves was straining over his knuckles, his grip was so tight. “I mean, I have to do it, right? I’ll have to do it on the job.”
He would have to, at least if they didn’t want to have to somehow find their way down from the third floor and through the whole of Blackbird’s. This was their best option, and Hyunjin supposed they all had to do things they didn’t like on jobs sometimes, but there was something about Jisung’s desperate grip, his white face, that turned Hyunjin’s stomach a bit.
He’d never seen Jisung scared before, he realised. Even in moments where Hyunjin was scared, Jisung was calm and in control. There was something unsettling about Jisung being scared, and of something as mundane as heights.
Jisung took Hyunjin’s silence as an answer and nodded, seemingly at least partly to himself. “Right,” he said. “So I just have to hope that Changbin-hyung catches me if I fall.”
“You’re not going to fall,” Hyunjin said. He tried to mimic the way Jisung spoke to him sometimes, when they were on jobs together, or— like how Jisung had spoken to him that time Seungmin had been attacked. Firm and decisive, sure of himself; words that Jisung could rely on, even in moments where he didn’t think he could rely on himself. That’s what Jisung so often did for Hyunjin, so that’s what Hyunjin wanted to try for him.
Jisung looked at him for a few moments. Then he nodded and said, “I’m not going to fall.”
He turned carefully so that he was facing Hyunjin, his hands still clutching the railing. It looked like it took a lot out of him to let go in order to wrangle the rope around his body, and then more still when he first let himself carefully, slowly, over the lip of the building. Hyunjin waited until he was gone before he, too, climbed over the railing so he could watch Jisung’s progression. The drop was high, it was true, but it didn’t scare him. There was something about the wind in his face up here that felt like freedom.
Jisung didn’t fall, of course, although he was much slower than he had been inside. Hyunjin half-expected Changbin to start heckling him for taking too long, but Changbin didn’t say anything at all until Jisung got to the bottom, and whatever he did say, as he stood close helping him with the rope, was too quiet for Hyunjin to hear. So instead of paying attention to that, he just let himself over the lip too.
It was much, much harder at this kind of distance. He got tired faster, the ropes dug into his body much more harshly as time went on. Even with the gloves on, his hands ached from holding the rope and letting it run against his palms. At one point he glanced down and was shocked to see that he was barely halfway, Changbin and Jisung still small underneath him. If this was similar to the distance from Blackbird’s third floor to the ground, Hyunjin was glad that they were only going to have to do it once.
It took too long though. Even as he was doing it, he could tell it was taking too long. They needed to be faster than this, and he wasn’t sure how they could be faster without simply losing their control. They’d have the packs, too, weighing them down, throwing them off. It was going to be difficult.
By the time he reached the ground, he was shaking, not with fear but with exertion. Changbin’s hands steadied him, just like he’d done with Jisung, and he said, “There you go. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Why don’t you go up there and do it,” Hyunjin said. Changbin laughed, and handed him a bottle of water that Hyunjin hadn’t realised he had with him.
“Drink that,” he said.
It was half-gone. Presumably, Hyunjin realised, Jisung had drunk from it while they’d been watching Hyunjin’s progress down, and now Hyunjin would drink from the same bottle, his mouth where Jisung’s had been. Or maybe not, if he kept his mouth from touching the plastic, which he did, because there was something agonisingly silly about craving an indirect kiss like that, and he couldn’t allow himself to have it, not yet.
He finished the bottle, and set it on the ground by their feet to take home with them when they left. Then he straightened and said, “Jisung’s afraid of heights.”
Jisung flushed bright red. He gave Hyunjin a look that Hyunjin hadn’t really seen from him before: hurt, like he thought Hyunjin was making fun of him after all. But Hyunjin hadn’t meant it like that, even as Changbin grinned and said, “Is that why you came down from there like a little old lady?”
“How about you go try it, hyung, how about that?” Jisung snapped.
“Are there really no other options?” Hyunjin asked, and both Changbin and Jisung fell silent. “If Jisung’s scared, aren’t there other options?”
Changbin’s face went gooey-soft. Jisung looked at Hyunjin the way he did sometimes, that expression that made colour want to climb high over Hyunjin’s throat. He loves you, he loves you. “Ah, Hyunjin,” Jisung said on a sigh. “You’re so sweet.”
“No, I’m not,” Hyunjin said, very grumpy, because he wasn’t, he really wasn’t, and no matter how many times Jisung tried to pretend like Hyunjin was, that didn’t make it true. Didn’t Jisung have the scars to prove it, the ones that Hyunjin left on him every time he lashed out in his way?
“I’ll be fine,” Jisung said. “I can do it. It was just a lot higher than I’d realised it would be, certainly a lot fucking higher than it had been inside. But I did it, didn’t I? Don’t worry about me, okay?”
Hyunjin shot him a glaring little look, one that Jisung just grinned back at. Hyunjin wanted to call him stupid, which wouldn’t have sounded nice except Hyunjin kind of meant it nicely? It would have come out fond, or at least fondly exasperated, and he wanted to tell Jisung, let me worry about you for once in your fucking life, Jisung, except every time he tried to say something like that to Jisung, Jisung seemed to double down on not allowing it. So Hyunjin would have to do it secretly maybe.
Changbin looked up at the roof of the warehouse, squinting in the sunlight that had made itself very much known at this point. “Are you brave enough for one more round, Jisung?” he asked. “Or is that too much to ask.”
It really had been a mistake to mention it in front of Changbin, Hyunjin reflected. He forgot sometimes that his relationship with Changbin was very much not Jisung’s. Changbin felt like Hyunjin’s indulgent, loving older brother. Changbin sometimes felt like he was the older brother who would flush your head down the toilet with Jisung.
He watched that competitive edge come over Jisung’s features and sighed. One more time, he thought, as Jisung stormed off towards the staircase again, yelling something a little incoherent under the wind. And then I’ll make Changbin-hyung blast the heating all the way home.
——
Chan set a mug down on the table in front of Felix, a citrusy and sweet scent wafting out of it, the handle turned in Felix’s direction. “Here,” he said, as Felix fiddled with the label of the tea bag hanging over the lip of the mug. “That one should be good.”
“Thank you, hyung,” murmured Felix, pulling the mug close so that he could breathe in the smell. He felt the brush of Chan’s hand over the back of his head before Chan took his usual seat, setting his own mug of coffee down, the scent much more bitter, everything Felix didn’t like. He’d mentioned over their breakfast that he’d drunk herbal tea at home sometimes, especially in the winter mornings, and Chan had gotten up and dug around in the cupboards until he’d found something that Felix might like.
It had been a quiet morning, just the two of them in the apartment, a rare circumstance. Felix had woken first, for once, and had been in the process of getting dressed when Chan had stirred, pulling the covers down from his face to blink slowly at Felix, his face puffy with sleep. He’d slept, at least, and while he’d been quiet as he’d dressed and come out to cook the two of them an easy, simple breakfast, he had seemed— better. Calmer. He’d even smiled once or twice at Felix, real and true and handsome.
Chan nudged him with his foot, a little touch against his calf. “Drink your tea,” he said softly. “It’ll go cold.”
Felix nodded, and sipped at the tea, which was good, he could admit. Not his usual thing, but good nonetheless, and nice in the morning coldness of the apartment. There was supposed to be a meeting in here soon, Changbin having texted that they were on their way back from the warehouse, and once the others joined them, the room was bound to heat up, but right now it was chilly.
“Is it good?” Chan asked.
Felix smiled at him, watched as the edge of Chan’s mouth quirked upwards like he couldn’t help himself when he saw Felix smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I like it.”
The keypad outside sounded, but it wasn’t Changbin who stepped inside. Instead Jeongin came in, with some brown manila folders in his arms, holding them like they were precious cargo somehow. Behind him was Minho, who did his usual thing and did not remove his shoes. He was holding dishes, two of them stacked on top of each other, with two mugs balanced carefully on those; from their own breakfast, Felix assumed. He hadn’t heard anyone cooking but it must have been before he was even awake.
Chan beside him had gone very still, very stiff. When Felix glanced at him, he was glaring at Minho, his eyes narrowed in a way that Felix hadn’t seen before. Not the kind of explosive anger that Felix had seen from the floor of Chan’s office but something different, something colder and lingering. Felix’s stomach sank a bit.
“Hello,” he said, as cheerfully as he could, addressing the two who had come into the room. “Sorry, Jeongin, I’ve taken your chair.”
He didn’t offer to give it back. He didn’t want to sit away from Chan for this meeting, not with the way he was watching Minho as Minho crossed over to the sink without a word and set everything down and started running the hot water. Jeongin gave Felix a quick smile, and ignored Chan’s entire existence.
“That’s okay, Felix-hyung,” he said, sliding his feet into the house slippers that had made an appearance once the weather got colder, for use before the underfloor heating really came on. He swerved by the table, dropping the folders down in front of Chan before heading into the kitchen with Minho. “I wasn’t going to sit there anyway. Here, hyung, let me help.”
He tried to nudge Minho out of the way of the sink, as far as Felix could tell, to take over the dishes, but Minho simply did not budge at all. He didn’t say a single word, just made it very clear that he was not going to accept Jeongin helping. Jeongin tried sticking his hands straight into the sink but that didn’t work either, and eventually he was forced to admit defeat and step back.
He didn’t step away, though, not quite. He seemed happy to watch Minho as he first washed their dishes and then began to dry them, carefully and methodically. He must have seen Minho do this numerous times, Felix thought, because he knew how often they ate breakfast together, but Jeongin seemed perfectly content. Like this was something he enjoyed seeing.
Felix looked back at Chan. He did not look like this was something he enjoyed seeing. He looked like someone who had bitten into a lemon, a nasty twist to his mouth. Felix felt the first drips of something like annoyance inside him. He’d thought they’d sorted this out last night, the two of them, after Felix had reassured Chan that he had nothing to worry about. That Jeongin was where he wanted to be. But apparently not.
There was the beep of the keypad again, whoever it was entering the code really bashing it in. It was not entirely surprising that Changbin came in first, his cheeks splotchy red from the cold, the tip of his nose pink. “Whew,” he said, one hand on the doorframe to balance himself as he yanked his shoelaces loose. “Let me tell you it is brisk out there.”
“Everything go alright?” Chan asked, his attention very alert.
“Yeah, yeah,” Changbin said, approaching the table at a saunter now he was free of his sneakers. He slid a little sly glance backwards, at where Jisung was trying to kick his own shoes off, and added, “Though Jisung waited until they were on the roof to reveal he is deathly afraid of heights.”
“Deathly is a gross exaggeration,” Jisung said loudly, thick with indignation. He was flailing his foot behind himself in an attempt to fling his shoe off, like a dog trying to dislodge an unwanted bootie. It finally went flying off, thunking against the door. “Would any ground dwelling creature be pleased to dangle fifty feet in the air? I think not!”
From the kitchen, Jeongin called, “Sounds fun to me!” He did not see the way Jisung stuck his tongue out at the back of his head.
Chan stared at the closed front door for a moment before he asked, “Where’s Hyunjin.”
“He said he deserves a little treat for having to endure waking up so early,” Changbin said with an eye roll that did not disguise his fondness in the slightest. “He’s gone to that cafe up the road.”
“Well, we don’t need him for this meeting,” Chan said, a little too clipped to be his normal tone. He sat up a bit straighter, lacing his hands together on the table. “Shall we start?”
Minho replaced the towel he’d been using to dry the dishes back on its hook while Changbin unzipped his thick coat, tossing it over the back of the couch. The two of them sat — Minho in his usual place at Chan’s direct right, which Felix thought was particularly brave of him, and Changbin in Hyunjin’s spot, putting him opposite to Chan. Jisung had a split-second of hesitation but chose to sit next to Felix rather than Minho. He hadn’t taken his padded coat off, and it pressed against Felix’s arm. With it on, Jisung looked impossibly round.
Jeongin, after drying his hands on his pants, flounced over to the couch and flopped back onto it. Felix thought he might involve himself in the meeting but he just silently turned his Nintendo on, the music low. Supervising, Felix thought dryly.
Minho watched Jeongin go, his head turning to keep track, and Chan sourly said, “Head in the game, thank you.” Minho immediately resumed a more neutral posture, his gaze dropping to rest on his own lap. Chan squinted at him for a second with an open kind of distaste that Felix did not like before he was looking at Jisung instead, far more neutrally. “Jisung-ah, you don’t have to stay for this meeting,” Chan said, his voice mild rather than scolding.
“Eh, I know,” Jisung said, wiggling a little, “but it’s warmer up here than the rest of the building. And it’s nice to be in the loop.” His cheeks still had that same kind of pink tinge that Changbin’s did.
Chan nodded, then— looked at Minho without looking at Minho, his gaze in Minho’s direction without actually making contact. Minho took that as his cue. He set fingertips down on his stack of folders and pushed the topmost one toward the centre of the table, flipping it open. “This morning Seungmin and I were able to get screenshots of the safe in Blackbird’s,” he said, quiet but clear, and Felix leaned forward to look at the greyscale printouts, zoomed in on the safe. As Minho fanned the pages out, he could see there were shots of the front of the safe, the dial and handle, and then shots of it open, the interior. “When they opened it, they stood in such a way that they blocked the camera’s view of the dial, so we couldn’t see the combination; it’s possible that was coincidence but more likely it was tactically done.”
“Yeah,” Felix agreed, settling back in his seat, “my father wouldn’t want to take any chances at someone unauthorised in the security rooms seeing it.”
Minho nodded shortly, tucking the papers back into a tidy pile. “Seungmin is working on identifying the exact model of the safe now, and once he does he is going to put out feelers to see if we can’t secure one, either to buy or borrow.”
Chan inclined his head, but said nothing about Minho having worked through the night to get this information. He just said, “Next.”
Minho closed that folder and replaced it with the second one, Felix seeing his own handwriting when it was opened. “I’ve revised the text you want to send to your sister,” he said, and Felix felt a little startled when he realised Minho was speaking to him. Minho pulled a slip of paper out of the folder, this one with his own writing on it. He handed it over to Felix. “Let me know if you think she’ll be able to read between the lines.”
Felix took the paper gingerly with a murmured thank you. This rewritten version of his message was much shorter than his original. It read:
Hi Rachel.
This is Felix, I changed numbers recently. It’s been a while since we last spoke, so I wanted to reach out. How have you been, how is the family? I’m doing well, I actually settled nearby and would like to meet up sometime soon. Let me know, it would be nice to hear from you.
Felix read it three times, calculating, trying to see it from his sister’s eyes. He understood why the details needed to be pruned out — in case the message was intercepted somehow, if his father was monitoring her messages, it could have nothing that might tip him off. This message was much colder, and Felix wished it could be a little— softer, warmer, because he wanted his sister to feel that he still loved her, hadn’t forgotten her. But he supposed the fact that he was sending a message at all would have to convey that.
“Yeah,” he said, handing the paper back. “She should understand this.” She’d know it was from him, the name would be obvious to her but not to anyone else reading the message, a little secret between them. And she was smart enough to read between the rest of the lines. I’m still here, I want to get you out, tell me anything you can.
Minho didn’t return the paper to the folder, he put it in the centre of the table, tapping on it. “Seungmin said he has everything in place, so he’ll send it today, if that is acceptable?” he asked, looking at Chan with an unmatched form of deference.
Chan kind of made a motion, like he was brushing away a buzzing fly. “Yes, we need it sent as soon as possible,” he said, like he was annoyed that Minho was even asking the question at all.
Minho left the paper where it was, and then reached for his third, and final, folder, his blank expression shifting just slightly into one of discomfort. When he flipped it open, it was a printed photo of a building front, still in the process of renovation but mostly finished. Above the large front window there was a sign that said Cafe Daniel.
“This is the building next to Blackbird’s,” Minho said, and Felix felt his heart sink a little. “The office on the upper two floors is already in operation, though it will be closed in the evening so it’s less of an issue. But the cafe, as Seungmin said before, is going to be open twenty-four hours, and it opens in two days, on Monday morning.”
“There’s no way we can do the job in two days,” Jisung said, putting the obvious into words, his eyes wide in his face.
“No, there isn’t,” Minho agreed, grim. He pulled out another piece of paper, this one was a rough blueprint of the building. He continued, “The building is set up similarly to our own, with the stairwell running up all four floors. But there’s walls and doors on each landing, separating the floors.” He gestured, methodical and sharp, pointing at dashed lines and tiny notes. “The one between the first and second floor might not be locked, but the one between the second and third floor almost certainly will be, due to the two different businesses, the upper office’s security policy. Hyunjin would likely be able to pick that lock, but the issue is the cafe doors lead right out into the landing, and if the door into the cafe is glass, that means that Hyunjin and Jisung will be completely visible while trying to get through the door.”
Most eateries these days did have glass doors, Felix thought, and even if this cafe proved to be an exception, it was still going to be an open place of business. All it would take was one person coming or leaving from the cafe at the wrong moment, some stupid civilian seeing Hyunjin and Jisung clearly trying to break through a door, and then the entire plan would be scuppered.
“That would get the cops called on us no question,” Jisung said. “And I’m gonna have a concealed rifle with me, not to mention the explosives. I’d really rather not get arrested.”
“It’s a lot riskier than we’d initially planned, yes,” Minho said, again gathering the papers up to put them back in the folder. “The other option is the parking garage on Blackbird’s opposite side, where the valet cars are put.” He looked up from his task and pinned Felix with his gaze. “I wanted to ask you about the security.”
Felix had not prepared for this, and it took his brain a moment to begin to whirr, dredging up the details that might be useful. “Uhm,” he said, “from what I remember there are two booths, one on the entrance and one on the exit, and they have a guard each.” He’d never actually been in the parking garage, had only seen it from the outside when driving past. “There’s usually a couple armed security officers roaming the floors, though they tend to stick by the stairs I think? But I don’t know how you’d get in, the second floor and up are open to the air, but the first floor has concrete walls. There’s no way a pair of people sneaking in wouldn’t get seen, they’d have to pass by one of the security booths.”
“A distraction?” Changbin suggested, the first time he’d said anything during this meeting. His hair was all windswept still, curly like Chan’s but a decidedly different sort of texture. “Some kind of disturbance at one side so they congregate there, leaving the opposite side unmanned?”
Minho’s expression twisted into a wince. “I don’t like the idea of putting any of the security on alert, even if they decide to dub it a false alarm.”
“We utilise the open second floor,” Jisung said, nodding like he was being very wise. “Bring a really big ladder.” Changbin kicked him under the table.
“If I thought we could get away with that unseen,” Minho said, very dry, “it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“So, what?” Chan asked, his annoyance cutting through the playful air like a knife. “You don’t have any ideas?”
Minho opened his mouth to reply but at that moment Jeongin made a little noise, almost like a squeak. Minho’s head snapped around, looking at him, all of his attention focused. When he saw that Jeongin was merely reacting to something in his game, his shoulders untensed just slightly.
“If you could pay attention,” Chan said, very tersely, very nastily, “like I have asked, although I do know that it’s difficult for you to do as I ask, you asshole.”
There was a brief pause of absolute silence, broken only when Jisung shifted uncomfortably on his chair. Minho looked at the table. Felix saw Jeongin jerk upright on the couch, already with one foot on the floor, but before he could say anything, Felix said, "Wow. That was uncalled for."
The silence this time was even more absolute. Chan’s eyes snapped to his, an expression so shocked on his face that Felix had a very uncomfortable sense of deja vu. Minho looked at him like he had never seen Felix before in his life. Jisung made a noise that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been muffled immediately.
“What?” said Chan.
“That was uncalled for,” Felix repeated. “You’re being really hostile, it’s unprofessional and out of place.”
Chan stared at him. Felix wasn’t sure if it was because it was him, of all people, to scold Chan, when Felix usually had the confrontational capacity of a wet noodle. Or if it was because Chan had taken Felix’s somewhat indulgent, gentle support of him these last couple of days as some kind of approval — or if not approval, then an understanding of Chan’s feelings.
At this point, Felix did get why Chan was feeling the way he was — but that did not mean he thought those feelings were things that should be left where they lay, rather than something to be overcome.
Whatever the case, it was clear Chan hadn’t expected that Felix would call him out so publicly. Felix wasn’t especially happy about it, but he could not let that comment pass. He had seen the way Minho had flinched, just a little.
“Felix-hyung,” said Jeongin’s voice, close now. Felix looked away from Chan and found that Jeongin had gotten up after all and come to the table. He looked a little nervous, even as his hand settled on Minho’s shoulder. Minho sat fully upright, still giving Felix that blank look of confusion. “Thank you, but you don’t need to.”
“No,” said Felix, smiling a little at him in reassurance. “I think I really do.”
Jeongin smiled back at him, tentative but there. He looked so grateful that it made Felix want to cry a little. It was as he had told Jeongin just yesterday: he was on his side. Felix knew better than anyone the importance of having the space for your own decisions.
Chan was looking between the two of them, starting to frown now as his shock faded. Jeongin said, “I think this meeting is over, yeah? Minho-hyung, come on, let’s go— do basically anything else, huh?” He did something that was not quite tugging Minho to his feet but gave the illusion of doing so, as Minho nodded his head and got up from the table. He didn’t look at Chan, didn’t offer any words to him. He just let Jeongin slip his hand around his elbow and tug him to the door of the apartment.
The door had barely shut behind them when Changbin got to his feet, snatching up the piece of paper with the revised text message draft. “I’m gonna run this to Seungmin,” he said, already several steps away from the table. Jisung made a floundering noise, watching Changbin go, and then looked between Chan and Felix in a nervous kind of way. He pointed to the door and grunted, not even bothering to make an excuse as he fled behind Changbin. He slammed the door a little in his haste at getting out.
Felix sighed. He looked at Chan, who did not seem to have looked away from him that entire time. He was frowning properly now, but still there was that surprise, that faint hint of betrayal that made Felix feel a memory of shame. Chan didn’t say anything to him, though. He just kept looking at Felix like he wasn’t sure what to make of him right now.
“I’m sorry,” Felix said eventually, gently, “for saying that in front of the others. But you were out of line.”
“You,” Chan said, and then stopped. He was clearly choosing his words very carefully, which pained Felix to see a little bit, mostly because if he could do it with Felix, he could do it with other people. “He—”
“I know,” Felix interrupted. “I know you’re angry, hyung. He knows that too. But no matter how angry you might be at him, he had done nothing, in that moment, worthy of being spoken to like that, and you were wrong to do so.”
“Lix,” said Chan, a little more heated now. “He has made no attempt, none, to reconcile this with me. There’s been— nothing, no apology, no explanation, he just hides behind Jeongin.”
“Hyung,” Felix said, so patient, so much more patiently than he felt like being. Getting angry wouldn’t solve anything but for the first time in a very long time, he really felt like doing so. “He doesn’t need to apologise to you for having sex with someone who has shown himself to be enthusiastically willing. And how can he reconcile with you when, truthfully, at this point you’re making up a problem to continue being upset about? Is there even anything he could do that would appease you, outside of grovelling for forgiveness?”
“I’m not asking for grovelling,” said Chan, scowling so heavily it was shading his eyes. “I’m asking for an acknowledgement that he lied to my face.” Felix could feel the way his features had settled into a deeply unimpressed expression. With his lack of response, it gave Chan a moment to chew on his thoughts, his dark scowl not lifting one bit as he added, “And I want him to cut things with Jeongin off. At least until Jeongin isn’t a teenager anymore.”
That— was laughable. “So, like, three more months?” Felix asked, letting his tone convey exactly how ridiculous that was. “And until you get your way you’re going to throw a tantrum?”
Chan reacted like Felix had reached across the table and slapped him. “I’m not throwing a tantrum,” he said, loudly enough that his voice rang a little in the room.
“Yes, you are,” Felix said, implacable. “I was trying not to intervene because I could see where your concern was coming from originally, but all those worries you had have been addressed and settled. I talked about them very explicitly with Jeongin last night. There’s no reason for you to be acting like this now, other than that you’re upset you’re not getting your way. It’s childish, and frankly, hyung, it’s also extremely unattractive.”
He seemed to have shocked Chan into speechlessness. He gaped at Felix with an expression that was like a more animated version of Minho’s look from earlier — like he had never seen Felix before in his life, or at least this version. But this was a part of Felix that didn’t come out very often anyway, mostly because he did not really like feeling this way. He didn’t like talking sharply, he didn’t like getting angry. None of this felt good.
But it was like he had told Jeongin: he had to do it. He had not wanted to interfere, acutely aware that this was, at its heart, a family matter that he had no right to have a say in. He knew Jeongin well enough, but not enough to overstep his bounds as Chan’s— lover, or partner, or boyfriend, or whatever word they could use to describe their relationship as. He’d mostly been hoping that Chan would pull his head out of his ass and get it together, but apparently not, and he could no longer step back and watch things get worse.
Eventually, Chan said, a little hoarsely, “I thought you’d be on my side.”
“Why?” Felix asked. “Because we’ve slept together?”
Chan winced a little, over the words or how flippantly they’d been delivered, Felix couldn’t really say. He knew that was how Chan had been thinking of it, in some way or another. He and Felix were together now, and therefore Felix would be on his side. It wasn’t that Chan did not think of him as his own person, but that Chan liked to think of them as a unit — and that didn’t just apply to Felix. He liked to think of them all as a unit, as a family, and they were — but that didn’t mean that families didn’t have disagreements. That was the thing that Chan was truly struggling with.
“No,” Chan said. “That’s not it — I thought you’d be on my side, because— because Minho made me a promise and then he broke it; he lied to me. That hurt, Felix, and I feel so unsure and shaky, like I don’t know this person I thought was something like a friend. And you’ve seen how worried I am about Jeongin, I thought you’d— understand. I thought you’d sympathise.”
Felix, in spite of himself and the fact that he knew Chan needed a dressing down, felt a twinge of guilt. He put his hand on the table, palm up, waiting. After a moment, Chan put his hand on top of it, let Felix squeeze their fingers together. Something about that, perhaps just the reassurance, made Chan’s shoulders slump. “Hyung,” he said, a little gentler now that Chan was beginning to really look like a soggy puppy. “I am going to be really blunt here: You had no right, none, to tell Minho-hyung to stay away from Jeongin. That would have been overstepping even if you were a parent, don’t you get that? Jeongin is an adult. And even if you disapprove, you had no right to ask — or demand, as I suspect the case might be — for Minho to make you that promise. So yes, I do understand that you feel like you’ve been lied to — and I am here, saying very firmly that just because that is how you feel, doesn’t make it true.”
Chan’s hand in his was limp. “He’s going to break Jeongin’s heart,” he said, so sadly, his eyes big and brown, framed by long lashes. Felix had to hold back a sigh. “Worse, I think he might break Jeongin’s spirit.”
“I don’t think that will happen, but even if it does, your place in this is to just be there for him in the fallout,” Felix said. He squeezed Chan’s hand one more time and then took it away. “You can’t keep ordering him around, or bullying Minho-hyung, even if you believe it’s the right thing to do. This is out of your control, and the way you’re acting now is going to ruin your relationship with Jeongin. Do you hear me? You need to think about it, hyung, about whether your pride at all of this is worth alienating your brother. And possibly the rest of the team, too.”
He had expected, during this conversation, for Chan to be angry, to react with loud words, sharp gestures — the way, he realised now, he would have expected his father to react to any mild criticism. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Chan just looked devastated, like Felix’s words had wounded him somehow. Chan felt too strongly, trusted too much of his heart to others, to Felix, to be anything other than hurt by this. But it was what Felix had needed to say — it was what Chan had needed to hear.
Felix stood up from the table, shoving a hand through his hair. “I’m going to go downstairs, peek in on Jeongin maybe.”
Chan’s face snapped up to track his movements. “Lix—” he began, and Felix cupped his face to silence him.
“I love you,” Felix said, not with tenderness but more so with gritty truth. He kissed Chan’s forehead, lips barely meeting the skin there was so much hair in the way. “I do, very much, and I’m here for you — but not blindly.”
“Are you mad at me,” Chan mumbled, his face slightly squished between Felix’s palms.
“No,” Felix said. He had his own worries squirming in the pit of his stomach. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” Chan said, sounding— glum, was the best way to put it.
Felix kissed his forehead again. “It’s going to be okay, hyung,” he promised. Because he was fairly certain it was. Minho was not going to hurt Jeongin in any of the ways Chan feared. It was looking more like Minho was the one with the higher likelihood of evisceration, if things went sideways. “I’ll see you tonight, okay?” he said, brushing Chan’s frizzy curls off his face. “Please don’t hide away in your office all night. Come to bed.”
Wordless, Chan nodded, and it dislodged Felix’s hold on his cheeks. “I love you too,” Chan whispered, staring at a spot on the table. Felix fought down the knot of guilt in his gut.
When he turned back to look at Chan as the apartment door was closing, Chan was still sitting at the table, staring blankly down at it.
——
“Hyung, hyung,” Jisung called, bounding down the stairs after Changbin, scrambling to catch up with him. “Hyung, wait for me.”
Changbin didn’t wait for him, but he did slow a little bit on his way down the stairs, glancing over his shoulder at Jisung. “Oh,” he said, “you escaped too, huh?”
“Duh,” said Jisung, as he caught up, trying to sling an arm around Changbin’s shoulders. It was a futile effort at the best of times, considering the shoulders, but Changbin elbowed him away fairly quickly and Jisung fell to the side with an oof. “That was excruciating.”
Changbin sighed. He looked a little tired, a little pensive, in a way that Changbin usually wasn’t. As far as Jisung knew, Changbin very rarely called Chan to the floor on stuff, but then there wasn’t usually stuff for Chan to be criticised for. Changbin, though — his loyalty to Chan was as clear as the sun in the sky, his trust and unwavering belief in the man kind of awe-inspiring for Jisung, who had wanted, in the beginning, to feel something similar, to know what it was to trust someone else in that way.
He did, now. He felt something of the same way for Chan. But Jisung could say it, at least in his own head: Chan was being an absolute dick about this.
They rounded the corner; Hyunjin, his foot on the first step up from the landing below, looked up at them and said, “Oh, is the meeting over?”
He was carrying a paper bag, branded with the logo of the coffee shop a few blocks away, the one that Jisung liked the best. In his other hand he was carrying a cup holder with two iced americanos in it, the largest size the store sold. His giant coat was unzipped, but his nose was pink from the cold, and with his dark hair left free around his face he looked unbelievably soft and cute, blinking up at them.
“Technically,” Changbin said.
Jisung, covering his mouth like he had done the night before, said, “Chan-hyung has lost his fucking mind.”
Hyunjin looked between the two of them. “What happened,” he said, commandingly. “Don’t leave me out of the gossip.”
Changbin sighed, gustily enough to be funny rather than a sign that he was upset in any way. “You know I don’t gossip, Hyunjin-ah,” he said.
“Bullshit,” retorted Hyunjin. “Anyway, I wasn’t talking to you, Jisung will tell me everything. Right?”
This last question was directed at Jisung, who took a moment to register being addressed and then said, “God, yeah, I’ll tell you everything, it was wild.”
Hyunjin looked triumphantly at Changbin, whose face had softened into lines of pure fondness. “I have to take this to Seungmin anyway,” he said, brandishing the paper. He took the couple of steps down to where Hyunjin was on the landing and said, “Aw, for me, Hyunjin? You shouldn’t have.”
He reached out as if to take one of the coffees from the holder. Hyunjin swung slightly to the side so he couldn’t get at it, and said, “It’s not for you, hyung, it’s for Jisung.”
Jisung gasped, mock-theatrically, inviting himself in on the joke, while Changbin spluttered for a moment before saying, “For Jisung? After I got up so early to haul you two over to Yongin? All of that and you don’t even bring me a coffee?”
“Go get your own coffee,” Hyunjin said tartly. “You didn’t even do anything, you just sat around on the ground. Jisung and I did all the hard work.”
“Unbelievable,” Changbin said. Jisung was laughing properly now, both at the bitchy little tone in Hyunjin’s voice, always hilarious when not directed at him, and the way Changbin was trying, and mostly failing, to be upset when he was always so delighted to be teased by Hyunjin. “Everything I do for this team, everything I do for you, my favourite little brother, and I get treated in such callous ways—”
“I’m going to tell Jeongin that you called me your favourite,” Hyunjin said, in a tone of absolute glee.
Changbin paused. Then he said, “You know what? I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. Maybe I can steal one of Seungmin’s energy drinks.”
He gave Jisung a mostly cheery wave of his hand and then carried on down the stairs. Hyunjin waited until they could no longer hear the echoing footsteps before he spoke. “I got him a chocolate chip scone,” he said. When he looked away from where Changbin had disappeared to, he was smiling, and the smile didn’t fade as he looked at Jisung. It was very much like taking a continuous blow to the head. “I’ll leave it upstairs for him later. Here.”
He pulled one of the coffees out of the holder and held it out to Jisung. Jisung blinked at it, and then at Hyunjin, who raised an eyebrow expectantly at him. “Oh,” Jisung said. “It’s really for me? I thought it must have been for Felix.”
“Don’t be silly,” Hyunjin said dismissively. “Lix doesn’t even drink coffee.”
That was true, and Jisung had known it, Felix had told him that himself, in fact. He simply could not quite fathom a world in which Hyunjin had genuinely gone out to get himself something and had brought Jisung a coffee back without Jisung even asking him for it.
He took the coffee, tentatively, still kind of unsure if Hyunjin was going to snatch it back or reveal it was all a joke. But Hyunjin didn’t, he just waited until Jisung had hold of it and then said, “Come on, let’s go to the PC room, we can sit at the old reception desk and you can tell me about the meeting.”
Jisung followed him up the stairs, coffee clutched in his hands. The PC room was cold, but there was a space heater in there for when Jeongin wanted to use the computer, so Hyunjin plugged it in and switched it on and shrugged out of his padded coat, which he lay over one of the bar stools. He sat, and looked pointedly at Jisung, who sat down next to him. For lack of anything else to do, he took a sip of his coffee, and realised it was very strong, perfectly so.
“It’s good?” Hyunjin asked. He had his own coffee in his hands but he hadn’t drunk any of it yet. He was just watching Jisung.
“Yeah,” Jisung said. “It’s exactly how I like it.”
Hyunjin nodded. There was something almost shy about his body language, not easily quantified to Jisung, who was not used to that kind of thing with Hyunjin. “So,” he said, leaning forward a little. Jisung had to resist the instinctive urge to lean away again, away from that beautiful face. “What happened?”
Jisung settled into his seat, trying to not squirm with Hyunjin’s attention on him like this. He’d so rarely had this in the past, and yet it was happening more and more recently; he didn’t know how to deal with it at all. “Well, uh, it was just a normal meeting, really. We were talking about a bunch of stuff, the safe, and Felix’s sister, you know, the message we’re sending her? But Chan-hyung was being all weird to Minho-hyung, like— he talked normally to me but every time he spoke to Minho-hyung he was all snappy and rude. So it was already really awkward, you know.”
Hyunjin wrinkled his nose. He lifted his drink and took a long sip, his full lips pursing around the straw cutely. He did know, they all knew, the tension in the building thick enough to suffocate them, and it was about time someone took Chan to task on the matter. Jisung was mostly surprised it was Felix to have been the one to snap. It was a shock to discover Felix had it in him.
“And then,” Jisung said, voice gaining confidence because Hyunjin’s attention on him hadn’t wavered at all, utterly rapt, “Jeongin made a little noise from the couch because— I don’t know, actually, he lost in his game or something. But he made a noise and Minho-hyung looked at him for, like, a second, and Chan-hyung told him to pay attention and then called him an asshole.”
Hyunjin’s eyebrows flew into his hairline. He pulled off his straw, swallowed, and then said, “What?”
“Yeah!” Jisung said, unable to hold back the smile beginning to curve his mouth at Hyunjin’s scandalised expression.
“What was Minho-hyung’s reaction?” Hyunjin asked. He grabbed the straw and stabbed it around his drink, stirring the ice. “Hope he told Chan-hyung to stuff it — I get being worried about Jeongin, I was too, but he can’t just— act like that.”
“Minho-hyung kinda just looked sad, actually,” Jisung said, much of his amusement dropping as he remembered. “But, uh, Felix called Chan-hyung out? Like right there in front of everyone.”
Hyunjin perked up, eyes sparkling. “Lix did?” he asked, his teeth flashing from behind a half-smile, disbelief and glee colouring his tone.
Jisung nodded. “I almost started laughing but I didn’t want Chan-hyung to get pissed at me, so Changbin-hyung and I kinda just booked it out of there.”
Hyunjin, on the stool, swivelled a little bit, back and forth, one of his long legs kicking idly. “Ah, Chan-hyung, what an idiot he can be,” he said fondly. “I really do love him.”
“He’s trying, I think,” Jisung said. He was able to see the strain in Chan, the stress. He seemed like a man who really needed a vacation and one just wasn’t forthcoming. He did not, exactly, understand the nature of the current problem with Minho, beyond Chan being very protective of Jeongin. It seemed an unusual thing to have him so worked up over. “These last couple weeks just really haven’t been his best.”
“Felix said Chan-hyung made him go down to Minho-hyung’s room to talk to Jeongin about sex stuff,” Hyunjin said, and Jisung nearly choked on his coffee. Hyunjin kicked him lightly, shoe making contact with Jisung’s ankle. “Gross, Jisung.”
Jisung used his sleeve to clean up the dribble of coffee on his chin. He was red with embarrassment, but he managed to say, a little wetly, “He did what? Oh, man, poor Jeongin. Poor Felix. What the fuck.”
Hyunjin sighed, a bit theatrical with it as he sat back in his stool, the low backrest barely keeping him up. “It’s because of all the—” He gestured vaguely. “You know.” Jisung blinked at him, and Hyunjin sighed again. “My meltdown yesterday?” he said, cheeks going the slightest bit pink while his face remained in that sort of expression he often levelled at Jisung these days — like he thought Jisung was an idiot, but without any hostility. Jisung had grown quite fond of that expression; it made warm, squirmy things start up in the pit of his stomach. But he rather thought right now Hyunjun was using it as a mask.
Don’t make him feel self-conscious about it, he thought sternly at himself. The last thing Jisung wanted was for Hyunjin to have to worry if Jisung was judging him in the private spaces of his mind. He wanted Hyunjin to feel comfortable being vulnerable around him.
“It wasn’t a meltdown,” he said cautiously. “You were upset.”
Hyunjin swung his leg again, catching Jisung’s shin this time. It didn’t hurt any more than the first strike had. “That’s not the point,” he said, brusque and haughty. He shook his hair out of his face, midnight and gleaming. He’d had it pulled up all morning, bitched about having a headache on the way home and took it down. Jisung wasn’t sure which look was more devastating. The hair tie was still around his wrist.
Jisung was staring, had been staring for too long when he realised Hyunjin was simply looking at him expectantly. He rewound Hyunjin’s words. “What’s the point,” Jisung said slowly.
“God, drink that coffee, Jisung,” Hyunjin said, and Jisung obediently took a long sip, exaggeratedly pouting his lips as he did, looking up at Hyunjin through his lashes. Hyunjin did not seem impressed. “If you start making stupid poses at me again, I’m going to leave you here and won’t tell you any more.”
Jisung swallowed, too much at once, nearly choking again. His eyes watered a little. “Sorry, oh guru of knowledge,” he managed to scrape out. “Bestow upon me your wisdom.”
Hyunjin squinted at him. “You’re lucky you’re so cute,” he said, shaking his head, and Jisung felt like someone had kicked his chair out from under him.
Cute! his brain trilled. He thinks I’m cute!
“Anyway,” Hyunjin said, firm now, biting his pretty bottom lip for a moment in a way that did not at all help Jisung’s galloping heart, “I think that thing you said— about Chan-hyung not always being right? It’s— that, it’s him, thinking the same way I did. But for me it’s— I reacted like that.” His eyes lowered, long lashes covering his irises in a pretty sweep. “Chan-hyung when he’s worried gets angry.”
“He thinks Minho-hyung is hurting Jeongin?” Jisung asked, a touch surprised.
Hyunjin raised his eyes again, gaze flat. “You share a wall with Minho-hyung,” he said, tart. “Haven’t you heard them?”
Jisung gave a one-shouldered shrug. He hadn’t, not really. When they’d gotten started the day before he’d put on his noise-cancelling headphones and it had been problem solved.
“Well, Jeongin sounds like he’s being murdered,” Hyunjin huffed, and Jisung had to hold back his instinctive reply of, god, I wish that were me. He didn’t want Minho, but he would quite like to get dicked down good enough it made him forget himself that way. It had been a long time. “And I guess apparently Chan-hyung had spoken to Minho-hyung a while ago and made him promise to stay away from Jeongin?” Hyunjin said, and Jisung’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah. So he’s mad about the broken promise and also I think just kinda pissed he isn’t getting his way.” He gave a sort of rolling shrug and then sucked down several gulps of his coffee.
Jisung lifted his straw to his mouth again, sipping a little more slowly. All this drama, he thought. So much going on while Jisung plodded along unaware, because he could scarcely take his eyes off Hyunjin. Felix getting together with Chan had totally blindsided him, and now this too. Not just Minho and Jeongin, but also to find out there’d been all this— mess, just under the surface, churning about. Chan trying to ward Minho off like an overzealous father in a teen drama, poor Felix having to give Jeongin, nearly twenty years old, the birds and the bees talk. Jisung would have liked to have heard that conversation.
“Thank you, by the way,” Hyunjin said, breaking the quiet that had settled between them. Jisung looked at him, cocking his head to the side in question, and Hyunjin set his coffee on the counter. “For last night, I mean. Taking care of me,” he clarified, suddenly not that creature of pride and poise but just— Hyunjin, young and unsure. “And this morning, too, even though you were shaking in your boots over the heights.”
Jisung’s brain took a second, little signals misfiring. Then he slowly raised his leg, brandishing his sneaker-clad foot. “I’m not wearing boots.”
Hyunjin stared back at him for a moment, and it became clear he was not going to laugh. Before Jisung could lower his leg down Hyunjin had reached forward, fast as a snake strike, and grabbed his ankle. He shoved Jisung’s leg up, too high, Jisung was not that flexible, so his whole body rotated, the stool under him tipping onto two legs. Jisung screamed, nearly dropping his coffee but Hyunjin had already grabbed it with his other hand. Jisung scrabbled at the bar, his sweaty hands sticking to the polished wood.
“Mercy!” he cried, as Hyunjin loomed over him, still holding his leg up. “I’m sorry!”
“You’re a menace, Han Jisung,” Hyunjin said, while Jisung slowly slid backwards, his hands squeaking on the bar. Then Hyunjin dropped his foot, and Jisung had been so focused on trying not to fall backwards that with the sudden weight shift he fell forward instead, straight onto the carpeted floor of the PC room.
It didn’t hurt. He rolled, once because of momentum, and then again for dramatic affect, almost knocking his head into the pool table. Once he was laying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, he said, very solemnly, “I’m going to report you to HR.”
Hyunjin came over, kneeling beside him, his chin resting on his hand. “If I give you Changbin-hyung’s chocolate chip scone, will that buy your silence?” he asked, just as gravely. Playing along. Jisung’s heart was light as air, light as happiness itself.
“Nah,” Jisung said, sitting up, putting their faces nearly level. “It’s rude to steal from the elderly.”
Hyunjin turned his face away, ducking it down, but Jisung could see the tell-tale curve of his cheek even from this angle. Never where you’ve seen it, he remembered Hyunjin saying, and thought, Ah.
“I’ll take that instead though,” Jisung said, before he could think better of it. “That smile. Seems like a fair trade.”
Hyunjin took a second but then he looked back at Jisung, eyes wide, the smile gone in place of a kind of genuine surprise. Jisung smiled at him, like it had just been a joke, but it was a little weak. Hyunjin’s face had gone petal pink.
“Hyunjin,” Jisung began, and he wasn’t even sure what would come next — an explanation, an apology, or something too fucking real for either of them to handle.
He would never know, because at that moment the door to the PC room swung open and Felix came in, though he stopped when he saw the two of them. “Oh,” he said, as Hyunjin positively leapt to his feet, putting several steps between himself and where Jisung was sitting on the floor. “Sorry, I uh—”
“It’s fine,” Hyunjin said, doing that motion again, shaking his hair out of his eyes. “Jisung was being dumb, the usual. I was kind of filling him in on recent events.”
“What a meanie you are,” Jisung said, letting his mouth take the lead, his brain slow and mourning the moment between them that had been so quickly snuffed out. “Bullying someone who is like, half your size.”
Felix giggled, even if Hyunjin didn’t. God, fuck, what had Jisung been thinking, trying to flirt so obviously with him. He got to his feet, patting his ass and thighs off. The PC room floor was— not clean, gritty particles stuck to his palms. He could not remember the last time someone had vacuumed in here. He was not convinced anyone ever had.
“I heard you told Chan-hyung off,” Hyunjin said to Felix. “Did he grovel for forgiveness?”
The smile on Felix’s face, the one leftover from laughing at Jisung’s joke, fell away and he sighed, looking tired, a little worn out. “No,” he said. “I didn’t— I upset him, I think. He said he wasn’t mad at me but—”
He gave Hyunjin a look that could have come straight out of an animal shelter commercial, his eyes big and liquid. “Ah, angel,” Hyunjin sighed, before he folded Felix up into his arms. Usually when that happened, Felix melted into the hold, but he held himself a little tense today, letting Hyunjin hug him.
“I don’t know,” Felix said, lifting a hand to rub at his face, although there were no tears, and then letting it rest against Hyunjin’s arm as Hyunjin pulled back a little bit. “I just— I know I shouldn’t think like this, but I feel bad making him feel bad. Even when he’s being an idiot. He’s done so much for me, I’d be out in the winter unprotected if not for him.”
“Hey,” Hyunjin said, running his knuckle down the slope of Felix’s nose and then booping the tip very gently. “It wasn’t just him, I deserve credit too.”
Felix gave him a very weak smile. “It’s his money though,” he said, and then shook his head when Hyunjin looked like he might argue. “I know, I know what you’re going to say. It’s why I stood up to him anyway. I just— it doesn’t feel good, none of this feels good.”
How sweet Felix was, how kind and good. Jisung, after a moment of wondering whether or not it would be an overstep, went over and laid a gentle, comforting hand on Felix’s shoulder. “Minho-hyung probably really appreciated the interference,” he said honestly. Felix looked at him with those huge, long-lashed eyes, and Jisung gave him a little smile. “Chan-hyung would forgive you practically anything, I think. Don’t worry about it too much.”
“Thank you, Jisung,” Felix said, tucking his face down a little, so his temple rested on Hyunjin’s shoulder lightly. He looked a little shy. He was so pretty, not in the way Hyunjin was but beautiful all the same. It made Jisung’s chest ache a little. He’d never really coveted anyone else’s looks before, but he did wonder, sometimes, if maybe he had Felix’s delicate, boyish prettiness, Hyunjin’s head might have turned for him first.
“See?” Hyunjin said, swaying into Felix and making him stand up straight so they could look at one another. “Even Jisung can see how googly-eyed Chan-hyung is for you, and he’s the most oblivious person in the house.”
Jisung went pink, while Felix pouted, bottom lip sticking out. “Poor Jisung is going to think you don’t like him at this rate,” Felix said, which— was sweet, for Felix to try and stand up for him a little. Jisung wondered if Hyunjin really hadn’t told him anything about their history.
Hyunjin for some reason, had also gone a little pink too, the colour dusty in the terrible lighting of the room. Jisung felt compelled to say, “Ah, it’s okay, Felix. I like it when he teases me.”
Felix blinked at him and then grinned, a huge, sparkling smile, while Hyunjin went absolutely cherry red. Oh, no, Jisung thought, with a bit of a questioning lilt. He probably shouldn’t have said that.
“Do you?” Felix asked, in a tone of incongruous glee. And then, “Ow!” He jerked away from Hyunjin, who, Jisung saw, had apparently pinched Felix’s side.
“I don’t think I like it when the two of you talk,” Hyunjin said, sour and scowling. Felix just blinked at him, affected innocence. Jisung kind of just felt a little confused.
He was saved, he supposed, by the door to the PC room opening again. This time it was Jeongin, looking more haggard than he’d been when Jisung had watched him flop onto the couch earlier. Still, when he saw them all, he worked up a smile for them. “Hey,” he said, a little subdued.
“Jeongin-ah,” Felix said, and detached himself from Hyunjin to instead do a cute little run to Jeongin and enfold him in his arms. Jeongin blinked; he wasn’t one for overt physical affection, but he didn’t push Felix away. He just sort of patted him. It was interesting for Jisung to realise Jeongin was, actually, a little taller than Felix. “Is Minho-hyung okay?” Felix asked as he pulled away.
Jeongin’s face collapsed into a wince, and then he gave a little shrug. “He’s in his room, he said he wanted to work. He wouldn’t— really talk about it, I think he needs some time to process a little. I don’t really know what to do,” he added, glum.
“I think I got through to Chan-hyung, enough so that he hopefully won’t be making any more comments,” Felix said.
Jeongin nodded. “That’s good,” he said. His smile this time was something more genuine. “Thank you, hyung. I came up here to find you, because I wanted to say it again.”
“Ah, Jeongin,” Felix said, taking Jeongin’s hands in his. Like this, Jeongin’s hands looked huge, dwarfing Felix’s. “I owe you this and so much more, but that isn’t the only reason I did it. I really do just want you to be happy. Chan-hyung wants that as well, he’s just being— not very smart about it right now.”
“We never did love him for his brains,” Hyunjin said, sardonic and charming with it, and that made Jeongin laugh, a little, and Jisung smile. No, he wasn’t sure what it was about Chan — he was a good man, irrational outbursts notwithstanding. He could have run them like a machine but instead he’d made them into a family, this building into a home. Jisung looked around this room, so well familiar at this point, full of people he cared for. He had this because of Chan, they all had this because of Chan.
Gently, Jeongin extricated his hands from Felix’s. He smiled to soften the motion, but it felt stiff. “I’m going to go back down to Minho-hyung, I don’t want him to be alone for too long,” he said, giving a little wave that in other circumstances might have been jaunty, but right now seemed more like he was just going through the motions of normalcy. His worries had not, seemingly, been quelled by Felix’s quiet assurances.
After Jeongin had left and the door had shut behind him, Hyunjin quietly said, “He’s in love, isn’t he? This isn’t just sex for him.”
Felix looked tired when he met Hyunjin’s eyes. “Yeah.”
Again, that feeling of surprise in Jisung, but also not. Of course Jeongin had fallen in love. It was Jeongin, he had a lot of love to give. It was just that unsteady feeling of the ground shifting under Jisung’s feet again. The world around him different than what he’d thought.
Hyunjin hummed, a long thoughtful noise. “Chan-hyung’s backing Jeongin into a corner, and I don’t think he is going to like the outcome,” he said, cryptic. He and Felix shared a loaded look before Hyunjin was shaking his head, and more lightly saying, “Anyway, you want to watch a movie? We’re not done with our Ghibli marathon.”
“Oh, sure!” Felix said, perking up a bit as Hyunjin swiped his coffee off the bar and took a sip. He offered it to Felix afterwards, but Felix’s face scrunched up in evident disgust and he shook his head, making Hyunjin laugh.
Jisung’s stomach sank, that familiar cold feeling in the pit of it, but he didn’t let any of the emotion he was feeling leak onto his face as he watched Felix and Hyunjin begin to saunter towards the hallway to the television room. It was okay, he thought to himself. He needed to remember he and Hyunjin weren’t really friends, not quite yet. Maybe he would take Changbin his scone, chat with him for a while.
“Hey, earth to Jisung,” Hyunjin called, and Jisung turned to look at him. He’d paused by the open door to the hallway. “What are you doing?”
Jisung stared at him. “Huh?”
“Grab your coffee and get in here,” Hyunjin said, looking at Jisung like he was an idiot. Felix made an endearing little flappy motion, like he was waving Jisung in.
I’m invited, Jisung thought, with the same sort of incredulity he might have once thought, Minho-hyung wants to fuck Jeongin, and then scrambled to grab his coffee, almost dropping it in his haste.
“My legs are short, I can’t be expected to move at your speeds!” Jisung said, bounding into the television room behind them. He was trying not to appear too excited and was desperately failing, but he didn’t care.
Hyunjin flopped down onto the bigger couch, nearly in the centre, and Felix squeezed down next to him. There was space, Jisung supposed, on the other side of Hyunjin, but he wasn’t sure if that wouldn’t be a step too far, or if he’d be able to survive it anyway — sitting next to Hyunjin, nearly touching, for two hours would be agony. So Jisung climbed onto the smaller couch, claiming the whole thing for himself. Felix slipped his shoes off immediately, bringing his feet up and tucking them under himself. Hyunjin ran his hands through his hair and deftly tied it back into its previous ponytail. Jisung felt warmed all the way through, watching him.
Nothing could dampen that happiness, not even Felix leaning into Hyunjin’s side, nor Hyunjin putting his free arm around Felix’s narrow shoulders. Jisung was just happy to be here. His eyes, once the movie had started, kept flicking over, watching Hyunjin, admiring his lovely face, the soft curve of his mouth and little wisps of hair too short to be tied back. How lucky he was, he thought, to have met Hyunjin, to have been put on a path where their lives could collide.
Hyunjin caught him, at one point, his eyes flickering over. He cocked his head slightly in silent question. Jisung just beamed back at him, wiggling his socked toes on the couch, his sneakers laying on the floor. After a moment, Hyunjin smiled back, a smile more like one of Felix’s — something small, something sweet. Then he turned his face back towards the television, the light of it playing over his skin.
Jisung sat back and slowly sipped his coffee, until it was more water than ice, and even then, he finished that too.
——
Minho couldn’t concentrate on his notes. He’d been trying for the past fifteen minutes, reading the same page over and over, but unable to take in a single word. He should’ve just given up, set it aside, before the frustration became too much. He could not work on job planning in this state. But there was a sense of— failure, in that, and he didn’t want to.
He sighed, dropped his little packet of papers down onto their manila folder beside the bed. The label on the folder was a badly doodled black bird. There was an idea formulating in his mind, a patched solution to the building issue, but he really didn’t like it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to come up with something else, especially not around— the sound of Chan’s voice, echoing through his mind.
Minho had accepted Chan’s inevitable disapproval, his anger. But that didn’t mean it was not weighing on him, little cuts at every disdainful glance, his words dripping in disgust. Minho could not set it aside enough to focus, but sitting here roiling in the guilt, the feeling of failure, was not an appealing option either.
There was another folder, tucked under a few others atop his short filing cabinet, that he could possibly peruse in lieu of working. His list of potential apartments. Not because he was reconsidering running away, but rather because he was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t going to get— fired. Perhaps that was not the right word, though it carried the sentiment well enough. Minho knew he was still needed for the Magpie job, Chan could not pull him from it. But that did not mean Chan would keep him on for future ones. And if he revoked Minho’s access to the team, decided to find another enforcer, Minho was out not just of a job, but of a place to live too. He needed to be prepared for that, as it was looking increasingly like an inevitability.
Anxiety spiked, ticking his heartrate up. He had the money to leave; years of not spending his salary on anything other than the occasional book or gun meant he had a healthy savings account. That was not why his heart was suddenly thumping in his chest. It was, simply, the sickening feeling of having the ground shifting under him again. Of course he would be made to leave this place, right when he’d begun to truly settle. The resignation in him was not new; he expected this much, from life at this point. The bitterness, however, was new. It was a strange tang at the back of his mouth.
He wanted so badly to hold onto Jeongin, to continue to wake with him in his arms. But that was too good to be true. They could still have— something, perhaps. But not living under the same roof would make things harder, and then more difficult still would be trying to coordinate times and places to meet. Minho was no fool, he knew if he was removed from the team, he would not be allowed back here. And he could not ask Jeongin to come to him, to whatever sparse and small apartment Minho got for himself. They’d meet in love motels, maybe. The thought made Minho feel vaguely ill.
There was the patter of footsteps outside on the landing, and then the bedroom door opened and Jeongin slipped inside. He stopped when he saw Minho sitting there, and smiled a little, a real smile, despite the obvious tiredness on his face. “Hyung,” he said, as he padded his way to the bed. “I didn’t know you wore glasses? They’re cute, I like them.”
Minho had kind of forgotten he was wearing them. Instinct told him to snatch them off, but he didn’t. He only ever wore them in his room when he was reading or planning, had gotten them only a year or so ago, when he had finally grown sick enough of squinting at his pages to make the journey to an optician. He could not remember ever going to one before in his life, and he was hoping these glasses lasted, because he did not relish having to go back.
“I’m glad my failing eyesight is hot to you, baby boy,” Minho said, which made Jeongin laugh a little. He felt— in spite of his own tiredness, in spite of the pain he felt at hurting Chan, nothing compared to the feeling he got when Jeongin came into the room, that dawning sense of happiness that was so foreign to him. Jeongin here, to see him.
Even if this Jeongin was— more worn than Minho usually saw. A tired Jeongin, a wounded one. Minho, who had accepted Chan’s anger as a fact of his choices, was still being hurt by it. He could not imagine Jeongin’s suffering over it. Chan, who was Jeongin’s favourite, his only family, this older brother who had rescued him from that hell of a children’s home and protected him, loved him, cared for him all these years. It was hurting Jeongin to have Chan be angry at him, hurting Jeongin being angry with Chan in turn. Jeongin was not a creature meant to hold onto emotions such as this.
Minho could bear many things, but he could not bear this, watching Jeongin get more and more worn down in the face of his brother’s disapproval. Using himself as a shield, protecting Minho from the brunt of Chan’s anger.
He reached out and took Jeongin’s hand gently, curling their fingers together. Jeongin sat beside him and said, “What were you looking at?”
“Nothing,” Minho said, taking his glasses off and putting them on his makeshift nightstand; a stack of books. “It doesn’t matter. Baby boy, I’ve been thinking— about what to do, if Chan-hyung throws me out. Because I think he might be going to.”
Jeongin sighed, and squeezed his hand. “I’ve been worried about that too,” he said. “He’s really— holding onto this.”
Minho looked down at their joined together hands, feeling the anxiety in his system rise, turn to nausea. The fact that Jeongin too had begun to sense such vibes from Chan did not bode well at all. Perhaps this really could not be salvaged.
“But if that happens,” Jeongin continued with a sudden steely lightness, “we can find somewhere else, right? We have enough money between us, so we could find an apartment, even if it’s small.”
It took Minho a long second to parse through what he had said, the words not quite sinking in. He blinked at Jeongin a little as they did so, and saw Jeongin watching him back, registering the surprise on his face. He was starting to frown. Slowly, Minho said, “I figured that I would find a place. I’d find a place and—” Jeongin was staring at him, and it made Minho finish in a stutter, “I’d visit, when I could.”
Jeongin was properly frowning now, but not in an angry way; he looked sad, mouth twisted in a way which suggested he was chewing the inside of his mouth. “Do you not want me to come with you?” he asked, after a couple of seconds of silence. “I want to go with you, I don’t want to live apart. If you go, then I go too.”
Now it was Minho’s turn to stare. He had never, at any point in thinking about this, contemplated Jeongin going with him. It had always been him, in some small apartment, by himself, waiting for the times that he could go and see Jeongin.
“It’s got nothing to do with whether or not I want you there with me,” he said. “Jeongin, this is your home.”
Jeongin looked distressed. He grabbed at Minho’s other hand too, holding both of them tightly. “Hyung, this is your home too,” he said.
It was, but not like this was Jeongin’s home. This was somewhere Minho had been invited to live because he was working for the team, a place he could rest his head. He had never thought of it as something fully permanent, because no place could be for him, no place could be a home the way Jeongin thought of it. This was Jeongin’s home because it was his, had always been his. It was Jeongin’s home because his brother had made it so.
“Hyung, I don’t want to leave,” Jeongin was saying earnestly, his eyes locked on Minho’s face. “I don’t want to have to, but if it needs to happen, if— if you really do have to go, then we’ll go together.” He meant it, he really meant it. Minho could feel that sincerity radiating off him, the way that only Jeongin could mean something.
For some reason, it stole Minho’s breath away. Something was creeping up in his mind, filling him with a slow sense of dread, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint the reason. “Why,” he whispered.
Jeongin blinked, like the question surprised him, or confused him. “I want to stay with you, hyung. Always.”
They sat there, looking at one another, Jeongin honest and imploring, face and eyes an open book that Minho was only just now reading properly. All those years of Minho not realising what was happening before his very eyes, and now these last few days, ignoring what was plainly obvious right in front of him.
Minho felt the way his face went sickly pale, the nauseating sweep of it. “Oh god,” he said hoarsely. He was glad to be sitting, because he might have swayed if he’d been standing. “You’re in love with me.”
Jeongin went pink, all across his cheeks and nose, but when he spoke his voice was very steady and firm. “Yes,” he said. “I am. I love you, hyung.”
Minho had to turn his face away, staring blankly at the floor. He could not bear to look at Jeongin’s face. The horror was so strong that he didn’t know what to do with it, could not begin to process it. He’d agreed to fuck Jeongin, and even that had felt like a thousand steps beyond what was right. To let himself handle Jeongin’s body was already far past anything he deserved. This wasn’t that. This was so much more. This was infinitely worse.
This was Jeongin choosing him over Chan, being invested enough in Minho that he could do something like that.
Minho was not worth that. He never had been, and he never could be. Not to Jeongin, who was kind and true, who had never hurt another person and did not know what it was to kill, who was untainted by the carnage that Minho represented. Minho was not worthy of that love.
Jeongin sat quietly in the aftermath of that declaration, not saying anything else. When Minho was finally capable of looking at him again, Jeongin was just watching him, not frowning anymore but not smiling either. He was— serious.
“You said this was just sex,” Minho said, a little too high, hearing the almost-panic in his voice. “You never—”
“If I’d told you a couple nights ago when I kissed you,” Jeongin interrupted, “what would you have done?”
Run, Minho didn’t say, but he didn’t need to. There was a reason Jeongin hadn’t told him. He’d known.
Minho felt like some small creature in a pot of steadily boiling water, helplessly trying to acclimate to an ever increasing temperature. Jeongin was trying to be careful, let Minho keep things at his own pace, but this was— it was too much. It was everything he’d wanted, but life wasn’t one of Minho’s little fucking fantasies. Minho in his dreams was someone who could do a real relationship, who could give Jeongin a life.
Minho as he was wouldn’t even be able to pretend at that. The idea of him trying to play at normalcy was pathetic, laughable. What was he going to do— take Jeongin out to cute cafes, when Minho couldn’t even handle a minor crowd of people, wouldn’t be able to sit anywhere except the corner, his leg shaking the whole time with nerves, head on a constant swivel. As if he’d be able to hold down a fucking job, eat lunch in a break room and talk about what his coworkers’ kids were doing for their birthdays.
God, fuck, did Jeongin want kids? Minho didn’t even know — Jeongin and Hyunjin had once been in the living room talking about what their lives might’ve been like if they’d finished school, while Minho had been in the kitchen making pajeon. Hyunjin had said he might’ve wanted to be a professional painter, or run galleries, no surprise, but Jeongin had quietly said he might want to work with kids, be someone who could help them, like a teacher or social worker. Did he— like them? Minho could never be a father. He couldn’t give Jeongin a life
Distantly, Jeongin’s voice filtered through the buzzing thoughts. “Hyung,” he was saying. “Breathe.”
“You can’t choose me over your brother,” Minho said, not processing Jeongin’s words at all, desperate for Jeongin to understand this.
Jeongin took in the way Minho was beginning to tremble, concerned but calm. “You know,” he said, very softly but with that firmness Minho was quickly growing familiar with, “I’m really tired of being told what I can and can’t do with my personal life.”
Once upon a time, Minho would have felt an urge to shake him. He still sort of did. Wake up, he wanted to cry into Jeongin’s face. This was real, and Jeongin felt like he was living in some dream. And when Minho was with him, he felt like that too. Could begin to believe that maybe they could do this, maybe he could do this, be the person Jeongin thought he was.
“You can’t,” Minho repeated. He tried to pull his hands away, but Jeongin held onto them. “Chan-hyung is your family, your only family. I’m not worth losing that over.”
Jeongin shuffled a little closer on the bed, expression locking down, like he was preparing for a physical fight. “Hyung,” he said. “I’d leave the whole world behind if you were with me.”
It was like being struck, like being slapped — and it hurt like it had been a physical hit, too. Not just Chan, then, Jeongin would choose him over all the others. Over his life as he knew it. The confusion was overwhelming, the despair worse.
Minho wrenched his hands away and stood up from the bed, pacing away. He could not bear to sit there for this conversation, frustrating beyond belief. He needed to move, to do something with the energy thudding through him. “You can’t do that, Jeongin, not for me,” he burst out, whirling around to see Jeongin was still sitting on the edge of the mattress, legs curled up. “I’m not worth that, I’m not worth anything. I’m nothing.”
Jeongin gave him a look that was so unfamiliar that by the time Minho realised that it was pity, Jeongin was already saying, “That’s not true.”
“I hurt people for a living,” Minho pressed on, heedless. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I killed for the first time when I was seventeen. You still had your fucking braces on, when you were seventeen. Is that— worthy of love?” He could not parse the expression on Jeongin’s face now, no longer pity, something— wild, almost. In a barely there motion, Jeongin was shaking his head. Minho’s upper lip curled, feeling self-hatred bubble up, a counter against what Jeongin was insisting. “I’m good for nothing but violence,” he spat.
“That’s. Not. True.” Jeongin bit every word out, a roaring fire behind his eyes. He stood from the edge of the bed slowly, almost with menace. “When have you ever wanted to hurt me?”
“That’s not the point, and you know it,” Minho said, because he had never wanted to hurt Jeongin, never wanted to raise a hand against him, but that didn’t mean violence wasn’t the biggest part of what made up Minho’s very cells. “Just because I— you’re the exception, not the rule.”
“Am I?” Jeongin asked, and before Minho could answer, Jeongin was speaking again. “You say there’s nothing to you but violence. And yet there’s so much more that you’ve shown me.” His voice was low and almost venomous, despite the words themselves. “You think I don’t see the love you’re capable of? You’re going to tell me I’m wrong, that you don’t feel it? What exactly is it that motivates you to protect me, to look after me, to feed me and teach me to fight and send me back to bed when I’ve wandered out too early.”
“That’s—” Those were small things, tiny drops of rain against an ocean. They could not balance out the corruption of him. “It doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?” Jeongin shot back. “Do you hate doing it, do you have to force yourself?”
Minho began to shake his head, because— of course he didn’t hate it, and it had never been a chore, to care for Jeongin. He loved him. But that was precisely why it did not count. Minho loved him, so it was easy. He did not get credit for things that were easy, things that were how he should be acting.
Jeongin huffed. “Why do you think,” he said hotly, “the violence you are capable of matters more than the person you choose to be every day when you are with me?”
Minho was beginning to feel like the room was too small. “Because no matter what I do, violence is the core of me,” he cried. “And it bleeds out, even onto you. No matter how hard I try, and yes, I do try, you’re right. But I can’t stop it. I’ve made you cry. I made you cry just a few weeks back.”
Abruptly the hopelessness of it all felt like it came crashing down on him. The truth of what he was, no matter how hard he pretended or tried. No matter what Jeongin believed. He didn’t want to have this argument. It took such a toll, remembering, exactly, what he was. He was so tired that he didn’t even want to stand here and listen to Jeongin talk like this. The fact of the matter was that Minho could never give Jeongin the life that he deserved.
Minho swallowed thickly. “And two nights ago you trusted me with your first time,” he said, voice stiff and tightly leashed, “and I called you a whore. You know I— I can’t even do that sweetly, I was trying, for your sake. And it slipped out anyway. And don’t— don’t say it’s fine because you like it, when I didn’t fucking know you would. In fact I was sure you wouldn’t.”
“Bedroom games don’t matter,” Jeongin said, vehement, and when Minho opened his mouth to argue Jeongin bulldozed over him, saying, “No, I listened to your bullshit, now you’re going to listen to me. You would never, ever call me a demeaning name for real. I’ve been called stupid, I’ve been called worthless, I’ve been slapped around for being clumsy or ditzy.” There was colour high on the planes of Jeongin’s cheeks, his eyes sparkling, a little damp. Minho’s hands were shaking. “You’ve never done that to me, you never would. I don’t give a shit if you call me a whore in bed. You never say it with the intent to hurt, and you’d never call me a name outside of that. So don’t— just don’t. What we do in bed is fucking invalid in this conversation.”
“And me making you cry?” Minho asked, lips barely moving. His physical body felt strange and far away. “Is that invalid too?”
“I’ve made you cry too,” Jeongin said, which— wasn’t right, wasn’t true. “It was an accident. People fight, hyung, sometimes it happens.”
None of that countered the fact that Minho had caused Jeongin harm, even trying his best, he’d still fucked up. And it wouldn’t stop. “You’re not listening to me,” he said, the words escaping on a hard exhale that he struggled to regain after it had gone.
“I am!” Jeongin cried. There were definitely tears in his eyes now, and Minho felt wretched. “I am, hyung! But I don’t know what you want from me — to believe something I know is fundamentally untrue? To disregard everything — everything — I know of you?” He sucked in a breath, and it sounded wet. “To feel nothing for you, to let you fuck me but to not care if you leave? I’m supposed to just let you go, and then— then, find someone who— is the right kind of deserving for me? Is that what you think this should be?”
Minho stared at him, his face beautiful even in his upset. The dark messy hair, a smudge of ink over a pale face and sunset cheeks. Jeongin, this boy he’d watch grow up. This boy he loved. “Yes,” he breathed.
Jeongin’s eyes widened, his expression turning stricken. After a long pause, he whispered, slow, “You don’t want that.” The horrified shock on his face steadily gave way to a fervent almost-anger. His hands fisted at his sides. “Not deep down, under all that useless self-loathing. Me, with another man. In love with another man. You couldn’t stand that. You love me too much. Or are you trying to say you don’t—”
“Of course I do!” Minho shouted, feeling the dam of his emotions crack. “And the thought of you with someone else makes me want to fucking die. But I’d rather feel that a thousand times over than watch the light in you slowly burn out as I fucking drown you in darkness!”
Again, silence. Minho’s chest was heaving, the air in the room too thin. That— feeling, was descending on him again, where the world began to tilt, and his ears rang, tinny and muffling. Tears trembled on his lower lashes, blurring his vision.
Jeongin crossed the room, over cracked and stained flooring, gathering up Minho’s hands in his and squeezing. It was like an anchor point, Minho’s hands the only real, solid part of him, while the rest of his body felt dissolved around the edges. “Don’t,” Jeongin murmured, soft and coaxing, “don’t go that way. Come back to me, breathe. Come back.”
It was stuttery, but Minho did try to breathe, his chest hitching, steadily smoothing out. He clutched onto Jeongin’s hands, his skin clammy. He counted Jeongin’s lashes until the screeching static of his mind had quieted.
Jeongin’s thumb rubbed over Minho’s scarred knuckles. “Are you here?” he whispered.
Tiredly, Minho nodded, feeling the droop of his own shoulders. He was so fucking exhausted.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Jeongin ordered him softly, his eyes moving over Minho’s face.
“I’m scared,” Minho managed to grit out, his jaw barely moving. The tears hadn’t gone completely; the corners of his eyes felt wet, and his eyelids had that prickling, itchy sensation still.
“Scared of what?” Jeongin asked, taking a half-step forward so that Minho could feel the warmth of his body. It was more comforting than it should have been.
“If we leave,” Minho said. “If we leave, and you— you’ll realise. You’ll realise that you’ve made a mistake. I’m scared that you’ll regret it.” He swallowed thickly, tears welling again. His voice broke as he admitted, “I’m scared you’re going to leave me.”
Jeongin’s hands spasmed around his. “No,” he said, low and fervent, like a promise. He stretched the small distance between them to press his lips to the corner of Minho’s mouth. Minho let his eyes close, two tears falling down his cheeks as he did. He turned his face a little blindly, so that Jeongin got the message and kissed his mouth properly. It was brief, just a warm, dry touch, but it settled something inside Minho back into slumber. Most of him, though, was a tired buzzing thing, like someone had set him on a low vibration mode and simply forgot to turn him back off again.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, voice steady, firm, despite the softness of his kisses. “Unless you start beating me, or being actually cruel to me, I can’t think of a single reason that I would ever, ever give up on you.”
Minho had no words for that. Everything inside him had recoiled at the thought of beating Jeongin — he could never, never do that. Nor could he imagine dragging Jeongin down, picking and chipping at his heart and soul with deliberately cruel words. But that, like it had earlier, did not mean anything, could not signify much in the grand scheme of things.
He felt nothing but— despair. He had known that Jeongin had a fierce loyalty in him, had seen it applied to Chan, who was worthy of such an attachment. He did not know how to extricate himself from this, in a way that would not shred them both to pieces.
Jeongin already loved him. Leaving would break his heart. It would douse his light. And even if Minho knew he’d be better off with someone else, he could not stand the thought of abandoning Jeongin now, knowing every night that Jeongin was crying himself to sleep. Or worse, out on the streets looking for him.
When the silence went on too long, when it became clear Minho was going to do nothing but stare at him in terrified wonder, Jeongin spoke. “I’m never going to leave you,” he said, and this was a promise, sombre and implacable. Jeongin’s eyes were near black in the light, shining. “I told you a few nights ago I wanted you to be my first. I want you to be my last too. I don’t want anyone else. Not in my bed, and not in my life, either. I just want you. I’ve only ever wanted you. The way you are. Not a different form, not changed. You, just you. As you’ve always been, with me. If not here, then we’ll go somewhere else. I’ll go anywhere with you.”
Minho, again, had that feeling of being something small, too small, looming under something he could not hope to fight nor comprehend. It was all too big for him. “I don’t understand,” he said eventually, because he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was so tired. “I don’t understand.”
Jeongin stepped even closer and put his arms around him, one across his shoulders, the other around his waist. Minho wanted to sink into the embrace but he held himself still, barely even leaning into it. “That’s okay, hyung,” Jeongin murmured. “It’s okay.”
They stood like that for a long time, until Jeongin stepped back and tugged him to the bed again. Minho went, too tired to protest, to do anything other than move on autopilot. Jeongin made him lay down, coaxing him into it, holding him close as they lay on the bed. Minho put his face to Jeongin’s neck, breathed in the scent of him. How could a creature such as him love another person this much, he thought. How could he possibly feel this. He’d thought his capacity for love had died when he was a child.
“I’ll talk to Chan-hyung,” Jeongin said quietly, after a long stretch of silence. “Hopefully we can stay here, but— if we can’t, we’ll figure it out, together. Okay, hyung? We’ll do it together.”
Minho said nothing. He had no more words to give. They all felt dried up inside him. He just put an arm across Jeongin’s stomach, curled his fingers into his side. He let himself drift.
——
Chan sat in his desk chair, halfway swivelled around so he could stare out the window. From this angle all he could see was the sky, faint patches of blue beyond wispy clouds. He hadn’t gone outside in days. Maybe he should. Maybe a walk would do him some good.
His stomach grumbled, hunger gnawing at him. It was well past lunchtime, closer to dinner but not quite. Not time to eat, too late and too early at the same time. He hadn’t had the energy, or courage, to venture upstairs to the apartment for food.
There was a feeling in him of being hollowed out, that went beyond his physical hunger. This strange sensation of being alone, of being unheard and unseen. His conversation that morning with Felix had felt like a final nail in a coffin, the one last person in the house that Chan had thought was somewhat on his side.
You need to think about whether your pride at all of this is worth alienating your brother, Felix had said, and it kept bouncing around in his head, because it was so absolutely off the mark. It wasn’t about Chan’s pride, it was about— love, the love he held for Jeongin. Chan didn’t care about looking stupid, or apologising when he’d fucked up. Surely after the debacle with Felix’s origins — which had been the absolute worst way he’d ever been wrong in his life — that was clear. Chan wasn’t a particularly proud person, not in that way.
So no, that wasn’t it at all. He wasn’t digging his heels in because he couldn’t stand admitting he was wrong; he was digging his heels in because he knew he was right.
His head swivelled to the door as a knock resounded, the sound small and tentative, not a pattern he recognised. He turned in his chair, sitting up from his slouch, and called, “Yeah?”
To his utter surprise it was Jeongin who came inside. Jeongin had not, as far as Chan could remember, ever knocked on the office door. He’d never seemed to take Chan’s space as anything other than an extension of his own — a byproduct, probably, of all the time that there had been no divide between their spaces. They had lived and slept and worked in the same room for so long that it had always felt like there could be no distinction between what was Chan’s area and what was Jeongin’s. So Jeongin had never knocked before coming into the office, unless he knew Chan had a meeting. Jeongin had always walked right in.
Some of the rigidity in Chan’s spine loosened a little. Jeongin was alone, standing in the doorway, not quite fully inside. He looked— tired, although Chan couldn’t quite place what exactly it was that made him think that. It was something about the slant of his shoulders, the way his arms hung by his side. His hair looked damp, like he had recently showered.
“Hyung,” he said, quietly. “Can I come in?”
Chan blinked at him. The question confused him more than anything else — Jeongin said it like he thought Chan was angry at him, but it had been Jeongin angry all this time. “Of course,” Chan said. He motioned to the chair opposite his desk. “Sit down? What is it, what’s wrong?”
Part of him, the most uncharitable part, thought, Has it really happened that quickly? Jeongin looked like someone who had come to terms with a truth that he didn’t want to face, and Chan wondered what had happened, what had gone wrong, for Jeongin to be looking like this. What had Minho done or said, for Jeongin to look like this in Chan’s office now.
Jeongin wasn’t looking at him. Instead as he sat, he looked off into the corner of the room, with his gaze fixed almost on middle distance. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Chan watched him, not entirely sure what was going on, not entirely sure what to say. He’d always known what to say to Jeongin, always had the words to cheer his little brother up. But recently every time he opened his mouth all he seemed to do was make Jeongin angry, or, he reflected, make Felix upset. It seemed like it might be easier to let Jeongin say the first thing.
It took a while, the silence stretching a little too far. Worry sat like a lead weight in Chan’s gut, edging out the feeling of hunger. Chan was not sure he’d ever heard Jeongin this quiet for this long. Eventually Jeongin’s eyes snapped to his, and he sighed. “Hyung,” he said, and yes, he was tired. It was evident in his voice, a weariness that Chan had never heard from him before, only from himself. “Do Minho-hyung and I need to move out?”
Chan blinked at him for a second before the words sank in properly. Even then he wasn’t sure he was hearing them right. “What are you talking about?” he asked, a little blankly.
“Do we need to move out?” Jeongin asked again. Whereas before he hadn’t seemed to want to meet Chan’s eyes, now he wasn’t looking away, his gaze so direct and unwavering that Chan almost wanted to be the one to break. It was only the years of training himself to never back down in a situation like this that kept his eyes on Jeongin’s. “I know you need him still, for the job for Felix-hyung, but if we need to, we’ll move somewhere else.”
“Wait,” said Chan. This conversation confused him so much that he couldn’t quite keep up with it. “Why would you need to move out? What on earth do you mean?” Did Jeongin think that because Chan was angry at him, he would kick him out? That was impossible. He would never do that to Jeongin, and Chan wasn’t even angry at him in the first place.
Jeongin scowled, his empty tired face morphing into anger for the first time. “Because you’re being awful to him,” Jeongin said, almost snappish. “You’re making him feel like shit at every turn, and it’s ruining the team dynamic. You get that you’re his boss, right? And landlord. So if you hate him, we have to move.”
Chan felt a little— prickled, over the insinuation of unprofessionalism. “I’m not the one mixing business with pleasure here,” he said, a little nastily, feeling that same petty, uncharitable part of him rise up again. “Regardless of our personal issues, I’m perfectly willing to keep him onboard.”
Jeongin inhaled sharply, nostrils flaring. “How very big of you,” he said, snide. “You’ll just punish him at every turn, make him miserable? He can’t stand up to you, he won’t. If he’s mixing business with pleasure, what is it you’re doing?”
Throwing a tantrum, Felix’s voice in his head said, and Chan grit his teeth, his lips pressed together hard.
“So he wants to leave,” he said, a much more neutral tone, the words eked out through his clenched jaw. It would be bad, if Minho left. Bad for the team and bad for business and also just— it would hurt. Another wound on top of the ones Chan was currently nursing.
“No,” Jeongin said, still in that defensive, angry tone. “Hyung, he doesn’t want to leave, he doesn’t want that and neither do I. He thinks you want him to leave, because you hate him now. And it’s stressing him out.”
Chan swallowed down his first nasty thought at that, which was that if Minho was stressed, it was because of his own actions. But something in this conversation was beginning to resonate back to months ago, when Chan didn’t want to make any moves on Felix for this exact reason. He hadn’t wanted Felix to feel like Chan was leveraging his comfort and safety and the roof over his head, in exchange for sex. This wasn’t quite the same, but it was similar enough that Chan found himself discomfited.
He’d created this team as more of a family, close-knit, carefully picked, honed for their purpose. Jeongin and Hyunjin and Changbin would be able to have fights with him and not blink or ever worry they might find themselves thrown out. But Minho had always held himself at a careful distance, and it was no wonder now that he might be getting uneasy at the idea of potentially being removed.
Chan would not do that. Even if he never managed to forgive Minho for this, he still wouldn’t do that. They’d just work around it.
He felt— shame. Shame that not just Minho thought this of him, but that Jeongin evidently did as well, enough so that he was here, confronting Chan about it. This was not the person Chan wanted to be, not the calm, collected leader he’d striven for. “I don’t hate him,” Chan said quietly. It was not a lie, either; he knew it in himself, that he didn’t hate Minho, not even now. It was different, this emotion inside him. “And even if our relationship was broken beyond repair, I still wouldn’t throw him out.”
“Really?” Jeongin said, his eyes steady but fierce. “Because that’s news to both of us. How is he supposed to stay here, if you refuse to reconcile with him?”
“I’m not refusing that,” Chan said, very firmly. He didn't like being angry all the time, didn’t like the way it was making the others look at him, didn’t like how it made him feel. But he just couldn’t get over this. Every time he thought about it, he felt upset all over again. And he didn’t know how to fix it, because even if Minho apologised and never touched Jeongin again, so much damage had already been done. “He betrayed me. I trusted him and he betrayed me and now my trust in him is broken—”
“He didn’t betray you,” Jeongin cut in, disdain dripping from every word. “You made him make a promise that he had every intention of keeping, even though you had no right to ask it of him. He did his best, and now you’re— being like this, being angry with him for something that is barely his fault, thinking all these terrible things of him, saying terrible things to him.” His eyes flashed. “I saw the tape you know, of the day you made him promise. You’ve been so fucking awful to him, and now you’re confused about why I’m asking if we need to move out? Hyung, come on.”
The question, the implication, finally sank into Chan. “You would go with him,” he said, not really a question. It didn’t need to be a question. Jeongin had said we all this time.
Jeongin nodded. “I would.”
Horror swept through Chan, so quickly that he almost grabbed the edge of his desk to steady himself. If the thought of Minho leaving had never come into his mind, the thought of Jeongin going with him was beyond his comprehension. He had never even contemplated a life in which Jeongin wasn’t at his side, living with him, working with him. He’d almost built this entire thing up as a way of ensuring that Jeongin never had to think about being separated from him. And now here was Jeongin, saying he would go, saying he would—
“You would choose him over me,” he said, almost a whisper.
Jeongin watched him, long seconds of quiet. Some of the anger seemed to have drained out of him, leaving a strange, sombre Jeongin in its wake. Chan felt like the air in the room was a little too thin for comfort. This was not quite the nightmare scenario he had anticipated when he had first realised what Minho’s feelings for Jeongin were, but it was close to being on. Jeongin, lost to him, one way or another.
“It’s not a case of choosing between you,” Jeongin said eventually. “It’s not that I even want to do that, hyung. But if you force my hand, as you seem to be determined to do, then yes — yes, I will choose him. I will go with him.”
Chan felt— he was no longer sure. He thought maybe he should feel angry, betrayed too by Jeongin; after all those years of sacrifice, of doing whatever he could to keep Jeongin safe, it stung to think that it had not been enough. But that sting was easy to shake off, after a moment — it had never been about that, it was never a matter of Jeongin owing him for it. Minho, yes, in the wake of all this Chan had thought about what Minho owed him, but Jeongin? No, Jeongin did not owe Chan anything.
But still — to be cast aside in favour of someone that Chan remained unsure was worthy of Jeongin’s kindness, his warm heart, his sweet naivete. It hurt more than Chan thought he could put into words.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would you do that?”
“Because he needs me,” Jeongin said, the answer coming so quickly it was like it hadn’t even required conscious thought.
“I need you,” Chan said plaintively.
“Not like he does,” Jeongin said. “You need me because I’m your brother, but you have others. You have the team, you have Felix-hyung. If I wasn’t there, you’d still have people around you, to love and care for you. If he left, if I didn’t go with him— who would he have? What would he have? He’d have nothing.” Jeongin’s voice dropped to a whisper now. “I couldn’t bear that. It would destroy him, to be alone again like that.”
Chan almost said he would have us, but of course, he wouldn’t. If Chan decided to break with Minho over this, then it was true — Minho would have nothing, just like he had done before Chan had brought him into the fold. He might have money now, a reputation that would lead him to jobs, but he would have nobody, and it pained Chan to think about that. The Minho who had joined them a few years was not, he realised with something like guilt, the Minho who existed with them now. The roughest of his edges had been smoothed out over the years, most of his bite tempered through exposure to others.
Perhaps he had missed that, he thought with a wince. He didn’t think he was the only one, to have not noticed exactly how Minho had changed in his time with them. The Minho that had come to them had barely even interacted with them. The Minho of now would, even Chan knew, not fare so well alone.
He looked at Jeongin, his determined face. His younger brother really had grown up. It pained him to think about. It was a good thing, he knew, that Jeongin no longer needed to rely on him for everything, but it hurt, all the same.
“You really care for him,” he said. It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise but he felt like he was only just seeing it. To be able to see that for Jeongin, this wasn’t some kind of fling, some kind of late stage teenage rebellion. Jeongin was willing to leave with Minho if he needed to. He was serious about this.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, soft but no less fierce for it, “I’m in love with him.”
Chan felt it, the absolute truth in that statement. He felt that truth in his own mouth whenever he said I love you to Felix. He couldn’t pretend not to hear it. He could not pretend to misunderstand it. In some ways it made him despair even further, to know how seriously Jeongin was taking this, how strongly he felt. While Chan knew that Minho cared for them all in his way, knew that he cared for Jeongin in his way, the thing that had been niggling at him all this time was the fear that Minho, proud and prickly and violent, was not capable of the same kind of love that Jeongin was giving him.
He almost asked does he love you, but couldn’t bring himself to say it in the end, because he wasn’t sure if he would get the truthful answer, or just the answer that Jeongin wanted to be true.
He couldn’t do anything about that, though. Either Minho was capable of it or he was not; either he would hurt Jeongin or he would not. Chan had no way of knowing. But he could not allow Jeongin to leave, could not allow either of them to run off and leave Chan behind. Maybe Jeongin was right, maybe Chan did have people who could help him along the way — but Jeongin was not other people. Chan only had one of him.
“Okay,” he said, with a sigh, defeated. “Okay. I’ll talk to him. I’ll— make peace with him. You don’t have to worry anymore, okay? You’re not going to have to leave. I wouldn’t do that to you, Jeongin. To either of you. Both of you have your home here. That will never change.”
For a frightening moment, there was something in Jeongin’s expression, some sharp, wary thing, that made Chan afraid it wasn’t enough. This Jeongin was not one he fully felt he knew. The fact that Jeongin was willing to leave at all felt like it had thrown so much of what Chan had thought to be true out of the window.
Slowly, Jeongin nodded, once. “And you’ll apologise to him,” he said, even and unyielding. It wasn’t a request. Something must have shifted in Chan’s face because Jeongin’s expression locked down. “You will. You said horrible, awful things to him. You called him a rabid dog. He already thinks—” His mouth snapped shut, teeth clicking audibly, a muscle working in his jaw. He didn’t finish the thought, instead he just said, “You’re going to say sorry.”
Chan blew out a breath through his teeth. “Fine, yeah, alright,” he said, because even though he felt Minho owed him an apology in turn, it wasn’t like Chan didn’t have things to say sorry for. He’d been out of line, with a lot of what he’d thrown at Minho. He’d done it because he’d felt hurt but that didn’t make it okay. “I’ll apologise, I will.”
Jeongin hummed and then said, “Okay.” That strange expression vanished, leaving Jeongin looking a little smaller. It had been protectiveness, Chan realised. A fierce protectiveness, bracing Jeongin’s frame up for a fight.
I’m in love with him, Chan heard again, and felt the fear of it all over.
“Thank you, hyung,” Jeongin was saying. He looked at Chan with those bright brown eyes, expectant and trusting. Even after everything, he still believed Chan’s word. Jeongin always had — if Chan said something, so be it. The responsibility of that had never seemed to weigh so heavily on Chan’s shoulders before. “He’ll come see you tomorrow.”
Chan glanced at his phone on the desk and saw what he had already suspected — it was not late, even for Minho, who had always kept somewhat earlier hours than most of them. “Tomorrow? Why can’t he come now,” he said, without any bite in his voice, because he was mostly just curious. “Is he busy or something?”
“He’s asleep,” Jeongin said, as he got up from his chair, stretching a little. Chan heard the crunch of some bone in Jeongin’s spine.
“Asleep?” Chan asked, this time with a little note of disbelief.
Jeongin’s expression flickered, and he shot Chan a quick warning look. “Yes,” he said. “He’s asleep. None of this has been easy for him, at all, and so he’s resting. I’m not waking him up, he deserves the peace today, so he’ll come and see you tomorrow, okay?”
The intensity of it somehow shocked Chan all over again. Even with the gut-punch knowledge of how Jeongin felt about Minho, this protectiveness just seemed out of place. Maybe because Jeongin had always been the one who needed protection. Maybe because it was just odd when applied to someone such as Minho who, Chan couldn’t help but feel, did not really require it. But he didn’t want to upset Jeongin, not after making up with him, so he just said, “Okay. I’ll speak to him tomorrow.”
Jeongin nodded. He was at the door now, but he paused and looked back at Chan and gave him another arched little look. “And I want five million won.”
Chan huffed out a bare laugh, smiling a little, but Jeongin just stared at him expectantly. “Wait, really?” he asked. It was a chunk of money, nothing that Chan couldn’t spare, but— “Why? You want reparations?”
“Minho-hyung doesn’t have any furniture,” Jeongin said, the words clipped. “I want to buy a living room set, and maybe some stuff for a little kitchen, like a dining table and a mini-fridge. I’m moving down to the second floor with him.”
Chan gaped at him, unable to help it. “Uhm, okay, well. After the Magpie job, we can see about renovating Minho’s space,” he said, weakly.
The corners of Jeongin’s mouth twitched, a little. A tired smile. “Okay,” he said. “Goodnight, hyung. I love you. I really do.”
“Goodnight, Jeongin,” Chan said quietly. “You know I love you too.”
The door clicked shut behind Jeongin. Chan sighed, put his head in his hands. Thought about what kind of apology he was willing to give, what he would have to hear from Minho in reply. The betrayal still burned inside him, the knotted feelings around that broken promise still tight around his heart. But for Jeongin, he could do it.
He smiled, more of a quirk of his mouth than anything else, entirely humourless. He’d have to apologise to Felix too. He seemed to be doing that a bit too fucking much lately.
——
The red lights pulsed, blinking along their strips, dimming to nothing and then flaring back to life. Jeongin stood beside the pool table, one hand braced on it. His palm splayed halfway across cold wood, and halfway over velveteen green fabric.
In his chest, his heart was pounding, not a heavy sort of thump but something faster, lighter. He swallowed like that could force the feeling down.
Jeongin, in all the years he had known Chan, had never doubted him once before this. He did not want to ever be put in a position where he had to doubt him again. That had been terrifying. Even while the core of Jeongin knew Chan would never kick him out— there had been something so viscerally shocking about Chan’s behaviour these past few days that had made Jeongin begin to wonder. Wonder if what he thought he’d been so sure of was wrong. Wonder if Chan wouldn’t become fierce with anger, once he realised Jeongin was no longer putting him first. Well, go with him then, he’d been afraid Chan might say.
His resolve had not wavered — if Chan had said that, then Jeongin would still have chosen Minho, would have gone into the unknown of the world with him. But the fear had been there all the same.
That had not happened. Instead, much like when Hyunjin had threatened to leave, it seemed to knock something loose in Chan’s brain. Make real exactly the damage he was doing, the consequences. His brother had been hurt, yes, and Jeongin wasn’t so angry at him that he didn’t feel sad over that. But he’d listened, finally.
It would take time for the waves of this to settle and all the bruises to heal but they’d get there. They would. Jeongin would drag Minho to a happily ever after even if he got cut up in the process. He’d fight for it.
He closed his eyes for a moment. In his mind, Minho’s face, the paleness of it, the tears shining in the awful artificial light. His voice, so helpless and broken and small as he’d said, I don’t understand, that even now it made Jeongin want to cry. What had been done to him to make him this way. To hear Jeongin say I love you and to react like a rabbit in a claw trap, watching the hunter draw near, all flashing eye whites and frothing lips. To pull back even as it shredded fur and flesh off the bone, and was hopeless besides.
Minho reacted to love like it was pain. Gentleness like it was a strike. And yet Jeongin could see, the empty well of him, the way he craved it too. Bereft of it for so long, terrified of losing it. Unable to understand why it was being given to him, when he was so sure he didn’t deserve it.
For now Minho didn't need to understand. He just needed to know. Understanding could come later. For now it was enough that he knew he had Jeongin, would continue to have Jeongin, to rely on, to love him.
His heart going at a more normal pace now, Jeongin took a deep breath and then left the PC room, right as Hyunjin was coming down onto the landing. He looked very pretty, his hair long enough now that he could pull it into a full ponytail, a look he seemed to be favouring these days. Just a few shorter, wispy bits floated around his face. He was wearing a black hoodie big enough for a polar bear to wear.
“Hey hyung,” Jeongin said, hearing the tiredness in his own voice. “Are you looking for Chan-hyung? He’s in his office.”
“Nah, I’m escaping; Felix is deep cleaning the kitchen, so I’m coming back here to watch a drama or something,” Hyunjin said. His hands were held in front of himself in a cute, floppy position, his sleeves totally swallowing them. “Do you wanna watch it with me?”
“Ah, no thanks, I’m heading downstairs,” Jeongin said, feeling embarrassment of all things prickle at the back of his neck. Things felt so awkward with Hyunjin these days, and Jeongin knew exactly why, but he wasn’t sure how to bring it up. It was something that needed— tact. And he had all the tact of an elephant in a tea shop.
Hyunjin’s eyes narrowed. “Downstairs,” he repeated slowly. “You slept in Minho-hyung’s room last night, right? You’re going there again?”
Jeongin felt the prickle turn into a blush, all the way over his face, as he nodded. In the past, turning pink in front of Hyunjin would have gotten his face squished, but Hyunjin didn’t try that now. “There’s more— privacy,” Jeongin said, a little strained.
Hyunjin mulled that over, a frown coming to his features — his thinking frown, his judging frown, his eating frown. Doughy and soft. “Jeongin-ah,” he finally said, “are you— really okay? Like with— everything, between you and Minho-hyung?”
Jeongin could feel himself turning even pinker, his skin growing hot. Hyunjin was all wide eyes and tangled hands, fabric clutched between his fingers. A kind hyung, who had every reason to be so confused and concerned. “Yeah, I am,” Jeongin said, and then, less stiff, less rehearsed, sincerity thick in his tone, he added, “Hyung, I’m really sorry if what you heard yesterday morning freaked you out. It wasn’t— something for your ears.”
Hyunjin’s head bobbed. “It just sounded bad,” he whispered. His posture had been hunched, but it straightened some now as he took a deep breath. “But I know I don’t have the best metric for these things,” he said, and this was firmer. His eyes did not waver from Jeongin’s. “As long as you’re okay, that’s what matters.”
Jeongin felt a little sad, at the idea of Hyunjin worrying about— this. With Chan, it was a bit of a ridiculous notion, that he would think Jeongin would let Minho hurt him in a way he didn’t want. That he would think Minho capable of it. But Hyunjin— it made sense, it made terrible sense, and it wasn’t because he thought Jeongin was stupid or Minho was cruel. It wasn’t rational for Hyunjin, Jeongin knew that. And how terrible, for him to have those thoughts, unable to help it, unable to reconcile what he knew with what he felt. To hear Jeongin’s sobs of absolute pleasure and imagine only the worst.
“I am okay, I promise,” Jeongin said. He reached out, put his hand over Hyunjin’s, hidden and tangled in his sleeves. Jeongin gripped bony fingers and squeezed, feeling the warmth of Hyunjin’s skin even through the fabric of the hoodie. “I really promise.” Hyunjin did not squeeze his hand in turn, but he didn’t shake Jeongin off either.
“Okay,” Hyunjin whispered.
Jeongin let his hand linger for another beat before retracting it. “I need to get back to Minho-hyung,” he said, before the silence could stretch into awkwardness.
Hyunjin shifted away, his posture closing off but not in a defensive way. “Alright,” he said, and worked up a small smile, doughy like his frown. “Have fun?”
“Shut up,” Jeongin grumbled without any heat and all, and heard Hyunjin huff out a little laugh as he brushed past him.
When Jeongin made it down to the second floor, Minho’s door was closed as always, but when he reached for the handle it wasn’t locked. He was careful as he turned it, trying to be as quiet as possible. It wasn’t late yet but the deeper they got into winter the earlier the sun set, and right now it was approaching golden hour, the sun on the opposite of the building, leaving this side in darkness. The newspapers over the windows rendered the light watery and thin, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust.
Minho was a lump on the bed, and he stirred before Jeongin had even managed to close the door. Jeongin bit back a sigh and let the door shut with a click. “Sorry,” he murmured as he approached the bed, seeing Minho’s eyes glinting in the dimness. “I was trying not to wake you.”
“Too well trained for that,” Minho said, whispering. It was like there was a third person in the room they were trying not to wake, but it was just them. Alone. “I woke when you left, too.”
“Sorry,” Jeongin said again, and Minho’s head lolled back and forth in a listless kind of denial. He was on his back, his undereyes puffy. Jeongin hoped he’d not been laying here awake all this time — he’d meant it when he said Minho deserved rest, and Jeongin had gotten up a while ago after Minho had dozed off. Hunger had driven him up to the apartment, where he’d unenthusiastically picked at a bowl of cereal and then showered. It had taken him a while to gather the courage, to plan out the words, to confront Chan. He nudged his shoes off and knelt down, pulling the covers back so he could slip under them. As he got situated, he said, “I went to talk to Chan-hyung.” With faux idleness he smoothed the blanket down over his lap, watched the shadows shift in the low light. “I should’ve threatened to run off with you right out the gate, it might have stopped him being so obnoxious these last few days.” He turned to look at Minho, who had not moved, his face settled into tired blankness. Jeongin felt something in him ache like a bruise at the sight. “He said we can stay,” he said gently, and watched as Minho let out a breath — silent, but Jeongin could see the way his chest sank. “He even says he'll apologise to you, which— would be nice, but we’ll see.”
Minho was still very quiet as he said, “I’m glad we don’t have to leave.”
Jeongin scooted down so he could lay beside Minho, his head on the neighbouring pillow. He touched Minho’s hair, watched the way Minho’s lashes fluttered, the way he turned into the touch. “Me too,” Jeongin murmured. He pulled on Minho’s shoulder so he rolled onto his side too, and then he nudged closer and wrapped his arms around Minho’s body, tucking Minho’s head under his chin. Minho wasn’t small by any means but he still fit well, against Jeongin’s body like this. He was not— relaxed, there was a tension to Minho’s body, reminiscent of earlier, when Jeongin had hugged him. He’d allowed the embrace, but there’d been a sense of tenuousness to it. “You should rest more, hyung,” he said gently, one of his hands coming up to resume petting Minho’s hair, a soft stroking motion.
There was a pause, and then all of that tightly held tension in Minho relaxed. His spine curved, legs coming up a little so his knees knocked against Jeongin’s thighs. Making himself smaller. He nuzzled his face against the hollow of Jeongin’s throat, like he was trying to bury into Jeongin’s body. “Thank you,” he said, so quiet it was barely audible.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, pulling him in tighter. “Oh, hyung.” He wondered if anyone had ever put Minho first, chosen him first. Likely not.
It was like Jeongin had told Chan — Minho needed him, in ways Chan could maybe never understand. He remembered Hyunjin under the kitchen light, turning to Felix and saying, I won’t let you be alone. Jeongin, quite fiercely, understood that feeling. He would never let Minho be alone again.
In his arms, Minho was shaking, a faint tremble along his spine. “I’m sorry,” he said, gaspy and soft. “For the meltdown earlier. I'm sorry—”
“No, no,” Jeongin cut him off, but not harshly. He kissed the crown of Minho’s head, cupping the back of his neck, cradling him. “You've been so, so fucking hurt,” he said against Minho’s hair, fierce and sad. “You've been wronged.”
“I’m not—” Minho stammered, still shaking. “I haven't—”
“You have,” Jeongin said, his thumb rubbing through the short hairs at Minho’s nape. His other arm was under Minho’s body, slowly growing numb, but he didn’t pull it away. He kept it wrapped around him, tight. “I know you believe everything you said,” Jeongin said, nuzzling into Minho’s hair, his lips dragging. “That you're worthless, that you deserve nothing but pain. I know the world has made you feel this way. But hyung. I’d be dead if not for you. And even if we put that aside, since you came here you have made every one of my days so much brighter. You make me happy. That's the truth. Please believe that too.”
Minho was quiet for a long time. Jeongin might have thought he'd drifted off if not for his rapid breathing. “I keep waiting to wake up,” Minho finally whispered, the words raspy. “This feels impossible. I'm frightened, Jeongin.”
“I know,” Jeongin said, as heartbreaking as it was. “I know.” He pulled back just enough that he could see Minho’s face again, lolling on the pillow that was Jeongin’s arm. Jeongin brought the hand that was cradling Minho’s head around so it was cupping his unscarred cheek. “I need you to promise me something,” he said, thumb pressing against Minho’s cheekbone, his fingertips digging into Minho’s skin. With Minho’s back to the window his face was in dimness, clear enough to see but darkened. But Jeongin didn’t need to see every detail of Minho’s expression right now. He only needed Minho to see his. “Hyung,” Jeongin said, “I need you to promise me you won't talk any more about how you're worthless, or good for nothing but violence. I can’t stop you from believing it, but— no more, hyung. I won’t let you use that to push me away. I won’t let you use it to keep hurting yourself. No more.”
Minho closed his eyes tightly, a stronger tremble running through him. “Okay,” he said, eyes fluttering open again to meet Jeongin’s gaze.
“You promise?” Jeongin pressed.
“Yes,” Minho said, a bit damp with it. He looked at Jeongin like— like he’d been out to sea and Jeongin had grabbed his hand, begun leading him ashore. Like he’d finally beheld a lifeline, but something more worshipful. “I promise.”
Jeongin smiled down at him, smoothing his hand up and using it to brush Minho’s hair off his forehead. “My hyung,” he said, with his own reverence. “My sweet hyung.” Even in the low light, Jeongin could see Minho blush, his ears going dusty red. He dropped his voice as he said, “I love you,” watched as the words rocked through Minho’s body, his eyes going heavy-lidded, lips parting. “I really love you.” The words came out a croon as he said, “You’re so good to me, I feel so safe with you—”
Minho surged up, pouncing like a cat — he’d been in Jeongin’s arms and then suddenly he was on top of him, urgently pressing Jeongin down into the mattress. The rest of Jeongin’s sentence got lost in Minho’s mouth, smothered into silence. Jeongin clutched at Minho’s back as Minho kissed him like he wanted to devour him, a franticness that Jeongin was not sure he’d felt from Minho yet thus far. One of Minho’s hands came up and held Jeongin’s face, splayed across his hairline, his temple, holding him steady. Jeongin couldn’t pull away even when he began to feel dizzy, could only lay under Minho, mouth open obediently as Minho licked into him.
It was Minho who broke the kiss, had to be him, his mouth finally sliding sideways and dragging wetly across Jeongin’s cheek, down so he could begin to attack Jeongin’s neck with that same kind of fervour. Jeongin arched a little, his head pressing back into the pillow, baring his throat to Minho’s mouth. His teeth were cruel, sharp stinging nips all over the side of Jeongin’s neck, up under the cut of his jawline, quickly soothed by the warmth of Minho’s laving tongue.
Jeongin squirmed, gasping out, “Love you, love you.” His hand cradled Minho’s head, letting Minho mark him, enjoying the pain of it. His lips were throbbing, kissed red. Minho’s hands shoved under his hoodie, pushing it up roughly, baring Jeongin’s chest and stomach. His mouth went from Jeongin’s neck to his chest, just as frantic. Jeongin moaned when, a little gentler than he’d been before, Minho’s teeth found his nipple, scraping over the sensitive skin. “Hyung, hyung,” Jeongin whimpered, grinding his hips up into the weight of Minho’s body atop him. “Oh, hyung, I love you, I’m so glad I can finally say it.”
“I need to be inside you,” Minho said against Jeongin’s skin, his own voice rough as gravel and gasping. There was a raw edge of desperation there that had pleasure shivering through Jeongin’s body. Minho came back up to nuzzle under Jeongin’s jaw, tipping Jeongin’s face back again, forcing his neck to be bared. “Can you take me again?”
“Yes,” Jeongin breathed, arching under the attention of Minho’s mouth on his already abused skin. “Oh, yes.” His hands clawed with their own kind of desperation at the back of Minho’s shirt, yanking it up and off him. As it came over Minho’s head Jeongin took a moment to press the material to his face, inhaling deeply. He was already nearly fully hard and that rocketed him the rest of the way, his body responding to Minho’s scent the exact way it had been trained. Blindly, he dropped the shirt off the side of the mattress as Minho followed its trail, kissing Jeongin as soon as his face was uncovered.
It went quickly, from there. Minho yanked Jeongin’s bottoms off and only pushed his own pants down enough to free his own cock. Jeongin still had his hoodie on, rucked up under his armpits. The only pause Minho took was to slick his cock up, using the leftover lube on his fingers to smear around Jeongin’s hole, sloppy for Minho, who’d been meticulous about this so far.
“I’m ready,” Jeongin said, when it seemed like Minho might— falter. He bent his leg up, knee almost to his own chest, reached down and spread his ass open. “You’ve fucked me loose, hyung. I can take you.”
Minho pressed his thumb inside, slick, tugged a little, watched the way it pulled Jeongin open. In the dimness, it wasn’t quite so mortifying. Jeongin kept his leg and hand where they were, holding himself so Minho could look his fill. The way Minho’s mouth was dropped open, his chest heaving with pants, made any embarrassment worth it.
“Baby boy,” Minho whispered, slipping his thumb out. He replaced it with his cock, a slow press, Jeongin’s body not giving way quite as easily as his words would have suggested it would.
Jeongin’s eyes fluttered shut, his free hand gripping hard at the sheets beneath him. He tried to relax but the stretch of it hurt, just a little, more than he’d expected considering Minho had fucked him that morning. That actually was probably contributing. Earlier Jeongin had taken a hand mirror and looked between his legs in the bathroom when he’d showered. He’d been a bit puffy and definitely red. “Hurts,” he whimpered, letting his lashes lift just a bit, pressing teeth into his bottom lip as he looked up at Minho hazily.
Minho, being Minho, didn’t take this as a coy compliment to his size — he fucking stopped. Even in his own daze, the frenzy of it, he stopped. Concern notched his brow, and he, just as slowly as he’d been pushing forward, began to pull out.
That would not do. Jeongin reached down and grabbed handfuls of Minho’s ass, fucking rock hard as it was. Not the best handhold but Jeongin pulled Minho upwards right as Jeongin rocked down, forcing Minho’s cock the rest of the way inside, so fast Jeongin made himself squeal. “Ah,” he moaned, high and breathy, his cock pulsing out a thick stream of precome onto his belly. “Fuck, fuck.”
“Jeongin,” Minho said, strangled, his eyes gone absolutely glassy with pleasure for a moment. “Fucking— ah—” His head dropped down onto Jeongin’s shoulder, hips rolling just a little, like he couldn’t help himself.
“Mmm,” Jeongin purred, running his hands up along Minho’s back, nails scraping lightly. He tipped his face so he could breathe words into Minho’s ear. “I like it when you hurt me.”
Minho’s elbow was braced by Jeongin’s shoulder, opposite the one Minho was currently laying his head on. His hand had been up by Jeongin’s hair, and he moved it now, fingers sliding along Jeongin’s scalp before he gripped the strands, hard. Jeongin made a keening kind of noise, wriggling. He was pinned too well to do anything except lay there, stuffed full of Minho’s cock.
"Brat," Minho hissed into his ear, beginning to rut his hips forward in a rhythm.
“Love you,” Jeongin mewled back, the best weapon in his arsenal, finally able to be deployed. His parted lips found the shell of Minho’s ear, smearing dampness in their wake. Minho’s hand in his hair tugged as he moved. “Love you, always.”
Minho shuddered, the movement of his hips stuttering a little. “Don’t,” he pleaded, surprising Jeongin. “I’ll come.”
Oh, Jeongin thought. He found himself grinning, and then laughing, the joy of it bubbling out of him. Minho began to move again, faster, and faster still. He came up and kissed Jeongin, their mouths barely meeting right because Jeongin was still smiling, still laughing a little. And Minho, not pulling away, drinking in Jeongin’s laughter like it was a physical thing.
——
The kitchen smelled like lemon and ammonia, zingy and vaguely headache-inducing. Overhead, the light buzzed, as the sky steadily turned golden yellow through the window.
Felix rinsed the slippery soap residue off his hands and then grabbed a clean rag from the drawer beside the stove, so he could begin to dry the counters. Under his slippers, the floor still had that sticky-tacky feeling from being a little damp.
He hummed as he worked, his brain a little too buzzy to actually have any music playing. The movie Hyunjin had put on earlier had been lighthearted and pleasant, but Felix hadn’t been able to immerse himself in it like usual. Something like adrenaline ticking his anxiety up just enough to keep him constantly that slightest bit on edge.
In the more rational spaces of his mind, he knew everything was fine. He knew he was safe. He knew Chan wasn’t mad at him. But conflict for Felix had always been— bad, it had meant incoming abuse. And it was hard to shake off that expectation, engrained into his brain like grooves over the earth.
So after the movie he had come up here and decided to put some of that jittery energy to work. He’d never cleaned the kitchen before. He’d never seen anyone else clean the kitchen either. They all sort of did the dishes and idly wiped up food splatters if there were any, and Felix made a point of trying to make sure he always tidied up after he baked anything. But there was a definite accumulation of flour and crumbs in the corners and grooves, and things tended to crunch underfoot on the hardwood floors.
Hyunjin had, very valiantly, put away the dishes that had been in the drying rack, but after that he had not particularly wanted to help Felix sterilise the sink. Felix had been a little manipulative about it, actually, pulling out the food catcher from the drain, vaguely mouldy and full of wet food, and Hyunjin had gone a little green and quickly escaped, claiming the smell of ammonia gave him a headache. That was probably somewhat true; after breathing in all these fumes Felix had a bit of pulsing going on behind his eyes. But more so Felix sort of got the impression Hyunjin just never cleaned anything really, pampered brat he was. Felix loved him so much but he was also glad to be alone, where he wouldn’t have to conceal his jitters or put on a smiling face lest Hyunjin fuss. Sometimes Felix liked the fussing, liked to be held and soothed. But right now he just wanted the quiet and space to process his feelings.
At this point, the sink had been deep cleaned, and the floor swept and then mopped. In the colourful sunset, the stainless steel of the sink gleamed. Felix felt a little more— settled, he supposed. Mostly he felt pleased with himself as he dried the counters, spotless and pale.
The keypad beeping heralded someone’s arrival, and Felix was a little surprised to turn and see it was Chan coming in and toeing his sneakers off. “Oh, hyung,” Felix said, voice lilting in genuine pleasure. “Hi.”
Chan’s eyes flickered over him, taking in Felix’s somewhat tattier clothing choices and the rag in his hand. He smiled, a little, but it was tired and didn’t reach his eyes. “Hey,” he rasped, and Felix noted the red rims of his eyes. “Can we, uh, talk?”
Felix straightened, his hand suddenly clutching the rag hard.
Whatever his face was doing, it made Chan hold out a hand and say, “Nothing— not like that. I just want— I want to talk.”
Felix bit his bottom lip, his anxiety, which had been slightly quelled from his exertion, skyrocketing again. “Sure, hyung,” he said, because he was an adult, and he couldn’t run from scary conversations just because he wanted to. “Give me a moment.”
Felix tossed the damp rag into the washing machine to be run through later, and then went to the sink to give his hands one final wash. He moderated his breathing the whole time, counting in his head. Out the kitchen window, huge fluffy clouds drifted through the warm, pastel sky.
After his hands were dried he came padding over to where Chan stood waiting for him, that same weak smile tugging the corner of his mouth up. “Are we expecting company?” he asked. “I don’t think the counters were this shiny even when we first moved in.”
“There were just a lot of crumbs in the corners, and I wanted to— keep busy,” Felix said, fiddling with the hem of his overlong sweater, wrapping it around his fingers. “What’s— up?”
Chan stared at him for a long moment, that smile— faltering, almost, though it was more of a slow fade away. Then he reached out, quick but not rough, and pulled Felix forward, against his body. He was— firm, his arms wrapping around Felix’s narrower frame, pressing his face against the side of Felix’s head, breathing in the scent of him. Felix’s eyes fluttered shut, and he let himself hug Chan back, soaking in the solidity of his body, his warmth. He’d missed this.
“I love you,” Chan murmured, still nuzzled into the gentle waves of Felix’s hair. He squeezed Felix a little harder, forcing some of the air out of Felix’s lungs. It was such a— comforting sensation.
“I love you too,” Felix said, his voice low and deep with it. He turned his face just enough that he could say into Chan’s ear, “Hyung, what is it?”
He heard Chan swallow. After a few more golden moments Chan pulled back, his hands gliding across Felix’s back and shoulders to settle on his upper arms. “Can we sit?” Chan asked, all big dark eyes and frizzy curls.
“Yes, of course,” Felix said, feeling the way his insides were going all melty like chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven.
He expected Chan would lead him to the kitchen table, but instead he took them into the living area, pulling Felix down beside him on one of the plush couches. Chan turned toward him, their knees touching, and then picked up Felix’s hand, cradling it almost. He brushed reverent fingertips over Felix’s knuckles, stretched Felix’s fingers out until they were splayed, almost like he was comparing their hand sizes. He didn’t speak, and almost seemed to be zoning out a little.
Felix tipped his head, trying to catch Chan’s eye. “Hyung?” he murmured, and Chan blinked, gaze finally raising to Felix’s face again.
“Jeongin came to talk to me,” Chan said, soft and— haggard, almost. The weight of a lifetime behind his eyes. Felix felt all that warm gooeyness in him evaporate, stomach sinking. “He— gave me an ultimatum, basically. I back off or he and Minho will leave.”
Of all things, Felix had not expected that. It— shocked him, genuinely. “Oh,” he said, sad, “oh, hyung.”
“I capitulated, of course,” Chan said, a little flat, a little wry. “I wouldn’t do that to either of them. But especially not— Jeongin.”
No, Chan could not. Felix brought his other hand over, placing it atop Chan’s for support. It had been awful enough when Hyunjin had threatened it. But for Jeongin to be willing to leave, to abandon everything that had been built for him here, must have shaken Chan badly. Must have hurt him. Chan, who loved Jeongin— more than he loved Felix. Who loved Jeongin most.
Felix understood the nature of the threat. The necessity of it. Hyunjin had said it earlier, Chan-hyung’s backing Jeongin into a corner, and I don’t think he is going to like the outcome. But that wouldn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
“I’m going to have to talk to Minho, at some point,” Chan continued, a little dull. “Tomorrow, probably. Jeongin wants me to apologise.”
Felix licked his lips to moisten them, his whole mouth feeling dry. “I think talking to Minho-hyung might be good,” he said, grasping for the right words. “Really talking to him, not as his superior but just as— someone who cares about Jeongin. About this team.”
“Levelling with him,” Chan said, and Felix nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.”
Felix shifted, pressing closer, as close as he could, drawing their tangled hands into his lap. “Jeongin loves you,” he said, putting all his fierce belief of that idea into the words. “Hyunjin threatening to leave with me didn’t mean he doesn’t love you. Jeongin is the same. It’s just— when you back people into corners, it forces them to make choices.”
Chan stared at him, almost like he was seeing through him. “He said he’s in love with Minho.” The words— hollowed out.
“Yes,” Felix said. “He told me as much, a while ago.” He watched Chan blink, watched as some of his attention refocused. Felix explained, “It was before you found out who I really was. He spoke to me about it.”
“He did?” Chan asked, something like surprise lacing his tone. Something like betrayal.
“He asked me to keep it a secret,” said Felix, with a note of apology. “I did, because I didn’t realise it would be such an— issue. And because it felt important, for Jeongin to have room to make his own choices at his own pace. He told me Minho-hyung loves him back.”
Chan— drooped, wilting like a flower in summer. “I figured he must think so,” he said, glum. “I’m not sure if he’s right.”
“I’m not either, but hyung, I don’t know Minho-hyung very well,” Felix said. He shook Chan’s hands a little, trying to cajole him. “As far as I can tell, of everyone here, Jeongin really does know him the best. And Minho-hyung does seem to deeply care about him.” The more Felix understood what to look for in that regard, the more he saw it. Like yesterday, when Minho simply— let Jeongin have his room, handing over his space for Jeongin to use as he saw fit. That was a stark show of immense trust, and for someone like Minho, what was trust if not love?
Chan had not seen these things, the way Felix had, was not comprehending them through the same kind of lens. Felix’s words had not seemed to comfort him much. “When Minho first joined up — properly, when I realised I wanted him on the team, not just as a sporadic external hire — I sat down with him and did a kind of more in-depth interview,” Chan said, and Felix pictured it. Minho in that office downstairs, or maybe the one at Maniac, sitting opposite Chan in front of a desk. The both of them sizing one another up, two people with scars and claws. “We talked about what he wanted in the long term. He was very blunt about not wanting friends, he just wanted to be respected and secure. When I asked if he had any kind of significant other, he was almost scornful. He said he had no capacity in him for romance.”
“Hyung,” Felix said, feeling the tiredness seep into his tone, his body language, “surely you can recognise that whatever Minho-hyung might have wanted almost five years ago, he has come to care for this team very much?”
Chan’s face spasmed in something like a wince. “I— I know that, on some level,” he said slowly. “But it’s hard to see, he’s hard to read. He’s always felt like someone running his own show, alongside ours. He’s never really opened up. Even Seungmin, who feels similar at times, has softened in a way Minho doesn’t seem to have done.”
“Like I said,” Felix said gently, “I don’t know Minho-hyung very well, but my eyes are the freshest because of that. To me, his care for Jeongin is obvious — as is his care for the rest of the team, it is just quieter, subtler. Minho guards himself, but that doesn’t mean he is cold or unfeeling. He’s still just a person. And Jeongin’s already in love. Enough so to be willing to leave. This has been in motion long before any of us were aware of it. No matter how much you might want it to stop, it’s far too late.”
“Yeah,” Chan said, the word rasping out of him. The shadows under his eyes were almost the colour of a bruise. “I have— become aware of that.” His head drooped a little, and again he seemed to focus down on their hands. His thumb ran along the bones on the back of Felix’s hand, bump after delicate bump. This time he raised his gaze again without prompting, eyes serious and unwavering suddenly. “It’s not pride, you know,” he said, and Felix tilted his head in confusion. “Earlier you said I was being stubborn out of pride. But I can admit when I’m wrong, Lixie. I fucked up so badly, a few weeks ago. I can admit that. My actions shame me, but acknowledging that I was wrong— doesn’t. That’s not what this is.”
His tone wasn’t confrontational, just— intense. Steady. Felix worked to match it when he asked, “What is it, then.”
“Worry. Love,” Chan said, his eyes boring into Felix’s in a way that, unusually, made Felix want to look away. “I know Jeongin. He wants devotion and commitment and probably a ring on his finger at some stage, and I’m not sure Minho wants the same, is capable of wanting the same. He doesn’t seem like he would ever want to put down roots like that.” Chan’s mouth went tight around the corners, and finally he broke eye contact. Felix let out a shaky exhale. More quietly, gaze still dropped, Chan said, “I can admit my approach has not been the right one. I lost my temper, and I’ve been acting— childish.” For the barest flicker, his gaze darted up, the ghost of a smile on his full lips. “Unattractive.”
Felix blushed, the warmth blossoming over his face in a feeling almost like a splash.
Chan squeezed his hand. “I know what it must look like,” he said, “but it’s just the worry. I’ve spent a decade protecting Jeongin. And I just— don’t think this is going to end well for him.”
Felix’s heart was fluttering quickly. “I think,” he said carefully, “these are all good things to calmly bring up to Minho-hyung when you have your talk tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Chan said, his head bobbing in a nod. “I will. I have no idea if Minho will level with me, but I’ll try. For Jeongin’s sake, and the team’s, I’ll try. I don’t want to lose Jeongin. He’s— my family.”
“I know,” Felix said, and now it was his turn to squeeze Chan’s hand. He’d heard the emotion, trembling and potent, in Chan’s voice. “I know, hyung.”
“You— get it, don’t you?” Chan asked, his eyes large and shining. He held Felix like he was a lifeline. “I’m not trying to be the villain. I just love him, Lix.”
Yes, Felix knew. “Love makes us foolish, sometimes,” he whispered.
“And aren’t I just the worst example,” Chan said, with no small amount of self-deprecation. An almost— anger overcame his face, but it wasn’t directed outwardly. It was gone very quickly though, as Chan’s gaze refocused on Felix’s face. “I’m sorry to you too. For putting you in the middle of this. I know standing up to me probably wasn’t easy.” His face, now, did a visual version of Felix’s melting chocolate feeling from earlier. Going all gooey soft, the love palpable. “My brave little one.”
“Hyung,” Felix mumbled, the word trailing off as his blush returned.
“Is it fucked up to say that I’m glad you feel like you can, though?” Chan asked, head tilting, smile sad. “That I’m happy to know that you’re not afraid of me? After what I did to you. I thought you might always be a little scared of me, and I hated that.”
“I was a little scared,” Felix admitted, and watched Chan’s eyes go particularly puppyish. “But most of that was just my own past. I expect people to react a certain way to criticism, even when rationally I know they won’t.” Seriously, with all the ardent sincerity he could muster, he said, “You’re a better man than my father. I have faith in that. I’m not afraid of you in that way.”
There was a definite glint of tears in Chan’s eyes now, and Felix’s throat felt a little choked. “Good,” Chan said, the word unsteady, “that’s— that’s good.” He raised one of his hands, cupping Felix’s cheek. His palm was dry and so warm. “You’re such a miracle, Felix,” he murmured. “Like my own little fallen star. I’m so glad you found us, I’m so lucky.”
“Hyung,” Felix whispered. He brought a hand up to hold Chan’s hand, still cupped to his cheek, and turned his face so his lips were brushing Chan’s palm. “I’m glad I’m here too.”
——
Changbin was not, he could admit, the smartest man around. He knew this, he’d made his peace with it years ago. He had street smarts, that was for sure, and he knew his way around the particular brand of diplomacy necessary to work in this city in the areas they did, but no one would ever call him academically gifted.
Perhaps that was why he opened his mouth and said, “God, did you know, you’re really hot when you’re all pissy like that.”
Seungmin shot him a look so poisonous, Changbin was surprised his skin didn’t peel off like he’d been doused in acid. Changbin couldn’t really say anything to defend himself, because he honestly stood by his statement — there was something about Seungmin when he was mad that got Changbin’s blood going a little bit. It was why Seungmin being grumpy or mean with his words during sex had never once upset Changbin or put him off. Sometimes it just made him want to push Seungmin a little harder, just to see the way his eyes flashed, the way his mouth pursed in that way.
Still. Perhaps it had not been very sensible to say it out loud.
Seungmin did not eviscerate him with his words. Perhaps he took mercy on a lower life form. Instead, he just turned back to his computer and said, “I am going to throw myself off the fucking roof.”
Even knowing that Seungmin didn’t mean it, Changbin felt a slight spike of alarm. “Don’t do that,” he said. “It would be very messy and hyung would make me clean it up.”
“God forbid you do some work once in a while,” Seungmin said nastily.
Changbin didn’t take it to heart. He had been down here, sitting here watching Seungmin scroll and click around on his computer, for the better part of two hours, and he knew that Seungmin had been looking for even longer. He was trying to track down the same brand and model of the safe they knew that Lee Jaerim used, and it was proving difficult. In fact, it was proving impossible. Apparently they no longer made that particular model of safe and any that had been made were usually installed like Lee Jaerim had installed his: in walls, or some kind of other permanent installation.
Seungmin had gone from looking at basic listings to sending out alerts on websites that had looked sketchy to Changbin’s untrained eye. The dark web, he’d said knowingly, and Seungmin had called him an idiot. He’d sounded a lot more fond then than he had done just now.
“This is ridiculous,” Seungmin said, voice laced with frustration. “I can find you literally any bit of information out there, I can track down any piece of equipment that you could possibly want, and I can’t fucking find the exact safe that we need? Of all things, this is the one thing I can’t find?”
“Baby,” Changbin said gently, “if you can’t find it then you simply can’t find it.”
“That’s not good enough,” Seungmin said. “We need it, if we can’t find it then Hyunjin is going to have to go in there without having trained on it, which means—”
Changbin reached out and covered Seungmin’s hand with his own. He’d been clenching it against the desk, so tight his knuckles were white, as his other hand scrolled with his mouse furiously. At the touch, every word in Seungmin’s mouth seemed to dry up, and he clamped his mouth shut, his jaw visibly tense. Changbin looked at him for a few moments before he spoke, fond beyond measure. Maybe it was wrong to feel fond when Seungmin was in this kind of mood but it was just so Seungmin to care so, so much about something that he would never admit to caring about.
“If you can’t find it,” Changbin repeated, “then you can’t find it. And that’s not your fault, and you’re not to blame for it. It’s just that it cannot be found. Okay?”
Seungmin looked at his computer, not taking his eyes away, not looking once at Changbin. But under Changbin’s hold, his hand slowly began to uncurl, not in a way that would let Changbin take it and hold it, but enough that it was hopefully no longer painful to hold it in such a position. His other hand was still now, paused in the search.
They sat in silence for a minute or so, Seungmin’s shoulders slowly untensing, his body becoming slowly looser, until Changbin thought that Seungmin might speak. He didn’t; instead, they were eventually interrupted by a pinging sound from Seungmin’s computer. Changbin didn’t not know what that chime indicated — there was a whole system of chimes, each one indicating a different kind of event, and Seungmin had tried to explain it one time and it had gone over Changbin’s head — but Seungmin didn’t tense up again so presumably it was not the chime that meant oh fuck someone just walked in the front door.
“Oh thank god,” Seungmin muttered, as he pulled his hand away from Changbin’s. With the other he pulled something up on the screen, a page of text — some kind of message, from the look of it. “Oh,” Seungmin said. “It’s Felix’s sister, she’s responded already.”
Changbin shuffled closer, looking over Seungmin’s shoulder at the message as they both read it together. He half-expected Seungmin to bat him away, but Seungmin didn’t; he didn’t even twitch when Changbin simply rested his chin on his shoulder in the end.
Hey Felix. It’s good to hear from you after so long. I’m the usual. These days my father travels a lot. I’d really love to travel too, but I can’t do it alone. I’m always home lately, it gets very lonely. My father is away on a business trip, and won’t be back until next Monday, so the only people I have for company are our security, and they’re not very friendly. It would be nice to see you some time, but meeting up might be difficult.
Changbin was— a little impressed, he had to admit. There’d been a large part of him that had expected to simply get no reply, or if they did, to get a response questioning who the hell Felix was, or a request to be left alone. He had not at all expected to get something back that matched their coded message perfectly, especially not when Felix’s sister could only have had a handful of hours to construct it.
“She’s smart,” he murmured, sitting back.
“She seems to be,” Seungmin agreed. He didn’t seem quite so impressed with it as Changbin was.
“Can you print it out for me?” Changbin asked. “I’ll take it up to Chan-hyung to show him.”
Seungmin nodded, clicking for a few seconds, and then off to the side, his little printer whirred to life. The printer always amused Changbin, because while everything else in Seungmin’s room, the computers and screens and technology, was all top of the line and expensive and somewhat frequently replaced, the printer was a regular home printer that Changbin had picked up for him from Homeplus a month after Seungmin had first joined. Nothing fancy, one of the cheaper models they sold, never replaced except for the ink inside it.
When Changbin had questioned him about it, Seungmin had said, printers are the devil’s creation and I’m not spending money on something that will break just as much, expensive or cheap.
Seungmin reached over and grabbed the paper from the printer tray before passing it over to Changbin. Changbin took it, and then took a moment to lean over and kiss Seungmin on the side of his mouth. Not a proper kiss, but something gentle, intimate in a way that usually made Seungmin stiffen. Today was not any different; he went still, and then relaxed again.
“Go take your paper to Chan-hyung,” he said, “and leave me alone to find my safe.”
Changbin did as he was told, mostly because he had seen the little spark in Seungmin’s eyes that seemed to promise, if he behaved himself, a night spent close together in Seungmin’s bed. It was in large part for that reason that he took the stairs as fast as he could, but another reason was that when he got halfway to the second floor, he could already hear the sounds of moaning coming from Minho’s room. A moaning that he’d— well, it wasn’t that he’d never wanted to hear it, it was more that he’d never thought he would hear it: Jeongin, moaning, loud and uninhibited.
Christ, Changbin thought, as he started taking two stairs at a time, trying to not listen to those hitching, half-sobbed sounds. They really are going for it. It was clear from what he could hear that if nothing else, Jeongin was very much on board with what was happening. Changbin might have never thought to hear that from Jeongin but he knew what it sounded like when someone was enjoying themselves, and Jeongin certainly was.
Luckily the sounds dropped off as he climbed the stairs — he did not know how Jisung was coping next door to that — and by the time he let himself into the apartment, he couldn’t hear it at all. Which was a relief, because when he stepped inside, Chan was in the living room, sitting on a couch next to Felix. All the same, Changbin closed the door hastily behind him.
Chan had one of Felix’s hands in both of his, holding it tight. The other had been curved around the gentle slope of Felix’s cheek, but he dropped it as he looked over at Changbin. Felix’s eyes were a little red-rimmed but he was smiling, just enough to tip Changbin off that apparently they’d made up after their little argument this morning. He was still kind of shocked that it had been Felix, in the end, who had called Chan out on how he was acting.
He’d told Seungmin about that, when he’d first gone downstairs to hand the initial message over. Seungmin had still been in bed, and Changbin had come into his room and sat on the small part of the bed that wasn’t taken up by Seungmin’s body under the covers, woke him with a kiss, and said, Felix called Chan-hyung unprofessional.
Seungmin, half-asleep and grumpy with it, glaring at Changbin with those beautiful eyes, had said, Good job on him for doing what you were too chickenshit to do, which had been fair enough, Changbin supposed, and had made him laugh.
“Hyung,” he said now, as he slid his shoes off and let them half on top of a pair of Jeongin’s sneakers that he didn’t even wear anymore. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“No, no,” said Chan, but he didn’t let go of Felix’s hand. “We were finished talking. What is it?”
Changbin came over and held out the piece of paper that Seungmin had printed out. “We’ve had a reply from Felix’s sister.”
“Already?” Chan asked. Felix had already snatched the paper out of Changbin’s hand and was scanning it, his eyes very wide as he took in the words. Chan leaned over his shoulder to read too and for a long few moments there was only silence, two pairs of eyes reading over the short missive.
Chan sat back first, a conflicted expression on his face. Felix seemed to read it a second time, a little more slowly, and when he looked up, he looked first at Changbin and then at Chan, his expression somewhat anguished. “She’s trapped,” he said. “She can’t get out, not if there’s security watching her while our father is gone.”
“Wasn’t there security in the past?” Changbin asked.
“I guess,” Felix said. He chewed his thumb nail for a second, a move oddly reminiscent of Jeongin. “But they were just there to watch the house. Sometimes we had to have a bodyguard if we went out. This sounds more like they’re there to watch her. She isn’t going to be able to get out by herself, hyung.”
Chan was silent for a long moment, looking at Felix, and then looking at Changbin. “He’s going to be gone until next Monday,” he said.
Changbin nodded. Yes, he’d noted that detail, for the exact same reasons Chan had. It would be a tight squeeze, but they’d learned over the years that it was best to do jobs when whoever owned the target was out of the country, or even just elsewhere in this country. Security got lax while the boss was away; people cared less about upholding standards when there wasn’t someone up high to impress. That was not necessarily the case with Lee Jaerim, but it was certainly worth taking advantage of the possibility.
“It’d be difficult,” Changbin said, but he knew Chan. He knew that look on Chan’s face. Determined, hungry, but in an oddly bleak way. The face of a man who had had his revenge denied to him so long that it had hollowed him out in many ways.
Felix looked between them, the note clutched in his hands. “Hyung,” he said. “If she can’t get out, then we need to help her, you said we could try to help her.”
He said it not like he thought Chan was going to go back on that promise but like he thought it had slipped Chan’s mind, somehow. A desperate kind of tone, like he thought it was something that could easily be overlooked even if it were life and death to Felix himself. Chan put his arm around him and tugged him in and said, “I know, Felix. We’re not going to leave her to fend for herself. Trust me, okay?”
Felix slumped against him, going a little limp like a puppet who had just had a few strings cut, not all of them. Chan held him there and looked at Changbin, a somewhat grim expression on his face. Truthfully, Changbin did not at all know how Felix’s sister was going to be able to fit into the plan. The thought of leaving her there, of what might be done to her, sickened him, but logistically it was a bit of a problem.
Chan took the note from Felix’s hands; he did not let go easily, but eventually he did, and he watched it be transferred to Changbin’s hands with obvious unease. “Can you take this to Minho?” Chan asked. “He’ll want to see it as soon as possible, I think.”
Changbin winced. “Right,” he said. “Minho-hyung.”
“Is there a problem?” Chan asked, brow furrowing just a little.
“Nope,” Changbin said, waving the paper just slightly. “I will deliver this to Minho-hyung. Now.”
“Thanks,” Chan said, clearly confused but not wanting to press it. Under his arm, Felix notched his head against Chan’s neck, eyes squeezing shut.
Changbin took the stairs down a lot slower than he’d taken them up. Part of him hoped that if he took long enough, by the time he got there, things might have settled down; this turned out to not be at all the case, because when he arrived at the landing, things were certainly quieter but he could still hear— Jeongin, his moans a little more broken now, interspersed with words that weren’t easy to make out with the thicker wall between Minho’s bedroom and the hallway.
Changbin floundered. He wasn’t proud of it. It was embarrassing, honestly, to stand on that landing shifting from one foot to the other, listening to the noise from the bedroom and being unable to bring himself to interrupt for the long minute it took to work up his courage. He was usually brave, usually willing to do things that scared him or made him uncomfortable, but this felt different. This felt dangerous in a way he had never quite experienced.
Eventually, though, there was a quiet moment, and he lifted a hand and made himself knock, hard enough to not be missed, on the door. All sound cut off from the room, like a blanket had been dropped over Changbin’s head. “Hyung,” he called, hearing the nerves in his own voice. “It’s me. We’ve had a reply from Felix’s sister, Chan-hyung asked me to bring it to you.”
There was silence, and then the faintest sounds of movement from inside the room, Minho’s voice saying something, Jeongin’s voice saying something back. Even without being able to hear the words, Changbin recognised that particular tone from Jeongin; it was the same one he’d always used when he’d finished with a room at the art museum and Hyunjin wanted to stand in front of a single painting for another ten minutes without moving or seemingly blinking.
The door opened. Minho stood there in a pair of sweatpants, slung dangerously low on his hips, and no shirt. He was probably barefoot too, but Changbin did not want to look any lower than his waistband. He’d already caught sight of a particular shadow in his lower peripheral vision and he did not need to investigate that further. There was a sheen of sweat over Minho’s skin, shining in the base of his throat. His mouth was so red and swollen it looked a little bit like he’d been stung by a bee. It made Changbin feel his own ears flush red. He stood right in the doorway, so Changbin could not see past him to where Changbin knew Minho’s bed lay, but it’s not like Changbin would have tried to look around him anyway. The weirdest part of it was that this was the first time Changbin thought he’d ever seen Minho shirtless. He had fewer scars than Changbin would have expected.
He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t need to. Changbin passed the paper over and Minho took it and read it, a quick scan of his eyes over the text. Then he read it again, just as fast, and then said to Changbin, “Wait here.”
He disappeared back into the bedroom, closing the door after him but not before Changbin caught just a flash of Jeongin on the bed, facing away from the door, covered in the bedsheets, his dark head of hair flat against the mattress. Then the door was shut, and Changbin was left standing on the landing, feeling fidgety and remarkably out of sorts.
Jisung’s bedroom door was shut. God, really, how was Jisung coping living next door to this? As easy going as Jisung was, this must be testing even his zen levels. He’d have every reason to complain, but if he wanted to be moved somewhere else, Changbin had no idea where they were going to put him.
Minho’s door opened again. He shoved a slip of paper at Changbin, who almost fumbled it but managed to take it without dropping it to the floor, and said, “Get Kim Seungmin to send that.” Then the door slammed shut again.
Changbin took that as the sign that it was, and immediately fled down the stairs to the workshop, where Seungmin had turned to face him, one eyebrow cocked in a sardonic way that really should not have been as attractive as it was. Changbin looked at him, his heart going hard in his chest, his ears still flushed with embarrassment, and said, “I’m back.”
“You’ve worked hard,” Seungmin said, bone-dry with it. “Minho-hyung wants me to send another message, I assume?”
Changbin nodded and came forward to give Seungmin the paper. He hadn’t actually read it, so he took his stool at Seungmin’s side again and settled to read once more over Seungmin’s shoulder. The message was written in Minho’s surprisingly neat handwriting, a little longer than Changbin would have thought, considering Minho hadn’t had much time to compose it. It would have been very like Minho, though, to have had various messages floating around in his head this whole time.
I’ve been travelling a bit these days. It’s a great way to meet people. I’ve made more friends recently than I think I’ve ever had before. I’m sorry to hear you’ve been feeling lonely. Something that always cheers me up when I feel lonely is staying up late and ordering takeout from my nearby 24 hour Chinese place. It always tastes better at 3 in the morning for some reason. You should give it a try, and let me know what you think.
Seungmin pursed his lips and lay the paper on the desk in front of him, positioned in a way he could read it as he typed. “Are the orgasms addling his brain?” he asked.
Changbin shrugged. It was possible, but over the years he’d learned to not question Minho’s plans. He’d often had insights on jobs that had gone against Changbin’s instincts but had ended up being right in the end. “It’s Minho-hyung,” he said. “I’m sure he has a plan.”
“Well, yes,” Seungmin said. He didn’t sound like it was particularly reassuring to him. “It would be nice if he could share them with us once in a while.”
Changbin lifted his hand and cupped his palm just under Seungmin’s ear, rubbing his thumb gently against Seungmin’s temple. Seungmin stiffened and then, so subtle it would have been easy to miss if Changbin didn’t love him the way he did, turned his head so that his head was resting in Changbin’s hold.
“I think,” Changbin said, very thoughtfully, “I’m going to ask Chan-hyung for a raise.” And felt, just as much as he heard it, the way Seungmin snorted with laughter at him.
“Hyung,” he said, “I’m not sure there’s money enough in Chan-hyung’s account to compensate for everything you deal with.”
Notes:
just a psa, chapter 23 will be up on June 30th, and then chapter 24 will be going up a week earlier than usual, on July 7th. so mark your calendars accordingly 🥰
Chapter 23
Notes:
hello again, i come to ye gathered here bearing bountiful fruit. maybe. idk. this chapter's a bit quiet imo, after some of the uh dramatics of the last few. i hope that is a nice respite rather than being unexciting 😔
trigger/content warnings: hyunjin talks a little more about some of the sexual abuse he experienced from his time while abducted, it isn't graphically detailed but it is more than what we've seen/heard of it so far, so please keep that in mind.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Minho woke later than usual.
It was still early, by a normal person’s standards, the day hardly wasted, but even so it was a little odd for him to open his eyes and realise he’d overslept, so to speak. The light filtering in through the newspaper covering the windows wasn’t as grey and hazy as usual, and the little patches of sunlight shining through the holes were further along on the floor. Dust motes floated through the shafts of sunlight, swirling and slow.
His room was so empty and fucking bleak, he thought, staring out at the dim expanse of it, the dark dusty corners. It didn’t feel that way right now, though, even though nothing about it had changed. Jeongin being in it with him simply made it feel utterly transformed.
Against Minho’s side, Jeongin breathed steadily, his hair soft against Minho’s cheek. They’d moved positions in the night, Jeongin wriggling down so he was covered totally by the blanket, wedging himself against Minho’s chest. He wasn’t the easiest person to sleep beside, was prone to tossing and turning, trying constantly to press nearer even when they were already aligned. But Minho’s body had already adjusted, waking only enough when it happened to register that there was no threat, and then falling back into slumber.
And Jeongin, as always, slept soundly enough that little could rouse him before he was ready. Minho took advantage of that, squeezing Jeongin closer, holding him tightly, his face tipping down to press a kiss to Jeongin’s forehead. All Jeongin did in turn was snuffle a little, his eyes remaining closed even when Minho began peppering kisses over his face. It felt so— good, just a pure unfiltered goodness, the simple pleasure of soft skin under Minho’s lips. This warm, trusting weight of a person Minho loved in his arms.
Of a person who loved him back.
The knowledge felt different in the morning light. Things often seemed shifted, after a night of sleeping on them, and so it held true even with this. It wasn’t any more— comprehensible, any less gargantuan. But that pitch of terror it had rocketed Minho to yesterday just wasn’t present now.
In fact, it had receded enough, like a tide going out and revealing new shoreline, that Minho found something which had been obscured under all the more tumultuous emotions — relief. Selfish, vile relief.
Thank god, it whispered in the back of his mind. Thank god he loves me back.
It didn’t help the dread in him. In some ways, it made it worse. Further proof that Minho did not deserve this, was too selfish, too cruel. How could he find any happiness, in Jeongin loving him. It was nothing but a horror. And yet— he knew Jeongin well. So well. And he knew what Jeongin’s loyalty looked like, what his love entailed. He knew Jeongin would never leave him, once having chosen him. Incomprehensible, that Jeongin would choose him, Minho could still not parse that one out. But he’d done it all the same, and that— Minho knew what that meant. Even if Jeongin got dragged through muck and blood and filth, Minho would still have him at his side.
He was selfish enough to be comforted by this, but not so selfish that he didn’t hate himself for it.
“Baby boy,” Minho whispered, lifting his arm off the dip of Jeongin’s waist to brush Jeongin’s hair off his face. He stroked his thumb over Jeongin’s temple, while Jeongin slept on, his breathing even, lips parted. He was warm, almost overly so, not with fever, just from the thick duvet and Minho’s shared body heat. His cheeks, normally pink anyway, were especially flushed. Minho’s eyelids felt sort of stiff from the tears yesterday, and they stung again now with the potential for fresh ones. Even quieter, he whispered, “I’m going to try not to disappoint you.”
He hadn’t even told Jeongin he loved him back. He wasn’t sure he could, the words crystalized and lodged in his lungs, felt with every breath but impossible to expel. It hadn’t mattered — Jeongin had known anyway. You love me too much for that. God, god, how could Jeongin see him so well, and yet still miss so much. He’d torn into Minho’s heart like an oyster, reaching through blood and viscera to pull out the pearl of his feelings and somehow still refused to see all the rot under the shell too.
Minho would never deserve him. But he could try. He would try. As long as Jeongin drew breath, he would try.
And that started now. He left one last, lingering kiss on Jeongin’s forehead, before he began carefully extricating himself, climbing over Jeongin and sitting on the edge of the mattress, pulling his clothes from the previous day towards himself. He dressed quickly, silently, and then made sure Jeongin was tucked in properly, bringing the blanket up so it covered the lower half of his face. Jeongin hadn’t stirred, and Minho gave himself a few seconds to admire his face as he slept. And then he walked to the door, opening and closing it with only the barest whisper of sound.
As he climbed up the stairs, he reflected it might be too early for this. He should have sent a text message— but no, it didn’t really matter. If Chan wasn’t awake yet, Minho would just go up to the apartment and fix both himself and Jeongin some food, would bring it down to Jeongin in bed and wake him with the smell of toast and cut fruit. He’d find a way to make use of the venture.
When Minho reached the third floor and passed through the PC room into the back hallway beyond, he found Chan’s office door closed, as usual. He was shaking, a little, he realised as he raised his hand.
No more running, he thought, and knocked.
A pause. “Yeah?” Chan’s voice called out, confused and maybe a little bleary. Chan was often awake early but that didn’t make him a morning person the way Minho was.
Minho took that as permission, and he opened the door, stepping just inside. Chan blinked at him, his hair uncombed, eyes puffy from fitful sleep. “It’s just me,” Minho said, unnecessarily. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt awkward in this way with Chan, wasn’t sure he ever had. “Can I come in?”
Chan rubbed the side of his face, scratching at his stubble, and said tiredly, “I didn’t think we’d do this conversation at eight in the morning, but yeah, come sit.”
Minho made himself take one of the seats in front of Chan’s desk, even though all he wanted to do right now was pace. There was a mug of coffee sitting beside Chan’s mousepad, steaming and mostly full. He wondered if Chan had literally just sat down before Minho had come to find him.
“I can come back later,” he offered, though he wasn’t sure his nerve would hold.
Chan shook his head. “Jeongin will probably want to chaperone, if we do this later,” he said, which was reasonable and likely true. He gave Minho an assessing little look. “He’s asleep right now, I assume?” A pointed little remark, somehow. At Minho’s nod, he said, “Yeah, I think we need to talk just the two of us, so now it is.”
Minho straightened, inhaling deeply, shoulders back. Bracing for a blow, not wanting to be knocked over. He was determined to take it, whatever Chan wanted to lob at him, even if it was unkind. Minho— wanted to hear it, wanted to hash this out, however it would need to be to do so. “Okay,” he said, hands placed atop his thighs.
They stared at one another from across the desk, the coffee steaming in white swirls between them. It became obvious Chan was waiting for Minho to speak, but it was not Minho with words bottled up in him, that was Chan. Once the stalemate had drawn on just a little too long, Chan blew out a long sigh, picking up his coffee and taking a sip from it. “Whenever we’d have a disagreement,” he said, lips smacking a little as he put his coffee down again, “about a job, or about security, you’d be very vocal about your dissenting opinion. But when the time came, when I gave the order, you’d carry it out. No matter how unhappy you were with my choice, you’d still—” He winced a little, lips pressing together. On the desk, he was rotating his coffee mug, round and round, fingertips on the rim. His chest hitched with a little huff of breath, and then he was saying, “Every time, every single time, when I gave an order I knew you didn’t like, I would wonder, is this the moment I run into Minho’s wall? And that always was something, lingering at the back of my mind. That I had no idea what I would do, if I gave an order and you simply said no.”
Minho could do nothing but stare and blink. He had no idea what to do with that information. It made his stomach feel squirmy, uncomfortable.
Chan watched him. “You’re not like the others,” he said, oddly gentle. “In a lot of ways, you’ve always felt like too much of an equal. You’re a member of this team but in some ways it’s always felt like simultaneously, you’re running your own team.” His voice turned very rueful. “It’s just a team of one.”
There were no words, for that. Minho— it didn’t surprise him. He had never been someone who allowed himself to be looked after, never let himself think of anyone or anything as permanent. Including this team.
It was self preservation. It was his ever-whirring mind, seeing the cracks and where things could fall through. He could not let himself get complacent. It would only make it that much harder when he had to move on. So he’d held himself apart. Chan viewed this team as his family, while Minho had desperately tried to hold onto an aloofness that had long since melted away. He’d just pretended it hadn’t. He could admit that, now, in the wake of everything. These people had become more to him than coworkers, more to him than friends. But he had never let them close enough to feel the same for him.
“I—” Minho’s voice cracked a little, stuttery and small. He cleared his throat. “I know what I look like, from the outside. What I seem like. But I am— a member of your team. You have my loyalty. There’s very few orders you could give, that I would outright refuse to carry out. And most of them are things you would never ask of me anyway.”
Chan stared at him, his face not the most open of books, but one Minho could read anyway. He could see the way the words landed, the shock of them. Abruptly Chan scrubbed his hands over his face, like it had all become too much. “I don’t understand, Minho,” he said. “You promised. You agreed with me. You say you’re loyal and now you’re slapping my baby brother around in bed.”
Minho coloured at that, shame a lead weight in his gut. It was an effort to keep his face from twitching. The urge to hang his head, to admit to wrongdoing, was strong. He wanted to plead, to make excuses. But he heard Jeongin’s voice in his head saying, Bedroom games don’t matter. Minho wasn’t sure that was true, but he wasn’t going to— apologise, for them. He took a steadying breath, his hands fisting. “I did promise you,” he managed to say, steadily. “And when I made that promise— I had every intention of keeping it.” He hoped Chan could hear the truth in that.
If he could, it didn’t seem to help. “So what happened, huh?” he asked, bafflement turning into frustration. The first sign of anger from Chan in this conversation so far.
This wasn’t going to be easy. Articulating his feelings to Jeongin was hard enough, and he loved Jeongin so much the feeling honestly terrified him. The idea of trying to express any of that to Chan, a Chan who was rightly furious with him— made Minho feel like he couldn’t breathe.
It starts today, he thought, working to calm his galloping heart. It starts now.
“Jeongin,” said Minho. “Jeongin happened.”
“What, because he kissed you?” Chan asked, disbelief dripping from the words. “You couldn't push him off?”
“I did,” Minho said, his own emotions seeping into his voice now. Imploring Chan to understand. “I did. Hyung, I am loyal to you. I didn't want to betray that. But if you put my loyalty to you up against—” He cut himself off, teeth digging into his bottom lip.
“Your libido?” Chan attempted to finish for him, eyebrow cocked, a mocking edge to the words.
That feeling was starting again, like the room was too small, like his clothes were— heavy, pressing on him, constricting. He grasped for words, when he was made up of feelings and images, impossible to articulate. How could he possibly explain any of it.
“Do you remember,” he began, “the night we took Felix to Maniac. And I had to haul Jeongin's drunk ass home.”
Chan's attention on him grew very sharp. “Yes.”
Minho knew what conclusion Chan had immediately jumped to, and he didn’t have it in him to get sidetracked trying to deny it. He had to stay on course, couldn’t let go of the train of his thought. “Hyung,” he said, then he gritted his teeth, throat working. All he could think of was Jeongin, the sharp line of his smile when directed Minho’s way. The warm, fleeting touch of his fingertips, unexpected sometimes but never unwelcome. How could he explain. “No one— touches me. No one fully trusts me, not even the people who live in this house.” The left corner of his mouth quirked without amusement, his scars stiff and hindering the movement. His voice was sardonic as he said, “Rabid dog, and all. Never sure if I'm going to lose my temper and bite.”
He’d expected Chan to nod a little, maybe, but not to flinch. It made Minho falter for a moment, before he could get himself back on course.
His nails were digging into his palms. “No one,” he said, a little hoarse, “except— Jeongin. He trusts me. He trusts me so fucking much.” Minho could feel the way his throat was going tight, how it was becoming harder to eke the words out of a chest that felt, more and more, like it couldn’t spare the air. “I'm a fucking killer and Jeongin, drunk off his ass, gets teary because he started thinking about how miserable I was in prison. He watched me beat a man to death and he tells me he still sees good in me.” His breathing was too fast, paced like he was in a fight, or running. And he was blinking quickly, obviously staving off the sting of tears. He hated being so obvious. “Hyung,” he said, imploring and tired. “It's not that my loyalty to you is unsubstantial; it's that you're pitting it against my love for Jeongin, and I will never put anything above him.”
Chan gaped at him, for long enough that Minho’s ears started burning. “Your— love, for Jeongin,” Chan said, strangled, and Minho inclined his head. Chan sat back in his seat heavily, his desk chair swaying with the shift in mass. “You told me, when you first signed on, that you had no interest in dating. That you weren’t even capable of romantic attachment.” His befuddlement sounded less hostile now and more just— taken aback.
“I thought I wasn’t,” Minho said, feeling the truth of that statement reverb all the way through him. “Jeongin makes me feel many things, that I thought had been beaten out of me as a child.” Parts of him that he’d thought were dead, rekindled to vibrant life under Jeongin’s hands.
“I— Minho—” The words were a little gaspy, like Chan was speaking not just before he’d gotten his thoughts together, but before he’d even inhaled properly. “What I saw on your face in the workroom that day was not—” He snapped his mouth shut, giving Minho a very speaking look.
Minho, somewhere along the way, had lost control of his own expression, and he had no idea what it was doing now. His face felt numb. “No,” he agreed, a little hollow, “that was hunger.” He saw on Chan’s face a new kind of fear, an echo of what Minho himself felt. “I’m not going to lie to you and say the love I have for Jeongin is sugary, that it’s— picnics and coffee dates. It isn’t. It’s— intense, the most intense thing I’ve ever felt.” He met Chan’s eyes for this, voice going low and intent in a way that would offer no comfort as he said, “I'd kill for him again. I'd die for him. I'd burn down the fucking world to keep him smiling, to keep that light in his eyes.”
Chan, sure enough, did not look at all reassured. His expression was reminiscent of someone watching a natural disaster unfold on television in real time. Just a slow dawning of horror, hit after hit that didn’t stop. He was clearly at a total loss for words.
“I’m not asking for your blessing,” Minho continued into the silence, “I know you won’t give it. And I know this isn’t what you wanted for him. It’s not what I wanted for him either.” More quietly, afraid of trying to paint himself as a martyr when that wasn’t the case at all, he said, “I was making arrangements to move out after the Magpie job, because I could sense things were going too far, and I didn’t want—” He swallowed thickly, trying to disperse the growing lump in his throat. Even just talking aloud about leaving was so painful. “As much as the idea of leaving this team, of leaving him, hurt me, I would have done it for his sake.” He leaned forward a little, whispering now to try and conceal the shake in his voice. “Hyung. Please. I tried to keep my promise. I did everything I could.”
Chan, slowly, raised his hands and buried his face in them, breathing audible. He stayed like that for a long few moments, likely gathering his thoughts. This was a lot, Minho knew. He wished he was better with his words, could convey this— pull, inside him, as undeniable as gravity. Finally Chan dragged his hands down, but only so his bloodshot eyes were visible, his hands still over his mouth and nose. From behind them, he asked, “And if Jeongin decides down the line he doesn’t love you after all?” Minho felt the words like a white hot poker being pressed through his chest, and Chan continued, heedless, “Because he’s young and naive and sees satellites as stars, what if in the future he realises he was seeing things in you that aren’t there.” His hands pulled down the rest of the way and then clasped, the knuckle of his thumb pressing to his bottom lip. “What will you do then, with all your intensity and anger.”
“Let him go,” Minho answered immediately, not having to pause to consider it. “I’ve only ever wanted him willing.” Something like shame flit across Chan’s face, which discomfited Minho some. What, exactly, did Chan think him capable of. “It would destroy me, truthfully. To lose him now. But I would never keep him against his will, through threats or guilt or manipulation. If that’s what you’re asking.”
Chan nodded quickly. “Yeah.” His voice was raspy.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Minho said, nearly pleading with it now. “I know I’m not good enough for him. I know I never can be. But if nothing else, please believe that I love him. Please believe that I— will do my best to keep him happy, in whatever form he decides that will take.”
Chan stared at him, clasped hands in front of his face, elbows on his desk. Studying, searching. “You feel familiar,” Chan murmured. “You feel like a stranger. Everything you’ve said in this conversation makes perfect sense and no sense, with the man I’ve known for years.”
“I’m a private person,” said Minho, flatly delivered as always but intended as humorous all the same.
Chan huffed out a couple puffs of air that turned into a low chuckle. He pressed his thumbs against his eyes, rubbing them. “Fucking Christ,” he said, finally taking another drink of his coffee, cool enough now to chug. “I thought, all this time, that you only wanted sex from him, and that he’d be too naive to keep his heart out of the mix, and you’d get bored eventually and end it and he’d be heartbroken and confused.” He paused. “The reality isn’t— it isn’t worse, but it feels more. It feels bigger. Because yeah, you’re intense. And he is stubborn. I thought this would blaze out in half a year and now—”
Now they were looking down the barrel of the rest of their lives, possibly. Minho would never leave Jeongin, and it was beginning to look like Jeongin was too— too himself, to ever leave Minho. Loyal and stubborn and his eyes full of stars. So everyone around them would either have to adjust to it, or cut them out. There was no other option. This change, however much any of them may not have desired it, was permanent.
In a whisper, Minho said, “I wouldn’t have done that to him. If it was only sex, I could get that anywhere. I wouldn't hurt him like that, I wouldn’t do that to you either.”
“That was— it was why I got so angry,” Chan said, voice strained.
Yes, Minho could understand that. Of course Chan had been upset, had guarded Jeongin so fiercely. Jeongin was worth guarding anyway, but Chan believing that Minho was going to use Jeongin and then dump him, made the need to protect Jeongin that much more dire.
“I couldn’t understand why you’d destroy everything that had been built up around us over the past four years just to fuck him,” admitted Chan. “It hurt, it was deeply upsetting to think I’d misread you in such a fundamental way. Truth be told, the reality is— less upsetting, but still very disquieting.” Minho straightened, took that hit and kept his head high. He’d opened up and now Chan was, too. Any antagonism had left the other man now, and he was meeting Minho halfway. Being honest, but not deliberately cutting. “You’re right,” he said on a sigh, “I can’t give my blessing, exactly. I just don’t think you’re right for each other.” A wry smile overtook his features, utterly devoid of humour. “But Jeongin has made it very clear where he stands, and it’s at your side. Even if it means leaving mine.”
“I tried to talk him out of that,” Minho rushed to clarify, needing Chan to know that at no point had Minho ever, ever tried to turn Jeongin against Chan. “This is his home, and you’re his brother. His family.” He licked his lips nervously and added, “If it really isn’t— feasible, for me to stay, we can try to work something out—”
“No,” Chan said, sharp and final. Minho immediately leaned back, falling silent. Chan’s eyes softened, and so did his tone. “No. I’m making it sound like— no.” He ran a hand through his hair, pushing all the frizzy curls off his face. He made a point of initiating eye contact, intent and earnest. “This is your home too, Minho. I want this to be your home. Just because I don’t— I wouldn’t approve of you getting with— Jisung, or Seungmin, or Changbin, either. But if you had, it would have been a simple matter of me saying, hey, this is probably not a good idea. And even if you’d chosen to ignore me, everything would have moved on. I would have shrugged and said, oh, well, you tried. But because it was Jeongin, I let my emotions eclipse the fact that you’re a part of this team, an important part. I’ve never considered you someone I needed to protect, not like I do with the others. But you are. You are someone who relies on me. I don’t want to leverage that over your head — your safety, your home. It isn’t right of me.”
The sting of tears was back, and Minho blinked quickly to push it away, tucking the corners of his lips in tightly to keep anything from wobbling. Chan likely noticed the glassiness to his eyes, but he did not comment on it. “Thank you,” Minho said, strained.
Chan’s mouth did a thing, that was like a sad version of a smile. “I’m sorry, Minho,” he said. “For what I said to you a few nights ago, and even in the workroom back then.” Minho began to shake his head but Chan held up a hand, like he would in a meeting to quiet everyone. “Please, let me—”
“You were right,” Minho said over him. “I would be dead if it weren’t for you, or back in prison — which is effectively the same thing, since I don’t think I would have survived another stint.” Chan blinked, Minho felt squirmy. He’d said too much on that particular front. “You put your trust in me and I broke that trust. I didn’t blame you, for what you said.”
“But I should have done what I am doing now,” Chan insisted. “Sat you down and talked. Instead of hurling insults. I really am sorry, Minho. I’ve been a shit leader to you, a shit older brother.” Now it was Chan who looked like he might cry, and Minho was not sure what he would do if that happened. “I think,” Chan said, “if I ask you to make any more promises, Jeongin will never speak to me again, but please, be careful with him? I love him most in this world.”
Minho was absolutely unable to speak. Especially when his thoughts were confusedly echoing, older brother? He settled for nodding, and Chan turned his face away, looking at the wall.
“You should get back to him,” Chan murmured. “He’ll wake soon.”
Minho inclined his head, deferential as always, and then he left, carefully shutting the door behind him. That had gone— alright. As alright as it could have. He couldn’t promise Chan, as he would have liked to do, that he would never hurt Jeongin. He wished he could make that promise. But he was bound to fuck up.
He could promise to try. He could promise to listen. He could promise to strive for change. It would have to be enough.
When he let himself into his room, the lights were still off, but silhouetted against the dim light coming through the covered windows he could see Jeongin sitting up in bed. His hair was an absolute mess, standing up like a flock of crows had tried to make a nest out of it. He was slouched, eyes barely open as he squinted in Minho’s direction, swaying slightly. It was clear to Minho he’d sat up just to ensure he could hold vigil and not fall back asleep, and it was barely working.
“Where’d you go,” Jeongin mumbled as Minho closed the door, locking it.
“To talk to Chan-hyung.” He could hear the fondness in his own voice, there without him giving it permission to be.
“Hmph,” Jeongin said, petulant and cute about it. “Did he behave?”
Minho smiled, unable to help it as Jeongin’s squint grew suspicious. “Yes, he did,” said Minho. “He apologised, like he said he would. And I explained some stuff that will hopefully make things going forward a bit easier.”
Jeongin’s lower lip jutted out, less in a pout and more in a precious, dubious kind of expression. “What did you explain.”
“How I feel for you,” Minho said, approaching the bed. Jeongin followed his movements blearily. “That this isn’t just sex.” Once he was close he paused, staring down at his mussed up bed, Jeongin right in the centre of it. “He asked that I take care of you. He says he loves you most in this world.”
Jeongin made a long, grumbly sort of noise. “Whatever,” he muttered, rubbing one of his eyes. Minho wanted to eat him like candy. “Are you staying up?”
“I was going to,” Minho said. They had a team meeting later, and he wanted to go over all his notes beforehand.
“Oh,” Jeongin said, and Minho couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or just tired. “Okay.”
“Why?” he asked. “You can go back to sleep, I don’t mind.” Now that he didn’t need to avoid Chan so scrupulously he could theoretically take his work up to the kitchen.
“I know,” Jeongin said on a weary sigh. Minho had to press his lips together to stop from smiling too wide. “I just—” Jeongin blinked up at him, leaning towards where he stood, a hand braced on the mattress. “Can you lay with me? If you’re busy, you don’t have to—”
Minho was already slipping his shoes and pants off, leaving him in his shirt and boxers. Jeongin’s words died away as he watched. “I don’t have anything to do that can’t wait an hour,” Minho promised, and Jeongin flopped back on the bed, scootching over to make room that he immediately retook as soon as Minho was under the covers with him.
He was so warm, and Minho wrapped him in his arms, pressing kisses to Jeongin’s face when he turned it up towards him, like a flower to the sun. It made Jeongin giggle, but it was still a very sleepy sound. Jeongin’s weight against him was different, when he was awake versus asleep. The weight of him now was loose and limp in that way that heralded unconsciousness.
“Mm, right where you belong,” Jeongin mumbled, the words sounding like mush. Minho couldn’t tell if it was because he was falling back asleep or if it was because he’d moved so his mouth was pressed to Minho’s shoulder.
“Where I belong? You want to keep me here forever?” Minho asked, running his fingers through the spikes of Jeongin’s dark hair. At Jeongin’s noise of assent, the way he tightened his arms around Minho’s middle, Minho said, “I think Chan-hyung might have something to say about that. He is paying me for work, after all.”
“Poo on Chan-hyung,” Jeongin grumbled, mutinous in that way he got.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, hiding his smile in Jeongin’s hair even though there was no one else here to see it. He felt— so light. So much better. “You’ll have to forgive him at some point.”
“I’ll forgive him. Eventually,” Jeongin clarified with emphasis. “Maybe after the couches arrive.”
Minho’s hand stilled. “The— couches?”
Another long, heavy sigh, the air damp and warm against Minho’s neck. “I may have wheedled out more than just an apology for us, from Chan-hyung,” Jeongin said. When Minho pulled back to check his expression, Jeongin had only one eye slitted open, his other squeezed shut. He did not look like he was joking, though it was hard to tell.
“You— what,” Minho said lamely.
“I want furniture,” Jeongin said, scowling. “So Chan-hyung is buying us some. For the emotional damages.”
“I see,” Minho said, a little strangled.
“Hmph,” Jeongin said, smashing his face into the crook of Minho’s neck. “And I’m ripping the newspaper off the windows. If you want privacy so much we can get curtains.”
Minho began to stroke Jeongin’s hair again, a little more dazed than before. “Whatever you say, baby boy.”
“Mm. That’s what I like to hear.”
——
Changbin came into the workshop to find Seungmin sitting at his computer perfectly still, reading some text on the screen. He didn’t look up to see who it was that had come in, which probably meant he’d seen Changbin coming on the cameras, since when Changbin crossed the room to him, he wasn’t surprised to have company. He was just squinting at whatever was on his screen.
“You’re early,” he said, after a moment or two of Changbin just— looking at him. Truthfully he got more than a few opportunities to just watch Seungmin, since Seungmin was usually in one of two moods: he either let Changbin watch and pretended he didn’t notice what was happening, or he bitched about it and made Changbin stop. Changbin wasn’t quite sure what the mood was today.
“Am I?” he asked mildly. “What are you squinting at?”
Seungmin still didn’t look away from his screen, clicking through to print whatever it was he was looking at. “Another message from Felix’s sister came through a few minutes ago,” he said.
Changbin blinked at the side of his face, his pretty nose and long lashes. “Did you let Minho-hyung know?”
“No, the meeting is starting soon,” Seungmin said. He minimised the text on the screen to reveal some kind of building blueprints underneath. “I’ll give it to him then.”
The printer clicked and whirred for a few moments and then spat something out. Changbin went over to it to collect it: a single sheet of paper, one sided, the text large and black. It had the message that Minho had written the night before and the new one underneath, both of them together only filling half the page.
It’s nice to hear you’ve made some friends, I’d like to meet them too. You were right, jjamppong tastes better in the middle of the night, though I’m not sure my stomach appreciated it. Next time I’ll get something else. Do you have any recommendations? Now would be the time to try them, while my father is away.
“Huh,” said Changbin. “She actually did it.”
“Sounds like it,” Seungmin said. He sounded a little grumpy, like it was still annoying him that he couldn’t quite work out what the takeout message was all about.
Changbin came back over and put the paper down on the side of Seungmin’s desk, and then pulled the nearest stool over so he could sit down, as close as he could be without nudging Seungmin’s desk chair. Seungmin glanced over at him. “Why did you come down so early,” he said. “I’m busy.”
“I wanted to see you,” Changbin said. He lifted his hand and slid it, slowly like he was testing the waters, around the back of Seungmin’s neck. “Aren’t you happy to see me too?”
Seungmin just made a sceptical little noise in his throat but didn’t deny it. He didn’t tell Changbin to go away, or take his hand away, either. Changbin’s thumb pressed to the hollow beneath Seungmin’s ear, and felt the way that Seungmin let the weight of his head rest just slightly against the hold. He was never quite sure if Seungmin did that on purpose or not — on the one hand, Seungmin rarely did anything that was not on purpose, and even more rarely reacted on instinct, without thinking. On the other hand, Seungmin was not in the habit of so obviously broadcasting his likes. His dislikes, sure, but not so much the things he liked.
But Changbin had always known, the way that Seungmin liked to have Changbin’s hand like this against him. Supporting him, holding him up. Seungmin had leaned into the touch from the first time Changbin had done it.
“It’d be funny,” he said, a murmur, as if there was a risk of being overheard; there wasn’t, there was nobody else even on this floor yet, “if we hijacked this meeting to confess our relationship.”
Seungmin, miraculously, didn’t tense even a little at the words. He was doing something on his computer that Changbin didn’t understand, and which looked very complicated, but considering that Seungmin’s face was utterly placid, it probably was not that difficult. Or maybe it was just that it wasn’t difficult for Seungmin. “I’m not sure funny is the word I would use,” he said.
“You don’t think so?” Changbin asked, studying Seungmin’s profile. “Everyone gathered where we can see their faces, just, oh, by the way, Seungmin and I are helplessly in love and have been for—”
“That’s a troubling sign,” Seungmin interrupted, voice so idle it was almost aggressive.
“What is?” Changbin asked. There was a smile coming to his face, one he couldn’t possibly keep away. He just liked it so much when Seungmin decided to play along with him, without Changbin even really needing to coax him. Perhaps it was perverse of him to like it, because if there was one thing he could never do, it was win a war of words with Seungmin, but Changbin didn’t need to win. He just needed to make Seungmin smile.
“Delusions,” Seungmin said. “You should see a doctor about that kind of thing, hyung.”
Changbin laughed, unable to help it, and although Seungmin still didn’t smile, he did lean even harder into Changbin’s hand on his neck, really making Changbin hold him up now. Changbin could just let his hand rest against the back of Seungmin’s desk chair, but he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to hold Seungmin up, keep him steady in this way.
“Hmm, well, I can only speak for myself, I suppose,” he said. Seungmin shifted on his seat. He looked like he was having to physically hold himself back from side-eyeing Changbin. “But don’t you think you should confess all the same? The meeting is the best place for it.”
“Confess what,” Seungmin said. “I’ve got nothing to confess. Don’t lump me in with you, hyung.”
Changbin rubbed his thumb against a knotted piece of muscle in Seungmin’s neck and felt Seungmin shiver. He didn’t comment on it. “But how will you explain it?” he asked. “If I die on the mission, how will you explain your anguish at my gravesite?”
Seungmin went still. It was a kind of stillness where Changbin couldn’t work out if it was a sign of upset or not. After a few seconds of silence, Seungmin said, “Hyung, you are so fucking stupid.”
“Hey!” Changbin protested.
“You’re not going to have a gravesite,” Seungmin said. “Only rich assholes like my dad get graves. You’re going to be cremated so if anything, I’ll be sobbing over your ashes.” He sent a quick darting look at Changbin, and the humour was alive in his eyes, so bright that Changbin felt his breath catch seeing it. “If you have any requests for where I should scatter them, I’m all ears.”
Changbin opened his mouth for a joke, and then shut it again. Truthfully, he knew what he wanted done with his ashes, he’d known since he was sixteen and holding the urn that contained his grandmother’s. Chan had been by his side, outside the crematorium, his hand on Changbin’s shoulder, so comforting that it had almost brought Changbin to tears, again.
When I die, he’d said, speaking for the first time since he’d woken up that morning, mix my ashes with hers and scatter them on the beach, she never got to see the sea, and Chan had said, you’re not going to die, and Changbin had almost smiled and said, everyone dies someday, hyung.
But that was too much, for this conversation, and so he opened his mouth again and said, “Don’t scatter them, you need to make a shrine in this workroom for me. So everyone can cry over me.”
“Like I said,” Seungmin said, “delusions.”
He leaned forward, dislodging Changbin’s hand, but Changbin had already been moving away, because he’d seen it on the camera feeds too, Chan coming downstairs, talking to Minho as he went. Jeongin trailed a little behind them, smothering a yawn behind his hand. Changbin was not sure he’d seen Minho and Jeongin apart for any meaningful length of time in the past couple of days, and wondered if this was going to be an ongoing thing or just a sign of the honeymoon period.
Changbin took a seat at the workbench, just before the door opened and Chan came in, looking serious but not tense, not upset. Minho, coming in after him, also looked normal, that— feeling about him like he was a dog preparing to be kicked missing now. It looked like whatever had happened yesterday with Felix had finally knocked Chan’s head back into gear.
“Hey, hyung,” said Changbin, and then dodged as Chan tried to ruffle his hair like Changbin used to constantly do to Jeongin as a kid. He dodged so hard, in fact, he almost fell off his stool. He heard a snort from Seungmin, mostly covered up by Jeongin’s soft, slightly tired sounding laughter.
“Hello, Changbin,” said Chan, like all of that hadn’t happened, and slid into a stool at the end of the table, the one nearest the door. Changbin just glared at him.
Minho looked like he probably would have sat to the side of Chan, with his back against the wall and his eyes on the door, except that Jeongin got there before him, so that Minho had to sit with Jeongin on his left, separating him from Chan. Changbin— was not sure if Jeongin had done that on purpose, he no longer knew with Jeongin, but if it were on purpose, it seemed a clear sign that Jeongin still did not quite trust Chan just yet.
The door opened again, Jisung holding it with a flourish for Hyunjin to come through, tugging Felix by the hand behind him. “Thank you, Jisung,” Felix said with a bright smile at him. Jisung bowed like a knight bowing to their liege lord, which made Felix giggle.
Hyunjin rolled his eyes. “You are such a nerd,” he said. Jisung flashed him a peace sign which made Hyunjin roll his eyes harder.
Chan snagged the stool on the other corner to him and pulled it so that it was sitting right next to him. There was more than enough space on that side, unlike upstairs with the kitchen table, so nobody usually sat like that. Felix came and sat down next to him, leaning into his side. Chan put an arm around his shoulder, squeezing him in a hug for a moment. Changbin really did wonder that how a man could look so incredibly besotted at every possible moment.
Hyunjin took the seat closest to Felix, the one next to Changbin, although he shuffled the stool a little closer to Felix, the legs scraping on the floor with a hair-raising sound. This put them within easy touching distance, which Changbin found kind of sweet, actually. The easy connection between Hyunjin and Felix still struck him, even now, as something miraculous. That prickly Hyunjin, who did so much to protect his soft, squishy interior from the outside world, had taken one look at the new, wet little kitten delivered to their door and decided to take him under his care.
Maybe it wasn’t that shocking, actually. Was that not what had been done for Hyunjin all those years ago? He certainly was the type to— pay it forward, so to speak.
Jisung rounded the corner so that he could take the stool next to Minho, waggling his eyebrows at Changbin opposite. With a sigh, like this entire thing was somehow a chore for him, Seungmin got up finally from his desk chair and sat at the other end of the table, alone against the edge.
Once upon a time it hadn’t even been a thought in Changbin’s head to reach out and take his hand. Now he had to actively stop himself from doing it.
Chan looked around at them all, hands resting against the bench in front of him. “Well,” he said. “Hi. Good afternoon, everyone.”
“I love when you act like we don’t all live in the same house,” Jisung said.
Chan shot him a squinty little look. “We don’t usually have meetings with all of us in it,” he said. That was probably just as well, Changbin thought, considering with Felix now added, the kitchen very much couldn’t contain them all, and Seungmin was unlikely to cope well with everyone constantly being in here for big meetings. “We’re coming down to the wire on Felix’s job,” Chan said, after Jisung just smiled winningly back at him. “Maybe more so than we would have expected. I think I want to do it this Friday— well, Saturday, technically. Three in the morning, right, Minho?”
All eyes swivelled to Minho, sitting next to Jeongin. “Thereabouts,” he said, without much inflection.
“Whoa, this weekend?” Jisung asked, rocking forward on his stool. “What changed?”
“We’ve had a message from Felix’s sister,” Chan said. “Jaerim is out of town. He will, theoretically, have taken some of his better security detail with him. Is it a problem?”
Jisung looked a little uncomfortable having the question turned on him, always happier to be told what to do than have the decision put in his hand. He shrugged, but Hyunjin said, “We haven’t gotten the safe. I haven’t had any practice on one.”
“I know,” Chan said. “And that’s not ideal, but it’s looking like they don’t even make that model anymore, and tracking down a used one isn’t panning out so well.” He glanced at Seungmin to confirm nothing had changed on that front, and Seungmin just sat there with a pissy little look on his face, clearly still annoyed about his failure to figure that out. Chan looked like he almost smiled at that, before turning back to Hyunjin. “It might be a long time before we can get one. Do you think we should wait?”
Hyunjin ran a hand through his hair, getting it away from his face. Changbin still felt like he was getting used to the dark hair, even after all these weeks. “I’ve worked on similar safes in the past,” he said. “I guess just let me know the time frame I’m dealing with? I might not be able to get it open quickly.” His voice went a little doubtful, a little unsure of himself, in a way that Changbin felt like he was hearing more often from Hyunjin, after getting used to Hyunjin being so self-confident, hard-won after everything he’d been through. “I know you want that money, but if I can’t get in, then I can’t get in.”
“When I say three in the morning, the goal is to be at the safe at three,” Minho said, still in that kind of flat way. Hyunin’s gaze switched onto him. “That would give you at least thirty minutes of play time, more if you really want to push it. I just want the two of you out of there before four, which is when we begin to run the risk of them coming to collect the earnings for the night.”
Hyunjin thought for a few seconds, lips pressed together, before he let out a breath and said, “Okay. That’s— reasonable.”
There was a beat of silence, then Seungmin said, “We got another reply in. From Felix’s sister, about twenty minutes ago.”
That caused a slight stir around the table, Minho’s face snapping to Seungmin, but before he could say anything, Felix was leaning across the table, his hand reaching out. “Can I see?” he asked.
Seungmin handed him the paper. “This has both the reply Minho had us send last night, and her response,” he said.
Felix felt almost like he retreated with it, holding it close for a moment before he released it enough for him and Chan to read it together, Chan’s chin hooked on Felix’s shoulder. It was a remarkably intimate position for a team meeting, but then the blurring of those lines for Chan with regards Felix was— well documented at this point.
Felix read it and then seemed to read it again, much like he’d done the night before with her first response. Like he was absorbing every part of it, these words from a sister he had not seen for almost a year. Chan, however, shifted back a little, just enough to raise his chin from Felix’s shoulder but not enough to actually put any real space between them. “You told her to order Chinese takeout?” he asked, sounding baffled.
Minho was blank-faced. “What did she say in reply?” he asked.
“She said she did and it gave her indigestion,” Seungmin said.
Minho held out his hand silently. Felix looked at him and then back down at the paper in his hands, and for a moment his indecision was obvious. Changbin almost said, we can print another copy, but Felix had already handed it to Chan, who passed it onto Minho, who scanned it, reading it quickly. “She’s going to order more,” he said, just the barest hint of satisfaction in his voice. “Good.”
“Why do you want Felix’s poor sister to have the shits?” Jisung asked, frowning.
Minho looked at Felix instead of answering right away. “You said the building set up of your father’s place in this city is such that there’s an elevator which opens straight into the entrance hallway of the apartment. And to be allowed all the way up, we need to use either biometrics — your fingerprint and face — or to be given access from someone already inside the apartment.”
Felix nodded. “Yeah,” he said. Changbin wondered when the hell Minho had been able to pick Felix’s brains about that. It sounded like— well. Like a proper rich person set up, which Lee Jaerim definitely was.
“I am assuming that whatever guards are stationed inside the apartment are near the elevator and that they keep a close eye on which floor the elevator is at,” Minho said. “If you went to go get her, and the elevator suddenly started moving all the way up to the top floor unexpectedly, it would put them on very high alert. The best way to mitigate that is to desensitise them.”
Realisation came over Jisung’s face. “So you have her order takeout in the middle of the night, over and over, so that way when the rescue party comes, the security thinks it’s another order of jjampong, and not some dudes with guns.”
Minho gave a one shouldered shrug, his body language not— casual but almost dismissive, the way he sometimes got in meetings like this. Like the attention, the focus on him and the intelligent ways he came up with plans and solutions to problems, embarrassed him in some way. “That’s the hope,” he said.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, the awe and admiration strong in his voice. “You’re so smart.” Minho’s ears went so red so quickly it was like someone had held a flame to them.
Chan was watching him, back to serious. “You’ve been formulating a rescue plan?” he asked, surprise lacing his tone. Beside him, Felix was wide-eyed in that way he had, looking like a tentative fawn.
“I figured we’d have to go and get her,” Minho said. “The initial reply she sent confirmed my suspicions. I’m not sure, however, when we will get her. Before the job is out of the question, and afterwards—” He paused, pursed his lips for a moment and then said, “If all goes well, it might not be hard. But if any of us get arrested, or hurt, or worse — or if Lee Jaerim rockets back into the country upon hearing what’s happened to his vault — any of that could throw a huge wrench into things. We’d struggle to get her out in that case.”
“What about during the job?” Felix asked quietly. There was a suppressed kind of hope in those words. Changbin wondered what it was like, to have living family. Wondered what he wouldn’t do for them, if he did have them.
Chan sat up a little straighter. “I could go, instead of playing watchdog for Hyunjin and Jisung.”
“If any of us went, I was planning on it being Felix,” Minho said. “She is his sister.”
“Um, no offence to Felix,” Jisung interjected, “but he couldn’t like, even shoot a cow that’s not moving. And he’s an okay fighter but he wouldn’t win against any armed guards.”
Minho squinted at him and then at Felix. “Are you really that bad?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Felix, just a little pink about it.
Minho looked kind of baffled by that. He’d known it, Changbin knew he’d known it, but perhaps he’d thought it was put on, to cover for Felix being Lee Jaerim’s son, and now the confirmation that it was actually real was finally sinking in. After a moment he looked at Chan. “So,” he said, almost a scathing drawl, “you want to go to the home of Lee Jaerim, while the rest of us are on a high stakes job, thus leaving you without any backup, fight off the guards by yourself and steal his remaining kid?”
“I— could do that, yeah,” Chan said. He didn’t sound or look as confident anymore. Changbin thought, listening to Minho list it out like that, that it sounded like one of the dumbest ideas they’d ever come up with.
Probably not the dumbest. They’d taken on a lot of stupid jobs in the past, before they’d had the luxury of saying no.
“No,” said Minho, flatly.
“Maybe I could go too?” Felix suggested. “Chan-hyung could— pose as someone who’s captured me. There is a reward out for my head, after all. They’d know what I look like, but they wouldn’t necessarily recognise him.”
Minho didn’t look happy with that idea either, but then he looked like he wouldn’t be particularly happy with any idea along these lines whatsoever. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll give it some thought.”
Seungmin shifted in his seat. “That would leave me alone in the van,” he said. He didn’t sound happy about it, and Changbin— maybe he wasn’t particularly happy about the idea, either. It was hard enough to know that he’d be leaving Seungmin behind, to know that Seungmin was out in the field for once and not be there to watch him, to have to go hours without any idea of how things were going. The idea that Seungmin would be alone through it was incredibly painful.
“You know my systems well enough now, I think, to manage them without me?” Felix said. His voice was a little gentle, like he was speaking a truth but one he knew might not be enough for Seungmin. “I can walk you through it again if need be.”
“No,” said Seungmin. It was not a snap, but it was— irritated all the same. Or perhaps that was the wrong expression. It was like Seungmin simply wanted the conversation to be over and would do anything he could to make it so. “Whatever. It’s fine.”
“Seungmin?” Changbin asked, saying his name the way he would usually say baby. A risk, in the middle of a meeting, but nobody seemed to blink.
Seungmin looked at him, their eyes meeting for a single, heart-pounding moment, before Seungmin sighed and said, “I just don’t like any of this. I don’t like having all of us out doing different things, so spread around. I don’t like how dangerous all of this is.”
There was a long silence, all of them absorbing that. Seungmin was right, after all. It did make it less safe, to have so many people doing different things at the same time, to not have the backup anymore. Chan might have been only one man but he still could have provided help, in a pinch. Sending him to Lee Jaerim’s place to pick up Felix’s sister took him out of that equation.
“That’s the closest you’ve ever gotten to admitting you have feelings,” Hyunjin said, eventually, a smirk playing around his mouth.
“Oh shut up,” Seungmin said, decidedly a snap now. “I take it back. I hope you get shot.”
“Let’s— not,” said Chan, looking exceedingly tired all of a sudden.
“If we want to do the job in five days,” Changbin said, before Hyunjin could start bickering with Seungmin, “then what about the building issue? The cafe next door?”
“Ah, Minho said he might have something?” Chan said, looking to Minho.
“It’s a very tentative solution,” Minho said. He set the paper with the message from Felix’s sister down on the table, like he only felt like he could let go of it now that the conversation had fully moved on. “I think we should utilise the valet parking service. Rent a car, put the disguised rifle and explosives in the backseat, while Jisung and Hyunjin hide in the trunk. Someone — Chan-hyung, I think — will drop the car in front of Blackbird’s, as if he was a client come to visit the casino.” His eyes were flickering between all the people he was mentioning, taking in their reactions. “Instead of going into the casino, Chan-hyung will go around the back and leave. The car then gets driven by the valet into the parking garage, thus bypassing the issue of trying to sneak past the booths. At that time of night, the casino will be busy enough that hopefully the car will get parked up on the third floor.” His eyes focused on Hyunjin and Jisung then, glancing between the two of them. “You’ll only have to sneak up one floor from there. The fourth floor of the parking garage has no roof at all, and it’s got a height advantage on the casino. Even with all the gear you’ll have, you should be able to make that jump.”
Jisung was blinking rapidly by the end of it, clearly trying to take it in and think it through. “Wow,” he said. “Wow! Hyung, that’s amazing.” Next to Minho, Jeongin shifted and then reached out and took Minho’s hand, as if to say that he agreed with that assessment. It was still somehow shocking that Minho let him do it without a murmur of dissent.
“Hyunjin?” asked Chan.
Changbin turned to Hyunjin, who was— pale, very pale, his mouth washed out in his white face. It took him a moment to speak. “I’ve been—” His face spasmed. He rolled his shoulders a little bit, something he did when he felt— trapped, in some way. Trying to loosen muscles that were not even necessarily tense. “I’ve been moved in car trunks before.”
This time the silence between them was horrified, Hyunjin’s words sinking in slowly. Jisung looked like he wanted to throw up; Changbin understood the feeling, sick to his stomach, like he’d swallowed oil, thick and clinging to his throat. It was not that he ever forgot what Hyunjin had gone through but in reality he knew very few details. Sometimes, in the old place, during the first few months of his— recovery, Changbin supposed, sometimes Hyunjin would ask questions about what they were doing or make comments about what he thought was normal, and afterwards Changbin would have another little piece of knowledge in his head, depraved and disgusting, to wrangle with as best he could.
Eventually Hyunjin had stopped doing that. Eventually, he’d gone to Chan to talk about all of that stuff, and Chan had told Changbin very little of it, keeping Hyunjin’s privacy. And perhaps Changbin could have felt upset about that, could have felt like Hyunjin didn’t trust him enough with it, just like how it was Jisung that he always took on his trips out for revenge. But Changbin had never felt like that. He occupied a different role in Hyunjin’s life, that was all.
“I’ll scrap it,” Minho said, very firmly. “I’ll come up with something else—”
“No,” said Hyunjin, interrupting him. Felix reached out and touched his hand. Hyunjin turned his palm up, the movement almost impatient, but when Felix threaded their fingers together, Hyunjin closed his hand with a squeeze. “No. This is the only way. And it’s simple, it’s easy.” Before anyone could say anything else, try to argue with him, he added, “How will we get out of the trunk.”
Minho certainly looked like he still wanted to argue. But he also, Changbin knew, respected Hyunjin as a fellow professional, and so he said, “They make models now where there’s handles inside the trunk. You would be able to pop it open from the inside.”
Hyunjin nodded. It was short, jerky, nothing at all like his usual. He was still very pale, and he was not looking at any of them, his eyes focused above all their heads at the wall opposite where he sat.
It was Jisung who cleared his throat, drawing some of the attention to him instead. “How will we, uh, get the car back?” he asked.
“We won’t,” Minho said. “That one will have to be left behind. Hence the rental.”
“We’ll need to rent a second car too, if Felix and I are going to get his sister,” Chan pointed out. He’d been watching Hyunjin so carefully through that entire little thing, and only now did he look at Minho. “While you three are at the vault, I mean. You’ll need a getaway car of your own.”
“Yes,” said Minho, like that much had been obvious.
Jisung looked between them all, fidgeting in his seat. “So like, we’re really doing this, huh,” he said.
Changbin would have expected excitement from Chan, this close to pulling out the job he had been planning for, emotionally if not literally, for most of the past ten years. But when he spoke, he just sounded grim. “I think we really are,” he said.
——
Hyunjin sat on his bed, sketchbook open in his lap, watching the dust motes in his room lit up by the early afternoon sunlight coming through his window. The page on his sketchbook was empty, his tin of pencils laying on the bed next to him, nothing clutched in his fingers. He’d wanted to draw, had planned on it when he’d woken up this morning, but now that he was here, with the time, he did not have the motivation any longer.
Instead he was just— looking at his room, at the light, the yellow square of it against his wooden flooring. The air in here was slightly cold but if he got up and sat in that square, he’d be warm, the sunlight hot against his skin. But he was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants and didn’t need to do that. Underneath him was the softness of his duvet and underneath that the giving surface of his mattress. Nothing hard in here, nothing harsh or unforgiving.
His body had forgotten the feeling of hunger. What a miracle that seemed sometimes.
He was not sure how long he had been— drifting, he supposed was what he was doing, before there was the light rap of knuckles on his closed bedroom door. It roused him, as if he’d been in slumber, and he sat up a bit straighter, calling out, “Come in?”
If he’d been a little more present, he might have stopped to wonder who it was on the other side of the door — but as it was, he didn’t really have the capacity for that thought, and then it turned out to be Chan, the lines of his face sombre, but in that gentle way he managed to make such a serious expression.
Hyunjin, slowly, closed his sketchbook, the pages flipping one after the other in a gradual fall. Chan gestured, silent, and Hyunjin nodded, gathering up the open tin of pencils and moving them so that way when Chan sat down on the edge of the bed, he didn’t upend it and send the contents rolling across the floor.
After a moment, Hyunjin moved so he was also sitting on the edge of the bed, not touching Chan but near enough to feel the weight of him on the mattress. He wasn’t so bad off right now that such a sensation bothered him, but he felt very— aware of it.
They sat, for a long time, in the quiet. Hyunjin knew Chan must have something to say, but he didn’t really have it in him to prompt it. It felt kind of nice, to sit here like this, Chan’s presence so solid, so stable.
Eventually, Chan quietly said without looking at him, “When you first came here, I knew the moment I set eyes on you that you weren’t some random street kid.” There was a huskiness to his voice, an intimate kind of rasp. Nothing sexual, not at all, just emotional. A secret, for the two of them. Hyunjin always wondered at Jeongin’s relationship with Chan, how they were when the two of them were alone. More brotherly perhaps. Chan had always felt like something a bit to the side of that, with Hyunjin. “I knew something awful had happened to you. I wanted to help you, but I wondered if I could. You weren’t— you were so far out of reach.”
Hyunjin swallowed. He stared at a sock, bright yellow, that had missed his laundry hamper. “Yes,” he whispered. He remembered.
“It didn’t take us long to put some of the pieces together, enough of them that it really— it felt so big, too big, for us,” Chan murmured. His eyes drifted askance at Hyunjin for the first time since speaking. “You know, Changbin and I talked about handing you over to the authorities.”
Fear cut like a blade through Hyunjin even though he knew that wasn’t how things happened. His head snapped around, so he could look at Chan, lower than him right now because he had his elbows on his knees. “You did?” he asked.
Chan nodded a little, still so sombre. “You just— you sat in your corner of the couch and you stared into space all day, and if you weren’t doing that then you were crying,” he said, and Hyunjin had to look away again. He looked down at his own lap, his hands folded together, seeing them as if from someone else’s eyes. “The bruises healed and you gained weight but you didn’t seem to improve, and we didn’t know what to do. We thought maybe someone else could help you better, you needed resources— you needed things I just couldn’t give you.”
Hyunjin could understand why Chan would have thought that, though it simply wasn’t true. He had needed, more than anything, time. Time to wake from the nightmare he’d been living, time to come to terms with it, to understand he’d left it behind. Free from the weight of expectations. He wasn’t sure how he would have coped if he’d been shuffled off to some official place, where people in uniforms and white coats would have asked him questions and prodded at him. Who would have possibly tracked down Hyunjin’s family, handed him over and wanted him to be— a person. A child, a son. His memories of his family by that point had faded into nothing at all. It would have been like being left with strangers — strangers who would have had expectations of love, of joy. Strangers who would have said, he’s finally come home. But it wouldn’t have been that at all, to Hyunjin. It wouldn’t have been a comfort or a haven. It would have been another cage.
“You gave me exactly what I needed,” he said, raw around the edges with honesty.
Chan smiled, just a little quirk at the corner of his mouth, a single dimple appearing. “Maybe.” Huskier, quieter, he repeated, “Maybe.” He looked away, his head hanging down a little. “I’d like to say that we kept you because we didn’t know if you had any living family — neither of us wanted you to end up in a group home,” he murmured. Hyunjin repressed a shiver. No, that would have been awful for him. “Or because— we just didn’t trust the authorities to do the right thing, with a kid that could so easily be swept into the darkness again. Those things are true, but they weren’t why we kept you, in the end.” He reached over, sudden but not quick, and wrapped his hand around Hyunjin’s, shockingly warm.
Hyunjin, after a moment, turned his hand over so he could grasp Chan’s back. Chan’s hand was dry, a little rough. Hyunjin’s was soft now, scrupulous as he was with lotions. They hadn’t always been this way.
“The reality,” Chan said, voice rough now in a way that made Hyunjin aware he was holding back tears, “is we just couldn’t stand the thought of never knowing what happened to you. Even though we knew someone else might be able to do a better job— we couldn’t stomach it. We loved you already.” When he turned to look at Hyunjin now, he still had that same quirk to his mouth, but his brown eyes were shining. He swallowed thickly, and then said, “I’ve loved you since I put that hot chocolate in your hands and watched your eyes light up in wonder.”
The first night. “Hyung,” Hyunjin said, eyes stinging and voice wobbly.
Chan brought his other hand over, pressing Hyunjin’s hands between both of his. “It’s been one of the best rewards of my life, watching you— become something so much more, watching you grow and flourish,” he said, so serious, so honest. Hyunjin was blushing, was furiously blinking back tears. “I did what I could for you. But it’s been you, Hyunjin. It’s almost all been you. I’m proud of you.”
Hyunjin’s hand spasmed between Chan’s, squeezing down. He said, again, “Hyung.”
Chan’s crooked little smile dug a little deeper into his cheek. “Can I hug you?”
Instead of replying, Hyunjin simply dropped Chan’s hand to instead wrap his arms around his shoulders. He buried his face into the collar of Chan’s shirt, felt Chan hold him back, their thighs pressed together, the angle awkward but not bad. Not bad at all.
Chan smelled the same as he always had. It was a scent Hyunjin associated with comfort. The same detergent, the same shampoo, as all those years ago. Back then, Jeongin and Changbin had smelled similar if not the exact same, all of them using the same products. But through the years they’d all varied, once they had the money to do so — all of them except Chan, who still smelled like that very first waft Hyunjin had gotten when Jeongin had guided him home. That apartment door opening, Hyunjin soaked with rainwater, inhaling that first breath and not knowing, in that moment, how his life was about to change.
Home. It was the smell of home. One Hyunjin had been allowed to discover for himself. One that he’d chosen, in a life that had denied him choice at so very many turns.
When they pulled away, the tears had seeped out of the corners of Hyunjin’s eyes, smudges of wetness he quickly swiped his fingertips through. Chan didn’t fully let go, his hand sliding across Hyunjin’s upper back to settle on his shoulder. “Are you sure about the job?” Chan asked, hand squeezing like he was trying to steady Hyunjin. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Not even yourself.”
“I’m sure,” Hyunjin said, wiping his tears on his pants. He would not let the whole mission grind to a halt because of him.
Chan watched him for a beat and then said, “I have hated Lee Jaerim for over ten years. Revenge is— important to me. But it’s not as important as you.”
He was going to set Hyunjin off again. “I’m sure, hyung,” he repeated, with a confidence that he, shockingly, didn’t have to fake. Being locked in a car trunk was going to be deeply unpleasant, but he could do it. Jisung would be with him, and that— changed things, considerably. “I can do it.”
“Okay,” Chan said, and then his hand was lifting off Hyunjin’s shoulder, settling back down into Chan’s own lap. Another pause, and then he suddenly asked, “Where would you have gone.” Hyunjin tipped his head in question, and so Chan said, “If we’d forced you to make good on your word, and you’d had to leave here with Felix. Where would you have gone?”
That felt like a sudden change of track, and Hyunjin wasn’t sure where it had come from. Perhaps all this talk to how Hyunjin had changed. A few years ago, maybe even a single year ago, the idea of Hyunjin striking out on his own would have been foreign, impossible. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Overseas. I wanted to go somewhere with nice beaches. I liked the idea of making Felix even frecklier. Why?”
“Jeongin threatened to leave yesterday,” said Chan, and Hyunjin’s stomach dipped. “He came into my office and basically said if I didn’t get off Minho’s back, they’d move out together.”
Hyunjin, in that moment, felt a fraction of what Chan and Changbin must have felt when Hyunjin had threatened the same. Just the word no, surging up like a tide. That information did go a long way in explaining something he’d been turning over in his mind a little. Tactfully, Hyunjin said, “I did wonder why you were suddenly so much politer to Minho-hyung in the meeting. I thought maybe Felix had gotten through to you.”
“That was part of it,” he said, and then smiled, an actual smile. “But it was mostly Jeongin taking a leaf out of a certain other hyung’s book.”
Hyunjin sniffed for effect, and then again for real — his nose was running. “He really loves Minho-hyung, I think,” he said.
“Yeah,” Chan said, smile turning rueful. He was very handsome, Hyunjin thought, though he would not admit that aloud without the promise of reward. “He does.”
Hyunjin paused, thoughtful. It boggled the mind a little, Jeongin and Minho, Jeongin willing to run away with Minho. But Hyunjin understood. He wondered what he would do, if Jisung left. He wasn’t sure how he would act, if Jisung wasn’t in his life any more.
“Jeongin deserves to be happy,” Hyunjin whispered. He deserved to be with the person he loved.
Chan’s eyes were unreadable. “So do you.”
——
What a long, exhausting day it had been, and it was only nearing six. A productive day, in many ways, but exhausting all the same.
Chan had left his room early that morning but not because he had wanted to, necessarily. It had been one of the hardest things in the world, to leave Felix slumbering there, although Felix had not seemed to really notice, rolling over into the warmth that Chan had left behind and smushing his face in the pillow. But despite the amount of time he’d spent in his office the past few days, Chan had not actually gotten much work done. His usual habit of drowning himself in his workload had not really borne much fruit; understandable, really, because what had been going on had been particularly distracted.
It was why he had been up so early, to try to get things done before their meeting. But then Minho had come to see him, dropping a bombshell that Chan really would never have expected from him. Even now, hours later, he simply didn’t know how he felt about it. He thought that maybe it was going to take a long time for him to come to terms with it. To fully comprehend what it meant that Minho loved Jeongin.
Just yesterday he’d heard the ring of truth in Jeongin’s voice when he said that he loved Minho. He’d heard it this morning, when Minho had begged him to understand. And if nothing else, there could be no denying that they felt that way about each other.
It was not that it was rare for Chan to feel lost as to his way forward. He was used to figuring it all out by himself. That was what being the leader was about, at all; he could not rely on other people to figure out the path for him, he had to do it himself — or at least, that was what he’d always thought. But he had to admit that there was a relief to being back on the same side as Minho. He hadn't fully realised, until he was looking down the barrel of Minho perhaps no longer being an option, how much he had come to rely on him as a source of knowledge and advice.
Thank god they had made up. Thank god he’d made up with Felix yesterday, too. But between that conversation this morning, the team meeting, and then his conversation with Hyunjin afterwards, so heartfelt that even now he could not think about it without the emotion welling up inside of him, he was tired, and he had still not managed to get any fucking work done.
It was not helped by the fact that he’d fucked something up on his computer. He had, for the most part, taught himself how to use them; he’d had some basic classes during the couple of years he actually attended middle school, and then had not had much need to touch one until almost adulthood. Most of the jobs he was given before then had been physical, practical things, without much call for computers. He hadn’t even had a smartphone, or a bank account, until he’d turned eighteen and been working with a group who had managed to get him his actual resident card.
Everything else, he’d learned to do himself, mostly through trial and error. Unlike Hyunjin, who stuck with his phone and treated everything else like they were personally out to get him, he had needed to learn, and he’d managed it well enough in the end. But it meant that things like this, where he was staring at a spreadsheet that the accountant for the club had sent over, something broken because of an unknown thing Chan had done, he had no idea how to fix it.
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, looking at the messed up cells of the spreadsheet. He’d have to ask Seungmin to take a look at it, try to fix it for him, which was always mildly surprising although Seungmin never batted an eyelid at things like this. There was a lot that Seungmin would treat you like an idiot over, but usually when Chan came to him with computer stuff, Seungmin was remarkably patient.
Over the course of the day he’d somehow ended up with a mass of papers covering the usually pristine surface of his desk, and he was just fishing through them for his phone, to summon poor Seungmin upstairs, when he heard it start buzzing against the wood. When he found it, the screen was lit up with an incoming call from a contact saved only with a bear emoji. He hit answer immediately.
“Chris,” said Hyunjae, as soon as the call connected.
“Hyunjae,” said Chan, not sure what to make of hearing from Hyunjae at this time in the evening. Usually it was Chan contacting him, and even then, they usually texted to arrange a call first. “What’s up?”
A beat of silence. When he spoke again, Hyunjae’s voice was perfectly calm. “I’ve managed to procure a 1980s Meilink, with a combination dial,” he said. “I’m willing to give it to you if you do something for me in return.”
Chan resisted the urge to pull the phone from his ear and look at it in disbelief like something from a movie. “You have a Meilink,” he repeated.
“Yes,” said Hyunjae, still so steady. “I hear that you’re in the market for one just like it.”
Chan nodded, even though Hyunjae couldn’t see him. “And what is it that you want in return?” he asked, a little wary about it. Hyunjae was not really the type of person to forgo payment for something, particularly not when, reading between the lines, it seemed that he’d found this safe purely for whatever job Chan was doing.
“I want to see Yongbok.”
Chan exhaled in a rush of air, probably audible down the phone line. His first instinct was to say no, no way, something inside him rising up in protest. He was not sure, for a moment, if it was something protective or possessive, and didn’t like it either way.
“Let me see Yongbok and I’ll give you this safe free of charge,” Hyunjae said, when Chan was silent for just a bit too long. “That’s the deal.”
Chan took a careful breath in, making sure that this, at least, Hyunjae wasn’t likely to hear. He felt like he was battling that something inside of him, an urge to keep Felix so close to him that no one, not even Hyunjae, could look at him or get to him. The feeling was— strange, seemingly out of nowhere, considering that he didn’t feel it at all when it came to the others. He didn’t even feel it with Hyunjin, who he’d watched Felix literally kiss.
It was not a sensation that he wanted to make decisions whilst feeling. “Let me call you back,” he said, and hung up before Hyunjae could answer.
There was not a lot of time, he knew. He couldn’t keep Hyunjae waiting for too long, not without Hyunjae potentially taking offence. He fired off a quick message to Minho, short and concise: come to my office, and watched as it was read, with no reply.
It didn’t matter. The knock on his door came less than two minutes later, and when he called Minho in, Minho was fully dressed and composed. Thank god for fucking miracles, Chan thought, and then said, without preamble, “Hyunjae just called me. He has a Meilink safe and he’s willing to give it to us, free of charge, if we take Felix to see him.”
“No,” said Minho, immediately, his face falling into the kind of scowl that had once made even Changbin flinch. “It could be a trap.”
“I know,” Chan said, feeling the urge to tug at his own hair. It was not as though he hadn’t thought of that. He trusted Hyunjae, as much as he trusted any of the people he worked with outside of this family, but there was a difference between blind faith and trust. “But we could really do with that safe.”
“We might find it elsewhere,” Minho hedged.
“Will we?” Chan asked. “Free of charge? On such short notice, when Seungmin hasn’t been able to do so thus far? We need this safe. Is there no way to make this work, Minho?”
He could see that Minho wanted to say no, and wash his hands of the whole thing. Say no and let this opportunity go and let the chips fall as they may. But Chan could see, too, the way that Minho’s brain was already starting to whirr into motion, figuring things out, and he knew that Minho knew, as much as Chan did, that it was a gift horse they should not easily overlook.
If nothing else, Chan was willing to do this if it meant the job went more smoothly, to make sure that Hyunjin didn’t run into any nasty surprises. He got the feeling that Minho felt the same way.
After a few seconds of silence, Minho’s jaw steadily getting tenser and tenser, he said, “You can’t go to him. You can’t meet him on his ground. You can’t bring him here either, obviously, you’ll need to suggest meeting somewhere else.” His mouth twisted for a moment and then he added, “Maniac, perhaps. One of the meeting rooms rather than your office, to— conceal your position there.”
Chan felt his own mouth twist. The thought made his stomach sour, although he knew that Minho was right to suggest it. But he’d spent a long time trying to keep those worlds separate, the Bang Chan who owned Maniac a different identity to the Chris who ran this little team for hire. The legitimate business owner versus the criminal he had been for many years longer. He could probably make up an excuse for Hyunjae, claim to know the owner, but Hyunjae was smart; there was a good chance he would put it together anyway.
Before he could overthink it, before he could talk himself out of it, he picked up his phone and called Hyunjae back, putting it on speaker for Minho. Hyunjae picked up on the second ring. His voice, when he said Chan’s name, was less calm than it had been before, a tense edge to it.
“We can meet,” Chan told him. “But we’re not coming out to you, we’ll meet elsewhere.”
“Okay,” said Hyunjae, interrupting him before Chan could explain. “We can meet at Maniac, I’m willing to meet there.”
Chan looked up at Minho, shocked, his heart thumping uncomfortably in his throat. Minho was not so much scowling as trying to kill Chan’s phone with his face at this point. He didn’t speak, probably not wanting to alert Hyunjae to his presence. He just kept quiet, looking at the phone, but not telling Chan to hang up.
The beat of silence in the conversation had probably tipped Hyunjae off to Chan’s shock, so he didn’t bother hiding it when he said, “How do you know about Maniac?”
“Oh,” Hyunjae said. He sounded genuinely surprised. “Was it supposed to be a secret? I figured it out a while ago.”
Chan wanted to bury his head in his hands. He wanted to rub at his face until it stung a little, abrasive enough to bring some clarity to his mind. All these years of keeping everything a secret and first Felix had figured it out — although Felix had eventually admitted to it being something of a fluke, and that Maniac wasn’t the first business he’d tried to find him through — and now Hyunjae.
“I haven’t told anyone about it, though,” Hyunjae said, when the silence went on too long. “I mean, why would I, it’s not like it ever came up.”
“Fine,” Chan said, his jaw feeling so tense that the words came out through gritted teeth. “We’ll meet at Maniac. I’ll see you there in an hour. I’ll tell the front door to expect you.”
“Great,” said Hyunjae, and this time he was the one who hung up without another word.
Chan looked at Minho, who looked back, too obviously annoyed about the whole situation to be as stoic as it seemed he wanted to. All Chan could think was, he knows about Maniac and he knows about Felix, a barb-coated thought inside his head. Two secrets that Hyunjae knew, and Chan simply had to trust that Hyunjae would keep them. Again that feeling of where did trust end and become naive faith.
“You can take me or Changbin,” Minho eventually said, that short and clipped tone he used when he was irritated. “One of us needs to stay back in case it’s a trap and they come to the house.”
“Jisung, too, then,” Chan said, tapping his forefinger against his desk. Their muscle split equally between the two spots. “But I don’t want it to be just me and you there, either. I’d like a third with us, if possible, as well as Felix.”
The options, then, were Hyunjin or Jeongin; Seungmin absolutely was not one. Chan knew who he’d want, in a situation like this, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe it was a test, for Minho, to see what he would do, or maybe it was just that Chan didn’t want to make the call about it. Neither of those options made him feel good about himself, the same way he hadn’t been sure if it was better that his apprehension about Felix meeting Hyunjae came from a possessive or protective place.
The silence between him and Minho went tense, thick enough to cut with one of Hyunjin’s knives, before Minho made a frustrated noise and the tension broke a little. “Jeongin,” he said. “It’ll have to be Jeongin. Hyunjin’s too likely to piss one of them off.”
Harsh, but true: Hyunjin had a tendency to run his mouth, and Chan had no doubt that it would come up with Hyunjae, who had, after all, been the one to reveal Felix’s true identity in the first place. He thought about Hyunjin confronting him, demanding to know if Hyunjae was stupid or what, and shuddered. Besides, he’d been on the same page all along. It was Jeongin, with his shooting skills and passable fighting abilities, that they’d have to take.
Chan heaved himself out of his chair, motioning to the door. “You go and get Jeongin ready,” he said. “I’ll go let Changbin know what’s happening and get Felix.”
He went to Changbin first, not even bothering to check Changbin’s room and instead heading down to the basement where Changbin was more likely to be. As he passed the door to Seungmin’s workroom, though, he heard Changbin’s voice rise, a half-shout, that particular way he had of projecting amusement in an angry way. Chan stuck his head in the door and found Changbin sitting at the workbench holding something wooden in his hands, something put together at odd angles. Seungmin was standing over him reaching for it when he saw Chan there.
“Oh, good, hyung,” Seungmin said, plucking the wooden thing from Changbin’s hands. Changbin said hey! “Can you take him away, please? He’s messing things up for me.”
“It’s not my fault your instructions were unclear!” Changbin protested.
“I can’t, sorry,” said Chan. They were probably expecting a smile from him, some sign that he might join in ribbing Changbin, and when he was just serious and blank, Changbin straightened up, looking at Chan with his humour dropping off his face. “Changbin, I just had a call from Hyunjae. He’s got one of the safes that we need, but in return he wants to see Felix.”
Changbin let out a huff of air. Seungmin dropped whatever it was that Changbin had messed up on the table and went back to his chair, sitting in it and spinning his back immediately to Chan and Changbin. Chan wasn’t sure if that was him trying to give them privacy for the conversation or if he was simply doing something else — the camera feeds on one of the screens were changing rapidly as Seungmin clicked around on something.
“You’re doing it?” Changbin asked.
“Yes,” said Chan. Changbin nodded, accepting it. Always so easy to accept Chan’s words, except for when it really mattered, when Changbin knew it wasn’t the right way; then he would simply refuse to follow the instruction. The opposite to Minho, it seemed, who would argue endlessly but ultimately do whatever Chan wanted him to do. “You and Jisung are staying here. I’m taking Minho and Jeongin with me.”
“Where are you meeting him?” Changbin asked, already climbing to his feet, pushing the stool back with a screech on the flooring.
“Maniac,” Chan said.
Seungmin immediately turned in his chair and gave Chan a look of such raw and vehement betrayal that Chan almost flinched from him. He’d seen Seungmin in plenty of moods before, seen Seungmin furious and in high dudgeon over something, but never that particular look. “You told him you own Maniac?” he asked, voice loud enough to almost ring in the room.
“He already knew about it,” Chan said. “He offered to meet there. I didn’t tell him.”
Seungmin did not look appeased by that. In fact, his face twisted in a way that let Chan know that as far as Seungmin was concerned, that was even worse. There was an almost immediate twitchy air to him. He turned back to his computer, and this time his clicking was almost violent.
Chan looked at Changbin, who was frowning at Seungmin, and only glanced at Chan when he felt Chan’s eyes on him. He smiled a little, and said, “Go on, hyung. You don’t want to be late. I’ll hold down the fort here, don’t worry.”
Chan clapped him on the shoulder and then left the room to take the stairs up to the apartment mostly two at a time. He was breathing heavily by the time he got up there, but at least that was doing something to calm the energy racing through him, soothing the anxiety in his blood.
Inside the apartment, Felix and Hyunjin were sitting at the table, both of them apparently just finishing up dinner — leftovers heated up by the looks of things. When he came in they both looked at him, and it was— gratifying, after the past few weeks, to watch Felix’s face light up. Hyunjin also gave him a small smile, which was nice after how much scowling he’d been doing recently. “Hyung,” Felix said. “Are you going to eat? Hyunjin left the stir fried pork for you.”
“Ah, no,” Chan said. “Lix, I— I had a call from Hyunjae, he said that we can have one of the safes we need if he gets to see you. Are you up to that, would you like that?”
Felix blinked at him, lowering his spoon down into his mostly empty bowl of rice. “Hyunjae-hyung? He wants to see me?”
Chan nodded. Felix looked a little bit like he thought this was a joke, or a trick, but not in a way that he thought Chan was being cruel. Just more like he couldn’t believe it was actually true. Chan said, “If you want to, I’ll take you to Maniac now. We’re meeting him soon.”
“Oh,” said Felix, still for a moment. Then he came into sudden motion, pushing his bowl away and his chair out, climbing quickly to his feet. “Oh, I’ll have to change, I can’t go looking like this.” He motioned to his clothes, Chan’s sweater and some pyjama pants covered in little ducks. “Just— give me like two minutes, okay, hyung?”
He rushed off down the hallway. Chan stood there, looking at where he’d vanished. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Hyunjin asked.
Chan’s eyes snapped to him. Hyunjin looked very serious, that thoughtful little notch between his eyes. “I don’t know,” Chan admitted. “I trust Hyunjae, of course I do, but— we need that safe, Hyunjin. We’re completely out of time.”
“I know that, hyung, but him dangling it over your head just to get to Lix— I don’t like that.”
Chan didn’t like it either. And he hadn’t liked the way Felix had reacted to the news, with no fear whatsoever, just excitement, the thought of getting to see his Hyunjae-hyung clearly something joyful to him. It was such a horrible impulse in Chan to feel this way, and yet he could not quite squish it down.
Hyunjin sighed when Chan just stayed quiet, but he didn’t look like he was annoyed at Chan about any of this. He knew, more than anyone, the importance of getting that safe; he was the one who would be over a barrel if he couldn’t get into the one in Lee Jaerim’s office. “I guess I should go change myself,” he said.
“You’re not coming,” Chan said. “You’re staying here, with Changbin and Jisung. I’m taking Minho and Jeongin with me.”
That made Hyunjin look annoyed — more than annoyed, he looked pissed. “Hyung, you’re taking Felix off into who knows what danger, and you expect me to just—”
“Yes,” Chan told him. “That’s exactly what I expect. I expect you to just stay here. I don’t know how this is going to go, and I’m only taking Jeongin because I know he can shoot. I need you to stay here where it’s safe, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin’s mouth twisted. He clearly wanted to say something more and was holding it back. He was literally biting the inside of his mouth, by the looks of things. Chan just looked back at him, hoping for Hyunjin to get it, to understand. “Fine,” Hyunjin said, after a long few moments. He threw himself back into his chair, very dramatically. “Fine, I’ll stay here.”
“Thank you,” said Chan, as sincere as he could make it.
The door opened again down the hallway and when Felix appeared in the room again, he had on his light wash jeans and a very soft, dusty blue sweater. It was a clear step up from his usual clothing, and Chan was torn between three impulses: to sigh internally over how cute he looked; to feel smug about the fact that he’d bought all of the things Felix was wearing; and to feel slightly put out about Felix dressing up in the first place.
“You look so cute, angel,” said Hyunjin, in the same way he would comment on how cute Jeongin was when they were a little younger, before Jeongin had started to respond with threats of violence.
Felix fidgeted from foot to foot for a moment. “You’re not coming with us?” he asked Hyunjin.
“No,” said Chan, answering for Hyunjin. He held out a hand to Felix, who took it easily. “Let’s go downstairs. Minho will be waiting for us by now.”
Minho was indeed waiting for them, outside the back door with Jeongin. Jeongin leaned against the side of the van, still outside after Minho and Seungmin’s trip yesterday to find out the safe model. Minho had been standing very close to him, almost looming, in fact, a detail Chan chose to ignore for now. Minho had apparently managed to fit in a trip to the basement, since both him and Jeongin were wearing guns, Minho’s half-concealed under his bomber jacket, the one he’d worn to Maniac last time, Jeongin’s on a holster on his hip, not hidden in the slightest. That was probably on purpose, knowing Minho.
Jeongin, it was fairly obvious, was excited to have been invited and not entirely sure what to do with the energy. He was restless as he straightened up from his slump, hands clenching and unclenching at his side. He didn’t say anything, though, as Minho came over to Chan and said, “You have a gun in your office, yes?” Chan nodded. “Jeongin and I will take the van. You and Felix come in the car.”
In the car, Chan expected Felix to talk, to chat Chan’s ear off about what was going to happen. But he didn’t say anything, he just sat with one foot tucked up under his body, his shoe off in the footwell. To begin with, he watched out of the window, looking at the darkening streets as they drove, the people still milling about at this time. But they only made it a couple of blocks before Chan had to reach over and take his hand, threading their fingers together.
After that, whenever Chan glanced over at him, Felix was watching him back, face unreadable in the streetlamps flashing past.
At Maniac, they parked the van and the car around the back and then let themselves in the back entryway, which caused a mild commotion among the staff, none of whom had been expecting to see him. It took a few moments to work out, but eventually he was able to track down the head bouncer, and tell him who to expect to arrive. “Just send them straight up to my office,” he said, and got a silent nod in response.
His office was up on the third floor, soundproofed beyond belief to keep the disturbance from the club to the barest minimum. It was not the first time Minho or Jeongin had been here, but it was the first time for Felix, and Chan saw him looking around, taking it all in, even as he still held Chan’s hand hard. The office at Maniac was far more impressive than his one back at home, which was just a space for him to work and not a place that needed to impress.
Truthfully, he hadn’t changed much in here from when he’d first taken over, although the rest of the club had been through renovations over the years. The walls were panelled in dark wood, the floorboards the same, the heavy desk and brown leather chair that had come with the place the exact same. It would have made everything depressing if he hadn’t had every piece of furniture in the room that could be upholstered, re-upholstered in pale green. The two comfortable chairs that sat in front of his desk, the two couches that sat opposite each other, another chair by the door for anyone who wanted to wait there. In between the two couches was a glass coffee table, shiny and wiped clean regularly. He’d replaced all the light fittings until the room actually looked like a place of business and not like the semi-dungeon it had felt when he’d first taken over.
The hardest part had been clearing out the smell of cigarette smoke. That had taken a while.
Felix had taken Chan’s hand as they’d left the car and had not let go of it, even in front of the staff, even as they walked up to the office. He held it still now as Chan went to his desk and with his free hand unlocked the top drawer and checked that his gun was still there.
“It’s nice in here,” Felix said quietly. When Chan glanced at him, Felix gave him a little smile, almost playful. “Much nicer than the office at home.”
“This is where hyung cosplays being a businessman,” Jeongin said, as he went to one of the couches and threw himself down into it. Minho came to stand behind him, stiff and tense, the line of his shoulders almost painful to look at. Even knowing that they needed this safe, he was clearly deeply unhappy about this entire scheme.
“Excuse you, I do not cosplay,” Chan said. “This club pays for your—” He faltered a little bit. Truthfully, when it came to Jeongin, he asked for very little. He still played on the same DS console that he’d had for years and years and hadn’t even upgraded his laptop since there had been computers originally in the building. He paid for Jeongin’s food and some pocket money that Jeongin never seemed to spend and that was it. “Well,” he amended. “It’s going to pay for your couch.”
“Couches,” Jeongin corrected.
“Rather than a couch, we could use a bed frame,” Minho said.
Jeongin tipped his head back against the seat so he could smile up at Minho, both dimples on display. Minho looked down at him and for a moment that tense, harried expression on his face totally broke. His face went utterly soft, and what struck Chan in that moment, after everything, was the realisation that that expression on Minho’s face was not new. Chan had seen it before, many times, the way Minho softened for Jeongin.
He’d never even questioned it. It was Jeongin: everyone loved him in this way, disarmed by him. Chan had been a bitter, grieving teenager and even he had taken just one look at Jeongin and wanted to help him any way he could. He’d never blinked at Minho eventually coming to the same conclusion. He’d never realised it could be something more.
“Don’t worry, hyung,” Jeongin said, sweetly. “We’ll get one of those too.”
Minho opened his mouth to say something but then there was a knock at the door, the head bouncer calling in, “Boss, your guests are here.”
Minho grabbed Jeongin by the upper arm and, ignoring Jeongin’s grumbles, pulled him to his feet and then over to the wall farthest from the door, where they stood, side by side, shoulders pressed together, although that seemed to be mostly down to Jeongin, who had swayed a little to the side to make it happen.
Chan eyed them, hoping that Minho chose to play nicely — he didn’t get to nix Hyunjin from the roster for antagonistic purposes only to be the same way himself — and then called, “Okay, let them in.”
The office door opened. Hyunjae came into the room first, dressed in a long dark coat, followed by the boy who had shown them into the warehouse last time, Sunwoo. There was another man with them, tall with long limbs, the kind of tall where it seemed like he was looming without meaning to. Sunwoo was scowling, the stranger was smiling with a cat-like mouth, and Hyunjae was looking at where Felix was standing by the desk, holding Chan’s hand still.
“Yongbok-ah,” he said. He didn’t come closer, stood just inside the room like the sense of hostility that both Minho and probably Chan were giving off was enough to keep him at a safe distance. But he was looking at Felix, only Felix, and the relief in his voice and face was obvious. “You’re okay.”
Felix nodded, his hair flopping into his eyes, too long in the front by this point. Chan would have thought that Felix would want to go to Hyunjae, but instead he shifted his hold so that he was half-clinging to Chan’s arm now. Was he scared? Had the excitement of getting to see Hyunjae finally given way to the reality of the situation — here was a connection to his father, someone who knew both sides of his life.
When Felix spoke, his voice was soft. “I’m Felix now,” he said. “I go by Felix.”
Hyunjae exhaled. “Felix,” he said, his own voice gone softer. Chan had thought that they’d put Hyunjae’s worry to rest those couple of weeks ago at the warehouse but either they hadn’t done so or the anxiety had built back up because he was looking at Felix like he thought some kind of miracle had occurred.
After a moment of Hyunjae just looking at Felix, his eyes slid to where his arm was joined with Chan’s, and then up so that he was looking Chan in the eyes. He didn’t seem even a little bit surprised by how close they were standing, their relationship screamingly obvious. “Chris,” he said. “Thank you for letting this happen.”
Chan nodded slowly. “You pulled my arm a little bit,” he said. His voice was not quite as dry as he’d have liked. “That safe was hard to turn down.”
Hyunjae smiled, very weakly. He finally moved his eyes away from Felix’s direction, seemingly with great reluctance, and nodded at Minho, who was so tense it was like another presence in the room with them all. “Minho,” he said. Minho just looked at him. If Minho had been annoyed before at Hyunjae knowing Felix was with them, that was likely to be a blip in the road compared to Hyunjae knowing where Maniac was. Even if it was Minho’s idea initially, he was going to be angry about it for a while.
Then Hyunjae looked at Jeongin. “Oh, hello,” he said, an eyebrow raising. “I’ve never met this one. Is he new?”
The question was directed at Chan, who had to hold back an almost hysterical laugh at the thought. It was Minho who answered though, low and sharp, an almost snarl of, “No.” He shuffled somehow closer to Jeongin, a half-step in front of him that Chan expected Jeongin to protest against. But Jeongin just let it happen and leaned around Minho’s shoulder to give Hyunjae a little wave. He’d heard enough about Hyunjae through the years that it was probably a trip for him to finally meet him.
Nobody told Hyunjae what Jeongin’s name was. Chan saw Hyunjae notice that, and choose not to push the question.
“You’ve met Sunwoo,” Hyunjae said, motioning to the boy, who was had his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but here. “And this is Juyeon, he’s not new either.”
The tall man, Juyeon, waved at them, still smiling. He had a look about him that suggested whatever happened in this room was not going to upset or bother him in the slightest, and if it weren’t for the gun peeking out from under his open jacket, Chan might have considered him harmless. But he’d never seen Juyeon around before, and clearly neither had Minho, which meant Juyeon likely didn’t work in the warehouse and instead was a part of Hyunjae’s even more unsavoury business ventures. Chan was not going to underestimate him.
“Where’s the safe,” Minho said, not really a question, more of a demand.
“It’s around the back,” Hyunjae said. “We brought it over in one of our vans, you can take it back to your place with you.”
The look on Minho’s face said quite clearly that he thought Hyunjae was a moron. “No,” he said. “We will not be taking your van home with us. We will transfer the safe over to our van.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” put in Juyeon. His voice was just as mildly cheerful as his smile, a little quieter than Chan would have expected given his height. “We had to use a mini forklift to get it into our van, that thing is heavy as hell.”
A pause, while Minho almost vibrated with stressed out energy. He was right to protest taking Hyunjae’s van back home with them; Chan had thought it before but this, too, was the difference between trust and blind faith. They trusted Hyunjae to bring them the safe, and to let him know where Maniac was. They could not trust a vehicle he’d provided to not be bugged in some way. Hell, even a GPS tracker on the thing would be disastrous.
“Minho,” said Chan, a slight sigh in his voice. “You go down and check the safe is the right one that we need, first off. See if you can move it at all. If not, we’ll figure something out, I can get some of the guys working here to help.”
“Juyeon, you go with him,” said Hyunjae, half-turning to Juyeon who gave him a little salute.
Minho looked at Chan. Then he looked over his shoulder at Jeongin, who smiled back at him, warm and a little bit knowing. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll stay here with hyung.”
Minho made a little noise, just that bit too quiet to make out the mood of it. Then he looked at Chan, an oddly pointed look. In spite of their conversation this morning, Chan prickled a little at the implication that he wouldn’t do his best to look after Jeongin — that was all he’d done for the past eleven years, after all. He jerked his head at the door.
Minho went, making sure that Juyeon went ahead of him, presumably so he could stalk after him through the hallways. Jeongin went back to fidgeting again. It reminded Chan irresistibly of the brief period of time, a few months after they’d settled into the ramshackle apartment they’d call home for a few years, where Jeongin’s separation anxiety had been so severe that he hadn’t even wanted to go to the bathroom alone, but his anxiety over interrupting or upsetting Chan had still been strong enough that instead of asking Chan to come with him, he’d just fidgeted restlessly until Chan noticed him doing it.
This, at least, seemed to just be normal restless energy. He still seemed a little amazed to be out on team business in the first place.
Sunwoo sidled up to Hyunjae and said something quietly to him, something that had Hyunjae sighing. He didn’t respond to whatever it was. Instead, he turned his attention back to where Chan and Felix were standing. His expression was half-anguished, as if he was looking at something he had not fully believed was actually real. His eyes kept flickering down to where Chan’s hand was holding tight to Felix’s, and then back up. For a moment, his and Chan’s eyes met. Chan— wasn’t sure what his face was doing.
There was a tug on his hand. He looked at Felix, whose freckles stood out in the lighting of the office, little bursts of starlight. With his free hand, Felix motioned ever so slightly to where Hyunjae was standing, watching them. “Can I talk to him?” he asked, a murmur.
The question made Chan ache inside. He realised, in that moment, that he did not want Felix to ever feel like he had to ask permission for anything, but especially not this. Not when it was something he wanted, something for Felix. “Of course,” he said. “Felix, of course you can talk to him.”
Felix took a deep breath. Then he gave Chan a weak smile. “Will you come with me?”
Chan felt, for a moment, like he could genuinely cry. He squeezed Felix’s hand. “Of course,” he said. “You lead the way.”
Felix didn’t really need to have to, though. As soon as Hyunjae realised that Felix was coming over, he strode forward, meeting them halfway across the room. “Yong— Felix,” he said. “God. God. I am so glad that you’re alive.”
That made Felix giggle a little. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m okay. You didn’t have to blackmail poor Cha— Chris-hyung into seeing me, you know. You could have just asked.”
Hyunjae’s eyes flickered to Chan’s once again. He gave Felix a smile, a little tight. “Well, I wanted to make it a sure thing,” he said, vaguely.
Chan stiffened a little bit at that. The implication was not lost on him — yes, Hyunjae had known that Felix was alive, but there were other horrors, weren’t there, beyond that of being killed. Chan knew of them well. But the idea that he’d been— keeping Felix captive in some way, that he’d have refused to let Hyunjae see him, made his stomach feel a little sour.
He hadn’t even managed to keep Felix locked up for a single night the one time he tried. He didn’t have that in him. He couldn’t keep someone a prisoner anyway; he especially could not do it in a household that included Hyunjin.
“No, no,” Felix was saying to whatever Hyunjae had asked him that Chan had missed. “No, I’m really great! Everyone at Chris’s place is really nice, they’ve been so lovely to me. Although,” he added, with that smile he had, the one that promised mischief, so rarely seen and so much treasured by Chan. “You did get me in some trouble, hyung.”
Hyunjae groaned. Chan’s hand tightened around Felix’s. Was it something they could joke about now? Chan would never dare, he couldn’t think of those days without drowning in the guilt and mortification, but he was glad, in a way, that it was something Felix could use to tease other people. Glad that it was becoming a memory, something in the past.
“God,” Hyunjae said, exceedingly heartfelt. “I knew I’d fucked up the moment Minho went running out of there. I should have known better than to say anything, but I was just so confused about what you were doing there. Changbin said things were hectic afterwards, I really hope it wasn’t too bad?”
There was a brief, tense moment of silence. Chan wasn’t sure what Felix was going to say. Would he tell the truth, reveal all the ways that Chan had messed up, reveal how close he had come to losing his life? Chan wouldn’t blame him, if he did. But in the end Felix just said, “They didn’t know who I really was, that was all. But it worked out in the end. They don’t care who my father is.”
He flashed Chan a smile, the sunshine one, the one that made Chan feel like he’d just been knocked over the head a little bit. Chan could do nothing but smile back, knowing that the love was obvious on his face. If Hyunjae hadn’t realised before, he sure would know now, because Chan had been teased to the ends of the earth and back about the palpable affection on his features when he looked at Felix like this. Even Felix had made fun of him for it.
“I didn’t know you were no longer— working with your father,” Hyunjae said carefully, drawing their attention back to him.
Felix nodded his head, a little shyly. “Yeah, I… I ran away,” he said. “After Narae died.” Hyunjae lowered his head, not quite a nod, but some kind of acknowledgement; he’d heard about that at least, then. “I just had to get out of there, hyung, I had to. I mean, you knew him, you know what he was like. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
Hyunjae gave Felix a soft-eyed look. The look of someone who knew Felix’s worth, the same way they’d all come to see it. “Yeah,” he said. “Yon— Felix. I worried about you, you know? After I cut ties with Jaerim. He was a piece of shit to work with but I knew that it must have been even worse to have him as a father. I thought about you all the time.” He quirked his mouth. “Little Yongbok in his awful neckties. I regretted that I couldn’t have helped you more.”
“Ah, hyung,” said Felix, voice thick in a way that suggested imminent tears. “You were the only one nice to me. Out of everyone he worked with, you were the only one who was nice to me.”
“And then I opened my big mouth and dropped you in it,” Hyunjae said. “God, Felix, I am so sorry. What an idiot your hyung is.”
“You’re not,” Felix said, definitely choked up now. “Hyung, can I hug you? Is that okay?”
Hyunjae nodded, already holding his arms out. Felix let go of Chan’s hand and almost threw himself against Hyunjae, who caught him with a little oof. Felix’s arms went around Hyunjae’s waist, and Hyunjae’s arms came around Felix’s shoulders in a bear hug, Felix almost disappearing into it. Hyunjae put his face to Felix’s hair, not kissing it, just holding him close. It was the closest thing to emotional that Chan thought he’d ever seen Hyunjae.
There was nothing romantic about it, either. Chan really wasn’t proud of the squirming feeling in the pit of his stomach at the sight of the two of them hugging.
“You seem pretty happy here,” Hyunjae said. “But if you ever, ever, need somewhere else to be, you can come to me. My door is always open to you, Felix.”
Chan clenched his fists and then let go. Hyunjae’s voice was pitched low, like it was meant for only Felix to hear, but Chan could hear it all the same; he was standing too close to not. Something private for Felix, an offer that could be secret to him. It was good, he told himself, for Felix to have options. That was what he’d wanted all along for Felix, for him to not feel indebted to Chan, to not feel like he was stuck here with him.
“Thank you, hyung,” Felix said, his voice muffled. “But I’m okay. I am happy here.”
There was a quick knock on the office door, before Minho came inside, stalking in much the same way he’d left earlier, Juyeon following after and closing the door with a quiet click. Minho saw Felix and Hyunjae hugging and his face went through about five different emotions before he clearly decided to just let it go. Apparently there was too much else to handle right now.
“Well, it’s definitely the right model and make of the safe,” he said, clipped, as Hyunjae let go of Felix and stepped back to look at him, his face sliding back into business mode. Felix returned to Chan’s side, his hand slipping into Chan’s again. “Smaller than the one we wanted but it will do. I tried to move it and could not.” There was a lot being brushed over there, Chan thought, probably long minutes of Minho trying to push something that would not be moved.
“I did warn him it was heavy,” Juyeon said. “I tried to help too but even the two of us couldn’t really do anything.”
“We’re going to need serious manpower to move it over to our van,” Minho said. “But if we open it up and hook under the door, we can probably lift it that way.”
“Okay,” said Chan, already moving to his desk where the telephone was so he could call down to the shift manager’s office. Chan was not in charge of scheduling and didn’t know exactly who was working tonight, but he did have a major role in hiring and almost all of the bouncers he’d hired to work here were burly, to put it mildly.
“Also,” Minho added, “I need a crowbar.”
Chan stopped, looking back at him. “A crowbar?”
“Yes,” said Minho. “The safe isn’t going to fit in the back of our van, not with that bench that Seungmin put in there. I need to take it out if we’re going to get that thing home.”
“Oooh,” said Jeongin, very sing-song. Minho’s attention snapped to him, the same way it had yesterday in the meeting. “Seungmin-hyung isn’t going to be happy about that.”
Minho scowled. “I don’t give a shit,” he said. Jeongin laughed, covering his mouth with a hand. “We don’t need it anyway.”
Chan sighed. Even so, Seungmin was really not going to be happy about it, not after all the work he’d put into the van over the past couple of months. But they needed the safe more than they needed a bench in the back of the van, and that was pretty much it. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try to get you a crowbar from somewhere.”
“Actually,” said Hyunjae. “I happen to have one of those in my van.”
Chan stared at him. Hyunjae looked back, grinning at him. “Christ,” said Chan. “Do you just have everything?” Hyunjae just shrugged, mysterious in a handsome way that Chan didn’t think he could ever hope to emulate. “Fine,” Chan said. “Let me get my men sorted and we can get this show on the road.”
——
If asked, Jisung wouldn’t have been able to explain the difference between walking into the apartment at night when it was quiet because everyone was sleeping, and when it was quiet because it was empty, only that there was a difference, and that it was creepy. Something about the darkened windows and the stillness — not the stillness of sleep but the stillness of absence. Jisung didn’t even believe in ghosts but being up there when he was by himself made him scared that some little old lady would come floating across the room or he’d look up and there’d be a word written in blood on the ceiling.
Still, it was late enough that he needed something to eat, and so he hauled himself upstairs and let himself into the apartment, telling himself that if he just didn’t look up, there wouldn’t be anything frightening in the first place. Sure, he was alone, but there were no ghosts in the entire building, and if there were, it would have been down in the PC room where that guy Minho had murdered had been—
A door swung open down the hallway as he walked across the kitchen, and he’d been so sure that he was alone he almost jumped onto the island counter. He hadn’t realised Hyunjin was up here and not down in the workroom with Seungmin, watching for the others coming back. He’d done that the last time he and Changbin went out, after all, and this time Felix had gone out. It made sense.
But no, Hyunjin was in the apartment, and he ran out into the main area like there was something hot on his heels, his expression expectant. His hair had clearly been pulled back into a ponytail but he’d dislodged it enough that the front parts were hanging around his face, framing it in a slightly wild but still beautiful way. When he saw it was Jisung in there, it was not that his face fell, necessarily, but the look on his face certainly shifted.
“Oh, it’s just you,” he said.
Jisung recovered, finally, from the shock of thinking he was alone and suddenly finding Hyunjin there. Anyone suddenly being there would have been bad enough; it being Hyunjin was almost enough to take all of his brain offline.
He leaned back until he was resting against the kitchen counter, arms flung out to the sides, hands draping as delicately as he could make them. He channelled, as best as he could, every single one of those black and white movies he’d ever seen where a woman walked into a detective’s office smoking a cigarette on a long stick: head tilted to the side, hip pushed out, eyes hooded in a way meant to look ridiculous. He lifted one of his socked feet up and put it on the counter, trying to extend his leg. It wasn’t easy; he wasn’t that flexible.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said, almost a purr, as over the top as he could make it. “People will—” He paused for dramatic effect, raising one hand and setting the back of his wrist across his forehead. On a long exhale, he said, “Talk.”
He saw Hyunjin’s eyebrow twitch. Then he stalked forward and smacked Jisung’s foot off the counter. “Get your foot off there,” Hyunjin snapped, as Jisung almost lost his balance and had to cling to the counter to stop himself sliding to the floor. “Nasty little gremlin.”
Jisung righted himself, standing up straight, but Hyunjin’s height advantage meant he still loomed. “Yep, that’s me,” Jisung agreed. Hyunjin didn’t look particularly impressed, his gaze laying heavy on Jisung for a moment before it shifted to the door of the apartment, his lips pursing. Jisung could connect the dots easily enough. “You worried about Felix?”
“He’ll be fine,” Hyunjin said, not so much with surety, more like as something he’d been repeating to himself.
“He will,” said Jisung, firm. Hyunjin looked to him, something quietly beseeching in his eyes, like he craved the reassurance but didn’t want to ask for it. Jisung injected as much surety into his voice as he could as he said, “Chan-hyung will keep him safe.” If nothing else, Jisung was sure of that.
Hyunjin rolled his lips together, a fidgety sort of movement, and Jisung focused very hard on looking only at his eyes. “It’s just so weird, to have Felix gone on something job related,” Hyunjin said, almost like the words were bursting out of him. “And Jeongin too? I don’t like being left behind.”
More and more Hyunjin was coming to Jisung with these little, emotionally vulnerable moments, and every time Jisung just desperately did not want to fuck it up. “I’m sure—” he began, and then laughed a little. “Well, I was going to say I’m sure Seungmin wouldn’t mind if you waited downstairs for them, but I think he would mind. You could still do it though.”
That earned him a tiny smile from Hyunjin. “It’s alright,” he said on a sigh, flexing his shoulders in a stretch. “I’m not that bad off.”
Jisung watched him, the way he tilted his head to one side, then the other, like he was trying to chase out the tension he’d been holding. On the counter, Jisung was trying not to let his fingers tap. “Hyunjin-ah,” he said, a little breathless because half of his attention was on the long column of Hyunjin’s neck. “Can I talk to you about something?”
“That’s ominous,” Hyunjin said, but he came closer, leaned his hip on the edge of the counter, looking at Jisung with all of his attention.
“It’s about— the job, Felix’s job,” Jisung said, and Hyunjin continued to just look at him. “Minho’s proposal? The trunk thing.”
“Ah.” Hyunjin’s lashes lowered, gaze straying to the side, like the grout on the countertop was suddenly very interesting.
“We could maybe figure something else out—” Jisung began, but Hyunjin shook his head sharply.
“It’s okay,” he insisted, still without eye contact. He brushed some invisible crumbs off the countertop. “It is, it really is. I’ve told Chan-hyung I’ll do it.”
That fierce, warm protectiveness rose to life in Jisung’s chest. “You can change your mind,” he said, emphatic.
“It won’t set me off too badly,” Hyunjin said. He gave a half shrug. “Like, if I have a panic attack, then I have a panic attack. It isn’t the end of the world.” He finally raised his eyes again and then immediately frowned in consternation when he actually saw Jisung. “Oh, that’s a look you’ve learned from Felix. Stop big-eye-blinking at me. You look like one of those stray dogs begging for food.”
Jisung tipped his face down so now he was big-eye-blinking through his lashes, lip pouting out. “Hyunjin,” he said, pitched into a low whine.
Hyunjin, very slowly, reached across the distance between them. He settled a crooked finger under Jisung’s chin, raising his face up. Jisung stopped breathing, eyes wide. Once his face was at a more normal angle Hyunjin pulled his hand back, much faster than he’d reached out. “Do you actually want to talk about this?” he asked, very seriously.
“Uhm,” Jisung said, his voice kind of squeaky. He felt like Hyunjin had turned off about seventy percent of his brain, with that little touch. “Only if you want to?”
Hyunjin bit his bottom lip, frowning a little in thought. He inhaled deeply, straightening his spine as he did so, pushing his shoulders back. “It's not—” he said, and then shook his head, tried again. “It wasn't really just the act of being put in a car trunk that made it unbearable. The small space, being unable to escape, not knowing how long I was going to be in there— all of that was awful. But what made it into something I couldn't stand was knowing, as soon as that door slammed over me, what was waiting on the other end of the ride.”
Jisung stared up at him, quiet in the pause. He sensed that he wasn’t supposed to speak here, that Hyunjin was simply gathering his words together. Jisung wanted to listen, he did, if Hyunjin wanted to talk about it, but there was a definite pit of dread opening in him, black and sucking and cold. He’d met Hyunjin when Hyunjin was nineteen, it was difficult already to think of him as a child, abused and in pain. Jisung’s imagination did enough, without any details.
As the quiet went on, a little too long, Hyunjin eventually shook his head, frustration clear in the movement. The right words were evading him, it seemed, and he gusted out an unhappy sigh. “They would rent us out for parties,” he said, the words clipped and hard and raw. He met Jisung’s eyes, a quick flick. “Private parties. I was always alone in the trunks but once I got there, there'd usually be other kids too. They'd— pass us around, drug us if we got too squirmy about it. I hated those nights worse than the rest. Better locked up in tiny cold rooms than— that.” He cleared his throat, shuffled his feet against the fake wood flooring. His voice had dropped to a rasp but it was louder, more crisp as he finished, “So that's why I don't like being in car trunks. It's less about the ride and more about the destination.”
Jisung not know what to say, did not know if there was anything that could be said in reply to that. All his energy was going into making sure his face was blank, though he wasn’t sure he was managing that perfectly. His hand on the counter had gone from simply laying there to clutching the edge, his joints straining with the pressure.
In front of him, Hyunjin was waiting, looking increasingly unsure. Jisung wanted to stop that expression on Hyunjin’s face, but he did not think he could loosen his hold on himself. He felt like if he moved, if he spoke or even tried to change his expression, he would crack like thin ice over a lake.
Hyunjin whispered, “Whenever I talk to Chan-hyung about this stuff he looks at me with that same kind of neutral expression, just letting me vent. I don’t need that from you too.” His eyes searched Jisung’s face. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
And just like that, Jisung fissured. “I hate them,” he said, the words bursting out of him, poisonous and true. The anger, that temper, welled up through the cracks now that he’d let them appear. “It happened to you and not to me so I feel like I can’t— make it about me. But I hate them, Hyunjin. I want to find them and rip them open and feed them their own insides. You slit their throats and it’s so much better than what they deserve.” More vehemently, his teeth flashing, he repeated, “I hate them.”
Hyunjin stared at him, and stared, and stared. The anger in Jisung slowly seeped away, like air out of a pin-pricked beach ball. It left him feeling small and stretched, a deflated puffer fish.
“Thank you,” Hyunjin murmured, head tilting a little. He was still staring. “I don’t like the idea of you being angry — you’re not someone who is built for anger. But still, thank you.”
Jisung wasn’t sure what that meant; anger came so easy to him sometimes it was frightening and shameful. But that didn’t matter right now. “Hyunjin,” he said instead. “I know the others have probably said similar things, but I have to say it too: I’ll protect you, on the job, and after. Always. With my life, if it comes to that.”
Hyunjin’s gaze on him shifted, changed — it had already been an intense, stripping kind of thing, and now it was scorching, like a laser, like a flame. “I know,” he said, and it was hoarse. “I know that.” Again, he reached out, this time with both hands. Jisung stood still, let Hyunjin— cup his face with both hands, Jisung feeling so small. Hyunjin’s hands were big, and they were cool against the heat of Jisung’s skin. His thumbs pressed, not exactly gentle, into the softness of Jisung’s cheeks, digging in, rubbing.
“Hyun— Hyunjin?” Jisung said, hating the quaver in his voice. He didn’t dare even twitch.
Hyunjin’s face was close to his, and his grip was almost bruising. Almost angry. “After the job things will be different,” he muttered, fierce and seemingly not even to Jisung. “I promise. Just wait a little bit more.”
“Uhm,” stammered Jisung. “Okay?”
Hyunjin was breathing quickly. His hands shook, the movement translating through to Jisung, and then abruptly he let go, stepping back, and Jisung swayed a little. He gulped in air — he’d been forgetting to breathe.
I thought he was about to kiss me, Jisung thought. And that was stupid, the stupidest thing he could ever think. But still— what had that been.
Hyunjin had a hand on his own hip, and he was halfway turned away from Jisung now. His other hand was shoved into his own hair, holding it off his face. He spoke into the silence, voice brusque, “Having you will make it easier.”
Jisung, his brains nearly leaking out of his ears, said, “Huh?”
“The job, I mean,” Hyunjin clarified, that familiar snap of impatience in his tone. “The— trunk. You being with me will keep me in the present. So don’t worry.”
“Okay,” Jisung said, slow and kind of feeling like he’d been set adrift.
Hyunjin raised an eyebrow, and he was so devastatingly beautiful that Jisung’s knees almost buckled. “Is that all you can say?” Hyunjin asked. His hand dropped from his hair and went to his hip, so he looked very judgy indeed, elbows sticking out, that eyebrow still cocked.
“Yes,” Jisung said, contrary. He smiled when Hyunjin levelled him with a flat stare, unable to help it.
“I think I am going to grab my safe cracking kit and wait for the others downstairs,” Hyunjin huffed, turning the rest of the way away from Jisung and heading to his room. When he hit the mouth of the hallway he looked back and somewhat tentatively asked, “Do you want to— come?”
Jisung blinked. “Yeah,” he said, hesitant, and then when the question sunk in he repeated, more surely, “Yeah! Let me just eat a granola bar or something really fast, then we can go down together.”
Hyunjin gave a curt nod and then vanished down the hallway. Jisung flung open several cupboards and found the last peanut butter granola bar they had. He tore it open and shoved three quarters of it into his mouth, chewing fiercely.
He cupped my face! his brain was screaming. He wanted to open the window above the kitchen sink and scream into the sky.
Instead, he shoved the rest of the granola bar into his mouth, cheeks bulging, and then punched and kicked the air several times. The wrapper was clenched in his fist, making crinkly noises with every flailing motion.
“What are you doing,” Hyunjin asked, flat, and Jisung dropped his arms back down to his sides. He hadn’t heard Hyunjin come back, silent as a panther, but there he was, heading to the entryway. He had a soft leather bag in his hands.
“Fighting the house ghost,” Jisung said around the half-chewed mulch in his mouth. Hyunjin shot him a distinctly disgusted look that probably had more to do with him talking with his mouth full than any judgement he was making about Jisung bullying spectres. Jisung toddled over to him, holding his hands out. “I’ll take that for you.”
Hyunjin sighed. “It isn’t heavy, Jisung.” But he handed the bag over all the same.
——
Seungmin watched his screens, his head the kind of nails on chalkboard white noise that he hated the most. There was work to be done, so much fucking work to get done, but he could not stop watching the camera feeds. Every time a car drove down the street in front of the building, he twitched in his seat, unable to repress it, or do anything about the instinctive burst of panic that came over him. It was just— too much.
He had been sitting here like this ever since Chan had come into the room and said that they were leaving for Maniac to see Hyunjae. Since he had dropped the bombshell that Hyunjae knew where and what Maniac was in the first place. Changbin had tried to talk to him, for a while, but eventually even he had given up. Instead, he was just working quietly on something, Seungmin did not know what, the shuffling of his papers the backdrop to Seungmin’s fixation on the cameras.
He was not sure what exactly he was looking for, other than the return of his team safely. Intruders, perhaps, a sign that Hyunjae knew where their house was too. But that didn’t happen. Eventually, the white van pulled into view, and then down the sidestreet to the back parking lot, slow and careful.
Seungmin shot to his feet, striding quickly towards the back of his workroom. Changbin was a little slower, scooting his stool back with a terrible screech over the concrete. “Baby, I’ll get it,” he said, and Seungmin ignored him.
The huge metal loading door was locked, chained shut. Seungmin knelt now to release the padlock, tugging at the thick grimy chains for a few seconds before a body very gently shunted him aside, hands slipping under his.
“I said I’ll get it, my love,” Changbin murmured, and it made every hair on Seungmin’s body stand on end. He snatched himself away, standing again, while Changbin deftly unwrapped the chains. Seungmin’s own hands were grimy now, the chain a bit greasy. He went to the little bench off to the side and picked his rag up, wiping at his hands rather than watch Changbin haul that metal door up, his muscles moving under his shirt.
No sooner than he’d gotten the door open than the van appeared, swinging around and beginning to back in, red break lights lighting up the room. The air outside was fucking freezing, getting sucked in immediately. Seungmin’s space heaters would be working overtime tonight.
“Hey, hey,” Seungmin said, rushing to the back of the van so it stopped with a jerk. He smacked at the back doors, peering around the corner of the van.
A moment later Minho had opened his window, poking his head out and looking back, “Kim Seungmin, I could have run you over.”
Seungmin ignored that. “I want Changbin-hyung to drive it in,” he said. “I don’t trust you.”
Minho lifted his foot off the brake and the van very slowly began to roll again. Seungmin was forced to step back. “You’re a dick!” he shouted, and then, “You’re not doing it right—”
Minho retreated into the cab, the window rolling back up, and Changbin came round to help direct him. Seungmin could do nothing but watch with his arms folded tightly over his chest. The van ended up mostly where it had been before, though Minho at one point swerved too much and dinged one of Seungmin’s filing cabinets. But he was inclined to think that had been very deliberate on Minho’s part, not due to Changbin’s deficient directions.
As soon as the van had come to a stop proper, Seungmin stalked forward, intent on opening the back, and Minho climbed out, keys in hand. “Here,” he said, tossing them over before Seungmin was ready, so they hit him in the chest. He managed to grab them before they slid to the floor.
Seungmin held them in his clenched hand and brandished them threateningly at him, teeth bared. “It’s okay, he didn’t do too badly,” Changbin said, in a soothing kind of voice, and Seungmin turned his snarl on him.
He used the keys to open up the back. There, on the floor of the van, sat a mid-sized safe, weighing as much as two Changbins, Seungmin knew. Getting it out was going to be a bitch—
There were holes in the side of the van wall, the plastic cracked and ripped, where the little sitting bench he’d installed had once been and was now gone.
“Where’s my bench?” Seungmin said, almost a yell for him.
“I’ve got it!” Jeongin said cheerfully, slipping out of the passenger seat of the van and brandishing the long plank of wood. He must have been riding with it upright in between his knees. “There wasn’t room in the van for the safe with the bench in too, so we had to take it out, sorry.” He came and handed Seungmin the entire piece, with the missing plastic chunks from the van still locked into the screws.
If Seungmin had been a cartoon character, the plank of wood in his hands would have snapped in half by now with how hard he was clutching it. Changbin had his lips pressed together, and Seungmin couldn’t tell if he was trying not to laugh or wince.
“Everything alright in here?” The voice came from outside, and then Chan was squeezing around the van, the keys for the car in one hand, and Felix’s hand in the other, tugged along through the small gap.
“Kim Seungmin is very upset about his bench,” Minho said, as Jeongin came and plastered himself along his side.
Changbin took the bench out of Seungmin’s hands, lowly saying, “I’ll fix it.” Seungmin squinted at him. That wasn’t the point.
Chan came around and peeked into the back of the van and then nodded approvingly after looking at the safe for a moment. He looked at Seungmin over his shoulder. “This is the right kind, yeah?”
“Yes,” Seungmin said, through gritted teeth.
His workroom door slammed open, less loudly than Jeongin would do so but loud enough that he winced. Too many people in his space.
“My baby is back,” Hyunjin said, practically mowing Changbin over in his haste to get to Felix. Behind Hyunjin, Jisung kept the door from swinging shut too fast, moseying in more casually. He was holding a soft, lumpy leather bag in his hand.
Felix let Chan’s hand go so he had both hands free to take Hyunjin’s draping weight. Hyunjin was nuzzling his face into Felix’s hair in a way that was very quickly turning the brown strands into a bird’s nest. Felix was laughing, a little, huffs of air as his cheeks turned red.
“Hyunjin,” Felix said, still full of laughter, “nothing even happened.”
“Snatched from the very jaws of danger,” Hyunjin said, apparently in a very dramatic mood. He squeezed Felix hard and then lifted him off his feet, Felix giving a small squeak.
Jisung wandered over to where Jeongin was drifting near Minho, and said, “Were you also snatched from the jaws of danger, our precious baby?” He reached out as if to squish Jeongin’s face and Jeongin jabbed him in the solar plexus.
“Did everything go smoothly, then?” Changbin asked, setting the plank of wood onto the workbench, while Jisung doubled over and wheezed.
Chan was watching Hyunjin and Felix fondly, and when he looked at Changbin, his expression stayed all besotted. “Yeah, I think Hyunjae just wanted to make sure Lix was alright,” he said. “And the safe seems to be in good working order.”
Seungmin slid past them all quietly and went to the loading door, still wide open, and began the process of closing it while the others continued talking. Changbin didn’t come to help him this time, probably because there was no way to do so smoothly without appearing— doting. So Seungmin locked it up himself, wrestling a little with the chunky chain. The van only just fit, the door sliding down with just a breath of space to spare. He snapped the padlock into place and then tugged twice on it hard, just to be sure.
By the time he came back into the main area, wiping his hands on that same rag, Hyunjin had released Felix, and Minho and Jeongin were gone. A drop of the tension Seungmin had been carrying between his shoulder blades relaxed, but just that bit.
Chan had his arm around Felix’s narrow shoulders, holding him in close, just a whisper of possessiveness there. Hyunjin was in the back of the van, poking around the safe. It was opened, had been when it had arrived.
“Can I close this?” Hyunjin asked, peering at Chan. His long limbs looked especially squished in the cramped space of the van.
“Yeah, I have the code, so you can do whatever you need to, to try and get into it,” Chan said, still with that fond smile on his face.
Hyunjin immediately closed the safe with glee, latching it and spinning the dial. “Bring hence my tools,” he said, holding a hand out imperiously, and Jisung came over and, with much flourish, gave him the leather bag he’d been carrying. Hyunjin opened it and pulled out a stethoscope, settling down into a cross-legged position on the floor of the van. “Everyone go away, I need quiet.”
“Yah, I was working on something,” Changbin said, his eyes glancing over Seungmin for the barest flicker. Seungmin had a steadily sinking sensation in his stomach. Of course Hyunjin wanted to work on the safe now; the job was in five days. They were running out of time for the practice. But that didn’t help soothe Seungmin’s fraying nerves.
Hyunjin put the stethoscope’s ear pieces in place, shooting Changbin a scathing little look. “So am I. Unless you’re willing to move this thing up to the fourth floor so I can work on it in my room, you’re the one who needs to take your shit elsewhere,” Hyunjin sniffed.
Jisung put his hands on his hips, assessing. “Could we move it?” he asked to the room at large, as Changbin came to stand next to him.
“No,” Chan said, when it looked like both Jisung and Changbin might be willing to give it a go. Chan’s smile had turned wry. “It’s a lot heavier than you might think, which is part of the security of a safe in itself. At best we’ll be able to shove it out the back of the van later. I think Hyunjae used a motored dolly system to get it into his car; Minho said it took himself and four other men just to move it out of Hyunjae’s vehicle and into ours.”
That would explain the exceedingly crude removal of the bench. Jisung gave a low whistle and, surreptitiously, Changbin gave Seungmin an apologetic little look. “We’ll get out of Hyunjin’s hair for now then,” Changbin said, herding Jisung across the workroom to the door.
“If you can’t get into it, let me know,” Chan said to Hyunjin. “I can give you the combo, so you can try to learn what to listen for. I can always change it again later.”
“Yeah, yeah, but I want to try it on my own for a while,” Hyunjin said, shooing them away.
Chan laughed and, with Felix in tow, went to where Jisung and Changbin where waiting for them by the door. “Alright, we’re going, I’m sure Seungmin will enjoy the quiet,” Chan said, still smiling.
Seungmin said nothing, just watched them file out, one by one.
“I’ll be back down here later,” Changbin said on his way out. It was pointed in a way that only Seungmin probably caught. He bit down a sigh as the door swung shut, leaving him alone with Hyunjin.
When Seungmin turned around, he saw Hyunjin had the diaphragm already pressed to the door of the safe, turning the dial slowly with his other hand. His face was scrunched into that familiar frown of his. “Oh, it’s smooth,” he whispered, to himself, moving the diaphragm millimetres to the left.
Seungmin looked around, the suddenly empty space that he’d been craving for, except it was empty in the wrong way. He wanted Changbin back. Being with Changbin made him feel— the same way he did when he was alone, but in the good way. Whereas oftentimes being with others when Seungmin felt like this, was lonely in the bad way. The broken bench sat, lumpy and awkward, on the workbench.
He walked across the workroom back to his desk, and only once he’d sunk down into his chair did he allow himself a deep sigh.
——
It was still relatively early by the time they got back to the apartment, early enough that on a usual day, Felix wouldn’t have been tired in the slightest. After those first few weeks when he’d been catching up on months of not enough rest and passing out at 9pm on the dot, his usual bedtime had been pushed further and further back until he’d been almost back to his normal one. But tonight he was tired, worn out by all that had happened today.
They’d left Jisung on the second floor and Changbin in the main room of the apartment, saying that he was going to make a snack. Felix had been a little surprised that Chan had followed him to the bedroom, expecting him to go to his office to work, but he was not complaining about it. In fact, when they’d first started climbing the stairs, and Chan had had to drop the arm from around Felix’s shoulder in order to walk properly, Felix had felt the loss of it like the loss of his own limb.
Chan shut the bedroom door behind himself, before sighing a little and saying, “That was such a long day.”
Felix smiled, taking his hand, fingers tangling loosely. “You got up too early,” he said, a little teasing. “You were teasing fate.”
Chan blinked. “How do you know how early I got up?” he asked.
“I woke up when you got out of bed,” Felix said. “You banged your knee against the dresser and woke me up.”
Chan looked at him, trying for comical outrage but smiling too hard for it, really. “And you didn’t even check that I was okay?”
“No,” said Felix, grinning at him. “I was sleepy and it was warm in bed. You were very silly for getting up. It was your punishment.”
Chan just smiled. He took a step forward and pressed a kiss to Felix’s forehead, close-lipped and a little dry. The warmth of it filled every single part of Felix’s body, like a wave passing through him, starting at his forehead and spreading to the very tips of his toes. It felt so good, but once it passed, it left him feeling so much colder, bereft of something he hadn’t known he was without before. There was a sadness inside of him suddenly that he could not have put into words.
“Hyung,” he said, before Chan could step back and leave him even colder. “Hold me?”
Chan’s arms came around him instantly, one across his shoulders, pulling him in that way, the other sliding around Felix’s waist, heavy against his body. Felix wound his own arms around Chan, one of his hands around Chan’s upper back so that it could cling to Chan’s shoulder, the muscle there, just the slightest give to his skin. He pressed himself so close against Chan that he wished he could go that one step further and just melt completely into him.
If he said this to Hyunjin, even now, Hyunjin would tell him he was kind of crazy to feel this way. But when he was like this with Chan, held in the circle of his arms, in this private space between them with no one else to see, Felix felt the safest he could ever possibly be. Or maybe it was just that now, after everything, this was where he was Felix, just Felix, and he would be loved in whatever form that happened to take.
Maybe that was what it meant to have no more secrets between them. He was simply Felix. Chan was simply Chan. There was safety in that that Felix had never experienced in his entire life before.
“Lix,” Chan whispered, his voice very soft by Felix’s ear. “Are you okay?”
Felix thought about it for a few moments. “Yeah,” he said, sighing it out into Chan’s shoulder. “Yeah, I’m okay, hyung.”
“It must have been a lot for you,” Chan said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to give you more time to prepare for it.”
Felix drew back, looking Chan in the face but without actually stepping back. Held safe in that circle of Chan’s arms. “I’m not sure more time would have been all that helpful,” he said. “I would have just stressed myself out about it, I think. But,” he added with a smile, “it was nice to see him.”
Chan’s face did something— odd. Not a smile, although it was like he’d tried to smile and failed utterly at it. It was almost a grimace, in fact, and after a few moments he said, “You— I was surprised by how close you seemed with him.”
“With Hyunjae-hyung?” Felix asked, surprised. “Not really. I only ever really saw him when he came to talk to my father. We had a few conversations, that was all.”
Conversations that Hyunjae had mostly sought out, because Felix would not have really dared. Most of his father’s contacts were not as nice as Hyunjae, and Felix had tried to keep to himself as much as he could around them. But Hyunjae had been nice, asking him how he was getting on in school and then how his work was going, drawing quiet conversation out of Felix in stolen moments when his father’s attention was elsewhere or when he’d left the room. Felix would not say they were close, they hadn’t known each other well enough for that, but those conversations had felt like a lifeline at the time.
Chan was quiet for a moment and then he said, “Close enough to hug him.”
Felix stared at him. Chan looked back, slowly going very, very red. It was hard to believe that tone had come out of his mouth: sulky and sullen, like a child. “Hyung,” Felix said, not sure if he wanted to laugh or not. “Are you jealous?”
Chan tried to let go and pull away, and Felix had to haul him back in. Of course, if Chan actually wanted to, he could have easily broken that hold; if there was one thing Felix was not ever going to be capable of, it was hold Chan in place if Chan didn’t want to be held there. Manhandling was decidedly Chan’s domain in their relationship. But Chan let himself be held still, his eyes looking everywhere but at Felix’s face, face pink all over.
Felix lifted a hand to cup Chan’s cheek, not quite turning Chan’s face to his but putting the suggestion there, for when Chan was ready. “Hyung,” he said gently. “Why on earth are you jealous?”
Chan was silent again. Felix didn’t break that silence, he just stood in it, let Chan come up with the words. When he did speak, Chan still didn’t look at him. “He knew you before I did,” he said. Felix opened his mouth to point out how silly that was, but Chan was still speaking. “He knew you before all of this, which means he was in a position to help you in a way that I never was. He knew the truth of who you were before I did, which doesn’t feel good. I don’t like that he has this knowledge of you that I just don’t have. And,” he added, finally looking at Felix only to give him a little side-eyed look, “he’s very much your type, I think.”
Felix thought maybe he did want to laugh, but he held back. Because Chan was not wrong, at least as far as the last bit. Felix had almost certainly had a crush on Hyunjae in those early years of knowing each other, before Hyunjae had broken ties with his father and disappeared from his life. It had probably been inevitable: Hyunjae was handsome, muscular, older, and kind to him. All the same things could be said of Chan.
But back then— Felix had not had the mental capacity to even realise that about himself. It had been difficult enough to get through the crushing weight of day to day life, his feelings for Hyunjae had only been something he recognised later, once that weight was gone. It hadn’t mattered, by that point. He had Chan now.
He ran a hand through Chan’s hair and this time used the other hand, still cupping Chan’s face, to force him to look Felix straight on. “You,” he said, “are totally ridiculous.”
Chan’s face twisted. “Felix—” he protested.
“No,” Felix said. He pushed Chan back, just gently, but it was enough; Chan let himself be pushed, until his knees hit the edge of the bed and he sank down onto it. He was looking at Felix with wide eyes, like he wasn’t quite sure what was going on, wasn’t quite sure what to make of Felix’s mood all of a sudden. Felix took advantage of his confusion to climb right into his lap, knees straddling Chan’s thighs, and then cupped Chan’s face again and kissed him.
Gone were the semi-chaste things they’d shared these past few weeks, neither of them pushing too hard or asking too much of each other. Felix kissed him hard, drinking down Chan’s gasp and not letting Chan take a moment to think. He settled his weight down in Chan’s lap, both as a way of keeping Chan in place, and a way of making his intentions very clear; his ass was pressed firmly against Chan’s crotch.
When he broke away from the kiss, Chan blinked his eyes open to stare at him. He looked baffled still. Felix wanted to shake him. “You have nothing to be jealous of,” he said. “Nothing. Don’t you see, hyung? I’m yours.”
Chan’s face softened but Felix could see that Chan didn’t get it. Maybe Chan would never quite get it, what it was that Felix was trying to say, what he meant. How deep it went into his bones, this feeling of belonging to Chan, of being Chan’s. Maybe it was beyond words, beyond the ability to express in such a way; maybe it was only through actions that Felix could ever get it across.
“I’m yours, too,” Chan said.
Felix kissed him again. “Nobody knows me like you do,” he said. He took Chan’s hands, resting uselessly on the bed, and brought them to his hips, pressed them there, as hard as he thought Chan could stand it. Chan’s line as to how willing he was to use his strength against Felix was certainly much closer in the sand than Felix’s. “Nobody has ever known me like this.” He pushed one of Chan’s hands lower, bringing it around until it was pressed against the curve of his ass. Chan’s hand curled there almost by instinct, holding him without Felix needing to make him do it.
Felix rolled his hips against Chan’s, as smooth as he could make it when he could feel, almost, some of the fog coming over his brain. It had been so long, it had been too long, these weeks of not feeling like this, of not even letting himself feel this way. But Chan had been jealous this entire night, silently possessive, and he had still let Felix go, had still let him have that chance to see someone who Felix had cared about.
“Hyung,” he said, breathy and low, his mouth dragging against Chan’s cheekbone as he spoke, his hips still fucking down into Chan’s. Chan must be able to feel it, the way Felix was getting a little hard for him already. “Hyung, please, I need you, I need you.”
“Felix,” Chan said, on a groan. He said Felix’s name like a curse. He said Felix’s name like the sweetest prayer. “Felix.”
“Nobody else,” Felix told him, as he felt Chan’s hands start to pull him down, pull him closer, with each rock down of Felix’s hips. “Nobody else has ever had me. Don’t you see, don’t you get it? I’ll never love anyone else like I love you.”
A moment later he found himself on his back, his legs spread wide around Chan’s hips, Chan’s mouth on his. Chan kissed him like he was out of his mind with it, as Felix clutched at his back and shoulders, as Chan rutted his hips into Felix’s with a control that seemed— tenuous at best. The force of it almost drove Felix up the bed a little bit. Felix held onto him, kissed him back with that same kind of reckless abandon, and let himself sink into it, let himself be lost.
——
Jeongin lay on Minho’s bed, not tucked under the covers yet but sleepy enough, by this point, that he probably would wriggle under sometime soon. There was still something fizzing under his skin, though, an excitement at having been out on official team business, to have been the one chosen to go meet with Hyunjae. It was fighting with the fact that his usual bedtime had been and gone, leaving him in an odd sleepy but not actually tired state.
Minho was still up too, sitting upright on the bed with the contents of the Lee Jaerim file spread around him. It was an odd quirk of Minho’s, the way he worked basically only on paper, his thoughts scrawled down in pencil or pen, everything compiled into packets for him to peruse whenever he wanted. The notes were usually given to Seungmin to type up, another task on Seungmin’s roster that he complained about endlessly, but Minho had been very adamant in the past that only Seungmin was to type them, and only on Seungmin’s computer, and it had seemed to go someway to placating Seungmin, that little show of respect.
Jeongin was still not sure if Minho refused to go near a computer for this kind of thing because he didn’t trust computers or because he didn’t know how to use them. His insistence that Seungmin do it on his secured machine suggested the former, but Minho didn’t go near computers ever otherwise, so Jeongin didn’t know. He, personally, wouldn’t be able to cope with all the papers, but Minho seemed to have an innate understanding of where everything went.
Jeongin was watching him. He wasn’t pretending otherwise, wasn’t being coy about it: he was laying on his side, hands under his head against the pillow, watching Minho read through plans and look through maps, a pen sometimes in his hands, sometimes held in his mouth as he shuffled everything around. He knew that Minho knew he was watching him, but he didn’t say anything, and neither did he seem particularly bothered by it. He was perhaps too sucked into the work for that.
He switched the pen from one hand to the other, writing naturally with both hands. Jeongin knew that Minho was ambidextrous, had seen him do something similar before in the past, but it always amazed him to see it in action. Jeongin often felt so clumsy, barely able to do anything with either hand, that Minho’s ease with it was something he’d envied in the past.
“Hyung,” he murmured, soft enough to be ignored if Minho was too busy. But of course, whatever it was that Minho was doing, he stopped and looked at Jeongin, gaze steady. Jeongin had seen him try to hide it sometimes in the past, a pause before he looked, like he was stopping himself from reacting too quickly. He wasn’t bothering anymore, and it filled Jeongin with giddy warmth.
“What is it, baby boy,” Minho said, when Jeongin just kept looking at him, unable to help the smile on his face.
“It’s really cool that you can write with both hands,” Jeongin told him, without lifting his head up, looking at Minho through his eyelashes in a way that he knew looked overly flirty. He was starting to realise, though, that Minho was not— averse to Jeongin’s obvious shows of coyness, even as affected as they could be. In fact, it seemed Minho liked them.
Minho looked down at the pen in his hand like he was surprised to find it there. “Is it?” he asked, flicking his eyes back at Jeongin. He didn’t sound like he cared too much about that, which Jeongin could have called. Minho didn’t seem to care about being seen as cool or interesting or anything other than what he simply was.
“It is,” Jeongin said. “Did you teach yourself that?”
He’d always wondered, if Minho had taught it to himself as a way of being better on jobs; the first time he’d noticed it, he’d almost asked Minho to teach him, but he’d been sixteen and Minho was only just starting to tolerate him after the break-in, and Jeongin hadn’t wanted Minho to scoff or laugh at him. But now he could ask anything he wanted to ask.
“No,” said Minho. “I’ve always been able to do it.”
Jeongin almost sighed at that. Of course, of course it was an innate talent, another to be added to Minho’s roster, with his quick brain, his strength, his protective streak. Sixteen year old Jeongin would have been crushed by that — sixteen year old Jeongin had still been made to sit at the kitchen table a few times a week in order to get through middle school science, a venture he even to this day he didn’t get the point of. It had been a lesson in humiliation, mostly, because Minho would come through and see him sitting there and come over and, every so often, try to explain something to him, which had made Jeongin want to drown himself in the kitchen sink. The reminder that he was young, and more than a little stupid, particularly in Minho’s eyes, had been too much.
He’d snapped one day, just before his seventeenth birthday. Hyunjin never has to do this! he’d ranted, which was true, Hyunjin had never been made to open a textbook at all. And you never graduated middle school anyway! he’d told Chan, and threw the textbook across the room, and nobody had made him pick one up again.
Childish of him, thinking back, embarrassingly childish. But it had got the job done.
“Are you happy?” Jeongin asked, as Minho turned back to the papers, shuffling them around in a way that must have made sense to him. “About the safe?”
“Yes,” said Minho. He sounded a little absent, but his eyes kept flickering to Jeongin. “I wish we had more time, but there’s nothing to be done about that. Just have to hope Hyunjin gets the swing of things before the weekend.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Jeongin asked.
“Then that might fuck us over,” said Minho, very shortly. He didn’t offer an explanation for it, but he wasn’t annoyed or upset. Just only halfway paying attention. Jeongin would have asked him to elaborate, not sure if it was just Minho’s pessimism speaking or if there was a more tactical reason, but Minho was looking through the papers in earnest now and after a moment he made an irritated noise under his breath.
“What?” Jeongin asked, sitting upright.
“I can’t find the text Felix’s sister sent this morning,” Minho said, still looking. “I thought it was here, it should be here, but perhaps I forgot to grab a copy from the workshop.”
“Do you need it?” Jeongin asked, already shuffling to the edge of the mattress, where he’d left his shoes earlier. “I’ll go get Seungmin-hyung to print another out for you.”
“Ah, baby boy, it’s okay,” Minho said, but Jeongin had already wriggled his feet into his sneakers and was climbing to his feet. He almost said, let me be useful to you, but he knew without needing to say it that it would just make Minho annoyed at the idea that Jeongin needed to be anything. But Jeongin got so few chances to do something for Minho, who seemed to spend so much time looking after Jeongin.
“I’ll go get it,” he said brightly. “I won’t be long.”
Minho looked like he wanted to protest but he let Jeongin go, let him slip out of the room and into the cold hallway. It was very cold, away from the warmth of the bed, even though he was still wearing his hoodie from when they’d been out. He could still not quite believe he’d been chosen for that, and even if it had been something small in the grand scheme of things, it still mattered. It was still a significant step forward for him.
He raced down the stairs, wanting to get the paper as quickly as possible so that he could return to the warmth of bed. He didn’t bother knocking on Seungmin’s door, not that anyone ever did that, and just pushed it open saying, “Hyung, can you print out—”
He stopped, the words dying in his mouth. At the workbench, Changbin ripped his mouth from Seungmin’s, turning to look at Jeongin with horror. They had been kissing, the two of them, Seungmin not at his desk but instead perched on the edge of the table, Changbin standing between his spread thighs. Even now, where Jeongin stood, he could see the way Changbin’s hands were pushed up under Seungmin’s sweater, so that Jeongin could also see the pale skin of Seungmin’s side and stomach.
It had been real kissing, too, nothing tentative or unsure about it. Not the kind of kissing done between two people trying it out for the first time. Seungmin, also looking at Jeongin now, was actually panting a little bit. Oh god, Jeongin thought, faint with the horror of it. Is Changbin-hyung touching his nipples?
“I am so sorry,” he blurted out, certain his face looked like a tomato, and then he turned and slammed his way back out of that room.
He got up two whole stairs before he stopped again, part of his brain saying you didn’t get the print out whilst most of his mind felt like a series of bolded question marks and nothing else. He thought he understood, for the first time, the meaning of the phrase in a tizzy. He could not have had an actual coherent thought if he’d tried, and his body felt locked into place, a sort of complete embarrassment keeping him right where he was, caught in indecision.
“Oh god,” he said, hands covering his face, his view of the concrete stairwell obscured by his fingers. “Oh my god.”
The door to the workroom flung open, a cut-off call of his name, and Jeongin jumped at the sound of it, whirling around to find Changbin standing just outside the door, clearly having chased after him. He looked even more panicked than Jeongin felt, and he said again, much quieter now, “Jeongin-ah, fuck, can you come back in here? I can explain, just— come back in?”
“Yeah,” said Jeongin, his heart still racing in his chest, mostly just grateful to have an answer for what to do that wasn’t just standing on the stairs wanting to flap his hands around a bit.
He came back into the workroom, where Seungmin was no longer sitting on the bench but instead standing, his sweater pulled back to neatness; if it weren’t for the flush on his face, the redness of his mouth, he would have looked perfectly normal. Jeongin avoided his eyes, looking slightly down to the floor. The most he’d ever seen of Seungmin’s body was his skinny arms in the summer when he admitted defeat to the heat and wore a t-shirt, he never even wore shorts. That flash of tummy from Seungmin was striking Jeongin as infinitely more embarrassing than if he’d walked in on Chan and Felix in the middle of fucking.
Changbin shut the door, with a remarkably soft click — Jeongin hadn’t realised that door could shut so quietly — and then came around Jeongin without touching him to stand near Seungmin. There was something very closed off about Seungmin’s body language, his arms folded across his chest, his hands tucked under his armpits, a kind of tenseness that Jeongin would not have dared bridge. But Changbin put his hand against Seungmin’s back, where Jeongin couldn’t see it, and said, “Jeongin, you…”
It was not often that Changbin was at a loss for words. Seeing it now made Jeongin say, “Hyung, I really am so sorry, I should have knocked.”
Seungmin said nothing. He wasn’t looking at Jeongin either, his face turned away to face the wall where the bricked up windows were. Changbin glanced at him and then sighed and said, “No, Jeongin, it’s— it’s not your fault. We should have been paying more attention.”
“Should put a fucking lock on the fucking door,” Seungmin muttered.
Jeongin twisted his hands in his sweatpants, a way of stopping himself from lifting either of them up to chew on his fingers instead. Seungmin sounded mad, a bite to his voice that was not his usual edge, the kind that Jeongin knew was not serious. For all Changbin was trying to reassure him, Jeongin knew that he was to blame — Seungmin was always imploring him to knock, to learn to come into rooms with more grace than an elephant, and Jeongin had never taken it seriously. It was Jeongin’s fault that he’d interrupted like this.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
There was silence for a beat, and then Seungmin sighed, the air whistling slightly through his teeth. When he looked at Jeongin, finally, he no longer seemed quite so mad, just very tired. “It’s fine,” he said. It was short, extremely clipped, even by Seungmin’s standards, but Seungmin never said anything he didn’t mean, so if he said it was fine then he must mean it.
Jeongin tried to make his shoulders relax, looking now at Changbin, feeling again that pulse of abject embarrassment. Changbin was clearly trying to be normal but he was blushing too, pink across his face, and that was the weirdest part, suddenly, because Jeongin never saw Changbin embarrassed. Changbin used to sing along with songs playing in stores trying to get Hyunjin to smile in public. Changbin hadn’t even blinked that time Jeongin knocked an entire counter of drinks over at a coffee shop, even as Jeongin wanted to die from humiliation. He’d never seen Changbin look like that.
“You,” he said, not sure how to word it. “Are you two—?”
“Yeah,” said Changbin. He rubbed at his face with the hand not still touching Seungmin’s back and said, “Yeah, we’re together. It’s not— we have been for a while, it’s not really new.”
Jeongin absorbed that. How long was a while, he wondered, how old was not really new. The most shocking part was that Jeongin had not noticed it at all. How unobservant was he to have not seen any of it? But when he cast his mind back, he couldn’t really even think of any moment that should have been a tip off. Among the others, their relationship seemed to be the same it had always been: friendly, a close working relationship, Changbin so often subjected to Seungmin’s many errands and requirements.
Perhaps they had been spending more time together recently? But Jeongin could not really place his finger on that, either, whether that was new or not. They had somehow managed to keep this so completely under wraps that nobody, not even Minho, had suspected it. Jeongin had prided himself on keeping his feelings for Minho secret and yet it was slowly coming out that a bunch of people knew. He maybe should have gotten advice from Seungmin, since he seemed to be the real expert on it.
“Wow,” he said, after the silence had stretched on too long.
Changbin smiled, very weak, a smile that was only there because he knew he was supposed to smile. His face, when it sobered up, was remarkably serious. It was always so jarring, to see Changbin look so solemn. It made Jeongin understand when people often said that Changbin was intimidating. “Jeongin,” he said. “I know this is a lot to ask but— would you keep this a secret from the others? Just— for a while longer?”
Jeongin twisted his fingers further into his sweatpants, hoping he didn’t stretch the material too badly. He wanted to ask why, why did Changbin want this to be a secret? Wasn’t it difficult, to sneak around like this, to be constantly waiting to be caught out by someone or another, by some idiot who had never learned to knock when he entered a room? The others would all be happy for them, Jeongin knew; Jeongin was happy for them, now that he was starting to wrap his head around the entire thing. It was a bit of a weird combination for him — he’d been fairly certain Seungmin was asexual, which showed what he knew — but he was happy for them all the same.
But when he thought about it, really thought about it, it was understandable to the extent that part of him wished, suddenly, that he’d had the same opportunity. To enjoy his time with Minho, the start of their relationship, without anyone looking at them, without any of the intense scrutiny that had occurred. It would have been nice, he thought, but realistically, they would have been caught out almost immediately anyway. His happiness was too much to hide.
“I can keep it a secret from everyone else,” Jeongin said, “but I have to tell Minho-hyung.”
Seungmin twitched. Changbin said, an odd note of desperation in his voice, “Jeongin, I know you two are in a relationship now, but you really don’t have to tell each other everything.”
Jeongin— well, he disagreed with that, honestly. It hit him suddenly that Seungmin must have been the one to tell Changbin about Jeongin’s feelings for Minho, and that Seungmin must have not told Changbin about Felix for those couple of months he was sitting on that. Changbin had certainly not known about that in advance. Jeongin felt like he had seen, up close and personal, the kind of effect that secrets had on a relationship, and he had no desire to start that kind of thing so early into his own with Minho.
Besides, it wasn’t just that. “Hyung,” he said. “I mean, I don’t want to keep secrets from him anyway but like, look at me.” He motioned to his face, still red with embarrassment, the flustered feeling still holding him tight. “He’s going to know right away that something is up.”
Changbin looked at Seungmin, a helpless, questioning look, but Seungmin was back to looking at neither of them, staring at the wall again like it held all the answers to his problems. He looked like he didn’t want to be in this room, having this conversation, a sentiment Jeongin understood perfectly.
“Besides,” he added, “I only came down to grab something, I’ve already been gone for long enough that he’ll probably come looking soon.”
“That’s—” Changbin sent another look at Seungmin, who stood there, jaw tense, arms folded still against his chest. “Jeongin, I really think—”
“It’s fine,” Seungmin interrupted, a toneless repeat of previous words. “You can tell him.”
Jeongin was surprised; Changbin looked outright shocked. He turned slightly more towards Seungmin, body language like that of someone trying to shield Seungmin, except that he was shorter and not quite managing it. “Baby,” he said, an undertone that Jeongin heard anyway. He had to repress a noise at the pet name. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said Seungmin. His eyes flickered over to Jeongin. Despite Changbin’s obvious discomfort with the situation, there was nothing really unsure in Seungmin’s face now. “It’s— if it’s Minho-hyung, he won’t tell anyone else about it.”
Jeongin nodded slowly. That was true, Minho would not, not if Jeongin asked him. Probably not even if Seungmin or Changbin asked him, especially not after Seungmin had kept a secret of a similar nature for Minho all that time. But if there was something they all knew about Minho, it was unlikely to be something he was happy about.
“Seungmin—” Changbin started.
“You said you came to grab something,” Seungmin said, without looking at Changbin, who was staring at him with the confusion slowly dropping from his face and being replaced by something that Jeongin didn’t like, actually. It was a little too similar to how Chan looked at Felix sometimes. Christ, he must be a really good actor to keep that look off his face most of the time. “What is it?”
“Oh,” said Jeongin, blinking at the sudden shift in the conversation. “Um. Minho-hyung needs the texts from Felix’s sister printed out again.”
Seungmin nodded, and turned away to go to his desk, straight-backed and silent. Changbin watched him go, chewing on his bottom lip before he gave Jeongin a little sideways look and said, over the sounds of Seungmin clicking, “You really do need to learn to knock, Jeongin-ah.”
There was a touch of his usual humour in his voice, weak as it was, and so Jeongin pulled himself up to his full height with an annoyed huff of air. Changbin still said it was one of the worst days of his life, the first time they realised Jeongin was going to be taller than him. “Well, maybe you shouldn’t be getting it on in the middle of the workroom!” he said. “Anyone could have walked in.”
“At least we knew enough to close the door,” Changbin retorted, which— Jeongin didn’t really have a response for that.
The printer spluttered into life and spat out a couple sheets of paper, which Seungmin snatched up and then, spinning on his desk chair, held out to Jeongin, an insistent motion. Jeongin had to go to him, taking the papers from him with a murmured thank you. Seungmin just hummed. The way he was looking at Jeongin now, steady and as open as Seungmin ever got, somehow made Jeongin feel like he might tear up, a hint of the crybaby he had once been and still could be.
It was the trust, he thought. This, on the back of Seungmin going to bat for him against Chan, seemed to be another brick in that wall. Another sign that Seungmin really did see him as a grown adult.
He said goodnight to Changbin, put up with the squeezing hug Changbin subjected him to before he let him leave the room, and then was back in the cold hallway with the workroom door shut behind him. For a moment he found himself wondering what would be happening behind that closed door, what kind of conversations would be taking place, what they were doing— and then he stopped himself with a little slap to his face and started up the stairs.
Despite what Changbin had just told him, he didn’t knock on Minho’s door before he slipped inside. It was him, Minho would know it was him from the way his footsteps sounded on the concrete floor outside, but also he hated the idea of asking for permission to come in here. He’d wriggled his way past the defence of the door once and he was not going to let Minho throw it up again.
Minho was already looking at him as he came inside. He had one foot inside a sneaker, like he really had been about to come and find what Jeongin was up to, and he was frowning. “Baby boy,” he said, looking at Jeongin’s face so intently that it was almost like having something hot pressed there. “You were gone for— what happened, why do you look like that?”
Jeongin didn’t answer for a minute, just came to the bed and handed the papers off to Minho, who immediately set them aside, and toed off his own shoes so he could fold himself down cross-legged on the mattress. He didn’t really know how to begin telling Minho about this.
“Jeongin,” said Minho, so perfectly serious, so perfectly concerned. How could he possibly think he was a bad man, when he could sound like that?
“It’s okay, hyung,” Jeongin said. He reached out and took one of Minho’s hands. “I just— Seungmin-hyung wasn’t alone in there? He was with Changbin-hyung, and I didn’t knock, and well, I um. I caught them making out.”
There was a split second of perfect silence. The kind of silence that made Jeongin, who had always thought the phrase was stupid, think, oh I really could hear a pin drop like this. Then Minho said, much too loud, “They were what.”
“They were making out,” Jeongin repeated. He was trying to keep his voice steady but the situation was finally striking him with how absolutely bonkers it was and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or not. “They’re in a relationship too, and they said I could tell you, but it’s a secret for now, so we have to—”
“Oh, that asshole,” Minho growled; Jeongin honestly wasn’t sure which one he was talking about for a moment. “No wonder he fucking stood up for Kim Seungmin so much when it turned out he’d been lying to us. I don’t believe this, I’m going to—”
He moved as if to climb up off the bed but Jeongin still had hold of his hand and he clung to it, making sure Minho didn’t get much further than up onto his knees. It was Minho, so he could have absolutely shaken Jeongin off him, but he didn’t, he just went still as Jeongin said, “Hyung, no, you can’t, please.”
“How long?” Minho asked, looking at Jeongin. His expression was angry, yes, but also aggrieved in a way that made Jeongin, absurdly, kind of want to laugh. He couldn’t explain why, but he thought maybe it was just slight hysterics. What a weird day this had been. “How long have they been hiding this behind our backs?”
“I don't know,” Jeongin admitted. “A while, I think.” Minho growled again. Jeongin yanked their joined hands to his chest. “Hyung, please, just let them be. It’s not bad, they just wanted privacy, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Minho sat there, breathing heavily, not looking away from Jeongin’s face. Jeongin smiled at him, as reassuring as he could, and with his free hand reached up and brushed the hair back from Minho’s face. He watched the way Minho almost flinched from the touch at first and then he relaxed into it, let Jeongin pet him a little even. Jeongin’s hand was too cold for it, but Minho clearly didn’t care.
He needed touches like this, Jeongin knew. Soft and gentle, careful affection. Jeongin wanted to give him it all.
“Seungmin-hyung gave us privacy while we figured this out,” Jeongin said. “He saw us on the monitors, you know. In the television room. He didn’t say anything to anyone about it. Can’t we give him the same, until they figure it out too?”
Minho made a bitten off noise, like he disagreed but knew he was wrong for it. Stubborn in his way. Jeongin smoothed his thumb along Minho’s browline and then leaned in and kissed him, right on the corner of his mouth. Minho still wasn’t quite used to that; Jeongin felt him exhale, shaky, and one of his hands grabbed Jeongin’s upper arm, not like he was pulling him away but rather like he was holding Jeongin steady.
“Put your work away?” Jeongin asked, voice barely a murmur at this point. “Come to bed?”
He could feel Minho’s breath against his cheek, they were so close. Minho’s eyes bore into his, remarkably beautiful. He was almost unbearably handsome, even more so now than he’d been at nineteen when Jeongin had first seen him. That fifteen year old Jeongin, with his braces and shyness, filled with the excruciating reality of being in the throes of puberty, wouldn’t have been able to wrap his head around Minho being more handsome.
“Okay, baby boy,” Minho said eventually, his eyes fluttering shut. “Let’s go to bed.”
Notes:
Reminder that we're posting chapter 24 a week early, so it will be up one week from today on July 7th (some ppl were wondering why — we just have a wedding to go to the following weekend and are busy asdfghj) but yes, keep it in your calendars!!! you aren't gonna want to miss it 😈
Chapter 24
Notes:
here we are.... we finally made it.... it's done.... [looks at the remaining chapters left to write] IT'S DO—
this is a long chapter but honestly it's not as long as we'd expected it to be so we take the wins where we can find them i suppose!
chapter specific tags: for this one, almost everything that could be tagged is covered by the general fic tags up above, but dialled up to 11. please take heed of this!! there's also some vague homophobia and casual misogyny on the parts of the baddies in this chapter.
Chapter Text
Hyunjin let his head hang forward, the water running hot down his neck and over his shoulders. The glass divider between the shower and the rest of the bathroom was almost fully opaque with condensation, the white steam of the water filling the entire room at this point. He always had hot showers; the first time he’d had a shower in his new life, he hadn’t even known hot water was an option. Once he’d known better, he’d never turned back. He’d let himself stand under the water for much longer than usual tonight, though, and it was maybe a little ridiculous.
He didn’t care. In fact, he wasn’t thinking of anything that wasn’t the agenda for tonight; months of planning condensed into a single point, like sunlight through a magnifying glass, and the thought of that left him buzzing with a nervous energy that he really, really did not like. They were hours out from the biggest job of their entire lives, a job that had absolutely no guarantee of going well, and he thought maybe he deserved a hot shower.
It had been a hectic few days, as the night Chan had set for the job barreled towards them. Hyunjin had spent most of the time in Seungmin’s workshop, working on the safe that they’d managed to lug out of the back of the van — well, Changbin, Minho, Chan and Jisung all together had managed to shove it out. Hyunjin and Seungmin had stood around, Hyunjin bitching at them not to damage it, Seungmin muttering about it scuffing his floor. Which was concrete, so scuffing was the least of the issues with it, in Hyunjin’s mind, but the floor had only been a little damaged and the safe not at all.
It had taken him a few hours, the first time, to break into the safe, the clicking of the mechanism so much more subtle than models he’d been used to in the past. A truly expensive safe, and he had been deeply, deeply glad to have had the practise. Chan had reset the code for him and Hyunjin had tried again and again, until he was consistently getting it within the time frame he was likely to have in that office in Blackbird’s.
He would just have to hope that it was as easy tonight.
He sighed, and turned the water off. As soon as he opened the divider door, there was a rush of cool air against his skin; as warm and humid as the air was in the bathroom, it was still cooler than it had been in the stall itself. On a normal day, he’d get dressed in the bathroom, even if the humidity kept his skin a little damp. It always felt like an added layer of warmth, although Changbin often insisted that it was just making him more cold in the end.
Hyunjin didn’t know. Science didn’t make sense to him.
He towelled off a bit, just enough that he wouldn’t be trailing water all the way through the apartment, and then, at the very least, pulled his boxers on. That way he could wrap his towel around his shoulders, let it drape down his front and back, so that only his legs were displayed at all. Chan had had to show him, years ago, how to wrap a towel around his waist, but Hyunjin had never liked it. It left too much skin on display, his chest and shoulders bare to the world.
Even when it was just himself in the room, he never liked it. And so he’d bought the biggest bath towels they sold and he draped them over his body to hide as much of it as he possibly could.
The air in the hallway outside was even colder than in the bathroom and he darted through to his bedroom, which was just that bit warmer, although he still huddled on his bed for a few moments, holding his towel closer to his body. His blanket was thrown half onto the floor from earlier, when he’d tried to nap, tried to get just a little bit of sleep. He’d mostly just lay there with his eyes closed, his body not shutting off in the slightest. The time he’d set his alarm for was the time he usually went to sleep, so he rolled back out of bed in the worst possible mood. The hot shower probably hadn’t actually woken him up any but it made him feel better about the night ahead.
After a minute or so of allowing himself to process his existence he got up off the bed and went to his desk where he had laid out the clothes he would wear tonight. They were simple, the same kind of all-black outfit he usually wore on jobs, but at least now he no longer had to worry so much about keeping his hair covered. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, with Seungmin keeping them from the cameras, but a flash of bright red in the middle of the night was certainly more obvious than a dark head of hair.
He pulled on a pair of pants that were fashioned to look like jeans, but probably weren’t, judging by how stretchy the material was. Then there was a black turtleneck, very tight, which he wore under one of the few hoodies he owned that wasn’t baggy. It was hardly tight, either, but it didn’t come with any excess of material, wouldn’t get in the way of his movements. It would hopefully, too, give him just enough warmth that he wouldn’t freeze to death out there without a coat on.
Next was the process of drying his hair, at least enough so that it wouldn’t freeze to his scalp when he and Jisung were out on the rooftop together. He sat on the edge of the bed, the air dryer droning as it blasted hot air at his head, and tried to let the heat and sound empty his brain out. He was not usually this on edge for jobs, but then, he supposed, jobs tended to— not be this. Not so many steps, not so high risk.
He usually didn’t have to lay in the trunk of a car on a job.
He let out a breath and switched off the hair dryer, the room plunging back into silence. It was quiet up here in the apartment, almost too quiet now that Jeongin had basically all but moved downstairs. Hyunjin was used to being able to go down the hallway and knock on Jeongin’s door to ask if he wanted to hang out, and now that he was down in Minho’s room it felt more— difficult, somehow. Fraught, perhaps, because he’d never once knocked on Minho’s door before.
He still wasn’t sure what he thought about it all. The change was strange. He envied Jeongin like he was not sure he’d envied anyone, even as he was happy to see the way Jeongin was so very obviously happy. He wished the feelings inside of himself could be simple and nice but that had never been the case. Things were always complicated.
He scraped his hair, mostly dry if not fully, back into a ponytail, as close to his skin as he could make it so that it wouldn’t come loose in the middle of the job and get into his eyes. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, his skin pale, hair dark, his face tired and severe looking. It was a look that he was not sure he really liked, but it would do for tonight. He didn’t need to look good for sneaking around.
He grabbed his boots from his wardrobe and let himself out into the hallway. He could hear some kind of shuffling from the main part of the apartment, and when he padded out there it was to find Felix sitting on the arm of the couch, fidgeting, his feet moving back and forth against the floor like a cat kneading. He looked very unsure of himself, sitting there like that.
Like Hyunjin, he’d dressed in all black, although his look was decidedly more aimed at fitting in on the street and less like he was some kind of cat burglar. He was wearing Chan’s leather jacket, something Hyunjin had once joked was the only stylish thing Chan owned, and a baseball cap pulled over his hair, which was honestly the cutest thing Hyunjin had seen. He peered at Hyunjin from under the rim and said, “I was waiting for you.”
“Aw, angel,” Hyunjin said. He wanted to ruffle his hand through Felix’s hair but he couldn’t with the cap on. Instead he held out his hand for Felix to take, so that Hyunjin could tug him to his feet. It was truly amazing how Felix could not keep his emotions off his face, or, maybe, it was that he’d had the skill, once, and chosen to let it go now. Every bit of his nerves was showing, his eyes so big in his freckled face. “Let me put my boots on, okay?”
Usually, when he went out on jobs, officially or unofficially, he wore shoes that were soft and supple, things he could move easily and silently in. It had taken years to work these combat boots to that level, expensive things that he’d bought with the express purpose of wearing them in. They laced up, so they took a bit of time, but Felix waited for him, fidgeting in the entryway with his own boots on.
Hyunjin took his hand again once he was done, and Felix clutched it like it was a lifeline. He was not built for jobs, his angel baby, not built for the stress of it all. Hyunjin squeezed his hand and said, “Let’s go downstairs, okay?”
Most of the others were already in the workroom, milling around, Seungmin and Minho by the van discussing something in remarkably quiet, mellow tones. Chan was sitting at the worktable looking over some papers and when he saw that it was Hyunjin and Felix who had come into the room, he managed to pull a smile through the stressed out expression on his face. Perhaps some of that had to do with the sight of Felix in his leather jacket.
“Look at you two,” he said, holding out a hand for Felix to take. Felix did so without letting go of Hyunjin’s, which always amused Hyunjin. “Copying my style.”
It probably hadn’t been too difficult for Chan to dress for tonight, Hyunjin reflected. He, too, was in full black, his usual style, but he looked more dressed up than the rest of them, presumably because his first task was to take the car to Blackbird’s and pretend like he could, feasibly, be someone going to a casino for an evening. He was wearing a black dress shirt with black jeans, wide enough on the legs that he hadn’t tucked them into his boots. There were a set of leather gloves laying next to him on the table, presumably to cover up the tattoos.
Hyunjin let go of Felix’s hand and took his own seat at the workbench, on the end closest to the door, as Felix went to sit next to Chan to find out what he was looking at on the laptop screen he had open in front of him. Over by the van, Minho’s voice suddenly rose in a scathing comment about Seungmin being the most nit-picky person Minho had ever met.
“Says you,” Seungmin retorted, before Changbin started trying to make soothing noises at them.
Jeongin, sitting on a stool that he’d pulled away from the table a bit, was watching them without making any move to intervene. That, potentially, was down to the fact that he seemed to mostly be watching Minho, his gaze remarkably focused on him. A quick glance at Minho showed why: he was wearing a long-sleeved tight black shirt that zipped up the front, the zipper pulled down just far enough to show the hollow of his throat. It was tucked into slim cargo pants, which were in turn tucked into the combat boots that Minho seemed to wear on every job. Hyunjin was fairly certain they were steel-capped on the toes. There was a tactical belt on his hips, already with a gun tucked into a holster. Jeongin was looking at Minho like he was very much mentally undoing that zipper in his head.
Changbin was dressed in something similar, his shirt plain black but still long-sleeved, and even Hyunjin could admit that his arms were, in a word, ridiculous. Jeongin, meanwhile, had clearly tried to mimic the look as best as he could with his wardrobe, and had settled on black jeans that he’d tucked into his boots, and a thin black sweater that was decidedly looser than what Minho and Changbin were wearing. It would do, Hyunjin supposed, but he kind of wished they’d got Jeongin a matching outfit, with the cargo pants. He thought that might have looked funny, their three different builds on display at once.
He tried, for a few moments, to work out what the argument was about, but it seemed kind of impossible. It kind of felt like Seungmin and Minho were just bickering for the sake of it, both trying to let out some of their nervous energy. It was something about the van, which meant Hyunjin didn’t need to worry, because he didn’t have anything to do with the van.
Their backpacks and equipment were all lined up on the floor, his pack full of Felix’s explosives next to Jisung’s, and the guitar case that held the rifle. There was something odd about seeing them all, everything laid out like that. There were holsters on the workbench too, handguns for everyone to pick up when it was time to move out. And Hyunjin’s hunting knife, next to the thigh holster he’d be putting on for it.
The door opened again and Jisung came into the workroom with remarkably little fanfare, for him, although it was possible that he just got slightly overlooked with the way Minho and Seungmin were bickering. Hyunjin noticed him, though. Hyunjin noticed him immediately, and had an odd moment of deja vu, because it was exactly like he’d gone back in time to before their trip to Blackbird’s the first time, as he watched Jisung walk to the workbench to collect the holster that had been laid out for him.
The clothing was different but the effect on Hyunjin was the same: a feeling like he wanted to slide off his stool and go to the floor and thrash around on the concrete in a screaming tantrum. Jisung was wearing black jeans too, tight like Hyunjin’s, but somehow— worse, the way they clung to Jisung’s legs, highlighted the skinny narrowness of his hips. Hyunjin thought they might actually be the jeans he wore to Maniac last time. He’d paired it with a tight black t-shirt, one that looked like it might be long sleeved, and then over the top he was wearing a leather jacket.
Hyunjin, looking at that jacket, and then at Felix in his jacket, wondered how the hell two people could wear such similar pieces of clothing and yet have such completely different effects on Hyunjin.
The jacket was not the worst of it, though, although it was pretty fucking bad. No, Jisung had taken the time to do his hair, the way he had worn it the last time they went to Blackbird’s, slicked back so that his undercut was showing. The hair that Hyunjin had told him looked hot, the hair that Hyunjin liked more than he thought he’d ever be able to say in words because to try would be unbearably embarrassing.
He watched Jisung, waiting to see if Jisung would notice him looking, not sure what he’d do if Jisung did, in fact, catch him, but Jisung seemed to mostly be paying attention to the bickering, as if he was trying to figure out what the problem was, and so it was Changbin who noticed him next, and his voice cut through the fight as easily as a warm knife through butter.
“Now why the fuck are you dressed like we’re off to a nightclub,” he said. Jisung, in the middle of buckling his holster in place, went still like a rabbit caught in headlights, blinking as all the attention focused on him. “You realise we’re going on a job, right,” Changbin added, the laughter in his voice.
“Well, yeah,” Jisung said. “What, I can’t look good on a job?”
“What are you looking good for,” Changbin said. “You’re not even going to be on the security cameras.”
Jisung pretended to slick his hair back, except of course it was already slicked back and he wasn’t going to touch it for fear of dislodging the gel. “Well, what if we get arrested,” he said. “If I’m going to jail, I at least want to look hot in my mugshot.”
Despite the reminder that arrest was, in all probability, likely for at least some of them, it caused a burst of laughter around the room, which had almost certainly been Jisung’s aim, considering his smile when he heard it. It was really amazing to Hyunjin, sometimes, how much Jisung invited being laughed at. It was obviously different to the kind of mocking laughter Hyunjin had often had directed at him; nobody here would ever laugh at another person the way some of those men had laughed at Hyunjin. But it meant that he couldn’t stand it, sometimes, to be considered the butt of a joke. And yet Jisung invited it, in a lot of ways. He didn’t take himself seriously in a way that Hyunjin genuinely, genuinely envied.
“If you get arrested, looking good in your mugshot will be the least of your worries,” Chan said dryly.
“Nuh-uh!” Jisung said, sounding exactly like a child for a moment. “It’ll be my biggest worry! I mean, look at Hyunjin,” he added, gesturing at Hyunjin, who startled a little bit at so suddenly being included in the conversation, at having so many eyes on him now. “Look at him! I don’t want people to see our mugshots and think, wow, that other guy’s a freak. I need to do my best too!”
“God,” said Hyunjin, unable to stop himself. “You are so stupid.”
It was perhaps the most fond he’d ever sounded of Jisung, and certainly the most fond he’d ever sounded in front of other people. He’d been letting it slip a few times in front of Jisung in private, but around the others, it still felt like something— taboo, was maybe the word, but maybe not. It just was what it was, private. Something for him to have without anyone else being able to see it. A little step forward that he’d taken all by himself.
So much of Hyunjin felt like it was constantly on display, his past a neon sign that flashed over his head even when it was nowhere near the topic of conversation. Maybe he wanted those private moments sometimes.
Jisung looked at him. There was always a moment, when Hyunjin said something like that, where Jisung looked at him as if to check what, exactly, was going on. Like he couldn’t quite tell just from Hyunjin’s voice if he was joking or serious, he had to look at his face too, to fully know. Hyunjin, truthfully, had no idea what he was seeing, because as far as Hyunjin could tell, he looked about the same no matter what, but Jisung seemed to clock it all the same.
Jisung grinned, a slow spread of his smile across his face. He leaned against the worktable, turned in Hyunjin’s direction, his hip propped against the edge of the wood. He looked cocky, the same way he sometimes did at Maniac, when he was flirting with the pretty girls who wanted to touch his arms and take him home to bed. All of his attention was focused on Hyunjin, in a way that made Hyunjin want to shiver.
“Yeah,” Jisung said, voice light, his eyes alight with playful humour, “but I’m cute, right?”
A spark went up Hyunjin’s spine. He’d wondered, a few nights ago, if Jisung had actually registered it when Hyunjin had called him cute. You’re lucky you’re so cute. Apparently he had.
It should have maybe flustered him. He was not quite sure why it didn’t, except that hearing that leading question out of Jisung’s mouth made him want to not give in so easily. He looked at Jisung as steadily as he could, raising one eyebrow, as devastating as he could make it. “Don’t push your luck,” he said. His voice came out— low. It almost shocked him, but he was rewarded with Jisung straightening up from his slouch with a little squirming movement, his eyes back to being wide in his face.
They looked at each other. Hyunjin felt— he didn’t—
“Hey,” broke in Chan, and it wasn’t that Hyunjin had forgotten others were in the room but they’d faded enough in the background that he almost jumped at the sound of Chan’s voice. “Don’t argue.”
Hyunjin felt, for a moment, a confusion so strong that he almost opened his mouth and said, what are you talking about, except of course, for Chan, and probably the others, it probably did sound like arguing. It probably sounded the same way it always did: Jisung trying to be friendly, and Hyunjin shutting it down. Except it hadn’t been like that at all, and Hyunjin knew that Jisung had felt it. He was a little pink as he laughed and said, “Ah, sorry, I was just fishing for compliments.”
Felix sighed, gustily, and met Hyunjin’s eyes for a moment. Whatever anyone else thought, Felix had seen the truth, and he gave Hyunjin a pointed little look, a little mischievous, a little exasperated, before he said, “Jisung-ah, I like your hair.”
Jisung grinned sunnily at him. He seemed to not be feeling any of the stress and tension of today, or at the very least, he was not showing any of it on his face, in his body language. Hyunjin had not been joking a few days ago: Jisung was not someone made for anger. “Thanks, Lix,” he said. “I like your jacket, we match.”
Felix laughed a little, leaning into Chan’s side. “It’s not mine,” he said. “It’s Chan-hyung’s.”
“You suit it more,” Jisung told him conspiratorially, like Chan wasn’t sitting pressed right up against Felix. Felix laughed again, and Chan rolled his eyes a little bit, but he was smiling.
Hyunjin watched them quietly, not breaking in. There was something about watching Felix and Jisung interact that made Hyunjin’s insides feel warm but tangled up together. It was not just the slightly agonising knowledge that Felix could, if he wished, spill one of Hyunjin’s biggest secrets, because he knew, deep down, that Felix would never do that to Hyunjin. It was just that their energy felt the same sometimes. Both of them made for laughter, for happiness.
Minho appeared by their side, manifesting out of nowhere like some kind of demon. Hyunjin, who had made a habit of moving silently, still didn’t quite understand how he could do it, when Minho was solid and strong. “Hyung,” he said, and Felix fully jumped, his hand pressing against his heart. “It’s time.”
The mood, which had been just lighthearted enough, sombered immediately. There was very little other talk, aside from people asking others to hand them stuff, as Hyunjin collected his pack and followed Chan silently out of the back door to the car they had rented for the express purpose of leaving in Blackbird’s parking garage. It was nice, a black BMW, with leather seats and a touch screen set in the front console. It had come with a GPS tracker, presumably so the rental company could track it down if it got lost, and Seungmin had seemed to take great pleasure in breaking it and deleting all the data it had stored inside.
Hyunjin put his stuff in the backseat, and Chan put Jisung’s in there too before he shut the door. The metal loading door to the workshop was rolling up behind them, remarkably quiet, although that was probably because the mechanism had been oiled to an inch of its life in the hopes of not waking up the entire fucking neighbourhood with the sound. Minho came out of the back door carrying what looked like most of his group’s stuff just as Jisung drove the van back out of the workshop, very slowly, something very cautious about his driving suddenly.
“This thing is so big,” he said, once it was outside, leaning out of the front window to talk to them all without the sound carrying too far. “Sorry if I knocked any of your stuff over, Seungmin.”
Seungmin, stepping out of that opening in his workshop, said, “You didn’t, but thank you for apologising, which is more than what Minho-hyung did.”
“I’ve never touched your stuff,” Minho said, which was very much a lie, but Seungmin just sighed. Now that the van was out, Felix and Jeongin traipsed out after it, Felix’s arm hooked around Jeongin’s elbow, which was one of the cutest things Hyunjin had ever seen, the two of them walking side by side. Jeongin was carrying a gun in his free hand, something big and mean-looking. Hyunjin didn’t like it at all. Seungmin stepped back inside the workroom, and a moment later, Changbin pulled the shutters shut on the loading door, closing them both in there, presumably to lock it up from the inside while Seungmin supervised.
Minho had the doors of their actual car open and was loading bags into the footwells down there. It was no BMW, but it was a recent enough Hyundai model, and it had originally been sourced at Minho’s very specific request. Hyunjin didn’t know cars, and frankly could not think of anything he was less interested in, other than maybe sports, but Minho had said this model because it was fast and easy to manoeuvre.
“Just in case we ever get into a car chase,” he had said, so casual with it that even now Hyunjin wasn’t sure if it had been a joke or not.
Jeongin untangled himself from Felix, clearly intent on heading to Minho, perhaps to help out, but Chan said, “Jeongin-ah?” Jeongin looked at him, and for a moment he looked so grown up, so remote and beautiful with it, that it made Hyunjin want to cry. It made him want the Jeongin he first met back, fourteen and small and sure only of the fact that he was loved.
At least Jeongin was still that last thing. How odd to match him in that now.
“Yeah, hyung?” Jeongin asked.
Chan held out his arms wordlessly. Jeongin’s expression softened and he looked a bit more like himself, except when he went and folded himself into Chan’s arms, he was taller than Chan by more than Hyunjin would have expected. He’d been a little taller for a while now but now— ah, he was grown, he was grown.
Hyunjin shivered. It was definitely going to be cold tonight, without a coat.
Chan held Jeongin close, saying something softly into Jeongin’s ear that had Jeongin nodding. Then they both stepped away from each other and without a word, Jeongin went to Minho, who ran a hand over Jeongin’s hair, shockingly intimate, and said, “You’re in the back, baby boy.”
Jeongin slid into the backseat of the car just as Changbin and Seungmin came out of the building, the door shutting and locking automatically behind them. Without a word, Seungmin went to the van that Jisung was still half-hanging out of, and climbed into the back of it. Changbin went to where Minho was standing next to the Hyundai, tapping his foot against the ground.
“Whatever took you so long,” he said, very sarcastic for some reason. Changbin gave him a mean little side-eye, the kind of thing he usually kept for Jisung, but didn’t say anything and just got into the driver’s seat of the car. Minho rolled his eyes and went to the passenger side.
Felix had watched them all and it was only now that he came to Hyunjin, who met him with open arms. Felix clung to him so hard, so tight against his front with his hands pressed right against his back, that it felt like Hyunjin could absorb him whole. He kind of wanted to. He hugged Felix back just as tightly. He wanted to say something— light, maybe, something to maybe make Felix smile, but he couldn’t manage it.
Instead he just said, “Angel baby, stay safe, okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” Felix said. “I’ll have Chan-hyung with me.” He pulled back a little bit and looked up into Hyunjin’s eyes, his expression very fierce for Felix. “You stay safe too, okay?”
Hyunjin nodded. He would do his very best, at the least. He let Felix go with one last kiss against Felix’s forehead, and let him go to Chan. They would see each other soon enough but they would insist on being the way that they were. He didn’t bother watching their hugs and instead looked up and across at the van and instantly, shockingly, met Jisung’s eyes.
Jisung was watching him and he didn’t look away or do— anything when Hyunjin looked back. There was that emotion in his eyes again, the one when he had looked at Hyunjin back in Maniac, drunk out of his mind against that bar, that glittering expression that Hyunjin had never seen on him before that night. He didn’t know what it meant, and sometimes he thought he had figured out all of Jisung’s expressions.
Then Jisung smiled. “See you soon, Hyunjin-ah!” he called, waving his arm out the window.
“Shut up,” Hyunjin said. “You’ll wake the neighbours.”
Jisung laughed, quietly, and ducked back into the cab of the van, as Felix broke away from Chan and went and climbed into the back of said van. There was the sound of the door being pulled shut, and a moment later the sound of Changbin starting up their engine. Hyunjin looked at Chan who said, “Shall we?”
Hyunjin gave a very small nod, and then he folded himself into the passenger seat of the BMW. Its engine was smoother when Chan turned the car on with a press of his finger, less of a roar and more of a gentle hum. It smelled— really nice in here, that new car scent. Hyunjin wondered if it would smell like this in the trunk.
Chan led the way out of the parking lot, followed by Jisung in the van, then Changbin in their car at the rear. They hadn’t gotten very far when Changbin broke off from their little procession to head a longer way around to the vault, to avoid being seen too much with the rest of them, to make tracking them on the cameras a little more difficult. They’d return a different way too, once everything was done, almost heading out of the city before they came back.
It was quiet in the car, just him and Chan together with the sounds of the wheels on the road, the hum of the engine. Chan didn’t seem to want to speak, and Hyunjin didn’t feel much like it either, so he just curled up his body as best as he could against the door and looked out at the city going past.
Even at this time in the morning, the city was not quiet. Quieter than it was during the day time, but Hyunjin was always shocked anew whenever he was out late at night and he saw how many people there were, how many cars drove on these same roads. Sometimes he wished he could stop them and ask what they were up to. Were their purposes as unsavoury as his own?
“Hyunjin-ah,” Chan said, eventually. Hyunjin turned his attention to Chan in the driver’s seat, but Chan didn’t take his eyes off the road, his face in profile. “How are you feeling about all this? Do you want to run through it again with me, is there anything you’re unsure about?”
Hyunjin took a moment to give the question the care it deserved, to really think about his answer. But he’d been over everything multiple times, with Jisung and Changbin and even Minho, who had been the most thorough about it, grilling Hyunjin on details that Hyunjin was fairly certain he didn’t even need to know. Jisung had probably gotten it worse.
“I’m okay, hyung,” he said quietly. “I’ve got everything.”
Chan nodded. He didn’t look overly convinced though. How stressful tonight must be for him, to be sending everyone out, even Jeongin, and to have no control over anything that happened to any of them. All of them helping him to chase after a dream that Chan had been grasping at for ten years now.
There was an honour in being included in that, Hyunjin thought. In being part of this team who could do this for someone who had done so much for them in turn.
“I just— I know how much this is asking of you,” Chan said, interrupting the silence that had fallen again between them, something urgent in his voice. “I know tonight is going to be difficult for you. If it’s too much, Hyunjin, it’s not too late, we can still—”
“Hyung,” said Hyunjin. He reached out and touched Chan’s knee, a brief touch to get him just to stop. “I’m going to be fine, I promise. Is this still about the car?” When Chan was silent in response, his energy a little guilty, Hyunjin said, “It’s going to be fine. It’s not asking too much of me. I can do this, hyung, I really can do this.”
They pulled up at a red light, and Chan took that chance to look at Hyunjin. There was a GS25 on the other side of the road, its blue sign lit up so bright it might as well have been a beacon, and it reflected around Chan’s head almost like a halo, even through the window. He looked at Hyunjin’s face for a long few moments, long enough that the signal turned green. But Chan still didn’t drive off right away.
“If you’re sure,” he said.
Hyunjin was sure. He could be sure, because he was not going into this alone, he would not be alone. It was the same feeling as those nights he climbed in the windows of sleeping monsters and slit their throats in their beds. There was danger in it, but it didn’t feel like it, because just half a block back, sitting in an idling van, was Jisung. Jisung, who had promised to always protect him.
“I’ll have Jisung with me,” he said. “Of course I’ll be okay.”
——
The last time they had come to Blackbird’s, Jisung hadn’t actually made it to the alley that everyone else had spent most of the night at, and so he had followed Chan carefully all the way there, not letting too much distance get between the two of them but not too close to make it suspicious or dangerous.
He had been aware the entire time of Felix and Seungmin in the back of the van, the two of them sitting on the floor now that Seungmin’s bench had been ripped out and not replaced. Changbin had talked about fixing it for a while before Seungmin had said there was no point if he was going to be the only one in there for most of the night, and so Jisung had been as careful as he could as he drove, not wanting to brake too fast or go too quickly over speed bumps if he could avoid it.
“Sorry,” he said over his shoulder every time, and every time there was Felix’s voice piping up, “It’s okay!”
The alley where the van was going to be parked for the night was a few blocks from Blackbird’s, and at some point the evening before, Changbin had driven their second rental over, a nondescript Kia, and parked it in the alley to stop anyone else from getting the same idea and blocking them off. Chan pulled off to the side of the road on one side of the alley entrance, and Jisung copied him on the other side, letting the engine idle but cutting the headlamps so that they were back in darkness.
The back door of the van opened, and a moment later Jisung watched Felix in the side mirror come around into view. He had his baseball cap pulled low over his face, and everything about his stance should have screamed suspicious but his body language was such that he just looked harmless, easily overlooked. He skirted around the alleyway and after thirty seconds or so, the light from the Kia’s headlamps spilled out onto the street in front of them.
Felix drove the car out of the alley and pulled around to the right, where Chan’s car was sitting at the side. He stopped, and Jisung watched the car’s passenger window roll down, Felix and Chan likely speaking, the conversation too quiet for Jisung to possibly hear with his own windows rolled up. Through the rear window Jisung could see Hyunjin lean across Chan, probably speaking to Felix too. After a few moments Hyunjin settled back in his seat. Only then did Felix continue down the street and then turn to head to the back of Blackbird’s.
Jisung pulled the van forward and then, very carefully, reversed it back into the alley. It was not the biggest van in the world, but it was still considerably larger than a car would have been, and he wasn’t used to driving it, but it was easier than he’d expected to reverse all the way down to the dead end and then stop, leaving just enough room at the back for Seungmin to get out if he needed to.
Chan pulled in after him, also reversing down the alley, leaving quite a bit of space between him and the front of the van. It probably meant the front of the car was sticking out a bit but at this time in the morning it hopefully wouldn’t cause any issues for the time they were here.
Jisung rapped his knuckles against the divider and spoke through the grate. “You’re okay back there?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Seungmin. He sounded harried but he often did, so Jisung just took him at his word and hopped out of the van.
Chan and Hyunjin were also just getting out of their car, both of them closing the doors after themselves as quietly as possible. Hyunjin lifted a hand as if to run it through his hair, a nervous habit of his, Jisung had noticed, but his hair was tight in a ponytail and he had to let it drop back down. He was chewing on his bottom lip in lieu of being able to mess with his hair.
Jisung opened the trunk of the BMW. Now that he looked at it like this, the trunk really didn’t seem all that big. Big enough for him, to be sure, but Hyunjin was taller and a little bigger overall, their shoulder width notwithstanding. It was certainly not going to be a comfortable journey, with Jisung trying to keep his limbs to himself.
Chan came around and looked down at it too. With the van lights still off, it was really hard to see Chan’s exact expression but when he spoke his voice was serious. “Okay,” he said. “It’s time.”
Jisung climbed inside first. It was odd, to be getting in the trunk of a car, especially willingly. He’d never once thought he’d ever be doing something like this, but here he was, folding himself down as small as he could do, shuffling his way to the very back. There was a smell in here that he could not have put into words — not musty, but not as clean as he’d have liked, for a rental car that, hopefully, was cleaned after every time it was rented out. He really hoped it had been cleaned before he got back in here.
It had been dark anyway, down this alley with no streetlights, but as Hyunjin climbed in with him, what little light there had been got blocked by Hyunjin’s body. Jisung had pushed his way as far back as he could, his spine pressed against the back of the trunk, his hands held in front of him. When Hyunjin lay down, it was as Jisung had suspected — there was not enough space for them to simply not touch, as much as he would have liked. Instead, his hands brushed against Hyunjin’s upper back, with nowhere to twitch them out of the way. His knees, curled up to fit, bumped against the backs of Hyunjin’s thighs.
It was hard to make his peace with that kind of touch. Even knowing it was just for a job, that there could be no helping it, Jisung couldn’t help but feel guilty about it. “Sorry,” he muttered, trying to move his knees any way he could.
“It’s okay,” Hyunjin said. Jisung wasn’t sure if he was talking to Jisung or to Chan, who Jisung could just about see beyond Hyunjin, looking down at them from outside. “I’ll be okay.”
Chan didn’t say anything for a few moments. Jisung couldn’t see him well enough to make out the expression on his face, but eventually Chan said, “Good luck, you two. Be safe.”
The trunk lid was closed on them. Jisung’s first thought was, holy shit I didn’t know it would be this dark. It was a complete pitch-blackness, like his sense of sight had been cut off completely all of a sudden. Hyunjin was right in front of him, Jisung knew it, because he’d seen him and he could feel him even now, the way Hyunjin’s breathing meant his back pressed a little more firmly against Jisung’s hands with each inhalation. But he couldn’t see him now.
Hyunjin was stiff, and as they heard the muffled thud of the driver’s door slam, he made a small noise, barely audible. For a moment, Jisung’s hand opened, almost on instinct wanting to press, comforting and warm, against Hyunjin’s back, before he remembered himself and curled it back up into a safe, neutral position. A moment later, the car engine started; back here, without the seats to cushion them, the vibrations of it were remarkably strong.
It wasn’t until they started to move that Jisung heard Hyunjin’s breathing— change. Actually, he felt it first, the way Hyunjin’s back was pressing against Jisung’s fingers more often as his breathing sped up, coming faster. Then it was audible over the sound of the car moving through the streets, ragged in a way that Jisung had not heard before.
“Hyunjin-ah,” he said. Again that urge to touch Hyunjin’s back, again he had to repress. “Hyunjin-ah, are you okay?”
There was silence for a long stretch, no sound other than that laboured breathing and the wheels moving against asphalt. Then Hyunjin said, “Will you talk to me? Talk to me to distract me?”
Jisung would do just about anything in that moment to help Hyunjin, talking was not even close to a hardship for him. “Sure!” he said, a little high-pitched. “What about?”
Another little pause. “I don’t know,” Hyunjin said. His words were short, clipped; he sounded a bit like Minho at his most annoyed, except that was clearly not what was wrong here. “Anything.”
Jisung floundered. He was someone who always had the words, always had something to say, and it had gotten him into trouble so many times in his life that it would have been reasonable to assume he’d learn a lesson from that, but he never had. But right now, when asked to talk, it was like every word had vanished from his brain. He couldn’t think of anything to say for a long moment of Hyunjin’s back pressing rapidly against his curled up fingers.
“When sea cucumbers get cornered by a predator they shit out a bunch of their organs to give the predator something to snack on so they can escape,” he blurted out, pulling from a nature documentary he’d seen. “Then they just regrow the organs.”
It was odd, considering Jisung couldn’t see Hyunjin — although, at this point, his eyes were adjusting and he could just about make out the back of Hyunjin’s head — and Hyunjin’s breathing didn’t even out, but Jisung felt Hyunjin’s confusion all the same. “What the fuck, Jisung,” Hyunjin said, the words a little breathless. “Why do you know that? Do you have any happy facts in that skull of yours?”
“The ocean is messed up, dude,” Jisung said, almost blabbering it out. “Uhm, uh. Elephants are super smart and have been known to mourn their dead?”
“I said happy, Jisung!” Hyunjin said, slightly too loud.
“Well, sorry!” Jisung said. “It’s not my fault the animal kingdom is the way it is! Um, let me think. Did you know if you give a certain species of songbird a colourful leg tag when you’re trying to monitor it, you fuck up the entire local mating system?”
And so it went, him explaining the video he had seen on this phenomenon, or as much as he could remember of it, as they trundled their way through the few blocks they needed to travel to Blackbird’s. Hyunjin’s breathing never quite became normal again, but the more Jisung talked, the quieter Hyunjin got, until the only sign that he was still not okay was the quick movement of his rib cage.
He was just shifting gears to tell Hyunjin about the sharks who had learned to walk on land when the car slowed and then pulled to a stop. Jisung shut his mouth, the words cutting off, tensing up. Hyunjin did the same, the two of them laying as silently and still as possible, as they heard first the front door open and then, very muffled but audible as Chan’s voice, a conversation with presumably Blackbird’s valet. Then the car door shut again, with the vague rocking sensation of someone settling into their seat.
Jisung didn’t dare speak again. He wanted to, badly. He wanted to keep telling Hyunjin about the random animal facts he knew, a whole brain full of the things that he could impart if he needed to. He didn’t want this silence between them, not now that he knew Hyunjin didn’t like it. But he couldn’t risk it, and so he was silent, as their rented BMW made its way into the parking garage.
It was obvious they were in the parking garage, at least, by the way the car titled, and despite their best efforts, and the relatively shallow incline, Hyunjin shifted backwards just enough that Jisung was pressing more firmly against him. He had nowhere to go, and Hyunjin clearly didn’t want to try moving away, and so they just stayed like that. Jisung breathed carefully through his nose and got— the scent of Hyunjin’s shampoo, something with almond milk in it, judging by the smell. He breathed through his mouth after that.
The car pulled to a stop again, much less smoothly than Chan had done so outside, a lurching kind of movement. The door opened and closed again. Then there was silence. A long stretch of it, neither of them moving, despite the proximity, despite the humidity of this trunk now, despite Jisung’s senses filled with Hyunjin’s scent. Neither of them moved.
Their earpieces crackled, their only signal of an incoming message. “He was talking to a security guard,” Seungmin said, low into their ears. “They’ve gone downstairs now, you two can get out.”
Hyunjin moved so quickly it was clear he’d been waiting for that signal. His hand found the little lever like he knew instinctively where it was, but it was more likely that he’d just memorised the location, studied this trunk until he knew it like the back of his hand to make sure he could escape. And sure enough, when he pulled on it, the trunk popped open enough for Hyunjin to shove it all the way.
Cold winter air rushed in to meet them. Jisung was extremely grateful for it, even though it would be bitterly cold on that rooftop. Hyunjin was already hauling himself out of the car, not particularly dignified with it, but then, as Jisung found out when he followed suit, it was very hard to be dignified when you were climbing out of the trunk of a car. He almost lost his balance on the other side.
Hyunjin yanked open the back door of the car and found their bags, all their equipment. They put on their gear as quickly as possible and then Jisung picked up the guitar case that held the dismantled rifle. They looked at each other, their eyes meeting. There was not much light up here but Jisung could see Hyunjin’s face more clearly now. He looked pale, possibly a little shaken still but— ready. Focused.
There was a sound from below them. A car moving. They couldn’t know if it was on the street or coming into the garage but it didn’t matter. They turned as one and ran for the ramp to the floor above.
——
Loitering around the near back of Blackbird’s was not, it had to be said, Felix’s favourite thing to be doing. He’d often seen that building from this angle, when he’d been summoned here by his father, one of the cars bringing him around the back so he could enter through the side entrance, like an employee. If he came with his father, he always went in the front, trailing after Jaerim as he made his presence known. Felix preferred the back, if he was honest, but not like this, not now.
Even being inside the car wasn’t helping the nerves he felt. When they’d come here in the van, he’d been streets away and perfectly hidden inside. Here, sitting in the driver’s seat, he felt exposed, on show. Someone who worked there, someone who recognised him, could come by at any moment and see him and he would not be able to do anything about it. Nothing except lock the doors and hope Chan arrived.
He slumped further into the seat, pulling the cap lower over his face. If anyone looked inside he could only hope that they saw someone asleep in their car, which wasn’t unusual even in this area of town. He might get an unfriendly police officer knocking on the window telling him to move along or asking to see his licence — a problem, since Felix had learned to drive without ever having a licence — but that was better than many of the alternatives.
There was a tablet in his lap, one that Seungmin had provided for him. He’d offered Felix a phone to use but there was something about owning a phone that still felt— wrong. He couldn’t explain it in words, but when he thought about it, maybe it was the easy expectation of contact that went with it. The memories of his phone lighting up at all hours, his father’s name popping up on the contacts screen. There was a relief in knowing that the only people who needed to contact him lived in the same building as him and could find him whenever they wanted.
He had the screen darkened as low as it would go, so that it wouldn’t light up his face in the darkened car too much, but the audio feed was going, as Seungmin worked his way through the security that Felix had set up at the vault. It had been deemed necessary to have Felix on the line so that Seungmin could ask him if anything went wrong, but truthfully, Felix had not had to do anything thus far. He had just sat there and listened to Seungmin click and every so often mutter to himself, barely audible through the connection.
Felix held himself still as someone walked past the car, a couple of men in the kind of clothing someone wore to go clubbing. It was obvious from the way they stumbled that they were drunk, and Felix watched them go past, holding his breath, and then almost jumped again when Seungmin’s voice came through the tablet, much louder now.
“Chan-hyung’s almost there,” he said.
Felix straightened a little and sure enough, less than a minute later, Chan came out of a side-street a block down from Blackbird’s and turned towards the car. He was walking casually, a decided saunter, his hands in his pockets, looking not even a bit out of place even though it was so early in the morning. Felix had learned to blend into the background, but he’d never quite learned what Chan was managing to do right now: the skill of it seeming perfectly natural that he should be there.
Felix scrambled over the centre divide as Chan got closer, moving into the passenger seat. He’d just got settled again, the tablet back in his lap, when the driver’s door opened. Chan pulled off his long black coat — a heavy wool thing, Felix thought, well made — and balled it up before tossing it into the backseat. For a moment there was the distant sounds of people laughing, shouting drunkenly, and then Chan got into the car and closed the door and everything was muffled quiet once more.
Chan immediately started undoing the buttons of his dress shirt, revealing the tank top he was wearing underneath. “Lix,” he said, as he pulled the sleeves over his arms, “you’re good?”
“Yeah,” said Felix. “I’m fine, hyung.”
Chan tossed his shirt into the back seat alongside his coat and then turned to grab the other one they’d stashed there for him. This put his bare skin even closer to Felix, and even in this situation, even nervous and twitchy, there was a not insignificant part of him that wanted to reach out and squeeze Chan’s arms a little bit. He managed to resist the urge, and then Chan was pulling on the looser, long-sleeved shirt he would wear for what came next.
“Seungmin?” he said, as his head emerged from the neck of his shirt. “How are things?”
“They’re going,” said Seungmin dryly from the tablet’s little speakers. “Give me another minute or two.”
Chan nodded, although Seungmin couldn’t see that, and then he looked at Felix. He reached out and took the hat off Felix’s head, tossed it into the back of the car with the shirt he’d taken off, and then ran his hand through Felix’s hair. Felix let his eyes flutter shut for a moment at the familiar touch, the way Chan took a moment to rub the shell of his ear. Then he said, “It went okay, with the valet?”
“I handed it off okay,” Chan said. “Seungmin, are Jisung and Hyunjin okay?”
“They’re fine,” Seungmin said shortly. “Please be quiet for five minutes.”
Chan looked at Felix and mimed zipping his mouth closed. It made Felix smile, which was clearly the point, because Chan rubbed his ear again, smiling back. Felix tucked his hands under his thighs, where they wouldn’t so obviously shake, and let Chan touch him, that small point of connection.
Seungmin’s voice crackled back over the tablet speakers, tinny with it. “Hyung, I’m in the vault system now,” he said. “I’ve got their cameras on a loop, all of their security systems. Felix, I’ll be honest, that was a bitch.”
“Yeah,” Felix said. “It was supposed to be.”
Seungmin huffed out what might have been a laugh, might have been an under the breath curse word. It was hard to tell with Seungmin. “Anyway, hyung, I can tell Changbin-hyung’s team to head in now.”
Chan took a deep breath. It was killing him, Felix knew, to be sending Jeongin with that team, to be sending his little brother on the most dangerous part of this job. Felix— there was guilt, inside of him, because it was his fault, deep down, that Jeongin was in danger, that any of them were in danger. It was his mission, the one he’d asked them to do. He couldn’t have known, at the time, what kind of temptation he was laying at Chan’s feet, but even so. He knew how hard this was for Chan.
He put his hand on Chan’s knee and squeezed it. Chan looked down at that hand, then up at Felix and said, “Yeah, Seungmin, send them in.”
“Okay,” said Seungmin. The tablet screen went blank as he ended the connection. There was darkness in the car, the only light now that from the streetlamps a little bit away. There was silence too, as they both looked at each other, Felix taking in Chan’s features in the blue light of nearly three in the morning in the city.
Then Chan let out a breath and said, “Okay.” And then he started up the engine and pulled the car smoothly away from the curb.
——
Jeongin sat ramrod straight in the backseat of their car — he was shaking, but it was so intense it felt more like vibrating. His M16 lay across his lap, their bags in the footwells beside him, or on the other seats. His elbow kept hitting the grip of his smaller handgun, tucked away in its holster at his side. They were driving around in careful loops near the building where the vault lay, hidden.
In the front passenger seat, Minho was grilling Changbin, who was playing along less and less. They’d run through the job verbally at least five times at this point. Minho had gotten out his folder and was showing Changbin the layout of the basement level again.
They hit a red light. “Hyung,” Changbin whined, shifting in his seat to face Minho a little better. “I could recount the plan unconscious at this point. Besides, isn’t memorising that layout your job?”
“It’s in case I get killed,” Minho said, quick and without any inflection. Jeongin turned forcefully from the thought of Minho, shot through, bleeding out. It would not happen. They would all be fine. “You will need to know how to get out.”
“Seungmin can guide us,” Changbin pointed out.
“You can’t rely on tech like that.” Minho was implacable.
The light turned green, and Changbin shifted towards the front again. Jeongin scooted forward a little, resting his cheek on the side of Minho’s seat. “Shouldn’t I memorise it too?” he murmured, and Minho turned to face him as best he could.
“You have one job, baby boy,” he said, gentler. Changbin gave a long suffering kind of sigh, repressed. “Do you remember what it is?”
“Shoot anything that moves that isn’t you two,” Jeongin readily recited.
“Very good,” Minho said, nudging down to brush his lips over Jeongin’s forehead. “Do you remember what else I asked of you?”
Their faces were very close, Minho’s mostly in profile still. “Obedience,” Jeongin muttered.
Minho touched his jawline, idle almost, except Jeongin could feel the tremors in his body too. “When I give an order,” he said softly, “you will obey. Is that clear?”
Jeongin wasn’t so sure on that point, but he knew Minho needed to hear it, so he said, “I promise to listen.”
“Good boy,” Minho said, turning back around as Jeongin’s face flushed pink.
In a very small voice, Changbin said, “Can you not use your bedroom voices when I’m in hearing range.”
“I can gouge your eardrums out for you,” Minho said lightly, putting all his papers back into their manila folder and then shoving the whole mess into the glove compartment. “Kim Seungmin fucker, I want to hear not a single complaint out of you.”
Jeongin couldn’t see much of Changbin but the back of his head and the edge of his face, like a peeping crescent moon, but he could still tell the look Changbin shot Minho was baleful. “How long is it going to take you to get over that,” he asked, maybe a little glum.
“Eons untold,” Minho said, crisp. Between them, in the cupholder Changbin’s phone lit up with a text from Seungmin — it was the only warning they got before their in-ears crackled to life unpleasantly.
“Chan-hyung and Felix are heading to pick up the sister,” Seungmin said, his voice hollow and odd through the little speakers. “I’ve got the cameras up on the vault and I’m looping what I need to, so you’ve been given the go.”
Changbin smoothly swerved into a turning lane, and then they trundled along for another minute or so before they reached their target building — it had once been used as an office of some kind, only two stories high. The signage on the front had been taken down, the letters still faintly visible from the difference in sun damage on the building’s paint. According to the layout plan, there was a lobby at the main entrance to the building, used as a concierge when the place was in operation, and then beyond that was a large open plan office space, with some smaller, private office rooms at the back.
Jeongin had seen the print outs, the empty cubicles, and then the kind of creepier liminal space of the basement, with its long hallways and barren rooms. His hands were sweaty.
Changbin brought the car into the slim alleyway at the side of the building, pulling up so they were just level with the side doors of the building. Double doors, metal, with a traditional lock and a chain looped around the handles with a padlock securing it in place. There was a camera right above the doorway.
“They can’t see you,” Seungmin said, like he’d seen Jeongin’s face peering through the car window.
The engine turned off and both Minho and Changbin shot out of the car like it had been choreographed. Minho went straight to the doors, going to his knees to immediately begin picking the main lock, while Changbin yanked open the backdoor of the car to begin unloading their backpacks. Jeongin helped with that, passing him the packs and the guns, then scooting out of the car himself.
Jeongin hefted his backpack onto his shoulders; it had several squashed duffle bags in it, but mostly had the explosives. It was— manageable.
The click of the door lock turning was faintly audible, and Minho began picking the padlock next, careful to not jostle the chain and make too much sound.
"Put your gloves on," Changbin whispered to Jeongin as he pulled his own pack onto his shoulders with noticeably more struggle.
Jeongin knew Changbin's was the heaviest; it had the drilling equipment. Most of it. Some was in Minho's pack, weighing him down too. Jeongin, silently, pulled his black latex gloves out of his tactical belt and yanked them on. They stuck to his skin, his palms sweaty with nerves. Both Minho and Changbin were already wearing theirs.
And then Jeongin picked up his rifle, getting used to the feel of it through the latex. The temperature out here was low enough that his fingers were already feeling stiff, but he wasn’t cold, not really. It was a strange sort of sensation, like he could tell it was cold, but he didn’t feel it. There was too much taking up the rest of him — his rapid heartbeat, his blood susurrating under his skin, seeping adrenaline into his every capillary. He felt a little like he could be sliced open and he wouldn’t even feel it right now.
In Minho’s hands, the padlock snapped open, and both Minho and Changbin very carefully worked the chain out from around the door handles, the links clinking ever so softly. They set it gently aside in a coiled pile. Minho glanced at the camera above the doors as he got back to his feet.
“No one inside heard anything,” Seungmin said through their in-ears. “I’ve got the camera feeds looping and the guards that are supposed to be patrolling are talking to one another; they’re not close to where the door will let in.”
Changbin and Minho took their own rifles in hand, Changbin very, very gently closing all the car’s doors. Jeongin’s heart felt like it was trying to crawl up his throat.
Minho touched his earpiece. “Where are the guards?” he murmured.
Some clicking. “Two are in the front lobby, five in the security room, another two are in the centre of the main area, between the cubicles,” Seungmin listed off. “And there’s one guy in the bathroom at the back.”
Minho nodded, his hand dropping to his tactical belt where he pulled out a little black, rectangular device, switching it on. He then returned it to the belt. The cell phone jammer, Jeongin assumed. “Ready?” Minho asked them, and Jeongin and Changbin nodded in tandem.
In his mind’s eye, Jeongin was picturing the layout, his instructions ringing in his mind; shoot anything that moves. Hopefully the guards being so spread out would mean their numbers would be less effective. Being outnumbered like this was less of a hindrance when they’d only be facing off with a few of the guards at a time.
Changbin set a hand on one of the door’s handles, and slowly, he turned it, until he could quietly pull the heavy metal door open. Minho slipped in first, the hallway beyond dim but not utterly dark. Jeongin went next, and then Changbin followed, controlling the door’s swing shut so it made only the slightest sound when it latched again.
They were in a slim, long hallway. At the end of it was another door, but that was propped open slightly with a door stopper, and from that sliver of an opening yellowish light was seeping through. The three of them paused, listening. There was very faint talking, male voices.
Minho looked at them and nodded, taking his place at the leading position and hefting his gun up properly. Changbin went behind him — with the heaviest pack, he was arguably the most vulnerable — and Jeongin brought up the rear. As soon as they went through that door and into the wide expanse of the open office space, they’d be exposed and everything would kick off.
And— well, it did.
Minho kicked the door open hard so it swung wide, wide enough that all three of them could come through in a rapid single line before it was able to swing shut. At the sound, the two guards in the middle of the office space whipped around to see where the noise had come from, already reaching for the holsters at their hips. Average height, bulkier builds, wearing button downs and, probably, slacks. Jeongin couldn’t see below their chests because of the cubicle walls separating them.
He swung the M16 around and squeezed the trigger, the rifle kicking back just a little with the repetitive recoil. Both men went down, but Jeongin didn’t know if he’d hit them or if one of the others had; they’d all fired, the shots loud and ringing in the huge room.
A shout went up from deeper in the building, and Jeongin worked to keep up with Changbin and Minho as he monitored the far wide hallway, where he knew the bulk of the other guards would come from. They hugged the outer wall of the building, ready to duck down behind the mass of cubicles that ran alongside the wall as necessary.
Movement. Jeongin shot at the smudge of dark hair he’d seen beginning to poke out from around the far corner of the hallway, saw the bullet hole appear in the wall just shy of his target. Another shout went up and then the man pulled back out of sight again.
Jeongin cursed, stilling. It was very hard, to aim while walking. Changbin and Minho got a little ahead of him, and he didn’t want to move, instinctively didn’t want to lose the stability. Jeongin tried to walk sideways, keeping his back to the wall, his eyes and gun trained on the hallway to his right.
Out of the corner of his left eye, Jeongin saw movement, heard the hinges of a door. The muzzle of his gun twitched in indecision, a momentary flounder on his part, unsure if he should try and take down the new threat. But one of the others — likely Minho — had already shot, and there was the solid thump of a body hitting the mottled carpet. And a few moments later, Jeongin almost tripped on that same body as they finally reached the back wall of the room. The man who’d been in the bathroom, he realised. The button on his slacks was still undone. What a humiliating way to go. Jeongin, gingerly, stepped over the body as they turned and began to follow the new wall.
Soon they’d be at the door to the basement; the problem was, soon they would also be in view of all the guards gathered in the hallway. Right now, said guards were likely using the cover of the wall to try and get their bearings. Probably wondering why the fuck they couldn’t see these intruders on the fucking cameras. Soon they’d realise they would just have to deal with the faulty equipment. Soon they would start shooting back.
Minho crouched, just far enough that the cubicle walls would be able to conceal him, and both Changbin and Jeongin followed suit. It slowed them a little, Jeongin having to bend a bit farther than he would normally because he didn't want his bulky backpack to give him away like a shark fin over water. Felix had promised that if the explosives were hit by a bullet, that wouldn’t cause them to go off, but Jeongin would rather not risk it.
They reached the end of this bulk of cubicles, and Minho knelt down, his breathing heavy but moderated in such a way that he was utterly silent. Changbin knelt as well, and then Jeongin. He could faintly hear voices.
Minho leaned toward them. “I want to take as many of them out as we can before leaving the cover of the cubicles,” he whispered. Jeongin nodded. This batch of cubicles and the next were spaced far apart, about ten feet, and the gap matched up almost perfectly with the hallway the guards were all hunkered down in right now. As soon as they broke for the next set of cubicles, they’d be out in the open and in perfect view. “On my mark, stand and shoot,” Minho ordered, jerking his head in the direction of the hallway. “We’ll run when they all duck for cover.”
“Yep,” Changbin said, just as quiet.
All three of them shifted, turning and getting their feet under them so they could pop right up. Minho glanced over them and apparently approved, because he whispered, “Three, two, one — now.”
They stood, guns raised to their shoulders already, maybe not exactly in perfect sync but close enough. Their packs made them a little slower, especially Changbin.
The hallway was a huge arch, all the way on the other side of the room, Jeongin taking in the image in a flash — many men, most of them huddled to the wall, their guns drawn. Hair dark and faces pale, their features an indistinct smear over the distance. Jeongin pulled the trigger and held it, as the men raised their guns and finally returned fire. There was nothing but the painful cacophony of gunshots and cries of pain, the scent of blood and gunpowder in the air.
It was hard to tell who’d been hit and who’d simply ducked for cover. A chunk of the cubicle wall to Jeongin’s right blew out in a spray of splinters. The man who’d fired the bullet had half hidden behind another cubicle, and Jeongin caught him in the arm, maybe. He fell out of sight.
“Go,” Minho said, practically a snarl, barely heard over the way he was still shooting. He moved, and they followed, leaving the cover of the cubicles. The men in the hall had all scattered, either ducking back into open doorways or using the cubicles as cover, just as they had done. The guards popped up to take shots, and Jeongin finally understood Minho’s little exercise with the tennis balls. Except this was so much harder.
When they stepped into the open, Jeongin saw one of the men they’d shot right as they’d entered wasn’t dead; his white button down was red all over his right shoulder, and he was awkwardly shooting at them with his left hand from his position on the floor. Jeongin put several bullets directly into his chest, though from the look of it Changbin had also lowered his aim to finish the man off.
Jeongin looked away, the muzzle of his gun skipping around as he tried to chase the blips of movement around the room. The men were spreading out, and he was having trouble multitasking; running and aiming and shooting.
They reached the next batch of cubicles just as a pair of guards popped up from over top the cubicle walls to their left, much closer than Jeongin had been expecting. He swerved his gun around, shooting in an arc, but the other men were already shooting at them. And this time the cry of someone wounded came from very close. Out of the corner of his eye, Jeongin watched Changbin recoil, his hand slapping down on the side of his own head, and then he fell to the floor hard.
Minho heard Changbin’s scream, and he also immediately dropped, Jeongin following suit, the three of them once again using the cubicle walls as cover. A few more bullets whizzed over their heads, blowing off chunks of the plywool walls, before their enemies also stopped shooting. Over the sound of his own ragged breathing, he could faintly hear them reloading.
“Changbin,” Minho whispered, difficult to hear around the ringing in Jeongin’s ears. Jeongin, his back pressed to the cubicle wall, looked and saw blood oozing from between Changbin’s fingers, his hand still clapped against the side of his head. Fear twisted talons in Jeongin’s gut, turning and turning. Minho had his free hand on Changbin’s shoulder, and he said, terse, “How bad is it?”
“I think it’s just my ear,” Changbin muttered. He dropped his hand a little, and Jeongin hissed quietly. It looked less like he’d been hit by a bullet and more like someone had simply decided to take an entire bite out of Changbin’s ear. A bit of the shell and the lobe was left. The rest was gone. “Hurts like a motherfucker.”
“It looks like it didn’t hit your head,” Jeongin said quietly. There was a lot of blood.
Changbin sucked in a breath through his teeth, and then settled his gun back into his hands properly, rolling his shoulders and smearing blood all over the grip. “I’m fine, we need to keep moving.”
In their ears, Seungmin, sounding— off, said, “One of them is crawling around the cubicles to your left. He’s going to try and pop around and surprise you.”
Jeongin brought his gun up, swivelling to take aim preemptively at where he assumed the man would appear. They only had to wait about ten seconds, Jeongin scarcely breathing, but then sure enough a head appeared. The man hadn’t even gotten his gun around the corner too before Jeongin had shot his skull open, the blood splattering like a watermelon that had been dropped.
He hadn’t seen any of his previous kills quite to clearly, so— close. It felt— unreal, still. He wondered if there’d be guilt, later.
“Seungmin?” Minho whispered, touching his in-ear.
“The rest of them are crouched like you are on the far side of the cubicles, by the South wall,” Seungmin said, the words rapid. “Move quickly, stay down, and you should be able to open the door to the basement without any of them seeing you.”
Minho did not wait, he immediately moved into motion, standing in a half-crouch. Changbin hoisted himself up, softly groaning as he did so, more from the weight of his packs than the pain. Blood dripped off the hinge of his jaw.
The door was close, about fifteen feet away, along the wall they were already walking beside. Jeongin did his best to do his duty as the person bringing up the rear, but he didn’t trust himself enough to try moving backwards. He just had to hope Seungmin was paying attention and that if someone tried to sneak up behind them, he’d give them a warning.
His hands inside the gloves were sweaty, his grip on the rifle tightening and loosening in turns.
They reached the door. Minho took a hand off his gun to grab the handle. “Please be unlocked,” he whispered, an uncharacteristic show of nerves.
The handle turned, the door clicking open. After a beat, one of the guards from across the room shouted, “They’re heading downstairs—”
Minho yanked the door the rest of the way open. “In, in,” he hissed, and Changbin darted through with Jeongin hot on his heels. There was the sound of shots as Minho came through the door, and because they were all still crouched, the bullets just hit above their heads. There was the metallic ping of them hitting the metal door as Minho shut it behind them.
“There’s no one down here; all the guards that should have been here were hanging out in the security room,” Seungmin said, still with that edge to his voice.
“Come on,” Minho said, closer to his normal voice. He took the stairs quickly, Jeongin scrambling a little to keep up.
“We aren’t going to bar the door?” Jeongin asked, glancing back just once before they exited the stairwell and found themselves in— something out of a horror game, honestly. The lighting down here was garishly yellow, the walls barren and matte, the floors a staticky grey. It was the kind of place that Jeongin could imagine had no end, the sort of liminal space someone could get lost forever in.
“If we bar the door they’ll all just be waiting for us when we come back up,” Minho said simply, not stopping. He took the lead position again, his gun held lower, looser, their pace quickened without being a run. Jeongin had studied the maps some but he still found himself a little confused, was glad Minho seemed to know exactly where they were going.
They turned down hallway after hallway until finally, up ahead, Jeongin saw an open doorway to their left. The hallway continued on beyond that, but this was where they wanted to be.
There was no door at all, just an open archway into a large room, and there, along the wall to the right, was the huge vault. It looked like the sort of thing Jeongin only ever saw in movies, built directly into the room, the door large and heavy metal, big enough for two people to walk through side by side, when it was open. It even had one of those spinny round handles too. A complicated looking keypad sat beside the handle, as well as what looked like a hole for a specifically shaped key.
There was, really, nothing else in the room. A slim table sat along the far wall, with nothing at all on it. There were a couple of power outlets. That was it.
Changbin shed his pack, plopping it onto the centre of the floor. Minho took his own backpack off a bit more gently, and Jeongin was especially careful with his own. Changbin immediately got to work opening the packs and setting up for the next part of the mission.
“Where are the guards now?” Jeongin asked into the air, and it took a few beats before Seungmin replied.
“They’re coming downstairs now,” he said. “They’re moving slow, because they have no visual aid. They’ve tried calling for backup but the jammer seems to be working.”
“How many are there?” Minho asked, ejecting his magazine and loading up a new one in. He looked at Jeongin and quietly said, “Reload, baby boy.”
Jeongin obeyed, even though his current magazine wasn’t totally empty. He didn’t want to be scrambling to reload in the middle of a shoot out.
“There’s five up and moving,” Seungmin said, “though one of them seems to have taken a hit to the arm.”
“Let us know when they get near and what their positions are,” Minho ordered. He glanced at Changbin, who seemed— steady enough, his hands deft as they pulled all the necessary equipment out of their packs, assembling it. Minho sauntered to the open archway, kneeling down just inside of it. Jeongin did the same, and Minho said, “I’ll cover this end of the hallway, you cover the opposite. Don’t hesitate; when you see movement, just shoot. We have the bullets to waste. They don’t.”
“Right,” Jeongin said, and Minho moved to turn away, bringing his gun up against his upper arm again, but Jeongin added, “Hyung.” Minho looked back at him. Jeongin, a little shaky with the lowering of the adrenaline in him, said, “I love you.”
Changbin coughed; Minho’s face softened. “I know, baby boy. You’re doing well, okay? You’re doing really well.”
Jeongin glanced, quick and darting, at Changbin. He bit his bottom lip. “Okay,” he whispered, worry quivering like a newborn rabbit in his gut.
“In position, sweetheart,” Minho murmured, and he helped Jeongin settle — one knee on the carpet to steady himself, his eye just peeking around the archway of the door, the gun out of cover more so than the rest of him. Minho’s touch was quick and efficient as it guided him, but it was warm too. Soothing.
Jeongin didn’t say anything about how he could feel Minho’s hands shaking just like his own were doing.
——
Jisung and Hyunjin kept to a crouch as they half-ran across the top level of the parking garage, the sky spanning above them, black as pitch. No moon, tonight, and the pollution and light of the city blotted out the stars.
They made their way silently, with all their cargo, to the East side of the building. There was a wall spanning the entire top level, and if Jisung was standing up properly, it would likely come up to the bottom of his ribcage. Not exactly the most secure thing, but this was a private building and he got the sense this top level was rarely used. There weren’t even any cars up here.
He set the guitar case down, and then, carefully, pulled his backpack off and set it aside. Hyunjin also removed his own pack, squatting down beside the outer wall and leaning his back against it. He was quiet as Jisung crouched next to the guitar case, flicking the clasps open and pulling the lid off.
Inside the case, nestled into dark grey foam, was the disassembled Remington.
“Baby,” Jisung crooned, plucking the pieces out and assembling them quickly, not having to even think about it. Muscle memory, at this point.
Hyunjin watched him, silent and rapt, his head cocked to the side a little. It was cute, as cute as he could be, right now, with his dark clothes and his hair scraped back off his face. It made him look so severe. It made him look beautiful.
Once the rifle was all put together, Jisung, carefully, set it down atop the foam of the casing, and reached for his bag instead. He pulled out a little handmade contraption: a selfie stick upon which a small, compact mirror was mounted instead of a phone. Carefully, he extended it, just enough so that he could see, in the reflection of the mirror, overtop of the low wall. It took him a moment of searching to find his target, but then he caught sight of the security guard. He was standing right outside Blackbird’s rooftop door, in profile right now. If Jisung popped up, he ran the risk of being seen in the man’s peripheral vision.
“Poor bastard,” Jisung muttered, squinting at the mirror. Through the darkness, Jisung could just make out the way the man was smoking, the lit end of his cigarette a red little dot. Out of the corner of his eye, Jisung saw Hyunjin look at him askance, so he elaborated, “He just has no idea what’s about to happen.”
“Do you feel guilty?” Hyunjin asked, quiet.
Jisung took a moment to think about the question, watching the man take another long drag off his cigarette. It would not be Jisung’s first kill, though lethal violence for him was always— under orders. He hadn’t done this a whole lot. It was not that he thought himself above culpability for the lives he’d taken, so much as in many ways, he’d felt more like the tool through which they’d found their deaths, rather than the active perpetrator. Perhaps if he ever killed someone up close, it would feel different.
“Not exactly,” he hedged in answer to Hyunjin’s question.
“You shouldn’t,” Hyunjin said, still in that low tone. “He works for the Magpie. He’s probably not very nice.”
“Oh, probably,” said Jisung, and then he grinned at Hyunjin, leaning over a little and handing his contraption off to him. Hyunjin made a noise of confusion, taking the handle of the selfie stick gingerly. “Careful it doesn’t reflect any light. I need you to keep an eye on him and let me know when he turns fully away.”
“Sure,” Hyunjin muttered, sinking down further in his slouch against the wall. He began angling the mirror this way and that, frowning cutely as he tried to get the man in view.
Jisung would have liked to sit and watch him, but he couldn’t. He pulled the rifle into his arms, notching it just so, and got his legs under himself so he would be able to change positions quickly. They didn’t have a lot of time to play with this. If the man stayed in that same position for too long, they’d just have to risk him seeing them, but for now they would try to wait him out.
“He—” Hyunjin said, tipping the mirror. “He’s turned his face that way.” Hyunjin motioned with his own head, lightly bonking it back against the wall, which Jisung supposed was meant to mean East.
“But not his body? Just his face,” Jisung asked.
Hyunjin squinted at the mirror. “It’s dark,” he complained. “He’s— oh, he’s moving, there’s— can you hear that?” Jisung could; loud voices from down on the street, probably a group of friends piling out of one of the samgyeopsal joints up the road, drunk and pleased. “He’s gone to the back wall of the roof, and is looking down—”
Jisung surged up onto his knees, pivoting quickly and scuffing his jeans something awful in the process. He swung the rifle around and planted his elbows on the edge of the wall, one eye squeezed shut as he peered down the scope. It took him seconds to find the man in the magnified view, another few to get his head in the crosshairs. The guard was still looking over the edge of the roof; if Jisung shot him now they ran the risk of his body falling over the wall and down onto the street below.
Step back, he thought, and stopped breathing, so even that slight movement wouldn’t mess up his aim. Come on.
And then, satisfied the ruckus on the street was just noise, and not a threat, the man did exactly that.
Jisung squeezed the trigger. Even with the silencer, the sound of the gun going off was a pretty decent pop. It echoed around the night, summoning a slight surge of noise from down on the street. They’d think it was a firework, or a car backfiring.
The man’s body dropped, just within the confines of the roof’s low walls.
“Not bad,” Jisung said to himself, fast hands already disassembling the rifle. A nice piece of equipment. He’d shove it back into the guitar case and see if they couldn’t maybe come back for it some day.
Hyunjin lowered the mirror, nose wrinkled. “Ew,” he said. “Your kills are messier than mine.”
Jisung, busy shoving the rifle parts back into their foam casings, couldn’t come up with a quip. He was already thinking about the next step: the jump from here onto the other roof.
When he turned back to Hyunjin after latching the guitar case closed, he found Hyunjin had folded down the selfie stick and was shoving it back into the pocket of Jisung’s pack. Then Hyunjin stood up, finally able to without the risk of being seen, and slung his pack over his shoulders. It was bulky, Jisung knew. As was his own.
“Will you be able to make the jump?” Hyunjin asked, peering over the edge of the wall.
Jisung stood too, pulling his own pack on, feeling the weight of it settle. He looked across at Blackbird’s roof. It was a whole floor shorter than the parking garage, but the gap was also bigger than Jisung had anticipated. Enough for a car and then some to be able to fit through the street below.
“I hope so,” he said, his heart pounding hard in his chest. He grinned up at Hyunjin, the wind whipping their hair around their faces now they were out of the shelter of the wall. “Otherwise my short legs will get a whole lot shorter.”
That was if the fall didn’t kill him. It could, if he landed wrong; even if he landed right, there was no guarantee.
“Seriously, Jisung,” Hyunjin said.
“I don’t know, Hyunjin,” Jisung said honestly. “I think I can. Probably. Should we get a running start?”
Hyunjin shook his head. “I’m not; I don’t want to risk my toe catching on the edge of the wall and sending me tumbling before I can even try to jump. Or missing my footing entirely.” And then he put fingertips on the ledge of the wall and brought one foot up onto it, then the other, like it was a very tall stair. Jisung’s heart skipped a beat as Hyunjin balanced there, on the wall, his face now far above Jisung’s. The wind was cold on Jisung’s face.
“Here we go,” Hyunjin whispered. He crouched down, shifting his weight onto his toes, and then he leapt, using his arms at his side to give a little extra momentum.
It was graceful, it was powerful. Jisung lurched against the wall, the cinderblocks digging into his lower stomach, fingers clutching, as he watched Hyunjin bridge the gap in a controlled arc. He landed on Blackbird’s green roof, perfectly silent, and the only moment of issue was when his momentum carried him too far and he had to roll; smashing a backpack full of explosives down onto a concrete roof was not ideal, so Hyunjin made sure that when he pitched forward, he rolled onto his shoulder and then down along his arm, coming to a not-so-smooth stop on his side.
He’d more than cleared the gap. But his legs were longer than Jisung’s.
Hyunjin found his feet as Jisung forced himself to climb onto the ledge just as Hyunjin had. Don’t look down, he thought, but the dark alley beneath was like some great, sucking force, and the wind felt like it was trying to push him forward. Jisung crouched down, the backpack throwing off his centre of gravity in a way he did not like.
How had Hyunjin made it. Jisung was shaking, and it wasn’t just from the sharp bite of the air.
Just jump, do it, you can do it, he told himself, but for a long moment, all his muscles were locked in indecision.
It was a long way down.
Jisung jumped. It wasn’t the same kind of graceful arc that Hyunjin had managed. Jisung felt the strain of his leg muscles, even fit as he was, the weight of the backpack was a stagnant burden.
The good news was Jisung didn’t miss — he’d been worried he’d smack his head, or land chest-first on the ledge and have his whole ribcage crumple like an egg shell. But he landed on his feet.
The bad news was he landed on the ledge, a mere handspan in width, and in trying not to let his momentum carry him forward and risk jostling or crushing his backpack, he overcompensated when he tried to rear the other way. As his spine arched, his backpack swung, the contents shifting, and he felt his whole weight tipping backwards, his arms pinwheeling.
Hyunjin leapt forward and grabbed the straps of Jisung’s backpack firmly, hauling him forward. For a moment, Hyunjin was basically holding Jisung suspended in the air by those straps, Jisung’s feet not touching anything at all. Then he was being set firmly down on the roof, his legs feeling distinctly like jelly.
“I’ve got you,” Hyunjin said, very— gentle, for him.
Jisung’s hands came up and grabbed Hyunjin’s wrists, Hyunjin’s fingers still wrapped around the backpack straps, knuckles pressed to Jisung’s chest. “My hero,” Jisung said, swaying in a way that wasn’t entirely in affectation.
Hyunjin’s eyes narrowed. And then he was applying pressure, using the handhold of the backpack straps to push Jisung back. The low ledge was behind Jisung, right behind him, as soon as he tried to step back his heels and calves met the brick of it. So when Hyunjin pushed him, it meant Jisung was, again, leaning back over that edge. His hands on Hyunjin’s wrists tightened.
“Hyunjin-ah, I’ve already peed myself a little!” Jisung cried, his palms unpleasantly sweaty against the bones of Hyunjin’s wrists. He glanced to the side, saw exactly how far down he’d be falling, and gave a high pitched squeak. “My bladder is going to be completely empty in about two seconds!”
And then Hyunjin was hauling him back again, stepping to the side as he did it so Jisung stumbled forward across the roof a few steps. He pressed a hand down against his side, wheezing a little. There was a pain there and Jisung wasn’t sure if it was a cramp or if it was all the shit in his lower intestines being vapourized into diarrhoea from the stress.
“You’re gross, Jisung,” Hyunjin said, eyeing Jisung’s groin like he thought Jisung had been serious.
Jisung covered his crotch with his hand. “Don’t stare at my wet spot.”
“Are you two done,” Seungmin’s voice suddenly snapped through Jisung’s earpiece, staticky and tinny.
Jisung startled and Hyunjin did too, his hand twitching up to his ear with a wince. “Ah, Seungmin, my bladder,” Jisung whined.
“I unlocked the door about five minutes ago, and the camera feeds on the third floor are being looped,” Seungmin said, clipped and annoyed. So, his usual tone.
“Right,” Hyunjin said, and then looked at Jisung expectantly.
Jisung took a steadying breath and then pulled his Glock out of its hip holster. He double checked the magazine, and then flipped the safety off, holding it with both hands and aiming it down. “Open the door and then stay behind me, okay?” he said to Hyunjin.
Hyunjin nodded and went to the door, with its automatic keypad, and it swung open without an issue when he pulled the handle. He let Jisung pass him by, and then followed, shutting the door nearly silently.
They were in a sparse stairwell, painted yellow concrete, ugly as anything. There was a black, circular dome in the upper corner. Jisung took one hand off his gun to make a peace sign at it, grinning.
Through the earpiece, Seungmin gusted out a sigh.
——
At nearly three in the morning, Seoul was still almost as bustling as it was during the day. The traffic on the roads thinned out a little as they approached the apartment high rises of Gangnam, but it was by no means quiet.
It felt strange to think Felix had spent two decades of his life living here. Aesthetically, this neighbourhood looked very similar to the rest of the city. Maybe a little more— polished, in some aspects, the cafes independently owned with French names above their doors in curly writing instead of larger chains. The building fronts upkept a bit better, and the trees lining the streets maintained so their roots did not beleaguer the brick sidewalks. God forbid a baby stroller have to go over a bump.
The main standout was the cluster of skyscrapers which housed some of Seoul’s most elite, their silver supports and blue-green glass that gleamed at the height of the daytime. Now, they were a smear of black against the skyline, sporadic windows lit up golden, crowned at the top by bright white lights. The Samsung Tower Palace complex, which took up multiple blocks, every road around them large.
Chan had, when they’d first begun planning this rescue, almost thought they would have to abandon it simply because he had no fucking idea where to park. The streets were technically no parking zones and while he didn’t think anyone would call to tow them away in the middle of the night, he didn’t want to take any chances. The buildings themselves all had parking lots and underground areas for cars, but those had manned security booths, were private for the residents. Felix could probably get them through but Chan hadn’t liked the idea of being boxed in like that, having to wait to be allowed out.
They’d scouted the entire area around the building and found a single little road, almost like a service road, that was sandwiched between one of the high rises and the main street, a median with very well manicured bushes separating the two. It gave some illusion of privacy, and it seemed to be where people who weren’t allowed to park in the complexes would leave their cars.
So Chan headed there, the fingers of his left hand tapping a little on the steering wheel. Beside him, Felix had abandoned the tablet, shoving it into the glove compartment. He kept shifting this way and that, like he just couldn’t get comfortable.
It was a narrow street, made even narrower by the cars parked here, taking up over half of one of the lanes. Chan found a gap between two cars that should just fit them, and spent a bit longer than average parallel parking. In his defence, the nerves were starting to really kick in.
To their right, the building loomed. Chan took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then slowly let it out through his mouth. He undid his belt and then touched the pocket of his pants, where some extra ammunition sat, and then he laid fingertips on the grip of his gun, still in its holster against his side.
He was going to have to point the gun at Felix, hold it to Felix’s head. The thought made him vaguely nauseated, even if it was— necessary, was planned. He could hurt Felix on accident so easily, if the gun went off—
“I think I might take the magazine out,” Chan said, thoughts on a loop until he saw the way Felix was looking at him. Flat and a little scathing. Chan asked, “What?”
“You need the gun to be loaded so you can shoot the guys when the time comes— maybe even earlier, if they don’t buy the ruse and we have to resort to Plan B,” Felix said, tone low and a bit blistering. Plan B was, effectively, the panic plan. The shoot-everything-that-moves-and-then-run-like-hell plan.
Chan wilted, feeling something squirm in the pit of his stomach. “I don’t like the idea of pointing a loaded gun at you,” he mumbled, and Felix sighed.
“Hyung,” he said, undoing his belt and then turning in his seat. He laid one of his small hands on Chan’s forearm. “I trust you. Just keep the safety on if you’re that worried.”
I trust you. Those words stabbed at him, tiny pinpricks of pain, like trying to swallow shards of glass. In the low light, Felix watched him, unwavering.
Chan nodded, the slightest incline of his head. “Okay,” he whispered.
Against his arm, Felix’s hand was shaking lightly. He lifted it off, but not before Chan had felt it. “I’m ready,” Felix said. He ran his hand through his hair, fluffing it. “We can do this.”
They could. This wasn’t the most impossible thing Chan would have ever pulled off in his life. In some ways, it was much easier and more straightforward — they weren’t even having to break in, Felix was the literal key through the door. But it felt— worse. The fact of this being a strike against the Magpie, and then to be risking Felix in this way. It was so much, too much. Chan’s heart was going double time, his pulse probably visible in his neck, that vein standing proud along his temple.
Felix got out of the car and Chan followed suit, the night air a shock to his system. He quickly pulled open the backdoor so he could pull on his coat again, with the added bonus of covering up the gun at his hip. On the backseat his M16 lay, and after a moment he tucked it down gently into the footwell. He’d have liked to bring it in with him, but the building security might have something to say about that. Might, because in the lobby, Chan was going to be playing the role of a bodyguard. He imagined sometimes the kind of for-hire goons that came through here would be packing serious heat.
It wasn’t worth the risk though, so Chan left the larger gun on the floor of the car and then shut the door. This way it was a little more hidden on the off chance someone, for some reason, decided to peek into the car.
“Alright,” Chan said, pulling a black mask out of his pocket and tugging the straps over his ears, setting it comfortably across the bridge of his nose. He came around to join Felix on the sidewalk.
Felix gave him a once over. “Follow a little behind me,” he said, his breath puffing out of him, visible in the air. Then he began to lead the way.
They walked to the end of the little side street and then turned the corner, toward the nearest main entrance. There was a little courtyard here with a modern art sculpture at its centre, and beyond that the lobby of this building had a glass front, lit up even at this time of night.
Chan, remembering he was supposed to be playing a bodyguard, darted around Felix to open the door of the lobby for him. He’d half expected Felix to quirk a smile at him, or roll his eyes, but— Felix, as soon as the golden light touched him, had transformed into something just slightly— off. It was in his posture, the way he walked, how he held his weight. The tip of his chin and the coolness of his gaze.
He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t even look Chan’s way, as Chan watched him go inside and then silently followed.
The lobby was large, with a high ceiling and black stone floors. There was a concierge desk with a sharp looking man sitting behind it, and next to that was a row of very modern looking glass swing gates, four of them. Next to those was a large console display, which is what they’d have to use if Felix couldn’t get them through those gates. If Felix’s father had removed Felix’s information from the system, they’d have to ask Felix’s sister to buzz them up and— Chan did not know how that would go. They hadn’t given her a heads up they were coming, as that was just too dangerous. She’d been smart so far but Chan wasn’t sure she’d catch on fast enough if they rang up claiming to have a delivery she’ll have known she didn’t order.
Chan worked to wipe his face of all emotion, trying for the same kind of icy blankness Felix was currently radiating. He was glad, suddenly, that he’d worn his nice wool coat, as it made him look like he— blended in at least somewhat.
The man behind the desk straightened and then stood, examining them with clinical politeness. He was wearing a button down, waistcoat, and tie. Chan could not imagine having to wear a fucking tie at three in the morning.
“Hello, gentlemen, can I help you?” the man asked, deferential but also— assessing.
Felix ignored him, and it looked like the man might say something more, but as they approached it was clear that suddenly, the man recognised Felix’s face. He sat back down, still watching them, but he did not try to make any more conversation.
Chan did not want to have to hurt this man. It was different, with the Magpie’s men. This guy was just some normal civilian doing a normal civilian job.
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
Felix stopped in front of one of the gates. Its display was lit up all blue, and there was a keycard reader, and then a fingerprint reader. Chan’s blood pressure was probably through the roof as he watched Felix put his thumb on the fingerprint one, and waited.
The little display turned green and the glass doors swung open. Chan hurried after Felix before they could close again. He got close enough that he could hear the rapid, slightly wheezy way Felix was breathing. Beyond the gates lay a bank of elevators, eight in total along a long hall.
“You’re doing great,” Chan whispered as they made their way to the elevators.
Felix’s hands at his sides flexed. “It’s this elevator,” he said, very softly. They were far enough away now that the concierge wouldn’t be able to hear them. Felix stabbed at the button that would summon the lift. “The others will go up to the right floor but this is the only one that actually leads into the apartment.”
Chan hummed, watching the number on the display panel steadily lower.
From this angle, the man behind the front desk couldn’t see them, not unless he was to get up and peer around the corner. But even so, Chan was glad when the elevator arrived and the polished metal doors slid open. He very nearly placed his hand on Felix’s lower back to guide him forward, simply through force of habit, and only just managed to stop himself.
Once in the elevator, there was another console. Felix this time rested his whole hand on it, and once it turned green a single button on the panel lit up. Floor sixty-two. Felix pressed it, and the elevator began to swoop upwards.
Chan reached beyond the edge of his coat to rest his hand on the grip of his gun, flicking open the strap holding it in place in the holster. He was very conscious of the security camera in the back corner of the elevator. He didn’t want to pull his gun out yet.
They were rising quickly. Felix got into position, right at the centre of where the doors would slide open. Chan hoped— the guards wouldn’t be right there, waiting, guns already up.
He put his free hand on the back of Felix’s neck, a touch that right now would be comforting, before it turned into something rougher for the ploy.
“I trust you,” Felix whispered, those same painful words. He didn’t look at Chan as he said it, and under his palm, even through the leather glove, Chan could feel his tension. “I trust you.”
The elevator was stopping. As they reached their designated floor, there was the sound of a bell, both inside and outside, and then the doors slid open.
A huge entryway, beige and cream everywhere, a spiral staircase. Voices, from further in the house, male. One of them saying, “The little bitch didn’t fucking say she was ordering food again—”
Chan’s grip on the back of Felix’s neck tightened, and Felix, with some excellent foresight, smacked the close doors button as Chan began to march him forward. The doors nearly caught on the hem of Chan’s coat, but it meant he could draw his gun nearly immediately without the elevator camera catching it, which he did.
The staircase led to a second floor, with an open kind of mezzanine, and gaudy pillars that were likely more for show than support underneath it. From a hallway beyond them Chan caught movement, and he raised his gun, pressing the muzzle of it against the side of Felix’s head.
“Hey, put it on the— whoa!” one of the guards said, as two of them came around the pillars and finally got a look at what was going on and realised this was not, in fact, another delivery of late night jjampong. They both immediately went for their own handguns, holstered at their hips.
“Keep your fucking guns in their holsters,” Chan said, nearly shouting it. He shook Felix by the hold he had on the back of his neck, pulling in such a way Felix’s knees had to bend a little. “Or you’ll get to explain to the Magpie why his son’s brains are all over the wall.”
Both the men froze, looking very uneasy. One was significantly older than the other, maybe in his fifties, while the other one was likely around Chan’s age. The older one slowly straightened from the defensive stance he’d instinctively taken, and equally slowly, he lifted his hand off the hilt of his gun. “Who are you?” he asked, both hands raised slightly, in a show of peace. “How did you get in—”
“No,” Chan snarled, pushing the muzzle of the gun harder against Felix’s temple, forcing Felix’s head to tilt. Felix whimpered, a pathetic little sound, that Chan hoped was all affectation. “I want the Magpie. I want my money.”
“He’s not here,” the same man said. His voice was— very calm. Chan wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. “He’s in Shenzhen. But we can get in contact with him, and get the money.”
The two guards exchanged a speaking look, and Chan decidedly did not like it, did not like that the older one, clearly the one in charge, was giving silent direction to the other. Chan had no cards to play here — it wasn’t like he was going to actually shoot Felix.
After a tense few beats the older man began to slowly back away, his hands still up the whole time. The muzzle of Chan’s gun twitched, Chan legitimately indecisive for a flicker of a moment. Too long of a moment. The older guard was already behind one of the pillars, and it wouldn’t have been smart to try shooting them both — the younger guard had not imitated his older counterpart’s movements. He still had a hand resting on the grip of his holstered gun.
Chan did not like this. The older guard could be calling for backup. Hell, for all Chan knew there could already be backup in the house.
“He’s calling the boss,” the younger guard said, his hair so thoroughly slicked back it looked like a permanent feature, “and getting the money.” With his free hand, he gestured toward Felix. “But before we give it to you, I need to examine him.”
Chan drew Felix nearer. “No fucking way.”
“Look, here,” the guard said, thumbing his holster open. Chan made a show of raising his elbow so he could dig the muzzle of his own gun against Felix, but all the other guard did was, very slowly, every movement obvious, pull his gun out with his forefinger and thumb and set on a side table. Then he stepped away, about six paces. He could jump back and grab it still, but it was no longer in ready reach. “Okay?” he said, eyes assessing and level. “I need to make sure he’s the real thing.”
“Your eyes broken or something?” Chan growled, his hand lifting from the back of Felix’s neck to instead grab a handful of Felix’s hair, pulling so Felix’s head was forced to tip back. Felix made an actual pain noise, high and gasping. I’m sorry, little one, he thought, making sure Felix’s face was visible in the light. I’m sorry. “How many people got faces like this?”
Movement, behind the guard, beyond the pillars and in the shadow of the hallway. Chan for a flicker thought it might be more security, but after a moment, he caught— half a face, a skinny, sharp shoulder. One wide, frightened eye. Felix’s sister. Jisoo.
“You aren’t getting the money until we’re sure,” the guard was saying firmly, and Chan forced himself to refocus. “And before you threaten to kill him again, we both know you won’t; there’s no money in that, and it’ll be a death sentence for you as much as for us.”
This was the part of the plan where Chan had to really, really hope the Magpie would have instructed his men to not kill whoever delivered Felix back to them. No matter the method or manner of that delivery. It would be bad business, in case something like this ever happened again. No one would respond to a reward offer if doing so would end with them in a ditch.
Chan, very much, did not like having to trust the fucking Magpie.
But there was nothing to be done for it. He marched Felix forward, strong strides straight toward the guard. When they were close enough, he shoved Felix down onto the floor at the guard’s feet. Felix went down like Chan had put real force into the movement, appearing to land hard on his knees and hands. The guard stuttered half a step back when Felix’s head nearly knocked into his kneecap, Felix crying out as he hit the stone floor. Chan used the cover of the minor commotion to click the safety off his gun.
From the hall, Felix’s sister gave a hastily stifled gasp. But not hastily enough.
The guard whipped around to locate her, his whole demeanour going a lot meaner. “Why the fuck aren’t you in your room?” he snapped, as Chan stepped back several paces, his gun raised up now and pointing at the guard’s chest.
Not yet, he thought, his finger itchy on the trigger, feeling terribly exposed without Felix in front of him. It wasn’t that he wanted to use Felix as a bullet shield, so much as he was fairly certain they wouldn’t shoot Felix in the first place. Chan was much more dispensable.
Jisoo had mostly retreated back into the hall, stammering, “My— food— I—”
“Who the fuck is she?” Chan demanded, loud and volatile. The tip of his gun quivered. “Who else is here?”
From behind Jisoo, the second, older guard materialised from the darkness of the hallway. He grabbed Jisoo’s upper arm, hauling her into the room proper along beside himself while she made a frightened noise. His other hand was wrapped around the handles of a small duffle bag. Chan swivelled so his gun was now aimed at the older guard, likely the higher threat.
“She’s the Magpie’s daughter,” the older guard said, while Jisoo squirmed a little. His grip on her upper arm was brutal. “There’s no one else here.” Chan hoped that was true. He could feel sweat beading along his hairline. The man held up the duffle bag a little, dangling it. “Five hundred million won, as promised. If it’s him.” He looked at Jisoo and asked, “Is it?” She curled away from him as best she could, her lips pressed together tightly, and he shook her hard, her long black hair swaying violently with the motion. “Is it him?”
“No,” she said, voice wobbling. Her eyes shone with unshed tears.
“It’s me,” Felix said, low and soft. He was sitting on the floor, legs curled to the side, hands still braced on the stone, but he lifted his head, looked at his sister. “It’s okay, noona.”
Her face crumpled as she stared down at him. “Yongbok-ah,” she gasped, the tears gathered in her eyes suddenly falling down her cheeks. She had freckles.
Chan’s fingers were beginning to ache with how hard he was gripping his gun.
The younger guard was giving a low whistle, eyeing Felix on the floor by his feet. “The other guys really weren’t kidding when they said Jaerim’s boy was his only fuckable daughter, huh,” he said, nastily, with a leer that made Chan wish he could take a little extra time with him.
The older guard did not respond to that, his face perfectly impassive. He tossed the duffle bag toward Chan, not nearly hard enough for Chan to catch it, but enough so that when it hit the floor it slid, stopping more or less at Chan’s feet. He did not move to pick it up.
This relinquishment left the older man’s hand free to grab his gun. But he didn’t. Not yet, anyway.
“The Magpie wants to speak to you,” he said, flat and empty. Maybe an attempt at professionalism. “It’s been nine months and no one else was able to track the little traitor down. He wants to discuss employment. Who are you?”
Chan wondered if that was true, or if it was just a stalling tactic. No doubt backup had been called in some capacity. He’d already suspected that the older guard hadn’t just been grabbing the reward — he’d also rung Lee Jaerim at whatever emergency number he’d left behind, and those words confirmed it. And there was no way such a man would be alright letting Chan, a person of unknown identity, storm into his home and be allowed to simply walk out.
Maybe they did want his skills. Maybe they just wanted to know who the fuck he was. But still. Employment. As if. Chan almost laughed. Almost.
He cocked his head to the side a little, the corner of his mouth lifting in something like a smile, something like a sneer, hidden behind the mask. “Sprinkles.”
In one deft motion, hours of practice behind it, Felix flicked open the knife he’d been concealing in his sleeve and then slashed the blade across the younger guard's achilles tendon, just over where his smart oxfords ended. The man screamed, immediately dropping to the floor, and the motion and sound caused the older guard to startle, his hand now instinctively going for his own gun even though he hadn’t yet even realised what had happened. Chan, already aiming at him, finally pulled the trigger, and the older man’s head snapped back as the bullet found his forehead.
Jisoo was the one screaming now, flinching and covering her head with her arms. The younger guard on the floor, face twisted in pain, was grabbing at Felix, fingers digging into Felix’s arm, trying to get the little knife from him. Chan stepped forward with trained efficiency and shot him in the head too, the gunshots echoing in the huge room.
There was so much red, now, splattered and pooling on the pale stonework. Chan, quickly, not as gentle as he maybe could have been, went to where Jisoo was cowering and grabbed her shoulder. “Were they telling the truth?” he demanded, giving her a little shake when it seemed like she would continue to do nothing but sob. “Is there no one else here?”
Jisoo, wordless, nodded, her face wet with tears and blood flecks.
Relief washed through Chan, tempering some of his anxiety. But only some. This wasn’t over. He bent and helped Felix to his feet, Felix leaning on him heavily. “Are you okay?” Chan asked, soft.
Felix looked at him, dark eyes wide. He was pale. His hands were bloody. “Yes,” he said, equally soft. He visibly rallied, going to his sister and putting his hand on her back. “Ah, noona,” he murmured, as she continued to noisily cry. He stroked along her back. “Noona, it’s alright.”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Chan said, strained. He touched Jisoo’s shoulder again, more carefully, and for the first time she actually looked at him directly. Her eyes were red rimmed, the corners of her mouth downturned, still scared. “I’m sorry, I know this is frightening,” he said, as gentle as he could be right now, “but if there’s anything you want to take with you, you’ve got to grab it now.”
“I— okay,” she said, voice thick and wet. She swiped her fingertips over her cheeks, wiping away her tears. “Okay.”
“I’ll help her,” Felix said, using his hand on her lower back to turn her, lead her away.
“Ten minutes, Felix,” Chan said to their receding backs. They made for the stairs, strides quickening, and Chan wanted— to give them a little space. So he headed around the pillars to the hallway, in search of the Magpie’s office. With any luck, the guard had left the door unlocked in his haste to come back out. With any luck, Chan might find something useful in there.
With any luck. They were sure using up a lot of it tonight. Chan hoped it held.
——
Changbin’s arms were already tired — though he supposed a more out of shape person would have begun floundering after the first hole through this fucking concrete wall, thirty centimetres thick. Changbin was on his third hole, the drill bit dull and screeching against the concrete at this point. He’d need to swap it out, glad they’d thought ahead to bring extras, and then even more extras. Jeongin wasn’t exactly bulky but his shoulders were decently wide, and these bits only made holes ten centimetres across.
In his hands, the whirring drill suddenly pushed forward. The bit breaking through to the other side of the wall. Changbin pulled his finger off the trigger and gently eased the bit back out, holding it up and then tipping it so the concrete cylinder inside it fell out with a sturdy thump onto the carpet. It rolled to join its two brethren, and all the fucking dust. Changbin was going to be coughing it up for weeks.
Sweat beaded down his face, along his temples. His ear throbbed, the blood sticky and unpleasant over his neck as he moved, changing out the scuffed and dull bit for a new one. Without the shriek of the drill, it was shockingly quiet — at least, around the shooting, it was quiet. Though that was getting much more sporadic.
In his uninjured ear, Seungmin’s voice came over the connection, emotion thick and strained in every word. “Are you okay?” he asked. The quaver in his voice, the words themselves — Changbin knew the message had been said in his ear, and his only.
“Yeah,” Changbin murmured, loudly enough for his mic to pick up but only just. Minho and Jeongin might know about them, their relationship, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be so on display about it. “I’m okay, though I can’t model earrings in the future.”
Seungmin sighed, shaky and soft. Changbin wanted to hold him, he wanted Seungmin in his arms. I won't die here, he wanted to say. I wouldn’t do that to you. But he couldn’t make that promise.
From the doorway, Minho, still crouched with his gun up, said into the air, “Yah, Seo Changbin, how long does it take to drill a fucking hole into a wall?”
“Well, see, if Jeongin was still twelve, I wouldn’t have to make this hole so damn big,” Changbin snapped back. “But he isn’t, so.”
Minho made a huffing, impatient sort of noise, and then he shot someone — Changbin couldn’t see from this angle, but he heard the way a man down the hall swore loudly.
They hadn’t planned on it taking quite this long, and it wasn’t going to go any faster if he continued to just sit here. The new circle drill bit in place, Changbin got back up onto his knees and set the bit onto the concrete, pulling the trigger and exerting gentle pressure. Dust immediately began flying through the air again, peppering his hands through the gloves, gritty against his exposed wrists.
This was shorter than trying to get through the door of the safe— hell, this was actually possible. Changbin wasn’t sure what kind of machinery they’d have needed to drill through the vault door itself, or what kind of contraption would have been needed to try and get through the very complicated looking keypad. They were lucky the inside wall of the vault was concrete all around, hadn’t been lined in metal. Otherwise this would have been much harder.
And so it went on like that. Changbin worked until his whole body hurt, his arms trembling with the effort of holding up the heavy drill, the constant demand for pressure. His knees bruised against the floor. And always his ear, throbbing and stinging. His hands, when he finally had a hole he hoped was big enough, were nearly numb from the vibration of the drill.
The shooting had long since stopped. As soon as Changbin wearily set the drill aside, Minho was speaking into the blessed silence. “Seungmin?” he said. “They’re not all dead, surely.”
“No,” Seungmin said, for all their benefit. “There’s only three left alive, and they’ve retreated upstairs, they’re trying to use the landline to call— whoever. I’ve cut their communications, obviously. But they’re probably going to realise you’re using a jammer soon, and that they just need to leave the building to make a cell call.”
“But for now we’re alone down here?” Minho asked, still crouched, still that ready position. Jeongin was— trying to also maintain the pose, but Changbin could see him shaking, a little. His muscles giving.
“Yeah, you’re alone, I’ll let you know if that changes,” Seungmin said.
It was only then that Minho finally moved, standing up slowly, giving away that he was stiff. Jeongin actively groaned as he got to his feet, dropping one hand off his gun to rub at his knee with a wince. Minho came over to eye the hole in the wall, just to the side of the vault’s door. Changbin was absolutely covered in dust. He probably looked like a ghost.
“Can you fit through this, baby boy?” Minho asked, looking over his shoulder at Jeongin with an assessing little squint.
Jeongin made a chirping, inquisitive kind of coo. He pattered over, putting his gun down on the ground and kneeling next to Changbin. He peered into the hole, hands braced on either side of it — there wasn’t much to see through it right now, the lights inside the vault seemed to be on, but at this level all that was visible were the little, individual drawers. “I think so?” Jeongin said. He reached down and unclipped his tactical belt, setting it aside on top of his M16. “I can try.”
And with that, Jeongin tried — he at first tried to lead with his head, but quickly realised if he did that he’d be going face first into the floor on the other side. So he pulled back and got into a sort of diving position, putting his hands and arms through and then wiggling his head and shoulders in. The sides of the hole scraped at him, the rough concrete catching on his sweater. He kept making little struggle noises that even now, Changbin couldn’t help but find cute.
“We can make the hole bigger, baby boy,” Minho said, a hand braced on the wall, looming above Jeongin’s struggling half-body and Changbin still kneeling.
Very muffled, Jeongin said, “I can do it!” His feet slid a little on the ground, but then he pitched forward suddenly, with a triumphant, “Aha!”
Changbin supposed that meant he’d gotten his shoulders through. The rest of him would likely be less trouble; he didn’t have much of a derriere to speak of, and there wasn’t anything else that was going to get caught. His head and shoulders were always going to be the issue.
Jeongin took a moment to situate himself, getting his feet into a better position, and — Changbin imagined — setting his palms on the floor on the other side of the hole. Right now his midsection was still in the wall, his stomach resting on the bottom of the hole.
Changbin looked up only to see Minho staring at Jeongin’s ass, which— there wasn’t really any more of Jeongin to see at the moment, but the slight smirk on Minho’s lips didn’t exactly speak to professionalism. It took a second but Changbin made sure to catch Minho’s eye, giving him a baleful stare before mouthing, Don’t.
Minho’s lip curled; it wasn’t a smile. He leaned down and slapped Jeongin’s ass, hard. Jeongin cried out, his legs twitching, and he said, “Hyung!”
“Couldn’t resist, baby boy,” Minho said, and Jeongin mumbled something Changbin couldn’t hear. His ears were still ringing, from all the shooting, from the drill. “Hurry up.”
“I’m trying,” Jeongin said, just a bit petulant, and Changbin really wanted to evaporate.
As Jeongin renewed his efforts to get through the hole, his lower back, and then his ass, safely hidden by concrete, Changbin quietly hissed at Minho, “We’re on a job.”
Minho’s eyes glittered. He didn’t reply.
“Uhm,” Jeongin said, and Changbin turned his attention back to the hole — where Jeongin was trying to pull his feet through, but his chunky combat boots were stuck. “Guys? Help.”
Changbin bit back a sigh, while Minho didn’t bother. They both took hold of an ankle each, unzipping Jeongin’s boots and pulling them off his feet for him. Once free of them he slithered the rest of the way through the hole with ease, saying oof once he’d hit the carpet fully on the other side.
Minho leaned down, speaking into the hole, “There should be a red lever, beside the door.”
“I see it,” Jeongin said, a slight pant in his voice.
The sound of fabric shuffling, very faint, and then a few seconds later there was a loud kind of cranking noise, latches being pulled back. And then the door to the vault was swinging open, Jeongin standing on the other side, smiling widely. His sweater had a long rip down the side, and he was streaked with dust. But still, he was triumphant. Even without his shoes.
“I did it,” he said, looking decidedly fox-ish with his eyes curved into crescents.
“You did,” Minho said, brushing dust out of Jeongin’s tousled hair. “Good job.”
Changbin, a little shakily, got to his feet. He tossed Jeongin a duffle bag. It went soaring right by Jeongin’s side, landing inside the vault. “Start opening drawers, Jeongin,” he said, a little tired.
Jeongin chased the bag down, gleefully yanking open drawers — some were the size of a letter, others large enough to fit a young child in. They were all numbered too, but there was no list in sight of what each drawer contained. That was probably digitised somewhere they’d never get access to.
“Minho-hyung,” Seungmin said, clipped. “I’d get to work setting up the charges — I don’t think you have time to empty the vault and then do that. You need to do it now.”
Minho looked at Changbin, sharp and silent, his question obvious. “I can do this part,” Changbin assured him. Seungmin could guide them, on what to take versus what to leave.
The tension in Minho, which had, at least a little, begun to loosen, returned now. He was methodical as he slung one backpack onto his shoulders, holding the other in his left hand. With his right, he picked up his M16 again.
“Get what you can into the packs,” Minho ordered, “I’ll try to be fast.” He stopped beside Changbin, their shoulders almost brushing. “I won’t be far, but—” His voice dropped to a whisper, gaze darting back toward the vault. “Protect him.”
Changbin blinked, then felt something in his chest— squeeze. The look in Minho’s eyes right now was as feral as it ever got, wild and true. “I will,” Changbin promised, and together they looked at Jeongin, kneeling on the floor of the vault, still in his socks. He was making small, shocked little noises over the little pile of slim gold bars he had found, his eyes wide with wonder. “Of course I will, hyung.”
Minho gave him a curt nod, and then he swept out of the room, his gait heavy with all the extra weight he was carrying.
——
Hyunjin had, long ago, mastered the art of near-silent movement. Purposeful and calculated with how he put his feet down when stepping, the gradual shift of his weight. Jisung was not as good, but he was good enough that there was no moment where Hyunjin had to pause, wincing. It helped that the casino below them was loud, slot machine chimes and laughter drifting up, muffled.
The third floor hallways were empty. There’d been a tense moment where, on the landing of the staircase, he and Jisung had looked down and seen, briefly, the bright cream marble floor that was the second floor’s lobby, the backs of the two security guards down there. But then they’d darted through the open doorway and into the maze-like halls of the third floor.
The security room was up here, but according to Seungmin, there were only three armed guards in there, and the other five people were watching the monitors in the gambling areas, checking for cheating, not so much for real threats. They would be unarmed and untrained, Felix said. There for their sharp eyes and nothing more. With any luck, no one in the security room would ever even see Hyunjin or Jisung.
Hyunjin stayed behind Jisung as they went through the hallways, turn after turn. The walls were painted a gross cream colour that bordered on yellow, making everything sickly, and the floor was carpeted in a spotty berber. Some doors had little number labels on them but many of them were just blank, and all were identical. Even though he’d spent a long time studying the layout, now that he was here, it was confusing. He knew where he was going, but only by counting. Counting doors and counting turns, left then right then left again.
Jisung kept his gun out, always pointed down, even though Seungmin would have warned them if there was a threat. It did make Hyunjin feel safer, made him feel— something he couldn’t fully quantify. He rested his fingertips between Jisung’s shoulder blades, keeping track of him so he could glance periodically over his shoulder.
They stopped with one last turn to make, both of them pressing their backs to the wall. Jisung edged as close as he could to the corner without his shoulder peeking over the edge. Hyunjin could hear soft voices.
“There’s two men outside the door,” Seungmin murmured, like he didn’t want to risk startling them again.
The news of the guards wasn’t a surprise — Felix had told them that much, and they’d seen it on the cameras anyway. But Jisung still found the nearest little black dome in the ceiling and made a, go on, kind of motion at it.
“The closer one is four metres away from you, the other is five. They’re both about Hyunjin’s height,” Seungmin said. “They’re talking and looking at one another, so the one that is farthest is kind of facing you. Kill him first, I think.”
Jisung was looking up at the ceiling, not at the dome anymore, just kind of blanked out in thought. Hyunjin could see him running through the visualisations. After a few seconds Jisung nodded, first to himself, then to Hyunjin. He brought the gun up, adjusting his grip. The silencer made it so much longer.
Then, like on the roof, Jisung whirled around the corner, swinging the gun into place as he did so. Hyunjin heard— the beginning of a word, maybe, from one of the guards, before Jisung took the first shot and the sound abruptly cut off. The gunshot sounded like a loud clap, and then another rang out as Jisung took his second shot.
It had happened so quickly. Clap, clap, and then the blunt, meaty thunk of the bodies hitting the carpet.
Jisung slowly lowered the gun, and Hyunjin cautiously stepped around the corner. This hallway was long, and there lay two men, in uncomfortable suits, their blood splatters painting patterns on the ugly yellow walls. Head shots, both of them. Jisung was shockingly efficient. Hyunjin wondered what it said about him, that he found it unspeakably attractive.
Hyunjin touched his earpiece. “Seungmin?” he whispered.
“I hit the security room with some loud feedback to cover the sound of the shots,” Seungmin said, a little terser than he’d been before. Stressed, maybe. Hyunjin could relate. His heart was pounding so hard it threatened to crack his ribcage, it felt like. “I think it worked. They don’t seem to have heard anything.”
Hyunjin went to the office door, picking his way around blood and viscera and limbs to do it. He was very surprised, when he touched the door handle, to find it unlocked. Then again, he supposed anyone would have likely thought the guards enough security. A flimsy door lock wasn’t going to do much.
He pushed the door open, and then, wordless, grabbed the nearest body under the armpits. Jisung flicked the safety back on his gun and shoved it into its holster before he grabbed the legs, and together they hauled the dead man into the office, laying him none too gently on the floor. They repeated the process with the second body. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done about all the blood. They just had to hope that anyone passing by the hallway would do so fast enough to not notice the splatters.
Once they had both bodies in with them, Jisung closed the door, gingerly setting his backpack down on the— paler carpet of the room.
“I’m shaking,” Jisung whispered, holding up his hand to showcase exactly that.
Hyunjin was too, a little. “We’re almost halfway through,” he whispered, reaching around Jisung to flick on the light. And then— “Oh, ew.”
This room was a total contrast in the worst way possible to the hallways they’d just been sneaking around in. The rest of the third floor was awful in a haunted, liminal space kind of way. But this— it was an extension, Hyunjin supposed, of the main area of the casino.
The carpet under their feet was plush and cream, engraved with swirling flowers and plants. The walls were panelled in beige marble, what little Hyunjin could see of them around the massive paintings everywhere. They were the one pretty thing in the office, completely negated by the chunky, gilded frames they were in. The desk was gilded gold. There was a tacky chandelier hanging from the ceiling. In front of the desk was a wooden chair, also gilded in gold and upholstered in the same shade of cream as the carpet. On the wall opposite the desk there was an alcove with a huge grecian style urn.
Jisung was eyeing the ornate candelabra balanced on the edge of the desk. “Yeah, you know, this is bad, even to my eyes.”
Hyunjin shook his head, like he could erase the memory of the room from his mind even while he was still beholding it. He set his own pack down and rifled through for his kit. Near him, the bodies of the guards were oozing blood all over the carpet. Not that it mattered. Soon this room would be ashes. Which would be an improvement.
“Set out the explosives, I’ll work on the safe,” Hyunjin ordered in a low tone, and Jisung nodded, immediately kneeling and setting to work carefully pulling Felix’s creations out of his backpack, one after another.
Hyunjin went to the landscape painting behind the desk, feeling a little remorse for having to destroy the thing. But there was no way they’d be able to take it with them. He pressed the corner of the frame, a delicate engraved flower giving under his thumb, and then the painting slid upwards to reveal the smooth, black front of a safe.
He opened his kit and pulled the stethoscope out, removing his in-ear and putting it in his hoodie pocket. And then, just as he’d done countless times in Seungmin’s workshop, Hyunjin placed the stethoscope’s earpieces in his ears, set the diaphragm onto the door of the safe, and began to turn the dial.
——
It was strange, for Felix to be back in this apartment, to be standing inside his sister’s room again. There was such a sense of unreality to it, off-balancing just enough that it was keeping him calmer than he perhaps otherwise would have been. If it weren’t for the open suitcase on Jisoo’s bed and the way she was throwing clothes into it, fast and messy, he might have been gripped by a fear that he had woken up somehow and the past nine months had all been a dream.
Chan had said they had ten minutes, and Felix had emphasised that there was very little time to spare — there’d been no way to get into the cameras here, and they could have no idea if anyone was coming. Despite that, and despite the way she was moving around the room, Jisoo still kept talking.
“No, but, Yongbok,” she said, as he handed her the shoes she’d requested from her wardrobe, one of the only pairs she’d asked for. “When I told you that Father was out of the country this weekend, I didn’t think you’d move that fast.”
Felix rubbed his hands on his jeans, a little movement he’d found himself repeating over and over in the five minutes that they’d been packing. There was blood on his fingers, or there had been, from when he’d slashed that man’s tendon, perhaps, or from when Chan had shot him, close enough that Felix had not been able to avoid seeing the wreck of the guard’s face. He wasn’t sure. The blood wasn’t even really there anymore, he’d wiped most of it off on his jeans, but the sensation was there. Tacky. Caught in the webbing between his fingers.
“Noona,” he said, a little tiredly. “We don’t have time, just—”
But she wasn’t really listening. There was something— disarming about that, too. She’d always been a little bossy; sometimes Hyunjin reminded him of her. But there was another edge to it right now, a frenetic kind of energy about her. Maybe she was in shock. “Seriously though,” she said over him, throwing a couple of blouses into the case without even making an attempt at folding them. She looked to the door and then lowered her voice, quiet enough that even with the door cracked open, anyone standing outside probably wouldn’t hear more than the fact of the murmur. “Yongbok, who is that guy? How did you meet him? I really thought he was turning you in, I was so scared.”
Felix glanced at the door. He wasn’t sure where Chan was, but he guessed it was probably his father’s office. Felix had wondered, for a moment, if Chan was going to attempt to pick the lock, before he realised that the guard who had brought the money bag out had probably left the door open.
“Noona,” Felix said again. “It’s really too much to explain.”
She fixed him with a look. Sometimes, when she did that, she looked exactly like their mother had on the rare occasions she’d had to scold one of them. Narae had been too young to really remember much about their mother and had always grumbled about Jisoo making that face. Let me have a memory without your face on her body, she’d used to say.
“Yongbok,” Jisoo said, firm, flat. The name was bad, the name was bad; he held down an odd little shudder at it. “I want to get out of here, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want us to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
“He’s a friend,” Felix said. There simply wasn’t enough time to explain it, not enough time to reassure her of it all. “He wants to help us both, that’s all. Noona, he came here to get you out, please don’t be difficult about it.”
He was half-afraid she would continue to be difficult just to spite him. She could be like that, sometimes, when the mood struck her. She didn’t like it when he tried to tell her what to do, or tried to protect her in some way. He’d been his father’s heir, the only boy elevated above two girls their father barely saw any use in, but he was still only her little brother. It was her job to try to look after him, she’d told him once, when he was still in elementary school, curled up in her bed together secretly, not long after their mother died.
She just huffed under her breath, though, and then resumed packing, grabbing a couple more dresses from her wardrobe and putting them in the case on top of the shoes. It was a mess, and less than a quarter of what she actually owned, but it would have to do. They were only clothes. If there was anything Felix had learned over the past few months, it was that belongings very rarely actually mattered.
There was one thing that mattered though. “Don’t forget your photos,” he said, the words blurting out of him almost like they’d been an impulse, although they were not. He motioned with his hands to the small collection she kept on her bedside table: a photo of their mother, one of her and Narae together as children, another one of them when they were older. All of them framed, taking pride of place there. There was a secret, hiding in the back of the frame of the photograph of her and Narae as teenagers: a four picture strip of the three of them at one of those photo studios on the street, taken on a whim on another day their father was out of the country. They’d printed out three copies and kept them hidden. Narae’s had been under her mattress. Felix didn’t know if it were still there now.
Jisoo grabbed the photos and put them in the case too. She was much more careful with those, taking a moment to wrap them up in a couple of shirts before she tucked them safely under some of the other clothes. Then she said, “Oh, right!”
She whirled and went to her wardrobe and fished something out from one of the high shelves, up on the very top of her tiptoes to reach. What she pulled out was a little box, the one he’d kept hidden and locked in his wardrobe, the one that held the strip of photos of the three of them. The ring that he’d inherited from his mother, along with the couple of photographs he’d managed to keep. Other things too, things he’d thought were lost to him forever.
“I found it,” she said, watching his face carefully. Perhaps afraid that he would cry; for as tough as she could be, they both cried easily, the two of them. “Before anyone could get to it, when it became clear that you weren’t coming back. I made sure they couldn’t take it away or destroy any of it.”
Felix probably was in danger of crying, honestly; it was only the fact that he knew there simply was no time for the kind of emotional reaction he wanted to have that kept him from having it. He swallowed down every tear that threatened to spring to his eyes, but he could not keep the wobble out of his voice when he said, “Thank you, noona. Can we put it in your suitcase?”
She nodded, and tucked the box in next to the photographs, treating it as carefully as she had done her own belongings. Then she covered them with a cardigan and said, “I think we’re done here.”
Felix helped her zip it up and then slid it off the bed so it was resting on four wheels. It was lighter than he’d expected, small enough to be a carry-on if they were flying. The room was still full of things, enough so that a random onlooker probably would never clock it as a room of someone who had left the apartment.
There was a knock on the bedroom door, right before Chan stepped inside; a polite little warning so that they weren’t surprised. Jisoo still jumped a bit though, looking at him with wide eyes. She was intimidated by him right now, but Felix knew it wouldn’t really last. Once she got used to him, she’d be bullying him just like she bullied anyone else she could get away with bossing around.
“Lix,” Chan said, his eyes flicking between the two of them. He had papers in his hands, wads of them that looked like they’d been hastily scraped together into a pile, and he’d taken his mask off. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah,” Felix said. He reached out to take the handle of the suitcase but Jisoo knocked his hand away and took it instead. Felix let her, gave her that slight win, because it meant that when Chan reached out for his hand, he could take it as usual. It was not until he’d done it, completely on instinct at this point, and heard the slight noise that Jisoo made, very obviously and quickly repressed, that he realised exactly what he’d done in front of his older sister. His cheeks flared red; Chan, passing the papers over to Felix so he could get his gun back out with his free hand, didn’t seem to notice.
“What are these papers?” Felix asked, to try to cover up his embarrassment. Behind them was the rattling sound of the suitcase against the wooden flooring. He glanced down at what he was holding but it seemed to be a lot of text and numbers that he didn’t have time to really look over.
“When that goon went to get the money, he left the safe open,” Chan said, as he led them through the hallway to the front door, where said goon was laying dead on the carpet. “Most of what was in there was just money or jewellery but there were some papers that looked promising. I didn’t get a chance to read them properly but we can look over them later.”
Felix looked up from the papers and caught, in the corner of his eye, one of the security cameras nestled in the corner of the expansive entry way. He had grown up with those, ostensibly for simple home security, making sure that they were protected from home invaders, but he knew that his father could get into the video feeds if necessary. He knew his father sometimes watched the footage back too. He’d questioned Felix once or twice about things that had happened when he was away, especially as Felix got older and his father started to exert more control over him.
It was why Seungmin’s cameras had never bothered him. Why they had faded into the background, something he never really noticed after that first day. Even when he had, though, they had always felt— warm. Like a friendly eye watching over him.
“My dad will probably see this footage later,” he said. “He’ll know you took something from his safe.”
Chan glanced up at the camera too. Then something in his gaze— sharpened. Felix had seen that look in only a handful of moments and the last time had been a few nights ago when he had climbed into Chan’s lap and begged to be fucked. He’d seen that look then and Chan had more than delivered — Felix had been a little worried he might not be able to walk the following morning.
“Your father will see this?” Chan asked. His voice was not toneless but it was hard to say what tone he was projecting into it. Felix nodded. “Hmm,” Chan said.
He came to a sudden stop, right in the middle of the wide room. Right in view of that camera. Felix stopped too, turning to him to ask what was happening, but Chan already had an arm around Felix’s waist and was pulling him in hard. Felix almost stumbled into his arms, a surprised noise falling from his mouth, muffled almost immediately by Chan’s mouth on his, kissing him.
It was, probably, like something out of a movie: Felix half-bent back against the curve of Chan’s arm, his mouth parted against Chan’s, off balance enough that there was a delicious helplessness to it. One of his hands was trapped against Chan’s chest, the papers crumpling between their bodies. The other was still held tight in Chan’s hand. And he was being kissed with a heat that made his knees feel a little shaky; made the fog swirl white and misty against the furthest edges of his mind.
When Chan let him go, setting him carefully back onto his feet, Felix was panting for breath. Chan’s gaze raked over Felix’s face, almost like he was checking to make sure Felix was as affected as he’d wanted, and then he looked at the camera. “There,” he said. “That’s something good for him to watch.”
There was a vicious smugness in his voice, like nothing Felix had ever heard before. He’d heard Chan triumphant, happy, sad; he’d heard what it sounded like when Chan was angry, the words tripping out of his mouth in nasty spools; he knew what it sounded when Chan whispered, voice rough and thick with arousal, into his ear as he fucked Felix into wordlessless.
He’d never heard this before though. It was— really fucking hot, actually.
But then he caught his sister’s gaze over Chan’s shoulder. Her eyes were wide, staring at him like she could not quite believe what she was looking at, and a little bit like she thought he had actually gone crazy sometime in the past nine months. His face went red again, worse than before, an instant fire under his skin, and not a good kind.
He patted Chan on the chest weakly. “Hyung,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” And a moment later, Chan nodded and started again for the elevator.
——
Seungmin had known this would be difficult. He’d known it, all these weeks leading up to the job itself, he’d known that it would be hard, would test his limits in a way that nothing really else had. He’d thought he’d known what it would be like, though.
He hadn’t. He’d had no fucking idea.
On one screen, Hyunjin had finally gotten the safe door open, a slightly longer than comfortable procedure that Seungmin had half-watched with one eye as Jisung paced around the back of the room, checking his gun over and over. Hyunjin had it open now, and he and Jisung stood in front of the safe shovelling the money into their packs. The screen next to that one showed the feeds for Blackbird’s third floor, all of them on the one screen, the empty hallways and the security room and the wide stairwell.
A third screen showed the vault, where Jeongin and Changbin were doing something similar in the vault room, that huge space filled with cabinets and drawers and who knew what treasure troves. The two of them were yanking open drawers at random and stuffing whatever seemed useful, presumably, into their bags. The screen above that one showed the feeds for the rest of the vault, those empty office cubicles, the clinically blank business professional environment, repurposed for the Magpie’s needs. With the bodies laying on the floor of the main area, it looked like a horror movie.
Minho ran through those shots, appearing in one and then disappearing only to appear in another moments later. He was laying all the charges as he went, taking them out of his bag and setting them against the support pillars of the building, strategically planned out ahead of time. At least with him, Seungmin had not needed to guide him through the building; Minho knew the layout of that place like the back of his hand by this point.
The last screen had various CCTV feeds of the streets around where the Magpie lived, as close as Seungmin had been able to get when he couldn’t actually get into the feeds of the building itself. A nice area, the kind that Seungmin didn’t much like looking at even through the cameras because it was just that bit too familiar but in a way that felt like another life. The carefully designed streets, the high rise apartment buildings next to modern houses done by famous architects. Seungmin was a little surprised that the Magpie didn’t have one of those, but of course it was harder to break into a penthouse than it was a building where the windows were accessible from the ground.
So many video feeds, so much to keep track of, and he only had two fucking eyes.
It was quieter for now, at least. A moment to— breathe, a moment in which he could shut his eyes and soothe some of the strain in them, just for a handful of seconds. It wasn’t much but it had to be enough for now, until he could go home and rest properly, safe in his concrete-floor bricked up room.
He hated being out here like this. He hated, more than anything, being a part of the action in this way. Going on jobs always meant being closer to what was actually happening, but even then, even when it was like that, there was still something about the staticky black and white of the feeds that made everything feel— uncanny, was perhaps the word he would use. Unreal, in a way that he’d often liked whenever there was call for this, where they needed him for guidance or advice. It meant that he could watch Jisung shoot someone’s head off or Minho smash their face in and simply not even blink about it, because the image was grainy and hard to make out sometimes, if he worked hard at not seeing what he didn’t want to see.
He wished that it had been like that, the moment he had seen Changbin’s head snap to the side and his body hit the ground. He wished that it had felt unreal, so that it would stop playing in a loop inside his head, the way it had been the past— however long it had been since it had happened, since he had sat here and watched Changbin fall to the floor and thought, I just watched him get shot in the head.
He’d made a noise, and even now he was not sure what the noise had been, only that he had been grateful that he’d been muted on all channels. He’s dead and I watched it, he’d thought, and the knowledge that he could do nothing about it had made him feel, genuinely, like he was going to black out, and then— Changbin had groaned and moved and he had been alive, with blood pouring down the side of his neck and half an ear missing, but alive.
Alive. Changbin was alive. And there was nothing Seungmin could do to keep that being the case, other than try to guide him through as best as he could.
On the screens, Minho jogged lightly through the sickly yellow expanse of the basement rooms. Jeongin opened up a cupboard to reveal about four boxes, coated in metal and stacked carefully on top of one another. These didn’t seem to interest him — Seungmin had already noticed that Jeongin was gravitating more towards the shinier, more obviously expensive things — but before he could close the door again, Seungmin said into his ear piece, “Jeongin-ah, open one of those boxes.”
Jeongin looked up at the camera in the corner of the room and then took the top box off the stack so he could open it up. “Oh!” he said, as he held it up to the camera to show Seungmin what was inside. “Are these the hard drives?”
“Yeah,” said Seungmin, looking at the grainy image of the thin dark drives, slotted into their places in the box. “Those are the hard drives, we need those.”
“Okay!” said Jeongin, and then made as if to tip the entire box, at once, out into one of the backpacks.
“No!” said Seungmin, loudly enough that Jeongin jumped and Changbin said, Jesus, wincing. “Try to keep them in the box if you can.”
It took Changbin and Jeongin a little bit of finangling to fit the boxes into the backpack, stacking them one by one, precious time that perhaps they did not have. The last two boxes didn’t fit, and so they had to take the drives out of their protective foam and slide them in how they could; Seungmin would just have to hope they didn’t get too damaged in transit.
He watched them with one eye, as he tracked over the rest. Minho kneeling by a pillar, setting a charge. Upstairs, the guards huddled together in their security room, discussing what to do. Nothing yet outside the Magpie’s house, those streets very empty and still. Hyunjin and Jisung were finished with the money in the safe and were now setting their own charges up, placed around the Magpie’s office. In the hallways—
A guard at Blackbird’s was not where he was supposed to be.
Seungmin’s stomach lurched. A guard was walking towards the hallway that led to where the Magpie’s office was, and as Seungmin watched, before he could do anything else, the man turned into that opening and then stopped. The bodies were gone, dragged into that office where they were slowly going cool on that ugly cream carpet, but there was blood, a lot of it. Even in the grainy colours of the Blackbird’s feeds, the blood was stark.
The guard stepped back, out of the entrance of the hallway and brought his walkie-talkie up to his mouth. There’s blood outside the boss’s office, Jaehyun and Minhyuk are gone—
“Fuck,” Seungmin said, his heart rabbiting in his chest, as he frantically switched his voice channel to Jisung.
——
The inside of the safe was like something out of a movie, Jisung thought when Hyunjin first got the thing open. Full of yellow-gold ₩50,000 bills, some worn and old, others crisp and new. Piles of them rubber banded together. Jisung sort of felt like every children’s movie villain who had a musical number about gold, gold as they’d begun to shovel the cash into their packs, now bereft of the explosive devices.
The devices weren’t too big, larger than the breach charges from the Plaza Hotel job and decidedly different in appearance. Jisung didn’t pretend to know how they worked, he’d just carefully removed them from their bags, one after the other, putting them carefully on the carpeted floor. They were— dense, made of large metal tins that had been duct taped shut. On the front of every single one was an old style button phone, also taped down. Soldered wires ran from the phones underneath the lids of the tins.
With all the money in their packs, the safe cleared out, it was time to arm the explosives, arrange them. Before placing each one, Jisung input a number code into the button phones — one four three — and then hit the green call button. The phones lit up when he did that, and then he put the devices carefully down into the velvet lined safe.
They would not, theoretically, go off until either Hyunjin or Jisung flipped the remote detonation switch. Felix had said they were stable. Jisung supposed Felix would want to make sure Hyunjin got out of this alive if nothing else; he wouldn’t build volatile bombs.
Well, not any more volatile than they had to be.
“That’s all of them,” Hyunjin whispered, with three tins laid out on Lee Jaerim’s sturdy gold desk. He zipped his backpack up, hefting it onto his shoulder. It was softer now, but clearly still decently heavy.
Jisung closed his own pack, stuffing down wads of cash to get the zipper shut. There had to be at least two billion won here. He was going to retire.
“Jisung-ah,” Seungmin’s voice suddenly crackled into his ear, making him startle like a rabbit. Hyunjin swerved to stare at him. “Someone’s seen the blood splatters, he’s calling for backup. Get out.”
“Shit,” Jisung said, tightening the straps of his pack and then pulling his gun out, one smooth single motion. His heart, which had been going at a steady, thick kind of thump, was suddenly fluttering like cat pawprints on a hot concrete street. Quick and light and sickening.
Hyunjin was pulling his in-ear out of his hoodie pocket, jamming it back into place. “What is it?”
“Someone’s noticed,” Jisung said, pressing his shoulder to the door, his free hand touching the handle lightly, not yet turning it. He heard Hyunjin suck in a breath. “Where do we go, Seungmin?”
“He’s still standing at the end of the hallway. You’ll need to shoot him to get past, then run to— well, any room over there might do, so long as it is on an outside wall.” There was the sound of shuffling on Seungmin’s end, the screech of a keyboard being moved. “I’m here, I’ll guide you out.”
Jisung felt the slightest bit of weight against his back — Hyunjin pressing close. “Stay behind me,” he said, serious in a way he normally wasn’t. Hyunjin’s eyes were so wide.
He can’t fight, Jisung thought despairingly. How was he going to get Hyunjin out of here. He was the only one who could.
The gun in his hand was quickly growing warm with the stress-heat of his body. He gripped it hard, clicking the safety off. “If I crack the door, will the guy be in my line of sight?” he asked lowly.
“Yes,” Seungmin said, the sound of him click click clicking audible. “He’s got a gun out but it’s just loosely at his side, he’s talking to someone on the phone.”
Jisung took a steadying breath, in and out. Then he swung the door open, stepping out into the hallway, gun already raised.
The man at the end of the hall was wearing the same crisp, black and white uniform of all the other guards here. He jumped as the door opened, beginning to raise his gun — but he was too slow. Jisung shot once, caught him in the neck, and then again, this one going through his cheek, just under his eye.
His body had barely hit the ground when suddenly, another guard came around the corner, then another, then a third. They were all in the process of fumbling their guns out of their holsters, and Jisung blindly used his free hand to shove at Hyunjin, using too much strength because he was out of his mind with sudden terror. “Run!” he cried, turning around, and thankfully Hyunjin obeyed.
They ran the opposite way they’d been instructed, this direction clear of people, turning the corner just as the sounds of gunshots rang out. The plaster of the wall behind them blew out in small explosions as the bullets hit.
“Seungmin,” Jisung halfway screamed, not caring about stealth. “Where do we go?”
He and Hyunjin sprinted down the long corridor, Hyunjin not-so-shockingly fast. They were deep in the building. It was like a maze. They needed a room with windows. Jisung hadn’t studied this portion of the map.
A burst of static in his left ear, and then Seungmin urgently saying, “Right.”
They turned, Hyunjin slipping a little on the carpet, and Jisung grabbed his pack and hauled him upright again. Behind them, there was shouting, but no more bullets whizzed by them, not yet. They would need to keep turning.
“Left,” said Seungmin, as up ahead, their way was suddenly blocked by another pair of guards. Jisung chanced a glance back the way they’d come as they turned, seeing the other three guards come skidding around the corner.
They all fell out of sight as Jisung turned his eyes forward, to Hyunjin ahead of him, the lean lines of his body, his ponytail whipping behind him. He had the thought, We’re not getting out of this. It was both more panicked than anything he’d ever thought in his life, and yet numbly calm.
“Right, right,” Seungmin said, and Hyunjin had to swivel almost completely around to dart into the hallway he’d nearly passed. “The first door to the left— the one that’s cracked open—”
Hyunjin yanked the door the rest of the way open, practically tripping inside, all his usual grace lost. Jisung grabbed the handle and swiftly pulled the door shut behind them, but not before he saw the guards again come round the corner.
The door— clanged. It was heavy, thick metal. The lights in the room flickered on automatically so Jisung could see there were three deadbolts. He turned every single one, his fingers feeling slow and uncooperative. He’d barely got the last one locked when the door suddenly shuddered with the force of a hit — the guards, slamming against it. They jiggled the handle, but Jisung didn’t think those locks could be opened from the outside.
He stumbled back, his chest burning, all his limbs feeling weak. When he turned to look, Hyunjin was bent double, gasping for air. After a moment, Hyunjin dropped to his knees, pushing the pack off his shoulders onto the ugly grey carpet. Jisung took the room in — it seemed to be a conference room, the bulk of the space taken up by a long table with at least ten chairs around it. The wall opposite the door was all windows, the lights coming in indicative that this was the front of the building. The least ideal option.
He dropped his pack, collapsing into one of the chairs. The guards outside where still slamming at the door. Shaking so hard it was making fine motor movements difficult, Jisung struggled to open his backpack.
“It’s okay,” he said, trying to repress the quaver in his voice. “We’ll just escape from this room instead, it’s okay.”
Hyunjin gave no indication he’d heard. He used the edge of the table, pulled himself back to his feet, swaying a little. His alert attention was on the door. “Will it hold?” he asked.
Jisung wasn’t sure, but it was Seungmin who replied, “It should, for now. This is a conference room that also doubles as Lee Jaerim’s personal safe room. One of them. There’s a couple in the building. This one is for when he has important guests.”
“Of course,” Hyunjin said, higher than usual, a little hysterical.
There was the muffled sound of gunshots through the door, and then much louder kind of impact noises as the bullets apparently hit the door. Both Jisung and Hyunjin stared at the door, but he couldn’t see any indents in it from the bullets. They’d need bigger guns to shoot through the thing.
Hyunjin whimpered a little, drifting unsteadily around the table so he was far from the door. Jisung was trying to stay focused, because if he thought too hard about this, he would— lose it. One motion, then the next, repeating the order in his mind until one task was done so he could work on the next.
If Hyunjin died here, Jisung would ask to be sent to hell. He’d put himself there.
He pawed through the money in his pack to pull out their rappelling equipment, the rope and the clip. The conference table was sturdy metal and fucking bolted to the floor; they could use it as an anchor. Jisung would have to go out first and make sure the way was clear, keep anyone from taking shots at Hyunjin as he came down—
“Jisung,” Hyunjin called out, weak and wavery in a new way that Jisung did not like.
He looked up from where he was unspooling the rappelling rope, hands pausing.
Hyunjin was stood beside the wall of windows, face gone ghostly pale in the fluorescent lighting. His whites of his eyes gleamed. “None of these windows open,” he said, voice small.
Jisung felt dread drop cold and leaden into the pit of his stomach.
“And I think they’re all bulletproof glass.”
——
Chan, retrospectively, should have given Jisoo five minutes, not ten, to pack. And should have enforced it better.
They made it out of the lobby of the building, dragging the case from the smooth stone flooring onto the uneven bricks out front. “The car’s around here,” he told her, gesturing toward the side of the building.
The three of them walked quickly, the lights lining the high roof of the building flashing between blue and red and green, so high up they seemed to illuminate the underside of the sparse clouds above them with their colours. They turned out of the little courtyard and began to go down the little sidestreet, still dotted with parked cars. The streetlamps gave them limited pools of light to see by.
Chan used the key fob to unlock the car doors and open the hatchback, helping Jisoo to get her case inside. She wasn’t, exactly, what he’d expected. Her resemblance to Felix extended to her freckles and little else. She seemed— much stiffer than Felix, not in an awkward way, but in a cold way. Though that might just be the fear, the distrust. Chan couldn’t blame her for being wary.
“He’ll track your car,” she warned quietly, and Chan immediately felt a little bad for thinking of her as cold.
He closed the trunk. “He’ll know my face when he sees it, most likely,” he said, gentle. That didn’t seem to set her mind at ease.
“Noona,” Felix began, and then there was a gunshot.
They all flinched, scattering. Chan had his gun out before he could even think about it, searching for movement — there, at the end of the slim street, a car was sitting perpendicular and blocking the exit, its window rolled down.
Chan returned fire, not aiming as well as he should, more of a warning than anything. “Get in the car!” he ordered, walking backwards to keep shooting as he began to fumble for the handle of the driver’s door.
His gun clicked as the magazine emptied. Chan threw himself into the driver’s seat, shoving his gun back into its holster as he did so. He closed the door behind him and started the car. They were still being shot at, he could hear the pops of the shots and then the metallic clunking of the bullets hitting the back of the car.
Felix was sunk down in the passenger seat, Jisoo laying down across the backseat, covering her head with her arms. Chan slammed his foot down onto the gas pedal, the car jerking forward. They stopped shooting at him once the car came into motion, and he saw why when he exited the street and almost hit another of the same model. It swerved hard to avoid him, had only just missed its chance to box him totally into the little side road. They’d almost been trapped.
Almost.
“Not tonight,” Chan growled, accelerating as they turned onto the main street, the momentum almost making the car fishtail a little.
It wasn’t over. The car that had nearly blocked them in was course correcting and beginning to follow them, and behind that, the first car came zipping out of the darkened street, turning to tail them as well.
Fuck, Chan thought.
He glanced askance at Felix. He couldn’t see any blood, but he needed to make sure. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No,” Felix said, breathless and trembly.
“Jisoo-sshi?” Chan asked, unable to see her in the rearview mirror. All he could see was darkness and the bright glow of headlights.
She said, in a small voice, “They missed.”
“They weren’t aiming for us,” Chan said, anxiety making him chatty. He didn’t know what to do. “They were trying to hit the tires. I imagine your father wants us alive.”
Alive to torture, to gloat over and torment. Chan would be pulled apart like an insect in the hands of a cruel child, and Felix would likely be made to watch. Afterwards— would Felix be killed or left alive, Chan wondered, his fingers sawed off, his feet, left helpless and to slowly die from infection. Chan knew what Lee Jaerim was capable of. He had to get them to safety.
The cars were following them — not getting too close, not trying to shoot any more. They were on a busy road in the heart of Gangnam, with its thriving nightlife. Too many people, too many witnesses. And they’d know Chan wouldn’t go down without enough of a fight that money wouldn’t be able to cover it up. Chan needed to make sure they stayed on larger roads, but beyond that— he did not know how the fuck to shake them.
“Felix,” he said, taking a hand off the wheel for a second to fish his phone out of his pocket and hold it out across the gear shift. “Call Seungmin for me. Put him on speaker.”
Felix obeyed, pale as milk and silent. His hands were shaking so badly he had trouble opening the phone.
The sound out of the phone’s tiny speakers was crackly and broken, and it rang only twice before Seungmin was saying, obviously harried, “What?”
“We need help,” Chan said, no time for delicacy. The car was beeping angrily at him so he quickly snapped his seatbelt on. “Are you busy?”
Seungmin made a noise Chan was not sure he'd ever heard come out of Seungmin’s mouth before, and then he said, “Honestly, hyung? Yeah.” His nasally voice was a little high, almost shrill. “Yeah, I am.”
What’s going wrong with the others, Chan wanted to ask, but he couldn't let himself get distracted. Behind them, one of the sleek black cars drifted around a red Porsche, keeping up with them. Not too close. But not too far. “Sorry, but we’re being chased,” Chan said, and Seungmin blew out a sigh that sounded like a storm through the mic. “I need you to help us lose these guys.”
“Is it the police?” Seungmin asked, and now Chan could hear the prim sound of a keyboard clicking.
They hit a busy road, a red light. Chan squeezed into the right turn lane and nearly hit a couple trying to cross as he turned. The girl tottered back in her heels as her date flipped them off. “No, Lee Jaerim’s men,” Chan said, his gaze incessantly darting to his rearview mirror, watching, waiting. “Two cars. I don’t know how many people are in each.”
Both cars came around the corner, one after the other. This road was just as large but a little less busy. They’d catch up again soon enough.
More keyboard clicking. “Where are you?”
“Seonnung-ro, heading North.” His hands on the wheel were sweaty.
“Give me a second,” Seungmin said, and then the phone went totally quiet, but Seungmin hadn’t ended the call. Just muted them.
Chan could do nothing but keep driving. As they headed further North, toward the river, things got quieter, open businesses giving way to closed ones, to apartment complexes, and Chan got progressively more uneasy. He took a turn onto another road, which would take them back down toward Seoul University, and hoped that on a Saturday morning things might be a bit livelier there. They still had cars around, but— less. And not nearly so many people on the sidewalks.
There was a sudden burst of crackly, white noise from his phone. “I’ve got you on the city CCTVs,” Seungmin said, “I need you to get into that right turning lane up ahead and go onto the 01 Expressway, headed South.”
Chan obeyed, cutting off a white car that honked angrily at him. Nervousness made him say, “We won’t lose them on a freeway.”
“Two days ago a semi-truck lost control on the frost and took out the centre divider just after the exit for Sadang Station,” Seungmin said, quick and enunciating very sharply. “Traffic’s relatively light. If you can get some distance between you and the cars tailing you, then make a sudden stop and turn around, you’ll be able to go through the gap onto the opposite side of the freeway.”
“Seungmin,” Chan said, strained. “What’s to stop them from following us when we do that?”
“Well,” Seungmin said, and Chan could hear the sound of him shifting in his seat. “I did say a sudden stop.”
Chan, gaining speed as they took the ramp up onto the freeway, still took a second to gape at his phone even though Seungmin couldn’t see it. “You want me to do a J-turn in the middle of a freeway going a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour in a fucking Kia Rio?”
“It’s that or you drive around the city with them on your ass until Minho’s team can meet up with you and stage an ambush,” Seungmin replied as Chan merged onto the freeway. It was nice up here, cars dotting the road but clear enough for Chan to really gain some speed and weave around them. “But they’re— they’re not out of the vault yet.”
Chan’s gaze flicked to the dash. They had nearly a full tank of gas, and could feasibly run these goons around the city for hours if need be. But the longer they were fleeing, the more time Lee Jaerim had to rouse more troops to send after them. Escaping two cars was going to be difficult enough; five or more was likely to be impossible. And a confrontation— Chan did not think they would win, at that point. No, they needed to shake these guys as soon as possible.
“We’ll try this,” Chan said, firm in a way that did not match the low level of confidence inside himself at present. “Put your seatbelts on.”
Felix gingerly put Chan’s phone into the nearest cupholder so he had his hands free to do just that. In the backseat, poor Jisoo finally sat up just enough to click her own belt on.
“The exit is five kilometres away from you, the gap in the divider about half a kilometre beyond that. You’ll be able to see the cones,” Seungmin said, now from the cupholder, a little more muffled. “I’ll stay on the line, but I might be quiet — I’m multitasking.”
“Yeah,” Chan said, an edge of hysteria bubbling up in him. Behind them, the two black cars were still following them at that measured distance. When Chan sped up, they sped up. When he slowed, so did they. It was that, more than anything, that tipped Chan off that they’d have even more company soon.
“Hyung,” Felix whispered. He had one hand clutched around his seatbelt, right over his heart. The other was braced against the door. “Don’t let them take me.”
“I’m trying, little one, trust me,” Chan said. They passed a white minivan, windows too tinted for Chan to see if there was anyone in the backseat. Kids. He hoped not. This might end in a multi-car pile up.
“No, I mean—” Felix swallowed, wobbly. “Kill me, if you have to. I know it isn’t fair of me to ask but—”
“Felix,” Chan said, taking his eyes off the road just for a moment so he could meet Felix’s. His lover was looking at him with eyes full of tremulous fear, shining in the low light. “I’m going to get us out of this.”
Felix’s bottom lip trembled but he nodded. Chan turned back to the road, his fingers aching with how hard he was gripping the wheel.
The exit was coming up, and in the distance, Chan could see the neon orange and bright reflectors of the cones. He flicked a glance up to the rearview mirror, saw both cars tailing them had now overcome the minivan. Their twin headlights were about six car lengths away.
Chan pressed his foot to the gas pedal hard, the engine revving and the car bucking forward. There was a station wagon up ahead, in the slow lane. They began to rapidly grow closer to it, the cars behind them shrinking as they delayed matching his speed.
The speedometer climbed. A hundred. A hundred and ten. A hundred and twenty. They blew past the station wagon.
A hundred and thirty, and they passed the cones, a blur of neon colour.
“Don’t scream,” Chan said, and then slammed his foot down on the brake.
The car lurched, tires squealing and skidding across the asphalt. From behind them, the sound echoed, different pitches. There was a distant crash. Felix grabbed his door handle for stability as the backend of the car fishtailed, white smoke wafting up from the rubber burning on the roadway. Chan let the car spin around, still smashing his foot down hard on the brake pedal. Don’t flip, don’t flip, he thought, desperate, trying to not let them crash while also not wanting to fight the momentum too hard and risk the car rolling.
One of the cars that had been tailing them streaked past, a quick blur beyond their windows as they spun, its tires screaming like theirs were as it ran straight into the gully along the side of the freeway. The second one blew by them almost immediately after, not nearly fast enough for comfort.
Chan slammed the car into reverse as they were still spinning, the gears grinding loudly, a metallic moan. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, as he rotated the wheel and hit the gas, the car, already spinning, now rocketing backwards in an arc until they were, more or less, facing the oncoming traffic.
Car horns blared as Chan smashed the car back into drive, turning the wheel the opposite way and pressing the gas pedal again. The lights of the oncoming traffic were nearly blinding. Felix gave a muffled sound that would have been a scream if he’d not bitten it back.
The minivan they’d passed earlier lurched out of the way now, horn screaming as it streaked by. Chan drove halfway on the tiny shoulder, another car swerving around them, until they reached the gap in the divider again. The cones got knocked everywhere, reminiscent of bowling pins, the ground here dirt and uneven, causing the car to lurch, the undercarriage scraping.
“Are they following?” Chan demanded, as he worked to merge onto the opposite side of the freeway, the car bumping hard as the asphalt began again. There was a little more traffic on this side of things, but he was able to get in between a truck and a small sedan. “Felix?”
Felix pried his hand off the door handle so he could rotate in his seat, craning to look out the back window. Chan, finally, could check his rearview mirror to look at Jisoo. She had her eyes clamped shut and hands wrapped around her seatbelt, knuckles white. He couldn’t really see anything useful out the back window.
“They don’t seem to be following,” Felix said slowly. “There’s— I see a lot of brakelights, there’s other cars in their way.” He sat back in his seat properly, slumping down. “One of them drove into the ditch. If the other wants to try following us again, we have a head start.”
Chan pressed his foot down a little harder onto the gas, his heart pumping adrenaline through his blood like little jolts of electricity. He began, absurdly, to laugh, hysterical little giggles as he hunched over the steering wheel.
They probably needed to get off the freeway. Chan’s brain was going at lightspeed but couldn’t seem to follow a single thought to a conclusion.
His phone crackled. Honestly, he was a little surprised it was still in the cupholder, and hadn’t gone flying.
“Exit up ahead,” Seungmin’s voice came through, still in that fast, stressed tone. “There’s an empty lot with a chain link fence in front; just mount the curb and leave the car. Walk up to the next light and there’ll be a taxi waiting for you.”
“Fuck, Seungmin,” Chan said, “thank you.” He immediately smacked his blinker on and prepared to exit.
There was no reply, just his phone screen lighting up to show Seungmin had ended the call. Chan took the designated exit, and had to only go two blocks before he saw the empty lot just as Felix said, “There.”
Chan mounted the curb. Thankfully there was no one on the sidewalk, though there were a decent number of people on the road. No one would look twice at them for this though; even just up ahead there was a small lorry truck parked on the sidewalk.
“Out,” Chan said, leaving the keys in the ignition and only scooping his phone up. He took a quick few seconds to switch the magazine in his gun to a full one and then he was popping the trunk as he got out, immediately going round to the back of the car to haul the suitcase out. Jisoo, clearly on shaky legs, came around a little slower. She reached for the case but Chan said, “I’ve got it, don’t worry.” It wasn’t even heavy. He’d just carry the damn thing up to the crossroads.
Felix joined them, pushing the trunk door shut. He didn’t look much better than Jisoo. Chan wanted to comfort him, to hold his hand, but he needed at least one free for his gun.
The three of them walked as quickly as they could over the bricked sidewalk without it being considered running. There were a lot of streetlights here, a safe, quiet kind of neighbourhood, full of closed cafes and lunch restaurants. Both Felix and Jisoo kept glancing behind them, skittish, sticking close together. Chan held the case in one hand and had his other resting on the hilt of his gun in its holster. He kept his eyes forward.
As promised, there was a taxi idling on the curb when they reached the light. The driver saw them coming with the case and got out, opening the trunk as he did so. “Seoul station, right?” he asked, polite.
“Yeah,” Chan said, because— sure, whatever, that would work. Chan assumed Seungmin meant for them to switch taxis as a safety measure before going home. “But we’re running late, so we’ve really got to book it.”
“Ah, alright,” the man said, helping Chan get the suitcase into the trunk. He did move quicker after that, climbing back into the driver’s seat. Felix and Jisoo had already crammed themselves into the back, and so Chan got into the passenger seat. They were peeling away from the curb before he’d even got his seatbelt on.
Seoul station meant instead of backtracking onto the freeway they’d just left, they’d be on the streets for a bit before getting onto a different freeway, crossing the river. Clever, on Seungmin’s part. And they wouldn’t have to wait at all for another taxi once they got there.
Chan slunk down as much as he could, trying to lower how much of him could be seen from outside the car. In the back, Felix and Jisoo did the same, their heads just peeking above where the window began. Hopefully it was dark enough to conceal them.
The adrenaline was wearing off, and Chan found himself shaking.
There was a trot song warbling out of the car’s speakers. The GPS on the dash was a bright glow in the darkness, marking their progress along with the ticking of the metre. “Are there even trains this early out of Seoul station?” the driver asked, likely trying to be pleasant. He was middle aged and a little paunchy, with that loud kind of bluster to his speaking pattern even though he was not angry at all.
“We’re taking a bus,” Chan lied, feeling himself slowly deflate.
The driver fiddled with the radio, and the trot song changed to a different trot song. “Where you heading?”
“Away,” Chan said simply, sinking down an increment further and pulling his jacket closed more tightly around himself so the man wouldn’t see his gun.
The man asked no more questions, and Chan was left to wonder what exactly was going on with the others that had Seungmin so worried.
——
Minho was not sure he’d ever been quite so disquieted on a job, as he was right now, handling these explosives. He’d done dangerous things before — by the nature of his profession, he was often in situations a normal person would classify as perilous. But there’d always been a sense of control in that danger. He would get hurt only if he fucked up. And he made a point of not fucking up.
But the sheer amount of firepower he was laying out, tin after tin, can after can, felt— like a more chaotic kind of danger. He hadn’t made these charges, and they were volatile in a way that had little to do with him. They might very well bring the whole building down. And he just had to hope they wouldn’t malfunction and do it while he and the others were still inside.
He readied the final charge, leaving it in the tidy little pile he’d made around one of the building’s central support pillars — the rest he had left in each of the four corners of the basement, also clustered around support pillars. It had not been easy, carrying the two backpacks full of bombs, running through this maze of a basement level. The bags had been very heavy, and Minho was, at this point, fatigued. His adrenaline had long since left him, and in its wake he felt shaky and weak in a way he did not like.
His earpiece burst into muffled static just as he was wearily getting back to his feet. “Hyung,” said Seungmin. “Two of the guards are headed back down to the basement now.”
“Where’s the third,” Minho asked quietly, shoving one empty backpack into the other, zipping it shut, and then pulling it onto his shoulders.
“He’s left, out the front door. I presume they finally figured out they need to leave the building if they want to call for backup,” Seungmin said. Minho bit back a snort; that had taken them far longer than it should have. Though maybe they were’t stupid. He didn’t know what their orders were. Maybe they’d been told not to leave the premises no matter what. “The other two are going slow, but they’re headed to the vault.”
Trying to take us by surprise, Minho thought. He settled his M16 back into his hands, a fresh magazine put in before he’d begun running around with the charges just in case. “Guide me,” he ordered, and Seungmin said, “Turn around and go right.”
Minho obeyed, following Seungmin’s directions, his movements quick but quiet. The floor was covered in carpet, lending itself to stealth. He moved until Seungmin warned him, “You’re nearly caught up to them, if you turn the corner up ahead to the left they’ll be in your sight.”
He’d have liked more than that, positions, where each guard was looking, if their guns were up or pointed at the ground. But Seungmin had gone quiet, and Minho couldn’t speak now or he’d risk being overheard and losing the element of surprise. So he brought his gun up, finger butterfly-light on the trigger, and stepped around the corner.
The men were perhaps six metres from him, with one of them halfway turned back towards Minho, trying to keep an eye out for anyone sneaking up behind them. His gun was up, but not enough, and Minho was already holding the trigger down by the time the other man saw him and realised he needed to twitch his aim over. The M16 unloaded in an arc, hitting nothing, then the man’s arm, then his chest, then his shoulder, in a sweeping line. He was dead before his expression had even been able to morph fully into shock.
His comrade, though, was on the other side of him in such a way that none of Minho’s shots hit him, blocked by the meat shield that was his coworker; and by the time the body was falling, that other guard had raised his own gun, and now Minho’s wasn’t aimed correctly.
Minho shoved backwards, leaping behind the cover of the corner, as one, two gunshots rang in his ears. A searing pain ripped over his side as he fell backwards around the corner, landing on his hip, then back.
“Ah,” he breathed, setting a hand against his flank, just at the bottom of his ribcage. He struggled to get up onto his knees. “Fuck.”
“You’re hit?” Seungmin asked. On another day, Minho might have been touched by the legitimate concern in his voice.
Minho pulled his hand off, looking down at it. Blood shone wetly on the black latex, in this awful yellow light. “I think I’m okay,” he said, breathing a little raggedly through the pain. “I think it grazed me.”
It was an awkward position, he couldn’t see it very well — his shirt had a long, oblong tear in it, and through it all he could see was red. A very— solid graze, but Minho didn’t think it had hit his rib bones at all. It had just caught skin, torn and burned it.
He put his hand back on his gun, smudging blood over it, and got back up onto his feet. “Where is he.”
“He’s heading through the halls in a loop, trying to get behind you, I think,” Seungmin said, and Minho spun, immediately going around the corner again so he would be covered from the new angle.
“Tell me when he’s reloading,” was all Minho said, getting into position the same way he did when he and Jeongin were guarding the vault — kneeling just around the corner, head poking around just enough, gun up.
He did not have to wait long, though this guard was at least a little smart. He did not come blazing around the corner and running into the hall, he peeked around first, to check it was empty. Minho immediately shot at him and missed, the bullets hitting the wall and leaving holes, paint chipping onto the floor. The guard ducked back out of sight.
“What do you think Lee Jaerim is going to say when he sees this footage?” Minho called over. “When he sees you hiding around a corner to save your hide while we rob him blind—”
The man popped around the corner and shot at him, Minho ducking back out of the way. Four shots, now it was Minho’s turn to watch from up close as plaster rained down near his feet.
Soon, Minho thought. If the guard had been shooting at them upstairs too, then soon—
“Your aim is shit,” he said, like his side wasn’t fucking throbbing in time with his heartbeat. He poked the tip of his gun around the corner, none of his body, and the man immediately unloaded three more bullets.
“Now,” Seungmin said, and Minho leapt to his feet and ran down the corridor in a dead sprint, his footfalls heavy and echoing.
He had the M16 up and in position by the time he skidded to a stop at the turn, aiming down at the guard who was kneeling just around the corner, frantically still shoving a new magazine into his gun.
Minho pulled the trigger. The rifle vibrated, the hammer striking in a click— but there was no sound of a shot, no recoil.
He blinked, the man blinked back at him. Minho pulled the trigger again. Then again. Click. Click.
Jammed.
Fucking shit fuck, Minho thought, and the man on the floor raised his gun.
Minho swung his rifle around like a bat, hitting the man’s hand and gun away in an arc. It went off as he did so, the bullet whizzing past Minho’s shoulder.
With no time to try and go for his own handgun, Minho simply used their positions to his advantage. He kicked the man hard in his sternum, using the whole sole of his boot for the impact. That was followed up by a quick, hard jab to the man’s forehead with the butt of his rifle.
The man lost his balance and fell backwards, reeling. Minho stomped on his wrist, and the man gave a sort of wheeze. He rolled and punched Minho’s calf, and Minho let himself fall just so he could drop his opposite knee down onto the guard’s chest. He hit him with the butt of his gun again, this time over the temple. The man’s strength left him, falling limply back onto the carpet.
Minho panted, his body beginning to flag. His foot was still grinding the man’s wrist down, this position a bit of a stretch for Minho, who was not very flexible. He pushed off the man’s chest and instead bent to pry the gun from the man’s hand. For a moment, he did not release it, rolling onto the side to try and grapple with Minho using his other hand, while Minho continued to stand on his wrist.
Minho did not have time for this, and was too tired to kill the man with his hands. “Let me have it,” he snarled, “or I’ll smash my rifle into your face until you’re both dead and unrecognisable.”
The man made a bitten off little noise, something like a sob, something recognisable as fear. His hand fell loose finally, and Minho snatched his gun up. A Walther, heavier than Minho tended to favour.
“Please,” the man gasped. There was a trickle of blood coming from his temple, where Minho’s strike had split the skin. He was in his thirties, maybe a little older, with a square jaw and thick eyebrows. “I have a—”
Minho shot him in the forehead, the back of his skull blowing out and splattering across the grey carpet.
Family. Minho thought of Jeongin’s face.
He clicked the safety back on the stolen gun and dropped it onto the man’s unmoving chest. Then he took a couple of seconds to pull at the rifle, jostling the parts and trying to get it unjammed, to no success.
“Hyung,” Seungmin said into his ear. A reminder of urgency.
Minho made a noise of wordless frustration and then threw the rifle down onto the corpse of the man. He wasn’t going to bother hauling around a jammed gun right now, when he needed his hands free as much as possible for actually fucking useful things.
“That’s all of them?” he asked, striding around the way he’d come from to head back to the vault.
“Yeah, at least until their backup arrives,” Seungmin said. “I’ve been keeping an ear on the police radio, they definitely didn’t call for any official help.”
No, that did not surprise Minho. He had to hope that whatever backup was coming wouldn’t be very well trained for an emergency call in like this. They were just men scattered around the city and most had probably been sleeping.
He made his way through the hallways at a half jog. “Seungmin,” he said, a little breathless. He paused, ears burning, before saying, “Was he lying. About having a family.”
Seungmin, on the other end, was silent for so long Minho wondered if he hadn’t been muted. But then Seungmin said, “I— I don’t know. I don’t know who he is, hyung.” There was a tone to his voice, beyond the tension, that made Minho’s embarrassment rise. He should know better than to ask Kim Seungmin these things. The last thing he wanted was for Seungmin to try and console him. “I can look into it later—”
“No,” Minho said, clipped. The doorway to the vault room was in sight now. “It doesn’t matter.” That man had made his choices. If Minho hadn’t killed him then Lee Jaerim certainly would have.
When he entered the room, he found it much as he’d left it, just with more money piled up in the centre of the floor, spilling out of the vault itself, with its huge door hanging wide open. Nearly every little cabinet within the vault itself was opened too.
Changbin, who’d been bent double zipping up one of the duffle bags, straightened. “It go alright?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Minho said, pulling one of the empty backpacks out of the other and tossing it to him. Changbin caught it, and Minho wasted no time in holding the other open and beginning to indiscriminately shove the stacks of bills into its open maw. “You’ve got— everything?”
Changbin mimicked him, shoving all the money that could fit into his backpack. “We got all the external harddrives, and some paperwork — anything that looked official.”
“Hyung, look at this,” Jeongin said, and Minho looked to see Jeongin holding a necklace up to his face. It had pearls strung along it the size of his thumbnail, and a ruby as big as Jeongin’s eye dangling as the centre piece. “This isn’t even the fanciest thing we found.”
“You could buy at least one new television with that,” Minho said, flat, and Jeongin giggled, irreverently shoving the necklace into the pocket of his cargo pants. At this point, Minho’s backpack was full. He zipped it closed. Changbin was just finishing up as well. “We have to go. Backup’s been called.”
“Yep,” Changbin said, slinging the backpack up over his shoulders. Minho— was about to do the same, but he saw Jeongin struggling with the third pack.
“Trade me, baby boy,” Minho said, and Jeongin blinked but then obeyed readily. Minho hefted the bag up, swaying with the weight of it. “What’s in this?”
“Harddrives. Gold,” Jeongin said, pulling on the pack full of bills a bit easier.
Minho hoped the seams of the backpack held up. He hoped his spine held up.
Changbin picked up a duffel bag and swung the strap over his head, criss-cross over his chest. Jeongin did the same, letting out an oof as he did so. Minho grabbed the small bottle of lighter fluid and began to squeeze it out over the remaining money piled on the floor.
It was— a lot of cash. At least ten billion won. But they couldn’t take it with them and Minho wasn’t going to leave it behind in case it didn’t get destroyed in the blast. Lee Jaerim could be left with nothing at all. So it would burn.
Minho picked up the final duffle bag. It wasn’t too heavy, but it was enough that he didn’t want to sling it over his chest like Jeongin and Changbin had. He held it in his left hand, by the shorter handles. With his right, he pulled a zippo out of his pocket.
“Get out of the vault, go to the door,” he ordered, and both Jeongin and Changbin moved in tandem, until they were no longer in Minho’s line of sight. Only then did Minho strike a flame to life, only then did he toss the lighter onto the pile of golden bills.
He had been expecting it to take — he had not been expecting the very sudden swoosh of it, the intense heat. The flames, almost immediately, were taller than he was, licking at the ceiling tiles. Which were made out of— styrofoam. Or something like. Something that instantly caught fire too.
“Shit,” Minho said, stumbling back, towards the door. The smoke was black and acrid, chemical and stinging his nose. The entire ceiling was going up, the flames reaching tendrils out of the room and towards the tiles in the hallway. “Go, go—”
They ran. Well, they tried to run. It was nothing like the sprint it would have been, had they not been so weighed down. Minho wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not, but he swore he could feel the heat of the fire chasing them as they fled.
This was not the plan, he thought as the smell of smoke followed them at every turn. This was— very fucking bad. They needed to get out of here. The bombs weren’t supposed to go off until Minho hit the trigger, but if the fire reached the explosives before they got out of the building— it was all over.
They reached the doorway back up, Minho yanking it open, the handle cold through the latex of his glove. He gestured the other two through ahead of him, Changbin kind of— unsteady in his gate, Jeongin decidedly red in the face. There weren’t many stairs, but Minho found himself winded all the same when he got up to the ground floor. His legs trembled a little, the muscles burning, as they made their way back out into the cubicle area.
Changbin was blatantly panting, and he put his free hand over his side, groaning, “I’ve got a cramp—”
There was a gunshot, loud and startling, then another, Minho feeling— some kind of impact, on his backpack. There was no pain. All three of them dropped behind the cover of the cubicles.
“Seungmin!” Minho yelled, pressing fingers to his in-ear as he let go of his duffle bag so he could pull his gun out of its holster with his other. Why the fuck hadn’t they been warned someone was up here laying in wait.
Beside him, Changbin was trying to get the rifle in his arms properly, up on his knees, and kept fumbling, off balance. Impatiently, he yanked the strap of his duffle bag over his head, dropping it down beside Minho’s so he had better use of his arms.
There was silence over the connection. Minho could hear, from the far side of the room, shuffling as whoever had been shooting at them moved around.
Changbin repeated Seungmin’s name, shooting Minho a worried glance.
Their in-ears crackled. “Sorry, I’m sorry, fuck—” Seungmin gasped. “It’s the guy, the one who went and called for help— I didn’t see him come back, I’m— I’m doing a lot—”
“Focus,” Minho growled out.
“Yes, right,” Seungmin said, clicking. There was smoke, faint wisps of it, beginning to curl from the open doorway to the basement. “The man is on the direct opposite side to you, waiting to try and shoot you when you make for the side door. If one of you goes around one way and another goes the other, you’ll probably be in prime position to duck around and catch him off guard.”
Minho looked to Changbin, pointing at him and motioning him to stay right here. Then he pointed at Jeongin to double back a little and go around the mass of cubicles, counter clockwise. Minho himself would go clockwise. This way, they would have all angles covered; the man could only shoot in one direction at once.
Jeongin stood, staying bent double so nothing of him showed above the low walls of the cubicle. Minho— found getting to his feet hard, the pack such a dead weight. In his left hand he again grabbed his duffle bag, his right still holding his hand gun. Not ideal, but it would have to do.
He turned around the corner of cubicles, passing grim working space after grim working space. When he reached the end, he stopped, carefully setting his bag down, as silent as he could be.
“Minho-hyung,” Seungmin said quietly, like the guard might be able to hear him, “he’s kneeling facing you, I think he’s expecting you guys to make a run for the exit. From Jeongin’s position, if he pops around the corner right now, the guard won’t see him at all.”
Minho deeply did not like the idea of Jeongin sticking his neck out, quite literally, like this. But he had to trust Seungmin in this; there was no other way. Minho looked at the dark dome of the nearest camera, giving a single nod.
“Minho-hyung says take the shot, Jeongin,” Seungmin said.
Silence, for a beat, two, the only sound the distant crackling of the flames. Minho’s heart was racing. They didn’t have any more time to dawdle.
The sound of gunshots rang out, multiple in rapid succession; Jeongin holding the trigger down. Several bullets whizzed past Minho’s right, embedding themselves in the far wall. Then silence fell again.
“I got him,” Jeongin called out.
Minho’s shoulders untensed the slightest bit. “Seungmin, is that all of them?” he asked, and waited until Seungmin gave him an affirmative before he got properly to his feet again. Changbin’s head popped up over the cubicle walls, while Jeongin immediately half-jogged to Minho’s side, swerving around the body of the man he’d killed. There were several bodies, slumped along this area, blood seeping darkly into the carpet. Soon this would all be immolated, and if they didn’t hurry, they just might be burned alive with them.
Minho ordered sharply, “Come on.” He put his gun back in its holster and hefted the duffle bag up a bit higher.
Smoke lingered heavily in the air. Minho didn’t look back as he led the way through the short halls until finally, the double doors of the exit were in sight. Anxiety gnawed at his gut but there was no cavalry waiting outside for them as he pushed them open — the night was dark still, frigid, and as quiet as a busy city eve could be.
He strode the few steps to the car and yanked the trunk door open, tossing the duffle bag inside irreverently. Hopefully whatever harddrives were in there weren’t fucking fragile.
“Fucking hell,” Changbin groaned, the sound of shifting following as he, presumably, began to take off his pack. “That was the worst— shit, fuck, I left my duffle bag in the building.”
Minho tossed his backpack into the trunk, with nothing short of fervent relief. “That’s just too fucking bad I guess—” he began to snarl but then there was a muted thud, and Changbin was crying out, “Jeongin! No—”
The clanking of metal. Minho whipped around, seeing Jeongin’s bags and rifle on the ground, tossed haphazardly, and the door into the building slowly swinging shut.
Jeongin had run back in.
Minho had thought, all his life, that he’d known hell. That he’d known fear. He’d stared down the abyss of death many times, water in his lungs and glass in his skin.
But no, he’d never known fear, until this moment.
He bolted for the doors, his entire being narrowed down to that purpose. His body was shocked alive by new adrenaline, by sheer, unfiltered fucking panic.
“Hyung—” Changbin grabbed Minho’s wrist, stopping him. It was like being caught in a vice, Minho yanked to a stop so hard it jarred his shoulder.
He didn’t think; there was nothing but the terror, the need to chase Jeongin. Not a want, but a need, as sure as breathing was.
Minho pulled his gun out of its holster with his free hand, levelling it straight at Changbin’s face.
Their eyes met over the barrel, Changbin’s going wide. He let go immediately, raising his hands in a show of surrender. Minho, as soon as he was free, banged through the doors of the building, his tired muscles screaming as he pushed them into rapid motion.
He ran, the way he’d been unable to before. He ran through the hall and then back into the wide, open expanse of the main office space. The air in here was grey, semi-opaque with the smoke, immediately scratching against the back of Minho’s throat.
He could see movement, Jeongin coming toward him — Minho didn’t stop running, catching Jeongin in the middle of the room. “Hyung!” Jeongin said, with something like surprise, and then he coughed, putting his arm over his mouth. In his other hand, was the stupid bag.
Minho shoved his gun back into its holster and snatched the bag out of Jeongin’s grip. Then he reached out with his free hand and grabbed Jeongin, his hand fisting in the back of his collar, like that security guard from Blackbird’s had done all those weeks ago. Jeongin made another surprised little noise as Minho hauled him into motion by that hold, halfway dragging Jeongin back out of the room.
There were tears in Minho’s eyes, smearing at the corners every time he blinked. From the smoke, from something worse.
They ran the rest of the way out, Minho never letting Jeongin go, not relinquishing his hold even a fraction. The entire time he felt like he might throw up from fear, that any second the ground under their feet would suddenly be in pieces, fire and shrapnel tearing them apart.
It didn’t happen. For the second time that night, Minho burst out of those double doors and into the night, the sky a dark sliver above their heads in the narrow space between the buildings.
The car was on, idling. Changbin was in the driver’s seat, all the bags gone — he must have loaded them up. At least one of them had fucking brains, Minho thought viciously.
He let Jeongin go only to yank the back door of the car open, then took hold of Jeongin’s upper arm and shoved him into the car. It was rough, probably too rough. Jeongin landed on his side along the backseat with a small impact noise. Minho wedged the duffle bag down into the footwell, and then slapped at Jeongin’s feet until he curled his legs and Minho could slam the door shut.
He stalked around the car and then threw himself into the passenger seat. “Drive,” he said, his voice shaking with too many things to quantify.
Changbin drove; Minho reached his trembling fingers into his tactical belt to pull out the detonator, even though it was looking like it wouldn’t be necessary. They had to make sure.
The car lumbered out of the little side alley and onto the main road, which was still fairly small. This wasn’t a busy area. Hopefully that would mean no innocent casualties.
Minho waited until they were halfway down the block to flick the little plastic covering off the switch. Then he flipped it.
The boom was audible even from within the car, a burst of light illuminating them for a long, drawn out moment. Oranges and reds. Minho didn’t turn to look. The building would fall or it wouldn’t. It would burn completely or it wouldn’t.
“Whoa,” Jeongin said, awe in his voice. From the sound of it, he was turned around, watching. “We— did it, like, we actually did it.”
Minho closed his eyes, his head lolling back against the headrest. By feel alone he peeled off the latex gloves, sticky with sweat, and threw them down into the footwell at his feet.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, and then his hand, broad and warm, was settling on Minho’s shoulder. Jeongin’s voice was much nearer when he spoke again, excitement curled into every syllable. “Did you see how I—”
“Sit back and put your seatbelt on,” Minho said, sharp and angry. Jeongin’s hand left him. With the fear dissipating there was only the— the fury. He was incandescently fucking furious. “Did I see. Yes, I fucking saw. You can see if I bring you on another fucking job ever again. I’ll quit before it happens, I’ll—”
“Hyung,” Changbin murmured.
Minho’s eyes shot open, immediately seeking out Changbin’s face. It was in profile, the lines tired. Minho breathed unsteadily through his nose.
“That’s not fair,” Jeongin said, and it was, of all things, sulky. There was the click of him putting his seatbelt on. “I did a good job.”
Minho’s fingernails were digging crescents into his own palms. “Keep quiet,” he managed to say through barely parted lips.
Jeongin sighed loudly, shifting, but he fell silent.
They turned a corner, and when Minho chanced a glance in the rearview mirror, he saw Jeongin’s scowling face, and in the distance, through the back windshield, the flashing lights of ambulances and fire trucks.
——
Hyunjin was trying, desperately, not to panic.
Beside him, Jisung was examining the windows, poking at the sealant between the glass and the metal pillars dividing them. The door to their little hideaway shuddered, the muffled sound of voices never stopping.
They were going to get caught, there was no way out of this.
Jisung grabbed one of the office chairs, all spindly plastic. “Step back a little.”
Hyunjin did so, going around the other side of the table, and Jisung hurled the chair at the window. It bounced off, one of the wheels cracking away and skittering across the floor. The window wasn’t even scratched.
“We’re fucked,” Hyunjin moaned, covering his face. There was an especially hard slam against the door. Who knew how long it would hold.
His in-ear crackled, and then Seungmin said, “I’ve been monitoring their communications.” Something about his tone made Hyunjin’s stomach, already leaden, sink even further. “They haven’t called the police.”
Jisung looked to Hyunjin, his eyes huge in his soft face. “Ah,” he said lamely.
“I need to know if you want me to call the police,” Seungmin said grimly.
Hyunjin was going to throw up. Being arrested was favourable to being— shot on sight, whenever the door finally gave way. Or worse, being taken hostage. Used for ransom, or just for— cruelty.
What a mess, what an absolute fucking shitshow. This was supposed to be the less risky arm of the job.
“Yeah, maybe?” Jisung said, a hand shoved through his hair, cracking through the gel. “Ah, wait, let me try something—”
He pulled his handgun out of its holster.
“I don’t think that will work,” Seungmin said, clipped.
Jisung ignored him, looking at Hyunjin. “Get behind me,” he said, and Hyunjin did so, hiding behind the mass of Jisung’s body as Jisung raised the gun toward one of the windows.
He pulled the trigger. Hyunjin flinched, but the bullet didn’t go ricocheting anywhere at all. It— stuck. Instead of shattering like normal glass, it was like the window was made out of some kind of candied, gummy material. The bullet was stuck there, some fractures radiating out of the impact area, but they were small and didn’t penetrate into the thickness of the glass at all.
“Fucking shit,” Jisung muttered, going over to the window and poking at the bullet. It was in pieces, and it fell to the carpet with some smaller splinters of glass.
He could empty his whole clip, every bullet he had on his person, and they’d get a hole maybe big enough to fit a fist through.
Oh, they were going to fucking prison, and probably for domestic terrorism.
Hopefully they’d be put together.
Hyunjin went to a corner of the room, wedging his back there, and then slowly slid down so he was kneeling, hugging his upper chest. He could feel panic clouding his mind, dimming everything around the edges. He’d done so many stealth jobs, was so good at sneaking into, and out of, places. But he had nothing, now. Nothing at all. No better than an animal caught in a trap.
Jisung stepped back from the window, raising the gun at it again. He pulled the trigger. Again and again and again. Until the gun clicked, empty.
There was still no hole in the window. Just a dent, the glass going opaque where it had been struck by bullet after bullet.
A low noise of frustration rose up out of Jisung’s chest, and then he shifted his grip on his gun and hit the glass with the grip of it. It reminded Hyunjin of when Minho was in a frenzy, Jisung just hitting, over and over, that one dented spot.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin whispered, and Jisung whirled to look at him, his chest heaving. “You don’t have to.”
Jisung stared at him for a long beat and then dropped the gun, like his fingers had suddenly gone numb. “I need to get you out of here,” he said, voice trembling.
Hyunjin squeezed his eyes shut, his head dropping back so it thunked against the wall.
His in-ear fizzled and then Seungmin was halfway yelling into their ears. “They’ve found the bombs. They’re— messing with them—” Hyunjin could hear rapid clicking. His eyes shot open and he slid back up onto his feet. “You need to—”
If Seungmin continued to speak, Hyunjin did not hear it. Everything had been still and clean and coldly lit and then suddenly it was red, suddenly it was chaos, suddenly Hyunjin was in hell.
He’d been standing and then he wasn’t. A scalding wash of heat, an explosion so loud he felt the sound of it inside of him, in his bones, and then he was on the floor, under wood, under concrete. The back of his head hit the floor hard, a strike of pain shooting from his skull to his feet like lightning.
An alarm began to blare, Hyunjin knew it must be loud, but he could barely hear it. His left ear was ringing in a very far away manner. The right was silent. His eyes didn’t want to focus, and there was so much dust in the air, grey-white, that there was little to be seen anyway. Above him little blue flashes of light pulsed beyond the dust clouds — the electrical wiring laid open, a shattered light. Every time Hyunjin blinked, it was harder to open his eyes again.
He must have fallen unconscious. When he next opened his eyes, there was more light — red and orange, flickering, and the air was thickening with smoke instead of concrete dust. The scent was heavy in his nostrils, causing his body to give him a kick of urgency, and he pushed at the thick slab of plaster that was pressing down over his hips. He managed to shove it off, rolling over onto his hands and knees, glass shards digging into his palms. His pack had flown— somewhere. He could not see it now, among all the debris.
Neither could he see Jisung.
“Jisung!” he cried out, hoping for a response, but there was none. He could hear his own voice, even in his right ear, though it was faint, which he supposed was a good sign, as much as he could suppose anything right now.
When he tried to stand he fell over, scraping against the rubble piled in what had once been a hallway. He was as disoriented as if he were drunk, mind slow and body unresponsive. It felt like someone was shoving him over, every time he tried to get upright.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin mumbled, feeling true stirrings of worry begin to stab through the fog of his mind. He groaned through the pain and pushed himself upright once more— and then one of Lee Jaerim’s men came careening around the corner, likely trying to escape the fire.
For a long moment, they just stared at one another across the rubble and smoke. The other man was steadier on his feet than Hyunjin, bigger too, though he had blood dripping down the side of his face, and he was tilted a little, like he too was a bit— disoriented. Then the man’s hand pawed at his side, and Hyunjin knew he was reaching for a gun, so he shoved off hard from the wall he’d been leaning on and took several loping, graceless steps forward. He was half-falling the entire time, really, but he let gravity work for him, slamming his whole weight into the man’s side, grabbing at his wrist as he did. The gun, caught up in the man’s holster, fell from between their scrabbling grasps onto the floor. Hyunjin kicked it away, and it skittered out of reach, into the cover of the firesmoke.
They grappled, then, Hyunjin struggling desperately to keep his footing amongst all the debris on the floor. He reached blindly for the knife strapped to his thigh, weak fingers wrapping around the handle. He tried to wedge it between their bodies, keeping the point of it directed away from himself. The man grabbed his wrist easily, one beefy hand squeezing the bones until they ground together, the other prying Hyunjin’s grip loose.
Hyunjin leaned down to bite at the man’s arm, teeth sinking in through the thick material of his suit jacket. The man snarled, and he broke Hyunjin’s hold on his arm easily, shoving Hyunjin back down to the ground. The abrupt motion sent renewed dizziness spiking through Hyunjin’s mind, and he couldn’t even find his balance enough to sit up. He watched the man stagger to stand over him, Hyunjin’s own knife reflecting the firelight from its place gripped in the man’s hand.
Hyunjin pushed himself up on his elbows, but he had no more weapons, and no way to defend himself other than fighting skills that were lacklustre even when he was at his best. And he was very much not at his best. The man was already over him, knife settled firmly in his hand, and Hyunjin just knew getting stabbed was going to hurt so much more than being hit. His heart beat like a trapped bird in his chest, and his heels caught on the floor as he tried to scoot back, to get away.
And then Jisung came careening out from somewhere to the left, hidden by the smoke and half a wall, and he hit at Hyunjin’s attacker and landed the blow on his shoulder, when he’d likely been aiming for his face. Jisung had grey, ashy smudges on his skin, and a trickle of dark blood coming from his ear. His eyes were glazed, likely even more disoriented than Hyunjin if his eardrum was blown out.
The man backhanded Jisung with his free hand, and Jisung stumbled back from the blow even though he’d easily taken far worse in the past. He might have fallen over entirely, but the man was rushing him, pushing Jisung back against the wall. He slammed his left forearm down across Jisung’s upper chest, pinning him down like a butterfly in a shadow box, and the back of Jisung’s head connected with the wall. His already dazed eyes went even blanker, and his head lolled a little.
In the low, flickering light, the blade of the knife glinted in the man’s right hand as he drew it back. No, Hyunjin thought with wild, awful desperation.
And then the man stabbed Jisung. It happened so fast, so easy. A simple thrust forward and then the hilt of the knife was pressed flush to Jisung’s stomach, like it was one of those toy knives, with the retractable blades. No resistance, Jisung’s shirt and skin giving way to sharpened metal in one smooth, horrific motion.
Jisung’s eyes went wide, and as the blade was thrust into him his chest jerked under an exhale Hyunjin couldn’t hear over the blaze of the fire, the screaming of the alarm. Worse, he looked— frozen, hands hovering out to his sides uselessly, too late to put them into motion, to prevent an action that was already past.
Move, do something, Hyunjin thought frantically, his eyes glued on Jisung even while he struggled to scramble to his own feet.
But Jisung had been knocked on the head too hard and had clearly not gotten his bearings back— and the man, fueled by his own panic, drew his hand back and then quickly stabbed Jisung again. And again. He was frenzied, desperate, and Hyunjin, who knew how easily a properly sharpened blade could slide into a person, still found himself in denial that this could happen so quickly. It was like a nightmare, with the lowered visibility, the weakness of his limbs, the looming, pressing powerlessness.
After the second stab Jisung’s hands grabbed, mindlessly, at the man’s wrist, at the blade, doing nothing other than slightly slowing him down and nicking his own fingers. “Ah, ah,” Jisung said as the knife slammed into his gut. It was soft, choking. He hadn’t even had a chance to inhale after the first time.
Chunks of concrete tripped Hyunjin up as he stumbled forward, but he couldn’t look away, filled to the brim with the sickening rush of adrenaline, its urgency doing nothing to help his uncoordinated limbs and only serving to feed his panic. Everything in front of him was happening so fucking fast, but Hyunjin felt like he was fighting through water, moving in slow motion.
And then it all abruptly snapped back into terrible solidity, Jisung’s system finally catching up with what was happening. When the man cut him open for the fourth time, Jisung dragged in the air to scream, the pain hitting him after a few seconds of delay and making him arch and begin to thrash, like an animal, against the man’s hold on him.
He was too weak to make much difference, and his attacker had his own adrenaline high fueling him, but Hyunjin had, at last, managed to stumble to the pair of them. All his training fled from him, he could not think of sparring moves nor tactics, all he could do was hook his arm around the other man’s neck and let the terror of his humming body give him strength. He bodily ripped the man away from Jisung, letting his weight aid him. Jisung let out a punched-out sound as the knife was wrenched back out for the final time.
Their attacker’s feet got tangled in Hyunjin’s, in the debris on the floor, and all three of them went toppling to the ground. Hyunjin lost his hold, and so did their attacker; the knife went clattering down beside them. It was Jisung who snatched it up, who jabbed it at the man’s neck, an uncoordinated movement. The blade cut deeply to one side, an arcing slice, and blood came splattering out immediately. Some of it landed, wet and hot even in the heat of the fire, on Hyunjin’s face, across his chest. The man shrieked, at first, and clutched at his neck, where the blood was pulsing out, but it was no good. Blood ran in thick rivulets out of the wound, and already the man’s face was pale as milk. He slumped limply onto the floor, and Hyunjin dragged Jisung away, back out of any possible danger, amidst the gurgling, desperate sounds of their attacker dying.
They didn’t get far. Jisung’s feet stumbled as Hyunjin pulled him and he fell backwards, hitting a desk with his back before he slumped to the floor. Hyunjin went with him, doing his best to protect the back of Jisung’s head, laying him down carefully. He had to grit his teeth against the sounds that Jisung made with each movement, little bitten-off gasps and whines. He’d never heard Jisung make those noises before. Jisung’s pain, if he expressed it, was always performative, a little too on show to be taken seriously. This was not that, this was real and true and Hyunjin thought he might throw up hearing it.
Blood seeped, thick and dark, across Jisung’s shirt, shining wetly in the orange light. The material stuck to his stomach with it. Hyunjin’s panic was so thick it almost whited out his vision.
“Jisung,” he said. He pulled off his thin hoodie, yanking impatiently at his shirt underneath as it rose up with the movement, and then balled it up as best he could. When he pressed it, firm and hard against the wounds on Jisung’s stomach, Jisung cried out in pain. “Jisung, oh my god—”
Jisung lifted a trembling hand, gripping Hyunjin’s shoulder. The other lay by his side, like he couldn’t move it. “Are you okay?” he asked, very seriously, like he wasn’t bleeding out as they spoke.
“Me?” Hyunjin shook his head, before he took the hand that was gripping his shoulder and brought it to the balled-up sweater, jerky with his franticness. “Here, press down here, I need to— call someone, I need—”
Jisung’s hand lifted again. This time he raised it to Hyunjin’s face and brushed the back of his knuckles against Hyunjin’s cheek. He was frowning. “You’re not okay,” he said, a little indistinct around the edges. “Are you hurt? You’re crying.”
He was; Hyunjin had barely even noticed it. The fire was closer now, almost unbearably hot, smoke thick and stinging his eyes, burning in his lungs. “Of course I’m crying,” he gasped, pressing Jisung’s stray hand back down, and holding his wrist there for long enough that when he took his hand away, Jisung didn’t move it. “You got stabbed, Jisung, of course I’m crying— why would you— that was so stupid, why did you do that—”
Jisung’s frown deepened. “He was going to stab you,” he said, earnestly, so earnestly, and a little slurred, “I couldn’t let that happen.”
Hyunjin sobbed, bent over him. His hands were starting to get slippery with blood. “You’re so stupid,” he choked out. “If you die, I’m going to kill you.” Jisung huffed out a laugh, that immediately turned into a hiss of pain at the motion. Hyunjin’s heartbeat was in his fucking throat. “Don’t— you need to keep the pressure on the wound, okay, I’m going to get you out of here.”
Hyunjin straightened a little, just enough to look around. Smoke poured out from the doorway to their left, the flames visible beyond, so that way wasn’t happening. There was another door, but Hyunjin couldn’t remember right now where it led. He couldn’t even be fully sure where they were in the building. The explosion had completely turned him around. And there was so much debris, an obstacle course of concrete and jagged wooden beams.
But they couldn’t stay here. If he could get Jisung onto his back, maybe he could carry him out.
“Come on,” Hyunjin said hoarsely, grabbing Jisung’s arm, the one not holding his sweater to his wounds. He put it around the back of his neck, attempting to pull Jisung into a sitting position, but Jisung— didn't go. It was like he was already dead, his body limp, not even trying to help.
“Hyunjin,” Jisung said in a small voice, and Hyunjin let his arm go. It slipped down, resting on the floor once more. “There’s no point.” Hyunjin stared down at Jisung, eyes so full of tears he could barely see. Every time Jisung blinked, his eyes were slower to open again, like he was fighting to stay conscious. In a whisper he said, “I’m not making it to a hospital.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Hyunjin said. His voice was gasping; it was so difficult to breathe, between the smoke and the tears that flooded down his face, clogged up the back of his throat. “Don’t you dare die on me.”
“You need to get out,” Jisung said indistinctly, words faint with little hitches of pain. “You can’t help me, you’ll die here. Just— just leave me, Hyunjin, you need to get out. For me. Please.” His face twisted. He seemed more upset at the thought of Hyunjin dying than his own imminent death, and Hyunjin wanted to scream, hysteria bubbling up in his throat. “Please.”
There was a crash behind them, loud and startling, a sudden burst of heat. Hyunjin thoughtlessly threw himself over Jisung, protecting Jisung’s head with his body. No debris came tumbling down onto them though; it was likely something in the room over had merely collapsed under the heat of the fire, not some kind of secondary explosion.
Hyunjin was sick with how hard his heart was pounding, with the fear in him. Anticipating another crash, he pulled back slowly, just enough to peer down at Jisung’s face from a few breaths away. Jisung blinked up at him, slow, and as Hyunjin watched, his own tears landed on Jisung’s face, streaking clean lines through the grime on Jisung’s cheeks.
Jisung lifted his hand, an uncoordinated movement, swiping clumsy fingertips through the tears on Hyunjin’s skin. “Ah,” Jisung sighed out, eyes only half open. “I do love you, so fucking much.” Hyunjin let out a thready gasp, feeling Jisung’s touch, so light and tender, whisper across his cheeks. Jisung’s eyes, unfocused though they were, held all the fondness in the world as he gazed up at Hyunjin’s crying face. “You’re so good, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin shook his head, hair swaying with the movement. This was goodbye, Jisung was saying goodbye. “No, Jisung—”
“I’m sorry,” Jisung mumbled. The hand that had been touching Hyunjin’s cheeks with such reverent gentleness fell away, back down to the floor. Jisung’s eyes closed slowly. “I’m sorry.”
“Jisung.” Hyunjin grabbed Jisung’s face in both of his hands, shaking him lightly. Jisung’s eyes didn’t open again. Already there was a voice in the back of Hyunjin’s mind, whispering cruelly that he’d wasted all that time they’d had together. That Jisung was gone and would never know the truth of Hyunjin’s own feelings. He’d thought they had time, he’d thought he had time. He’d thought—
“Not like this,” Hyunjin gasped out, nearly indistinct through the force of his hitching sobs. His thumbs swiped over the dirt on Jisung’s cheeks, the dampness of his own tears on Jisung’s skin. “Not like this, please— Jisung.”
Jisung did not stir, though he was still breathing, panting shallowly through parted lips. Hyunjin leaned down, vision swimming with his tears, and kissed Jisung’s mouth, catching against Jisung’s bottom lip. He wasn’t gentle about it, not now, not like this. A firm kiss, pressed against Jisung’s slack mouth, feeling Jisung’s harried breaths against his skin.
Suddenly there was a hand gripping Hyunjin’s arm tightly, almost painfully; a moment later, Jisung gasped and as Hyunjin pulled back, Jisung’s eyes opened again, wide and far more alert than they had been.
“Stay with me,” Hyunjin begged. “Please.” There was too much blood for Hyunjin to feel any true reassurance, but he would be damned before he gave up until it was absolutely too late. Until Jisung was actually gone.
Jisung’s face twisted, a grimace of pain, not just physical. “Hyunjin—”
And then Hyunjin heard Seungmin’s voice.
His head snapped up, listening hard over the sound of the roaring fire. “Seungmin!” he called out, searching for the shadow of a person through the smoke.
Faintly, he heard a cry in response, his own name.
“We’re in here!” Hyunjin screamed. “Help, please—
Through the doorway free of fire came the form of a person, indistinct but then they came through the smoke— he wore a bandana over his nose and mouth, but Hyunjin recognized his friend.
Seungmin made his way efficiently over the debris and then stopped dead several paces from them, staring down at the tableau laid before him with wide eyes.
Hyunjin felt his own face crumple, because he knew— he knew what Jisung looked like. He knew this was likely hopeless. But seeing the horror in Seungmin’s eyes drove it home in a way that Hyunjin had been trying so hard to pretend wasn’t real.
“Help me,” he sobbed out, and Seungmin seemed to shake himself, kneeling down beside him.
“I’ll get his legs,” Seungmin said, muffled behind the bandana. “You get under his arms.”
It felt impossible, for Hyunjin to have to— do this. Do anything. When he felt like laying down and dying too, letting the fire eat his body down until it was ash. What if he can’t be saved, he thought, what if he really does die.
The rabbit, the rabbit. Don’t chase the rabbit.
Hyunjin— had to pull himself together, he had to. He swiped his arm across his face quickly, repressing the hitching of his chest as best he could. Seungmin grabbed Jisung under his knees, and Hyunjin moved to hook his hands under his shoulders. Together they hoisted Jisung up, his hands still weakly clutching Hyunjin’s hoodie to his stomach. He made a soft pained noise as they lifted him, the back of his head pressed to Hyunjin’s sternum.
“This way,” Seungmin said, over the ever-closer roaring of the fire. He pulled and Hyunjin followed, trying to keep hold of Jisung as they stepped over debris, around huge chunks of concrete and doors falling off their hinges.
Seungmin seemed to know where they were going, which was good, because Hyunjin didn’t even try to keep track. Every second lasted a millenia — Jisung’s little whimpers of pain every time he was jostled, the pounding ache of Hyunjin’s head, his body weak and trembly. It was adrenaline that kept him going, through the pain and the fatigue and the nausea.
They were taking too long. That was all Hyunjin could think, around the way he was desperately holding Jisung up, wondering when his arms were going to give way. They were taking far too long.
Jisung fell silent sometime around when Seungmin was guiding them from what was left of the second floor elite rooms to the employee service staircase. Concrete and slim and contained, when they began their descent, it was the first time in what felt like hours that Hyunjin inhaled something other than the scent of smoke.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin mumbled, but Jisung said nothing. His hands, which had been feebly trying to keep pressure over his middle, were limp and dangling beside him now, covered in blood.
“We’re almost out,” Seungmin panted, “this way.”
We still have to drive to the hospital, Hyunjin thought, something like numbness falling over him now. He couldn’t give up, he wouldn’t. But something in him was beginning to realise this was an empty effort.
There were only a few people down here, in the employee-only section, and none of them tried to stop them. They were servers in their uniforms, the occasional patron. Some of them untouched, others with smears of soot, or small flecks of blood from shattered glass and splintered wood. Everyone had only one goal now: out. Get out.
Seungmin’s back hit the exit door, shoving it open, the frigid night air a shock to the system. Jisung, faintly, roused, and Hyunjin gave a raw sob that he couldn’t keep bitten back.
The van was right there. Thank— something, someone somewhere. Please, Hyunjin thought, crying anew as they loaded Jisung’s limp form into the back of the van. Please.
Hyunjin crawled into the back with Jisung, Seungmin pausing for a fraction of a second before shutting them both in. It wasn’t like Hyunjin would be able to drive them.
In the low light given off by the monitors, Jisung looked dead. The firelight had been warm — this was cold, Jisung was cold. Hyunjin put his hand on the hoodie, and it squished, soaked with blood.
He pressed harder. Jisung did not stir. The van rumbled to life under them, lurching as Seungmin floored it out onto the street.
Hyunjin used his free hand to stroke Jisung’s sweaty hair off his face, leaning down to press their foreheads together. “I love you too,” Hyunjin whispered, feeling Jisung breathe, fast and light and weak, against his face. “I love you too, so please. Please, Jisung. I’m sorry.”
The van swerved around a corner. Jisung’s head lolled. Hyunjin lay next to him, curled around Jisung’s head like he’d done in the fire. Protecting him. In the front seat, Seungmin was on the phone with someone — a hospital. His voice was shaky and frantic through the grate. Seungmin, thinking of what came next, what they would be dealing with in five minutes, ten.
Jisung was alive. A second ticked by. He was alive. Another second. Jisung’s chest rose. Another second. Another. Another. Another.
Hyunjin clutched at the seconds as they flowed through his hands like sand— like Jisung’s blood, tacky between his fingers. He held them, as they slipped away. Every second where Jisung was still alive, Hyunjin made a home for himself in them. He would live in them too.
He could do nothing else.
Chapter 25
Notes:
we were expecting people to scream over the last chapter but we weren't expecting people to scream that much. so thanks for that? e_e?? honestly the love this fic gets blows our mind daily and we appreciate it so much
uhhhh that said, after this chapter we are going to have to put the fic back on a hiatus. we can't guarantee how long it's going to be for, but since we moved countries and i (rara) got a job where i CAN'T just sit and write 3k of this fic every day, production has slowed down considerably. so we're going to work on the last 5 chapters and then resume posting. again, no idea when that'll be; on the one hand, no more moving. on the other hand, loathed employment.
but we hope you enjoy this chapter!! the Aftermath of The Heist.
chapter specific content warnings: lots of blood; suicidal ideation on minho's part; medical related trauma.
Chapter Text
Felix’s heart still felt like it was trying to pound its way out of his chest as their cab worked its way through the city, the fare metre steadily rising in the front. His hands were still shaking, and he’d tucked them under his thighs to try to see if he could get them to stop, but thus far it had not worked. Next to him in the back, on his right, Jisoo sat pressed against the door, her face turned out to the window. Felix was not sure if she was actually watching the scenery go by or if she was just zoning out. Chan was in the front passenger seat, in Felix’s line of sight. He looked tense, his phone in his hands. It was clearly not sitting well with Chan to not know what was going on, to have had their line of communication cut short.
It was quiet in the car, nobody talking at all. The cab driver had tried a few times to start a conversation, asking Chan questions that had gotten him polite but decidedly short replies. Now various trot songs came over the speakers, one after the other, unbroken by their voices. They were lucky, he supposed, that ferrying people to Seoul station in the wee hours of the morning wasn’t exactly uncommon. Unmemorable in every way.
They were close to the station now, Felix recognized the area. He imagined they’d catch another taxi once they arrived, and pretend they had just gotten into the city. He was, simultaneously, absolutely exhausted, while still totally wired up on nerves. They weren’t safe yet, but his body was so tired, and the urge to be completely alert was fighting hard with the desire for sleep.
He heaved a heavy sigh, and Chan looked back at him. He looked tired too, now that all of his adrenaline was starting to run off, the high of the car chase giving way to the hour of the night. “You holding up okay?” Chan asked. But before Felix could reply Chan’s phone buzzed with an incoming call.
He had it against his ear so fast that Felix didn’t even have a chance to see which emoji contact name had come up on the device. “Yeah?” he said in greeting, and then to whatever it was that was said on the other end, “Yeah, we’re in a cab, like you told us, we’re almost to the station now.”
Seungmin then, probably checking in on them, and when he started speaking again, Felix could hear the faint sound of his voice but not any of the words, the phone volume too low for that. He turned to the driver and said, “Um, if you could let us out here, please?”
The taxi driver nodded silently. Felix had, honestly, never taken a taxi before in his life. His father had insisted on Felix being ferried around everywhere by his own men, in his own cars. When Felix had gone out on his own, he’d taken public transportation, kept to areas with crowds and many people around. There’d been a healthy fear of kidnapping instilled into him at a very young age, and he was no longer sure if it was legitimate or another form of control on his father’s part.
The car pulled to a stop on the curb. Chan, his voice very, very odd, said into the phone, “Which hospital are you at?”
A jolt of fear went through Felix’s body, a kind of fear that he’d felt much too many times in his life. He’d last felt it when he’d been sitting on that couch and saw Minho appear in the doorway of the television room, murder written all over his face. An anxious thing, that felt like every organ inside him had been suddenly flash-frozen, the ice dripping into every last piece of him.
Chan was pale, half-turned to the window on his side as if to muffle a conversation that they could all hear his side of. The hand not holding his phone was fisted in his lap. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll go there now. Can you call the others? They’ll need to backtrack a bit.”
There was a short reply, before Chan took the phone from his ear. His hand was shaking so hard when he tried to end the call that Seungmin beat him to it. “Hyung?” Felix asked. “What’s happened?” The look on Chan’s face, something horrified and nauseated, was scaring him more than he could say. He almost didn’t want to know what was going on, the fear of the answer was so strong.
“Jisung’s been— injured,” Chan said. Felix heard himself make a noise, something raw and animal; the fear of the unknown had not diminished, because he didn’t know what injured meant and it was clear that Chan was not going to elaborate in front of their taxi driver, to whom he said, “Sorry, can you take us to Hanyang University Hospital instead please?”
The driver gave Chan a little askance look, like he was beginning to realise that between Chan’s evasiveness over their destination once they got to Seoul Station, and now this sudden detour to a hospital, they were probably up to no good. But it was more money, after all, so he nodded and took the next turn he needed to get them to the hospital.
There had been silence before but not like there was silence now. Felix wanted desperately to ask for more information but Chan only had to glance back at him once for him to keep his mouth clamped shut. He could not explain more in front of a stranger, but the look on Chan’s face was enough to let Felix know that whatever it was, it was bad. It was very, very bad.
He sat back in his seat. Jisoo, clearly confused, clearly wanting to know more but reading the room as well as he had, reached out and took his hand. Felix clung to it, the fear and anxiety thrumming through him. He thought if he opened his mouth, he might throw up.
Hanyang University Hospital was giant, a campus made up of multiple buildings that connected to each other via walkways, and they got the cab driver to drop them off in the guest parking area. Chan paid the considerable fare in cash and tipped almost the same amount again. The driver was very effusive with his thanks as Felix got out of the back of the car, Jisoo scrambling out the other side. The driver popped the trunk and Chan came around to help them get the case out, lifting it like it weighed nothing.
“What do you mean, injured,” Felix said, now that the driver couldn’t hear them, now that they were standing outside in the darkness of the winter morning. “What happened, what did Seungmin say?”
“Nothing specific to the injury itself or the incident,” Chan said. He was holding onto the case still, but when Jisoo carefully took it from him, he let it go, so she could pull it. It seemed like having something to do, even as small as pulling her own case, was enough to calm her down. “He just— something went wrong with their part of the job. Really wrong. He said— that he didn’t think Jisung was going to make it.”
No, Felix thought, immediately thinking of Hyunjin. Jisung couldn’t die. He just couldn’t.
Felix reached out and took Chan’s hand, desperate to have the weight and warmth of it. Jisoo’s had passed muster in the car, but nothing compared to this. He was shaking still, a little harder now with this added thing on top of the crash of adrenaline from earlier, but when his fingers slid through Chan’s, he found that Chan was shaking just a bit too.
“Come on,” Chan said. “Let’s go find out where they are.”
The hospital had looked big enough from the outside, but on the inside, with patients everywhere, doctors walking past and nurses rushing here and there, it was little better than a maze. The floor tiles were white, the walls white, the lights just off-white enough to be almost migraine-inducing. The smell was the worst of it, a scent memory that Felix associated with his mother’s sickness. That particular lemon antiseptic and floral rot of death underneath that brought to mind images of his mother, thin and tired, swallowed by her white hospital bed.
He tried to not think of his mother, if he could help it. Sometimes that was hard; sometimes looking in the mirror brought her forcibly to mind.
It took a long time to track down where Jisung had been whisked off to. The receptionist in the main lobby was a college-aged girl who looked as tired as Felix felt, clearly the end of a long shift, and when her question of, and how do you know the patient was answered by Chan sliding her 300,000won, she shut her mouth and pointed them to the Trauma Care department, where she said their friends were waiting.
When they got there, it turned out that where Seungmin and Hyunjin were waiting was the public area, sitting with a mother and her groaning, vomiting kid, and a couple of young guys who had pushed some of the chairs together so they could create make-shift beds as they waited for whoever was being seen. Hyunjin and Seungmin were in a corner, both their hard plastic seats shoved right against the wall, and as Chan and Felix came into the room, Jisoo with her suitcase still rattling over the flooring behind them, Seungmin spotted them and immediately got to his feet and met them halfway across the room.
“Hyung,” he said, without preamble. “He’s in surgery, they won’t tell us anything.”
He was covered in blood, bright red smeared all down his front. It was all over his hands, smudged along his neck, too. It looked like something out of a horror movie. Hyunjin, who still had not looked up from the floor, not even when Seungmin had moved, looked even worse. Even in all black like he was, the blood was obvious. Felix doubted anything he was wearing could be salvaged.
Chan put a hand on Seungmin’s shoulder and then flinched and pulled it back; there was blood residue against his palm now. “Seungmin,” he said. He had kept his cool through the chase through the city, got them to where they needed to be, kept both Felix and Jisoo safe. But now, in the harsh lighting of this hospital waiting room, he looked pale and shocky, slowly lowering his hand to where the blood wouldn’t show up in his peripheral vision. His voice was shaking a little bit. “What happened?”
“The bombs got set off early,” Seungmin said. “That’s— that’s all I know, hyung, that’s all I saw.”
Felix felt like the floor had suddenly opened up beneath him, that sick swooping feeling of falling jolting through his gut. Neither Chan nor Seungmin looked askance at him in blame, but Felix felt the weight of it all the same, the guilt of responsibility absolutely searing.
It was my fault? Felix wanted to ask, but here, in this hospital waiting to see if Jisung would live, was neither the time nor the place to pull focus onto himself.
Felix broke away from them, more unsteady than before, going around Seungmin so he could go to where Hyunjin was sitting, his elbows resting on his knees, head bowed. His hair had been carefully tied up for the job but it was down now, the hair tie disappeared somewhere, and his hair fell forward so that none of his face was showing. Dust and dirt clumped the strands together, and it was wet in places with something that looked like it was probably blood. Felix didn’t know if it was his own or if it was Jisung’s.
“Hyunjin?” he said softly. Hyunjin didn’t move, stayed in that slumped position, his fingers and hands hanging loosely toward the floor. They, too, had blood on them, not a single patch of pale skin showing through the redness. So much of it that it was not dry yet. It was still tacky and shiny, which could not have felt good at all. “Hyunjin, it’s me.”
Still no movement at all. Felix went down to his haunches, hunching so that he could catch Hyunjin’s eye this way. “Hyunjin,” he said again, once he’d managed it.
Hyunjin twitched. Then slowly, so slowly, he lifted his head so that Felix was no longer having to contort in such an odd way to see his face. When he’d done so, though, it was very obvious that whatever else he was, Hyunjin was not really in the room with them right now. It was not blankness, not the way Minho could project, not the way Felix had learned to school his face whenever he was around his father. It was emptiness, a complete lack of humanity.
It took Felix’s breath away. Not in the good way, but more like his chest was seizing up, muscles unresponsive.
There was a nasty bruise all along the side of Hyunjin’s face, an impact kind of bruise, colouring his high cheekbone blackish purple, fading down to pool around his left eye. There was grime all over him in addition to blood — greyish and dingy. From smoke, from ashes. From being feet away from a bomb going off.
Hyunjin didn’t speak. He looked at Felix, seemingly taking him in, seemingly seeing him there, but he didn’t otherwise react. His skin utterly white, his mouth as pale as the rest of him; the bruises blended with his hair but the blood was stark in its vibrancy. Smudges of it over the bruises, another smear across the length of his forehead, as if he’d tried to wipe his hair out of his face without realising what was on his hands.
This close, Felix realised that it was not true that Hyunjin was not moving. He was shaking, a whole body tremble that did not stop, did not pause, as he watched Felix without anything on his face or in his eyes. Felix could hear his teeth chattering, but it was like Hyunjin did not even know it was happening.
There was a touch on Felix’s shoulder, something he flinched away from a little bit. When he looked up, it was Jisoo, her eyes flickering between him and Hyunjin, her hand gripping the handle of her suitcase. “Yongbok,” she said. “You— what have you gotten yourself into?”
What indeed. But just like before, this was not the time for Felix to answer her questions, not the time for him to give her answers to what was going on. So instead he just said, “Noona, will you wait here with Chan-hyung and Seungmin? I need to— look after Hyunjin here.”
She looked at Hyunjin, who was still just watching Felix, his entire frame jerking with the way he was shaking. “Shouldn’t he see a doctor?” she asked.
Probably, Felix thought, but he just said, “No, I’ll look after him. Just wait here, okay?”
She nodded, looking unsure still, and took one of the hard plastic seats a couple down from where Hyunjin sat. Felix looked back at Hyunjin, and said, “Hyunjin-ah, can you stand up? Will you come with me to the bathroom? I’d like to clean you up, if that’s okay.”
Hyunjin gave no indication that he’d heard a word that Felix had said. He didn’t move to stand. There was another touch to Felix’s upper back, and this time he did not flinch, because something about the weight and size of the hand was so obviously Chan that he just knew it to his bones. A moment later, Chan joined him in a crouch against the floor, looking at Hyunjin too.
“Hyunjin,” he said. Hyunjin’s eyes flicked in his direction but there was still no light of recognition in him. “Hyunjin-ah. Are you okay? Can hyung do anything, can hyung help you?” No response, nothing whatsoever. Chan reached out and touched Hyunjin’s knee and then took his hand off immediately when Hyunjin flinched. “Is he hurt, do you know?” Chan asked Felix, his voice quiet in a way that sounded like he was using the volume to mask emotion.
“I don’t know,” Felix said. “He hasn’t said anything.”
“He hasn’t said anything since we got here,” said Seungmin, from somewhere behind Felix. “The nurses wanted to take him too but I didn’t think that was wise.”
Felix wanted to know what the hell Seungmin had told the nurses in the first place. How did someone explain the kind of injuries Jisung must have, how did someone explain the dust and debris and blood coating Hyunjin. With every passing second the reality of this situation was sinking further and further into him and the horror felt like there perhaps was no end to it. Jisung, whisked away to some operating theatre that he might never return from. He was, in this moment, both alive and not alive, and if he died, that would be innocent blood on Felix’s hands.
He’d built those bombs. If Jisung died, he was culpable. He would be the cause of Jisung’s death. For Hyunjin’s absolute heartbreak.
“That was probably best,” Chan murmured. He didn’t touch Hyunjin again, and after a few seconds he got to his feet, with just the slightest groan that only Felix heard. “I’m going to see if I can get us some kind of private waiting room,” he said. “And find out what’s happening with Jisung, if I can, but we should have somewhere private to wait for news too.”
That was probably going to take another bribe, and not one smaller than he’d paid off the receptionist with. “I’m going to take Hyunjin to get cleaned up,” Felix said.
“I’ll help you,” Chan said immediately.
“No,” said Felix. “It’s okay, we’ll be okay. Go and get a private room for us, and we’ll meet you there.”
Chan looked hesitant for a moment before he nodded. He ran a hand, light and brief, across Felix’s hair and then said, “I’ll tell a nurse to tell you what room we’re in.”
Felix nodded. Chan left to find someone to presumably harangue about a private room. Seungmin did not sit down again. He lifted a hand as if to run it through his own hair and then seemed to remember the blood coating them. He said, in a jittery kind of voice, “I need to go sort out the cameras. I’m going back out to the van.”
“Okay,” Felix said softly, and watched him leave, Seungmin moving with a remarkable kind of haste for him. But that made sense, considering he’d been supposed to clear out the camera footage as soon as all the groups were clear — a blackout zone across their area of the city, all the streets around Blackbird’s and the vault. There was a time delay now, not a long one, and the zone would need to be larger, to take in the hospital, Felix imagined. Seungmin would need to work quickly.
More work for him. Felix should have been with him, maybe, tonight. Felix should have—
“Hyunjin,” he said softly. “Let’s go to the bathroom.” He stood up and held out an arm, for Hyunjin to take, to help lever himself upright. Hyunjin’s face followed his movement, where he hadn’t bothered with Chan, but he just looked at Felix’s arm like it was some foreign object. “Hyunjin,” Felix said, a little louder this time, trying to see if he could get through. “Come on, you’re covered in blood, you need to wash it off. I need to see if you’re injured too.” When Hyunjin just kept looking at him, he said, “It’s either this or we get a doctor.”
That had an effect. Hyunjin put his hand against Felix’s forearm, and between the two of them, Felix somehow managing to take some of Hyunjin’s weight, they got him up and on his feet. He leaned against Felix heavily, and as they made their way across to where the bathroom was, luckily not too far, it was slow, unsteady. It was not just that Hyunjin was tired, it was more than that; it was a little bit like trying to help a drunk man, like Hyunjin’s usual, almost supernatural balance was thrown off. It was not easy, and Felix was grateful when they finally pushed their way into the bathroom.
He helped Hyunjin sit down on a closed toilet in one of the stalls. The descent was— heavy, Hyunjin’s legs giving way a little bit, Felix thought, but he made it down without further injury. “Wait here,” he murmured, even though there was little chance of Hyunjin going anywhere else.
The bathroom had paper towels for drying your hands with, which Felix was grateful for, because that was going to be easier than trying to use toilet paper, thin and flaky when wet. He pulled a stack out of the dispenser, not really caring if he used up their entire supply in the end, and dampened about half of them, before he took them back to the stall where Hyunjin was waiting.
The thought of kneeling on that bathroom floor was decidedly unpleasant, but maybe there was a sense of solidarity in it, in that Hyunjin’s knees were certainly coated in something he didn’t want on him, so Felix could deal with whatever was on this floor. Hyunjin watched him, those dead eyes on him, but when Felix said, “Hyunjin? Can I wash your hands?” Hyunjin took a moment, like he needed a while to process the question, and then held his hands out. They shook even now, and continued to do so as Felix took them in his own.
Touching those bloody hands was much, much more unpleasant than kneeling on the floor. The blood would have been bad enough, but knowing that it belonged to Jisung made it all the worse. The first wet paper towel was soon red, half of Hyunjin’s hand showing through now, the pale skin with the blue veins underneath, and Felix dropped the towel onto the floor to get the next one.
As he worked, he kept his hands on Hyunjin’s hands, and sensed, more than anything, the way Hyunjin seemed to— rouse himself a little, as the blood vanished from his hands, his wrists. It was under his fingernails, and there was nothing Felix could do about that, but he tried to get rid of it everywhere else. There were— pinpricks, spots of red that wouldn’t wash away, and Felix tilted Hyunjin’s hands and caught glimmers in the low light. Glass. He used one of his nails to scrape out a piece, red welling up as soon as the shard was free. Hyunjin’s hands twitched, and he pulled them from Felix’s grasp. When Felix looked up, Hyunjin was sitting straighter, and his eyes were just that bit more alert. There was, now, a human spark of life, where there had previously been nothing. He still did not speak.
The glass would wait, it had to.
“Is it okay if I wash your face, Hyunjin?” Felix asked. It was the first thing that had been said in about ten minutes at this point, and his voice seemed much too loud in that silent bathroom. Thus far, only the nasty buzzing of the overhead fluorescent lighting had been with them.
Hyunjin jerked his head in something that Felix assumed was a nod. Felix straightened up himself, no longer half sitting on his heels, so that he could easily reach. Hyunjin, even watching him come closer, even having given permission, still flinched a little when the damp paper towel touched his cheek. But of course it was cold, by now, and a little slimy, and so Felix understood. He didn’t pull it back though, he just wiped as gently as he could with the slightly rough towel.
Hyunjin— stirred. “Lix,” he said, voice more rough that Felix had ever heard it. Felix was so surprised to hear it that he almost dropped the towel. “Lix?”
“Yeah, Hyunjin,” Felix said softly, as he wiped all traces of Jisung’s blood off Hyunjin’s forehead. “It’s me, it’s Lix.”
Hyunjin’s hand came up and brushed, just briefly, the underside of Felix’s wrist. Even just that brief touch made Felix jump. Not from surprise this time, but from how cold Hyunjin’s hands were. It had not seemed that bad when he was holding them. “What if he dies,” Hyunjin whispered.
Felix had to swallow hard, because that question made him again feel that awful sensation of being dropped from a very great height. “He’s not going to die,” he said, because what else could he say? It was a declaration he could not make, not truthfully; it was something he had no personal control over. But he had to hold onto the hope of it because anything else was unbearable.
Anything else would be— unforgivable.
“What if he dies,” Hyunjin whispered again. It didn’t seem like he’d heard Felix’s answer, or if he had, he had not taken it in. “Lix, what if he dies. What if he dies.”
“Hyunjin—”
“What if he dies. What if he dies.”
It was not a question, not really. Hyunjin did not want an answer from Felix. What if he dies could have no answer that was simple and easy enough for Felix to give. If Jisung died, part of Hyunjin would go with him, perhaps the parts that had kept him going through all these years of anguish and horror, the parts that had learned to be kind, and gentle, the parts that had given to others what had not been given to him in turn for so long.
If Jisung died, it would be one thing too far, Felix knew. He knew it down to his bones. If Jisung died, it would be one too many cruelties in a life that had dealt Hyunjin so few other things. Hyunjin would not come back from it.
“He won’t die,” Felix said. He could only wish it into existence. “He won’t.”
But as he wiped the rest of the blood away, as he dried off Hyunjin’s face, Hyunjin didn’t hear him. Hyunjin didn’t speak to him again, not the way he had said Felix’s name. Instead he just repeated what if he dies over and over again: the chant of a man desperate for it to not happen.
——
Chan had managed to bribe his way into the biggest family waiting room the hospital had by the time Minho, Jeongin, and Changbin arrived. It was certainly more comfortable than Chan had expected it to be, with plenty of chairs and a couple of soft, comfortable couches. During the daytime, it was probably well-lit, flooded with sunlight, but at this time of the morning in winter, it was still pitch black outside, and the yellow overhead lights were not helping Chan’s buzzing headache.
Jisoo had claimed the very corner of a couch, pressed into the arm of it despite the fact that there was nobody else there, and it could probably easily fit another two people. Seungmin had come back from his trip out to the van, stood for a moment looking around the room and then dragged an armchair over to the corner furthest from the windows. Chan had helped him move it, since it was a little heavy for Seungmin, who had been shaking to boot, and after that, Seungmin had curled up on it, feet tucked up in an uncomfortable looking way, too tall for the small chair. He had not moved other than to dump his blood-stained jacket onto the floor.
Chan had found a hard chair to sit on, and had just been contemplating going to find out where Felix and Hyunjin were, since they had not returned from the bathroom yet, when Changbin banged into the room. Jisoo jumped in her seat, which Chan didn’t judge her for, because the sound of the door suddenly flying open had sent him to his feet too, his hand twitching for the gun that he still had concealed under his coat. But it was just Changbin, striding into the room unarmed, his hair windswept and a horror of blood all the way down his neck.
“Jesus,” Chan said, with a sickening lurch of something like delayed panic in his stomach. “What the fuck happened to you?”
Changbin kind of just ignored the question, in favour of asking, or more demanding, “How’s Jisung, what happened, where is he?”
Behind Changbin, Jeongin had slunk into the room. He was white-faced, a little anxious looking, but mostly just— sullen. He didn’t say anything to anyone and just came and threw himself down on the spare couch without a word. Behind him, Minho closed the door to the room, and also without saying anything or looking at anyone, went to the table in the corner near the window and stood with his back to them all.
“He’s in surgery,” Chan said to Changbin. “We don’t know what’s going on or how he is.”
“Fuck,” said Changbin. He was very pale, or maybe he wasn’t, maybe it was just that his skin looked it compared to all the blood. It wasn’t just down his neck, there was some of it smeared across his face too. He looked around the room and for the first time Chan saw where the blood had come from — it was difficult to tell, but it looked like part of Changbin’s ear had been shot off. “Where’s Hyunjin, is he okay?”
“He’s in the bathroom with Felix,” Chan said. “Changbin, fuck, your ear, you need a doctor for that, I’ll go get one—”
When Changbin looked at him, despite the paleness of his face, he didn’t look like he was in shock, like Chan would have expected after an injury like that. He looked remarkably put together, actually; the true backbone of their little family, Chan often thought. “Why bother,” Changbin said. “It’s fine, hyung. They can’t put it back.”
Maybe it would have been funny, in other circumstances, but these were not those, and it was not funny in the slightest. It was true, besides: there could be no fixing Changbin’s ear now. But looking at it made Chan feel that sickening lurch all over again, because that was a wound that was— too close, far too close. One that could have been easily lethal.
Changbin looked back around the room and then, without really addressing Chan again, he found a chair like the one Chan had been sitting on and dragged it to the corner where Seungmin was still curled up in his chair. Seungmin said nothing about it, just watched as Changbin sat down. “What happened,” Changbin said, quieter than he’d originally asked the question when he first came into the room.
“Bombs went off early,” Seungmin said. He sounded like he was gritting his teeth. “That’s all I saw.”
“Fuck,” said Changbin, and reached out and took Seungmin’s hand. Seungmin, remarkably, let him, although he kept his fingers loose and didn’t hold back. Chan blinked a little at that, before he turned to where Minho still stood with his back to them all. He was fiddling with his tactical belt, taking things out, putting stuff back. He, unlike Changbin, was still wearing a gun, his handgun not even slightly hidden like Chan’s was.
“How did things go other than Changbin losing an ear?” Chan asked. That, too, was not funny; his voice came out kind of bleak.
It was Jeongin who answered, after a long enough pause that it became clear that Minho either had not heard or was not going to answer. “Fine,” said Jeongin. It was his best sullen voice, a tone that Chan didn’t think he had actually heard in a few years, not since he’d been a teenager in the truest, most distilled sense. “We cleared out what we could and then blew the place. Everything’s still in the car, Changbin-hyung parked a few blocks away. He said nobody followed us.”
“Okay,” said Chan. He should feel, he knew, pleasure at a job well done, at having managed all of the objectives they’d gone into this with, but he couldn’t, not when he didn’t know what was happening with Jisung. A celebration had turned into something that felt more like a wake. But still, there was something else here. Jeongin’s sullen, petulant expression, his closed off body language. Minho, refusing to look at any of them, refusing to engage, another throwback to a version of the man who had existed years ago. And Changbin, sitting with Seungmin now, very obviously actively ignoring that Minho and Jeongin were in the room too.
“So,” Chan said slowly, “what went wrong?”
“Nothing went wrong,” Jeongin said. “Everything is fine.”
Very quietly, very softly, Minho said, “Bullshit.”
A ripple of energy went around the room. Jeongin’s head snapped up to glare at Minho’s back. Chan felt the first trickle of something like dread drip down his spine. “It’s fine,” Jeongin said to Chan, his eyes still on Minho. “He just doesn’t like hospitals.”
Minho whirled around to face them. He had a couple of splatters of dried blood on his face and the look in his eyes made Chan step forward in alarm. It was the kind of look that had always promised violence, and it appeared to be directed right at Jeongin. “Bullshit,” Minho repeated, this time at a shout so loud it seemed to echo around the small room. “You know that’s bullshit, you know that’s not why I’m fucking angry— what the hell were you thinking?”
“Hey,” said Chan sharply. This was it, this was what Chan had always known was inevitable: Minho’s vicious temper, and Jeongin, made more vulnerable by virtue of his feelings for Minho, on the receiving end of it. “Do not yell at him.”
Minho turned on him, in the efficient, tense way he moved when he was on a rampage. “Do you know what he did?” he yelled. “Do you know? We lit the fucking place up, we got out, and then he—” He pointed at Changbin, a short sharp stab of his finger — “says he fucking dropped one of his bags—”
Changbin held a hand up, spluttering out wait, wait, but Minho was already facing Chan again, something wild in his face. “And so Jeongin decides to run back into the building that was on fucking fire—”
“We needed it!” Jeongin said over the top of him, shooting up onto his own feet. Chan wanted to interrupt, to bring it back under control, but he couldn’t; he felt too nauseated, thinking about Jeongin running back into that burning building for something that, at the end of the day, did not matter, not like Jeongin mattered. “I wasn’t going to go in too far—”
“You shouldn’t have gone in at all!” Minho screamed.
“You shouldn’t have come in after me then!” Jeongin yelled back. “If it was that stupid, why did you run back too!”
“You ran back in after him?” Chan asked Minho, somewhat aghast. Minho gave him a look of pure, unadulterated disgust.
“I tried to stop him,” Changbin said. He hadn’t bothered moving from his chair, and one of his hands was still holding Seungmin’s hand. Seungmin looked like he wanted everyone to shut the fuck up but he wasn’t going to be the one to leave the room. He had not unfolded from his tucked up position. “I grabbed him when he went to run after Jeongin but he pulled his gun on me and I decided I didn’t really want to die just to stop him from doing something fucking stupid.”
There was a long stretch of uncomfortable silence after that. Jeongin looked shocked, like he hadn’t known that had happened. Felix’s sister was looking between them all like it was a television drama she really didn’t want to be watching. Minho stood in the middle of the room visibly trying to pull himself together. He had stopped yelling, which was a good sign, but his hands kept curling into fists and then uncurling, slowly, rhythmically. In the silence, his breathing was so loud, horribly ragged.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin, after a minute or so. He was quieter now, much quieter, and almost hesitant. “I’m fine. Nothing happened.”
He was looking at Minho with the kind of eyes that had driven Chan to take him under his wing all those years ago. That pleading look, which he wore without artifice, without any attempt at manipulation, worked on every single member of this family, and Minho was not an exception. He looked at Jeongin, chest still heaving, but eventually he exhaled shakily and scrubbed his hands through his hair before pressing them to his face, for another long moment. “You can’t be doing shit like that,” he said, muffled against his hands. Then he lowered them, and added, voice harder, “Stupid shit. Reckless shit.”
Jeongin clenched his jaw, the tension obvious even from where Chan stood. He looked mad, the way he had when Chan had ordered him to not see Minho anymore, but his eyes were glassy too. “I’m part of this team,” he said, voice strained. “And sometimes I might have to make decisions on jobs that you don’t like—”
“Jeongin,” said Chan, not sharply, not unkindly, but certainly firm.
Jeongin looked at him in surprise. Chan shook his head at him. Jeongin’s face crumpled. “I’m sick of being the fucking baby!” he said, half a shout, but he was crying now, tears dripping steadily down his face. He wiped at his face with an irritated movement. “Fuck.”
Chan started towards him but Minho got there first. He put his hands on Jeongin’s shoulders and pulled him into a hug, one of his hands sliding into Jeongin’s hair. Jeongin’s arms hung loosely at his sides, his shoulders shaking as he cried. “This isn’t about you being the baby,” he said, his voice rough, low. “It’s about the unnecessary risk. It isn’t worth dying for. Dying, Jeongin. I know that— it might not feel like a real risk to you, but it is. It is. We might lose Jisung tonight.” Seungmin made a noise at that, almost a whimper; Chan felt that stomach-drop of anxiety he’d been experiencing all night at the thought. “Things can go so wrong, so fast, on jobs like that. It’s very fucking real.”
He pulled back, looking at Jeongin seriously for a long few moments. Jeongin was still sniffling, eyes to the floor. "You're not a baby," Minho said. His voice was soft, but not gentle, not at all; this was the truth, raw and unvarnished. "You are not a child. I know that, Jeongin. You will have to make some difficult decisions in the future, do things that are dangerous. But Jeongin—"
He cupped Jeongin’s face, lifting it slightly so that Jeongin was looking at him. Jeongin's eyes were still wet with tears. It broke Chan's heart to see him look like that.
"Jeongin," Minho said again, thick with emotion. "If something were to happen to you— I just can't do it. I fucking can't, Jeongin. So just know that the next time you risk your life like that, you're risking mine too."
There was a beat of stunned silence before Minho let go of Jeongin and stalked out of the door without another word. It shut with a bang behind him and the sound of it seemed to jolt Jeongin out of the daze he had been in. He burst back into tears, almost hysterical in seconds. This time Chan did get to him, pulling him into his arms and holding him tight, feeling Jeongin struggle just a little as if he wanted to go after Minho but knew that he shouldn’t. Chan just held him closer.
Fine, he thought, rubbing a hand up and down Jeongin’s back like he’d done when Jeongin was still a child. He stared at the closed door Minho had just disappeared through. Fine, I was wrong. I was so wrong.
“Hyung,” Jeongin sobbed, hands clenched tight into Chan’s shirt, “what did he mean, what did he— mean— why did he say that?”
Chan wasn’t sure what to tell him, but Jeongin didn’t sound like he didn’t know the answer to his question. He sounded like someone who wanted someone else to lie to him, to tell him that the awful truth was not real. He sounded terrified. “Here,” said Chan, tugging him gently back to the couch. “Sit down with me, here, come on. It’s okay, you’re okay.”
Somehow he managed to get Jeongin to sit with him, although Jeongin simply folded himself into Chan’s arms again and continued to cry. Chan stroked his hair and back gently and looked helplessly around the room for someone who could help him fix all this. He wasn’t sure he could handle it, at this moment. But Changbin just looked back at him and the expression on his face made it clear that he didn’t know what the fuck to do either. Seungmin was hiding his face in his elbow. Felix’s sister looked as confused as a person had ever been before.
The door opened a few minutes later, but it was Felix and Hyunjin returning. Hyunjin looked a little better with the blood washed from his skin, although his clothes were still coated in it. “Here they are,” Felix said, and then both of them stopped when they saw Jeongin sobbing in Chan’s lap.
Hyunjin sagged, so quickly and completely that Felix only just caught him. “No,” he whispered.
Oh fuck, Chan thought, and said, quickly, firmly, “We don’t know about Jisung yet, Jeongin isn’t crying because of that.”
Hyunjin looked a little like he wanted to pass out. It was Felix who looked around the room and said, dread in his voice, “Where’s Minho-hyung?”
That made Jeongin cry even harder. Chan was going to join him in a second. He felt like his sanity was truly hanging by a single thread. “Minho is fine, he just went for a walk,” he said. “Bring Hyunjin over here, okay, he needs to sit down.”
Felix walked Hyunjin over to the couch, still seeming like he was supporting Hyunjin most of the way. Changbin got to his feet and came over and met them halfway, taking some of the weight of Hyunjin’s half-collapsed body with a hand under his elbow. “Hyunjin,” he said, the fear and concern thick in his voice. “Are you okay?”
Hyunjin didn’t answer. Once he was seated on the couch, he turned his body away from everyone so he could just watch the closed door with an unnerving, if tired-seeming, focus. Felix had done his best but Hyunjin still looked wrecked, his face bone-white and bruised, his clothes still clearly covered in blood. Now that the blood was off his face, though, it was easier to see the scratches across his cheek. The deep purple of the bruise. The swelling at the corner of his mouth.
“He’s hurt,” Changbin said to Chan, the concern giving way to something like anxiety now. “Hyung, look at his eye, do you think he’s hurt any more than that?” His voice barely even dipped in volume, talking mostly over Hyunjin’s head; the way he was right now, it didn’t seem all that likely that Hyunjin would hear the words anyway. “Should we get him a doctor?”
“You know as well as I do that that wouldn’t end well,” Chan said, very tiredly. He rubbed a hand down Jeongin’s back; luckily Jeongin had reached that hitching breath level of crying that suggested he would soon stop. “Not right now. We can try later, I think, when he’s maybe feeling better, but right now, it will just end badly.”
Changbin didn’t particularly look happy about that answer, but he could not deny the truth in what Chan had to say. Hyunjin had never coped well with doctors, and once he’d started to recover enough from what had happened to him to make actual reasonable decisions about his own care, he had refused to see one. He’d told Chan, once, that there had been doctors sometimes in that place — or men who called themselves that — who came to prod and poke at him, take his vitals, give him foul tasting medicine they sometimes held him down to force down his throat. Chan had never wanted to make Hyunjin see a doctor unless it was genuinely necessary, and he was not sure, right now, if it was.
Changbin didn’t argue though. He just gave one last look at Hyunjin, full of a longing to help that would need to go unfulfilled, and then ran a hand, which was unprotested, against Jeongin’s hair. Then he turned and returned to his seat at Seungmin’s side of the room.
Felix watched him go with a slight frown on his face, an expression he turned onto Chan, but when Chan asked, “What is it?” Felix just shook his head. Chan lifted a hand and stroked it through Felix’s hair, needing to touch him. Felix leaned into it, his eyes shutting in a flutter. He looked tired too, purple under his eyes, his skin washed out by the lighting.
Under Chan’s other arm, Jeongin gave one last sniffle and then went limp, finally all cried out. Felix reached across and squeezed Jeongin’s hand. “Are you okay?” he murmured.
Jeongin didn’t answer. Instead he just shoved his face into Chan’s shoulder, like he used to do when he was a kid and wanted to hide from other people; he’d done this sometimes even around Changbin in those early meetings. His breathing was still unsteady, hiccuping a little every now and then.
“He’s okay,” Chan said. “Minho’s okay. Don’t worry, Lix.”
Felix didn’t look like he found any of that reassuring, or possibly it was just that it was impossible to not worry right now. But he didn’t say anything more, and with that, silence fell across them all. Changbin sat with Seungmin, neither of them touching now. On the couch, Jisoo had relaxed a bit, less curled up, although she looked far more uncomfortable than she even had been.
They had been sitting there for about ten minutes when the door opened again. Chan straightened but it was just Minho returning from wherever he had gone off to. He didn’t look at anyone or say anything as he came into the room, his shoulders straight back and tense enough to break a rock on. Jeongin roused a little, sitting up just enough to watch as Minho grabbed a chair and dragged it over to where he had stood earlier, as far from everyone else as possible.
When Minho sat, the back of the chair against the wall, facing out into the room, facing the door, Chan half-expected Jeongin to go to him, to say something. But instead Jeongin just watched Minho for a few moments, his face turned away from Chan so he couldn’t see what Jeongin’s expression was doing, and then he lay his head back against Chan’s shoulder. Hiding again.
Chan stroked his back. With his other hand he held Felix’s hand. The silence settled around them like a fog.
The minutes ticked by after that, slow and interminable. They were filled with a kind of boredom that Chan had not known was actually possible, his brain buzzing but his thoughts racing too much to actually think. There was a television in the corner of the room, set up on the wall, but nobody turned it on. Nobody got their phones out, nobody talked. They all just sat there in a stupor, waiting. Endless waiting.
Eventually Jisoo, moving slowly like she thought she might be doing something wrong, lay out against the couch, her arms under her head, and seemingly went to sleep. Against Chan’s side, Jeongin’s weight got heavier and heavier as he, too, started to drift off. Not a proper sleep, Chan knew by the sound of his breathing, but a dozing thing; unsurprising, considering Jeongin’s usual sleep patterns and the hysterical tears of earlier.
Chan truly could not have said how long they sat there for. Hours, he knew. Hours filled with absolutely nothing but the wait, the fear, the foreboding sense that any moment now someone would come through that door and give them the news that they were all dreading. Hyunjin didn’t take his eyes off the door. In the corner, Seungmin was impossibly curled up into a smaller ball than before. Changbin stared out into the space of the room with an empty look on his face that spoke to someone astral projecting their way through a situation. Chan felt much the same.
Beside him, Felix had started to slump, his yawns coming faster and faster. After one wide enough that it looked genuinely painful, Chan stroked his hair again. “Little one,” he murmured, “why don’t you sleep a bit.”
“No,” Felix said. “I’m okay.”
Chan was going to argue with him but he didn’t get a chance. There was a knock on the door, firm and shockingly loud. They all sat up at attention, even Jeongin, who came out of his doze in an instant, as the door opened and a doctor in blue surgery scrubs stepped inside with a clipboard and a tired expression of her own.
She looked around the room and Chan watched one of her eyebrows rise at the sight of them all gathered there. Not the patient’s family, that much would be very obvious. She glanced down at the chart in her hands and then looked up at them again, eyes bouncing from face to face. “Han Jisung?” she asked with the slightest raised voice.
Chan untangled himself from the people around him and stood up. “Yeah,” he said, more softly and huskily than he’d intended. He worked to straighten his spine as he came forward, meeting the doctor halfway across the room, and tried to project a sense of— authority, of being in control.
There was shifting behind him, Chan could hear it, and then Felix was again at his side, his small hand looping around Chan’s elbow. On Felix’s other side, Hyunjin was more alert than he’d been for hours, though he looked like being on his feet right now was a gargantuan effort.
The doctor’s head bobbed a bit, and she thumbed past the first page of her chart, slow, and Chan fought not to snap. Felix’s hand was clutching his sleeve. Finally the doctor said, “The blade missed his liver and larger arteries.” Chan felt a jolt of confusion. The blade? he thought, but the doctor wasn’t pausing. “However, three punctures did perforate his smaller bowel. It was a bit touch and go, he lost a lot of blood and needed multiple transfusions—”
“Is he alive?” Hyunjin broke in, loud and ragged.
The doctor’s face snapped up, and it probably spoke to just how awful Hyunjin looked that she didn’t even seem annoyed at the interruption. “He is,” the doctor said, and Hyunjin hunched forward like he’d taken a blow to the stomach.
Chan could only watch, feeling remarkably helpless, as Hyunjin stumbled back and sank, quickly, down to sit on the edge of the coffee table. Felix left Chan’s side to instead return to Hyunjin’s, putting a hand on Hyunjin’s upper back while Hyunjin breathed unsteadily through his mouth.
“Where is he?” This from Changbin, who’d risen from his seat for the first time since Hyunjin had come in, all those hours ago.
“He’s sedated,” the doctor replied, “and will be sedated for a few days, because while we were able to repair the damage done to his abdomen, he has a severe concussion and brain swelling we’re concerned about.”
That kind of injury was more in line with what Chan had thought they’d been dealing with, though it was no less concerning. “What can be done for that?” he asked.
“For now we’re just going to monitor him,” she said. “The swelling should go down on its own, and in the meanwhile keeping him under will allow him to rest.” She looked back down at the chart, thumbing to the next page. “He has some superficial injuries, minor cuts and abrasions, and his eardrum has been perforated, but that should also heal on its own. We’ll have more instructions for that once we’re ready to bring him out of sedation.”
“So he’s— going to be alright?” Jeongin asked from the couch, voice small.
“He feasibly could walk out of here in a week,” the doctor said, and the tension in the room went down palpably, like a balloon being untied. Chan’s knees felt a little weak.
“And if the swelling doesn’t go down?” Hyunjin said. His face was still very pale, but more than anything he just looked tired now. Maybe they could convince him to sleep.
“It should go down on its own, and if it doesn’t, surgery might be necessary,” the doctor said. “But there are steps between here and there, and he will be closely looked after.”
“Can we see him?” Chan asked.
“Yes, though as I said, he is sedated,” she said, snapping her chart closed. “You’ll need to discuss taking turns with the nurses, as only two people are allowed to visit at the same time.”
“Thank you,” Chan said, heartfelt in a way he hadn’t even been going for. But the sincerity of it bled out of him. Around the room, the others echoed him, indistinct and low. The doctor nodded, half a bow, and Chan mimicked the motion as she let herself out of the room.
There was silence after she left, the kind where nobody could— figure out what they wanted to say. Chan was filled with the oddest mix of relief and an ongoing, lingering anxiety: Jisung was alive, Jisung might remain alive, but it was still a might. Swelling to the brain was hardly something to laugh at, and Chan got the sense that a doctor’s ‘concern’ was a layperson’s nightmare.
He could do nothing about it though, and maybe that was the worst of it. The lack of— control. So he could only channel it into things that he could control, and so he straightened his spine and looked around the room and said, “Let me go find out where his room is.”
——
Jeongin’s head ached, but he’d rather chew off his own leg than voice anything close to a complaint right now. He had no right, none at all. Especially not when his head hurt not because of an injury, but because he’d cried all the water out of his system. And because he was so tired, the night having given way to day, sunlight coming in through the blinds.
He wasn’t sure if Chan had paid extra to have Jisung brought to a private room, or if this was just a matter of course for this kind of hospital with a patient who clearly needed extra care, but the room Jisung had been installed in was quite large, the head of the hospital bed against the wall, and a table set up next to the window, with a couple of chairs tucked underneath it. Against the wall opposite the end of the bed, next to where the door to the en-suite bathroom was, was a couch, basic and not overly comfortable looking but good enough for their purposes, Jeongin supposed.
There were another couple of chairs, set up near the bed. Hyunjin, when they’d all first been let into the room, had broken off from Felix and headed for one of those chairs with an intensity of focus that suggested he might just mow over anyone who got into his way.
Jeongin had not tried. Maybe it said something bad about him, but he didn’t want to be too close to Jisung right now. He looked so small in that big bed, limp in a way that was not— natural. He had a nasty bruise on his cheek, a deep kind of plum purple against the creamy paleness of his skin. His hospital gown was white with blue spots, the sheets crisp and drawn up nearly to his chest, one arm laid bare of them so IVs could be pressed into his skin.
He was alive. The movement of his chest was slow and steady, subtle but there. But seeing him like this felt— bad. Terrible and wrong. This should not have happened. It should not have happened at all.
Hyunjin sat right at Jisung’s side, his hand wrapped around Jisung’s bared one, limp in his grip. Felix had taken the seat beside Hyunjin, but he hadn’t tried to speak, nor was he touching Hyunjin. He was just there, a quiet support. God knew Hyunjin wasn’t making any conversation right now. Jeongin did not think he was currently capable of it, not after his words to the doctor.
It was surprising, the way Hyunjin had reacted to all this. And yet, also, completely unsurprising somehow. Hyunjin was a sensitive soul, would heavily feel it if any of them got injured or worse. And Hyunjin himself was also clearly hurt, carrying himself just a little more hunched than usual. The pallid face, the hollow, empty eyes, were a terrible echo of the past, a ghost in the room with them, but it was not surprising.
And yet.
As Jisung lay in that bed, Hyunjin sat at his side staring at him and looking like— they were connected, tied, in some way. Like Jisung’s wounds hurt Hyunjin too, just as much. Jisung was unconscious and Hyunjin was awake but gone, as unreachable as Jisung in this present moment. Both of them pale and unmoving.
Jeongin had wondered. He wished it hadn’t been like this, that his wondering was confirmed.
He rested an elbow on the firm, almost styrofoam-feeling couch arm, pressing his thumb into the hollow of his temple and rubbing. He needed a drink. Not alcohol, but water, or juice. Something with electrolytes. There’d been a pair of vending machines down the hall. He didn't have any money. He’d have to ask one of the others, and he didn’t want to do that right now.
He desperately wanted Minho, but that came with its own tangle of emotions. As soon as they’d been given Jisung’s prognosis, Minho had silently slunk off again without a word while the rest of them had headed to this room.
From the en suite, the sound of rushing water was a constant hum. Seungmin had taken one look at Jisung in his little bed and then made a beeline for the bathroom. The door was still cracked, and if Jeongin leaned forward he could see Seungmin at the sink, frantically scrubbing at the blood on his hands. It had been caked under his nails, Jeongin knew. He’d seen it, the dark, gooey blackness. His own hands itched with the phantom sensation.
At the open door of the room, Chan and Changbin were talking in low tones — but not so low that Jeongin couldn’t hear them. Talking about logistics, taking shifts here at the hospital, damage control, the car, the loot. Jeongin tuned them out, easy enough to do with the water in the bathroom still going, all the machines around Jisung incessantly beeping. At Jeongin’s side, wedged into the opposite corner of the couch was Felix’s older sister, her breathing faintly audible. She’d curled up and, as far as he could tell, gone to sleep. He’d wonder how she’d managed it, but she didn’t know Jisung. Jeongin did know Jisung, and had just had the worst argument thus far with the love of his life, and even he felt dangerously close to just nodding off.
No sooner had he had the thought, eyelids drooping, than Chan’s voice floated across the room a little louder than before, saying, “Minho.”
Jeongin’s head whipped up. Chan and Changbin stood on opposite sides of the doorframe, like two sentries, backlit from the stark light of the hospital’s hallway. And then Minho was coming between them, partly obscured by Changbin’s profile.
Minho said something, too quiet for Jeongin to hear more of it than the faint hum of his voice, but Chan said in reply, “Yeah, of course, you can take the car, I guess?” He looked to Changbin as he lilted the words into a question.
Changbin nodded, slow, like his head was heavier than usual. “I’ll drive the van home with Seungmin in a bit,” he said.
Jeongin got to his feet, understanding Changbin’s lethargic movements. His whole body was starting to ache. He went to the others at the door but kept his gaze on Minho, who watched him coming with red-rimmed, uptilted eyes. “You’re going home?” he asked once he was near.
“Yes,” Minho said, a damp kind of huskiness to his voice. The whites of his eyes were pinked, the tip of his nose a rosy shade. He’d been crying. Guilt settled cold and sickening in Jeongin’s gut.
He looked to Chan, who was just haggard by this point. “I’m gonna go home with Minho-hyung,” he said.
Chan glanced away from Jeongin, to Minho, and then said, “Okay. We’ll let you guys know if anything changes here.”
Changbin fished inside the pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out the car keys, handing them over to Minho. With them in hand, Minho turned without another word, heading briskly down the hallway. Jeongin reached out and touched, very briefly, Chan’s shoulder, giving him a look that he hoped conveyed— softness, sympathy, pain. That he saw his older brother, for all he was, all he’d done for them in the past. This entire night had opened Jeongin’s eyes in ways nothing else had.
Chan looked back, seeing Jeongin too, but nothing in his expression made Jeongin think he found any comfort in it.
Jeongin let his hand drop and then followed after Minho, having to jog a little to catch up.
It was a winding path back out of the parking lot, and then a bit down the block where they’d left the car. With the sun so low to the horizon, their shadows were long, and frozen dew glittered on the lampposts and car windshields. He’d have thought it was beautiful, if it weren’t for everything else that had happened so far this morning; he didn’t have the capacity for it.
The car was, thankfully, right where they’d left it. Jeongin wasn’t sure what they’d do if today ended up being the day they were finally victims of car theft. It would probably be everyone’s last straw.
Minho unlocked the car, and Jeongin climbed into the front passenger seat since it was just the two of them this time. He immediately began to blast the heater as soon as Minho turned the engine on, his cheeks stinging even just from that short jaunt in the winter morning.
“Where did you go,” he asked softly when the car was pulling away from the curb.
Minho turned the heater on lower and changed the vents, quick impatient little flicks of movement. Fair enough, Jeongin supposed, the windows were fogging from the inside, but the way Minho did it felt— unkind. “There’s a courtyard,” he answered tersely. “I needed some air.”
Jeongin put his hands under his thighs like he’d seen Felix do many times in the past, sitting back in his seat and staring out his window instead of speaking again.
He felt like crying again, and kept it locked in simply through the force of his tattered pride. Humiliating enough to have been scolded so fiercely in front of the others, to have been forcefully made aware that he’d, apparently, been stupid. There was a piece of him that wanted to believe Chan had sided with Minho on the basis that Jeongin was still green and young, but he knew in his heart that for once, that wasn’t the case. Jeongin had fucked up.
He glanced at Minho, as furtive as possible, without turning his face. He didn’t want Minho to see him looking, but that was unlikely anyway. Minho was locked forward, gaze glued through the front windshield.
It had never been hard to talk to Minho before, to be around him, not even before they got together, but there was a difficulty now, for the very first time. Yes, in the past, Jeongin sometimes had to be— tactical, he supposed. Strategic. To plan their interactions in advance. But that wasn’t hard like this was hard. That had been a puzzle, a slow unravelling, like Minho was a ribbon that had been tied into snarls by the wind and Jeongin was steadily undoing him. This was not that. This was— a prickly, sharp thing, that made Jeongin feel nauseated and his words stick like thick paste in his throat, choking and unable to escape.
He wondered if this constituted their first fight as a couple. They’d argued — quite a bit — but that had felt like they were fighting for each other, not with each other. He’d always heard the first fights were the roughest. Though he didn’t think the average couple were running heists and facing mortal peril very often.
Jeongin squirmed in his seat, watching the city go by in the low morning light.
Even with Jisung in the hospital, it was still hard for Jeongin to conceptualise the danger he’d put himself in. He wouldn’t have run back into the building if he’d thought there was any real danger; he did have some self preservation instincts. And his judgement had been— right, he supposed, since he’d not gotten hurt. It wasn’t something he’d do again, because now he understood the idea of weighing risks, and that one bag wasn’t worth his life, potentially. And the extended risks.
Minho’s profile was as sharp as shattered ice in the light. Jeongin thought of his words in the waiting room, something he’d been avoiding because it was too ugly to contemplate, but his mind was drawn back anyway. Know that the next time you risk your life like that, you're risking mine too. What had Minho meant by that? Did he mean if Jeongin was gone, he’d suffer so badly that he’d wilt and wither and eventually die like a plant left bereft of sunlight and water? Or did he mean something more— proactive than that, did he mean— did he—
Jeongin sank down in his seat, his head drooping until his forehead rested on the plastic lip under the window. He squeezed his eyes shut, breathed steadily through his nose.
How could Jeongin ever go into a job again. It felt unfair, it felt like emotional blackmail. It felt like a slow rope around his neck, squeezing until he couldn’t breathe.
But of course, of course. He should have known. Maybe he always had. That Minho would not live in a world where Jeongin was gone. That he would simply— end it.
The thought was so horrific that Jeongin wished he could simply un-know it. Scrub it from his mind. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to live with it, the fear of it. If it came to pass, if he died and Minho followed him, he wouldn’t even be around to see it. And it was still completely untenable.
Underneath them, the car lurched a little, turning, and then the engine cut out. Jeongin raised his head. They were home.
Minho got out, and Jeongin followed. When Minho opened the building’s back door, Jeongin expected him to stalk inside and let Jeongin catch the door before it swung shut, but he didn’t. He held it open for Jeongin to scamper inside, and then did the same when they reached the second floor and Minho unlocked his bedroom door. It, somehow, was worse than if he’d just left Jeongin to fend for himself.
Once they were both in Minho’s barren bedroom, Minho went straight for the large plastic curtain at the far end of the room, vanishing behind it with a jerky flick of it in his wake, without speaking, without a single glance back. Jeongin stood in the open, empty expanse of the room, irreparably stretching out the hem of his ruined sweater with how he was wringing it. If he tried to stop, he’d chew his fingers open, already the itch was there to pick at his cuticles, to dig his nails in until they bled.
The sound of the shower starting echoed from beyond the curtain, the rushing in the pipes and the water hitting the tiles. Jeongin— felt so lost. He wanted to shut down, in a way that echoed far back into his past, from before he’d ever met Chan. Just stop existing, because he had nowhere in that moment to fit.
He wondered if he should leave, go upstairs and use the shower in the apartment to wash the dust and smokescent off himself. That felt— wrong, like it would send the wrong message, and besides, Jeongin didn’t want to leave. But was that what Minho wanted, did he want to be alone?
Jeongin eyed the bed, tidied by Minho before they’d left on the job, a lifetime ago now, it felt like. He thought about sitting at the edge of it, waiting for his turn in the shower, and it made that feeling — the desire to peel his skin away — increase tenfold.
He pulled on the hem of his sweater so hard he felt and heard some of the threads there snap, wanting, suddenly, to tear it, to rip and claw at something. Unable to bear it any longer, he yanked the sweater over his head, the rip along the side widening as he tore it off his body. He dropped it on the floor and then bent, unzipping his shoes and pulling them off with that same kind of frantic energy. He tossed them aside too, the heavy rubber of the soles thudding on the scuffed tiled floor.
The cool air of the room was a bit of a shock to his system, hitting the damp planes of his back pleasantly. He shimmied out of his jeans and stepped out of them, beginning to make his way to the curtain, beyond which the shower still sounded, a wave of white noise. With more skin bared to the air, it was tipping from refreshing to actually chilly, his nipples pebbling with it.
He stopped in front of the curtain and contemplated knocking on the wall. But that felt— bad, awkward. The warring thoughts within him, that this was his room too, he had a right to the space, pushing back against the knowledge that no, it was Minho’s space, and he’d commandeered it. Bulldozed his way in and refused to leave, and now he was faced with the idea that maybe he wasn’t welcome. Maybe he wasn’t wanted.
He couldn’t knock. But he did say, “Hyung?” lilted just so, just enough that he could hopefully be heard over the rushing water. He twitched the edge of the curtain aside rather than wait for an answer, slipping into the strange, makeshift shower room Minho had cobbled together. Without a window to open or a fan, the air in here became heavy with humidity, steam thick in the air. The wide mirror was fogged up, water droplets creating stripes of clarity.
Minho’s boots lay in a heap right beside the curtain, his clothes similarly piled up, just beyond where the falling water would splash. Jeongin took that in, and then raised his eyes, finding Minho beyond the swirling steam, underneath the spray of water. Minho was looking back at him, his body rotated in profile, and it was impossible to tell if he’d been crying or not, the water droplets on his face indistinguishable. But his eyes, his eyes, they were— empty. They were full. They were dark and haunted.
“Hyung,” Jeongin croaked, his hands clenching over his stomach, as he wished he hadn’t taken his sweater off, actually.
There was a bruise on Minho’s shoulder blade, purple in the low light, and Jeongin’s gaze flicked over where it tapered off, and then— caught, on bright red, on—
“Is that blood?” he asked, rushing forward. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat. Warm water flecked all over his hands and arms as he grabbed Minho’s wrist, soaked into the soles of his socks.
Minho said nothing, did nothing, as Jeongin pulled his arm away from his side enough to see the— wound, it was a wound. An oblong kind of gash, a little wider than Jeongin’s pointer finger, ran just below where Minho’s ribcage started. The water was rinsing the blood of it away, pinkish drops all along Minho’s side, curving over his hipbone and down his thigh.
Jeongin knew, in an abstract way, that he was holding Minho’s wrist way too tightly. It felt beyond him right now, to try to control that.
“You need stitches,” Jeongin said, mouth feeling— numb.
Minho pulled his wrist out of Jeongin’s hold, tucking his arm in close to his body. Like this, it was easy to see why they hadn’t noticed it. He’d been hiding it. “It doesn’t need stitches,” Minho said, so soft it was almost impossible to hear him. “It’ll scab and heal over. It just grazed me.”
There wasn’t enough air in here, the humidity thick and choking. Jeongin felt lightheaded. “It was a bullet,” he said, and heard his own voice as if from very far away. “It could have killed you.” His eyes, still, had not strayed from where the wound had been visible moments prior, and now only the tip of it could be seen around Minho’s arm.
“Yes,” Minho said, and it wasn’t— unkind, pointed or sarcastic. But it was flatly factual, in a way that circled back to earlier, in that horrible waiting room. Things can go so wrong, so fast, on jobs like that.
If that bullet had been aimed a bit better, it would have punched a hole straight through Minho’s torso, shattered through bone and torn open his lung. They would have been emptying the vault and then Seungmin would have been in their ears saying, Minho-hyung’s been shot. And they would have had to run to him, would have found him on the floor, a hand over the hole in his chest, as blood seeped out and air rushed in, crushing his lung.
Jeongin thought of that, of Minho’s face pale like Jisung’s had been in that hospital bed, viscous redness bubbling out of his lips as they turned blue, and for the second time that day burst into tears.
He grabbed at Minho, desperate and frantic, throwing his arms over Minho’s shoulders, holding him close. The spray of the shower hit over his back, almost too hot, dampening the waistline of his boxers. Jeongin didn’t care. He nudged his face against Minho’s neck, nosing at the hair behind Minho’s ear, soaked with water. “Hyung,” he sobbed. “Hyung.”
Minho said nothing, bringing his arms around Jeongin’s body, fingertips pressing indents into the skin of Jeongin’s back. Their bare chests pressed flush, water sticking them together, Minho’s body so warm. He dropped his head so it rested on Jeongin’s shoulder, his mouth over the fading bruise his teeth had left days ago.
“I’m sorry,” Jeongin wept, his turn to cry tears that were lost among the water. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”
This feeling— it was what he’d done to Minho, Jeongin understood now. Only worse. This sudden, raking terror, even though Minho was safe, was alive. How much worse it must have been for Minho, when Jeongin had run back into that building. Losing Minho was, now, just an idea for Jeongin, just a thought — but it had been a sharp, possible reality in that moment for Minho, and Jeongin could scarcely imagine it. The horror of it, even as an idea, left him breathless. Losing Minho would—
It would kill Jeongin. It would kill who he was. His body might go on, but as a person he would— never be the same.
He had never contemplated it. Not in any real way, not like it might ever become something he would have to live with. Jeongin hated being thought of as naive, but perhaps in this, he had been so. It wasn’t that he didn’t know terrible things could happen, he knew that very well, but he’d somehow just— been determined that he would have a happy ending. He’d decided on that years ago, that Minho would be his, that they’d build a life, that they’d be happy. And it had never once really occurred to him that wasn’t a goal he couldn’t simply strongarm into achieving. That there were forces too big for him, that didn’t care what he had or hadn’t decided.
A single fucking bullet could have destroyed Jeongin’s very soul.
Was this why Minho had fought so hard, when Jeongin had insisted on coming on the job. Was this what Jeongin had made him endure. How cruel of him, when he knew Minho felt as deeply as he did. When he knew how much Minho was already hurting.
Minho was shaking against him. Underneath Jeongin’s mantra of I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry he was softly weeping, his lips trembling against Jeongin’s skin.
They stood like that as the air thickened to opaqueness with steam, swirling around their bodies. The water stole their tears away, and throughout it Minho held Jeongin, held him like he thought Jeongin was going to be ripped away.
——
Felix had been hoping that once Hyunjin got to see Jisung, got to see him breathing still, he might be— better. He’d wanted Hyunjin to resurface, somehow, to look at Hyunjin’s face and see some trace of his friend again. But that hadn’t happened, and maybe it had been naive of him to expect it, because even for him, seeing Jisung didn’t really make it better. It had helped some of his anxiety but it hadn’t made it better.
He sat beside Hyunjin now, on this hard little seat at the side of the bed, and watched Hyunjin watch Jisung. There had been a few minutes, in the bathroom and then in the waiting room, where Felix had thought Hyunjin was with them, aware and engaging in what was happening around him. That was no longer the case, if it ever had been.
He had been sitting here for a while now, Hyunjin like a statue beside him, Felix so tired and frankly out of his depth that tears kept springing to his eyes and he kept having to blink them away. The couch had been given over to Jisoo, who had curled up on her side and gone to sleep at some point, the only one of them who had managed it. Seungmin had gone into the small attached bathroom, where he’d been since. The taps had been running on and off the entire time, a faint kind of white noise through where the door was left open just a crack.
Chan and Changbin had been in and out of the room for the past while — Felix was not even sure how long it had been since they’d been let in here, or since Minho and Jeongin had gone home, but he thought it had been the best part of an hour by now. He was not sure what they were up to every time one of them left and came back, the two of them discussing things quietly together. Felix had, for a brief moment, tried listening in but their conversation had been half-formed, one of them starting a sentence, the other seeming to answer with something unrelated.
Felix had thought that he was maybe mishearing them before he’d realised that this was how they had learned to communicate. Hyunjin had told him a little bit of where they had lived before they moved into their current building, the four of them in one small apartment, and this quiet, fast conversation spoke to a long history of having to hold conversations in the earshot of others. They’d learned to read each other like this.
He’d tuned them back out after that. He didn’t need to know what they were talking about.
“Hyunjin-ah,” he said, leaning in so that he didn’t have to speak too loudly. It didn’t matter, Hyunjin didn’t react. “Hyunjin, are you thirsty? Would you like me to get Changbin-hyung to go get something for you?”
Hyunjin watched Jisung. Felix could not. He could not bear it. Every time he looked at Jisung, Seungmin’s words bounced around in his head, the bombs went off early. The guilt was incredible, like nothing Felix had ever felt before in his life. It had not even felt like this after his true identity had been revealed to Chan, laying there on that office floor and watching Chan’s heart break right in front of his eyes.
He had worked so hard on those bombs. He had reassured them all that they were safe, that they wouldn’t explode early, that they would go off only when they pressed the trigger. To know now that he was wrong was one thing; to know that his being wrong, unable to do the one real task he had been given, meant that Jisung was here, now, almost dead, was unbearable.
How could they ever forgive him for this? How could Hyunjin ever forgive Felix for this?
There was the brush of a hand against his shoulder; Chan, looking down at the two of them sitting side by side with his own exhaustion heavy on his features. He tucked that piece of hair behind Felix’s ear and said, “Little one. How are you doing?”
Bad, Felix wanted to say. I think the guilt is crushing me. But he couldn’t say anything like that in front of Hyunjin, and so he just shrugged a little bit and said, “I’m tired.”
Chan nodded, his face going a little soft at that. “Yeah,” he said. “I think Changbin is going to take Seungmin home, you and your sister should go home too. Try to get some rest, yeah?”
Felix’s brain took in the words and took a few seconds to process them. “You’re not coming with us?” he asked.
Chan shook his head. “No, I’m going to stay here and watch Jisung,” he said. “Make sure— I just want to make sure he’s okay. If anything happens, I want to make sure that I’m here for it.”
Felix had to swallow down the nausea that rose in him at the thought of it. Jisung was decidedly not out of the woods yet, and Felix knew from experience how quickly someone could go downhill; his mother had seemed okay when he last saw her and then four hours later she had been dead.
“What about Hyunjin,” he said softly.
Chan looked at Hyunjin. The pain on his face, looking at the empty boy sitting at Felix’s side, broke Felix’s heart all over again. “Hyunjin-ah,” Chan said. “I think it’ll be good for you to get some rest, do you want to go home with Felix?”
It took a long few moments but that, at least, got a response. “No,” Hyunjin rasped, his voice just as fucked up as it had been in the bathroom. Felix desperately wanted to get water into him, but short of holding Hyunjin’s mouth open and making him drink it, he didn’t know what to do.
“You can come back later,” Chan said. He was speaking in a voice that Felix hadn’t heard from him before, something soothing and comforting; he sounded like what he was saying was so utterly reasonable that of course Hyunjin would agree with him. “Changbin will bring you back after you sleep. I’ll stay here with Jisung.”
Hyunjin, for the very first time since he had come into this room, lifted his gaze away from Jisung. He fixed his eyes on Chan, with no expression, nothing there at all. “No,” he said again, and although his voice was toneless, as empty as his face, it made it very clear that if they wished for him to leave this room, they would be dragging him kicking and screaming.
Nobody would do that to Hyunjin. Felix watched Chan simply cave like a shitty house of cards. “Okay,” he said, still in that reasonable, soothing tone of voice. “You can stay here with hyung, and Lix will go home.”
Hyunjin turned back to Jisung looking small and diminished in the bed. He didn’t seem to care if Felix stayed or left, not now that he was here with Jisung. It maybe would have hurt Felix if he wasn’t drowning in guilt, if it didn’t make him want to burst into tears over how awful and unfair this all was.
I’m sorry, Hyunjin, he thought, as he pushed himself to his feet, his body almost too heavy for it. I’m so sorry.
Changbin was standing in the open bathroom door, saying something softly to Seungmin. The taps switched off, and Changbin stepped back just enough to let Seungmin brush past him into the room again. His hands were dripping water on the floor, droplets falling off his jawline, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. His hands were bright red, his cheeks similarly flushed, and Felix couldn’t tell if it was from the heat of the water or if he’d really just been scrubbing them that hard. Felix understood the urge, the— compulsion. Every time he thought about the blood that had been on his hands back in that apartment, spreading in a pool across the entry that he’d stepped on so many times in his life, it made his skin itch.
“Hyung,” Felix said, before Changbin could come over, or Chan could get distracted. He tugged Chan to the side, away from where Hyunjin would have been able to hear even if he’d been listening at all. Chan went easily, following him with that attentive look on his face. “Hyung,” he said again, voice pitched low. “Hyunjin has glass in his hands.”
Chan’s head swivelled to Hyunjin and then back to Felix, horror written all over his face. “Glass in his hands? From what happened? Felix—”
“I tried to get it out,” Felix interrupted, before Chan’s voice could rise any further in volume and alert the others. “He really didn’t like it, he wouldn’t let me touch them. They’re very small shards. It’s not anything immediately urgent, hyung, it’s just— there. When he’s feeling better later you could try to get him to let you take it out, when it’s just the two of you alone, okay?”
Chan was still looking at him with a faint kind of betrayal on his face though, and maybe Felix would have felt guilty about it, but he didn’t, for the reason he gave when Chan, softer now, asked, “Why didn’t you say anything when Changbin and I were talking about if he was hurt or not?”
“Because I didn’t like how you were talking about him over his head,” Felix said, as steadily as he could. It was the truth but that didn’t make delivering it any easier for him, the criticism involved in it. “The two of you. You talked about him like he wasn’t just sitting right there.”
He’d noticed both of them doing it, not just then but other times too over the past hour or so, not even murmuring as they discussed what to do with or about Hyunjin. Felix got the sense that it was normal for them, that it was something that they’d always done, ever since Hyunjin had come to live with them, and it was clear that Hyunjin didn’t actually mind in those moments. Judging by the way he’d reacted to Felix trying to get the glass, even like this, Hyunjin was capable of expressing when he didn’t like something.
He wasn’t overly surprised when Chan said, clearly confused, “But it’s not— Hyunjin doesn’t mind it.”
“I know,” Felix said. “But I mind it.”
It was decidedly to do with him, he knew, but it reminded him too much of standing still and silent at his father’s side, gritting his teeth as his father discussed him with other people. How it felt to not have a voice, to not be a part of the conversation at all. It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t a loss of agency for Hyunjin to have apparently handed the decisions over to Chan and Changbin, but it made Felix deeply uncomfortable all the same.
Chan didn’t get it. Felix didn’t expect Chan to get it. But Chan, after a few seconds, said, “I— see. I can try to do it less around you, Felix, but— this is how it is. This is how it’s always been.”
He glanced across at Hyunjin, sitting slumped slightly to the side, looking at Jisung in that unfocused yet intent way. Felix was beginning to worry Hyunjin had some kind of head injury, but if Hyunjin wouldn’t let him help with his hands, there was no way he was going to let Felix look over his head. There was a feeling, looking at Hyunjin like this, of utter helplessness.
He nodded tiredly. Chan’s face did that crumpling soft thing again, and he leaned forward and kissed Felix on the forehead. “Go home,” he said. “Get some rest.”
Outside the room, the hospital bustled with people, nurses and visitors, doctors rushing past, patients being pushed in wheelchairs or dragging their IV drips with them. Felix tried to breathe shallowly through his mouth, trying to avoid that scent memory as much as he could, as they worked their way down flights of stairs and through corridors and eventually found their way out to the parking lot.
It was cold outside, even though in the time that they’d spent waiting for Jisung to come out of surgery, the sun had risen in the sky, breaking through a light cloud cover. Felix shivered as he trailed after Changbin, Jisoo’s little suitcase rattling on the concrete. She was shivering even harder, not at all dressed to be out in weather like this, but then they had not planned for her to be out in weather like this. She was supposed to be safe at home, like they all were supposed to be.
Seungmin fell behind a little bit as they walked. Felix was not sure if that was on purpose or if it was just a side effect of Seungmin’s tiredness. He, even compared to Felix, got very little exercise. Whatever the reason, it gave Felix a chance to drop back too, to fall into step with him. Seungmin, his arms wrapped around his stomach, hands almost tucked under his armpits, barely acknowledged him.
“Seungmin,” Felix said quietly. A brief pause before Seungmin grunted something like an acknowledgement. “The— bombs. You said they went off early. Was it— was that me? Did I— build them wrong?”
Seungmin took another few steps and then he stopped. Felix stopped too, looking at him, but almost afraid to look, to see what expression Seungmin was making. But Seungmin just looked like he had done when he came out of the bathroom — pale and tired.
“No,” he said. His voice was a little hoarse too, a little bit like Hyunjin’s, but in a way more like he just hadn’t spoken for a while. He hadn’t sounded like that earlier when they’d first arrived at the hospital. “No, it wasn’t you. The guards tried to disarm them. That’s what made them go off.”
The relief that washed over Felix at the words was almost too much; he felt his legs go shaky and for a moment thought that it might finally be his turn to collapse. He managed to keep himself upright, which was probably just as well, because if he did go to the ground, he didn’t think Seungmin would have moved to help him. It was not apathy on his part, or lack of caring. He just looked like he didn’t have the capacity in him anymore.
“Oh,” Felix whispered.
Seungmin didn’t say anything else. He turned and started to trudge after Changbin and Jisoo, who were almost at the van now, the white sides of it standing out among the few cars in the parking lot. Felix followed, giving Seungmin a little more space, feeling just a bit less like the world was weighing down on him. It was still, he could admit, somewhat his fault, because he had been the one who had built those bombs in the first place, but he— it had not been his mistake that set them off. It was not fully on him, what had happened to Jisung.
When he neared the van, Changbin had just pulled the back door open. “You and Lix will ride back here,” he was saying to Jisoo as he did so. “It might be a little uncomfortable but—”
He trailed off, looking inside the back. Seungmin, hanging to the side with his arms still around himself, shivered in the cold air. Felix edged around Jisoo to look inside the van and was presented with— blood, less than he would have imagined, but blood nonetheless. Hyunjin’s hoodie lay on the floor, a sodden lump. Even though it was black, it was obvious what had made it so wet, because the blood had congealed now, gone cold and sticky.
“Right,” said Changbin. He sounded very much like someone holding onto his composure by the skin of his teeth. He was someone, Felix knew, who prided himself on being the one they could rely on: Changbin would drive them wherever they needed to be, bring them whatever they needed. Chan’s right hand man who looked after them all however he could. And he was clearly trying to do this right now, but all this was just a bit too big for even him.
He climbed into the back of the van and, with the toe of his boot, nudged the bloody lump of hoodie into the corner, where it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way and would, hopefully, not roll around as they moved. The blood on the floor, though, he could do very little about, and after a moment of just looking at it, he turned back to them, face a little pale, and said, “Look, just… be careful where you sit, okay?”
“Okay, hyung,” Felix murmured. He didn’t want to go into the back of that van. He almost viscerally didn’t want to. Even just standing outside, the smell of the blood was in his mouth and nose, and he couldn’t work out if it was actually as strong as it seemed or if he was just imagining it so because he could see that blood-soaked hoodie still. But the bigger part of him didn’t want to make things more difficult for Changbin, who was rallying as best he could when he, too, was tired and also missing half of his ear.
“Seungmin-ah,” Changbin said, as he hopped out of the van. “Do you want to ride up front with me?”
Seungmin, apparently, did not. He didn’t even answer, he just brushed past Changbin, still holding his arms around his chest and stomach, and climbed into the back of the van so that he could sit himself in the corner farthest from the door, tucked up where the partition was between this space and the seats in the front. It was also the furthest from that hoodie. He sat, legs curled in front of him, and did not look at any of them.
Changbin made a noise that was not quite a sigh but something like it, an exhalation that seemed, in a word, weary. “Right,” he said. “Felix, why don’t you and your sister get in too, and then we can just go home already.”
Jisoo looked like she very much did not want to get into the van either but she lifted her case up into the back and tucked it under the slim, makeshift desk with the computers and then sat with her back against the opposite side to where Seungmin was sitting. Felix sat down next to her, trying desperately to ignore the hoodie in the corner of his eye, the blood smears next to his own booted toe.
Someone was going to have to clean this van out, he thought, as Changbin closed the door and sealed them into almost darkness. Someone would have to wash Jisung’s blood off of the floor.
When the car started moving, first slowly through the parking lot and out and then faster once they got onto the roads proper, it felt very disorientating. It had been hard, last night — this morning, Felix supposed — to keep his balance in the moving van when he was sitting on the floor, and it was even harder now, probably because of his exhaustion, the way his body wanted nothing more than to pitch to the side and simply go to sleep. There was a dizziness to existence now that he was sitting down, like his body knew that he was resting and on his way home and had decided enough was enough.
Next to him Jisoo was silent, her knees tucked up against her chest. Seungmin, too, was not saying anything, although that was hardly unusual. He had his hands clenched in his lap. It was obvious just looking at him that his jaw was tense. The water had dried on his face, though the tips of his hair were still damp, little icicles. Felix wondered if he’d managed to get all the blood out from under his nails. With Seungmin’s hands clenched like that, though, he could not tell.
As they moved through the city streets, without any way back here of knowing quite where they were, Felix watched as Seungmin went— paler than normal. The colour drained steadily from his face, leaving him sickly looking and a little green, his lips washed out too. Are you okay, Felix wanted to ask, except that Seungmin didn’t like it when people fussed, didn’t like it when people asked those kinds of questions of him.
The answer was obvious besides. No, Seungmin was not okay. Even in the dim light that reached back here, he looked half-dead.
Eventually, though, Seungmin looked so bad that Felix was just about to open his mouth to ask all the same when Seungmin spoke instead. “Hyung,” he said, loud enough that it was jarring after such silence between them. “Pull over.”
Perhaps Changbin heard the frantic note in Seungmin’s voice, because he did as he was told instantly, the car lurching to the side of whatever street they were on and almost skidding to a stop. Outside was the sound of a car horn beeping. Inside, before they had even fully stopped moving, Seungmin was scrambling for the door, shoving it open and almost falling out in his haste. He disappeared to the side of the car somewhere. Up front, the driver’s door opened and then slammed shut again. There was the sound, a little muffled under the cars still going past them, of retching.
They were on a normal street, Felix could see from the open back door of the van, pulled off to the side but only just. Felix went to the back door and half-stepped out to see what was going on. He could guess, though, and sure enough, when he looked, it was to see Seungmin kneeling at the side of the street, a hand braced against the wall of a building, throwing up. Quite what he was throwing up, Felix didn’t know, but his body was clearly trying to purge him of something. The sound was— horrendous.
Changbin was hunched down next to him, half-covering him with his body, his hand rubbing up and down Seungmin’s back in soothing motions. “You’re okay,” he was saying, low but not low enough to not be heard. “You’re okay, baby, it’s okay. I have you. Hyung has you.”
The realisation came to Felix less like a lightning bolt and more like a puzzle he’d been staring at for hours had suddenly presented the answer to him. Oh, he thought, looking at the two of them, Seungmin shaking now as he stopped retching, leaning into Changbin as he panted for breath. That intimate tone Changbin had used; the way Changbin had sat in the waiting room holding Seungmin’s hand; all those little things that Felix had never even blinked at now all slotted together in a different way.
He looked at them, Changbin’s mouth pressed into Seungmin’s hair now, and thought, it’s none of my business, and ducked back into the van, where Jisoo was giving him a wide-eyed look. “He threw up?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Felix said tiredly. “He’s not— it’s not been a good night for him.”
She eyed the pool of blood in the middle of the floor, and then turned a little green around the edges and looked away again. “It hasn’t been a good night for a lot of people,” she said softly.
No, Felix reflected, it really had not been. He wondered, with that sense of guilt again, how many people had been injured when his bombs had gone off in the casino — innocent people, people who didn’t work for his father, people who had just gone out for a good time. The blast effect seemed— larger than he had anticipated, than he had planned for.
They sat there together in silence, the sounds of the street outside coming through the open door, cars roaring past, before eventually Changbin appeared at the open back doors with his arm around Seungmin’s shoulders, supporting him. Seungmin leaned just a little against him, Changbin’s face openly troubled and worried, and Felix thought, how have I never seen it before? Except he knew how: he had not been looking for it, and they had made sure he didn’t see it.
“Seungmin,” Felix said softly, as Seungmin climbed shakily back inside. “You could ride in the front? It might be less upsetting for your stomach.”
Seungmin shook his head, already settling against the side of the vehicle. His face was pale, bone white. “I don’t want to risk anyone seeing me,” he said.
Jisoo looked like she really didn’t know what to make of that but Changbin had already shut them back in and went up to the front again. This time he drove faster; not fast enough to break any traffic laws but less carefully, clearly trying to get them back as soon as he possibly could. Felix couldn’t tell how fast that ended up being, but it certainly wasn’t long before they came to a stop again, a proper one, and Changbin cut the engine.
The moment that engine died down, Seungmin was out the back of the van, shoving the door open roughly and almost falling over in his stumbling attempt to get out. Felix followed after him, a little alarmed, wondering if he should try to help him, but Changbin was already there, coming around the side of the van and putting his hand under Seungmin’s elbow and murmuring to him, too softly for Felix to hear. He stopped, and let them get ahead of him. He just waited until Jisoo was out of the van, her little suitcase wheels-down against the tarmac, and then followed Seungmin and Changbin into the building.
It was very cold in the hallway, all that concrete, no windows. Changbin and Seungmin were doing their best impression of ignoring Felix and Jisoo’s entire existence, which was fair, Felix thought. Neither of them said anything as they went into Seungmin’s workroom, and Felix only caught a glimpse of Seungmin’s white face before the door shut behind them.
With that, Felix felt the oddest sense of— aloneness. His sister was there, trailing up behind him, but with the workroom door shut and no doubt Minho’s bedroom door shut too, Felix just felt very alone. But there was no help for it, nothing to be done about it. He would be alone until Chan came home — or Hyunjin, maybe, and Felix didn’t know when either of those things would happen.
He sighed, and reached out to take his sister’s suitcase. She pulled the handle back a little and said, in that bossy voice she used when she wanted to be his older sister, when she didn’t want him to have to act like their father’s only boy, “I can do it.”
Felix looked at her. “Noona,” he said patiently. “The apartment is on the fourth floor.”
He watched her think about it. Then she let go of the handle and said, “Okay, I suppose you can take it.”
It was a slow slog, up to the top floor. As Felix finally carried the case into the apartment, it was like all of his tiredness suddenly crashed into him. You’re home now, his body registered, and everything flooded in all once. He put the case to the side and stepped back a little to let Jisoo come in, let her slide her sneakers off first and clear the entryway before he bent down to start unzipping his boots.
Releasing his toes from the confines of the boots was so much better than he’d thought it would feel. He hadn’t even realised how badly they’d been pinching him, confining him, in that way he’d grown used to not experiencing. Like the dress shoes his father always made him wear, too stiff, too unyielding. He set the boots aside with a sigh and then straightened up and found Jisoo standing in the kitchen looking around the apartment like she couldn’t really believe what she was seeing.
“I guess you can sleep in Jeongin’s room,” Felix said slowly, working it out as he spoke. “He’s not going to be using it.” He thought, for a few seconds, about how he should probably change the sheets in there, before remembering that Jeongin had washed all his bedding a couple of days ago, after he and Minho got together, catching Felix’s eye in the living room as he loaded them in there, and then Jeongin had not spent a single night in that room since. He had almost entirely just moved down to Minho’s room. So the sheets would have to be fine.
His sister was clearly not even listening to him. “Yongbok,” she said, finally turning away from the couch and television set up and looking at him. “What is this place, where even are we? This is a whole apartment?”
“Noona,” Felix said, the sound of pleading in his voice so obvious it was almost embarrassing. “Can we just sleep for now? I’ll explain later, I promise.”
But Jisoo had that look on her face, the same one from the apartment, stubborn older sister through and through. She pulled out one of the chairs around the table and sat herself down on it and said, “No, you are going to explain it to me now. I deserve some kind of answers, Yongbok.”
Felix sighed, but didn’t even think about arguing. She was right, after all — he had turned up at that apartment and brought her here and not given more than a few words of explanation. He went to the fridge and found the bottle of orange juice that belonged to Changbin and poured himself a glass, hoping that Changbin didn’t mind the thievery. He was unlikely to. Felix, though— he needed the sugar, needed the burst of it to keep him going through this conversation. He was so tired that it was causing a vague sense of nausea through him, his hands shaking as he set the glass down on the table and then slid into the chair opposite her.
“Okay,” he said, after he’d sipped the juice a couple of times. “What are you wanting to know exactly? And don’t say everything, noona, please.”
To her credit, she didn’t protest that, and simply sat for a moment thinking, clearly prioritising her questions. “Who are these people, I guess, is my most pressing thing.”
Felix just about resisted the urge to scrub his hand across his face. “I don’t know how much our father ever told you about business stuff,” he said. Jisoo pulled a face that kind of conveyed that it wasn’t much, which Felix expected. Their father never saw much use in educating the girls in this kind of thing, although sometimes Felix thought that in another life, Jisoo would have been a much better candidate for an heir. “Well, there are gangs around the city that ally with him, but there are a lot who don’t. I don’t know if you ever heard him talking about The Strays? Chris?” There was a kind of vague recognition in her eyes that made him add, “This is them.”
She blinked at him, then around the apartment set up. “I’ve heard him yelling down the phone about them, yeah,” she said. “Just vague stuff though, mostly. Weren’t they the ones who swiped his old weapon’s dealer?”
“Yeah,” Felix said. The day Hyunjae had finally cut ties with his father had been— a particularly bad day in Felix’s life. There had been nowhere for his father to vent his rage over it, although he had known it was coming, eventually; even Felix had seen the writing on the wall there, Hyunjae becoming more and more unresponsive, claiming more and more that he wasn’t able to fulfil Lee Jaerim’s orders. His father had misunderstood Hyunjae, in the end; he’d thought the implicit threats to Hyunjae’s family would be enough to keep him in line, and couldn’t comprehend that it had been those threats which had sent Hyunjae running. But Felix had not said anything, as his father had raged, as he had been hit and kicked. He’d had the bruises for days.
She nodded slowly. She looked back around the room, so obviously lived in and loved. The cups left out on the drying rack from the night before, the soft throw from Hyunjin’s bedroom on the couch where he liked to draw. “So this is home base for them?” she asked. “It isn’t what I would have expected.”
Felix got that. He’d been surprised too, the first time he arrived, when he had finally come face-to-face with the Chris that had caused their father so much grief. He’d thought it would be something— bigger, something much more organised. He had not, in any way, expected the family he had found here. “It’s a pretty small gang,” he said.
“So that’s what your—” Her face scrunched up a bit. “The guy who kissed you.” Felix felt his face heat up again at the reminder of what she’d seen. “He said something about our father recognising him on the cameras.”
“Ah, yeah,” Felix said. “He probably will.” Chan had said that, and Felix had always suspected that his father had pictures of Chan, or at least some idea of what he looked like. He’d never shown them to Felix. If he had done, Felix might not have had such a shock the first time he met Chan.
“Yongbok-ah,” said Jisoo, turning to face him properly, reaching a hand out across the table as if to touch him, although she didn’t quite. “Aren’t you worried? Our father will come looking for us, he’s been looking for you all this time. Now that he knows where you are—”
“He knows who we’re with, not necessarily where we are,” Felix interrupted. “And we’ve got some blackmail on him now, hopefully.” She looked confused, so he added, “We hit the vault tonight. His vault.”
She reacted like the words had actually hit her, her shock a very physical thing. Her face went white, then a little red. “You did what,” she hissed, eyes darting around like she thought their father could overhear them even here.
“I built the systems,” Felix said. She looked shocked by that too. He’d never spoken to his sisters of the actual work he was doing for his father. He’d never been sure, even in himself, if it was because he was ashamed or because he was trying to not taint them. But he’d done his best to keep his hands as clean as possible, to be his father’s son from behind a computer screen. “So I was able to get us past the security there. I’ll explain more later, but just— we’re safe here, I promise.” She didn’t look convinced; in fact, she looked downright sceptical, so he added, “It was why I came here in the first place. Partly for revenge, after what he did to Narae, but also partially in the hopes that I could get away, permanently. Safely.”
She sat back in her chair, chewing her bottom lip for a moment. “So Narae’s death wasn’t an accident,” she murmured, softly, almost as if to herself. Then she looked up at Felix and her eyes focused again. “I did wonder. It was all so— strange. And awful.” She said the word like it didn’t do the depth of how it had been justice. “I came home one day and she was dead and you were gone and Father was furious. I was locked in my room for a week after that, and I only caught bits of the conversation.”
It was strange to think that their experiences that day had been so completely different. Jisoo, confused and lost, two siblings suddenly lost to her, with no context to her grief. And Felix, on the run, unable to close his eyes without seeing the lifeless body of his sister under his father’s hands.
“He killed her,” Felix whispered. This time, after a moment, she did touch his hand, and he turned it palm up and clung to her like a lifeline. “I don’t know exactly why. You know he was trying to marry her off to Choi Siwon—” Jisoo pulled an instinctual face at the name, which might have amused Felix at any other time. “She wasn’t happy about it. I think she tried to gain some leverage to make him change his mind, and he decided a dead daughter was better than one that was a liability. Or one that made him vulnerable. I ran away, after that, after I saw—” He swallowed. His voice had gained strength as he spoke but it was back to that wavering whisper again as he said, “I shouldn’t have left you behind, but I wasn’t thinking—”
“It’s okay.” Where his voice was barely there, hers was firm, sure of herself. “I was never mad at you, I was mostly just worried, and confused. I knew he was looking for you, and he was so angry — honestly, Yongbok, I hoped that he never found you.” She was quiet for a moment, chewing her lip again. Felix just held onto her hand. “I think he regretted losing Narae, in some capacity,” she said. “As much as he can feel such things. His deal with Choi fell through. Father offered me in her stead, but Choi had never wanted me.”
Felix tried to scrounge up a smile but there really wasn’t one spare. “That was probably in your favour,” he said.
“Oh, I wasn’t exactly upset about losing out on such an illustrious match, don’t worry about that.” She went silent again, her eyes drifting off to the side of him as she thought. “So that’s why that guy— why he was in the hospital. And the other one, his ear was missing. It’s because you guys robbed the vault?”
There was a lot more to it than that, a lot more that Felix should probably explain, but he didn’t feel like getting into any of it now; he was simply too tired. “Yeah,” he said.
She looked like she didn’t quite know how to take all of that in. She sat there thinking for a few more seconds. Felix wanted, so badly, to simply take himself off to bed, but she wasn’t done, he could tell. When her question came, though, it was— surprisingly vulnerable. “What will happen to us now?”
Honestly, Felix had given it surprisingly little thought. It was almost like he’d been so focused on getting her out that he hadn’t thought about what would come after. “Well, you can probably stay here if you wanted to.” He knew that was true — Chan would make space for her, welcome her as Felix’s only remaining family. “Or we can get you set up somewhere else. Busan, maybe.” As far away from this city, their father’s name, as they could without leaving the mainland. “But it’s probably better to wait until the dust settles a little.”
“Yongbok-ah, I don’t have any money,” she said. There was a hint of something in her voice that Felix recognised — the same feeling he had felt when he had looked in his wallet one day and realised he would really run out someday soon.
Felix squeezed her hand. “There was more than paperwork in that vault, noona,” he said. “We can spare the cash to get you a fake passport and a nice apartment.” He’d be able to spare the cash, after he took whatever his cut was going to be. She could have every single penny of it; what did he need for money now?
“Just like that?” She looked dubious, as well she might. Felix understood it, too, that feeling of suspicion; their father never did anything for free, after all. “Why would they do that for me?”
“They’re good people,” Felix said, and felt, as he said the words, the sheer understatement of the sentence, and how utterly naive it sounded coming out of his mouth.
Her eyes narrowed at him. “I don’t trust that,” she said. Felix hadn’t really expected her to; it would be as naive as he was to do so, and she was not like him in that way. “Do you have any funds? Don’t think,” she added, a little hotly, “that I didn’t notice you said I could get set up in Busan. What about you, Yongbok?”
“I’m staying here,” Felix said. It was one of the few things he would never allow himself to be bullied on.
“Because of your boyfriend?” Her voice was— scathing.
Felix blushed immediately, feeling the heat of it rush to his face. “Noona.”
“That’s not secure, Yongbok-ah,” she said, serious but just a little bit— mocking, or maybe just condescending. “Men are fickle beasts. And you’ve been useful so far, but now— will Mister Head Honcho Chris really be okay with one of his members continuing to sleep with the son of the Magpie? Does he even know? Aren’t you worried they’ll— kick you out, or worse?” She suddenly seemed to remember exactly where they were, and that it was not necessarily their father’s ears that they had to worry about listening into their conversation. “Oh god, he doesn’t live here, does he?”
Felix felt slightly like he’d lost control of the conversation a bit. “Who? Chris?”
She nodded. “I imagine he must have his own place,” she said, almost like she was trying to convince herself of it. “He wouldn’t live with his lackeys, surely.”
Felix bit his own bottom lip. He really wanted to just get up and leave the room and go crawl into bed now, and he could feel something like hysteria climbing up his throat. “He lives here,” he said. Jisoo went a little white, and he took pity on her, and didn’t let her squirm. “He isn’t here right now. Noona, he— he’s the one who came with me to get you.”
He watched that sink in, almost like he could see the little pinwheel of a loading screen over her face. Then she said, high pitched and enough of a shriek that he was glad nobody else was in the apartment, “You’re sleeping with the leader of the Strays?”
“I know it seems bad,” he said, as she spluttered for a moment, lost for words, sounding remarkably like a pot left to boil over. “I know what you’re thinking. But he isn’t like our father—”
“Well, clearly!” she said, and she sounded exactly about as hysterical as Felix had felt just seconds ago.
Felix’s face was red as a tomato, he could feel it. “I mean,” he said, shoving the words out through gritted teeth, “just in that he’s— he’s a good person, he’s kind. He cares about everyone here.” Another understatement, but then sometimes Felix thought words couldn’t quite encompass how much Chan cared about the people who lived there. He thought of Chan’s face when he’d looked down at Jisung in that hospital bed, when he had looked at that empty Hyunjin, and had to block the thought out. “He’s the leader,” he pressed on, while Jisoo was quiet, “but everyone has a say, has a voice. It’s a team. We’re a team. I get what you’re saying and why you’re worried, but this is— it’s a family.” A family that, he knew, included him in it now. “I love him. I love the others too.”
She wasn’t just quiet, she looked like he might have actually knocked her speechless with this. She really didn’t seem to have any kind of comeback to that. Had she had any inclination of this side of him, he wondered? Was the shock specifically because of who he was sleeping with, or was there some reserved for the fact that it was a man? Their father had always known it about him. He’d thought his sisters had seen it too.
“Noona,” he said. “I want to go to bed.” He wanted to go to bed with Chan, specifically, wanted to curl up against him, that solid body, held firmly in those warm arms. But Chan was at the hospital, so Felix would just have to put up with it. As awful as he felt right now, he knew that Chan had it so, so much worse. He had no idea how he and Hyunjin would be getting on.
He wondered if Chan had managed to get the glass out of Hyunjin’s hands yet.
After a pause, Jisoo just said, “Sure.” She looked confused still, a bit like she was still buffering, but she also just, in an instant, just looked so tired. When Felix pushed to his feet, she followed him, and didn’t protest as he took her case through to Jeongin’s room.
It was strange, Felix thought, that the room could feel so unlived in even when it had been barely a week since Jeongin had moved himself mostly downstairs. The room had the same feeling Felix’s room sometimes had when he’d been with his father on a business trip, like a space just left in waiting. He put Jisoo’s case in the middle of the room and said, “The bathroom is next door. No one will disturb you here. If they ask you, just say I said that you could sleep here.”
“Where will you sleep?” she asked.
“I’ll just be down the hall,” he said.
She nodded. Then she did something he was not sure she’d been able to do since Felix had hit puberty and his father had put an end to it — she reached out and tugged him into her arms, a surprisingly warm and firm hug. Felix was so surprised by it that he didn’t even have a chance to hug her back before she stepped back again.
“I’m so glad you’re alive, Yongbok-ah,” she said.
As he went down the hallway to his own room, Felix found that he was shaking just a little bit. Alive, he was alive. Yet again he’d managed to make it through without dying, somehow had managed to keep fumbling through without even really being hurt. His father; that time on the street; Chan, standing over him in the office. No harm to him, and yet now, because of his job, because of his need to hurt his father, Jisung lay half-dead in a hospital bed, Changbin had only half an ear. Hyunjin was—
He didn’t bother with anything beyond brushing his teeth, and only then it was because there was something awful in his mouth, something that tasted the way the hospital had smelled. In the bedroom itself he stripped down to his boxers and then, without much thought given to it, found one of Chan’s shirts, somewhat oversized on him, and tugged that over his head. Only then did he get into bed.
He thought he would lay awake for a while. He thought the guilt might keep him up. But instead he fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.
——
The air in the workroom felt stale as Seungmin stumbled inside, stale in a way that Seungmin usually didn’t notice. But of course it was stale, in this room without windows, where the one door was opened only ever briefly, and kept locked to the outside world the rest of the time. Where was the air supposed to circulate from?
He stood in the middle of that room, familiar but not quite loved, as Changbin closed the door gently behind him, not letting it slam, not letting the loud noise echo around them. It was Changbin who turned the lights on, Changbin who went to turn on the space heater in the corner to take out the frigid chill in the air, Changbin who went to the computers and turned on all the monitors so that it was not just the passive alarms that would sound if something was wrong.
Seungmin stood there, shaking. His mouth was filled with the taste of his vomit, the nasty bitter tang of bile. His head hurt, a pulsing sensation right behind his eyes. The lack of sleep, probably, the dehydration of the night. He really could not stop shaking; he reached up to take Changbin’s jacket off his shoulders and his hands were shaking too hard to undo the button holding it closed.
“Hyung,” he said. He was not sure why. He was not sure what he wanted, exactly, only that the way he felt was so unbelievably awful that there was a part of him that was afraid he was going to simply shake himself apart.
Whatever he meant, Changbin heard him and immediately stopped what he was doing — something with the computer, and it was a sign of how absolutely exhausted Seungmin felt that he didn’t even have it in him to worry about Changbin messing something up — and came right over to where Seungmin stood. “Baby,” he said, and immediately undid the problem button and took the jacket away to lay it on the workbench. “Hey, you’re okay, you’re home now.”
He was home, but it still didn’t feel right. All that time in the back of that van Seungmin had been wanting nothing more than to be home, locked away behind these four walls. His own self-made prison cell, with all the comfort that came from that. But now that he was here, it didn’t feel any better. The relief he had been hoping for, craving, was still out of his reach.
“Hyung,” he said again. His teeth chattered a little. “Hyung, I thought he would die.”
Changbin looked— alarmed. The parts of Seungmin that were capable of reading the expression on his face were being swept away by the feeling that was coming over him inch by inch, something which dampened the world around him but not in a way that was comforting or good. Instead, it made everything feel so much worse. Like he was losing his tether on reality.
“He didn’t,” Changbin said. He stepped in very close, one hand cupping the back of Seungmin’s neck, the other around Seungmin’s waist as he tried to tug Seungmin into what was probably meant to be a hug. But Seungmin couldn’t go, he couldn’t seem to move at all. Yes, there was the urge to put his face to Changbin’s neck and breathe him in, but it did not feel real. “He’s still alive.”
“No, but I—” It was not like they were sudden, the tears that started to drip down his face. He had felt them threatening since he’d thrown up, but they’d never actually arrived until this moment. His voice was thick with them. “In the van. I was driving the van, I was taking them to the hospital, but Hyunjin and Jisung were in the back, I couldn’t— see them, and I just kept thinking, the entire time, that I would pull up outside the emergency room and open the back of the van and Jisung would be— dead. Just a corpse. Because I drove too slowly or I was too late to help them or—”
“But he didn’t,” Changbin said soothingly. “He’s still alive in that hospital.”
That didn’t matter, how could Seungmin explain that it didn’t matter in a way that meant Changbin understood it. He had not been there, he had not seen the blood all over Jisung, everywhere, thick and hot when Seungmin had touched it accidentally. All Seungmin could think about was the image that had plagued him all the way to the hospital: Jisung’s unseeing empty eyes, his skin the paleness of the freshly dead, Hyunjin covered in Jisung’s blood and holding his dead body in his arms, still begging Seungmin to do something, to help.
“It was my fault,” he whispered, as Changbin carefully wiped his tears away. “I didn’t warn them in time. I was distracted, because you— someone was shooting at you, when you were leaving the vault. I wasn’t looking at the office. And I didn’t warn them in time, if I’d warned them in time, they could have— taken cover, protected each other, I didn’t—”
“Hush,” Changbin said. His voice was so unusually hard and firm that it cut through Seungmin’s tearful babbling like a hot knife through butter. “Seungmin. It was not your fault. You were doing the best that you could in ridiculous circumstances. We should never have left you alone to do all that, you should have had someone with you.”
Seungmin said nothing, he just shook. He should have had help, yes. Should have had someone to watch those cameras with him, keep track of everything. But he hadn’t, he’d been alone, and so it had been on him. And when it really mattered, when it truly mattered, he’d taken his eyes away and missed what was happening. He’d done it first when he’d failed to notice the guard wandering away from his post until the last moment, and then again when it came to the bombs.
Each time, distracted by Changbin.
“Hyung,” he said, still a whisper. “I thought you died.”
Changbin went still, one of his hands still cupping Seungmin’s face where he’d been thumbing away the tears that still fell down Seungmin’s cheeks. He didn’t, this time, rush to comfort Seungmin, to remind him that he hadn’t died — of course they both knew that, otherwise they wouldn’t be standing in this room together like this. Instead he just stood there looking at Seungmin.
His ear was an awful bloody mess. A lump of dried scabbing and flaking blood down the side of his neck, ugly and stark. Seungmin had known it just from the feeds but like this, up close, it was obvious: an inch to the left and the bullet would have gone through skull, through the soft jelly of Changbin’s eyeball, and killed him.
“I’m sorry,” Changbin said eventually. “I’m so sorry you had to watch that, Seungmin.”
Seungmin felt his face once again crumple. The tears were so hot on his face that it was almost overstimulating, something nasty about it. This, right now, felt a little bit like dying. It felt a little bit like how he had felt when he was fifteen and his father had just been marched out of their house by the police officers. The sense of something— collapsing.
“I love you,” he said. He was sobbing now, really sobbing, and not trying to stop it. There was no stopping it; this was inevitable, it was always inevitable. It had been inevitable since the first time Changbin had told him that his eyes were beautiful. Seungmin had just been too stubborn to accept it until it was almost too late. “Hyung, I love you.”
His vision was so blurry with his tears that it was hard to make out what expression Changbin had on his face. His voice, though, was the calm, serious tone that sometimes felt like the best resting place for Seungmin’s aching bones. “I know, baby,” he said. “I know you do.”
Of course he knew, of course he did. Hadn’t Seungmin already known that, too? How excruciating it was, to be so loved and so known, to never have to say out loud with words what he could not usually bear to say. But he wanted to say it, he needed Changbin to hear it. Because Seungmin had almost never had the chance.
Changbin pulled him into his arms, and Seungmin collapsed onto him like a ragdoll, head tucked into his neck as close as he could get, wanting to disappear into Changbin’s body so they could never be parted. Changbin’s arms around him were just over the edge of too tight, like he, too, could not quite control the emotions in him. Hold me tighter, Seungmin wanted to say, crush me into you, but even if the words hadn’t been crazy, he couldn’t anyway; he was crying too hard for it.
——
Minho really did hate hospitals.
The brightness, the noise, the smell, all of it a cocktail of grating, unpleasant overstimulation. Urgent orders mixed with droll chatter and the cries of people in pain. The stinging scent of antiseptic layered over latex and blood. Blinding lights from overhead bouncing back up off white tiled floors, nowhere to turn for a rest.
He power-walked through hallways that never seemed to end. The others hadn’t been in the waiting room any more when he’d gone to find them, and each nurse he encountered pointed him in a new direction. It was a labyrinth, one he was more desperate to see the end of at every turn. His side throbbed, and no matter how fast he moved the halls went by so slowly.
It was Changbin he saw first, leaning against the doorframe of Jisung’s room, disturbing the blur of blinding whiteness with red, smeared across the side of his head, down his neck. Blood clotting thick and ugly, black in places.
They didn’t speak as Minho walked past, going into the room proper. Jisung lay on that hospital bed, small and soft under his gown, the pristine blanket. He was hooked up to so many tubes and wires, breathing laboured. Something clenched in Minho’s chest at the sight of him, tight and painful.
“This is your fault,” a voice said, and Minho turned to see Chan sitting on the low sofa in the corner of the room. His eyes were red-rimmed, salt trails from tears running lines down his face. “You didn’t protect him.”
I wasn’t there, Minho thought, hot with shame and cold with guilt, warring in his core. It’s not my fault, I wasn’t there, we weren’t together—
“You didn’t stop him,” Chan said, or— it was his voice, but Minho didn’t see his mouth move, it was just noise floating in the air, a thought shoved right into Minho’s mind. You didn’t stop him.
It was Jeongin, Minho had been with. Jeongin, Minho had not been able to stop.
He knew even before he looked back at the bed that it wouldn’t be Jisung laying there anymore, and he didn’t want to see, didn’t want to look, but like the voice echoing through his mind, he had no control. The room spun to show him, Chan fading out of view and instead putting the hospital bed in front of Minho, as if he was standing at the side of it. Jeongin now lay unconscious where Jisung should be, needles jammed under his skin, a tube down his throat.
Blood seeped up, through the gown, through the blanket, vibrant red against light blues and whites.
No, Minho thought, and then he jerked upright, eyes shooting open.
He was in his room. He was home. Sunlight came through his covered windows, dim and weak. Impossible to tell how long he’d been sleeping.
Minho, near frantic, looked around himself, finding Jeongin beside him, very quickly. He hadn’t woken, even though Minho suddenly sitting up had ripped the blankets halfway off him, exposing his bare chest to the air. Minho pressed his hand over his own sternum, feeling the way his heart was pounding, wishing he could soothe it into peacefulness with a gentle hand. Like how Jeongin would stroke his hair, settling him down.
Jeongin was alive, he told himself, swallowing down the threat of tears sticking unpleasantly inside his throat. Jeongin was alive, was whole. The nightmare was, for now, just a nightmare, stacking up on all the others, polluting and ugly and awful.
They would have to talk about it, Minho knew. He tucked the blanket back up, covering Jeongin with it once again. Earlier Jeongin had wept and apologised and then they’d towelled off and collapsed into bed together. There’d been no sex, for the first time since they’d begun sharing a bed. Too exhausted, too hollowed out. Even having Jeongin cuddled against him skin to skin had not awoken anything in Minho. He’d never felt less like indulging in carnality.
It was not a conversation for right now, or even for today. In truth, he would like to put it off as long as he possibly could. It would make Jeongin cry again. It might even end this, as fledgling and new and hopeful as it was. Some things could not be survived. And Minho wasn’t sure if Jeongin would want to stay with him, in this relationship that was doomed to be achingly, agonisingly intense.
He had needed to make Jeongin understand. But he wasn’t sure if he hadn’t revealed too much in the process.
Minho let his hand fall back down to his lap. Not right now. That was not for right now.
He reached over the edge of the bed and picked his phone up to check the time, finding it was just after five in the evening. Despite having slept the day away, Minho was still exhausted, eyelids stiff and heavy, his limbs weary. After that dream, though, he didn’t think he was going to be able to lay back down and sleep any time soon. He felt jittery in a sick kind of way. He should’ve been hungry, but he wasn’t. He should eat anyway, but he knew he wasn’t going to.
Goosebumps began to rise along his body, as the coolness of the air finally began to win out over the sleep-warmth of his skin. He slipped out of the bed fully, shivering as he rose to his feet. Silently, he went to his dresser and pulled out some worn house clothes, dressing efficiently.
Jeongin did not stir, and Minho took great care as he left the room to close the door behind him as quietly as possible.
The lights in the stairwell flickered on as he descended to the ground floor. There was nowhere he wanted to go, which was unusual — normally when he was restless he patrolled, but the thought of being out alone like that right now just felt— bad, in ways he couldn’t fully quantify. And hitting a punching bag over and over didn’t exactly appeal at this moment either.
He let himself out the back door of the building, into the little parking area where the van and car had been left. Minho popped the trunk of the car open, heart going fast again, but everything was there. Three backpacks and three duffel bags, bulky and oddly shaped.
Minho sighed, shaky, and then began the process of moving all the bags inside, taking them into Seungmin’s workshop. They were heavy, as heavy as he remembered, and his aching body protested the weight, so residually sore.
He left them, one by one, atop the workbench, until they were all piled there. The rewards that had almost cost them their lives.
How strange to think the job was done. Successful. There should be triumph, but Minho could not summon any. The job was never for him, never about him. The only triumph was that they’d all, somehow, made it out on the other side of things. But even that was tainted.
He pulled a stool out and sat down on it, dragging one of the backpacks nearer to himself. The bags all smelled a little like smoke still, acrid and unpleasant. He opened it, discovering as he did so this was the one he’d been carrying out. As the zipper came open the contents shifted and spilled out — slim gold bars, and the steely metal and matte black of harddrives. There were some papers too, files, creased and bent but intact.
Minho steadily pulled everything out, piling up the items by category. Later, when he was more awake, he would make intake lists, catalogue what and how much of everything there was.
As he reached absently back into the backpack, his finger was unpleasantly pricked by something sharp, like it had been bitten, or stung. He jerked back, examined the little scratch on his thumb, and then more gingerly pawed back into the bag until he could grab what had cut him. It was a piece of a harddrive, about two thirds of one, shattered open, the metal twisted and jagged, circuitry bared. Minho supposed they had to hope whatever was on it hadn’t been particularly important.
He set aside the chunk of decimated technology, pulling out more valuables and the occasional piece of shattered drive. Slivers of metal and plastic. Until he pulled out a gold bar that had a divot in it, just enough to fit a fingertip in. He turned it under the stark lights, examining the dent.
Ah, he thought, dull and numb, and grabbed the bag by the bottom and upended it fully. It was nearly empty by this point, a delicate necklace slithering out onto the workbench and another couple of gold bars thunking out. Amongst them were significantly smaller pieces of the shattered harddrive, but also— more. Tiny, thin pieces of metal. Shrapnel. Minho pushed through the debris until he found what he was looking for: a mangled, distorted little lead ball, flattened from hitting that gold bar.
It took another few moments of searching for Minho to find the entry hole into the backpack, poking his finger through it. Impossible to tell the angle of it, but Minho felt fairly certain that if the bullet hadn’t hit that bar, he’d have taken it in the back, probably around one of his kidneys.
How many times had he almost died on this job. Impossible to tell. This was an easily visible example, but there had no doubt been other moments. Where a bullet had whizzed by his head, just missed his chest as he turned. He’d been on some risky jobs, but nothing was like last night. He found he wasn’t keen to do anything like it ever again. Which was odd, in some respects. He’d always been cautious in his way, but he’d never felt such a jolt of sick, noxious fear as he felt right now, touching the small, fraying hole in the backpack.
It could have killed you, Jeongin’s voice, thick and shaky with restrained tears, rang through his head.
Baby boy, his lovely baby boy. How was Minho supposed to go back into the field like this?
A deep, empty kind of sorrow began to well up in him, but before it could take true grip the door to the workshop was swinging open slowly. Minho startled, rising halfway to his feet before he saw who it was.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, unsteadily coming into the room. His eyes were squinted nearly shut against the light, cheeks flushed pink from the warmth of sleep. He was wearing an oversized shirt of his own, and a pair of Minho’s dark blue boxers, which showcased his bony knees and slim calves. He wasn’t wearing shoes or socks, his feet bare on the cold concrete.
Minho ached at the sight of him. “Baby boy,” he murmured, getting the rest of the way to his feet and coming around the table. “Why are you awake?”
“You were gone,” Jeongin mumbled, rubbing tiredly at his eye with his knuckles. “Come back to bed? I want you.”
How was Minho supposed to live beside this, he wondered. This feeling like a tidal wave, engulfing him and filling up every one of his empty spaces. Jeongin blinked up at him, face puffy and hair sticking up at one side, and Minho felt like all the air in his lungs was being squeezed out of him.
He pulled Jeongin against his body, the material of his shirt worn and soft, his lithe body beneath it humming with warmth. Jeongin let out a little sigh, his arms coming up to slide over Minho’s shoulders, around his neck. Minho’s lips ghosted over the sharp cut of Jeongin’s cheekbone, his hands gliding down Jeongin’s back and over his hips. He bent his knees and grabbed Jeongin around the backs of his thighs and then lifted.
Jeongin made a soft, sleepy little noise of surprise as Minho pulled him off his feet. He understood what Minho was doing, instinctively wrapping his legs around Minho’s waist, his weight settling against Minho’s body.
“Let’s get you tucked back into bed,” Minho whispered, and felt Jeongin press a kiss, light and damp, just under his ear before tucking his face down against the side of Minho’s neck.
And just like that, Minho carried him out of the room and back up to his own. Jeongin was nearly asleep by the time Minho was laying him down in his bed, exactly where he belonged.
“Hyung,” Jeongin breathed, his eyes closed, and Minho sank down onto the mattress beside him, clutching Jeongin close like if he just held on tight enough, the nightmares would know better than to touch them.
——
Changbin came out of sleep so reluctantly, his eyes sticky with it, that it was a shock to check the time and see that it was about eight at night. It felt like it should be so much earlier, and it was always odd, sleeping in Seungmin’s little windowless room, with no outside indication as to what point in the day it was. It made it hard to keep track of the time, which probably explained a lot about Seungmin’s strange sleeping habits.
Seungmin was awake. To be like this in bed, both of them awake but still laying here together, was a very rare thing. Usually Changbin had to sneak off, or else Seungmin had wriggled out to go back to his desk, unable to sleep. But he lay tucked into the very small space between Changbin’s body and the wall, turned onto his side with his head against a sliver of the pillow. One of his hands was curled up against Changbin’s chest.
His eyes were still a little swollen from his tears, but he looked considerably better than he had done. It had been such a relief, to wash all that blood off him, but not as much as it had been for Seungmin. He’d started to hyperventilate again, when they got into the bathroom and he realised that, despite the scrubbing he’d done in the sink in the hospital, there was still blood in his hair, at the side of his neck. Changbin had had to help him, carefully and methodically, clean the blood away.
Then, just as carefully, remarkably gentle for Seungmin, Seungmin had washed the blood away from his ear. The throbbing of it had been almost too much, and Changbin had not been able to hold in his noises of pain. He’d been injured before, of course he had, but somehow those hurts — fractured ribs, black eyes, the busted lip of a fight in middle school — had not felt quite like this. This was no dull ache, it was a sharp, stabbing thing that seemed to simply never stop.
He’d thought it would stop him sleeping. But clearly the two ibuprofen he’d downed with half a bottle of water had helped because he’d not woken up once until now. His ear was hurting again though. He should have maybe let Chan call him a doctor after all, if only just to get a prescription for stronger painkillers.
“I should get to the hospital again,” he murmured.
Seungmin just watched him, quiet and unmoving. When his face was still like this, the beauty of his eyes were thrown into such stark relief. He rarely looked like this, though. He was not blank like he could so often be, he just looked tiredly empty, like the stress of the past twenty four hours had simply left him with nothing else to spare.
Changbin shuffled forward so he could press his mouth, soft and lingering, to Seungmin’s forehead. “Make sure you eat something,” he said. “Text Felix and ask him to bring something down. Make sure you eat.”
Seungmin had closed his eyes as Changbin kissed him and he didn’t open them again, not to agree or disagree to Changbin’s demand. The fact that he wasn’t refusing would have to be enough, Changbin thought, as he shuffled off the side of the bed and got to his feet a little unsteadily.
Last night, after the shower, he had pulled on the same pair of boxer shorts and then laid down under the covers, Seungmin in his softest pyjamas but Changbin otherwise naked. He couldn’t go outside in just his boxers, so as much as the thought was awful, he pulled on the same clothes from last night; he would get changed upstairs. He wasn’t sure if Seungmin was planning on sleeping more or not, but whenever he looked back, Seungmin was looking at him. The covers tucked up to his chin, half covering his mouth, his eyes peeking over the top. He never said a word.
They would have to talk about it eventually, Changbin thought, as he climbed the stairs up to the fourth floor, his body so heavy and tired it was like torture. They would have to talk about what Seungmin had said, the confession he had finally, finally made. But not right now, maybe not for a while, until the dust had settled.
Changbin’s heart had broken a little bit in that moment, listening to Seungmin sob like he’d thought the chance to say it another time might never come. What had it done to him, the night that he had just gone through. Seungmin had not been built for such things.
The apartment was quiet; if anyone was up, Changbin could not hear them. He let himself into his tiny bedroom and changed out of his clothing with real relief, dropping them in the corner of the room where he could deal with them some other time. He changed into a pair of his sweatpants and an old sweater, nothing that would turn heads but comfortable for what was sure to be a long night ahead.
Next he went across the hallway to Hyunjin’s room, where he visited less than would be expected. Hyunjin’s space just felt, to Changbin, like something incredibly private. A space he could decorate how he wanted, where he could exist how he wished to exist without anyone watching him. He’d rarely wanted to intrude on that space, even though he knew Hyunjin did not think of it as quite that private.
The bedroom was, not overly surprisingly, something of a mess, when Changbin let himself in there. There was a damp towel on the floor, like Hyunjin had dropped it from his body and just left it there, and a pair of pants next to it, discarded at some point and not picked up; perhaps an alternative pair to the ones he’d ended up wearing. The ones they’d have to throw away, or try to burn, now.
The ones covered in Jisung’s blood.
He’d been having a lot of thoughts like that, on his way home from the hospital and then since he woke up. Intrusive thoughts, he thought they were called, from what little reading he’d done on trauma recovery and PTSD, in those early years of Hyunjin being with them. He couldn’t remember what the books had said to do with those kinds of thoughts, but he remembered that they were normal, at least, so he kept just trying to shake them off. Literally, in fact, shaking his head like a dog after a bath, as if the thoughts were water droplets to be dispersed.
He did that now, as he carefully stepped over whatever lay on the ground on his way to Hyunjin’s built-in wardrobe units. Hyunjin had been so excited for those, when they’d first moved in. He’d had, for the time he’d lived in the old apartment, a drawer in a unit for any clothing that he’d owned, and most of what he’d had were either gifted from Chan, or shared with Jeongin.
He’d certainly made the most of the space, Changbin thought, as he opened Hyunjin’s wardrobe and saw all the clothing that was hanging up. Changbin had a decent collection but it was nothing compared to Hyunjin, who almost took it as a challenge to find odd, interesting items of clothing. Things that he wore once, maybe, to Maniac, and then the rest of the time he lived in his comfortable clothing, most of which still remained hand-me-downs from Chan.
Of course, his collection was still nothing compared to Jisung’s, but at least Jisung wore all of his stuff again and again, just like the jeans he’d been wearing tonight—
He stood in front of Hyunjin’s wardrobe and breathed for a while. It was a little shocking to realise, in the aftermath, that he hadn’t quite been able to envision what it would be like if one of them did die on the mission. He’d joked about it with Seungmin, but he’d never actually thought it would even come close to something like that. And yet, he could see, in his reflection in Hyunjin’s mirror against the wall, the missing chunk of his ear, where he’d almost been shot in the head. He could see, in his mind’s eye, the pale form of Jisung in the bed, in the brief moments Changbin had the courage to look at him.
It took him a while to be able to move again. After that, he kept every movement economical, as efficient as possible. He found a pair of Hyunjin’s sweatpants, dark but not too worn, and a new t-shirt for him to wear. It was baggy, but after a moment of thought, he dug out a hoodie, too, even baggier. He knew this hoodie, it was the one that made even Hyunjin look like he was drowning. Hyunjin always wore it on those days where he was visibly struggling.
He put them all in a bag that he’d brought from his own room, a duffel that was easy to carry and big enough to hold all the clothing and a replacement pair of sneakers, too, which he dug out from Hyunjin’s wardrobe, an older, battered pair that would be very comfortable to wear. He would have gone to get something for Chan, except he did not want to disturb Felix, and Chan’s clothes, at least, were not bloody, just— most likely sweaty.
When he went back into the main area, there was someone there now: Felix’s sister, poking around the kitchen, looking much more awake than Changbin felt. She gave him a look like she thought she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t but Changbin just said, “Hi. Jisoo, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. Even as uncertain of herself and clearly wary of the situation she was, there was something about her that was— much more forthright than Felix had ever felt. “I’ve forgotten your name, sorry.”
“I’m Changbin,” said Changbin. He hoisted the duffel over his shoulder and added, “There’s ramen in that top right cupboard, by the way. You can help yourself to any of the leftovers in the fridge, too.”
She looked surprised by that. “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”
Changbin just nodded at her. “Felix is in the far room on the left, by the way. If you need him.”
“Thank you,” she said again, much more softly. He felt her eyes on him as he pulled his sneakers on at the front door and let himself out, could sense that there was more she wanted to ask him, but didn’t want to disturb him. He was glad that she didn’t bother, honestly. He felt so tired, not at all up to the kind of socialising that kind of conversation would entail. He just wanted to get to the hospital where he could check up on everyone who had been left behind.
He didn’t check on Seungmin again before he left the house, out the back to where their car was. He got the feeling, inside himself, if he went into that workroom and found Seungmin out of bed, he’d want to coax him back in; if he found Seungmin in bed still, he wouldn’t be able to resist. So instead he forced himself outside and into the front seat of the car and then he started the drive to the hospital.
Part of him, the entire way there, was waiting for a phone call from Chan. Something that said, he’s gone, or, he’s not going to get better. The feeling that he’d get that bad news stayed with him through the drive to the hospital, through the wait for the takeout that he picked up from a restaurant on the street opposite the hospital, and then through the journey through the hospital itself.
Being in a hospital always reminded Changbin of his grandmother. He hadn’t had much cause to come to one in the years since she’d died — once so Chan could get stitches on a nasty cut he’d gotten on a job, and that time with Jeongin, his poor broken nose, his poor cut up mouth, that awful angle of his arm. But even then it had reminded him of his grandmother, in those last few weeks before she’d died, when he’d cracked and brought her to die in a place like this because he’d been sixteen and didn’t know how to handle caring for her anymore.
You did the right thing, son, one of the doctors had said, and Changbin hadn’t known if that was true, as he watched her frail body waste away in that sterile room. And then, afterwards, there had been the debt it had brought.
When he arrived at the room that Jisung had been admitted to, there was an odd layering of reality as he pushed open the door. He half-expected to see his grandmother laying there, her rasping breathing, her confused questions about who he was and why didn’t her grandson come to see her anymore. But of course, this was a private room, and his grandmother had died in a public ward, and there was, instead, Jisung in that white bed, his breathing quiet, the machines around him beeping and ticking.
Chan stood up as Changbin came into the room, hurrying to the door to meet him, taking some of the bags off him. “Changbin,” he was saying, a little too fast, looking and sounding like the lack of sleep was beginning to get to him. “Is everyone okay at home? Jeongin, Felix, they’re okay? Did Felix get his sister settled alright, I didn’t even think about where she’d sleep or anything.”
“Everything is fine at home, hyung,” Changbin said. “I think Felix put her in Jeongin’s room, it’s not like Jeongin is using it right now.” He put the bags he’d been left with down on the side table next to where Chan had set his, and then turned, to look at Hyunjin.
The chair he was sitting on was different, something with a cushioned seat and back, something Chan must have procured for him somehow, but Hyunjin himself had not moved from where Changbin had left him all those hours ago. He sat as close to Jisung’s bedside as he seemingly could without actually being on the bed himself. He did not look at Changbin. He did not look away from Jisung.
There was a ghost here in the room with them. Someone Changbin thought was long dead, a spectre of the past that Changbin had not ever wanted to see. He saw it in Hyunjin’s eyes when he lifted them to look at Changbin when Changbin said, “Hyunjin-ah, I brought food.” Those dead, empty eyes. That unseeing look of someone who only contained pain.
Hyunjin looked at him for a few seconds. It was not clear that he had actually comprehended what Changbin was saying. Then he turned his face back to Jisung’s still body.
“Has he slept at all?” Changbin asked Chan, mostly a murmured undertone, for the illusion of not talking about Hyunjin in the same room as him, except it was clear that Hyunjin wasn’t going to pay attention. That, too, was an echo of the past, the way he and Chan had discussed things while Hyunjin lay on the couch with his head in Jeongin’s lap, weeping silently as Jeongin watched television on that awful old model they used to have. “Did he eat?”
“No, and no,” Chan said. “I tried to get him to lay down on the couch with me but he wouldn’t move. Just kept looking at me like— that, and then ignoring anything I said. He won’t leave Jisung’s side.”
At least he was looking, Changbin supposed, because that morning he hadn’t even done that. One of the worst parts of it, and he saw on Chan’s face that he knew it too, was that there would be no getting through to Hyunjin until he had— come out the other end, however long that took. Whatever had happened in that building, however Jisung had ended up stabbed, the story would have to wait until either Jisung himself woke up or Hyunjin resurfaced enough to tell them.
Chan ran a hand through his hair, then winced as he felt the build up of sweat in it. “What food did you bring?” he asked.
Changbin shrugged. “I just stopped at a kimbap place,” he said. “I got a couple of them, with some fried rice for Hyunjin to maybe try. It’ll be soft and easy to eat.”
“That’s good,” Chan said. “Yeah, that’ll be good.”
Silently they unpacked the food together. The room was silent though; in the background was the constant, steady beeping of all the machines Jisung was hooked up to. Changbin didn’t know what they all did, only that he had more than his grandmother had had those years ago. He had an IV though, the needle pressed into his arm, although the entry point was hidden under some gauze.
Did it hurt, Changbin wondered. Did it hurt to have that pushed under your skin.
He had asked for a couple of extra paper bowls from the take out place, things they used when they ordered chicken or finger foods to be shared. As Chan unwrapped the kimbap from their foil, Changbin opened up the rice and scooped some of it into one of the bowls. It looked— good, he supposed, if he’d been really in the mood for food. He was hungry, he knew, almost starving hungry, a sensation he usually couldn’t stand, but it felt so abstract right now that even the smell of the food wasn’t doing much for him.
He would look after Hyunjin, as much as he could, before he took care of any of his own needs. The opposite of what they told you on planes with the oxygen masks, he knew, but Hyunjin mattered more right now.
He left Chan to finish setting up the food, and pulled one of the other chairs in the room close to Hyunjin, but didn’t sit down yet. “Hyunjin-ah,” he said very quietly. “It’s hyung, I’m here.”
Hyunjin looked at him again. How could there be so little life in his eyes? What was going inside his head that had taken him back to that place, where he was locked up in his own mind where Changbin couldn’t quite reach him.
“Hyunjin, I bought you some clothes,” he said, holding up the duffle bag for Hyunjin to see. “You should change out of the ones you’re wearing, they’re dirty.”
Hyunjin looked at the duffle bag, then back to Changbin’s face, and then away again, looking at Jisung. Was it survivor’s guilt that had kept him here like this, glued to Jisung’s side? Changbin would have liked to find the words that could convince Hyunjin that whatever had happened, it was not his fault — it would not matter even if it had been through some action of Hyunjin’s, Changbin knew in his heart that it was not Hyunjin to blame.
“You don’t have to leave Jisung,” Changbin said, struck by what he hoped was mild inspiration. “You can stay right here and hyung will help you change. You’ll feel better, I promise.”
“Yeah,” said Chan, clearly finished setting up, wandering over. “You remember how nice it feels to be in comfortable clean clothes, you know how it is, Changbin brought you some. If you want, hyung can help you, but don’t you want to change?”
If someone talked to Hyunjin like this during normal times, slow and careful, a little bit like to a scared child, Hyunjin would hate it. But in times like this, it got through to him just enough, like poking small holes through a membrane, carefully not ripping it but doing what they could to make a difference. After a few seconds he made a motion with his head that was almost a nod and then let Changbin get him under the arm and help him to his feet.
It had been— hours since those bombs had gone off in that casino and yet Hyunjin was still extremely unsteady, swaying as he stood. Changbin was not sure of the cause, if it was simply the lack of sleep at this point, the lack of food and water. Hyunjin wasn’t much use when it came to getting out of his clothes, either, his hands weak, his attempts at undoing his own pants impossible. Neither Chan not Changbin much wanted to actually undress him but they had to, in the end, Chan murmuring soothingly as Changbin carefully stripped him out of his jeans and into the sweatpants, and then helped him out of his shirt and into the hoodie Changbin had brought him.
He gave the other clothes to Chan. They were stiff with the blood on them, and Changbin had to work hard to keep his revulsion from showing on his face. How much blood had Jisung lost, he wondered. How much blood had he had to lose in the first place.
By the time Changbin helped him back down into his chair, Hyunjin seemed, somehow, more alert. Enough that when he looked at Changbin, his eyes weren’t quite so awfully empty. Changbin had expected the opposite, with them undressing him — a fraught thing from the beginning of their custody of Hyunjin — but perhaps the movement and the clean clothes had done something. He had not moved more than a single step from Jisung’s bedside though.
Bolstered by that alertness, and the way Hyunjin nodded when Chan asked if the clothes were better, Changbin fetched him some food — the fried rice in the little bowl, hopefully easy enough to eat. He sat down this time, next to Hyunjin, and said, “Here, I brought you this.” Hyunjin took it in his hands, almost cupping it. He looked down at it without blinking. “Eat some of this, you must be hungry, right? Eat some of it, for me?”
It took so long that Changbin thought Hyunjin might not actually do it, but it was like it had so often been back then — Hyunjin not connected to the world but trusting in him or Chan-hyung, doing as he was told because he had come to understand that they wanted only what was good for him. So he lifted the spoon and put half of what was on it into his mouth.
“Good,” said Changbin, as he watched Hyunjin chew and then swallow, each action clearly so difficult. “Good,” he added, as Hyunjin did it again, a slightly larger mouthful this time. Everything about him was mechanical, a body going through the motions.
He could hear Chan moving around on the other side of the room but he didn’t take his eyes off Hyunjin, which was why he saw immediately when Hyunjin tried to swallow that second mouthful and couldn’t. All the colour drained from Hyunjin’s face, his lips going pale. Changbin reached past him quickly for the little wastepaper basket by the side of the bed and held it under Hyunjin’s mouth, right before Hyunjin threw up what he had eaten.
It had been so little food that what came up was mostly bile. Hyunjin took the trashcan from him and hunched over it, making an awful, gagging, retching sound, as he heaved and mostly came up with nothing. The bowl that he’d been eating from had fallen to the ground, the rice spilled everywhere. Changbin put a hand to Hyunjin’s back, felt the way Hyunjin flinched at the touch, and then took it away. He felt— useless. Completely fucking useless, a lump of nothing sitting by this bed, unable to do anything to help anyone.
Hyunjin heaved for a while, bent over that trash can, his shoulders shaking. Chan came around to their side of the bed again but he didn’t touch Hyunjin either. Instead, he hunkered down on his other side, making himself small, and murmured to Hyunjin as they waited for this to pass. “It’s okay,” Chan was saying, voice barely audible over that horrible sound Hyunjin was making still. “You’re okay, Hyunjin, you don’t have to eat. You don’t have to eat, hyung will take the food away.”
“He needs to eat,” Changbin said, a little desperately. He felt — this had always been the thing he had been able to do for Hyunjin. Those first few months, when Hyunjin had first come to live with them, he’d clung to Jeongin like a limpet, seemed to warily trust Chan, and been actively skittish around Changbin, whose role in the group had meant he came and went frequently. Hyunjin had had much less exposure to him, and when Changbin and Chan had been in the same room together with him, that skittishness had increased tenfold, his anxiety palpable.
So Changbin had done the only thing he could think of to do, when he was only seventeen himself and barely knew how to deal with the awful situation he found himself dealing with — he had brought Hyunjin food. Small snacks, left on the table for Jeongin to share with Hyunjin. He had gone to a different restaurant every single night to get dinner for a while, trying out all the different foods that Hyunjin had not been exposed to, trying to figure out what Hyunjin liked, making a note of it to bring it to him again in the future. Later, it had been Changbin that Hyunjin asked for things, requesting different foods in that haughty, demanding way he had developed once he knew that they’d never throw him out for anything. That was what Changbin did.
“He can try again tomorrow,” Chan said. “There you go,” he added, as Hyunjin finally stopped vomiting and raised his head a little. He looked even worse than before, so pale, haggard with it all. He was shaking, his whole body trembling so hard they could hear his teeth clicking together a little. There were tears in his eyes from the force of his heaving but he was not crying, which terrified Changbin in a way. He wished, so badly, for Hyunjin to cry, because then he would know that Hyunjin was going to be okay. This Hyunjin looked so much like that silent, petrified boy that Jeongin had brought home that Changbin thought he had gone back in time for a moment.
Chan touched the trashcan and asked, “Can I take this away?” Hyunjin nodded and so Chan whisked it out of his hands, took a moment to scoop the spilled food on the floor into it with his own bare hands, and took it to the door, where he put his head out and murmured something to someone outside after a moment. Changbin put his hand to Hyunjin’s back again, where he was still bent over, looking blankly at his own lap. This time Hyunjin didn’t flinch or throw him off. He turned his face slightly in Changbin’s direction and just looked at him.
“Hyunjin,” Changbin said. “Do you think you could drink something? Some water or something like that?”
He couldn’t tell if Hyunjin could speak or just was not doing so. He sat up, very slowly, and raised a hand and pushed his hair back from his face, before he let it fall back into his lap. There were spots of redness over his palms, Changbin noticed, and he felt a kind of sickening despair come over him. “Hyunjin-ah,” he said, voice pitched as calm as he could make it. “Can hyung see your hands please?”
It took another few moments, that delay in all of Hyunjin’s reactions, but eventually Hyunjin lifted his hands from his lap and lay them on the bed, palms up, fingers curled loosely. There was glass embedded in the skin on both hands, sharp shards just small enough that it explained why they hadn’t been noticed before. Changbin sucked in a breath, the sound quickly smothered. It really did feel like it did when Hyunjin first came to them, trying to modulate all of his reactions to not spook this scared, hurt boy in front of him.
“You have glass in your hands,” he said. “Does it hurt, Hyunjin?”
Hyunjin looked down at his hands and then, an almost curious look about it, he tried to close his fists. Changbin, as gently as he could, stopped him, spreading his fingers out again. “Don’t do that,” he said. “I’m going to get the glass out, okay, Hyunjin? Just— Chan-hyung!”
Chan, who had finished up at the door and was now coming back to them with a bottle of water in his hands, said, “What is it, what’s wrong?” He looked with such sudden alert that it would have been funny if it weren’t— for everything.
“He’s got glass in his hands,” Changbin said. There was a level of distress in him that seemed to reach further than anything he had ever experienced. He was not sure he had felt like this even when his grandmother died, perhaps because that had seemed just so final. He had known she would die and so she had, and she had been dead. An underscore drawn under a chapter of his life. But this was simply a nightmare that kept on and on and on. “From last night, he’s had— glass in his hands this entire time.”
“Ah,” Chan said, wincing a little bit. “Yeah, Felix mentioned that this morning. I’ve been trying to get Hyunjin to let me take it out but he won’t, and I didn’t want to— push him too much.”
It was like with the food again, and it was a flaw of Chan’s that Changbin would never tell him was a flaw. People thought Changbin was the more obviously indulgent one, but at least he had, once or twice through the years, scolded Hyunjin or Jeongin for their behaviour. Small things, most of the time, but things that had been worth correcting. Chan simply didn’t have it in him. When he loved someone the way he loved Hyunjin and Jeongin — and, probably, the way he loved Felix — their flaws just became something to accept. He could never tell them off, and he could never force them into things they didn’t want to do, even when it was for their own good.
“Hyung,” Changbin said. “He has glass in his hands, you can’t just leave it.”
Chan gave him a look. A look which said he knew that, a look which said that Chan was tired, so so tired, and out of his depth, and the problems just kept coming. Chan hadn’t slept at all, and Changbin was not sure how much sleep he’d gotten the night before the job itself, if he’d napped like Changbin had for a bit or if he’d just gone into it after a full day anyway. If that were the case, no wonder Chan hadn’t had the energy to fight Hyunjin.
Changbin turned back to Hyunjin, whose fingers were still being held gently open by Changbin’s own. “Hyunjin,” he said. “We need to get the glass out of your hands.”
Hyunjin tugged his hands away and hid them back in his lap where Changbin couldn’t see them. “No,” he said.
“Yes,” Changbin said, more firmly. “Do you remember when Jeongin got that splinter in his hand and we had to get it out before his skin grew over it? It’s like that. Do you want that to happen to you?”
There was a long pause, before Hyunjin slowly lifted his hands and set them back on the bed. It was not that his body language was surly, because he still just seemed out of it, but that had been similar to those early days too, when Hyunjin had been mostly quiet and empty but every so often, when asked to do something, he had done it with an air of mild dissatisfaction. The first hints of the personality that had hidden under the surface.
It was less than a hint here. Changbin wished to have even that little bit just now.
Chan said, “I’d prefer a doctor do this but—”
“No,” Hyunjin said. He tried to curl his hands again, and Changbin had to stop him. “No, no, no—”
“No, I won’t get a doctor,” Chan said quickly. “I’ll just go see if I can get some tweezers or something, okay? Changbin and I will do it for you.”
Changbin had no idea how Chan actually procured a pair of tweezers, presumably the kind they actually used to remove glass from skin — Changbin didn’t know if that’s how they did it in the hospital, actually, that seemed a little old school. But he got a pair, and brought them to Changbin, who took one of Hyunjin’s hands in his and started on the work of digging the glass out.
It was not fun work. In fact, it was one of the worst things Changbin had ever had to do, sitting there with Hyunjin flinching with the pain but saying nothing, making no noise, as Changbin hurt him. It was a necessary hurt, a necessary evil, but that didn’t make it any easier to inflict it. As the little pile of bloodied glass on the side table grew, as Changbin finished with one hand and switched to the other, Changbin watched Hyunjin retreat. Any progress he’d made with Changbin in the room was slipping back out of his fingers.
Changbin dug out the last piece of visible glass and looked down at Hyunjin’s poor ruined hands, bloody and raw all over again. They would hurt for days as the wounds scabbed over; they hurt now, as Changbin drabbed the blood away from his palms. Hyunjin was not even flinching now. He was back to watching Jisung. He was barely even blinking.
“Hyung,” Changbin whispered.
“I know,” Chan said. He sounded like Changbin felt: terrified, heart-broken. As lost as the child Hyunjin seemed right now.
There was nothing they could do for him. They left him there in his seat, their hurt boy they could not help, and set up the cot that Chan had found in the cupboard in the hospital room. Later, Changbin would have to coax Hyunjin into laying down, into closing his eyes and resting a bit, but that would have to wait. They couldn’t get through to him now.
After that was done, after the resignation had come over the two of them, Changbin said, “Hyung, go home, get some sleep. We’ll be okay here.”
“But I—” Chan said.
“The others need you too,” Changbin said. “Felix needs you. Go home.”
Chan looked at him, looked at Hyunjin. Looked at Jisung, breathing in that hospital bed, for a long, long time. Then he said, “Call me if anything changes.”
“Of course,” Changbin said. “You’ll be the first to know.”
Hyunjin didn’t stir as Chan let himself out of the room. The click of the door latching after him didn’t seem to signify. He just sat there watching Jisung like a statue, with as much life in him as one. The silence in that room, other than the droning beeps of the machines, was already maddening. Changbin was looking at long, long hours like this. He had endured worse — he must have endured worse, although he could not think of any examples at this point.
He missed Seungmin. He fucking missed Seungmin.
——
It had been almost twenty-four hours since he’d left the house by the time Chan pulled the car up around the back of their building. He almost certainly should not have been driving, something he’d only really thought about as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot, but he’d committed to it and taken it slow, sticking to the side streets where he was unlikely to cause an accident. But it had been a relief, in more than just that way, to ease the car up their side alley and then pull, haphazardly he could admit, into one of the parking spaces.
He sat for a minute or so after he’d cut the engine, everything plunged into darkness without the headlamps on. From this angle, around the back, the only light that seemed to be on in the entire building was the kitchen light, high up enough that the faint light didn’t actually do much outside. Who was it, he wondered, moving around up there.
He should check on everyone, he knew, and so he made himself attempt it. But when he opened the door to Seungmin’s workroom, Seungmin wasn’t there, his bedroom door closed, and Chan didn’t want to disturb him if Seungmin was sleeping. He would see him tomorrow, at a normal time in the morning, Chan supposed.
After that, he skipped Minho’s room, where he would be tucked away with Jeongin. Chan had even less interest in disturbing them, not after what had happened between them in the hospital. Chan had sat in the hospital with Hyunjin, in that utter silence, and thought about it all, and realised, shockingly, confusingly, that he did not have any fear that Minho and Jeongin wouldn’t be able to fix things. A week ago, Chan had almost been begging for Jeongin and Minho to break up, for Minho to let Jeongin go for Jeongin’s own sake.
With what he had seen today, he almost wanted to ask Jeongin to be careful with Minho, to take care beyond his usual bull-in-a-china shop approach. How strange, how mindblowingly odd, to realise now just how vulnerable Minho had made himself with his love for Jeongin.
Chan had already apologised to him once. Now, as he climbed the stairs past Minho’s bedroom, from which no sound emanated, he thought, without reluctance or feeling like his hand was being forced in any way, that he would like to do it again, but properly this time.
He was so tired that the climb up to the fourth floor was near impossible. Why had he picked a place with their living space so high, why had he not found a building with an elevator? The answer, of course, was that this had been all he could afford at the time, and had come at a steep discount, someone wanting to offload a liability from their account books. And the reason an elevator would have been a bad choice would be that it would have broken within six months, probably with Jeongin in it, and they would not have been able to invite a repairman in.
Still, maybe it would be nice, for times like this, as he dragged his feet up the last flight of stairs and then let himself into the apartment itself, the beeping of the keypad an odd sort of relief to hear. The light had been on when he was outside, but it was off now, the kitchen in darkness. Someone had been up and eaten something, because there was a bowl drying by the side of the sink, but whoever it was was gone now.
He stumbled a little on his trip down to the hallway; there was something about having bare feet, after wearing his boots for so long, that had thrown him off balance. When he opened the door to the bedroom, it was to the sight of Felix still in bed, curled up in the middle of the mattress, his arms around one of Chan’s pillows, that he’d apparently dragged from Chan’s side of the bed. His hair was a mess against his own pillow.
He stirred as Chan came through the door, the light from the hallway spilling into the room and illuminating him. Chan stood and watched him for a long, long few moments, as Felix turned his face blindly to the light. How pretty he was, with his freckles, his mouth parted a little still from sleep, how beloved he was to Chan. The relief Chan felt over having kept him safe and sound through everything that had gone down the night before threatened to bring Chan to his knees.
Felix was a sight for sore eyes, and Chan’s eyes were so fucking sore.
Felix’s eyes opened and blinked at Chan a few times, squinting a little against the light assaulting him. “Hyung?” he asked, his voice rasping low.
Chan pulled the door shut and then took a few steps forward and simply let himself fall onto the bed, right where Felix lay. Felix squeaked, as Chan starfished over him, pressing him into the mattress. He was trapped under the covers, trapped under Chan’s body, which Chan no longer wished to move. Laying down had been a mistake, he realised almost immediately, because the tiredness came over him like a physical wave. It was worse than it had been in the car.
“Hyung,” Felix said — or more, wheezed. “Hyung, I can’t breathe.”
Chan, somehow, rolled over and then sat up, his legs over the side of the bed. He felt like he was swaying even though he was not standing up, and maybe he was, because when Felix sat up too, he put a hand against Chan’s shoulder as if to steady him. Then he leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp, so that they could have light to see each other by.
“How is Jisung?” Felix asked softly.
Chan sighed. “He’s alive,” he said, matching Felix’s tone. Felix climbed out from under the covers and half into Chan’s lap. Chan tugged him closer, needing him as close as possible, and Felix went easily, letting himself sit with his head against Chan’s shoulder, his legs slung to the other side. His arm went around Chan’s shoulders. He pressed a kiss, so soft and lingering, to Chan’s cheek. “How is your sister?” Chan asked.
“She’s fine, hyung,” Felix said. “Sleeping, maybe. I don’t know. How’s Hyunjin?”
Chan closed his eyes for a moment, both out of pain for the question and to try to ease some of the sting of them. “Not good,” he said, quietly. “He’s— really not good, Lix.”
Felix didn’t say anything, but then what was there to say. Instead, he pressed another kiss to Chan’s cheek and they sat there for a long time, close together, the silence stretching out and out. All Chan could think about was the way Hyunjin had shook after he had thrown up, the chattering sound of his teeth. The way he had sat by that bed and looked at Jisung and refused to look away.
He had to ask. He had to know. “It was Jisung you were talking about, wasn’t it?” he asked. “Weeks ago, when you said Hyunjin was thinking of sleeping with someone.”
Felix let out a breath. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Yes. It was Jisung.”
“Hyunjin’s in love with Jisung,” Chan said. The clarification was important. He had to know what was going on here, had to know what it was he had been missing, somehow, all this time. First he had taken Minho’s feelings for Jeongin as nothing more than base lust, and missed Jeongin’s feelings in return completely. Now Hyunjin, who had, apparently, somewhere down the line, stopped viewing Jisung as a vague annoyance he had to put up with and had—
“Yes,” Felix said. He sounded so certain of himself, of the truth in the words he was speaking. “Hyunjin’s in love with Jisung. He has been for a while, hyung.”
Was it more or less confusing than the idea of Minho in true, sincere love with Jeongin? It was hard to say. Minho, at least, had softened considerably towards Jeongin through the years, another victim to Jeongin’s charm. But Hyunjin’s relationship with Jisung had always been contentious, a confusing thing that Chan had never quite untangled. He’d never scolded Hyunjin over it, because the thought of scolding Hyunjin was awful, but he’d certainly had to remind him, a handful of times, to be kind when he could be. His words, sometimes, had made Jisung visibly flinch.
And yet, even so — it had been Jisung that Hyunjin chose to take him on his trips out to find and kill the people who had so grievously hurt him. Jisung who Hyunjin trusted to ferry him to and from his official solo trips too.
“I always thought he didn’t like Jisung,” he said. The lost confusion in his voice was almost embarrassing. “He can be so mean to him. He bickers with him so much.”
Felix was quiet again, his eyes fixed on Chan’s. Was that judgement in his eyes, at Chan acknowledging that fact but never having really done anything about it? But when Felix spoke again, he just said, “When I first came here, he was harsh, sometimes. I saw it. But recently, hyung, it hasn’t been that. Even last night, when you told them to stop fighting, that— wasn’t fighting. Hyunjin was flirting with him.”
Chan really could not wrap his head around it. Even putting it together himself and acknowledging it didn’t stop it being difficult to fully take in. He lifted a hand and scrubbed it over his face. He was so tired that his eyes were watering. More than watering, actually, he thought he might be crying a little, the tears so slow that it was hard to tell. “Ah, hyung,” Felix said on a sigh, and Chan felt that soft, familiar mouth press a kiss to his forehead. “Come on, let’s brush your teeth.”
Chan was at that stage of sheer exhaustion that part of his brain tried to protest that he should sleep at all. Just stay up, you could get some work done, whispered the devil on his shoulder, the same one that sometimes insisted, after he had already drunk too much, that he should simply drink more. But there was no room for protest, not as Felix slid off his lap and to his feet, and then tried to tug Chan upright again.
This was when they discovered that Chan’s legs were not particularly working; he stumbled once he was on his feet, and almost took Felix to the floor with him. But Felix steadied him as best as he could, the two of them swaying together. “There you are, hyung,” Felix murmured, as Chan’s head swam a little bit. “You’re okay. Come on.”
Chan leaned heavily against Felix as he stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth. When Felix had suggested it, Chan had almost questioned why, but afterwards, with his mouth tasting minty, and after the cold water he splashed on his face, he felt both more human and remarkably more tired. It was like his brain had registered the bedtime routine and decided it accepted it.
He undressed to his boxers and crawled under the covers, and the moment he lay down properly flat, it became almost a losing game to keep his eyes open. Despite his stress, his lingering worry over Jisung, and his confusion over what was going on with Hyunjin, his complete lack of sleep was winning out. It was as much as he could do to keep his eyes semi-open as Felix turned off the light on the nightstand and then got into the other side of the bed with him.
“You should get up,” Chan said, mumbling it through a mouth that seemed decidedly more difficult to move than it had a minute or so ago. “Go eat food.”
“I will, later,” Felix said. He lay down next to Chan and then pulled Chan into his arms, holding him close in a way that usually Chan held him. His skinny arms, the soft skin of his throat when Chan pressed an absent kiss against it. “You sleep, hyung. I’ll lay here for a bit longer.”
“Mm,” Chan said, almost most of the way asleep. “I love you, little one.”
Chan felt a brief brush of Felix’s mouth against his forehead again, the murmured words of I love you too, hyung, and then Chan was asleep.
——
Hyunjin jerked awake.
Usually when that happened, it was because he’d had a nightmare, but in this case, he had woken up still trapped inside one. Those fucking machines, their incessant fucking beeping. His head hurt, his hands hurt. When he breathed in there was an awful rasping feeling in his throat and in his chest, like something was being scraped away to make room for the air. Maybe he didn’t want room to be made. Maybe he didn’t want the air.
It was dark, other than the lamp switched on over on the table by the window, enough light to see Jisung by. He lay in that bed, close enough that if Hyunjin reached out, he could touch his arm, laying flat on top of the covers. Jisung did not sleep like that, he knew; Jisung slept curled in a little ball, like a mouse. He could not remember how he knew that. His head hurt so much.
“Hyunjin.”
He looked around, found Changbin sitting on the couch, his face lit up by the glow of his phone screen. Seungmin was here, Hyunjin realised, without any kind of surprise or curiosity. Without any emotion. There was no emotion left, nothing inside him but the blank knowledge that he had let Jisung get stabbed and not been fast enough to stop it. There was no room for the creature named Hyunjin inside this body, either — he had gone to that dark, uncomfortable place inside himself, where the pain of his body no longer mattered. And there was no Jisung to call him back like he had done in the past.
He was not a person, not right now. And Changbin, who had seen Hyunjin when he was the least a person he had ever been, could see it.
Hyunjin just watched him in the darkness. Seungmin was asleep, laying on his side with his head pillowed against Changbin’s lap. When Changbin spoke again, it was clear that he was trying to pitch his voice quietly to avoid waking him up. “Hyunjin,” he repeated. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
Did he need anything? The question confused Hyunjin. Yes, he wanted to say, yes, I need to disintegrate. But the words would not come out of his mouth, no words would, he knew without even needing to try. So he just looked back at Jisung, his head pillowed against his hands. He watched as Jisung’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell. Evidence that he was alive, still. Somehow alive, despite Hyunjin’s failure.
He did not sleep. He kept watch instead.
Chapter 26
Notes:
when we were editing this we realised there was a lot of food in this chapter. food is a metaphor for love, actually!!! don't read this when you're hungry.
we are not resuming the regular two week schedule from this point, we'll be updating whenever a chapter is ready. so updates are going to be sporadic, although they will always be on a friday at the same time. if you want to keep up with our progress, you can do so on our twitter.
chapter content warnings: vague allusions to homophobia, less vague allusions to misogyny, mentions of coerced abortion, discussions about suicidal ideation
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Minho carefully scooped the last of the kimchi fried rice he had made into one of the largest tupperware containers they owned, packing it down to make room for it all. Next to it, the stir fried pork was cooling, waiting to be packed up with the rest of the food that he’d just spent the past hour or so making, all of it spread out on the table.
The apartment was quiet other than the sounds of his cooking, or, now, the sound of his spoon scraping unpleasantly against the bottom of the pan. Nobody had come out in the time he’d been up here, but then he’d woken up much too early, when the sky had still barely been lightening at all. He had slept more in the last twenty-four hours than possibly ever before in his life, and the energy buzzing in his limbs foretold no more rest. And so he had untangled himself from a still sleeping Jeongin and come up here to cook.
Well, first he had gone downstairs, to check if Seungmin was awake, or to check in on the cameras if he was not, and instead found the computer screens all on but no Seungmin at his desk. There had been a post-it note stuck to one of the monitors, written in Seungmin’s handwriting, stating that he had gone to the hospital to check up on Jisung. Minho had stood there looking at that note, wondering who the hell Seungmin thought he was trying to fool, irritation in every part of him. It was one thing to understand that Seungmin needed to sleep sometimes and thus couldn’t always be monitoring things, another for him to leave the building in the middle of the night. The only thing that had stopped it from tipping over into outright anger had been that a single glance at the screens had shown a frankly insane amount of alarms set up. They were lucky a stray cat coming too close to the building hadn’t triggered them.
He’d shut off some of them, struggled with other ones, and then come upstairs, grateful for the four flights of stairs burning off just a little bit of the energy inside him. Then he had methodically worked his way through cooking everything that they had in the fridge and cupboards. One dish, then another, preparing it all in a way that was easy to be transported, things that could be eaten cold when they got to the hospital.
It had been chilly up here when he’d first arrived, the underfloor heating turned off. It was much warmer now, the air full of the smell of kimchi and oil. He set the pan aside in the sink, trying to not think about all the dishes that he’d need to do later. The one flaw of cooking, in his opinion, although he liked it sometimes too, the way it was easy but just distracting enough that he didn’t get too lost in his head.
He washed his hands, got the carton of strawberries from the fridge. They were Hyunjin’s, bought by Hyunjin for himself, but then Minho was planning on them going directly to Hyunjin, so he didn’t feel guilty as he started washing them and cutting the tops off.
He was just about finished when there was the sound of the keypad beeping. He looked back over his shoulder, setting the knife down on the cutting board, already knowing who it was. With some of the others, if it were Changbin or Jisung, he might have kept the knife in his hands, for the fun of the posture, but it was Jeongin who stepped inside, looking sleep-ruffled but awake. His feet were not bare. When he slipped his sneakers off, he was even wearing socks.
They looked at each other for a moment. It was Minho who broke the silence. “Hey,” he said softly.
Jeongin’s face softened in the slightest way, like he’d been worried— what? Minho would tell him to leave? “Hi,” he said. He stepped closer to the table, resting his fingertips against the surface. There was another pause. “You were gone,” Jeongin said eventually.
Minho nodded, short and stiff. “I needed to move,” he said, still so soft.
Jeongin nodded. He didn’t move from where he stood awkwardly at the table. Had Minho ever seen Jeongin so awkward with him? Possibly not. Even in the early days, when Minho had been awful and Jeongin had been young and unsure, he’d never been awkward with Minho. At the time Minho had thought it was Jeongin being too dumb to know better. Now he knew better.
“That’s a lot of food,” Jeongin said eventually, as he took his gaze from Minho and instead to the collection of tupperware on the table next to him.
“It’s for Hyunjin,” Minho said. “And the others. Anyone who wants it.”
Jeongin nodded again, and asked, “Have you eaten?” Minho didn’t respond to that. “You need to eat, too,” Jeongin said. That tone of voice that Minho found so baffling sometimes; Jeongin caring this way about Minho’s well-being still struck him as something so unnecessary. “Please,” he added, when Minho didn’t move to do that. “Come— I’ll eat with you?”
That was more acceptable, in that it was acceptable in the first place. Together they helped themselves from the food that Minho had prepared, while it was still warm, buffet style. Minho mostly took the pork, with white rice from the rice cooker on the side. Jeongin took a little bit of everything available, little enough that it barely filled his plate. Minho didn’t fuss over that. He just sat next to Jeongin on the same side of the table, taking Seungmin’s chair.
It was silent again. Jeongin started to eat, but Minho found that he couldn’t quite pick up his spoon. He saw Jeongin glance at him a couple of times, but where once he knew Jeongin would have bugged him to eat, Jeongin didn’t say anything. He seemed determined to mind his own business for once.
Once upon a time Minho would have said that was preferable. Now, it made him feel like there was bathwater in his lungs.
“I’m not angry at you, you know,” Minho said softly, not looking away from his rice. He hated the way his voice sounded in the quiet, stark and too loud even though he’d tempered the volume. “You don’t have to look so scared.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jeongin put his chopsticks down, the thin metal clinking against the edge of the ceramic bowl. “I keep thinking about what you said, yesterday,” Jeongin said, voice small, like it was some kind of shameful admission.
What you said. The more time that passed, the more Minho felt like maybe he shouldn’t have said it. There were, perhaps, other ways to get Jeongin to listen to him, to understand, the way Minho had desperately needed him to. But in the moment, scalding honesty had been the only avenue Minho’s scattered brain could come up with. The idea of Jeongin being so reckless on another job— it had made Minho feel like the walls were closing in.
But now Jeongin kept looking at him like he’d caught sight of something new, something that frightened him. Minho had never frightened him before.
“You don’t need to worry about it, baby boy,” Minho said. His mouth felt so dry. He carefully pushed his own utensils aside, silent. Eating anything right now would be an impossibility.
“I do,” Jeongin countered, turning toward Minho now so his bony knee knocked into Minho’s thigh. “I do because it’s still there.” A strained edge laced Jeongin’s voice, and Minho closed his eyes in a long blink to brace against it. He heard Jeongin swallow thickly. “You— I didn’t understand, before, why you seemed so upset. When you realised I love you.”
Oh. Oh, no. Minho really did not want to go down this route, have this conversation. His hands, limp on the table, curled into fists, and he bent his head forward, like he could hide beyond the curve of his own shoulders.
“I thought— maybe you were just afraid of hurting me?” Jeongin continued, tremulous and shaky. “Maybe you thought you didn’t deserve it.”
“I don’t want to talk about this, baby boy,” Minho whispered. His voice was a husk of itself, thin and transparent and crumbling.
“We have to.” Jeongin grabbed his forearm with both hands, those long fingers of his catching in the thin material of Minho’s shirt. It was a grounding touch, as much as it was a desperate one. “I wanted to let you talk about it when you were ready, whatever it is— all these things you keep pressed down inside you,” Jeongin said, and it froze Minho’s breath in his lungs, like he’d been tossed down onto his back in a fight. His entire torso seizing up, unable to draw breath. Maybe Jeongin felt it, felt the way Minho had gone tense, sensed his apprehension, because he said, so gently, “I don’t need it all, hyung, not right away. But. This. We have to talk about this. Because I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Minho forced his body into motion, stiffly turning so he and Jeongin were mirrored, their legs bumping together under the table. He made himself look at Jeongin’s face, in all its earnest sincerity. “What do you need to hear,” Minho asked, his voice as stilted as his movements had been.
“You love me,” Jeongin said, and then very quickly slid his hand along Minho’s arm to grasp at his hand, reassuring because of whatever Minho’s face had just done. “No, I— I’m not asking you to say it,” he said, quickly, and Minho tried to remember how to breathe. “I’m just— you do. You love me. I love you, too. I thought— when I pictured this, us, together, it always felt like sunshine, like joy. But it’s not like that for you, is it?”
“No.” Minho’s voice was very hoarse. “It isn’t.”
“What is it like,” Jeongin asked in a whisper, tongue dampening his bottom lip nervously. “For you.”
Clawing desperation. A sandstorm always screaming, tiny grains of sand slicing at Minho’s skin, an endless wave. This scorching, insatiable thirst, and he just wanted to crack Jeongin’s ribcage open and drink, and drink, and drink. Every moment spent without Jeongin in his sight was an anxious agony but having him in his arms was a happiness pitched so high it hurt. Like his body wasn’t accustomed to joy, to the extent that having even the lightest touch of it was overstimulating, rubbing his soul raw.
“It hurts, Jeongin,” Minho said, hollow and flat. “It’s so much. It’s always just felt like— too much.”
Jeongin nodded, and Minho watched his throat move as he swallowed thickly, saw the tears gathering along his lashline. “Yeah,” Jeongin said softly, damply, “I’ve been happy, when I’m with you. But this— you’re right.” His face crumpled a little, voice breaking, and he dropped his gaze, looking down at his own hand on Minho’s. “It’s too much.”
It was nothing Minho had not expected, had not dreaded, but it was awful to watch it unfold. Jeongin, who’d spent his life in comfort, would struggle with the ache of this. It would hurt all the more for not having experienced much pain before. Of course he would shy from it.
“Are you—” The words were barely there, scraped out of Minho’s too-dry throat. He felt like he had a mouth full of ashes. “Are you ending this.”
Jeongin’s eyes snapped back to his, alarm on every feature. “No!” he cried, both of them wincing at the volume in the quiet and dim of the room. “No,” Jeongin repeated, quieter, hands squeezing Minho, his hand and his arm. “Never, never.” His bottom lip wobbled as his gaze skittered across Minho’s face, expression softening like paper in the rain as he watched Minho’s own eyes fill with tears. It blurred his vision, Jeongin going indistinct. “Oh, hyung, never,” Jeongin murmured, fervent and tender. “I want to be with you for the rest of my life.”
Minho’s face crumpled, the tears immediately flowing over, streaking down his face warmly. His chest hitched with a sob when he tried to inhale, and he bit it back as best he could. He was crying so much lately, and he really hated it.
“But it hurts, hyung,” Jeongin continued, the quaver in his voice betraying that he was crying now too. Minho couldn’t see him through the water over his eyes. The sound of Jeongin’s voice was bad enough. The pain thick in every word. “It— I didn’t know it would hurt. Even when it shouldn’t? Why does it hurt?”
Minho reached out blindly, grasping at Jeongin’s hands, and curled toward him, until their foreheads bumped lightly. He squeezed his eyes shut, felt Jeongin’s harried little sobs against his damp cheeks. Their hands were shaking, as they clutched at one another, both struggling to get themselves back under control.
Jeongin had spent his upbringing wrapped in love as warm and soft as sunset-tinged clouds. It had always been easy for him, and Chan had done that. He’d set out to do that, Minho thought. He had raised Jeongin in a way that he’d never had to think too hard about it, get lost in the complexity; the love was always just there for him, a safety net Jeongin could always rely on.
But Minho knew love wasn’t a pink sky. Love was an ocean at night. Jeongin had been wading in the warm shallows his whole life and for the first time had gone out far enough that he’d lost track of the bottom. And Minho, terribly, was sitting here and watching it happen in real time. As the realisation struck, as the fear kicked in. Knowing Jeongin could pull himself out— or he could let himself drown. Those were the options.
And Jeongin was choosing to stay. So he would drown, as Minho had.
“I didn’t want you to feel this way,” Minho finally said, when he felt he could do so without every word cracking. He opened his eyes, new tears falling free as he did so, and found Jeongin’s eyes still closed. His dark lashes were resting on his cheeks, clumped together with salt water. “I didn’t want you to— know this.”
It would have been nice, if Jeongin had been able to think love was like his dramas forever. Cherry blossoms and spring breezes. That would have had to have been— a frivolous love, but there was nothing wrong with that. Minho could have contented himself with that, if it had kept Jeongin happy. Jeongin’s love, even a milder version, was more than he could have ever asked for.
Jeongin shook his head — more so he rolled it side to side, keeping their foreheads touching. “I just wasn’t ready,” he rasped. His eyes were still closed. “I didn’t know.”
No, Jeongin couldn't have known what it was like, to have so much of yourself in another person. There’s nothing that could have truly prepared him for the reality of the feeling of it.
Now, his lashes raised, his pretty brown eyes red-rimmed, shining with tears. His nose was pinked, mouth full. “I’m sorry,” he said, miserable with it.
Minho sat back a little, so they could better look at one another. “Baby boy,” he murmured. “Why are you sorry.”
“I didn’t know what I was asking of you,” Jeongin said, bottom lip pouting out. “I didn’t know what this would do to you.”
“I did,” Minho said, firm in a way that seemed to make Jeongin’s focus sharpen. Minho repeated, “I did.” He extricated one of his hands so he could brush his knuckles over the peachy softness of Jeongin’s cheek, wiping away the trails of his tears. “I let it happen anyway. That was my choice.”
“I never wanted to hurt you,” Jeongin said, all wobbly and soft, and Minho felt something in him just collapse under it. He knew that, knew Jeongin did not have a cruel bone in his body. His baby boy would not have wished this upon him. “I just want to make you happy, always. You deserve that.”
That— Minho did not, but this was not the time to argue that particular point. “You make me happy, Jeongin,” Minho said, and it wasn’t in any way a lie. Jeongin did not need to worry about Minho’s suffering. Because Minho was not like him. Pain was a part of his makeup, at this point. “The hurt of it— isn’t something I can’t bear.” He dropped his voice, gently resting his thumb on Jeongin’s chin, knuckles under his jaw, tipping his face nearer. “Especially not if the trade off is you.”
Jeongin stared at him in silence for a long moment, his mouth still twisted into a pout, eyes sorrowful. “There’s a wound in you,” he finally whispered, “I can tell, I can feel it.”
Minho truly did not know how to deal with Jeongin being able to sense, being able to see, so much of what he kept private in the depths of himself. It was not possible to hold it apart from him, probably. Unsustainable. But he did not like it all the same. That Jeongin knew him so well, to the extent that he could lay in Minho’s arms and feel that invisible blood all over his front, when they pulled apart.
“You don’t need to worry about me, baby boy,” Minho said, rather than answer properly. He could not explain to Jeongin that he deserved pain, it was his penance. Minho, by all rights, should be miserable always. Being given Jeongin was already going against the will of the universe, as far as Minho was concerned. The fact that loving Jeongin came with pain was in line with the way Minho was destined to live his life. “My— it’s not something for you to heal. It’s my due.”
“Hyung.” Just that one word, falling out of Jeongin’s mouth, mournful as a dove.
“It’s part of me,” Minho explained, struggling with it. His hand dropped from Jeongin’s chin, and Jeongin’s face immediately downturned, his gaze falling. “It has to be.”
Jeongin bit at his bottom lip, eyes trained on the dark, empty space between their bodies. He said nothing.
Minho leaned forward, ducking his own face down until he could catch Jeongin’s eyes again. He traced a fingertip over the backs of Jeongin’s hands, over skin stretched across bones. “It’s got nothing to do with you, okay?” Minho promised him, and this too was raw with honesty. “Nothing to do with us. You’re the best thing to ever happen to me. Ever, Jeongin.” He watched Jeongin squirm back a little, shy, his cheeks red. “So take care of yourself, hmm? Now that you know. Now that you understand.”
“Hyung,” Jeongin said again, and this time it wasn’t so bereft. Their knees knocked together as he wriggled, fidgety. “I do understand. I do.” He grasped at Minho’s hands, squeezing so hard it was momentarily painful. “I promise to not take risks in the future. But, hyung, I need you to promise me the same.”
That, of all things, took Minho back a little. He wasn’t a reckless person, didn’t seek out risky manoeuvres. But he went on jobs, and that was inherently dangerous. As was acting as their live-in security. He wasn’t sure what he could and could not promise.
When Minho maintained his silence, Jeongin tugged one of Minho’s hands up, brought it to his mouth, kissed the back of it tenderly. “I feel for you, the way you feel for me,” he murmured against Minho’s skin, and Minho’s hand spasmed in his hold. It was— nearly impossible, to conceptualise that. Jeongin, as lost for Minho, as Minho was for him. So much so that Jeongin would be soul-crushingly devastated, if something were to happen to him. It felt wrong, perverse almost. Minho did not deserve that level of devotion.
And yet if Jeongin was drowning for him, it must be so.
“Promise me, hyung,” Jeongin asked. Almost begging. His lips, sticky with tears, dragged across Minho’s scarred knuckles. “Please.”
A unit. A pair. Going forward, Minho would never be alone again. Too much of himself in Jeongin, and too much of Jeongin in him.
“I promise.”
——
The morning was grey and cold, barely any light filtering through the gaps in the curtains. It was early. Too early. Sleep would not return. Felix had not bothered trying, once he’d opened his eyes.
He was sitting, fully dressed, on the edge of the bed when a light, tentative knock fell on the door. He’d been zoning out — Chan had just gotten out of the shower, and he was shaving at the sink now, a fluffy dark blue towel slung low around his hips. Steam wafted out of the open bathroom door.
Chan, his face sudsy, looked over to Felix, who got up, feeling crackly, like old elastic, left to brittle in the sun. “I’ll get it,” Felix said, giving Chan a wry kind of smile. “You’re naked.”
“Nothing everyone hasn’t already seen,” Chan replied, his humour feeling hollowed out. He looked so tired still.
Not everyone. Felix opened the bedroom door to the sight of his sister, wearing a pair of rumpled, matching pyjamas. Pink with white stripes. He couldn’t help but smile, a real, true smile, at the sight. “Hey, noona,” he said. She was a little pale but looked— okay. More okay than Felix, who’d resembled a ghost earlier when he’d caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror.
“Morning,” she said, her eyes puffy from residual sleep but shrewd enough as her gaze darted all over his face.
The early morning assessment reminded Felix of Hyunjin, and made his heart ache. Hyunjin was across the city, hopefully still sleeping in a rickety cot. Resting. Oblivious to those terrible thoughts and fears which plagued his waking hours.
Jisoo watched him. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Did you sleep?”
“Yeah, some,” Felix said, allowing himself to be honest. “Did you?”
“I did, actually,” she said, voice lilting in genuine surprise, like she hadn’t expected such an outcome. “Better than I have in a while. I was wondering if I could use the shower?”
It was good, that she’d rested. That she’d felt safe enough to do so. “Of course you can, do you need any clothes to lounge around in?” he said. “Or are you just going to wear matching pyjama sets every day?”
“Brat,” she said, her mouth pinching. “I just need a towel—”
Her gaze drifted off Felix’s face, going over his shoulder, and Felix turned to see Chan leaning out of their en suite bathroom doorway, patting his face dry with a small hand towel. He still wasn’t dressed.
“Good morning,” he said, not smiling but not not smiling.
“Oh,” Jisoo whispered. “Well.”
Felix grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her out of the doorway, shutting the bedroom door behind himself. She allowed him to tug her down the hallway, but when they stopped outside the main bathroom and Felix pushed the door open further, she gave him an arched little look.
“What,” Felix said, though he knew well enough.
“Nothing,” she said, extricating her wrist from his grasp. “I just realised there’s no hope at all of convincing you to come down to Busan with me.”
Felix’s face was red. It felt like it’d be hot, sizzling to the touch. “Noona.”
Her voice dropped, nothing playful on her face as she asked, “Does he treat you well? Does he really?”
“Yes,” Felix said, stiff. He pointed to the cupboard above the toilet and said, “There’s towels in there. I’ll probably be gone by the time you’re done.”
She leaned a little nearer to him, like they were discussing secrets, and asked, “You’re going to the hospital?” Felix nodded, and she mimicked the motion, just as solemn. “Okay, be safe? I’ll— be here, I guess.”
He hugged her, the urge overcoming him. She wriggled a hand free from between their bodies to hold him back. “There’s a television in the living room, and you’re welcome to any of the food,” he said as he let go. “But maybe stay in? Don’t go anywhere.”
“I wasn’t planning on it, don’t worry,” she said, patting him on the shoulder as they parted. She gave him a weak smile, something maybe a little sad, before shutting herself in the bathroom.
Felix bit back a sigh, looking over his shoulder at the closed door of the bedroom he shared with Chan. It was— odd, bad almost, to feel amusement. Strange how even when something so awful had happened, was still happening, moments of stark normalcy persisted. He was so tired and stressed and wrung through that nothing should feel funny.
The look on his sister’s face had been, Felix imagined, similar to what his own must have looked like back when he’d first seen Chan without a shirt.
Life was strange, humans were strange.
He didn’t go back to their bedroom. He continued down the hall, passing Hyunjin’s room, the door left ajar, darkness beyond. He didn’t look inside, but neither did he close the door. He didn’t want to touch even that much of Hyunjin’s space without him there.
Earlier, in the slow process of washing up and dressing, Felix had faintly been able to smell cooking food. Now in the hallway, it was thick in the air, mouthwatering. He made his way into the main area of the apartment, not surprised to see Minho at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. Jeongin was at the island, packing tupperware brimming with food into plastic bags.
“Oh, good morning, hyung,” Jeongin said when he saw Felix. He smiled, but it was nothing like his usual, unhampered grin. He didn’t have the same dark circles under his eyes as Chan, but he’d— been crying, recently too. His eyes were puffy, red-rimmed.
Felix didn’t ask. “Morning. You’ve been busy.” He settled on the opposite side of the island to Jeongin, hands resting on the cool countertop.
“Minho-hyung did all this,” Jeongin said, resuming his task of stacking the tupperware into bags. “It’s for— Hyunjin-hyung. And you. And me. Anyone at the hospital.”
Felix felt himself go a little wobbly at that. Hospital food was terrible, it would have been impossible to get Hyunjin to eat it. Maybe now there was at least some chance.
Minho shut the water off, putting a pan on the drying rack, balanced precariously. He came to stand beside Jeongin, wiping his wet hands off on the hem of his shirt. Like Jeongin, his eyes were swollen, pinkish. The pointed tip of his nose matched.
They’d fought, Felix knew. It looked like now, they’d made up.
“You’re going to the hospital, baby boy?” Minho asked, and Jeongin nodded, a frown crumpling his brow as he looked at Minho in clear confusion. “Kim Seungmin went to the hospital in the middle of the night,” Minho explained. Seungmin went to the hospital? Felix thought, confused, and then oh, Changbin. He watched Minho and Jeongin exchange a glance that was— particularly sardonic on Minho’s part, the look of someone exasperated but not overly surprised. Neither of them were surprised. Oh, Felix thought again. “Felix’s sister can’t be left here alone.”
“Um,” Felix said, and Minho swivelled to look at him in that sharp, precise way he had. “I can stay behind.”
“No, I have work to do anyway,” Minho said, serious and even, eyes unwavering. “I’ll stay, watch the cameras, watch her.”
Jeongin touched his elbow, angling toward him. “Are you sure?” he asked, as Minho looked at him now, softening in every line. “I don’t mind staying with you, so you aren’t alone with her.”
“Don’t worry, baby boy — I think if I end up in a face off with Felix’s sister, I’ll probably live.” Minho said it quietly, like it was a secret, his face blank and eyes sparkling. Jeongin’s mouth curved into a smile, and he pushed lightly at Minho’s shoulder, making him sway.
“Hyung,” he mumbled, as Minho righted himself, moved closer.
“Go visit Jisung,” Minho said gently, leaning over to nose at the side of Jeongin’s face. “I know you want to see him, and Hyunjin too.”
Jeongin rested his hands on Minho’s upper chest, eyes closing. “If you’re sure.”
Minho hummed, eyes half lidded, like a cat in the sun. Jeongin turned his face until their mouths met, and Minho sealed them together properly, his hands sliding around Jeongin’s waist.
Felix looked away, busying himself tying the plastic bags shut loosely. There was an intensity to the affection between Minho and Jeongin that felt voyeuristic to watch, even when they were only kissing lightly. It made Felix feel embarrassed, his cheeks warming in a blush, yet at the same time, he couldn't help but smile. He was happy they’d made up. He was happy that they were together, that they had one another. It felt a little bittersweet, in light of everything going on with Hyunjin and Jisung. But Felix was glad for them all the same.
The sound of footsteps rang from the hall, and Chan’s voice saying, “Alright,” before he’d come into the room. Felix lifted his head just as Chan left the hallway, coming into view with a clap of his hands. “We can head out whenever—”
He stuttered to a stop, both in his motions and words, when he saw Minho and Jeongin, who’d smoothly stepped back from one another. Neither of them looked guilty, but Minho’s ears went red. Jeongin just stared at Chan, waited.
Chan coughed a little. “We can, uh, head out, if everyone is ready.”
“Yeah, I think we can go,” Felix said, lifting a couple bags up off the counter. As they brushed against his legs, he could feel the warmth of the food through the layers of plastic.
Chan, predictably, took the bags out of Felix’s hands. Behind them, Felix heard Jeongin murmur to Minho, “Take it easy while we’re gone, please. I’ll be back for dinner.”
They were all quiet on the ride over to the hospital, by some weird, unspoken mutual agreement. Chan had the radio on until a commercial break hit, and a news anchor came on, talking about the attack on a local casino, and then Chan had switched it off again.
When they finally arrived at Jisung’s hospital room, Felix held the doors open for Chan to carry the bags through, Jeongin behind him with the drinks they’d picked up along the way. The walk through the hospital hallways had been long, crowded; busier, this time of the day, with more people coming and going for appointments and procedures, or visiting those who were being kept here. Felix would not be anywhere else, but being around so many people, all of them strangers, people he didn’t know, was making him deeply anxious. He had no idea what was going on with his father, no idea if he was still in danger. It was a relief, in a sense, to arrive at Jisung’s hospital room.
Inside the room, Hyunjin was still sitting beside Jisung’s bed, his back to the door. He did not appear to have moved at all since Felix had left the night before, but of course he must have done, if only to use the bathroom. The television in the corner of the room was on, playing some movie that looked dull as dishwater, something so old it was in black-and-white but, Felix guessed, probably didn’t have anything violent in it. Seungmin was on the couch of the room watching it, only glancing across at them as they came in. He looked— tired, head resting against the wall.
Changbin had been sitting by the bed on the opposite side to Hyunjin, and he stood up. “You’re here,” he said, looking obviously relieved. If Felix had thought Seungmin looked tired, it was nothing compared to Changbin, who had not had enough sleep in the past thirty-six hours or so, and certainly looked it. “Is everything okay at home?”
“Yes,” said Chan, very firmly, as he set his bags of food on the table by the window. “Everything is fine.” To Seungmin, sounding much more confused, he said, “You’re here.”
Seungmin gave a delicate little shrug of the shoulders. “Yeah,” he said. “I came last night.”
Chan glanced around the room, but Jeongin was busying himself with the bags and Felix just gave Chan a little smile as if to say, what. The concerted effort on the part of everyone else in the room to act like this was totally normal was somewhat impressive. After a moment, Chan decided to not question it, although it was clearly not making sense to him, and he said, “Here,” before tossing the car keys to Changbin, who fumbled the throw and dropped them with a ringing clatter to the floor. Chan waited until Changbin had scooped them back up to say, “Go home, Changbin, go get some more sleep, okay? Bring the car back when you come back tonight, we’ll stay here today. Seungmin, go drive him, will you?”
Seungmin was already sliding off the couch and to his feet. He held his hand out for the keys and when Changbin hesitated, said, “Hyung, if you try to drive now you’re going to wrap the both of us around a lamp post. Give me the keys.”
Changbin sighed and gave him the keys. Jeongin had started unpacking the bags, Felix moving to help him, and as the smell of the food filled the air, Changbin looked at it and then gave Seungmin a beseeching look. Felix realised that they probably hadn’t eaten since the night before either; he’d seen vending machines on the way here but he wasn’t sure of the state of the cafeteria. Seungmin sighed, and then said, “We’ll get food on the way home, too. Come on, hyung.”
Seungmin went to the door. Changbin went to Hyunjin and put a hand on his shoulder. Hyunjin startled. Felix realised that he didn’t seem to have noticed anyone come into the room. When he looked up, he too looked exhausted, and he looked at Felix, then Chan, and then Changbin. “Hyung?” he said, voice barely there.
Changbin tucked a stray piece of hair behind Hyunjin’s ear. “I’m heading home, Hyunjin,” he said. “But Chan-hyung and Felix and Jeongin are going to stay here with you until tonight. Will you try to eat again? It smells good.”
“Minho-hyung made it,” Jeongin said helpfully, as he pulled the lid off what turned out to be tupperware full of spam fried in egg. He’d been subdued on the ride over here, but now he was visibly trying to rally, pasting on a more upbeat face.
“Minho-hyung made it,” Changbin repeated. “So it’ll be good. Promise me you’ll eat some, huh? You really need to eat something, Hyunjin.”
Hyunjin just looked at him. There was something so empty about him, like what made him Hyunjin had been stripped away and left only the shell sitting there. He didn’t seem to be keeping track of the conversation at all. Changbin looked a little like he wanted to cry. “Hyung,” said Felix, moving so that Changbin looked across at him. “I’ll make him eat, don’t worry about it. He’ll eat.”
“He threw up last night,” Changbin said, obviously fretful. This, Felix realised, was probably what tiredness truly looked like on him. A drive to care for others taken to the limit. “When he tried to eat. He needs—”
Seungmin appeared at his elbow, touching it gently. “Hyung,” he said. “Felix said he’ll help Hyunjin eat. Come on, come with me. You need to sleep.”
Changbin looked at him, then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. He held out his hand and Seungmin took it and squeezed it. Then Changbin let himself be led out of the room with only one quick glance back at Hyunjin, who watched him leave but didn’t say anything.
After the door had clicked shut, Hyunjin turned his head and took in all of them. Chan approached the bed and Hyunjin watched him, but Chan just stood and looked at Jisung. Felix had thought it the night before, when he’d seen Jisung after he was let out of the surgery — he looked small. The bed seemed to swallow him, his body diminishing in the whiteness of it. All of the machines beeped differently, surrounding him, looming over him. His arms, resting outside the covers, one with an IV hooked up to it, looked pale. Felix, more distressed than he’d realised he would be at the sight, wondered if his arms were cold.
Chan said, after a moment of silence, “I’m going to go talk to a nurse, see how things are going.”
“Okay, hyung,” said Felix quietly. Maybe he should keep Chan here, in this room with them, but the way Hyunjin was looking at him was like Hyunjin trusted in Chan to make this better, to fix it, where Chan had been able to fix things before. And Felix could see, too, the strain in Chan’s shoulders. The shock in the tenseness of his jaw, as he looked at Jisung breathing slowly in the bed. Chan couldn’t fix this. Let him do what he can, Felix thought. Let him control it where he can.
Hyunjin watched Chan leave. Jeongin had finished unpacking and opening everything and he said, “Hyunjin-hyung, what do you want to eat? There’s fruit, I had Minho-hyung cut a bunch.”
Hyunjin sighed, visibly, audibly. “I don’t want to eat,” he said, voice a little stronger now.
“Hmm,” said Felix. He went around the bed to where Changbin had stood and ran his hand very gently through Hyunjin’s hair. Hyunjin let him, sitting perfectly still through it. Although they’d washed his face and hands, and apparently at some point Changbin or Seungmin had convinced him to change into the clothes they’d brought for him, his hair still had little bits of soot in it, gritty against Felix’s fingertips. He leaned down and kissed Hyunjin’s forehead. “You’re going to eat,” he said.
For the first time in over twenty-four hours that Felix had seen, something like Hyunjin came back into his face. It was an expression almost like a scowl. “I don’t want anything.”
“I don’t care,” Felix told him, very softly, all bite taken out of it so that it was just a fact — he didn’t care that Hyunjin didn’t want to eat anything. That didn’t matter at all. He cupped one hand against Hyunjin’s cheek. “You’re going to eat. Come with me to the table so you can choose something.”
For a moment, Felix thought Hyunjin was going to keep fighting him. He looked like he wanted to lash out, possibly with his fists, but after a moment the look in his eyes faded and he finally, finally, leaned into the touch against his cheek. “Okay,” he said, almost a sigh. “Okay.”
Felix helped him up, Hyunjin unsteady on his feet. He’d been hurt too, the night before, and had now gone far too many hours without food, and possibly water. Jeongin stood by the table of food, looking utterly miserable, as he watched them come closer. He had a plastic bowl in one hand and with the other he reached out and took Hyunjin’s elbow, either for emotional support or to help him stay upright. “There’s fruit,” he said again. “Strawberries.”
“There’s a lot of stuff,” Felix said, as he finally took it all in. “How long was he cooking for?”
He’d seen how many containers there were but he hadn’t realised how much food that would translate into being. There was the egg-spam, and kimchi fried rice; pork cooked in a light sauce; a Thermos of some kind of pale looking soup. Plain rice, the dark brown-black noodles of jjajangmyeon. There were strawberries and cut pear slices and one small tub of frozen mango cubes, somewhat defrosted at this point. None of it, Felix realised now, was spicy. He recognised many foods that he knew Hyunjin had a preference for, and assumed that all of them were things that Hyunjin had expressed liking in the past. Realising that, realising Minho had put thought into this food, made Felix want to go curl up in the corner for a while.
“I don’t know,” Jeongin said, looking over all the food himself. “I don’t think he could sleep. He made all this instead.”
“What do you want?” Felix asked Hyunjin.
Hyunjin was looking at all the food, nothing much happening behind his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “Felix, I really don’t know. Can you— can you choose something for me? I’ll eat it, I will, but please— I don’t know.”
“Of course,” Felix said. Jeongin now looked past miserable, he looked like he was going to start crying too. “Go and sit on the couch, we’ll eat together there, and me and Jeongin will choose something for you. Go sit down.”
Hyunjin stumbled to the couch and sank down onto it. He was no longer looking at them, no longer looking at the table piled high with food. His eyes had gone right back to Jisung’s sleeping body, watching him with an intensity of focus that— actually concerned Felix. Hyunjin gave the impression of someone who thought that if they looked away for a second, the worst was likely to happen.
Felix looked at Jeongin and said, “You choose some fruit, okay? I’ll figure the rest out.”
Jeongin nodded and started putting strawberries in his bowl, more than Hyunjin was probably capable of eating but Felix left him to it. Felix looked at the array of food and started scooping rice into his bowl. He could remember those first few days after his sister had died, and it was all he could do to choke some food down. Meat had been an impossibility — he had tried, once, some sort of stir-fried meat dish he’d gotten from a convenience store, and just having the meat in his mouth, needing to chew and chew and chew it, had been too much. They could eat the pork, if they needed to. Hyunjin should have the rice and soup.
Jeongin took his bowl to Hyunjin, who took it without quite looking at him. Jeongin sat down next to him and touched Hyunjin’s knee, a light, fleeting brush of fingertips, and said, “Hyung, can I get you anything else? Do you want anything else?”
“No,” said Hyunjin. He set the bowl of fruit on the arm of the couch and then put a hand to his forehead, rubbed his thumb into the skin a little. Jeongin, by this point, was clearly starting to tear up. Felix wondered if he’d ever experienced a Hyunjin who reacted like this to him. Chan had said to him that morning, just a brief, whispered confession as they lay in bed, about how it had been like looking into the past, seeing Hyunjin like this. But as far as Felix was aware, it had always been Jeongin who could get Hyunjin to open up, who triggered some sort of reaction in him that the others never could access. Now, though, Jeongin looked like he was desperate for that to be the case again.
“Hyung,” he whispered.
Felix came over, put his own bowl of food into Hyunjin’s now empty hands, and said, “Jeongin, can you do me a favour? Can you go find your brother and then go to the vending machines and get some drinks for us? We need water, and maybe some Gatorade for Hyunjin, if you can find it, and something with sugar, some juice or something. Can you do that for me?”
Jeongin looked up at him. He looked like he knew exactly what Felix was doing, but he didn’t call Felix out on it. Rather, he looked a little bit grateful to have been given a task, to have Felix here to direct him. To be honest, Felix wasn’t sure where it was coming from inside himself. He’d never really expected to be someone useful in a crisis. He’d always sort of assumed it would be the opposite — perhaps the stress of the past few months had changed something in him. Perhaps it was the training his father had given him finally working out in some way.
Perhaps, he thought, it was just that there was nobody else, literally no one else, who was capable of dealing with this situation, so he was the one who had to do it.
The room was almost silent after Jeongin left it, quiet but for the constant beeping of the machines monitoring Jisung. Felix sat down next to Hyunjin and said, “Do you need me to feed you?”
Hyunjin looked at him out of the corner of his eye. It was the most emotion Felix had seen from him in hours. A brief flash of genuine annoyance. “No,” he said again.
“I don’t mind,” Felix told him. “I’m not picking on you. I’m not even trying to baby you. I just know how hard it can be to make yourself eat like this. You remember, don’t you? You fed me, that time, the dumplings. I couldn’t have made myself do it. So I was grateful for you helping me.”
The worst part was, Felix could see that Hyunjin was only barely listening. It was clearly not on purpose. He looked like he was trying to focus on Felix but couldn’t manage it, like he was still so disconnected from his body. It took him a moment to say, “I don’t need you to feed me. I can do it.”
“Okay,” said Felix, and handed him a spoon.
He didn’t watch as Hyunjin choked down mouthful after trembling mouthful of rice. Instead he got up and served himself some of the food: a little rice, more of the pork, a couple of the spam slices. He took his time, listened to the sounds of Hyunjin eating, and came back to the couch to find that Hyunjin had set the bowl down half-finished, but had picked up the fruit and was picking at the strawberries in a half-hearted way. He was looking at Jisung again.
Felix sat next to him, started to eat himself. It was not easy even for him. The smell of the food was beginning to be overpowered by the smell of the hospital again, and the sound of the machines was so distracting, a constant reminder of Jisung’s precarious state. He had watched Hyunjin eat four strawberries and one pear slice out of the corner of his eye before the door opened again and Chan and Jeongin came back up. Chan had his arms full of bottles of water, Jeongin was carrying two different coloured bottles of Gatorade and a bottle of orange juice.
“Thank you, Jeongin,” Felix said, as they carried everything to the table and started putting it down amidst the food. Felix looked at Chan carefully, taking in his face, the way he held himself. Whatever the nurses had been able to tell him had made no discernable difference whatsoever. That was probably a good sign, Felix decided. But Chan still looked stressed out and tired, and when he looked over at Felix, he didn’t really smile.
“Hyunjin-ah,” said Chan, as he came over and took in the sight of Hyunjin with his half-finished bowl of rice, the strawberries he was still slowly lifting to his mouth. Chan almost sagged in relief, and he put a hand on Hyunjin’s shoulder. Hyunjin let him, although he didn’t look up at him. “You’re eating, that’s good. That’s so good.” He added, almost to himself as much as to Hyunjin, “You have blood in your hair.”
Felix had noticed that, almost indistinguishable among the rest of the dirt and grime in there, blending in with the colour itself. He hadn’t been able to tell, at a first glance, if it was from a head wound that Hyunjin had himself sustained or if it had come from Jisung, and he hadn’t wanted to start fussing before he had gotten some food into Hyunjin — if it was a head wound, then it had long since stopped bleeding and judging by how Hyunjin was interacting with them, not imminently a problem. But something about the way Hyunjin had rubbed at his forehead earlier had been bugging him, that brief flash of apparent pain.
“Changbin got the glass in his hands out last night,” Chan said to Felix, as Hyunjin picked up another pear slice listlessly, then put it down again. “But I haven’t really been able to look him over for anything else — Hyunjin, is it okay for me to call you a doctor now?”
Hyunjin flinched so hard that the bowl in his hands almost went flying. “No,” he said. “No, no doctors. Hyung.” He held up the food bowl, which Chan took from him. “I don’t want to eat anymore,” he said. “Felix, I’m done.”
“Okay,” said Felix quietly. He set his own food aside, looked up at Chan. “Hyung, go eat something, Jeongin, you too. I’ll sort this, okay? Go eat something.”
Chan gave him a look of such overwhelming gratitude and love that Felix felt his ears turn a little red. Nobody had ever done this for him, Felix knew. He had never had someone else to take the burden, to make the decisions for him. The others had even left it in his hands to decide what to do with Felix. Felix had almost wondered if Chan would fight him on it, try to keep that control, but it seemed that Chan had seen the success Felix was having and was perfectly willing to carefully place the responsibility in Felix’s hands for now.
Chan went to the food table and transferred his fussing onto Jeongin, asking him quietly what he wanted and making a plate for him. Felix turned to Hyunjin and touched his hand, gently. The food did not appear to have made any discernible difference but Felix was willing to trust that it had done something. “Hyunjin,” he said, as Hyunjin looked back at him tiredly. “Does anything hurt? Are you in pain?”
Hyunjin took a moment to answer, but Felix wasn’t sure if he was having to think about his response or if he was just struggling to parse the question. “I don’t know,” Hyunjin eventually said. It sounded like the truth.
“Okay,” said Felix softly. “Chan-hyung said there’s blood in your hair, did you bang your head last night?”
Hyunjin shrugged. His eyes drifted back to Jisung and Felix had to touch him again to draw his attention back.
“Can I take a look, Hyunjin? At your head?”
There was a much longer pause now. Hyunjin’s reluctance was obvious, and Felix was about to tell him never mind, to forget it, when Hyunjin nodded slowly. Felix stood immediately, both wanting to do it before Hyunjin changed his mind and to get it over with, so Hyunjin didn’t have to sit through it any longer. When he put one hand to the back of Hyunjin’s head though, Hyunjin let his head hang back a little, resting against Felix’s palm, his eyes closing. It had been something that Felix had noticed before, through those months of sharing a bed, but with his eyes closed, his face still, Hyunjin simply looked young. And right now, he looked on the verge of collapse.
Felix tried to be as careful and quick as he could be, not wanting to run up against the edge of Hyunjin’s trust in him. It was hard to see, under the hair and the grime, but yes, he could see a clump of blood-matted hair next to Hyunjin’s scalp, the closed up remnants of some kind of wound. Not a large one, though, and as Felix had thought, not still bleeding. Still, it probably explained part of why he’d been unable to eat last night. At some point they’d have to wash the blood out and Felix would take a better look but for now, this was good enough.
Hyunjin made a noise, clearly at his limit. Felix bent to kiss his forehead again and then let him go. Hyunjin shrank back a little in his seat, resting his head against the wall. Felix thought about telling him how good he was doing, just to see if Hyunjin would give him that annoyed look again, wanting to see it just to know Hyunjin was— still there, but he couldn’t bring himself to try, not when Hyunjin’s exhaustion was being layered over and over itself as he watched.
There was a touch at his shoulder, so familiar that he didn’t even have to look over to know it was Chan. “He hit his head?” he asked, voice very soft but very obviously concerned.
“Yes,” said Felix, “but it’s not bleeding anymore and I think it’s okay.” When he glanced at Chan, he was empty-handed, but Jeongin was sitting at the table, slowly putting small pieces of the pork in his mouth, chewing and then swallowing it. He didn’t look any happier than Felix had been about the process earlier. “Did you eat?” Felix asked Chan.
“Yes,” said Chan, without meeting his eyes, which meant he had eaten something but it was obviously not enough. Felix suppressed a sigh. One thing at a time, he figured. He could only do one thing at a time.
“Hyunjin, I think you hit your head yesterday,” he told Hyunjin, who still had his eyes closed. “If it hurts, we can help. Does your head hurt?”
Hyunjin sighed. He seemed like he was at his limit in being asked questions of, but Felix waited patiently until Hyunjin took stock of himself and then said, sounding almost surprised to have realised it, “Yes. Yeah. It hurts.”
Chan was already moving to the door, saying, “I’ll get something for him.” Felix let him go and just went to the table himself to get one of the bottles of water and one of the Gatorade, taking a moment to rub a hand over Jeongin’s hair in a way that he half-expected Jeongin to protest, but Jeongin just gave him a dry little look that had absolutely no humour in it.
Felix tried to give the Gatorade to Hyunjin, who looked at it for a long moment and then reached out for the water instead. Felix let him have it, kept the other bottle for himself. Hyunjin looked at the bottle in his hands, made one not very convincing attempt at opening it, and then tried to pass it back to Felix. The door opened again before Felix could take it, though, and Chan came back into the room holding a blister pack of pills. Whoever he had had to bribe them for clearly had not put up much of a fight if he was back this quickly.
“Here,” he said, when he saw Hyunjin holding out the water. “Hyung will open that for you. Will you take some medicine? It’s just ibuprofen, it won’t even make you sleepy. I checked with the nurse, it’ll just help with your head. Here, let me get some out for you.”
Felix took a step back, let Chan fuss over Hyunjin, opening his water and handing him a couple of the pills and hovering anxiously as Hyunjin choked them down. The babying would have been endearing in any other context; in any other context, Felix suspected that Hyunjin would have shut it down almost immediately. But now Hyunjin just took what was handed to him, did what Chan asked, like he trusted that whatever Chan was giving him was in his best interest.
When Hyunjin tried to hand the water back to Chan, though, holding it up the same way he’d held up the bowl of fruit, Felix intervened before Chan could simply take it. “Drink some more,” he said to Hyunjin, who ever so slightly narrowed his eyes. Felix looked back at him. Hyunjin could take this as the lesser of two evils if he wanted to, because if he continued to not drink, Felix would have to convince him to let a doctor put an IV in him, and that— no. Felix didn’t want to have to do that, not to Hyunjin. “Just sips. You’re dehydrated, Hyunjin.”
“He’s right,” Chan said. He touched the side of the water bottle, nudging it back to Hyunjin. “Just a bit more, okay? It’ll make you feel better.”
Hyunjin did not look like he believed that but he lifted the bottle back to his mouth and started to sip at it, slow little tastes of the water. He seemed to hold each one in his mouth before he swallowed it, like even this was difficult. He managed half the bottle, both Chan and Felix watching him, before he took it away from his mouth and held it out to Chan again in a way that suggested he was going to be stubborn about it.
Chan took it off him, and the lid, and closed it up. He didn’t look at Felix as he did this, who was feeling an odd mix of sheer, overwhelming affection for him, and an incredible amount of irritation. No wonder, he thought, as he watched Chan return the bottle to the food table, Jeongin had grown up the way he had, no wonder Hyunjin was so often a nasty little brat about things. That was what came of spoiling people, of teaching them that no matter what they did, someone would always love and care for them.
Thank god, he thought with a rush of relief, looking at this empty Hyunjin who still knew that Chan would look after him if he demanded it. Thank god they had that.
“Felix,” Hyunjin whispered. He touched the back of Felix’s hand, the first time he had initiated touch this entire day. “Felix, I want to go back, I want to sit with him again.”
Felix put his hand under Hyunjin’s elbow, helped him back to his feet. If he hadn’t seen the way the food had helped earlier, he could see it now — Hyunjin was obviously steadier, more able to walk himself over, but he leaned against Felix like he didn’t quite believe himself capable of it. Felix walked with him, helped him back into the chair he had been keeping his vigil in. Hyunjin collapsed into it like every second away had been painful for him; he did not spare Felix another look.
Instead, as Felix pulled the other chair on this side closer to Hyunjin’s, Hyunjin reached out and touched, very gently, Jisung’s arm closest to him, the one that did not have the IV in it. He seemed to pause, as if waiting for— something. Felix to comment on it, perhaps, or for Jisung to come awake at the touch, despite the sedation. When nothing happened — when Jeongin simply started murmuring to Chan to eat more, when Felix just sat next to him silently, he picked that limp hand up in both of his own, and brought it, slowly, up to his mouth.
He pressed his lips against Jisung’s knuckles, right where they met the back of his hand. It was not quite a kiss but it was enough like it that Felix, instead of looking anymore, turned his attention to Jeongin and Chan, who, it seemed, were in a stand-off about the last piece of spam, both of them insisting the other one eat it.
“You’ve barely eaten anything,” Jeongin was saying, holding his bowl out of the way of Chan’s chopsticks attempting to drop the food in there. “You can’t just eat fruit, hyung, you need to eat more.”
“I’m fine,” Chan insisted. “I don’t want it, Jeongin, you should eat it.”
“You didn’t eat breakfast,” Jeongin said. He caught sight of Felix watching them and said, “Actually, Felix-hyung should eat it, he didn’t eat much earlier, I don’t think.”
Chan’s head shot around to look at Felix. Felix almost glared at Jeongin but he honestly didn’t feel like he had the energy for it, not after everything he had just had to do to get Hyunjin to listen to him. “I don’t want it,” he said, but Chan was already carrying it over, one hand cupped a little under it to catch it if it fell. He held it out to Felix with the kind of pleading, soft-eyed look that made Felix— he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure there were words, for the way that Chan made him feel. Like the sun was rising inside his very soul. He had not known that love like this could actually exist.
He sighed and opened his mouth. Chan fed him the spam, one admittedly large bite, and looked happier for it. “Good,” Chan said, like he had said to Hyunjin earlier, and ran the hand not holding the chopsticks through Felix’s hair, pushing his bangs from his eyes. “You should drink something too, Lix.”
“My tea,” Felix said tiredly, although it would be cold by now. He needed the sugar, needed something to keep him going. “Can you bring it over, hyung?”
Chan did, along with a bottle of water, which he loosened the lid of before he passed it over. Felix managed a smile for him, and this time Chan smiled back. “Go eat,” Felix told him. “Please.”
Chan looked, for a moment, like he wanted to be as stubborn as Hyunjin had been earlier, but he did go back to Jeongin and he started to actually eat, more than just the fruit, bickering quietly with Jeongin over how small Jeongin’s portion of rice was. Felix drank some of the water, then some of his peppermint tea. It was cold, and very sweet with it, but he sipped at it anyway. If he didn’t, he thought he might find himself having to curl up on the cot bed that they’d brought in for Hyunjin and take a nap. Although perhaps that was a good idea — maybe he could convince Hyunjin to lay down with him, get a little more rest. It seemed unlikely.
He realised suddenly that he could hear Hyunjin saying something. He glanced across to see that Hyunjin had moved Jisung’s hand so that the knuckles now rested against his forehead and he was whispering, very softly. Felix leaned in, worried that Hyunjin was talking to him and he hadn't been paying attention, but that did not seem to be the case.
"I'm sorry," Hyunjin was whispering, a little rushed, a little frantic. "I'm sorry, Jisung. I'm sorry."
I shouldn't be hearing this, Felix realised, but it was already too late — he'd heard it. The fear in Hyunjin's voice was palpable, along with a note of something— else. Something like regret, maybe, but Felix couldn't parse it. It wasn't an emotion he'd heard from Hyunjin before.
"I’m useless," Hyunjin whispered. "It was my fault, I couldn’t help you, I’m sorry."
This, Felix couldn't pretend to not hear. That self-recrimination was too much to bear. "Hyunjin, it was not your fault," he said quietly, leaning in so he could speak without Chan or Jeongin hearing. "What happened was not your fault.”
Hyunjin felt silent for a long few seconds and then he just bent his head further over the bed and whispered again, “It was my fault, I’m sorry.”
Felix, for the first time since he’d walked into the hospital room, simply had no idea what to do, no idea what to say. Yesterday Seungmin had told Felix what he had seen over the video feeds — that it had been his father’s men who had set off the bombs accidentally early, that Jisung and Hyunjin had been caught in the blast. At some point between Seungmin’s camera feeds of that area of the building cutting out, and him finding Hyunjin bent over Jisung in the gambling hall, Jisung had gotten stabbed.
Something, he knew, had gone down the night before, something to make Hyunjin act like this, to be whispering this into the dead air by Jisung's bedside. But he was either unable or unwilling to tell them about it, and Felix couldn’t make him say. But he knew— whatever had happened, it could not have been Hyunjin’s fault. Not unless he had stabbed Jisung himself, but that was an absolute impossibility.
He could not think of what to say, so he chose not to say anything. Instead, he shifted his chair even closer and leaned, a little, against Hyunjin’s side. After a moment, he felt Hyunjin lean back against him, and when Felix moved, Hyunjin moved with him, until Felix was taking most of his weight. Hyunjin was still whispering a little, but Felix let it wash over him, the same way he was not paying attention to Chan and Jeongin. He couldn’t do anything, couldn’t help in any other way, than just by sitting here with Hyunjin until Jisung woke up. He would, eventually, and then, Felix knew, everything would be okay again.
——
Seungmin had driven to McDonalds in near total silence, the restaurant chosen mostly because he knew there was one halfway between the hospital and home, easy and fast. In the passenger seat, Changbin had sat slumped, watching the sights going by in not quite a stupor but certainly without much interest beyond knowing that Seungmin knew where he was going. He’d nodded to Seungmin’s suggestion of where they go for food, and so to McDonalds it was.
It had been— years since Seungmin had actually been to a McDonalds. The last time had probably been in middle school, going there with his friends between when his normal school finished and academy started, all of them filled with the rush of it. If Seungmin’s parents had found out he’d run the risk of being late to after school English to go smoke crack in a brothel, they might have been less scandalised than finding out he’d done it to eat fast food.
Ridiculous. The life he had lived back then had been ridiculous. Later, when he’d been more grown up and his father had been dead and his mother had been gone, he’d had a burger and been slightly unimpressed. It didn’t taste as good when it wasn’t marinated in the glory of youthful transgressions.
It was early enough that the restaurant was still doing breakfast when he pulled into the parking lot. Changbin straightened up in his seat, arching his back in a subtle stretch that lost some subtlety in the way Seungmin heard it pop a couple of times. He frowned when Seungmin pulled into a parking space as far from the actual restaurant as possible. “I thought we’d go through the drive thru,” he said.
Seungmin glanced at the drive thru, which even at this time, still had a couple of cars waiting to join the queue. He would have to talk, if they did that, or at the very least he would have to roll down his window to let Changbin talk, which would mean the worker there would see him, their voice bright in that customer service way, and it would mean—
He didn’t know what his face was doing, but Changbin said, after barely a moment had passed, “Ah, no, of course not.” Seungmin looked at him, and saw Changbin looking back at him with an expression that was at once concerned, understanding, and tired. “I’ll go in. What do you want?”
I’m sorry, Seungmin wanted to say, and I know it’s too much, I know there’s a point it’s too much. But it was only yesterday that he’d been able to be open with his emotions for the first time in his godforsaken life, and it would be too much now. So instead he just said, also not willing to admit he didn’t know what the breakfast menu consisted of, “I don’t know, hyung. I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Changbin nodded. For a moment, Seungmin thought Changbin might kiss him, but Changbin didn’t. He just got out of the car, shut the door, and then headed to the front doors in a semi-jog, like he, too, wanted to get through this as fast as possible. Was that for his own purposes or simply for Seungmin? Who knew. Seungmin supposed it might not matter.
He’d chosen this spot on purpose: furthest from the road and the restaurant, somewhat shaded by a tree, although all the leaves had fallen off at this point in the year. He wriggled his way down in the driver’s seat, as far down as he could get with his legs in the way, and pulled the cap he was wearing further down his face. It didn’t really help. His hands were still shaking, now that he’d taken them off the steering wheel.
They’d started shaking the moment he’d stepped out of the doors of the hospital. As awful as the hospital was, it had least been four walls around him — many more than that, in fact, with all the hallways and wards and different rooms. But they’d stepped out of the parking lot into the cold, crisp, clear winter morning sunlight, and Seungmin had started to shake.
Changbin had seen it. He’d tried to take Seungmin’s hand, in fact, and Seungmin had not been able to bear it. It had filled him with more panic, something that had frustrated him beyond measure. There had been nothing for it except to make himself move as fast as possible through the parking lot to where Chan had said he’d left the car. They hadn’t been able to see it for a couple of minutes, and Seungmin had thought he would have another meltdown.
How many meltdowns could a person have in a twenty-four hour period? It was embarrassing, really.
As long as the time felt like it stretched, it really wasn’t that long before Changbin came jogging back out of the front doors of the restaurant back to the car, carrying a bag of food in one hand and a cardboard cup holder in the other. Seungmin had to wriggle his way back to upright, considerably more difficult than getting down had been, and unlock the doors from the inside before Changbin could get the passenger door open.
“Here,” Changbin said, handing him the drinks, one an iced Americano, the other in the kind of cups they put sodas in. Changbin got into the car and pulled the door shut, and then took the drinks back. “I got you a sausage egg McMuffin meal,” he said. “I hope that’s okay.”
Seungmin didn’t know, he’d never had one before. The food simultaneously smelled delicious to his empty stomach and also like it was going to make him heave. He hoped the iced coffee was for him because he didn’t think he could handle soda. “Sure,” he said, instead of any of that. He made himself add, “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I’ll eat as you drive,” Changbin said easily. “So long as you don’t mind that? You want to eat at home, right?”
Seungmin did want to eat at home, if he had to eat at all. He wanted to eat at his desk, with his cameras around him. He hadn’t wanted to say that though, because Changbin deserved to eat, and Seungmin was willing to sit here while Changbin did so. “Are you sure,” he said.
“Yeah, baby,” Changbin said. “Let’s go home, okay?”
Seungmin drove them. Changbin consumed his meal in less than five minutes, inhaling the muffin sandwich at a speed that would have put Jeongin to shame. He ate the small, greasy looking hash brown and then, at Seungmin’s urging, ate the other one too. Then he sat and sipped at his soda, in that uncharacteristic silence that came from being full of food and too tired for speaking.
It was not like Seungmin would fill that space with words. He usually didn’t when he drove anyway, because it took up too much of his attention; if he’d had the presence of mind for it a couple of nights ago, he’d have been worried about crashing the van as he sped Jisung to the hospital, talking to the emergency dispatch on the way to let them know they were coming. But he hadn’t been able to think about that kind of thing. The fear for Jisung’s life had been too overpowering.
At home, the building was still standing, the van and rental car still around the back. One of them would have to return the car soon. A task for when things weren’t quite so unsettled, maybe. When he parked up and cut the engine and glanced over at Changbin, he was asleep, head thrown back, mouth open. The most surprising part was that he wasn’t snoring yet.
“Hyung,” he said, and Changbin startled awake, the kind of thing that came from years of training your body to wake suddenly. He sat up and blinked at Seungmin. The bag with Seungmin’s sandwich in it had fallen into the footwell but the sandwich hadn’t spilled out. The coffee was luckily safe. Seungmin didn’t comment on any of it. He just said, “Let’s go inside, hyung.”
He hadn’t know what to expect, when he’d heard that Minho had been left behind with Jisoo, but he certainly hadn’t expected to push open his workroom door and find the two of them in there, sitting opposite each other at the workbench. When Seungmin came in, they had been sitting in silence, Jisoo watching as Minho stuck labels on ziplock bags that he must have brought down from the kitchen. On the table in front of them were piles and piles of jewellery.
Minho must have seen the two of them on the cameras because he didn’t even look up. “Kim Seungmin,” he said. Then, as Changbin stumbled into the doorframe and let out a curse, he did look up, and clocked the bag in Seungmin’s hand. “Is that McDonalds for me?”
“No,” said Seungmin tiredly. He went to his desk and put the bag down. A quick glance showed that most of the alarms he’d set up last night, all the extra ones set to go off if anyone so much as approached one of their doors, had been turned off again. Minho, presumably, since he had insisted Seungmin show him how to work the alarm system years ago. Or Felix, perhaps, who knew his way around a computer.
He turned back to the worktable. Changbin was standing semi-braced against it, goggling down at the pile of jewellery. Some of it had already been put into bags, Seungmin saw, labelled in Minho’s neat writing. As Seungmin watched, he picked up a very delicate looking gold necklace strung through with what were probably real pearls, all the size of Seungmin’s thumbnail, and put it in a baggie.
“What are you doing down here, hyung,” Seungmin said tiredly. He’d been ready to be— alone.
“Well,” Minho said, in his very bitchiest tone, “I had to come down here and watch the cameras, since someone decided he had to go running out in the middle of the night.”
Seungmin didn’t even have the energy for a retort, he just flipped Minho off. Minho’s eyebrow twitched but he went back to his sorting out of the jewellery on the table. He picked up a bracelet with what looked like rubies in it and said, “Is this real?”
Jisoo inspected it and said, “Yes, as far as I know. It belonged to my grandmother.”
“Hmm,” said Minho, and put it in a bag.
Changbin was just watching it all. Seungmin went back to him, and touched him on the elbow. “Hyung,” he said softly, aware that the other two in the room could hear every word that passed between them. “You should sleep.”
“Are you going to sleep too?” Changbin asked. “You haven’t eaten yet.”
“No, I’m going to stay up,” he said. “I slept some at the hospital. I’m going to try going through the hard drives.”
“Then I can help,” Changbin said. “I can help.”
He couldn’t, and they all knew it. He was almost swaying on his feet: not enough sleep, the food, the aftermath of the blood loss from his ear, the ongoing pain that Seungmin knew he still felt from the wound. But he looked a little bit like he was channelling Jeongin, like he wanted to be stubborn. Unfortunately, he was up against Seungmin, who knew how to outstubborn just about anyone.
For a moment he wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. The habit of keeping it secret, of doing whatever he could to hide just what Changbin meant to him, was too deeply ingrained in him. But then he looked at the two people in the room — Minho, who already knew, and Jisoo, who Seungmin didn’t really give a shit about — and decided, fuck it.
“No, hyung,” he said firmly. He reached up and ran a hand through Changbin’s hair, as sweet as he could stand to be in front of other people, and watched Changbin first startle a little, before his eyes fluttered shut. Minho made a noise that Seungmin fully ignored. “It’s time for you to sleep. Come on, you can sleep in my room.”
Changbin looked like he was going to protest. But the thing about Changbin, that Seungmin had learned well over the years, was that he simply didn’t have the patience for stubbornness. He could put his foot down about something and stick with it but when it came to things like this, things where he didn’t want to be stubborn, because he wanted to go to bed instead, he didn’t have the stamina. So it barely took a moment before he slumped and said, “Okay.”
Seungmin took him through to his tiny bedroom, the bed still rumpled from where they had laid there together the night before. Seungmin hadn’t bothered to make it after he got up, no energy for something that had seemed so pointless. He was gentle with Changbin, as gentle as he could make himself, when it didn’t come naturally to him: helping Changbin out of his clothes until he was just in his boxer shorts, and then, after Changbin crawled into the bed and pulled the covers over himself, Seungmin leaned down and kissed his mouth, so heartfelt it was like he was confessing all over again.
It’s okay, he told himself, he’s so tired he might not remember this anyway.
And then, more firmly, No, it’s okay, because he already knows you love him.
“Seungmin-ah,” Changbin murmured, his eyes half-lidded in a way that suggested he would be asleep within moments after Seungmin left. “Thank you. For coming last night.”
Seungmin went a little still, bent over Changbin in his bed, not sure what to do with his body suddenly. A knee jerk reaction of fear at being caught out that was pointless, now. He’d felt this same way last night, when he’d first gotten to the hospital, after he’d paid the cab driver in cash and then floated through the dimmed-light hallways, feeling not quite in his body the entire time, only to come back to earth with a thump when he’d pushed open the door to Jisung’s room and Changbin had looked up and seen him for the first time.
Seungmin had frozen in the doorway. Hyunjin was asleep in a cot by the side of Jisung’s bed, and in that room it had been fully dark, until Seungmin had opened the door and brought the outside hallway light, dim as it was, spilling inside. Changbin’s face had been— shocked, pure shock, which had morphed into something desperate that was unknowable in the shadows, and he had said, “Seungmin. You’re here.”
He was there. Against all odds, he was there. He had not expected to be there except he’d been sitting at his desk trying to watch the feeds, trying to make himself useful, and he hadn’t been able to think around the thought of I miss Changbin-hyung, I miss Changbin-hyung. As awful and scary as the outside world was, it had been so much worse to not have Changbin’s arms around him.
“I’m here,” he had said.
“I was just about to text you,” Changbin had said. His voice had been a little blank, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “To check up on you. How did you get here.”
“I took a taxi,” Seungmin had said. He’d stepped inside the room and let the door shut behind him, sealing them into the darkness, the two of them awake and looking at each other, Hyunjin asleep on the cot, Jisung asleep on the bed, the machines keeping careful track of whether Jisung lived or not. “I wanted to be with you.”
It was like, once he’d started, he couldn’t stop finding ways to tell Changbin he loved him.
Now, Changbin blinking at him in long, slow blinks, Seungmin softened and said, “It was nothing, hyung.”
“That’s not true,” Changbin said. He was drifting now, words slurring. “I know that’s not true.”
Seungmin said nothing, and sure enough after a few more seconds of silence Changbin’s eyes slid shut fully, his breath evening out almost immediately. He could fall asleep so easily, in a way that made Seungmin intensely jealous. Still, he waited a little longer, just to make sure, before he leaned in and kissed Changbin’s forehead, a chaste, lingering thing, and let himself back out of the room into the workshop.
Jisoo and Minho were still going over the jewellery, murmuring in quiet voices. Jisoo looked over at him as he came back in but Minho didn’t bother, he was sliding a set of rings into a bag. When he held it up to fasten it, Seungmin saw he’d written ENGAGEMENT-WEDDING — REAL DIAMONDS. Seungmin was going to have to look up old fences he’d worked with for this kind of thing.
“Kim Seungmin,” Minho said. “Your food is getting cold.”
The food was almost certainly properly cold by now, but Seungmin would eat it anyway. Another point in favour of getting a microwave down here; he’d never done it before because sometimes, sometimes, he needed the excuse to go upstairs. This, though, he’d just eat as it was.
He didn’t respond to Minho. Instead, he picked up three of the harddrives that had been piled on the other end of the worktable and carried them to his desk. He might as well, he supposed, make himself useful. He’d wasted enough of this morning as it was.
——
Time had been moving oddly since Hyunjin had woken up this morning. It seemed to keep slipping away from him, but not in a way that he fully recognised. Nothing he had experience with, like he did with the way boredom could make time feel like taffy, strung out and stretchy as you waited through it. It was not that he was zoning out, although he certainly was not zoned in. But he would be looking at Jisung, looking at the hand in his, and then he would glance up, and the people in the room with him would all be somewhere else, the shadows in different positions.
He viewed it all in much the same way he had viewed Seungmin being in the room last night: without interest, without concern. It didn’t matter, not really.
Felix sat beside him now, although he had not been doing so all the time. He had left the room once or twice, to go to the vending machines, to fetch some more bottles of water. One time, when Hyunjin had looked up, Felix was standing by the window, in Chan’s arms, Chan murmuring something to him that Hyunjin hadn’t strained to overhear.
Once or twice it had been Jeongin sitting next to him. As the food he had eaten, and the water that Felix continued to force down his throat, started to kick in a little, Hyunjin had at least been able to recognise that it was nice, to have Jeongin sit beside him, because Jeongin kept leaning a little, right against Hyunjin’s side, a level of touch he had not demonstrated in a long time.
Felix was sitting slightly apart from him, but close enough that if Hyunjin leaned slightly like Jeongin had been doing, they’d touch too. That was a comfort in and of itself. When Hyunjin focused back into what was happening, Chan was not in the room, and Jeongin was sitting on the couch, looking at his phone — a video, probably, because he was not typing, just staring at his screen. He had headphones in.
“Lix,” Hyunjin said. His voice was a little rough. It had been a while since he’d last spoken. “Where’s Chan-hyung?”
Felix did lean into him at that, his head turning so he could smile at Hyunjin, soft, without pity or judgement at how Hyunjin had somehow completely missed Chan leaving. “He went for a walk,” Felix said gently. “Not too long ago. He said he’d bring you some apple juice back.”
Hyunjin didn’t particularly want apple juice but he felt more like he could stomach it than he would have done this morning when Felix had first arrived. “Oh,” he said.
“Are you hungry?” Felix asked. “Do you want any more of the food?”
Hyunjin shook his head, and winced as the movement caused that ache to flare up again. It was a constant low-level thing, the pain, that got so much worse whenever he moved his head too suddenly. The pain medication that Chan had given him had helped some, but they were almost certainly wearing off now, and the pain was building and building. But if he wanted more, he knew that Chan — or more likely Felix — would insist on Hyunjin taking them with food. And he didn’t want to eat.
Felix hummed under his breath, like he didn’t believe Hyunjin at all, but he didn’t insist, like he had been with the water. Hyunjin had no doubt that when Chan returned with the apple juice, Hyunjin would have to drink some of it. There would usually be irritation at being so thoroughly managed except he didn’t have the energy for it. Mostly there was just the vague sense of surprise that Felix had it in him.
The door opened and Felix turned to look at who it was, although Hyunjin didn’t bother, until Felix said, “Oh, hello?”
Hyunjin looked behind them. Chan had come in, yes, holding a bottle of juice and a grape soda presumably for Jeongin, but he was not alone. There was a doctor stepping in behind him, dressed in a long white coat, her hair pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail. She gave Felix a small, tight-lipped smile, and then she stepped aside herself to let in a couple of orderlies, dressed in dark blue scrubs.
“Hello,” said the doctor. “We need to take Mr Han here for some tests. Would you be able to move backwards to allow my colleagues here to work?”
“Oh, of course,” Felix said. He got up and moved his chair completely out of the way, where it couldn’t possibly be in the way. Hyunjin, though, didn’t move. The thought of moving away from Jisung’s bedside in this moment was so baffling that his brain couldn’t quite process it.
“Tests,” he repeated. “What kind of tests.”
“They have to take Jisung for some scans, Hyunjin-ah,” said Chan. He had handed the soda to Jeongin, who had put his phone down but was otherwise watching what was happening without a word. Chan came over to Hyunjin and put a hand, warm and comforting, on Hyunjin’s shoulder. “Brain scans and things like that. So they need to take him away for a bit, but they’ll bring him back after that.”
Hyunjin thought about it through the pain-filled soup that his brain had become. Then he carefully, slowly, scooted his chair back without standing up. Chan squeezed his shoulder, a wordless kind of praise, and then the orderlies came in to start detangling Jisung from all the machines, or something along those lines.
Hyunjin watched them, even though he didn’t really know what they were doing, and he presumed they did. But they were going to take Jisung away, and Hyunjin wasn’t going to be able to watch the steady rise and fall of his chest for however long they kept him away, so he needed to take this chance, to know that Jisung was fine, for right now.
They rolled Jisung out, bed and all, murmuring to each other as they went through the door, careful to not bump it against the frame. Hyunjin tracked them with his eyes, did not move to stand. To his surprise, instead of following them out of the room, the doctor came and knelt in the newly-empty space in front of Hyunjin’s seat. “Hello,” she said, “so you’re Hyunjin, yes?”
Hyunjin stared at her for a long moment, then he looked at Chan, who’d stepped slightly away now, no longer touching Hyunjin’s shoulder. He was decidedly not meeting Hyunjin’s eyes.
A great many thoughts ran through Hyunjin’s mind in that moment, and the one that popped up on top simply said, Eugh.
He didn’t speak. He looked back at the doctor, with her sharply pulled back hair, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, and nodded. In his overlong hoodie sleeves, his hands fisted hard, gripping tight to keep them from shaking. He wanted to pitch a fit. He had too much pride.
“I need to run through a few quick tests with you, but I won’t do anything without explaining first, okay?” she said, still in that— gratingly gentle tone, like Hyunjin was a horse that was going to spook. He slid a glare at the side of Chan’s face, burning hot, and wondered what, exactly, she’d been told. “I’ve got a penlight here, it’s not too bright, I need you to follow it for me.”
Hyunjin obeyed, to the best of his ability, as the doctor moved the light back and forth. Despite her words he struggled not to squint his eyes shut, especially when the light shone straight into his pupils. More than once he felt like she was moving the light too fast for him to properly track.
“Hmm,” she said, ominously, clicking the light off and putting it back in her pocket. “Can you close your eyes, there you go, and touch your right pointer finger to your nose?”
Hyunjin missed. He overshot and poked himself in the cheek, quickly correcting his mistake. When it was his left hand’s turn, he got it on the first try.
He’d begun to tremble, just a little. There was a slight frown on the doctor’s face when he opened his eyes, and Hyunjin knew he was failing this test. That thought frightened him, because if he did, they’d want to— examine him properly, maybe scan him in machines like they were doing with Jisung.
He did not want that. He did not.
“Can you hold your arms up like this?” The doctor brought her hands up, fists closed, in a cartoonish kind of fighting stance, like she was about to throw punches. Hyunjin mirrored her, slow and stiff, his shoulders a little too high because of how tense he was. “I’m going to grab your wrists and try to pull your arms down, don’t let me, okay?”
He was glad for the warning. He was glad for his sleeves. She grabbed his wrists, the material of his hoodie acting as a buffer, and even so that touch was— bad. When she pulled, he resisted, and in this, he did not waver. She seemed a little surprised, pleasantly so. Hyunjin was too close to the edge of a panic attack to feel reassured.
“Okay, other way, I’m going to push, and resist.”
Hyunjin did, and when she finally released him, he curled his arms against his chest immediately, wanting to claw at where she’d been gripping his wrists. There was an urge to use his nails, scratch against the skin until the echo of her touch went away. He didn’t give in to it, but he did twist in his seat, angling himself away from her, knees tucked together against the arm of the seat.
“Can you—”
“No,” Hyunjin said, a loud snap in the grating silence of the room. The beeping of the machines had been maddening. The lack of them was somehow worse. “No more.”
The doctor inhaled as if to protest, but Chan had moved nearer to Hyunjin’s side, and she looked up at his face. Whatever she saw there made her shrug, rising back to her feet with a bitten off groan.
“Thank you,” Chan murmured, gently guiding the doctor to the other side of the room, his head bent close and voice dropping as he asked her something.
Hyunjin might have been able to hear it, but at that moment, Felix brought his chair back over, sitting at Hyunjin’s side once more. “You did well,” he murmured.
No, he had not. Hyunjin gave into the urge to scratch at his wrists, doing so over the fabric of his hoodie. It didn’t really help. He stared across the room, where Chan and the doctor had stopped, just beside the open door. As he watched, Chan rubbed his hand over his face, gaze darting to Hyunjin. His eyes were doing that puppyish concern thing. It made Hyunjin shrink further back against his chair.
“I understand,” Chan said, Hyunjin reading his lips as much as he was hearing him. “Thank you, again.”
He shook the doctor’s hand, and then she left. Once she was through the door, Chan heaved a heavy sigh, shutting it behind her.
“Everything okay?” Jeongin asked from his lonely perch on the couch. Hyunjin looked back at him, hadn’t realised he’d still been paying attention. He was sitting upright on the cushions, one earbud held in his hand.
“Yeah,” Chan said, grabbing another chair and dragging it across the floor where Jisung’s bed had been. “Hyunjin’s got a concussion.” He sat in the chair once he’d gotten it where he wanted — right in front of Hyunjin’s, facing him. It was not a graceful descent, he kind of collapsed, with another heavy sigh. Then he raised his eyes, meeting Hyunjin’s, and said simply, “Hyunjin-ah.”
Hyunjin cringed back, like he could burrow into the thin, ungiving padding of this awful chair. “Don’t make me,” he whimpered.
There were too many memories, and it was too much, right now. Maybe if he was better, the fact that this was a legitimate hospital, with legitimate doctors, would be enough to make him brave enough for it. Maybe if he was better, the simple fact that he knew, in his heart of hearts, that Chan would never, ever allow anyone to touch him in that way again, would be enough.
But he wasn’t better. Right now he felt like he’d climbed halfway up a mountain and then had stumbled on a rock and slid mostly down to the base again.
Touch came, light and careful, onto his back. Hyunjin knew it was Felix without having to look. That gentle hand rubbed circles over the bumps of his spine, careful and slow. “You’re all locked up,” Felix murmured. “It’s okay, Hyunjin. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”
Hyunjin couldn’t relax. He could only sit there, frozen, staring at Chan.
He watched Chan swallow, his mouth twist. “I won’t make you,” he whispered. “I’d never make you, Hyunjin-ah.”
All the tension left Hyunjin in a rush, leaving him feeling exhausted. He slumped over, his head knocking against Felix’s shoulder as he sought out something to rest it against. It hurt, a dull ache that rumbled around his skull. Felix held him, awkward because of the arms of the chairs between them.
Chan stood again, closing the distance between them and brushing Hyunjin’s hair off his face, tucking it behind his ear. “Brave boy,” he said quietly. His hand was warm and dry when he rested it on Hyunjin’s cheek. “I won't make you, but you need to tell me if you start feeling worse. I know you hate doctors, I know you hate all of this. But you could die, Hyunjin. Don’t ask me to bear that.”
Hyunjin couldn’t speak. He simply nodded, just once, and then tucked his forehead into the crook of Felix’s neck. Chan’s hand slid off his skin, and Hyunjin closed his eyes before he could see Chan step away.
Felix’s arm was warm around his shoulders. “You should nap, if you want,” he said, his deep voice pitched gentle and low, like a distant thunderstorm. “I’ll watch over you.”
“I want Jisung back,” Hyunjin whispered, raw and sudden, blurting it out thoughtlessly. But he did. The room was big and empty without him. How could they take him from here, when Hyunjin needed to watch the way his chest moved as he breathed. It couldn’t stop, so long as he was watching. Didn’t they know that.
“He’s not far,” Felix murmured. “They’ll bring him back. I promise.”
Hyunjin’s breath stuttered as he tried to inhale deeply. He had no more words. If he opened his mouth, he’d just say it, over and over. I want Jisung back.
I want Jisung back.
I want Jisung back.
——
Jisung was still away when Jeongin reached what felt like the end of his rope. An odd sensation for him, when so much of his life had been spent in a state of mild boredom — hours spent alone while Chan and Changbin worked, hours of figuring out ways to entertain himself, even after Hyunjin arrived, because Hyunjin wasn’t really much of a playmate back then. Even later, when Hyunjin was better, Jeongin had had to occupy himself most of the time. So it was strange to be sitting in the hospital room and think, Enough.
But it wasn’t boredom, at the end of the day. It was a slowly growing feeling inside of him that he needed to get home. That he had come and made sure Jisung was okay, and been there for Hyunjin — who was upright now and watching the softly playing television that Chan had turned on to cover up how quiet everything was without the machines monitoring Jisung — and now Jeongin needed to go home and check on Minho.
He still hadn’t told Chan about the bullet graze wound that Jeongin hadn’t even had a chance to check on this morning. He wondered if Minho would tell him during the eventual debrief, or if he’d keep that to himself.
“Hyung,” he said.
Chan and Felix were sitting on the little couch together, both of them also watching the television with as much enthusiasm as Hyunjin was. Jeongin had tried his best but for once in his life, the drama they were watching was not holding his attention. Both of them turned to face him, their heads swivelling in unison. It was always amusing to Jeongin when that happened, the way he could say a single word into a room and have everyone’s attention in a moment.
Hyunjin didn’t look. But then Hyunjin would have known he was asking for Chan.
“What is it, Jeongin,” Chan said, as Felix straightened up from the semi-slump he’d been laying in against Chan’s side.
“I’m going to head home,” Jeongin said. He put his phone in his pocket, his text to Minho letting him know he would be heading back soon showing as read. “It’s getting kind of late.”
Chan craned to look behind him, where the sky was starting to darken off. It wasn’t that late, but at this time of the year, it would be full dark soon enough. When he looked back at Jeongin, he was frowning, and said, “But Changbin won’t be around with the car for a while, Jeongin, I thought we’d go home then.”
That had never been Jeongin’s plan, if only because he knew Changbin wouldn’t be heading over until around the time Jeongin usually was in bed. And he planned to be so, planned on coaxing Minho in there with him as soon as was reasonable, to make sure Minho actually slept tonight. “It’s okay, hyung,” he said. “I’m going to take a taxi.”
Chan looked like he was going to protest — he looked a little bit like the idea of Jeongin taking a cab baffled him, never mind that Jeongin had done it a fair number of times at this point in his life — but Felix said, stretching a little as he climbed to his feet, “Ah, I’ll go with you then. I need to check up on noona.”
“Oh,” said Chan.
Felix turned to look at him, his own frown on his face. “That’s okay, right, hyung?” he said. “You’ll be okay with Hyunjin until Changbin-hyung gets here? It’s just, she’s my responsibility, and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I trust her with Minho-hyung or Seungmin.”
The sting of that, coming from Felix, of all people, made Jeongin say, upset, “Minho-hyung wouldn’t hurt her.”
Felix turned a little dead-eyed look on him that was very obviously meant to be funny, and maybe would have been, if not for— everything. “I’m not worried about that,” Felix said. “I’m more worried she’s going to chew them up and spit them back out.”
That— seemed more reasonable, in Jeongin’s opinion. He hadn’t seen much of Jisoo so far but she didn’t seem all that similar to Felix at all. There had been not a hint of wet kitten about her at any point in the proceedings.
“Oh,” Jeongin said.
Chan, at least, smiled, and he too got to his feet so he could lean in and kiss Felix on the forehead, so tenderly that Jeongin fought the urge to make a protesting, gagging noise in response. “Here,” he said. “Let me give you two some money for the cab so that Seungmin doesn’t yell about us using our credit cards for it.”
He gave Felix some money, a little pile of notes, that Felix looked at and said, “Hyung, this is too much,” which started a brief, discussion-argument about how Felix should just take the money, ended only when Jeongin suggested they use what was leftover to buy takeout for the others at home. Felix relented at that, looking ruffled, and Chan kissed him again, this time properly on the mouth.
“Urgh,” said Jeongin, before storming over to the door.
Hyunjin, demonstrating for the first time that he was actually paying attention, against all odds, said, “Will you come back tomorrow, Lix?”
Felix went to him, his face that warm, gentle way it so often had been this afternoon with Hyunjin. Their roles utterly reversed, Felix the one who looked after Hyunjin now. None of them had missed the implication there, that Hyunjin would not have to come back tomorrow, because he didn’t plan on leaving at all. It was not like anyone would make him leave, Jeongin knew. Chan would rather bribe the entire hospital staff than make Hyunjin leave if he didn’t want to.
“Yeah,” Felix said, taking one of Hyunjin’s hands — bandaged, because he’d had glass in them, and Jeongin hadn’t even known until he’d asked Chan about it earlier — and holding it loosely. “I’ll come back tomorrow morning, okay? With Chan-hyung.”
Hyunjin nodded, then gave that little wince he’d been giving every time he’d used his head in that way. Jeongin had never had a concussion, but he remembered the way moving his head had hurt his broken nose in ways he hadn’t even thought were possible. Hyunjin leaned around Felix and looked at Jeongin, his eyes squinting either in pain or in disgruntlement. “Text Chan-hyung,” he said. “When you get home.”
Jeongin’s heart warmed until it was like a little star in his chest. This morning, watching the way Hyunjin was, the way Jeongin had not been able to get through to him, the way he had picked at his food without wanting to eat, he’d begun to worry that something had been broken. But this was his Hyunjin-hyung, the one who fussed over him, tried to act so much like an older brother when Jeongin already had enough of those. It was a relief to nod his head and say, “Okay, hyung.”
He and Felix caught a cab a few blocks out from the hospital, rather than take one of the ones hanging out at the stand just outside. Jeongin flagged it down, the first time he’d ever actually done that himself, and he and Felix climbed in the back, Felix murmuring a quiet hello to the driver, who was the kind of grizzled middle-aged cab driver that every single taxi in the city seemed to be occupied by.
The two of them held hands the entire taxi journey home. He wasn’t sure who it was meant to benefit more, but he knew he was grateful for it. Grateful for Felix’s steadfastness; he was so slim and waifish but there was a thread of steel in him that was shocking for its starkness.
He let his head rest on Felix’s bony shoulder, while Felix stayed upright and watched their surroundings pass by. Felix would watch out for him, this deceptively fae-like hyung of his. Jeongin was so glad he’d come to them. He was so glad they could help him, even if the cost had been so high. Even if paying it felt like it was slowly wearing Jeongin away, like being buffered by an endless storm.
By the time they actually let themselves in the back door of the house, the two of them holding bags of food from a take out place Jeongin liked, the sun had almost set, the sky that quickly darkening blue of winter twilight. The door hadn’t even swung shut behind them before Minho came out of the workroom, saying, “Baby boy, you should have just come straight home.”
Jeongin smiled at him, barely less than a beam, feeling something ease at seeing him. It was still scary, that sensation, the unfathomable depths of it, but not too scary, because it was Minho. How little in the world there was to be afraid of when Minho was with him.
“We wanted to get food,” he trilled.
Minho took the bags off him, like he thought they were a burden, and said, “We’re in Kim Seungmin’s workshop.”
We turned out to be Seungmin, Jisoo, and Minho himself, Changbin apparently still off sleeping somewhere. Minho set his bags of food down on the worktable, amongst the organised chaos of the loot they had taken from the vault. Compared to this morning, things seemed to be in a lot better state: most of the jewellery looked like it had been bagged up, and there were neat stacks of cash on the end of the table that Jisoo and Minho weren’t sitting at.
Seungmin, turned in his chair to face them, a pile of hard drives on his desk next to him, said, “You better have gotten kimchi jjigae.”
“We did,” Felix said, as he put his own bags down next to Minho’s, and started taking the containers out. “Jeongin said you’d want that. Hey, noona,” he added, and handed her a container filled with curry rice. Her favourite, or so Felix had said, the two of them waiting quietly at a table in the restaurant for the food to be made. There had been something almost wistful in the way he said it, or perhaps pre-emptively mournful, in case he had misremembered, or had it wrong, but she took it with a smile that made Felix smile too.
There was silence as they sorted the food out, nothing but the sound of plastic container lids being popped off, disposable spoons being removed from wrappers, the crunch of chopsticks being pulled apart. Jeongin sat at Minho’s side, not quite leaning against him, feeling his warmth radiating off his body. He wasn’t sure if any of the people left at home had actually broken off working to go eat today but both Minho and Jisoo seemed to consume their food at a pace that usually only Jeongin achieved.
Felix ate a little of his food, picking at it mostly. Jeongin was going to remind him, as motherly as he could make it to see if Felix smiled, of how little he’d eaten that morning, when Felix said, “How are you getting on with what you got at the vault?”
Minho swallowed his mouthful of food and motioned with his spoon at the piles of cash at the other end. “We’ve got about four billion won in cash,” he said. Jeongin felt his eyes almost bug out at the number, unable to believe that much money was sitting in the same room as him. “That’s the only thing I’m finished going through. I need to count up all the gold bars.”
Jeongin looked at the duffel bag that Minho had carried out of the vault, left where it had been dragged on the floor of the workroom. It was one of the heaviest things Jeongin had ever tried to carry. “What do you even do with gold bars,” he asked.
“We’ll need to sell them,” Minho said, scraping up the last of his rice. “Or, well. Whoever we hire as a fence will sell them somehow. That’s what we’ll need to do with the jewellery, too.”
“How much do you think that’s worth?” Jeongin asked. He took Minho’s empty dish and set it aside in one of the plastic bags it had come with. Then he fished one of the leftover kimbaps out and gave that to Minho in turn.
Minho shrugged at his question, undoing the foil on the kimbap. “No idea,” he said. “I don’t really know the market value on that kind of thing. If Jisoo-sshi is right, and all of what we took was the real deal, it should be worth considerably more than even the cash we took.”
This was almost incomprehensible to Jeongin. “Wow!” he said.
Minho smiled at him, that soft little smile Jeongin had been seeing more and more often these past few days, so rarely given in front of other people. He plucked the first piece of kimbap from the roll and held it to Jeongin’s mouth. Jeongin took it and didn’t bother not letting his lips brush Minho’s fingers. Minho didn’t react to that, he just said, “We’ll need to get a fence first. We haven’t needed one since I got here, I don’t know if Chan-hyung has one. I don’t know any, personally.”
Seungmin, more than half of his soup left, said, “I have a couple of contacts. People that we can trust. I’ll get their information for you.”
Minho nodded, murmuring a thanks before he ate a slice of the kimbap himself. Things were always at their most peaceful, Jeongin reflected, hiding his smile behind a sip of his soda, when Minho and Seungmin were interacting in their professional settings. Their thought processes and priorities aligned so completely only then.
“It’s probably just as well that we took so much from the vault,” Felix said, still mostly just stirring his noodles. “Since we’ve presumably lost whatever money Jisung and Hyunjin got at Blackbird’s.”
There was silence at that, the reminder of what happened to Jisung. The money, at the end of the day, didn’t matter much to Jeongin, except for that he knew Chan and Minho wanted to at least make up what had been spent on preparing for the job. That hadn’t much mattered to Jeongin, and it certainly didn’t matter more than Jisung.
After a moment or two, Seungmin cleared his throat a little and said, “Speaking of. Lee Jaerim came back to the country earlier today. A few hours ago.”
Felix set his chopsticks down with an air of finality about him. “Oh,” he said, utterly tonelessly.
Seungmin turned back to his computer and pulled up a news article about it, the headline blaring out, EXPLOSION AT GANGNAM CASINO, TEN DEAD, MANY INJURED. He scrolled through it, past the text about the bombing itself, and then paused on a photograph of Lee Jaerim being hustled through the airport by his security. There was a young woman in the photo with him, just slightly behind, included in the security detail. She was very pretty, dressed nicely, and looked to be Jisoo’s age, maybe younger. Seungmin pointed to her. “Who is that?”
“I don’t know,” Felix said, frowning.
Jisoo glanced up from hoovering down the last remnants of her food. “Oh, that’s girlfriend number six,” she said.
That earned her a round of baffled looks, Felix’s eyebrows disappearing into his hairline. Minho said, with an air of put upon patience that he usually used with Hyunjin, “Who is that.”
“Oh, sorry,” Jisoo said, as she shoved her own empty container of food away. “I number them because I can’t remember any of their names. She’s the daughter of one of his subordinates.”
“He’s been dating?” Felix asked, in the same tone of voice Jeongin might have said, Changbin-hyung did a backflip?
Jisoo snorted. “In a manner of speaking, yeah.” At their continued confused expressions she said, “When you left, Yongbok, you left him without an heir. He didn’t have a son anymore. Narae was dead, and obviously he’s not leaving his entire empire to me, and nobody was tripping over themselves to marry me either. So instead he started finding all these young women to sleep with.”
“That’s— gross,” Seungmin said. He sounded almost fascinated by such behaviour.
“One of them told me that he promised to marry whichever one gives him a son. A new heir that he can put into the will.” She rolled her eyes, mostly at Felix. “I suspect it’s already in there, though, something about it being left to his male offspring, or along those lines. He definitely had the lawyer around a couple of times after you left. I thought at the time he was just writing you out of it but he started on this— pursuit around that time too.” She sighed and ran a hand through her hair, grimacing a little bit as she added, “One of them did get pregnant, too.”
“Well, fuck,” Felix said.
“Number four, I think,” Jisoo said. “I numbered them by order I met them, not for their ages or if he stopped dating the one beforehand. He has them all on the go at the same time. There may be more than I know. They’re all girls, too, some of them are maybe even younger than you are, Yongbok.”
“How very—” Minho paused, like he had to search for the right word. “Mediaeval of him.”
“What happened to the one who got pregnant?” Felix asked. He’d fully abandoned his food now. He’d set the lid back on it.
“Father held her off, basically,” Jisoo said. “I think she thought the wedding would happen right away but he didn’t do anything until they could do the scan to find out the gender, and it turned out she was having a girl. So he made her get an abortion. I think if she hadn’t done it, he might have taken drastic measures, too.” Felix made a little cut off noise at that. “Maybe she knew that. He said that he wasn’t going to pay any more for something worthless to him.”
“God,” Jeongin said. He felt sickened by this entire story. “He somehow manages to just get worse and worse.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about our father,” Jisoo said heavily, “it’s that there’s no limit to the depths of how awful he can be.” She glanced at the computer screen again. “Number six might be pregnant. That might be why he took her to Shenzhen with him. Or maybe he just wanted someone to fuck while he was over there. Someone he doesn’t have to pay for.”
“Christ,” said Seungmin.
“If she is pregnant,” Minho said slowly, a finger tapping on the workbench, “and if it’s a boy. He’ll inherit everything if the Magpie dies?”
“Presumably,” Jisoo said. She slid a sardonic little look at Felix. “Unless, of course, his new son turns out like Yongbok, in which case I guess he tries again.”
Felix flushed red. “Noona!”
She laughed, the sound light, not quite all there, but reached across so that she could take his hand and squeeze it a little. It was not something Jeongin had ever wondered about Felix, but it was clear, now, that Felix had not been out to his older sister before she had come here and it had not been able to be hidden. He seemed surprised by her easy acceptance every time, but pleased, his smile a little soft as he ducked his head and squeezed her hand back.
Jisoo nodded towards the photo of Lee Jaerim still on the screen. “If he’s back in the country, he’s a threat,” she said bluntly. “If you want to get ahead of whatever retaliation he’ll be working on, you’ll need to release your information soon.”
Jeongin met Felix’s eyes, then Seungmin’s. He was barely a part of this aspect of the job, but he felt the weight of it all the same. Nobody knew what kind of a reaction Lee Jaerim would have to the destruction of his casino, to the looting of his vault; he’d have seen on his security cameras who it was that had come to take his daughter away, after all. They’d erased the CCTV footage around the vault and casino, which protected them legally, but Jaerim would be able to put the pieces together.
Before anyone could react to that, though, Seungmin’s bedroom door opened and Changbin stumbled out of the room, banging his shoulder on the doorframe with a grunt of pain. His hair was sticking up in more places than Jeongin thought he could count, his eyes only half open.
“Is that food,” he asked.
Seungmin snorted with laughter. “Here, hyung,” he said, holding out the jjigae. “You can have the rest of mine.” It was only then that Jeongin realised that Seungmin had presumably left the food for Changbin in the first place, because Jeongin hadn’t bothered to get Changbin’s tonkatsu out of the bag when he wasn’t in the room. Seungmin must have thought they didn’t get Changbin anything.
Holy shit, he thought, the same way he had been thinking for the past week or so since he’d found out about their relationship.
Changbin took the carton of food and took a seat at the workbench. He really didn’t look anywhere close to awake but he started to eat with the enthusiasm of a starving man. Jeongin eyed him for a moment and then was distracted by Minho placing a mass of necklaces down in front of him, long strands of delicate gold all tangled up together.
“There you go, baby boy,” Minho said. “Make yourself useful.”
Jeongin gave him a squinty little look, before sighing, and getting down to work.
——
When they finally wheeled Jisung back into the room, it was late afternoon, nearly evening. Hyunjin had spent much of the time vaguely watching the droning television in the corner of the room, or up on his feet observing the parking lot out of the tall window. He’d stretched his hoodie sleeves out, wringing them so hard Chan was afraid he’d scrape open all the little scabs on his palms.
He wasn’t talkative, he wasn’t anything close to his normal self, but still, it was an improvement. He was, at the least, back in his body. A stark difference compared to the Hyunjin that Chan had dealt with yesterday, the one who had not spoken and could not eat and had not let Chan remove the glass from his hands. Some of it, Chan knew, was just the time passing, but he thought some of it was the magic that Felix had managed to bring, his kindness and patience rubbing off on Hyunjin just like it always did. Some of it was the food, the painkillers.
Little things, baby steps. They’d figure this out.
Now as a pair of nurses pushed Jisung’s bed back into place, hooking him back up to all his machinery, Hyunjin carefully brought his chair over, resuming his spot sitting at Jisung’s side. He held Jisung’s hand, his fingers curled around the loose weight of Jisung’s. That touch kept drawing Chan’s eye, like a neon sign. Had he ever, even once, actually seen Hyunjin touch Jisung before this? Not just accidental brushes, but a proper, real touch? He did not think he ever had.
The doctor stood off to the side, watching her nurses for a moment, before turning and meeting Chan’s eye. He went to her, feeling that familiar twist of anxiety in his gut, but her stern expression melted into something more gentle, something almost a smile.
“It’s good news,” she said quietly to him, and he felt those words like they’d actually cut something free. Like he’d been tangled in a mire of ropes and strings and now some of them had loosened, leaving him room to breathe. “The scans show his swelling has reduced significantly, and all his vitals are steady. All things considered, he’s looking really good.”
“Is there a but coming?” he asked, her last sentence feeling like it had trailed off.
Her face broke into a real smile, and she pulled her clipboard away from where she’d had it tucked against her chest. “Not exactly,” she said. “He’s still very injured, but there’s no sign of infection. If he continues this level of improvement then we could potentially bring him out of sedation tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Chan said, looking back at Jisung, small in his big, bulky bed, Hyunjin at his side. Those hands, their hands, entwined. “That’s— really great.” He did not sound as enthused as he actually was. Mostly this all still felt like some kind of waking nightmare.
“While the swelling has gone down, we won’t know if there’s been any damage to his mental state until he is awake for us to assess him,” she said, and Chan looked at her again. The smile had faded into something more serious. “Everything is looking good, so I don’t want to give undue alarm, but I also need us all to be on the same page.”
“Of course,” Chan replied. The thought of Jisung waking up and— not being Jisung, the Jisung they knew, the Jisung Hyunjin loved, was like a gut punch. “But you— you think he’s okay?”
“There was no damage to his brain itself, no lacerations, and his skull isn’t fractured.” She put her clipboard into the pocket at the foot of Jisung’s bed. “In my opinion, the chances of permanent brain damage are low.”
Chan let out a breath. “Thank you,” he said, and she nodded at him as she left the room, her nurses already gone. The machines were beeping again.
He just resisted the urge to peek at the clipboard. Maybe he would do, later. See if he could decipher her handwriting. See if there was anything beyond Jisung’s health he needed to worry about.
They’d been very— amenable, this place. Chan sensed the doctor’s curiosity, her desire to know what had happened exactly. But he felt that was because she wanted to know so she could treat her patient to the best of her capacity, rather than because she was wanting to sniff out— criminal activity.
Hospitals in this city were generally ready enough to look the other way, especially when given the incentive. Gang wars weren’t uncommon, nor was violent crime. A few years ago, one of the northern gangs had hit a bank and several members had landed in SNU Hospital with bullet wounds. The staff there had alerted the police. And then the chief surgeon of the hospital had been found summarily executed in his home, along with his whole family. After that, hospitals tended to mind their own business.
Chan had told them Jisung had been mugged, and there hadn’t been any other questions. It helped, he thought, that this hospital wasn’t in Blackbird’s immediate vicinity. Most of the victims of the blast had likely gone to Asan or Samsung Medical Centers.
“Hyunjin-ah,” he said, and could have cried at the way Hyunjin looked around at him, without delay, without confusion. He still seemed to be in pain, still a little slow, but he was so much more alert now. “That’s good, isn’t it. What the doctor said about Jisung.”
Hyunjin bobbed his head in something like a nod, albeit one that looked pained, and half-hearted at best. Chan had thought that the news would have inspired something in Hyunjin; happiness, perhaps. He’d hoped that hearing something good, something Chan had almost wanted to go to his knees to pray for, would have provoked something similar in Hyunjin, a lessening of the tension he seemed to be holding in his body. But it hadn’t happened. In fact, it was almost worse now.
There was something haunted on Hyunjin’s face. Not fearful, at least not in a way that Chan recognised. Something more resigned than that. Chan didn’t like seeing it.
“It’ll be good,” Chan said, rambling a little bit as he went around the room, tidying up the containers that had been left from dinner. He’d managed to get more of Minho’s food into Hyunjin, some of the soup that a nurse had heated up in their breakroom for him. That, he’d been fairly certain, was not allowed, but either his frequent tipping or the application of his best puppy eyes had done the trick. “When he’s awake, once he wakes up they can really assess the damage and then hopefully he’ll be home with us soon.”
Hyunjin hummed under his breath, to signify that he was listening, but he still didn’t speak. He didn’t move to help Chan as he cleaned up, which was not really all that strange. Hyunjin was not thoughtless but with Chan and Changbin, there had never been any expectation that Hyunjin would lift a single finger in his own care. That Hyunjin cleaned up after himself and generally kept their living spaces clean was more a side-effect of his own personality and picking up on what Jeongin did over the years — and he was better at it than Jeongin.
There was something about this, though, the way Hyunjin sat there, not seeming to register what was happening, while Chan bustled around him, that was again just a bit too much like when Hyunjin had first come to them. The silent boy on the couch who had not seemed to even comprehend that helping was something he could do. The scared thing, in pain, who had not had to do anything, because Chan and Changbin got there first.
Once he was finished tidying everything, Chan still felt that need to do something with his hands, to keep himself busy. But he hadn’t thought to bring anything else with him — his work was not the kind of thing he could do in a public place, and if Seungmin found out he was using a public network on his laptop, he’d probably actually murder him.
For lack of anything else, he took a seat too, pulling a chair up onto the opposite side of the bed from Hyunjin, Jisung laying in between them. Just like they were on Hyunjin’s face, the bruises were coming up on Jisung’s, his cuts and scrapes the angry red of wounds just beginning the healing process. Chan had always known Jisung was small, but it really was remarkable to see him like this. None of his personality on show, making up for it.
He watched as Hyunjin, almost absently, ran his thumb across the back of Jisung’s fingers, slow and like he was trying to soothe Jisung, who was not awake to feel it. It would have been a remarkably tender motion from Hyunjin on anyone else, even Felix, but to Jisung, it made Chan’s head feel like it was swimming all over again.
“I didn’t know,” Chan said. The words came out so stilted, because he had no idea how to express this, how to talk to Hyunjin about something like this when for so long there would not have been a possibility of doing so. He didn’t know how Hyunjin would even react. “I didn’t— realise. That you— had feelings for Jisung.”
Hyunjin was quiet for a long minute, his gaze focused on where his hand was holding Jisung’s fingers. Then his eyes lifted to Chan’s and he didn’t look happy but neither did he look angry, nor uncomfortable. “You weren’t supposed to,” he said. “Nobody was supposed to. Not even him. I wasn’t ready for that,” he added, in a whisper.
“No,” Chan murmured. No, that was not surprising. It was surprising enough that Hyunjin felt ready to even think about it, never mind be ready to actually act upon such things. “Of course not.”
There was silence again. There was a furrow in Hyunjin’s brow, the slightest frown, his eyes trailing back to Jisung’s sleeping body in the bed, tracking that slow up and down movement of his breathing. Without the context of his conversation with Felix, Chan thought he would have just been in a state of sheer confusion right now about what it meant, for Hyunjin to be here like this. Even with the context, even with the acknowledgement out of Hyunjin’s mouth, the whole thing didn’t feel real.
Hyunjin and Jisung, Jisung and Hyunjin. He’d thought, all this time, that they might never get along, not more than what they had managed to carve out for each other before this. The brief times where their relationship seemed almost friendly, or at least, at a point where they could exist peacefully in the same room, and then— something would snap, a tension Chan hadn’t known to look for. Always Hyunjin, at his meanest out of nowhere, his words weapons as he used them against Jisung, who always just took it like a kind of penance for something.
Chan hadn’t dreamed all of that, he knew. It had been real, and the dynamic that had defined Hyunjin and Jisung for so long. But now, with this context, he thought— ah. Hyunjin, lashing out, the way he always did when he was scared. Maybe Felix had seen it all for what it was right away.
“Hyunjin-ah,” he said, and waited for Hyunjin’s eyes again. “Jisung has feelings for you, too.” A flickering of Hyunjin’s expression, his lack of control starker than ever when he was in pain, upset. “You already knew,” Chan realised.
“Yeah, hyung,” Hyunjin said. His voice was a little rough, quieter even than before. “I knew.”
It should not have been another shock, because the fact was that everyone knew how Jisung felt about Hyunjin, so it stood to reason that Hyunjin would know too. Over the past couple of years, Chan had thought so many times of talking to Jisung about it, of trying to talk him out of it, maybe, or of warning him off, making sure Jisung knew that it was a no-go area. But he hadn’t needed to — Jisung had made his awful, ill-advised first joke and then, from that point onwards, whatever else he might have felt, he had treated Hyunjin with a kind of deep seated respect that had given Chan so much respect for Jisung in turn.
Of course Hyunjin had noticed it. I wasn’t ready for that.
“Hyunjin,” Chan said. “What happened in Blackbird’s?”
Hyunjin sighed. He sat back in his chair just a bit, not letting go of Jisung but not so much bent over him. He looked tired, and soon Chan would get the cot set up for him, save Changbin the effort later on. Hopefully it would be easier to coax Hyunjin into it tonight.
“The bombs got set off early,” Hyunjin said eventually. His voice was— oddly flat. He sounded the same way he had sounded sometimes when he had told Chan about what happened to him in that series of bleak, awful rooms. Not like he was doing it on purpose, blocking out the emotion like Chan might have done, but like the emotion was so much inside him it had gone all the way around again. Numbness as a way to cope. “Seungmin probably told you that already. I’m not— sure what happened for a while after that, I banged my head in the explosion.”
He was frowning, like he was struggling to recall. “Yeah, that makes sense,” Chan said gently. “That’s probably when you got the wound on your head, the concussion.”
Hyunjin nodded, like that knowledge meant very little to him. “I was— knocked out for a bit,” he said. “I don’t know how long. When I woke up, there was smoke just— everywhere. It was so hard to see, and Jisung was gone, I couldn’t find him. I was trying to find him, I couldn’t leave without him, but the whole room was just— it was like I was on a boat, I couldn’t stay steady. I guess that was the concussion, too.”
Chan nodded. He hadn’t been concussed before, but Changbin had, once, after a fight, back when they were much younger, when Chan and Jeongin were still in that shitty studio apartment. Chan had had to haul him home, not to his grandmother, but back to Jeongin, who had been asleep and not woken up through Changbin throwing up in the kitchen sink.
“I couldn’t find Jisung,” Hyunjin continued, “but when I was looking, one of Lee Jaerim’s men found me. We scuffled, he had a gun and I managed to knock it away. But I had taken out my knife, and he— pushed me to the ground and took it from me. And I couldn’t— the room was spinning, I couldn’t get back up, he had my knife and he was going to kill me, hyung.”
Chan took a chance and reached across the bed and covered the hand that was holding Jisung’s with his own. Hyunjin’s fingers were so cold, like ice under Chan’s. He didn’t let go of Jisung’s in order to hold Chan’s back, but Chan hadn’t expected that. Instead Hyunjin took a shuddering breath and said, “And then Jisung came and saved me.”
He said it bleakly. He didn’t say it like it was reassuring, like it was something that he was thankful for. He said it like it was haunting him, like this, finally, was what had put that expression on his face earlier.
“They— fought.” Hyunjin was back to frowning. Chan squeezed his hand, not wanting Hyunjin to struggle too hard to remember if it was difficult. “Jisung was injured, too, I think more injured than me even then. The other guy was bigger, you know how—” A deep, shuddering kind of breath. “You know how Lee Jaerim’s men are, and he just pushed Jisung against the wall and he— stabbed him. He stabbed him with my knife.”
“Oh, Hyunjin,” Chan murmured. His heart ached.
“He stabbed him four times,” Hyunjin said. His voice had dropped to a whisper, thick around the edges now. “I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t, not until it was too late. I had to pull the guy away, it was all I could do, and we went to the ground, all of us, and Jisung used my knife to stab him in the throat. And then he was— he was—”
Another breath. Under Chan’s hand now Hyunjin was shaking, and his fingers had tightened around Jisung‘s hand, as if he was trying to prove to himself that Jisung was still there, real and true. “It’s okay, Hyunjin,” Chan said, “it’s enough.” But it didn’t seem Hyunjin was quite hearing him — or maybe he just needed to tell this story, to get it out of him the same way he had needed to get all the rest of everything awful out of him.
“I held him and I tried to stop the bleeding and it just kept— coming, soaking into the clothes,” Hyunjin said, the words rushing out of him, still in that low whispering tone. “He told me to leave him, that he wasn’t going to make it to a hospital, that I needed to save myself. He begged me to go. But I couldn’t leave him, hyung, I couldn’t—”
The words had come faster and faster before finally breaking off, Hyunjin’s face crumpling. It was like the confession was choking him, seizing up his lungs. No slow build, no seeping tears here, but instead the sudden and shocking outpouring of emotion and grief, everything that he had been repressing for the past two days erupting out of him. He had to let go of Jisung then, to bring his hands to his face, to clutch them there as if he could hold it back that way. But he couldn’t. It was obvious that he could not control it at all.
“Oh, baby,” Chan said, already climbing to his feet to rush around the bed, “oh, Hyunjin, it’s okay, Jisung is okay—” But the words didn’t matter, none of that mattered, because Hyunjin wasn’t crying for the future, he was crying for the past. Still, when Chan sat next to him, and tugged Hyunjin into his arms, Hyunjin went easily enough, letting Chan fold him up, Hyunjin’s face pressed into the side of his neck where soon the skin was damp with tears.
“I love him, hyung,” Hyunjin sobbed, broken and damp. “I love him, and he— he just kept saying sorry, and I knew, I knew he loved me, he’d just— for me—”
“Hyunjin,” Chan said, clutching Hyunjin so hard he was surprised Hyunjin hadn’t asked him to stop yet. “He’s alive—”
“I couldn’t leave him,” Hyunjin continued, like he couldn’t even hear Chan. “How could I leave him? I wanted to lay down and die with him. And he didn’t even know. He was going to die thinking I hated him.”
Chan grit his teeth against the tears building in his own eyes. “He’s right here, Hyunjin,” he said, voice thick. “He’s breathing, he hasn’t left you.”
“I hate myself for this,” Hyunjin moaned. “I need him to wake up, hyung. I need him to wake up—”
It was barely comprehensible. In his arms, Hyunjin was shivering so violently it was like he’d been out in a snowstorm, his chest hitching hard with every breath. Chan could do nothing but hold him, rocking him gently side to side, murmuring that Jisung had lived, that it would be okay, that they could be happy, could be together. And all the time, he just thought, thank god. Thank god Jisung had lived, thank god Hyunjin had lived. Thank god Hyunjin could be here now, crying finally. Thank god he was crying.
“You’re okay,” Chan said to him, his hands stroking down Hyunjin’s shuddering back. “You’ll be okay.” And he had to believe it, he had to make himself believe it. He would do anything in the world to make sure that it was true.
Notes:
isn't it sweet that hyunjin finally admitted aloud he loves jisung ♥ also i cannot express the sheer level of cognitive dissonance i experienced writing the phrase "gangnam casino"
Chapter 27
Notes:
[old timey voice] well ain't that a word count.
thank you so much for all your lovely comments. we're sorry we've been so bad at not replying, we are going to try to make more of an effort this chapter 😤 but we genuinely love and appreciate every single one we get
with that... enjoy [non-threatening smiley emoji]
Chapter Text
The food in this hospital was certainly not the worst food Hyunjin had ever had, but it was the worst food he’d had outside of locked rooms. Changbin had gone to the cafeteria earlier that morning and brought back little cartons of rice and seaweed soup, even smaller containers of kimchi and pickles. The soup was salty, the kimchi completely flavourless. The rice was oddly mushy. Hyunjin, who hadn’t been hungry anyway, was pushing the rice uselessly around its container without eating any of it when Chan and Felix arrived.
They were holding hands as they came in, Chan holding a plastic bag in his free hand. He practically beamed when he saw Changbin and Hyunjin sitting at the table, both of them with the food in front of him. “Oh,” he said brightly. “You two have already eaten.”
Changbin shoved his soup away, apparently finally admitting defeat. He’d managed considerably more than Hyunjin had, but for Changbin, who tended to eat without complaint, it was a pitiful amount. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Please tell me you have something for us.”
Chan held up the plastic bag, which, after they moved the awful food away from the table and he tipped the contents out, turned out to contain bread from Paris Baguette. Lots of them, little individually packaged buns, a whole selection to choose from. Changbin snatched one up almost immediately, one filled with red bean paste. “Hyung,” he said, already opening the plastic wrapping. “You’re a lifesaver.”
There was a memory here. Hyunjin couldn’t quite place it — one of the early days, from when he first came to live with Chan and Changbin and Jeongin; perhaps the first day, even, although his remembrance of time back then was an odd, wavering thing. It had been Changbin then, coming to them with bread for breakfast, more food in one place than Hyunjin had seen in years. And when he had eaten one of those bread buns, it was the sweetest food he could ever remember eating.
Felix leaned against him, just a soft press of his weight against Hyunjin’s shoulder. “You should grab what you want before Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung take everything,” he said.
Hyunjin looked at the selection, knowing, without needing to be told, that the three people in this room would insist on him eating something, and reached out and took a croissant. Felix grabbed one of the same, still leaning against Hyunjin, and so they all opened and ate their bread around this small round table, in mostly silence.
On the bed, Jisung continued to breathe, and all the machines continued to beep beep beep. Hyunjin had spent the night watching him sleep, just like he had the night before, although with a lot less panic about it. The first night he’d managed to get some sleep just by virtue of being exhausted beyond measure and also actively in pain. Last night, he had eventually drifted off to sleep in the very early hours of the morning, only to jerk awake a few hours later, eyes gritty and sore, from a nightmare.
“What did you dream about?” Changbin had asked, when he’d noticed Hyunjin startle himself to consciousness. “You can talk to hyung about it if you want.”
But Hyunjin hadn’t wanted to, because in his dream, he had kissed Jisung, and instead of clinging on, Jisung had— unravelled, all of his muscle and bone and sinew unlooping in spring-like spirals and he’d been left holding only the parts that made up Jisung and not Jisung himself. “Just a nightmare,” he’d said. He hadn’t gone back to sleep after that.
“I spoke to the doctor on my way in,” Chan said now. “A different one from yesterday but he knew who I was talking about. They’re going to come and take Jisung off sedation in a little bit.”
Something inside Hyunjin lurched. It was a deeply unpleasant sensation, which he could only liken to falling from a height — something he had done, out of a window in a dead man’s clothes, so he knew how it felt. “Oh,” Changbin was saying, brightly, “that’s good, that’ll be good, won’t it, Hyunjin?”
Hyunjin, for a few moments, couldn’t speak. It was good, it was very good, and yet— terrifying. It was almost as though he had been so focused on Jisung living that he’d forgotten that once Jisung woke up, Hyunjin would be in a reality where he’d kissed Jisung, where he’d made his own feelings for Jisung known. He was going to have to talk to Jisung about what happened, too.
He’d told Jisung that everything would be different after the job. He’d thought he would be brave enough to try, once the Magpie job was finished. Well, maybe he wasn’t brave, but he no longer had any choice in the matter.
“Yeah, hyung,” he managed eventually. “That’ll be— good.”
If anyone thought his lack of enthusiasm was strange, nobody commented on it. Changbin, in fact, almost beamed at him, like the lacklustre response was exactly what he wanted to hear. Felix put the empty wrapper from his bread into the plastic bag that Chan had designated a trash bag and said, “Before that, though, I want to wash the blood out of your hair, Hyunjin. See if we can see how bad your head wound is.”
Hyunjin’s knee jerk reaction to that was to refuse. But then Chan said, “Won’t it be nice, Hyunjin? To not have your hair so dirty like that?”
This was, Hyunjin realised, a conspiracy. Had the two of them driven over here discussing how they would wrangle him into letting Felix do this? The worst part was that it did sound good, it sounded kind of amazing, actually, the idea of getting all the dried blood and soot out of his hair finally. His face was clean, his hands and body clean, but his hair remained a relic of a night long past. The white pillowcase that the hospital had given him for his cot was smeared by grey dust and little flecks of black, dried blood.
Chan looked at him hopefully. Felix pulled away so he could smile down at Hyunjin too, his expression much softer, much more understanding, but— implacable, also. The same way he had looked yesterday when he had insisted that Hyunjin would eat something. What a marvel, his angel baby was. Where was this strength of spine when it had come to holding Chan responsible for almost killing him.
Hyunjin sighed. “Okay,” he said.
Felix didn’t waste time, clearly understanding that the longer they took to get to this, the more likely it was that Hyunjin would back out. He didn’t even make Hyunjin finish his croissant, which he’d been picking at slowly. He let Hyunjin hand the half he hadn’t finished over to Changbin, and then in the space of a matter of seconds got him up on his feet and halfway across the room, ushering Hyunjin gently but firmly toward the open ensuite bathroom door.
It was a bit of bad luck, for them, maybe, that right at the moment a nurse came into the room. Hyunjin stopped dead in his tracks, Felix stopping a beat after, when Hyunjin’s hand slipped out of his.
“Good morning,” the nurse said, voice pitched quietly but still chipper. She had bleached hair, her roots coming in, and was wearing the familiar dark blue scrubs. There was a laminated tag clipped to her breast pocket, and Hyunjin did not bother trying to squint for her name. He just watched her go to Jisung’s bedside, watched her fiddle with a little piece of machinery attached to the various drips Jisung was connected to. “His EKG readings look promising,” she said, mostly to the room at large, “so I’m stopping the sedative feed.”
Hyunjin, as if in a trance, went to Jisung’s other side, the windows at his back so the early morning sunlight cast his shadow starkly across the bed, the lumps of Jisung’s body under the covers. He faintly heard Felix call his name, but it didn’t really filter through.
The nurse glanced at him in brief, open curiosity, but it was light and quickly dismissed, because she looked away from him and at— Chan, probably. Hyunjin wasn’t going to turn to check. “He will come around slowly, and might be in and out for a while,” she said. “Please alert a staff member once he’s actually conscious.”
“Of course,” and yes, it was Chan’s voice.
The nurse glanced back at the hulking machinery, the screens and their readings, then nodded to herself and left them again, as quickly as they had come. None of the graphics or beeping had changed at all, to Hyunjin’s senses.
He looked at Jisung — in the warm morning light, he looked a little less pale. His hair was dirty, like Hyunjin’s was dirty, stringy and pushed away from his face. There was movement, behind his closed eyelids, his eyes flickering in dreams. His lips were dry and a little chapped, parted.
He was breathing. It was so nice, to watch him breathe.
A touch came, light, careful, on Hyunjin’s upper arm. “Hyunjin?” Felix said softly. “Do you still want to rinse your hair?”
Did he want to? No, he’d never wanted to — he wanted to snap his fingers and be clean, without dealing with the physical sensations of water, of wetness, of cold. The grime was so thick at his roots he could feel it like a nasty layer, and he did want it gone. It was the process of it he wasn’t keen on.
It was leaving Jisung, when at any moment he could come awake, that he wasn’t keen on.
“I want to be here when he wakes,” he said, surprised by the smallness of his own voice. He touched Jisung’s hair, cupping the top of his head lightly. To do so he needed to bend over the bed some, putting his face nearer to Jisung’s. That eye movement was getting a little faster, maybe.
“You will be,” Chan said, from somewhere to Hyunjin’s left. He couldn’t look to see — Jisung’s lashes were quivering. “Do you remember when Changbin got his wisdom teeth removed? He kept waking up and then going back to sleep for a while.”
“Yeah,” and this now was Changbin’s voice. “It took at least twenty minutes for me to start feeling like— I was awake. And even then I was kind of wobbly.”
Hyunjin remembered, vaguely. It was like trying to see an image through fog right now. But that had been Changbin, and this was Jisung.
Jisung, who’d inhaled with new life, after Hyunjin kissed him.
He was not going to say that aloud. He was, also, not going to kiss Jisung again — he did not like the idea of doing so while Jisung was unconscious, and he was not going to do it with an audience either.
Instead he ran his thumb along Jisung’s hairline, a gentle stroking motion back and forth, his fingers and palm still cupped over Jisung’s hair. Jisung made a little noise, faint, something that could have been a vocalisation from an exhale. But it was a noise nonetheless. “Jisung,” Hyunjin murmured. “Jisung-ah.”
Another noise, this one still faint, but a little stronger. Jisung’s hand, the one with the IV, twitched.
And then his lashes fluttered, eyes opening a crack.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin said again, brushing his hand across Jisung’s forehead, as if he was pushing back his fringe, though there had been no hair falling over Jisung’s face. He felt a little— manic. Jisung’s eyes opened a bit more, his pupils huge, the glaze of them utterly unfocused. Hyunjin found himself smiling anyway, like a reflex. He pitched his voice gently as he said, “Jisungie, hey, hi, it’s Hyunjin, it’s me.”
Jisung stared up at him, eyelids at half-mast, no recognition or— anything, really on his face. “Hoonjnn,” Jisung breathed, lips barely moving.
Then his eyes closed again, and he was still once more, going back to his steady breathing.
“Jisung?” Hyunjin said, repeating his gentle-forehead-stroking move because it had seemed to do something before.
But not this time. The next noise that came out of Jisung was decidedly a snore.
Hyunjin’s heart was pounding. He could feel every thump of it against his sternum, a sensation he did not particularly enjoy. He waited, watching Jisung’s face, but there was no indication he’d be opening his eyes again imminently.
After that realisation came to him, he became keenly aware of the gazes of the others, and when he finally pried his gaze from Jisung to check, he found everyone else staring at him. Chan, in particular, looked like he might start crying, warm fondness etched over every feature.
Hyunjin blushed, a rush of nauseating heat over his entire face. He snatched his hand away from Jisung, straightening up, wanting nothing more in that moment than to poof into invisibility. He’d forgotten himself. He’d forgotten where he was. He’d forgotten who he was.
“Stop fucking staring at me,” he snapped, embarrassment churning in his gut.
Changbin immediately dropped his gaze, scratching at the side of his nose like he could pretend he hadn’t been goggling in the first place. Chan’s eyes snapped a little to the left, landing on Jisung, whose snoring was a small noise in the big room.
Felix, though, didn’t look away. His eyes were all big, liquid affection, and something else Hyunjin couldn’t pinpoint. “Come on, Hyunjin,” he said, grabbing Hyunjin’s hand again, but firmly this time. “Let’s go rinse your hair, hmm?”
Hyunjin went, because he didn’t want to be out here getting surreptitiously watched by the hyungs, though he knew, through the fog of frustrated mortification, they meant well. They always only ever meant well. It didn’t make it better, sometimes.
Felix closed them into the bathroom, much of the sound from the machines cutting out as he did so. It was something of a relief, even though it was still there, faintly, in the background. Hyunjin thought he might hear the sound of those beeping machines in his dreams for years come.
This bathroom reminded Hyunjin of the one that’d had at the old apartment, although honestly this one was probably a bit bigger and much less grotty. Jeongin had once said that that bathroom was the “nicer” one they’d had, and Hyunjin hadn’t really known any better, until they moved into their building now and they both got to see an actual nice bathroom. But this one was clean, and very white. Wetroom style, but there was a white plastic curtain you could tug away from the wall between the sink and the toilet, to at least protect some of the room from the spray.
How often he and Felix were like this together, the two of them in a bathroom, trying to figure out the best way to wash someone’s hair. Here, at least, there was a little moving bench, like a footstool but a little taller, presumably because the people using these showers often needed to sit down through most of it.
Hyunjin stripped out of his shirt and watched Felix’s eyes flicker across all the bruising that had been left over his body. Hyunjin hadn’t looked in a mirror so far but he’d seen the way Changbin hadn’t been able to hide a wince last night after he’d given Hyunjin new clothes to change. He glanced down, and regretted it, seeing the purple and blue mottling all over his torso. He felt tender, to be honest; last night, when he lay down, it was like for the first time specific pain had registered, and he’d noticed how badly his hip and ribs hurt.
He looked back up at Felix, who smiled at him, that warm sunshine smile even now. There was never any strain to Felix’s face when he smiled like that, and so it was now, as he said, “Why won’t you sit down, and I’ll make sure the water is warm enough?”
Back home, Hyunjin would have asked for it to be as hot as possible, but he knew that probably wasn’t a good idea here. Besides, who knew if this hospital shower even had the capacity to get as hot as he liked it. He probably couldn’t be picky about it. He sat on the stool, hunching over his thighs with his elbows on his knees, letting his head hang down. He was shivering in the cold air.
“Here,” said Felix. He held a towel under Hyunjin’s face, a hand towel that he’d folded up into a little sausage shape. “Put that against your forehead, so that the water doesn’t go all down your face.”
Hyunjin did as he was told, and hunched even more forward. He was not looking forward to this process one little bit, and the sound of the shower starting up made him flinch. Felix didn’t mention it. He just waited for a short while, presumably for the water to heat up enough, and then he said, softly, “Okay, here I go.”
The water wasn’t hot enough. It was barely even lukewarm. But it was just warm enough that it didn’t set off any bad memories, and so he sat through it, as Felix let the water run over Hyunjin’s hair, getting it wet first of all. It hurt, more than Hyunjin expected, more than he would have liked. It hurt like his mouth had hurt, after he’d busted his lip, every time he took a shower and let the hot water onto it. He could withstand it. He could.
Felix was gentle, at least, but then what else would Felix be. The water flowed over Hyunjin’s hair and Felix carefully ran his fingers through it, loosening the tangles, dislodging the dirt and dried blood. Hyunjin’s hair would be in no way clean after this but it would be cleaner. Hyunjin breathed through it, the way the hair pulled even despite Felix’s careful touches. The water trickled over his hands and down his arms, ticklish streams against his skin. He kept his eyes shut for most of it, but in the few instances he slit them open, he could see the water around his feet swirling grey and pinkish, disgusting.
Over the sound of the water he could hear movement from the other room: movement and voices, ones he didn’t recognise. The doctor, he realised. Did that mean Jisung was— awake properly, then? Most likely.
It was hard to continue to stay still in the face of that realisation, to hold himself steady as Felix kept working. Part of him wanted to leap up and go running out of the room to see what was happening. To see actual cognizance in Jisung’s eyes.
That was the part of him that was excited for what the future held. The part of him that yearned for it, for whatever he and Jisung would now be to each other. The same part that had initially rushed to Jisung’s side a few moments ago, hoping to watch Jisung’s eyes flutter open, hoping to see his gummy smile.
He didn’t move, though. He kept sitting there, because with the space to think, really think, he found he was scared, too. Scared of the change, scared of what it might mean. Scared to be seen, scared of Jisung understanding him in a way that Hyunjin had tried to keep from him. He wanted, so badly, for Jisung to return to him, but there was terror there, yes. And so he kept sitting still, hunched over on his stool, the water staccato on the tiled flooring.
“Ah, Hyunjin,” Felix sighed, eventually. “You hurt yourself real bad.”
Hyunjin didn’t answer. It could have been worse, he didn’t say. It should have been worse, because it should have been him in that hospital bed, or him who had bled out over the awful carpet at Blackbird’s. But instead it was Jisung, and Hyunjin needed a little bit longer before he went out there and faced the reality of this changed life he would be stepping into. And so he sat, and he shivered a little, and he waited for Felix to be done.
——
Jisung had been lost in dreams and darkness.
He saw his childhood home, the dingy kitchen tiles, the dust motes in the air. He saw Blackbird’s, saw himself stuck in the fire. Unease was heavy in him through it all, but he was not— a person. He had no body, no being, no thoughts. He was nothing but raw emotions, senses and stimuli.
And then he was awake. He could not have said how he knew, because he could not have really said anything at all — he was a consciousness in the dark, nothing more, but somehow, he understood that he was— returned to time. No longer floating in memories, in imagination.
“Jisung?”
He could not see. He struggled to open his eyes — not because he knew he had eyes, and he certainly could not feel them. It was instinctual. Open your eyes.
Brightness, blinding white brightness. Everything was blurry and indistinct. There was a face above his, close, blotting out some of that painful light.
A face he recognised. Even when he did not know himself, he would know that face.
The face smiled, soft and beautiful. Oh, heaven, Jisung knew. The fire. He’d died. That was why he didn’t have a body. That was why everything was floaty and strange.
He was surprised to be in heaven. He wasn’t surprised that heaven had Hyunjin.
Above him, Hyunjin’s lips moved, but this time Jisung couldn’t hear him.
“Hyunjin,” he said, through a numb mouth. He couldn’t hear himself any better now, a muffled dampening of his hearing, then his sight. He couldn’t see again. He couldn’t open the eyes he didn’t have.
And then he wasn’t awake, unconsciousness sucking him down, down, like a whirlpool in the ocean.
It was like that, for a time. Jisung coming aware just enough to know he was aware, and then losing grip of it again.
And then something changed, the pattern shifting. He came aware and, for the first time, he remembered he was Jisung.
He realised he was alive.
With that realisation came the subsequent slow recognition of his body. Or— maybe the other way around. Maybe he felt his body and then realised he wasn’t dead.
It was not a happy realisation. It wasn’t, really, anything. He had a body, but emotions and thoughts were still muffled. If anything, there was a tinge of surprise, and an anticlimactic kind of oh.
He began to piece through the stimuli battering him, making sense of things he’d been unable to previously process. The sound, the beeping of machines next to him, constant and droning. He could only properly hear them in his left ear, his right tinny and faint. The pain came next, dull but insistent like a toothache, radiating up his abdomen. A heaviness to his whole body, even while his thoughts seemed to be drifting up high, out of reach like butterflies.
Then he opened his newly returned eyes.
Ceiling tiles, off-white. The sharp scent of disinfectant. A voice said, “Oh, he’s awake again.”
Jisung looked to the right. He was in a hospital room, a private one that looked a bit shabby all the same. Chan was sitting at the side of the bed, Changbin standing behind him with one hand on Chan’s shoulder. “Hey,” Chan said with a smile that looked a little wobbly around the edges. “Hey, there you are.”
Jisung tried to smile back but everything was still odd and floaty and he wasn’t sure if he managed it. “Hi,” he said, and barely any sound came out. He coughed a little. His throat felt like someone had rubbed it down with sandpaper.
There were hands against his shoulders, helping him to sit up, his stomach throbbing. Changbin piled the pillows up so he could sit up and Chan settled him back and then helped him take a sip of water. It was cool and tasted like heaven, Jisung thought, relaxing and sinking back against the pillows with a sigh.
He had half a mind to doze off again, eyes drifting shut. Whatever medication they were giving him, it made his thoughts slow, dragging. It wasn’t completely numbing the pain though. The pain. Suddenly, his eyes popped back open. “I got stabbed,” Jisung said, remembering in a rush. He looked down, but all he could see was a pale blue blanket, his patterned hospital gown.
“Yes,” Chan said, voice a little odd. “And you have a concussion.”
“Oh,” Jisung said mildly. He supposed that was not good.
“Yeah,” Chan said. Then, gently, he murmured to Changbin, “Will you go let the doctor know he’s properly awake?”
Changbin nodded again, glancing at Jisung in a wide-eyed, haunted kind of way before he turned and left the room. In the brief span of time the door was open, Jisung could hear more voices, people moving to and fro. It all cut out again, regressing to a muffled kind of hum, when the door shut behind Changbin.
Jisung blinked, a long blink, struggling to open his eyes again, searching out Chan once he’d managed it. Chan was still, quiet, watching him somberly.
“Stop that,” Jisung mumbled, his mouth still feeling unwieldy.
“We were really worried about you,” Chan returned softly. He touched Jisung’s shoulder, lightly, and then pulled back.
Jisung took in the dark circles under Chan’s eyes, remembered Changbin’s frizzy hair. Immediately, he felt guilty. “I’m okay,” he said, even though he’d woken up ten seconds ago and didn’t actually know that for certain. The need to reassure others, however, was in his DNA, and Jisung wasn’t going to bother to try and change himself now.
“Yeah,” Chan rasped. “You’re gonna be. But you still scared the shit out of us, Jisung.”
Jisung swallowed thickly, struggling, and Chan picked up the water again, lifting it to his mouth. After another few sips, Jisung asked, “What happened?”
Chan put the cup of water down again. “You were in surgery for hours,” he said quietly. “Both Hyunjin and Seungmin were sure you were going to die. Hyunjin’s been—” He cut himself off, sighing heavily.
Hyunjin. Jisung ached, a scorching, painful thing, just as bad as his stab wounds. He looked to the left of his bed, sweeping across the otherwise empty room. Disappointment panged through him, foolishly. “Where is he?” he asked, even though he knew better than to ask questions to which he didn’t want to know the answers.
“Here,” Chan said, and Jisung couldn’t control the expression of absolute shock on his face as Chan nodded toward a slim, closed door in the wall. “Bathroom. He’s cleaning himself up a little.” And then, in answer to a question Jisung hadn't asked, added grimly, “He hasn’t left this room since you were put in it.”
Jisung stared at him. Chan stared back, the look on his face was flat, haggard. “How long have I been here,” Jisung asked hoarsely.
“This is day three,” Chan said, and Jisung felt distinctly like he was back in that burning building, smoke choking all the air out of his lungs, clouding his thoughts.
The heavy, metal door to the room swung open, and Changbin came in followed by a doctor, wearing dark blue scrubs under a lab coat and a serious, if not unkind, expression.
“Hello,” she said as Chan moved away from the side of the bed to make room for her to take his place. She glanced at all his machinery, jotting something down into her clipboard. “How are you feeling?”
In pain. Tired. Confused. “I think I’m okay,” Jisung whispered, watching her. She had short hair pulled back into a spiky ponytail. It took another few moments of her writing into her clipboard before she looked at him again.
“Can you tell me your name and date of birth?” she asked, moving closer until her thighs bumped the edge of his bed.
“Han Jisung, I was born September fourteenth,” he said, knowing this was probably some kind of cognizance test. Chan had said he’d been concussed. His head certainly fucking hurt.
More scribbling in her notepad. “Do you remember what happened to you?” she asked.
“I got stabbed,” Jisung repeated from earlier, with less surprise this time. He could remember it. He kind of wished he couldn’t.
The doctor hummed. “Do you remember how you got your other injuries, how you hit your head?” Behind her, Changbin glanced at Chan, shifting a bit, while Chan watched with absolutely no expression.
Slowly, Jisung shook his head. It wasn’t totally a lie. The explosion was very hazy, it had been so sudden and everything had been chaos. Even if he could remember though, he wouldn’t have told her.
She said, “Hmm,” and continued to write, her brow furrowed now. “Given your injury, loss of memory isn’t unexpected.” She tucked her pen into her pocket and then pulled out a small penlight, clicking it on. “Look at my nose, please.”
Jisung did as he was bid, staring at the tip of her nose as she shone the light into his eyes. He fought not to squint, not to blink too much. The light was— bright, too bright, oddly bright. His eyes felt tender.
Across the room, that slim door to the bathroom opened, and Jisung forgot immediately about his assigned task, gaze whipping over to see first Felix, then Hyunjin, exit the little room.
Felix looked pale and tired, but it was nothing compared to Hyunjin, who was pallid to the point of looking ill, his black hoodie only exacerbating that. There was a dark purple bruise curving around his left eye, over his temple and cheekbone, blood pooling almost black in his under-eye area. A cut slashed jaggedly across his forehead, and his hair was stringy with water, oily and lank around his face.
Chan met Felix halfway across the room, murmuring, “How’s his head?” But Hyunjin had caught sight of Jisung and stopped, and it was like watching some kind of veil get ripped away. Hyunjin’s eyes had been glassy and blank, like he was a puppet, or a zombie, and then all of a sudden he was Hyunjin again, the darkness of his eyes sharp and alert.
The machines went haywire, beeping like crazy, and the doctor said, “Jisung-ssi,” with a loudness that implied it wasn’t the first time she’d said his name.
He turned his head too fast looking at her again, shutting his eyes tightly as the room spun. “Sorry,” he gasped, remembering to breathe. He’d forgotten, for a few seconds there.
Distantly, he heard Felix murmuring, “I got a good look at it this time, it’s a pretty nasty wound on his scalp, but it’s all clotted now—”
“I think I will come back in a little bit to do a full, proper cranial nerve exam on you,” the doctor said, kind of halfway to herself, rather than to Jisung. Her voice made it impossible for Jisung to overhear the rest of what Felix and Chan were saying, their heads bent together. Out of the corner of his eyes, he watched Hyunjin grow nearer, a smudged dark shadow. “You’re clearly still coming around, it’s better to let yourself fall back asleep, if you feel like you need to.”
Jisung kind of did want to sleep again. The room felt unsteady, his body still strange and far away. He watched the doctor stand up again, turning to the room at large and saying, “I’ll be back in a while, he should drink water if he wants, but eat lightly for now — also, there’s only supposed to be two people in here at a time. He needs quiet.” Her voice at the end was harder.
“Oh, I’ll go,” Felix said immediately, gently grabbing Changbin’s elbow as he went. Changbin stared down at the point of contact in obvious surprise, but he didn’t shake Felix off, allowed himself to be led. Felix shared a little conspiratorial glance at Chan, tossed over his shoulder as he and Changbin left the room behind the doctor.
Jisung sank back against the pillows, feeling a lot of his energy leave him. To his utter shock, he felt— fingers, curling around his limp left hand, resting on the sheet. He lolled his head to look, and saw Hyunjin sitting beside his bed, his hand holding Jisung’s. The image of it was slightly indistinct around the edges, Jisung feeling floaty and cold. Hyunjin’s pale hand, his long fingers, curving around Jisung’s more tan ones. Was he dreaming, was he hallucinating. He didn’t want to look away to check.
Chan came and sat to Jisung’s right, in the chair the doctor had just vacated. “Do you want any food?” he murmured. “We have pudding, and fruit.”
How long before Felix and Changbin came back in, Jisung wondered idly. In the state he was in, he felt very clever for figuring out they’d only complied so easily because they were going to come back in as soon as it was safe. His hand twitched against Hyunjin’s, and Hyunjin’s grip tightened, still loose but more of a— a hold, now. Firm. Real.
This was all real.
Jisung was alive. Hyunjin was alive.
He’d thought Hyunjin was going to die. Stubborn Hyunjin, leaning over him as the fire roared, his face curtained by his hair, backlit by writhing orange and red light. Crying, his tears landing hot on Jisung’s face.
You need to get out, Jisung had said, wanting to beg but too weak from the blood loss. He could remember that— the smoke in his chest, the hot air licking against his skin. The creeping coldness in his fingers. Just— just leave me.
And instead of leaving him there, there had come the press of Hyunjin’s mouth against his, humiliating in its way.
Jisung raised his eyes from where they’d been stuck, dazed, on the image of their entwined hands. This close he could see the way Hyunjin’s lips were dry and chapped, pale. The deep, dark circle under his uninjured eye. The way his jaw looked sharper than usual. The tips of his hair were dripping.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin whispered when their eyes met, every line of his body and face conveying pain and sadness.
Hyunjin might be alive, but he was not unhurt. He did not seem whole. It had almost killed him. His stubbornness, his— his loyalty. It had almost killed him.
“You,” Jisung said, “why didn’t you leave?”
Hyunjin tilted his head in confusion. “What?”
“I told you to leave,” Jisung said, a little slow. “You could have died, why didn’t you leave?”
Hyunjin’s face went hard, all his beatific sorrow suddenly vanishing. He was never ugly, he was not capable of it, but sometimes, when he was mad, that beauty became something cutting, like a blade in its own right. He let go of Jisung’s hand like it had stung him. “Are you fucking serious right now?” he asked.
Jisung frowned. Same as the smile earlier, it felt a little wrong, like he wasn’t quite making the expression correctly. He tried to snag Hyunjin’s hand again, disliking the way his fingers felt cold like they had in the fire, but Hyunjin snatched his own hands out of reach. “Why are you mad?”
“Ohh-kay,” Chan said. There was a shuffle, the sound of a chair scraping across linoleum. “Hyunjin, I’m going to leave you guys to talk, okay?”
“Don’t—” Hyunjin said, but Chan was already leaving the room. Jisung heard Felix’s voice say, Oh, already? before the door shut again and the room was quiet.
Hyunjin glared at the door. Jisung watched him, the profile of his face. The longer he was awake, the more his stomach hurt but the floaty feeling in his head and limbs wasn’t quite fading. He did not like it. Talking to Hyunjin was already like running across a minefield, he couldn’t do it when he was feeling like this.
“Hey,” he tried. “Are you mad? If you’re mad, tell me why. I’ll fix it. I can fix it.”
Hyunjin bit his bottom lip, a slow movement. Abruptly Jisung remembered how Hyunjin’s mouth had felt, pressed against his. The softness of that lip. Shame burned through him, and as Hyunjin’s brows drew into a frown, Jisung shrank back against his pillows.
“You wake up, and the first thing you do is scold me for not leaving you there to die?” Hyunjin went from glaring holes into the door to instead turn that angry stare onto Jisung himself. “Why didn’t I leave,” he mimicked Jisung, nastily mocking. “How could you ask me that? Do you even— what a horrible thing for me to do, to fucking leave you, bleeding out. You think I could have lived with myself, if I’d done that? Of course I refused to leave you.”
Jisung wouldn’t have— thought less of Hyunjin for it, if he’d left him. It wouldn’t have been a horrible thing for him to do at all. Jisung blinked, mostly in confusion. “Hyunjin, there was a fire— you could have died,” he said slowly, like he wasn’t sure Hyunjin had understood his meaning at all.
“And you were dying,” Hyunjin shot back, features twisted into delicate fury.
Jisung’s mind was moving too slow for this, and his thoughts seemed to be scattering away from him. “I just mean— it was dangerous,” he said thickly. “I didn’t want you to get hurt. You’re right, I was already— dying, and you weren’t, I don’t— it would have been smarter, to leave me, you know, it’s not— it wouldn’t have made you a bad person—”
Hyunjin was not appeased— in fact he was looking angrier and angrier, and Jisung stopped, rethinking his words, realising maybe he needed to backtrack.
“Not that I think you’re dumb!” he said, holding back a grimace. “You’re not, you know I don’t think—”
“Stop. Talking,” Hyunjin bit out.
Jisung dropped his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, picking at the fuzzies on the blanket thrown over his legs. He figured an apology was always a safe bet. “I shouldn’t have scolded you. I just— I was worried about you.”
“And you think I wasn’t worried about you? Do you have any idea what it was like, what it’s been like, in this horrible fucking place, waiting for you to wake up?” Hyunjin’s voice rose as he spoke, a shout by the end of it, hands suddenly clenched hard in the blanket beside Jisung’s legs. Jisung’s muffled ear protested the loudness with a sharp stab of pain, and he winced. Hyunjin hunched a little, and when he spoke again it was quieter. “You nearly died in my arms, Jisung!” he hissed. His mouth pinched, an expression of consternation, like Jisung was being— dumb. “I’ve been worried fucking sick.”
Something about the look that was being levelled his way made emotion surge up within Jisung. Anger, it was anger. With sudden, terrible clarity, he remembered watching that man lumber to stand over Hyunjin’s prone form, the knife sharp and wicked in his hand. Remembered the terror on Hyunjin’s beautiful face, and the fear that had gripped his own heart, cold and icy, at the thought of Hyunjin being carved open.
Hyunjin did not understand, he didn’t, and Jisung should let it go, let the words lay where they were. Just keep his mouth shut. That had always been the best option, with Hyunjin, since the first time they had met. He’d managed to upset him with the very first thing he said to him, and it had been the sole dynamic between them ever since.
But very suddenly, he was upset, and he didn’t have the faculties right now to tuck his wounded little heart away. “It’s not the same,” he muttered mutinously, both wanting and not wanting Hyunjin to hear it.
“What,” Hyunjin said softly, and it was not a gentle softness, not in the least, “is that supposed to mean.”
Jisung swallowed thickly. “I mean,” he said, and stopped. The thought of putting this into words was nauseating. Too vulnerable, too open. But he had to try again. He kept his eyes down, on his hands in his own lap as he whispered, “I couldn’t stand it, if you died.” Hyunjin would go on, if Jisung died. But Jisung— if Hyunjin died, Jisung wasn’t sure he wouldn’t go mad, his mind cut adrift like a boat bereft of its anchor.
“You utter fool. I feel the same way about you,” Hyunjin said, with feeling so convincing Jisung could almost trick himself into believing Hyunjin meant it the way Jisung wanted him to.
But Jisung was not about to lure himself into that manner of heartbreak. It would not do to pretend, not even for a moment. He shook his head, hair scratching across the starched pillowcase. “No,” he said, quietly. “No, you don’t. You know that you don’t.”
Hyunjin gaped at him. “Do you—” he began, his voice hoarse, then he cut himself off. His hands clenched again in the blankets, knuckles going white, and he seemed to steel himself before he tried to speak again. “Do you not remember what happened?” There was something in his face, something like fear, but Jisung didn’t know why, what answer he was scared of.
Maybe he didn’t want Jisung to remember.
Jisung couldn’t say anything for a long while. He didn’t want to admit that yes, he remembered. It was shameful to think about, now. But he’d been dying, though that was little excuse. Truthfully, Jisung had always thought that even on pain of death, he’d never— he’d never tell Hyunjin how he felt. And he probably would have held to that, but blood loss had utterly muddled his head. When he’d said it, he hadn’t been— wholly there. On that hard floor, holding his insides in with one hand, he’d felt barely connected to his body, to his life. Nothing had been solid, anymore.
But he’d said it, hadn’t he. And what fucking timing too.
That was probably it, Jisung realised with a sinking sensation. Of course, that was it. Hyunjin had risked his life for Jisung, and in return he’d been— foisted upon, Jisung dumping his bloody, messy heart in Hyunjin’s hands, forcing him to hold it while Jisung lay there dying. And Hyunjun, sweet, loyal Hyunjin, in spite of his own feelings, had given Jisung comfort in his dying moments.
Any lingering upset drained out of Jisung, leaving him feeling cold and pathetic. He’d basically emotionally blackmailed Hyunjin into kissing him. No wonder Hyunjin was upset — of all people, Hyunjin hated to be forced, emotionally or physically. But he’d done it, for Jisung’s sake.
Jisung bit the tip of his tongue, trying to steady himself. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “Thank you for kissing me,” he said quietly, stilted, and Hyunjin sucked in a breath. “It was kind, it was so kind. But I’m sorry that you ever felt like you had to.”
Silence followed his words. A very long silence.
Jisung opened his eyes to look at Hyunjin’s face, trying to read something in it that would help with the conversation. But Hyunjin, he found, just looked more angry than ever, and Jisung could only say, helplessly, “I know you probably didn’t expect me to live to remember it, and now it’s— awkward, but—”
“You— wait,” Hyunjin interrupted, eyes wide and sparkling with his upset, voice low. “This can’t be real. You think that I kissed you because I thought I had to?”
Jisung suppressed a wince. “We can pretend it never happened,” he said in a rush, trying to sound reassuring, but even to his own ears, he just sounded pathetically hopeful.
Hyunjin recoiled. Some of the anger seemed to have been wiped off his face but Jisung couldn’t quite pinpoint the emotion that had replaced it.
It was probably low of Jisung, to expect Hyunjin to simply let it go, to let what Jisung did to him just fade into the past. But Jisung just didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t thought he’d have to reap the consequences of his confession, and Hyunjin likely hadn’t thought he’d have to face the mortification of that kiss. And then Jisung had gone and lived, the idiot, and now they both had to move forward in this world where all this had happened between them.
Fuck, Jisung didn’t want this to ruin their friendship, fraught and tender though it often was. He didn’t want to lose Hyunjin utterly. The thought made his muddled thoughts turn decidedly weepy.
“I know you only did it because I was dying,” he found himself babbling, a little desperately. “It doesn’t have to change anything.”
Hyunjin’s mouth had dropped open a little. “This can’t be happening,” he whispered, more so to himself, Jisung rather thought. “What the fuck, Jisung.”
He really did not think he was being at all unclear. “I was dying,” Jisung reiterated, “and you— I—” His cheeks prickled with a blush, but there was no warmth to it. Only humiliation. “Hyunjin,” he said, strained, beginning to really just want to go back to sleep, “don’t make me say it.” He’d spent so long keeping his pathetic little heart inside his chest that he didn’t want to tear himself open now.
But Hyunjin, for all his kindness, could be cruel too. And Jisung deserved no better, right now. “Say it,” said Hyunjin, teeth gritted once more, jaw so tight he was barely moving it as he spoke. “Fucking say it.”
Jisung shut his eyes. Being made to say it again, when he’d never really wanted to say it all, never wanted Hyunjin to know— this kind of imposition could never be taken back, he knew, but that did not mean Jisung wished to dig this hole ever deeper.
Hyunjin wanted him to say it, though, so he opened his mouth and he said, “I told you in that building that I love you. And I do. I love you.” Hyunjin did not move, he just stared at Jisung, beautiful and strange and Jisung’s heart ached. “I told you that and— and then you kissed me, because I was bleeding out and you wanted to do something nice for me before— before I died. I know that you don’t—”
“Do not,” Hyunjin said, fingers all twisted in the blankets, “finish that sentence.”
Jisung shut his fool mouth. He watched Hyunjin, the way Hyunjin was not looking at him, the tenseness in his jaw and shoulders, the anger that had come back over his face. He’d always kind of hated himself for the way he felt about Hyunjin, knowing that it could never be reciprocated, knowing in the depths of himself that a person like Hyunjin would never love someone like Jisung. But now that feeling was folded over and over on itself. It was one thing to know it was hopeless and have come to terms with that; another to know he had ruined everything for nothing.
“You’re fucking stupid,” Hyunjin said eventually. “You are so fucking stupid. Oh, you know, do you? You know I don’t feel the same way? What the fuck do you know?”
Jisung said, with all the surety he could muster when he felt so exhausted, “I know you don’t love me the way I love you.”
Hyunjin inhaled sharply through his mouth, and it sounded like the poisonous danger of a snake whispering over the ground. “You don’t know shit, Han Jisung,” said Hyunjin coldly.
That wasn’t fair, Jisung thought. He knew Hyunjin cared about him. Hyunjin cared about all of them. Jisung didn’t want— to diminish that, not when Hyunjin was a creature of such intensity. Even if Jisung wasn’t one of Hyunjin’s favourites, he still clearly cared. He had so few people to care about. But that wasn’t what Jisung meant, and Hyunjin surely knew it.
“I don’t mean— I mean romantic love, Hyunjin,” Jisung said, biting it out. He felt so raw, and his body was so battered. He rested a hand over his stomach, felt the thickness of the gauze beneath the layer of blankets and his hospital gown. “I am in love with you. I know you care. I’m not trying to— to imply you don’t—”
Hyunjin stood up, his chair legs screeching across the tiled floors. It was a sudden, jerky movement. “Oh my god, shut up,” he said, scrubbing his hands through his hair. Then he winced, lowering his hands, and there was a smear of blood on his fingertips, which he simply scowled down at. Head wound, the others had said, and Jisung was upset all over again.
“You need to let a doctor look at that,” Jisung snapped, and Hyunjin shot him a look of unfiltered disgust.
“Do not tell me what I need to do, Han Jisung,” Hyunjin snarled, clenching his bloody fingertips and taking a bracing stance, like he was going to physically fight Jisung. “From that fucking hospital bed, four knife wounds to the gut— don’t you fucking dare.”
Jisung frowned up and up at him. “I love you,” he said thickly, nearly vicious with it, and Hyunjin flinched. “I fucking worship you. I’m worried about you. Can’t you at least try to understand—”
Hyunjin’s face twisted, like he might start screaming, or worse, start crying. “I’m trying to explain to you that I do—”
“How would you have felt if it had been Felix?” Jisung burst out in frustrated, hurt desperation. The one thing, the one thing he’d never wanted to talk to Hyunjin about. Felix. Pretty, dainty, freckled Felix. Who Jisung couldn’t even hate, though sometimes he wished he could.
It had the desired effect, stopping Hyunjin short. His hands, slowly, unclenched at his sides, and he stared at Jisung like he’d grown a second head. “What?” he asked, all upset washed away under bewilderment.
As Jisung stared at Hyunjin’s openly confused face, those features Jisung loved so well, he felt himself soften. He’d never been able to stay angry at Hyunjin for long. Never wanted to hurt him. “If it had been Felix in danger, and not me,” Jisung explained gently, knowing Hyunjin was going to hate this. He probably hadn’t realised Jisung was aware of his feelings. “It would have been— a different sort of feeling, for you. That’s what I mean. That’s what I felt.”
Like the tide, Hyunjin’s anger might have slipped away, but Jisung could sense its imminent return, as his words sunk in. “What are you— saying,” Hyunjin asked, trembling like a hornet’s nest. Colour came high to Hyunjin’s cheeks, his temples damp with sweat.
Jisung hunched in a little on himself. “I shouldn’t have brought it up,” he muttered, tired all over again, “I don’t want to embarrass you.”
Hyunjin made a noise that was almost a gasp, almost a laugh, if a laugh could be enraged. “Too fucking late for that!” he cried, and Jisung immediately felt a wave of guilt. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my— tell me what the fuck you mean, you absolute shithead.”
“I know how you feel about Felix,” Jisung said woodenly, bracing himself. “You’re in love with him.”
Hyunjin spluttered something and then shrieked, “I’m in love with Felix?”
Jisung winced and glanced at the door, hoping Felix hadn’t heard that, and then said, “Yes!” He smiled, a small, pitiful thing, mostly as reassurance to Hyunjin that he wasn’t— being cruel. That he understood, what it was like to care for someone who didn’t feel the same. He felt the sadness in his own eyes. “You never cared who Felix really was, you cared for him and defended him, always believed in him,” Jisung said, remembering Hyunjin’s staunch loyalty, the sweet way he’d tended to Felix. “You were willing to leave with him, spend so much time with him. He bakes you brownies and you cuddle on the couch watching stupid dramas, you kiss him all the time— and you’re always so grumpy when Chan-hyung comes and steals him away.” Hyunjin’s bright smile flashed through his mind, rounded at the corners, the way his eyes always curved. “And he makes you laugh.”
Hyunjin seemed at a loss for words for a bit. Jisung so rarely saw him like this. But every word Jisung had spoken was true. Hyunjin had always liked Felix, since the moment they had met; there was a bond there, a connection, that Jisung had never been able to establish with Hyunjin. After all, Hyunjin had never once laughed for Jisung.
“Let me get this straight,” Hyunjin said slowly. “You think that I am in love with Felix, and that after you got mortally wounded protecting me, I kissed you, because you’d just confessed and I wanted to do you a favour while you were dying. And now we should just— pretend none of this ever happened?”
Jisung nodded, which was a little difficult when his head felt wobbly on his neck. He was glad that, despite his foggy mind, he’d managed to convey it all, eventually. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, that’s it.”
Hyunjin was chewing the inside of his mouth again, something he did sometimes, and Jisung wanted to tell him to stop it but the look on Hyunjin’s face kept him quiet again. “You are unbelievable,” Hyunjin said, right before whirling away.
“Hyunjin,” Jisung said, a little alarmed.
“I don’t kiss people as favours, Han Jisung,” Hyunjin snarled at him as he stormed to the door. He flung it open and announced, to whoever was standing outside it, “Take him back, set that building on fire again, and this time, leave him in it.” Then he disappeared.
A couple of seconds later, Chan stuck his head in. “Uh,” he said tiredly. “What the hell did you say to him?”
“I don’t know,” Jisung said helplessly.
——
Traffic at this time of day was terrible, the streets busy as clotted arteries. Changbin manoeuvred them into twists and turns, trying to stay off the more congested areas, get them home faster. It was totally silent within the car, Hyunjin turned away in the passenger seat, his back to Changbin. Usually Changbin would try to break the silence, try to get Hyunjin to smile at the very least, but he had not quite dared attempt it today. Whatever had happened in that hospital room was not something that Changbin could have a hope of fixing. One look at Hyunjin’s face had been enough to impress that upon him with no uncertainty.
Changbin glanced at him, the rigid lines of his back and shoulders. He wanted to ask Hyunjin if he was hungry, if he wanted food. But he didn’t ask. He just drove, as fast as he could make it, and he didn’t even turn on the radio. He let Hyunjin have his silence.
When they got home, Changbin parking a little haphazardly around the back of the building, the car had barely even stopped moving before Hyunjin was getting out. He slammed the door so hard behind him that the car shook a little. Changbin sat there, watching as Hyunjin went into the house, and only then did he get out of the car.
He had no idea what Hyunjin was going to do. Probably lock himself up in his bedroom, lick whatever wounds had been created. Changbin would not be able to help with that process right now. He would need to give Hyunjin time.
So instead of going upstairs, begging Hyunjin to talk, he locked the car and made his way to Seungmin’s workroom, yawning as he went, smothering the sound against the back of his hand. He, thankfully, did not feel quite as tired as he had done the day before, but it was certainly creeping up on him, the effects of a night awake. He was not like Seungmin, or Hyunjin, with their almost nocturnal sleeping patterns. He usually slept at perfectly normal times, and even just these few days otherwise was grinding him down.
Seungmin was awake. Changbin was genuinely not sure if that was because he had slept early and woke up, or if it was because he’d not been to sleep yet. Hopefully the former, considering Seungmin had not slept after they got back from the hospital the day before, and had not been asleep when Changbin had left again. Part of what had kept Changbin going the night, as the hours passed and Hyunjin slept and Seungmin didn’t come, was the thought that Seungmin was getting rest.
When Seungmin turned to look at him, though, he didn’t look like he’d spent the night awake. He looked remarkably bushy-tailed, for Seungmin. “Hyung,” he said, like he was pleased to see Changbin.
“Hey,” Changbin said. He came forward until he could kiss Seungmin on the forehead, and was pleasantly surprised that Seungmin let him. Perhaps some of the stress of the past couple of hours at the hospital was showing on his face. Perhaps Seungmin was taking pity on him. “What are you doing?”
The computer monitors were filled with the most eclectic collection of things that Changbin thought he’d ever seen on Seungmin’s screens. Spreadsheets and long pages of text in small fonts, on one screen a collection of photos, none of which seemed to have any connection to each other. Seungmin glanced at them and then focused back on Changbin. “I’m just going through some of the hard drives,” he said. “Figuring out what we can use, what we probably can’t. There’s some uh, interesting stuff on these.”
“Yeah, I can imagine,” Changbin said. He should probably have more interest in what they were finding, show some of the initiative that an old boss had once told him he didn’t have enough of. But he wasn’t really interested in the details of it all; that was for Chan and Seungmin and Minho to figure out, probably with Felix. Changbin could help with sorting things out, but the minutiae of all of Lee Jaerim’s shitty business dealings wasn’t something he wanted to know. Seungmin had already told him about the girlfriends; Changbin felt like that said it all.
“Did you eat breakfast yet?” he asked.
Seungmin hummed under his breath, which could have meant yes or could have meant no, but I don’t want to admit that. Before Changbin could respond, to bug him about eating, Seungmin said, “I didn’t expect you back so early. I certainly didn’t expect to see Hyunjin back at all. Weren’t they bringing Jisung out of sedation today?”
“Yeah,” said Changbin heavily. “They did, an hour or so ago. He seemed fine when he woke up, before the doctor threw me and Felix out. Talking, seemed alert, if in pain.”
“Okay,” said Seungmin slowly. “So then why did I just watch Hyunjin storm up those stairs like he wished every footstep would set fire to the building.”
That was the question. Changbin didn’t really know, other than something had gone down in that hospital room when he was turfed out. He had watched the two of them look at each other, Hyunjin and Jisung, an odd, tense moment, and then Felix had basically dragged him out of there, sat him down on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the hallway, and then took his own seat, beaming. Chan had come out a minute later, frowning.
Later, after the yelling had started and then died down again, Hyunjin had come out of that hospital room looking more angry than Changbin though he had ever seen him — real anger, not just Hyunjin’s usual irritation, but the kind of anger that boiled over and then simmered. He had been halfway down the hallway before Changbin had even been able to react, and as Felix cried out after him, Changbin had surged to his feet and gone to intercept.
“Hyunjin,” he had said, loud to catch his attention, moving fast so he could get in front of him, stop Hyunjin that way, without touching him. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” Hyunjin had spat, shoving past Changbin, in his upset not bothering to temper the push. Changbin had had to step to the side a bit to let him past, because truthfully, in a show of strength between them, Hyunjin would not win. And he was injured, still, although his anger seemed to have temporarily overtaken that.
“How?” Changbin had asked.
The question seemed to give Hyunjin pause, but only for a moment. “I’ll take a cab.”
“You don’t have any money,” Changbin had pointed out.
Hyunjin had whirled on him at that, his eyes alight. In that moment, it had not been mere anger in Hyunjin’s eyes, but something far more manic, far more desperate. A man on the verge of total, utter breakdown. A man who had, from the moment he could, only had those moments in privacy, and was now looking at having one in a very public hospital. “Then give me money,” Hyunjin had almost shrieked.
“I’ll take you home,” Changbin had said, desperate in his own way. “Here, I have the keys, I’ll take you home right now.” And he had, without going back to Chan and Felix, without going back to see Jisung awake for himself. He had just brought Hyunjin home.
“I don’t know,” he told Seungmin truthfully. “I wasn’t in the room for it. The doctor threw me and Felix out right after Jisung woke up. But I know that they— fought.”
Seungmin blinked. “How did they go from Hyunjin refusing to leave his bedside to fighting the instant Jisung woke up,” he said. “That was not at all what I was expecting you to say happened.”
Changbin, honestly, hadn’t known what to expect when Jisung woke up, not from Hyunjin. The intense survivor's guilt that Hyunjin had been demonstrating, the way it hadn’t seemed to be stopping or waning at all, had been deeply concerning to him. Some of it was the head injury but some of it wasn’t, and that pitch of emotion never worked out well for Hyunjin. It always ended up snapping in some way or another.
“What were you expecting,” he said.
“For them to kiss, maybe,” Seungmin said. The words were baffling for a moment, Changbin’s brain struggling to take them in, and his confusion might have been very obvious, but Seungmin looked at him and then said, “Oh my god, hyung, you can’t be serious right now. You didn’t realise?”
“Didn’t realise what,” Changbin said, squeaking a little.
“Hyunjin is in love with Jisung,” Seungmin said. He had no mercy on Changbin’s confused pea of a brain. “God, hyung, why do you think he’s refused to leave Jisung’s side this entire time?”
“I guessed— survivor’s guilt!” Changbin protested. “What happened in that casino was bad, they were lucky to be alive— Jisung’s injuries, he’d clearly gotten them protecting Hyunjin in some way.” Hadn’t Jisung always said it, hadn’t he said it just recently: I’ll always look after him. Changbin had always known he could trust Jisung to watch over Hyunjin, but somehow it had never actually been a potential reality in his head that this would mean Jisung maybe dying in service to that.
Jisung had, Changbin thought now. Jisung had always known that things might end up in that reality. And he had never once flinched from it.
“Well, yes,” Seungmin said. “But that’s not why Hyunjin’s been so upset. He’s in love with Jisung.”
“How do you know that?” Changbin said. He didn’t know why he felt so desperate about this. Maybe it was that he wanted it to be true. Maybe it was that it being true scared him. “You can’t know that.”
“I do,” Seungmin said. “I know it’s true, hyung. I implied it to him once and he knew what I was saying and he didn’t deny it. He’d have denied it, if it wasn’t true. He’d have bit my head off.”
Hyunjin would have. Hyunjin used to get furious at the mere idea that he had to tolerate Jisung’s presence in any way, shape or form. Jisung existing in the common spaces seemed to send Hyunjin into tizzies of anger, the likes of which Changbin had never seen before, and had not really seen in other circumstances; even Hyunjin’s anger at Chan over what had happened to Felix had not felt like the heated anger he directed at Jisung sometimes.
They had all seen it, these past two years. The way Hyunjin would be normal, perfectly fine, and then— a storm unleashed. The worst Changbin had ever seen it had been after he and Jisung had come upstairs together after a workout, Jisung to get a glass of orange juice, Changbin to shower. Hyunjin had not even blinked at Changbin, but Jisung standing in the kitchen, carton in his hand, sleeveless shirt sticking to his skin with the sweat— Hyunjin had laid into him, about his lack of hygiene, his lack of care in a way that was so nasty Changbin had intervened, sent him to his room like a misbehaving child. And Jisung had just stood there, and took it, and said he was sorry, over and over.
Changbin had never known what to make of any of it. Seungmin’s words now still didn’t seem to fully make it fit.
“I bet Felix knows too,” Seungmin added.
“Well, Jisung sure the fuck didn’t know,” Changbin said helplessly, “because the one thing I did hear of their fight was Hyunjin shrieking I’m in love with Felix in confusion. So apparently Jisung thinks Hyunjin’s in love with Felix.”
Seungmin stared at him. He looked very much like he didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry. “Oh my god, he’s as stupid as you are,” he said.
“Hey!” said Changbin, an instinct more than anything. Inside, his head felt like it was whirring at five hundred miles an hour, working harder than it probably had done for the past few days. His ear was hurting again; he’d have to take more pain meds before he went to sleep later. It was, admittedly, hard to think around the pain, but he managed it, just enough.
Hyunjin, in love with Jisung. Hyunjin, who had spent the past three days glued to Jisung’s bedside, unable to move away from it. Hyunjin, who had just found out that Jisung thought he was in love with Felix.
“Oh,” he said, drawing the sound out. “That’s why he was so upset. Oh, that’s not good.”
“No, probably not,” Seungmin said. He scrubbed a hand at his face, in a way that left his skin a little pink. “God, what a mess those two are.”
Changbin had to agree, although he wasn’t going to say it. In his head, now, was the way Hyunjin had been in the car, closed off, tense; upset. “I should go check on him later,” he said. “He was still refusing medical care earlier, that concussion had me— worried. But he seems much better now.” Changbin was mostly just grateful he was eating.
“Yeah, he was pretty messed up when we were carrying Jisung through Blackbird’s,” Seungmin said absently, distracted by something on his screen, something moving on a video he was watching, security footage of some kind. But the words, once Changbin actually registered them, made Changbin think— what? “I thought he needed a doctor for sure, to be honest. But I’m glad he’s doing better now.”
“What do you mean, when you were carrying Jisung through Blackbird’s,” he said, confused but— scared. Feeling, with an odd kind of certainty, that he wasn’t going to like this answer. “You mean when you were carrying him to the van?”
Seungmin froze. It was always so strange how obvious that lack of movement was on a person, especially someone like Seungmin, who frankly didn’t move all that much anyway. He looked, for a moment, like a prey animal aware that it was caught in the gaze of a predator. That feeling of dread grew in the pit of Changbin’s stomach.
“Seungmin,” he said.
He watched as Seungmin grappled with himself. Seungmin did not usually lie about things but there was no doubt that he could lie. Under normal circumstances, Seungmin could probably lie to Changbin’s face and Changbin would never even know. He was certainly good at lying by omission. But Changbin had already caught him out, and now he waited to see how Seungmin would react.
Eventually Seungmin slumped, his head turning back to Changbin’s direction. “Hyung,” he said.
“Tell me,” Changbin said. His voice felt like it was coming from someone else, or maybe more just like he was completely outside of his body. “Seungmin. What did you mean by that?”
Seungmin chewed the inside of his mouth, looking at him. “When the bombs went off,” he said, after a long pause. “When— the cameras cut off, but I knew that— that it was bad. That Jisung and Hyunjin would need help. And so I drove the van over there, to the casino, and I— went to get them.”
“You went inside Blackbird’s,” Changbin said, trying to make sure that he had this right, needing to know that he was understanding this correctly. “After the bombs had gone off. You went inside while the building was on fire.”
Seungmin was silent. He was not quite looking at Changbin, but doing that thing he sometimes did where he looked just past a person. Seungmin struggled with eye contact at the best of times but this was not that trick Changbin had once read of, of looking at someone’s ear to mimic eye contact. When Seungmin did this, it was because he was too uncomfortable to even fake it.
“Fuck,” Changbin said. He wanted to get to his feet, move around, pace up and down this room to see if it could help with the energy bubbling inside of him. This felt like he had just come home to bruises on Seungmin’s face all over again, but so much worse than that. “What were you thinking?”
The answer came so fast that it could only be the truth. “I wasn’t,” Seungmin said. “Hyung, I wasn’t thinking. I just— did it.”
“You can’t just— you should think,” Changbin said. His voice was much too loud in this room, and he could tell that it was, but he couldn’t seem to make it quieter at all. “Why would you take a risk like that, you can’t— you didn’t even have a gun with you!”
“I had to help them,” Seungmin said. “I couldn’t— not.”
Instead of flinching from Changbin’s tone, or getting angry back, or being annoyed that Changbin was, essentially, yelling at him, he looked— ashamed, almost, but steady with it. Someone who knew what Changbin’s reaction would be but who didn’t regret his actions. Changbin was reminded of Jeongin, in the hospital room, standing his ground in the face of Minho’s explosive anger.
Would he have ever told Changbin, if he hadn’t let it slip by accident like that? Changbin got the feeling that no, he wouldn’t have. He would have kept it like a secret.
“Seungmin,” he said again.
“What would you have done?” Seungmin asked. Would it have been worse, if he seemed upset or frantic, rather than this steady creature? “Could you have sat there, in that— that tiny box of a van, listening as the police scanner started reporting on an explosion, on a fire, trying desperately to establish contact through comms that were fucking dead?” Something about the cursing, in the middle of the flat delivery of Seungmin’s words, made Changbin startle a little bit. He couldn’t quite figure out why, when he knew Seungmin had the mouth of a sailor on him, but it was surprising all the same. “Watching static on a screen and knowing— knowing you’re just a few blocks away, that they need you and you could help, but instead you’re— you’re sitting there, doing nothing?”
Changbin tried to picture it. The inside of the van, the flickering of the screens — the feeling of absolute powerlessness, having to just sit there, still and useless, as the minutes ticked by, even as he knew that every second counted. And worse than that— it was Hyunjin. Hyunjin hurt, bleeding, frightened and alone. There was not a single thing in this world that Changbin would not do for Hyunjin.
He didn’t say anything. When the silence stretched out damningly, Seungmin said, “When I found them, Jisung was practically unconscious and Hyunjin was on the floor beside him, just crying and bleeding. I had to lead them out, through the smoke and the fire, Jisung a— a dead weight in our arms, Hyunjin barely able to stay upright.” The steady facade had broken a little now, his voice trembling under the force of the memory. “It was reckless and stupid, I know, but I had to, hyung, I had to. I wouldn’t take it back even if I could. They’d both be dead now, if I hadn’t.”
He fell silent, like he expected Changbin’s ire, his ongoing anger. But Changbin didn’t know what to say to him. It was so incredibly foolish to go running into a burning, unstable building, risky beyond belief, and yet— if he had been there, and if he’d known, without a doubt, that if he didn’t do exactly that, then it was likely that both Hyunjin and Jisung would die? Then yes, he would have done something stupid too. He would not have thought about it either.
He let out a breath, shaky and damp. His eyes were a little damp too. “It was reckless and stupid of you,” he said, and watched Seungmin’s face flicker into— something a little more closed off. “But brave, too,” he added.
It was brave in a way that Changbin was having real trouble processing when it came to Seungmin. It was not that he thought of Seungmin as cowardly, necessarily, but Seungmin liked his security, his walls and his safety. Truthfully, if asked, Changbin might not have said cowardly, but he probably wouldn’t have said brave, either. The idea of him not hesitating, not even stopping to think, and throwing himself so thoroughly into such a level of danger for the sake of another person — it wrenched at Changbin in odd, indescribable ways.
“It wasn’t brave,” Seungmin said. He seemed very insistent on this point. “It wasn’t anything. I just didn’t think.”
“You acted on instinct,” Changbin said. Seungmin’s head bobbed in the smallest nod, and Changbin pushed harder, needing Seungmin to understand. Needing Seungmin to understand what true bravery was. “And your instinct was to help, in spite of the real danger it put you in. In spite of how stupid it was. In spite of everything else. You’re right,” he said fervently. “You saved their lives. Your love for them saved their lives.”
This made the colour flush high on Seungmin’s cheeks, almost splotchy in his embarrassment. “Hyung!” he said, a protest that went unheeded by Changbin, who shifted closer to him and reached out and took Seungmin’s hand. It was cold, as always, and Changbin’s was warm, as always, and Seungmin didn’t pull away. He held Changbin’s hand back.
“I love you so much, Seungmin-ah,” he said, and meant it down to his fucking bone marrow.
Seungmin exhaled. His, too, was shaky and damp. “I love you too,” he whispered.
——
Felix waited until after the doctor had returned and then left again before he dragged a chair over to Jisung’s bedside and then sat in it. All his vitals looked good, she’d said, after shining another light into his eyeballs for an extended period of time. She made him do some cognitive and coordination tests similar to the ones she’d done on Hyunjin, though nothing that required him to stand, or even sit up properly.
Now, Jisung sat reclined against a plethora of pillows, struggling through eating a portion of green jell-o, slurping it off the plastic spoon obnoxiously. He seemed to be doing it just to make Chan, who’d been hovering even worse than he’d done with Hyunjin, wince and leave him be.
When Felix took his seat, Chan looked over from where he’d wedged himself into the corner of the couch. He gave Felix what could best be described as a warning look, while Felix blinked in affected innocence back. Then Jisung slurped down another mouthful of jell-o, and a full body shudder ran through Chan. He surged to his feet.
“I’m gonna grab an energy bar or— something,” Chan declared to the room at large, and then he was gone, banging through the doorway.
Felix looked at Jisung, found Jisung looking back at him. He held eye contact as he pursed his lips and brought his spoon to them, sucking another clump of neon green gelatin in.
“Jisung,” Felix said sweetly, “that doesn’t bother me.”
For lack of a better word, Jisung’s expression turned— glum. He cradled the mostly empty plastic cup in his lap, poking the remnants of jell-o listlessly with his spoon. “My head hurts,” he mumbled. “I don’t want to talk about it. Any of it.”
Gently, Felix collected the cup and spoon from Jisung’s loose grasp, putting them both on the little bedside table. “I know,” Felix murmured, because— yeah. Right now Jisung needed rest, and they should be here giving him gentle support instead of interrogating him. And Felix would have liked to have done so, but— Hyunjin. “We have to talk about it, at least a little though.”
Jisung sank back against his mountain of pillows, deflating. He was still pallid, the bruises on his face smudged purple and yellow. “I don’t want to,” he said again, petulant in a way that was reminiscent of Jeongin.
“You’ve been unconscious for days and Hyunjin’s been bad, Jisung,” Felix said, and Jisung looked away from him, but not fast enough to conceal the flash of pain. “I thought when you woke up he’d be better, maybe, not— like this. I can’t help him if I don’t know what happened.”
I’m in love with Felix? was the extent of Felix’s knowledge of what had just transpired, Hyunjin’s incredulous cry piercing through even the closed door. He knew a bit more of what had occurred a few nights ago, but only what Chan had revealed to him that morning: that Jisung got stabbed protecting Hyunjin, which was— obvious, predictable. And that Hyunjin had, in his terrified panic, refused to leave Jisung’s side after the fact.
How they went from that to Jisung accusing Hyunjin of being in love with Felix, was not something Felix could figure out.
He needed the whole picture. What had happened in Blackbird’s, and where Jisung’s head was.
“Hyunjin didn’t tell you anything?” Jisung asked, an indistinct mumble, his gaze still trained on the far wall.
“He’s spoken very little about it,” Felix said, truthfully, and then, “though he did tell me that it was his fault — what happened to you. It was his fault. That he was useless.”
Jisung’s face whipped around so fast his eyes went glassy for a moment, visibly dizzy. “He said that?” he asked, hand bracing down on the bed to steady himself.
“Yes,” Felix said, unwavering, and watched Jisung’s face flicker through a variety of emotions — anger, sadness, disbelief, horror. Perhaps it was a bit of a lie, to say Hyunjin had told Felix that, when he’d more so just— said it within Felix’s hearing. But that was semantics, and it didn’t really matter. Felix was fine playing dirty when it had the desired effect. “He kept apologising. He kept saying he needed you to wake up.”
“Oh,” Jisung said, his bottom lip wobbling a little. “He’s so good. He’s really— he’s so good, Felix.”
Felix knew that already, knew the depths of Hyunjin’s heart. He stared at Jisung, unwavering, face impassive as he asked, “Was it his fault, Jisung?”
“No,” Jisung said, a hoarse rasp around the edge of his voice. He shook his head a little— more so lolling it back and forth, his hair rubbing against the pillows at his back. “No, it wasn’t. It was my choice.” When Felix said nothing, gave no indication of being convinced either way, Jisung closed his eyes, breathed in shakily. Then, without opening his eyes again, he murmured, “The blast knocked me out. By the time I came around there was— smoke, in the air. I could barely see, my vision was weird, and I couldn’t hear much either.” His eyes opened now, seeking Felix out after a beat of staring blankly at the far wall. There was a tortured kind of pain in his dark eyes. “But I got up because— I had to find him, you know? I had to find him.”
Felix nodded. Yes, he understood that need, that urgency. He was not sure he had Jisung’s bravery, but he certainly could understand Jisung’s desperation in that moment.
“That man was going to kill him,” Jisung said, voice trembling like even just recalling it was almost too much to bear. “Hyunjin was on the ground, he looked so scared. I saw that knife and I couldn’t— what was I supposed to do? Watch him butcher Hyunjin?” Again, that head loll, back and forth, the corners of Jisung’s mouth turning down. “It wasn’t his fault. I could have waited, for a better moment or until I was steady. I could have simply saved myself, tried to run out of there. But I chose to help him. I chose it.” His voice steadied as he spoke, hardened, but was no less emotional for it. He met Felix’s gaze as he said, “I knew that man would gut me instead and I didn’t care. I just needed to get Hyunjin out of there. Felix—” He sat up a bit, gasping slightly, his hand pressing over his stomach, eyes a little wild.
“Jisung—” Felix said, sitting forward and pressing his hand down on Jisung’s shoulder, forcing him back. “Don’t—”
Jisung grabbed his wrist. His fingers were icy. “I had to get him out of there.”
“Yeah, I know you did,” Felix murmured, husky. “I know. I know.”
Slowly, Jisung sat back, his whole compact body beginning to quiver. His knees bent a little, poking up two little mountains under the blanket. His hand stayed over his stomach. He stared emptily at the ceiling and said hollowly, “He kissed me. After we— we killed the guy. He kissed me.”
Felix was glad Jisung wasn’t looking at him, he couldn’t quite control the flicker of shock across his face, the sharp swoop in his gut. Oh, he thought. Oh, Hyunjin.
He couldn’t imagine the kind of emotion, the absolute pitch of terror, Hyunjin must have been on, to be driven to do that. To push past all his fear and his caution and to just act— it was unlike Hyunjin, unlike him in every way. How desperate he must have been, how hysterical.
It shouldn't have been shocking, given how Hyunjin had been acting these last few days, and yet it still somehow was.
“He tried to lead me out and couldn’t,” Jisung was saying, dull and flat like he was reading the words off a script, soulless. Felix worked to focus on his words. “My legs had gone kind of numb, and my stomach hurt so much and I was bleeding everywhere. He cried, he cried for me, and I didn’t want to hurt him but— I couldn’t get up. And he was too injured to carry me. I told him to leave me, the fire was— spreading, coming closer. But he wouldn’t go.”
Jisung stopped then, eyes unfocused, far away, his breathing a little faster than usual, the beeping of the machines keeping up with the tempo. Felix let the silence drag on for a few moments before softly prompting, “And then he kissed you?”
Jisung closed his eyes, slow, lashes drifting to rest like snowflakes to the ground. “No,” he said. His hand, the one not on his stomach, lifted off the blanket blindly, fingers curling in the air around nothing, and with a jolt Felix realised this was how he looked in the fire. Reclined, one hand staving off blood loss, the other up and gripping Hyunjin’s arm, maybe, his sleeve. “My head— I was barely conscious, I was losing so much blood. And his face was all I could see, that fall of his hair— his tears. I could feel them, landing on my cheeks.” The hand grasping at the air moved, wobbly, up to his face, touching fingertips to his cheeks. Then it dropped, and Jisung, even with his eyes still closed, turned his face away from Felix, so all he could see was the plush curve of Jisung’s cheek, the back of his ear. “I told him I loved him,” he whispered, shame heavy in every syllable. “I shouldn’t have said it, but it was the only thing I was thinking. That I loved him so much. And I told him I was sorry. Then he kissed me.”
Felix sat with that, the awfulness of it all. Of Jisung, forever so careful, so attentive, always putting Hyunjin first, finally letting the words he’d clutched in his teeth for years loose because his body was failing, his lifeblood bleeding out all over Hyunjin’s hands. And— Hyunjin. Poor, poor Hyunjin. Powerless, frightened, watching that which he’d so long held in the deep beating chambers of his heart slip away, and able to do nothing to stop it.
“Then Seungmin found us,” Jisung murmured, face still turned away. “I don’t remember much, after that.”
It was a more detailed account than what Chan had told Felix, filled in some of the holes, but it didn’t reveal the answer to the mystery at hand. If Jisung had confessed, and Hyunjin had kissed him, then why on earth had Jisung woken up and accused Hyunjin of being in love with Felix?
Unfortunately, Felix didn’t want to reveal he’d overheard that particular tidbit, so he sat in silence for a moment trying to formulate how he was going to approach this. Eventually he slowly asked, “So— why, why did you fight?”
Jisung heaved a heavy sigh. “I don’t know,” he said, dejected. He turned his head so he could look at Felix again, eyes opening in a slow flutter. “I really don’t. At first it was— I scolded him, you know, I scolded him for not leaving me when I told him to. But then I think— I embarrassed him. The kiss. It was embarrassing. He thought I was going to die when he did it. I think he was worried I— I don’t know.” Another sigh, one shoulder raising in an impression of a shrug. “That I would wake up and expect it to— mean something?”
If Felix were a cartoon character, a lightbulb would have lit up above his head then. “You think he kissed you because you were dying,” he blurted.
“Well— yeah?” Jisung said, one eyebrow raised, his expression turning quizzical. “Of course. Why else would he?”
Felix’s mouth was hanging open, and he couldn’t stop it. “Jisung,” he said, the word coming out absolutely aghast.
That raised eyebrow flattened, Jisung’s brow lowering into a scowl. “What?” he asked— demanded, really. Like Felix was the one being ridiculous. “What other explanation is there. I know what you’re thinking but he doesn’t like me — he barely tolerates me, and he’s in love with—” A flicker of fear, of panic, his eyes skittering over Felix’s face like he’d just remembered who he was speaking to. Fucking Christ, Felix thought, as Jisung quickly finished that thought off with, “Not me. And I’d just saved his life, and he apparently feels super guilty. Of course he kissed me. He’s a good person, he’s kind and giving and— he wanted to give me comfort.” He paused, confusion falling over his face, looking remarkably like a toddler contemplating a maths problem. “I thought. But then he got really mad at me when I said it.”
“And you— you don’t know— why,” Felix said, strained.
“No,” Jisung said, and then, “Felix, my head hurts.”
He sounded so tiny and pitiful that Felix could do nothing but show him mercy.
“Okay,” Felix said, soothingly, getting to his feet and gently smoothing his hands over Jisung’s shoulders. “Okay.” He helped to remove some of the pillows so Jisung could recline more, and Jising relaxed into the bed, his expression smoothing out. Felix bit his bottom lip in thought, bracing Jisung in with the extra pillows, tucking them against his sides, before carefully saying, “Jisung. I’m gonna let you rest but I have to say— he didn’t kiss you because he felt guilty. Or grateful. That isn’t why.”
Absently, Jisung nodded a little. “He said it wasn’t a favour,” he agreed. “But then I don’t understand— I just don’t understand.”
It wasn't Felix’s place to explain, so he remained silent. Jisung, for his part, didn’t seem like he was expecting a response. Every time he blinked, his eyes were slower to open again. All the excitement had clearly tired him out, his face was pale.
Felix tugged Jisung’s blanket up a little higher, making sure Jisung’s feet remained covered, and then left the room in search of Chan.
He found him just up the hall, leaning back against the side of a vending machine, chewing on an energy bar. Even in this awful lighting, and even obviously tired as he was, Chan looked so very handsome. Felix let himself appreciate it as he approached, smiling when Chan caught sight of him.
“Hey,” Felix said, wrapping a slim arm around Chan’s trim waist, curling against his warmth with a contented sigh.
Chan held the energy bar to Felix’s mouth, and Felix took a hefty bite, caramel making it sticky. “Hey yourself,” Chan rumbled, laughing a little as Felix chewed. “Is Jisung done with his stupid jell-o?”
Felix worked to get the combination of peanuts and caramel to a point where he could swallow his mouthful without choking before he spoke. “Yeah,” he said. “I think he’s gonna nap now. And I think I might head home?”
“Oh?” Chan said.
“Mmm.” Felix kissed Chan’s jaw lightly. “Hyunjin needs me.”
“Oh.” The sound was more dejected this time around. Chan shoved the remainder of the bar into his mouth and then reached into his back pocket for his wallet. “Here,” he said, muffled around his mouthful as he held out some bills. Too many, again, just like yesterday. “For a taxi.”
Felix sighed but took them, not wanting to argue — he had an unfair advantage right now, what with Chan’s teeth halfway stuck together. “Thank you,” he said. “Will you be okay here alone?”
Chan nodded, swallowing thickly. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, leaning in to brush his mouth against Felix’s forehead, hopefully not leaving chocolate residue. “Go work your magic on Hyunjin, please.”
I’ll try, Felix thought but didn’t say, giving Chan’s chest a gentle pat before walking away. He did his best to fade into the crowds of visitors and patients until he was outside the hospital, on the street, watching a taxi unload a mother and small child onto the pavement, both bundled up in padded coats. Felix stood, shivering, and then snagged the cab before it could drive off again.
He opted to sit in the front passenger seat, staring out through the front windshield. The heat was blasting, almost too much after the cold of outside. He gave quiet directions, as short and to the point as he could make them, and the metre began its steady ticking as the driver pulled out onto the streets.
After a few blocks of the driver shooting him surreptitious little glances while Felix grew a little antsy over the attention, the driver asked, “Are you alright?”
“Oh, yeah,” Felix said, realising— of course, he’d just been picked up in front of a hospital, and he probably didn’t look so great. Not as bad as Hyunjin, or Jisung, even, but these past few days had certainly left their mark. “I’m okay. My friend was mugged.”
The driver’s head bobbed in a nod. “This city wasn’t always like this, you know,” he said. Felix looked at him, his profile, his hair streaked with grey and face made craggy by long days of sun exposure through car windows. “Muggings, shootings— have you seen the news? They’re saying that explosion in Gangnam might’ve been a gang thing.”
Felix turned forward again. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” he said.
He had the driver let him out a block or so away from home. He paid the fare with the money Chan had given him and still had so much left over. He did not want to go get food, or make any kind of detours; he would give the rest of it back to Chan tonight.
At this time the sun was high in the sky, a bright, deceitful kind of blue. Like a summer’s day. It didn’t do much to cut through the temperature, and so Felix walked quickly. Conscious of the last time he walked these streets alone, he made sure to walk against the traffic, so any cars he’d at least see coming.
But nothing happened. Just his nose stinging from the cold, toes starting to ache with it by the time he let himself into the building, his sneakers no match for it. It was barely any better in the stairwell, the cold radiating off the concrete.
There were very, very soft voices coming from beyond Seungmin’s closed workroom door. Felix thought about popping his head in, but Hyunjin was the goal right now, and he couldn’t imagine he was in the mood for socialising. So he headed up, and up, toeing his shoes off in the entryway of the apartment.
Hyunjin’s door was closed, latched. Felix let himself into the room quietly, shutting the door behind him with a gentle click. Hyunjin was nothing more than a lump under the covers, not even a hair visible. He did not move when he heard the door, but his voice did sound, muffled and dull: “Go away.”
“It’s me,” said Felix. Hyunjin didn’t reply. Felix picked his way across the floor to the bed. Hyunjin’s room was usually pretty tidy, but it seemed he had taken his clothes off after getting home from the hospital and simply left them on the floor.
Felix sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand down on the closest part of the lump he could reach. “Where’s your head,” he said, patting what he thought was Hyunjin’s hip. “Won’t you come out?”
A stretch of silence, then a heavy sigh. The lump moved in a strange wriggling motion and then Hyunjin unearthed himself from the blankets. His face was flushed red from the heat, his hair, unwashed and sweaty, stuck to his forehead. He did not look like any of his time locked away in his bedroom had been spent sleeping. Felix brushed his hair back, cupped Hyunjin’s face, and kissed his forehead. “There you are,” he said.
“Don’t be nice to me,” Hyunjin said, rasping a little. “Don’t pity me.”
“Ohh,” said Felix. He squished Hyunjin’s cheeks between his palms gently. It was a sign of how tired Hyunjin was that he didn’t even swipe at him. “You mean you don’t want me to fuss over you? You don’t want me to climb in there and cuddle?”
Hyunjin thought about it for a minute. “Take your clothes off first,” he said. “No outside clothes in my bed.”
Felix stripped down to his boxers and t-shirt and slid under the covers that Hyunjin held open for him. He settled down onto his back and let Hyunjin wind his way around him, one knee slung across Felix’s hip, a hand sliding up the side of Felix’s t-shirt to press too-hot against his skin. To be honest, it was all too hot under the covers, and not very comfortable, but Felix didn’t complain. He put one arm around Hyunjin’s shoulders and gently directed his head so Hyunjin’s face was resting in the curve of where his neck met his shoulder.
Nobody said anything for a while. Hyunjin’s breathing kept hitching but there was no dampness against Felix’s skin so he wasn’t crying. Maybe he couldn’t anymore. His hair was still dirty, which wouldn’t be helping his mood. Maybe in a while Felix could coax him to sit in the shower and let Felix properly wash his hair for him this time. Eating would have to come first, though. Felix held in his sigh.
“I feel so stupid,” Hyunjin whispered, after the light coming in the window had shifted the shadows a little.
“No,” said Felix. “You shouldn’t feel stupid. Why should you feel stupid?”
“Everyone knows, now,” Hyunjin said. His breath was so warm on Felix’s skin, and Felix hitched him closer, let Hyunjin cling to him. “I know you— knew, before, probably everyone already knew how I— felt. I tried to hide it but— I couldn’t, really. But now everyone knows, everyone has seen— they’ve seen me.” He takes a deep breath, and it’s unsteady, shaky. “Everyone watched me go to pieces, everyone saw me sitting there holding his hand, like a fucking fool—”
“Hyunjin,” Felix said, gentle but firm enough to interject. Hyunjin was beginning to tremble slightly. “None of us are judging you, there’s nothing shameful about any of it.”
At the very least, Hyunjin paused, breathing deeply, as if trying to regain control. Felix traced his fingers over Hyunjin’s shoulders, his back, in a manner that was hopefully soothing.
“Everyone sees, except— him,” Hyunjin eventually whispered, a little steadier than before. “I try, I do— try. But he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t see me.”
“He sees you,” Felix said. “I think Jisung sees you as much as any person can see another person. But I don’t think you’ve ever been as obvious as you think you’ve been. And I think Jisung—” Felix sighed, moving his hand up to stroke Hyunjin’s hair again. “You’re not the one who should feel stupid. I’m sure he will feel stupid, once he’s had a chance to think about it.”
“I kissed him and somehow he thinks I’m in love with you,” Hyunjin said, voice brimming with indignation. “How would that even work.”
“Well,” Felix said, shifting away just enough that Hyunjin’s head lolled off his shoulder, so Felix could see his face once more, “we do have a bit of an unusual relationship.” He bent his face down and kissed Hyunjin, a light press of their lips. Hyunjin’s were over-warm and damp from being pressed against Felix’s skin. When he pulled away, Hyunjin was scowling, the expression less striking because his cheeks were splotchy from warmth.
“Yeah, but it’s obvious we aren’t like that and you’re in love with Chan-hyung.” Hyunjin spoke each word with scathing emphasis and then smushed his face into Felix’s chest. His words were muffled when he added, “He’s so stupid. I hate him.”
Felix worked not to laugh, and succeeded, getting away with a slightly hitching sigh. Hyunjin’s pain, his anger, wasn’t funny, but the situation, in all its ridiculousness, kind of was. “You don’t hate him,” Felix said. He tipped his face down, lips brushing Hyunjin’s hair as he murmured, “And he loves you. He was going to die for you.”
Hyunjin gave a short, sharp inhale, his clipped nails digging into Felix’s back briefly. “Don’t— don’t,” he choked out, and Felix hummed soothingly at him. He did not need to hammer that point home — the four wounds piercing Jisung’s flesh did it well enough. What a striking, heartbreaking show of devotion it was. Felix could feel Hyunjin swallowing, could hear the thickness of it. He wasn’t surprised when Hyunjin’s next words came out wobbly. “I don’t— I don’t know what to do,” he said, and it was so lost and sad that Felix wanted to shelter him, wanted to wipe it all away. “I thought— I thought it would be enough. The kiss. I thought he’d understand. I thought he’d wake up and look at me and we’d— we’d—” He broke off for a moment, pain heavy in his voice, the tears thick and obvious when he inhaled deeply. “But he wants to forget it. He wants us to go back to the way things were.”
“He probably thinks that is what you want,” Felix said, which— until it had come out of his mouth, he hadn’t realised, but now he thought that was the likely truth of it.
“But I don’t.”
Felix, knowing he might as well be giving his advice to a wall, said, “Then tell him that.”
“I can’t,” Hyunjin said, the words Felix knew were coming. “I can’t. I’m so— angry at him.” He choked over the words, like saying them was an actual physical effort. “I shouldn’t have to. It should have been enough. I feel like I’m skinning strips of myself off every time I reach out to him and I’m so tired, Felix. I’m so tired of having to do it and it meaning nothing to him, while I become a spectacle to everyone else in the house. It’s humiliating.”
In some ways, Felix understood why this would be excruciating for Hyunjin. But that didn’t make it any less frustrating. He didn’t know how to get through to Hyunjin that none of them found his emotional vulnerability something to ogle at, worthy of ridicule. If one of the others were in his shoes, Hyunjin would be kind and supportive, and wouldn’t judge at all. But he held different rules for himself, kept his feelings hidden closely.
It would do no good to push. Not right now at any rate. So Felix just held him, and they lay there, as the daylight and shadows continued to shift through the room.
——
Jeongin woke late for him, which was to say, it was late morning, almost into the afternoon, before he opened his eyes to the sunlight peeking in through the cracks between the newspaper over Minho’s windows. He was not surprised to wake alone in bed; it was late enough that it would have genuinely shocked him if Minho had still been asleep. When he sat up, it was to an empty bedroom, the air cold down here. They’d have to get space heaters, he thought idly, as he lifted his shivering body out of bed and padded his way to the makeshift bathroom.
After he had peed and brushed his teeth, he dressed in something warmer than the boxers and t-shirt that he’d gone to bed curled up against Minho in. Most of his clothing was still upstairs, which was one of his main excuses for why he found one of Minho’s sweaters to wear. It was strange that Minho could seem so much bigger than him but when Jeongin wore his clothes, there wasn’t a huge difference between their shoulder widths.
He didn’t much like this time of year, the time when walking between the different floors was like walking through an ice box, the concrete walls and lack of windows keeping everything cold. In his television room, he had blankets and his heater, and in the apartment it was always kept warm. He didn’t know if that was for him or Hyunjin. But cold always reminded Jeongin of long winter nights spent shivering on that threadbare mattress under equally threadbare sheets, waiting for Chan to come home from whatever had kept him away.
A relief then, to slide inside the apartment, the warm air enveloping him better than any blanket could. He closed the door behind him quickly to keep any of the chill from getting in, and then slid off his sneakers so that he could pad onto the heated floor in his socked feet. The heat of it sent odd goosebumps up and down his arms, such a contrast to how cold he had been.
At the table, Minho made a noise of slight amusement. He had papers stacked up in front of him, presumably printed off downstairs. “Baby boy,” he said. Sometimes he said the nickname in a way that made Jeongin think he was just saying it for the feeling of the words in his mouth. Jeongin understood the feeling intimately.
“Hyung,” he said, because it was the same for him. Then, “I didn’t know you were up here, I thought you’d be down in the workshop.”
Minho pulled a face, something affected and delicate about it. “Changbin and Seungmin were there,” he said. He didn’t elaborate any further, so Jeongin didn’t know if that meant they’d been fucking or if just the two of them in the same room together was too much for Minho to handle. Probably the latter; Minho would not be so calm if it were the former. “I expected you to still be asleep.”
Jeongin smiled at him, feeling a little shy. But not like he had been, these past few days, not in a bad way. Shy in the face of Minho’s fussing, because that’s what it was, he knew. Minho was teasing him, just a little, but also he was asking— why aren’t you asleep still.
“Ah, hyung, I slept enough,” he said. He came closer to the table, to find that the papers appeared to be full of numbers, arranged in different lines. Too many numbers for Jeongin, who had cried the first time Chan tried to teach him long division. “I wanted to wake up earlier, I wanted to know what happened with Jisung-hyung.”
He’d expected a text message or something from Chan, but there was nothing. When he’d woken up and seen that, he’d thought, no news is good news, but it was not the easiest thing to stick in his head, especially not when Minho actually winced a little before he said, “Ah, yes. Jisung.”
It was not a pleasant feeling that spread through Jeongin at that. “What,” he said, “is he okay, he’s okay, isn’t he? Wasn’t he getting woken up today?”
“I called Chan-hyung earlier,” Minho said. Then he glanced at the dark hallway, and lowered his voice; Jeongin leaned across the table towards him instinctively. “Jisung woke up, he’s okay. There doesn’t seem to be any lasting kind of damage. According to the doctors, it looks like he’s going to be fine.”
It was a cliche, but Jeongin felt like he could finally let out a breath that he hadn’t known he had been holding. Like he had set down a heavy weight that he hadn’t realised had been straining his shoulders. He’d had to trust that Jisung would be okay in the end because the thought of not having his funny, kind hyung around anymore had been nigh unbearable, but it wasn’t until this exact moment that he knew that part of him had been— waiting. Waiting for the phone call, the text, the passed on knowledge, that Jisung hadn’t made it.
Tears pricked at his eyes. “Oh,” he said, very dumbly, but it was Minho, so he would never make fun of Jeongin for sounding a little bit stupid sometimes. “That’s good.”
Minho didn’t make fun of him; Minho gave him a small smile and said, “Yes, it’s good.”
Jeongin sniffed, trying to stop the tears from falling, trying to stop his nose running so much. “But?” he asked, trying to ignore the way his voice wavered. “There’s a but, right? You made it sound like there was a but.”
Minho glanced towards the hallway again. Then he said, “Come and sit down next to me, baby boy.”
Jeongin went, around the table to slip into the seat that Felix usually took. He shuffled the seat a little closer, too, so that when he looked at Minho, their knees bumped together. Minho looked serious without being upset or angry, and when he spoke, he leaned in again, but it was not in a playful way. He very much did not want to be overheard.
“Hyunjin and Jisung fought,” he said, low. One of his hands took Jeongin’s, their fingers held together gently. “After Jisung woke up. Though Chan-hyung didn’t know the specifics, which is— odd. He said he left the room for it.”
He gave them privacy, Jeongin thought, and then it came to him, the realisation— Chan knew about Hyunjin’s feelings too. Maybe that shouldn’t have been so surprising, after how Hyunjin had been these past few days, but it was, somehow. Chan sometimes felt like he had blinders on when it came to Hyunjin, both him and Changbin.
“Changbin brought Hyunjin home, because he was apparently very upset,” Minho said, still low. “So that’s your warning, to tread carefully.”
There was a wry humour there, not at Hyunjin’s expense at all but there all the same. Jeongin got it. At least he feels well enough to be pissed off, he thought, feeling relieved and confused and sad and also maybe a little amused all on his own too. “Things are returning to normal,” he said, not sure how he felt about that. It didn’t seem right, after Hyunjin’s obvious anguish recently, but at the same time— he craved that normality.
“They are,” Minho said. He squeezed Jeongin’s hand and then let go. “Are you hungry, baby boy?” he asked, already pushing up to his feet in anticipation of Jeongin’s answer.
Jeongin smiled at him, soft and showing no teeth, feeling awash with affection. “Always, hyung,” he said, which was true anyway, honestly, but especially true if Minho was willing to cook for him. He’d eat Minho’s food even if he’d just eaten a full meal beforehand. But he hadn’t eaten, not since last night, and so Minho nodded, and moved off to the kitchen to make something.
There was a real pleasure in watching Minho cook. It was not just that Jeongin found it sexy, and always had done, but of course it was that— the competence, the ease with what he was doing, all of it was incredibly sexy. But more than that, for Jeongin, was the sense, watching Minho cook, that Minho was doing something he actually enjoyed. He knew Minho had started cooking mostly because he needed control over his own food — he rarely ate takeout, unless they were all doing so, and he never, ever ate out at restaurants as a rule.
Yet cooking had so obviously become something that he actively liked doing. He preferred to cook Korean food, that much was obvious, but he wasn’t afraid to experiment sometimes, too, even if it were just for himself. When Jeongin begged Minho to cook for him, part of it was for himself, to see if he could make it happen, to see if he could get his prickly hyung to give into him. Another part of it was that — giving Minho an excuse to do something that he clearly found relaxing.
He watched as Minho made way too much food for one person; easy things, that didn’t take too long, but very obviously too much for just Jeongin. He waited until Minho was about to start on making ramen before he got to his feet and padded to the kitchen and pressed himself, light but not coy, against Minho’s side. It was mostly just for the ongoing pleasure of being able to touch so easily.
“Can we eat at the coffee table?” he asked.
Minho gave him that slightly sardonic look he did so well. It was reminiscent of the way he looked at Jeongin in the bedroom sometimes, except it was fond, here. When he looked at Jeongin like that when they were having sex, he held the fondness back, which drove Jeongin crazy with the need to get it back. “It’s your apartment, baby boy,” he said.
It’s yours, too, Jeongin wanted to say, but he didn’t want to ruin the atmosphere between them with another argument like that. Because it would be an argument, Minho unable to just accept the truth of it, that this was his home and he was as welcome here as any of them. Instead, though, he just pressed a kiss, soft and gentle, to Minho’s unmarred cheek, and then went to go see Hyunjin.
When he knocked on Hyunjin’s bedroom door, he sort of didn’t expect a response. Hyunjin usually didn’t ignore people like that, not when they were polite and respected his space in that way, but the Hyunjin who had been existing with them these past few days hadn’t been entirely recogniseable to Jeongin. Or more, he had been, but it still had not been all the way there. Like looking at a version of him mirrored.
But there was a response. Felix’s voice, calling out, “Come in?”
It was a bit of a surprise to hear his voice. Jeongin opened the door and peeked inside. The curtains were drawn, but Hyunjin’s curtains were flimsy things anyway, and so the light was only slightly dimmed by it. The bed was lumpy with two bodies, Hyunjin and Felix wrapped around each other under the covers in a way that made it hard to tell where one of them stopped and the other one started. Felix had propped himself up so he could twist around to see who it was. Hyunjin, who was facing the door, was giving Jeongin a blank little look.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, not sure who he was speaking to. Both of them, either of them. “Minho-hyung made food. Do you want to eat with me?”
Felix sat up so he could properly turn around, smiling at Jeongin. It wasn’t the strongest it had ever been, but it felt reassuring, all the same. Felix had the kind of smile where no matter what form it took, Jeongin couldn’t help but feel warmed by it, and it was no different here. “Thank you, Jeongin,” he said.
“I’m not hungry,” Hyunjin said. He sounded much better than he had at the hospital yesterday, which was surprising. More human, much more alive, but still tired. He even sounded a little bit whiny, petulant, like he knew what Felix’s response would be.
Perhaps he wasn’t expecting Felix’s blunt, “Don’t lie to me.” Hyunjin blinked at him, shocked, and Jeongin had to smother the laughter that threatened in his chest. “You’ve barely eaten since yesterday, I know you’re hungry. Come on and eat with Jeongin and I.”
Hyunjin sighed. He wasn’t much of a stubborn type, not like Jeongin was, but he was not used, Jeongin thought, to being lightly bullied into doing things in this way. Chan and Changbin had done what they could to encourage him but mostly left it up to him — give him food when he needed it, urged him to drink liquids and get sleep when he was tired. Jeongin would have expected that Felix’s approach would have caused Hyunjin to dig his heels in harder, but it really did seem Hyunjin was weak to this kind of Felix.
Hyunjin let Felix tug him upright, both of them in t-shirts and their underwear, and then they dressed again, Felix in the sweatpants he must have shed before he got into the bed in the first place, Hyunjin in a pair of soft flannel pyjama pants. He found a hoodie too, oversized and dark, which he tugged over his head before he joined Jeongin in the hallway.
“It smells good,” Felix said, closing Hyunjin’s bedroom door behind himself. “What did hyung make?”
“Fried rice,” Jeongin said. “And kimchi jeon. And ramen.” At Felix’s slightly raised eyebrow, he added, “Honestly, he made enough to feed the entire family, even though he said it was just for me.”
Felix smiled at him, a little— knowing, in a way that made Jeongin’s ears feel hot. He felt like he’d spent so long hoarding all of the ways Minho cared for him, all the times he enjoyed Minho’s secret affection, that it was odd to have it be out in the open. To have it not just be a symptom of being the beloved baby of the group, but instead for everyone to know that it was because Minho loved Jeongin specifically.
“It was only for you, baby boy,” Minho called, from where he was getting bowls out from a cupboard in the kitchen. “But I’m feeling magnanimous. I’ll let you share.”
When Jeongin had been gone, Minho had done as he’d asked, and set up everything on the coffee table, and he handed the bowls, plastic ones, to Jeongin now for him to sit with. Jeongin gave him a smile, closed-lipped but as sweet as he could make it, and Minho gave him his own version back, small but there.
“Why are we eating on the floor?” Hyunjin asked.
Jeongin shrugged. “More comfortable,” he said.
This was probably not true, and he was surprised Hyunjin didn’t immediately call him on that or deny it, but he didn’t. He seemed beyond arguments like that. Instead, he took the bowl Jeongin passed him and folded down at a long end of the coffee table on one of the pillows from the couch.
Before Felix sat down, Minho said to him, “Your sister hasn’t eaten. She should eat.”
Felix looked surprised for a moment. Jeongin wasn’t sure if it was Minho being willing to share his food with, essentially, an outsider, or if it was that he’d forgotten about his sister entirely. “Oh,” he said, glancing down the hallway. “Yeah, I should go get her. Thanks, hyung.”
He went to go get Jisoo; Jeongin sat down opposite Hyunjin and smiled at him, but truthfully he didn’t really know what to say to Hyunjin. He wanted to ask what, exactly, had happened in the hospital, but he knew Hyunjin well enough to know that Hyunjin would not appreciate the questioning, and absolutely would not want to talk about it. He’d want to lick his wounds for a while longer before that.
So instead of saying anything, he just started to serve himself, moving some of the noodles from the ramen pot into his bowl. Felix was right, it did smell good, and it was savoury and spicy when he ate some of it. “Careful, baby boy,” Minho said, where he was looming over the two of them watching Jeongin eat. “It’s hot.”
It was indeed hot. Jeongin had to breathe through it for a few seconds. “It’s good,” he said, once he’d managed to swallow. Minho nodded, like that was to be expected, and then glanced at Hyunjin, who had not moved to eat all. He didn’t say anything, though. He just went back to the kitchen table to continue with what he’d been working on when Jeongin had first come upstairs and interrupted him.
There had been the sound of murmuring down the hallway and now Felix appeared with Jisoo, who was wearing a pair of leggings and a green sweater, a little oversized on her frame. She was wearing socks with little teddy bears on them, and in that moment, with the big sweater and the cute details to her clothing, she seemed more like Felix’s sister than she had done at any point so far. They looked just similar enough for the family association to not be shocking, but Jeongin might not have drawn the sibling connection without prior knowledge.
Felix had once said he looked more like his mother. Jeongin wondered if that meant Jisoo looked more like their father. He wondered what it was like to look in the mirror if that was the case.
Jisoo looked a little bit surprised by the feast spread out on the coffee table, but at Felix’s urging she sat down at the short end nearest to where Felix sat next to Hyunjin, her back to Minho at the table. She took one of the bowls and scooped some rice into it, as Felix did the same into another bowl. This one he set in front of Hyunjin.
“Eat,” he said, a murmur but firm with it. Hyunjin, at the very least, picked the bowl up.
Jeongin didn’t watch him, didn’t draw attention to Hyunjin’s stilted motions, his silence, the flat, blank look on his face. He ate some more of the ramen, as Jisoo ate her rice, and eventually, with Felix’s encouragement, Hyunjin ate too. There was silence for a long time, until Jisoo said, “Fuck, this food is so good.”
“Hyung made it,” Jeongin said, as smug as if he’d actually had a hand in it himself.
“Well, at least you won’t starve here,” Jisoo said to Felix, which got a weak smile at best. She had said it jokingly, but for the rest of them, they were all too aware of the difference between the Felix who sat with them now, and the Felix who had first come to live with them. He really had been starving then.
Hyunjin leaned forward and served himself more rice, without needing to be bullied into it. He’d had such a small amount before, but this time he took much more, and Felix gave him a beaming smile. Hyunjin had the look on his face of someone who had not really been aware of his own hunger until this moment, the way Jeongin sometimes felt when he had been playing computer games for too long.
“Wait,” he said, the thought only just hitting him. “Where’s Chan-hyung, is he not home too?”
“No,” said Felix, laying a slice of jeon on top of Hyunjin’s rice. “He stayed behind with Jisung at the hospital, someone had to stay with him.”
“Oh,” said Jeongin. That made sense, it did, but there was a twinge in his heart at the thought of Chan there alone, even if Jisung was awake now. But looking at Hyunjin, he could see why Felix had felt the need to stay with him. Just like he had done these past few days, Hyunjin needed him so, so much more.
He wriggled his phone out of his pocket and opened it to his chat with Chan. The last messages were from last night, Jeongin wishing Chan goodnight before he’d gone to sleep. A text because he hadn’t been able to do it in person. Now he shot off a quick message just to ask how Chan was doing, and for an update on Jisung.
Hyunjin looked up from his food, his reaction very delayed. “Chan-hyung didn’t drive you home?” he asked, very slowly.
“How was he supposed to do that,” Felix said, smiling at Hyunjin, sweet and fond. “You and Changbin-hyung took the car.”
“You didn’t come home with Changbin-hyung and Hyunjin-hyung?” Jeongin asked, confused. He’d assumed it had all happened together. “How did you get home, then?”
“I took a taxi,” Felix said. He said this very brightly, like he was a bit proud of himself for it.
Hyunjin, for his part, looked suddenly a little distressed. “Chan-hyung should have brought you home,” he said insistently.
Felix laughed, setting his empty bowl down on the table so he could squeeze Hyunjin’s shoulder with a small hand. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “I’m a grown boy. I can take a taxi home by myself in the middle of the daytime and not get into any kind of trouble. Chan-hyung gave me money for it too.”
Hyunjin was scowling, even as he continued to put spoonfuls of food in his mouth. It was a little bit like once he’d started he genuinely could not stop. “Last time you were out by yourself, you almost got kidnapped,” he said.
“What!” said Jisoo, almost fumbling her bowl onto the floor.
“That was ages ago,” Felix said, remarkably dismissive about something that had so obviously affected him. “And Chan-hyung shot those guys.”
“What,” said Jisoo again.
Hyunjin’s eyes flashed a little, although Jeongin could not have said what with. It was not anger, and it was impossible for it to be something unpleasant when directed at Felix, but it was probably not anything good. Before he could say anything, though, Jeongin’s phone buzzed with a text from Chan and they all fell silent as they looked at it. It was almost like something out of a comedy drama.
Jeongin opened up the message and skimmed through it. “Chan-hyung says Jisung-hyung is okay,” he said. “He says he’s doing really well, he’s much more awake and lucid now. Apparently they’re eating lunch together.”
“Ah, that’s good!” Felix said.
Hyunjin, bitter like the first bite into a lemon, said, “I’m glad the single-celled organism is improving.”
Silence fell again; Felix outright winced. Jeongin didn’t know what to say, he didn’t know what was expected of him like this. He probably shouldn’t know that Hyunjin and Jisung had fought, and so it was probably expected that he’d ask, but he couldn’t pretend, and he couldn’t ask, not when Hyunjin sounded like that. And so nobody said anything, and slowly they all resumed eating. Hyunjin took some of the ramen, ate a mouthful, and then gave it to Felix, something vaguely— nauseated on his face.
It was Jisoo who eventually broke the quiet, after enough time had passed. “I must say, Yongbok-ah,” she said, as she reached over to scoop some more rice onto her plate. “You certainly have found yourself a kind, handsome one.”
Jeongin was contractually obliged to make a gagging noise at the mere idea of Chan being handsome. Felix went so red it was surprising steam didn’t come out of his ears. “Ahhhh, noona!” he said, flapping at his face with his hands. “Don’t say things like that.”
“Why not,” Jisoo retorted. “It’s true, isn’t it? He takes care of you all, sits in the hospital with his friend. And he’s got a great face, not to mention the six-pack.” How do you know he has one of those, Jeongin almost asked, except that he’d lived with Chan for over a decade now; it would have probably been more surprising if she hadn’t seen him undressed. “Does he have any brothers?”
Felix, wordlessly, pointed to Jeongin, who flashed Jisoo a little peace sign. She eyed him with something speculative in her eyes — not like she was interested in him, but more like she hadn’t realised the family relationship there before. Jeongin could almost see her doing the same thing Felix had done when he first arrived: cataloguing the similarities in their looks and realising there were none.
“Ah, well,” Jisoo said on an eventual sigh. “You’ve got your own handsome man, too.” In the corner of Jeongin’s eye, he saw Minho turn to the group of them, and when Jeongin looked over, Minho was blinking a little bit, like hearing it had both pleased and slightly shocked him. Jeongin caught his eye; Minho looked back, but his ears were a little red, before he turned back to his work. Jisoo waved a hand at Hyunjin, playfully dismissive. “And you’re too pretty for me.”
Hyunjin had probably been told he was pretty more times in his life than Jeongin could ever hope to count, but Jeongin didn’t think it had ever been considered a criticism before. He watched Hyunjin absorb the words, absorb the tone with which they had been said, and he smiled, just barely there. He didn’t say anything.
The keypad sounded, all of their heads whipping around to see who it was in almost comical unison, as if it could be more than a limited handful of people. Unsurprisingly, it was Changbin, stepping inside with a couple of plates in his hands. He looked a little bit alarmed to find everyone’s eyes on him. “Um, hello,” he said.
“Hi, hyung,” Felix said cheerfully. “Are those dirty or are you coming for food? Minho-hyung made us some, but we can share.”
“Dirty,” said Changbin, walking further into the kitchen. “From mine and Seungmin’s lunch.”
There was something about the way he said it that was almost a challenge. A little barbed, like he was trying to make a point. Jeongin didn’t know who to, because he just internally rolled his eyes, and Hyunjin clearly didn’t think much of it, and Felix said, “Oh, just leave them in the sink, we’ll wash them with the rest of ours later.”
“Oh,” said Changbin. “Thanks, Felix.”
“You know,” Hyunjin said, tone aggressively casual, almost mocking with it, “if Jisoo-noona likes them sweet and beefy, then Changbin-hyung might interest her; he’s chronically single.”
The plates clattered into the sink, Changbin fumbling as he set them down. He glanced back at them, the whites of his eyes flashing wide.
“I believe the phrase for that, Hyunjin-ah, is married to the job,” Minho said, very faux-idle, not looking up from his paperwork. Jeongin had to roll his lips together to stop from laughing.
Jisoo’s gaze flittered from face to face, confusion notching her brow, and then said, “He’s single?”
Oh god, Jeongin thought, desperately close to laughing now, as Changbin looked even more like a deer caught in headlights. At the table, Minho outright snorted, and didn’t even bother trying to mask it with a cough.
“Yes?” said Hyunjin, clearly confused.
“Oh,” said Jisoo, just as confused. “I thought…”
She trailed off. Next to Hyunjin, Felix had made his eyes very big, a warning in and of itself, although not one particularly intimidating. He looked very much like someone who was simply begging without words, and even if she didn’t understand why, Jisoo understood that look. Jeongin, too, understood that look — he didn’t know how, or when, but Felix had clearly found out about Changbin and Seungmin’s relationship too.
Perhaps it was the same way Jisoo knew. Astonishing that she had spent barely any time with them at all and had so quickly sniffed out something that had been a secret for so long.
“Ha!” said Changbin. “Ha ha.” He sounded like someone mimicking what they thought human laughter sounded like, having never heard it before. He pointed to the door, movements so awkward Jeongin winced. “I’m going to just— go see if Seungmin needs any more help,” he said, and then he fled. If Jeongin looked up the word flee in the dictionary, he would have seen the way Changbin moved just now.
“That was weird,” Hyunjin said. “Weird even for Changbin-hyung.”
His heart wasn’t in it, that much as obvious. He’d set his bowl down at some point in the conversation and it was almost scraped clean. He was blinking slowly, and he was very obviously leaning against Felix now. There was the oddest sense of deja vu, but not — a role reversal, from that first group dinner that Felix had been here for. The two of them sitting side by side, Felix slowly falling asleep against Hyunjin’s arm. Except now it was Hyunjin, his face a little slack with it.
“Aw, Hyunjin,” Felix said. “Maybe you should go take a nap, hm?”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Hyunjin said. But when Felix stood and started helping him upright, Hyunjin mostly shook off his hands and did it himself. He swayed, just once, when he was upright, and said to Felix, like he was trying to bargain, “Maybe just a short one.”
“Sure,” agreed Felix. “I’ll wake you up later. You can take a shower, too, after you wake up. Finally get all the dirt out of your hair.”
“A bath,” Jeongin put in. He knew how much Hyunjin loved baths, how often he had taken them when they first moved in here and there was a tub. It had tapered off as time moved on but sitting in the hot water had brought him so much joy, to feel the heat over every part of his body. A bath would be good for him, Jeongin thought. Hyunjin deserved something good like that.
“Mm,” Hyunjin said, blinking heavily at Jeongin. “A bath.”
Felix had to help him down the hallway to his room, supporting his weight, but it didn’t seem like it was a bad thing, not like back in the hospital. It just looked like it was crashing down on Hyunjin now, all of it — the concussion, the full stomach, the lack of sleep and lack of rest. They could hear Felix talking to him quietly through the open bedroom door, the cadence but not the words. Then there was the soft click of the door closing.
When Felix came back, he looked— tired all over again. He gave Jeongin a smile, but Jeongin shifted restlessly on the floor and said, “Hyung, what’s going on here? What happened at the hospital? Chan-hyung just said that they fought but why?”
Felix closed his eyes, a long moment of nothing, and then when he opened them, he looked right at Jisoo, still sitting on the floor, her empty bowl in front of her. “Noona,” he said, gently but like he was expecting an argument. “I have something I need to talk to Jeongin about. Do you mind…”
There was a beat of silence, and then, surprisingly, Jisoo didn’t argue. Instead, she got to her feet with a huff of air that didn’t actually sound annoyed. “Fine,” she said, already heading to the front door. “I guess I’ll go find chronically single Changbin.” The sarcasm in her tone was impressive. “Thank you for the food,” she tossed at Minho, who nodded at her, and then she was gone.
Jeongin really liked her, he decided. She kept people on their toes, which was always fun.
Felix sat back down at the coffee table, opposite Jeongin now. He looked serious, in that way that always looked off on his face. People said, sometimes, that Jeongin’s face was made for smiling, but he wasn’t sure if that was because it was true or because when he didn’t smile, he knew he could look severe. But Felix really did have a face made for smiling. Without one, or even the hint of one, he looked a little bit too much like a perfect oil painting.
He was quiet for a few seconds. Jeongin let him be, let him gather his thoughts. Eventually Felix said, “Hyunjin kissed Jisung, at Blackbird’s. When he thought Jisung was going to die.”
“Oh!” said Jeongin, much, much too loudly. But he couldn’t help it, not when those were possibly some of the last words he’d expected out of Felix’s mouth. How awful to think about it happening— he thought about it, of Hyunjin holding a bleeding Jisung, kissing him for the first and possibly last time, and felt an urge to crawl into Minho’s lap and cling. That could have been him, he knew; the wound on Minho’s side haunted him.
But all the same— he would never have expected a kiss. A physical thing, something he might have thought Hyunjin utterly incapable of.
“And now Jisung is awake,” Felix continued, tone heavy, “and thinks Hyunjin kissed him as a favour, because, according to Jisung, Hyunjin is in love with me.”
“Oh,” said Jeongin again. There was no excitement in his voice now, everything stripped out of it. He didn’t need to look in a mirror to know he looked comically crestfallen.
At the table, Minho snorted again. Felix glanced at him, and then at Jeongin, and then shrugged a little. “Yeah,” he said. “I tried to talk to Jisung but— he wasn’t doing good. He was struggling and I didn’t want to explain it too much because I couldn’t, not without revealing too much of Hyunjin, but— yeah.”
He looked defeated, in that moment, and Jeongin reached across the table and took his hand, squeezing it lightly. He wondered how much work Felix had been doing behind the scenes for Hyunjin to have been capable of kissing Jisung even on his apparent deathbed. Because the Hyunjin who had existed even right before Felix came would not have done that.
“This is kind of a mess,” Jeongin said.
“It really is,” Felix said, sighing. “And if you have any suggestions on how to fix it, I’m all ears, Jeongin-ah.”
Jeongin thought for a few moments, Felix’s hand warm in his. “Well,” he said slowly. Felix perked up a bit at the implication that Jeongin might have a plan. “I think— we take Jisung-hyung, and we take Hyunjin-hyung, right?” Felix nodded. “And then we put them in a room together and then we simply lock the door.”
At the table, Minho started to laugh, a proper laugh but one that had clearly taken him by surprise. The sound of it made Jeongin beam, even as Felix’s smile— faltered. It had been a joke, mostly because Jeongin didn’t think he’d ever have the nerve to actually lock Hyunjin up somewhere, but he thought there was merit to the concept.
“Ah, Jeongin,” said Felix. “That sounds a little bit like a worse case scenario kind of plan.”
“Well,” said Jeongin, a little grimly. “We’d better hope it doesn’t get to that then, huh?”
——
Jisoo hadn’t, thus far, seen much of this building that Yongbok was now calling home. She had been shown around the apartment on the top floor, and been invited to the workroom on the first, and everything in between had very clearly been off-limits in some regard. She had not needed to be warned to not go poking around looking — she was smarter than that, and besides, the areas outside the apartment were littered with cameras. She’d seen on the screens in the workroom that they were always watching too.
The surveillance should have made her uncomfortable. There’d been cameras at home, too, in almost every corner, and she knew her father kept an eye on them. They’d taken risks, her and Narae and Yongbok, when their father was away, and sometimes it was fine, and sometimes Yongbok had paid for it. But the cameras here didn’t feel like that. There was something close to friendly about them. She almost gave the one between the third and second floors a wave.
The second floor was the only one she had any idea about. This, from her understanding of bits she’d gleaned so far, was where Minho and Jeongin lived. Jeongin, she was still getting used to — he came across as much too young for this kind of business, although he was very obviously an adult. There was an innocence to him that she found a little off-putting. Maybe it was just all the time she’d spent around her father’s men these past months, locked inside with his thugs watching over her. Innocence seemed remarkable to her.
Minho though— now there was a gentleman. He had been perfectly polite to her since she’d arrived, and courteous, too, holding the heavy workroom door open for her a couple of times. She hadn’t really needed it, but she’d appreciated it all the same, because it had been done with no air of condescension to it. He had offered her food, and made sure she was okay while Yongbok was away. She was not sure if he liked her, necessarily, but he certainly seemed to give her a certain level of respect. A novelty, for her.
The stairway echoed with her footsteps, her sneakers slapping as she continued downstairs. Maybe she should have been curious about the rest of this building, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t the curious type, not really. She’d learned how to keep her nose clean from a young age, to keep to herself and not make any waves. She was not a pushover, not the way Yongbok was, but she knew when to pick her fights. And he had very clearly not wanted her to hear whatever it was that he had to say to his friends.
It was about Hyunjin, that much was obvious, Hyunjin and that boy who was stuck in that hospital bed — Jisung, she thought they’d said. He’d looked very small in that bed, and she’d felt quite sorry for him, having to go up against her father’s men, brutish to a fault. Hyunjin, however, she was unsure about. He was close to Yongbok, that had become very clear, and he was beautiful, possibly one of the most beautiful people she’d ever seen. Certainly not her type, as she’d said, but— still, she had eyes. And even under the bruising and cuts, he was gorgeous.
He seemed like he might be kind of— rude, though. Maybe he just wasn’t at his best but thus far almost everything out of his mouth had been tinged with a remarkable meanness. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, her sweet, gullible little brother so close to someone who seemed to have quite the force of character.
She was worried about that with Chris, too— or Chan, as he was actually called. How very Yongbok, she thought, to have found a handsome man, older and seemingly wealthy, and kind beyond what Yongbok had ever thought he would get in his life. She understood it, after all — she had daddy issues too, but still. She had never taken her brother for cliche.
She knocked her knuckles against the door of the workroom, waiting a moment or two before she actually slipped inside. The hallway had been very cold, and her in just her leggings and sweater. Inside it was much warmer, with a space heater chugging away, doing its very best against the concrete floor and concrete walls.
Seungmin was looking at her as she came in, an eyebrow raised. “You are astonishingly like your brother sometimes,” he said.
She chose to ignore that. “Hello, Seungmin-sshi,” she said, and then raised an eyebrow at Changbin, who was sitting at the big slab of a workbench that took up so much space. “Hello, chronically single Changbin-sshi.”
He went red again, and said, “Don’t!”
Seungmin was frowning, his gaze going in between them. It did not appear that Changbin had told him what had gone on upstairs, because he said, confused and sounding slightly pissed off about it, “What?”
“Your pretty boy upstairs informed me that if I’m looking for someone to date, Changbin-sshi is single for me to pick up,” Jisoo said to Seungmin, while Changbin spluttered a little bit. “Which obviously is confusing to me, since I was under the impression you two were together. Either that or you are the most suspicious pair of brothers I’ve ever met.”
“We’re not brothers,” Seungmin said. It came out very flat, but he was a little pink, too, now, as he got up to date with the situation. Even just a few days had been enough to show her that he was a prickly little thing, inclined towards solitude, although he’d let her be down here quite a bit. Probably because she was quiet. But pink across the nose like this, some of that self-contained pissyness stripped away, he was good looking — he was very good looking.
“So then you’re lovers,” she said.
“Noona,” Changbin said, pleadingly. He was twisted on his stool, looking up at her like he was a minute out from getting onto his knees to actually beg. Changbin had been as polite to her as Minho, but he seemed like he might be easier to boss around and truthfully, if he had been single, she might not have been against giving it a try. But he was not single; this was a house of carnal relations out the ears. “Please don’t say anything to the others yet.”
She eyed him, then Seungmin, who did not look inclined to beg her. His mouth was twisted, almost like he didn’t expect her to keep the secret. He didn’t trust her, maybe, or maybe he was just the type to not trust anyone, and she was, after all, a stranger. She understood that; in fact, more than that, she respected that kind of thing.
She wondered why it was secret though. But the more she got to know these people, the more she realised exactly why it was that Yongbok felt so comfortable here, why he didn’t want to come with her to wherever she went next. He’d found a home here, with all these men who were exactly like he was, a home he never could have had with their father. A home where even she could just exist, with all these men, and never have to worry.
She didn’t even have to lock her bedroom door here. She did so, because she had grown up that way, but she knew that she didn’t have to.
“I won’t say anything,” she said. “Who am I going to tell? Yongbok already knows.”
Seungmin grumbled something under his breath. Then he turned back to his computer screens, as if to say, I’m done. Changbin gave him a helpless little look, both unsure but also very fond, and then said, “Why are you down here? I thought you were all eating.”
“We finished,” Jisoo said, “and then I got thrown out. I came to see if I could help Seungmin sift through some more of the information.”
The line of Seungmin’s shoulders went stiff. There was still a crazy amount of stuff to sort out on the digital files, and he had been doing the bulk of it himself, she knew, with his computers and screens. He didn’t even always know what was truly significant and what wasn’t, and as she’d been helping Minho with the jewellery and the like, he’d asked her for advice a couple of times. She could help him, and they both knew it.
Changbin apparently knew it too, because he said, “Baby, let her help. You were just complaining that your head hurts.”
Another moment, and then Seungmin sighed and turned to give her a little side-glare that barely registered for her, and said, “Fine. Bring a stool over.”
She did as she was told, happy to be able to help even more with this project at utterly destroying her father, and in her gratitude, she didn’t even let the stool legs screech on the floor.
——
Jeongin held Minho’s hand on the entire car ride, and then through the halls once they arrived at the hospital, and Minho was grateful for it every second of the way. Their bodies swayed together as they walked side by side, Jeongin’s shoulder bumping his. It was grounding. Jeongin said nothing of the strength of Minho’s grip, or the way his palm was clammy, and grew more so as they approach Jisung’s room.
It wasn’t even the idea of being in the same space as Jisung that was causing Minho’s nerves — though that didn’t help. Seeing Jisung so wounded was a particular kind of horror. But no, it was Minho’s own memories, slowly sucking him backwards in time, no matter how he tried to turn from them.
He dreamed of hospitals a few times a month, but being at one in person was so much worse. His sense memory recreated the pungent scents and reverberating sounds and sharp lighting well enough, but it was nothing compared to the experience in person. How very— chafing it was, how it grated at Minho.
The worst of it was that his admittance to a hospital all those years ago had been his own fault. He could have circumvented the ordeal altogether if he’d just— let things happen as usual. Been brave, taken it as his due.
Instead he’d tried to opt out.
Jeongin looked at him, face tipping over. “You okay?” he whispered, just loud enough that the sound of a nurse running an empty stretcher past them didn’t drown him out.
“Yes,” Minho said, low.
It took a few seconds and then Jeongin faced forward again, quickening his stride. All he said in response was hmm.
The door to Jisung’s room was closed, and from beyond the tiny inset window, the light from beyond shone through. Minho had to drop Jeongin’s hand to grab the doorknob, finding it unlocked. The metal was cold after the warmth of Jeongin’s hand. He held the door open for Jeongin to go in first.
Both occupants of the room had been sleeping when they came in, and they also roused at the sound of the door, Chan a bit faster than Jisung. He’d just been dozing, sitting wedged into the corner of the couch, his elbow on the arm, head propped up on his hand.
“Hm?” he said as the door swung shut, his eyes blearily opening and head raising. When he saw them he said, “Oh, hey guys,” before his mouth cracked wide on a yawn, and he stretched his arms above his head.
Jisung made a garbled, confused kind of sound, and when Minho looked at him, small and hooked up to all his machines, he was trying to open his eyes, and they were apparently sticking. One came halfway open while the other stayed shut for a beat. Minho wanted to laugh at him but felt a bit too sad to do it.
Jeongin was beaming, and he left Minho’s side in favour of bounding over to the bed, crying out, “Hyung!”
Minho was about to caution him from being overly rough, but Jisung, bleary though he was, evidently saw danger approaching. “Ah, ah, gentle, Jeongin-ah,” Jisung said, the words slurring a tad, his body stirring under the blanket, “gentle, please.”
Jeongin slowed, and with exaggerated care, he sat on the edge of Jisung’s bed, taking up one of Jisung’s hands. “You’re okay,” Jeongin said, relief and love all wrapped up in his tone. “You’re awake.”
“Sure,” Jisung said weakly, his eyes all puffy still, barely opened into slits.
Minho felt a tug on his hand, as Chan came over and took the bag from him. He blinked at Chan, who paid no mind as he took the bag over and set it down on the table with a little sigh. “Everything alright at home?” Chan asked him softly. He didn’t snoop into the bag. He’d apparently just wanted to relieve Minho of carrying it.
“As alright as it can be,” Minho said slowly, brain just a touch behind. His words gained clarity and speed as he continued to speak. “Hyunjin’s in a tiff, but he ate lunch, they all did. Seungmin— Kim Seungmin is nearly done with all his— whatever he is doing. The information. And I’ve catalogued all the assets we retrieved from the job.”
Chan bobbed his head in a nod, hands on his hips. “Alright, that’s good, I’ll have to talk to Seungmin tonight,” he said, halfway to himself. To Minho he added, “I had them put clean sheets and stuff on the cot, are you sure you’re okay staying overnight?
Minho bared his teeth in a mockery of a smile. “I’ll endure it.”
“We’ll be alright, Chan-hyung,” Jeongin called from his seat at the edge of Jisung’s bed, his large hand still holding Jisung’s. “Go home, get some rest.”
Chan gave Jeongin a long, fond look, that Jeongin didn’t see because he was talking softly to a Jisung that did not look entirely in the room yet. Minho understood the sentiment — he was only here because Jeongin wanted to be, and there was little else that would have persuaded Minho to spend a night in such a wretched place.
“I’ll leave the car for you,” Chan said to Minho on his way out. “They were saying he could be released tomorrow, and if so you’ll need it. I’ll take a taxi.”
Minho nodded, not feeling the need to respond, and then Chan left, pulling on his long black coat as he went. Once he was out of sight Minho stared at the closed door for a beat, before forcing himself to look back at the bed.
It had not changed, the sight in front of him. Jisung still lay there, a little plastic oxygen tube running under his nose. And Jeongin still sat beside him. Minho’s nightmare was fresh in his mind, and he felt a little guilt, that he would rather see Jisung in that bed, than Jeongin. He’d rather see many things, before seeing Jeongin in a hospital bed.
“Are you hungry, hyung?” Jeongin was asking. “Minho-hyung made samgyetang, and we have rice too.”
Jisung’s face went squishy in thought. “I’m— hungry, yeah, but maybe not for something salty right now— Chan-hyung ate all my fruit cups, didn’t he?” His voice went a little mullish at the end.
Minho glanced at the little trash bin beside the couch, saw three empty plastic fruit cups inside. “I think your hoard of fruit has been decimated, yes,” Minho said, and Jisung deflated back into his pillows sadly. It was odd, seeing him like this. Some of it was the pain, no doubt, but a lot of it was also likely the drugs, being fed to him through that IV drip.
Jeongin rose from the bed, saying, “They’re just from the cafeteria, yeah? I can go grab more, it should still be open.” He came over and casually put his hand into the front pocket of Minho’s jeans, drawing out his wallet. Minho looked at him sharply, but Jeongin just smiled back at him and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Jisung watched the interaction, still all squishy-sullen, and he didn’t stop his bleary glowering even after Jeongin had left. Minho did not like being so squinted at, but he wasn’t about to tell the human pincushion to knock it off, so he turned to the table and began emptying out the bag they’d brought with them. Several containers of samgyetang, because if he was making it for Jisung then he was going to make sure Jeongin had some too. A book for himself, innocuous, and Jeongin’s brightly coloured game console. Some gauze and medical tape, because Jeongin insisted on tending to Minho’s little wound every night. And lastly, he’d brought a brand new and therefore blank notebook and pen, in which he could take heavily coded notes, if he so wanted. He wasn’t so stupid as to bring any of his files or other notes here, but he could maybe get a bit of work done anyway.
As he moved, Jisung’s voice came from behind him, pout obvious, “Hyunjin’s in a tiff?”
“Yes.” Minho did not turn around, eyes on his own hands, folding the tote bag up and setting it aside.
“He’s mad at me.”
No shit, Minho thought, maybe a little uncharitably. He’d be pissed too if he was in Hyunjin’s shoes, and that was him. He couldn’t imagine what he’d be feeling if he was Hyunjin himself. Vain and prickly and easily mortified, Hyunjin. Tempering his voice into mildness, Minho said, “Apparently so.”
Silence followed, aside from the hum of the machines. Minho, after staring down at the array on the table, snatched up his book and took it to the couch. He was already beginning to feel— twitchy, without Jeongin. That composure he held clipped into place like armour was not so easy to reach for.
He sat where Chan had been, crossing his leg over the other, and opened his book to the page he’d marked. The cushion still held a ghost of Chan’s warmth. Out of the corner of Minho’s eyes, he could still see the bed, see Jisung’s face turned toward him. It wasn’t a sharp kind of stare, in fact Jisung seemed to be thinking hard, his concussion doing him no favours. His soft face was dumpling-like, all screwed up in thought, mouth downturned and eyebrows heavy over his eyes in a scowl.
Minho stared down at his book in faux-idleness, not intaking a single word. It took much of his willpower to not shake his leg to expel the nervous energy building in him. How far was the cafeteria— at what point should he begin to worry? They should be safe here, but Jeongin was Jeongin, and he could be a magnet for trouble—
“But why is he mad at me?” Jisung finally muttered, like he’d needed all that time to run through the approximately three dots to connect and then still come up with nothing.
Minho snapped his book shut, looking at Jisung properly now — Jisung’s face was turned toward him but his gaze was low and unfocused, more in the direction of Minho’s knee than anything else. He was still frowning, still thinking. Minho could not keep from scathingly saying, “You have a melon for a brain.”
For a moment, it was like Jisung hadn’t even heard him. Then slowly his eyes raised, and his expression cleared some, leaving the faintest notch between his brows. He blinked at Minho, a little surprised, and Minho realised Jisung hadn’t even meant to speak his query aloud. What the fuck is in that IV drip, he wondered.
Then the insult filtered through. “Aw, hyung, don’t sweet talk me,” Jisung said, slow, like his response was not born of thought but rather dredged up from the depths of his instincts.
Minho clutched his book hard, warping the soft cover into a gentle arc. He could not smack a man with a concussion upside the head. He could not. Jisung was a person, not a malfunctioning television from the nineties. Giving him a solid whack was not likely to improve his condition.
It was a stroke of luck that the door opened then, and Jeongin came in, carrying a plastic bag swinging heavily. “I’m back!” he said unnecessarily, smiling widely, and Minho let the immediate swell of endearment soothe away at least some of his jitters and annoyance.
When Jeongin put the bag on the table, it fell over, tipping out a cornucopia of fruit cups. “Baby boy,” Minho said faintly, “how many did you buy?”
“I don’t know, I just handed them man-won and asked how many fruit cups that would get me, and it was this many,” Jeongin said, coming over and holding out Minho’s wallet. He took it, the leather warm from Jeongin’s hand, and then set it on the side table along with his book. Jeongin returned to the side of Jisung’s bed but just to gently place three fruit cups atop his thighs. He began unwrapping a plastic spoon and asked, “Do you need me to feed you?”
Jisung got a look upon his face like he was going to say yes, just because he thought it would be funny, but after a pause said, “No, it’s probably good for me to do it myself. Hand-eye-coordination, or whatever.”
Jeongin handed him the unwrapped spoon, and when he turned back around he was still smiling, though there was an edge to it as he looked at Minho. “It’s time to change your bandages,” he said, sweetly sharp.
Minho kept himself from hitching a sigh. “Baby boy—”
“I’m going to wash my hands, be right back,” Jeongin trilled, and he went into the bathroom, not quite latching the door behind himself.
Jisung, a piece of gelatined pineapple balanced precariously on his spoon, said, “You’re injured?”
“Hardly,” Minho replied, terse. He was healing just fine, it was barely more than a scrape. When Jisung just stared at him, Minho said, “Eat your fruit, melon head.”
With exaggerated motions, Jisung chomped down on his spoon, the noise of teeth on plastic reminiscent of childhood, somehow. If he kept up the bit he would get syrup all down his front — Jisung might’ve been conscious but he was clearly wobbly. So Minho looked away, depriving Jisung of his audience, and not long after Jeongin came back out. He gathered up the gauze, tape, and little bottle of saline and brought it all over to the couch, sitting next to Minho.
“Let me see it,” Jeongin said, still perfectly pleasant. Like he knew he was going to get his way no matter what.
He was right. Biting back another sigh, Minho pulled one arm out of his sweater, bringing that side of the garment up to bunch up around the side of his neck. This bared his left flank, while keeping his chest partially covered at a slant. He put his left arm along the back of the couch, behind Jeongin, reclining slightly as he did so. The air was cold, biting, and his nipples pebbled with it, goosebumps rising along his exposed arm.
Jeongin leaned in. “Thank you,” he said, fingernail already peeling up an edge of the medical tape sticking a rectangle of gauze to Minho’s skin. His touches doing this were always light, careful, but efficient.
The tape wasn’t too strong but it still yanked at the light fuzz along his side as Jeongin peeled it away. Normally that wouldn’t phase him, but they were on day three of this treatment, and the skin was beginning to get tender. Minho sensed, rather than saw, Jisung’s snooping stare.
“Oh, it’s looking really good,” Jeongin said, setting the soiled gauze off to the side absently, his eyes trained on Minho’s flank. Minho looked at that gauze, the rusty brown mixed with the orange-ish yellow of healing, and then went back to looking at Jeongin, the determined tip of his brows, the soft fall of his hair. He was running his thumb just under the wound, back and forth, so gentle, so careful. “It isn’t inflamed at all, it already looks so much better.”
Minho made a little noise of acknowledgement. He’d already known it would heal fine, but he didn’t reiterate that. If Jeongin wanted to fuss, Minho would let him fuss. Especially when it got Jeongin’s hands on him like this, every brush of his fingertips almost hot on his chilled skin. So warm, so soft, little butterfly kisses of sensation.
He held still as Jeongin dabbed saline lightly over the wound, made only a slight hiss of sound at the sting of it. “I know, I’ve got you,” Jeongin whispered, still so focused, and Minho sank down a little in his seat, spreading his knees a bit.
Minho wasn’t in the mood, but he wasn’t not in the mood, exactly, either. They hadn’t fucked since before the heist, and as much as he hated this place and how it made him feel like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, he was only a man, after all. And Jeongin would forever be like a siren call over still waters. Even now, in this starkly lit, grim place, Minho wanted him. Knew he could lose himself in him, in the pleasure of Jeongin’s body.
He lost himself a little, even now. Thoughts turning to brief, flickering images; images of pushing Jeongin back so he was spread out on this tiny couch, of pulling his sweatpants down around his narrow thighs—
“And, done,” Jeongin said brightly, hands lifting away, and Minho blinked. He hadn’t even noticed Jeongin taping new gauze on.
He watched Jeongin begin to clean up for a moment, gathering all the materials off his lap, and then meaningfully murmured, “You’ve forgotten something.”
Jeongin’s head whipped over, and he stared at Minho, cheeks pinkening, and then glanced beyond Minho, to where Jisung was in his bed. He turned even pinker, and he looked back at Minho and in a whisper-shout, said, “Hyung!”
Minho said nothing, simply raised an eyebrow in wordless expectation.
Shy, Jeongin squirmed, his gaze lowering. But he bent down and kissed the bandage over the wound, Minho feeling the gentle pressure of it even through the gauze.
Minho’s cock twitched in his jeans, and he let out a forcefully steady breath between his teeth. Jeongin didn’t look up as he sat back, face still pink, the colour diffused all the way down his neck.
“Good boy,” Minho said softly, just to watch the words land, Jeongin shivering as he stood, skittering over to the little trash can.
Slowly, Minho pulled his sweater back on properly, careful not to move in a way that tugged at his wound. His cock was pulsing with his heartbeat, but he wasn’t hard. He was just— aware of it.
Jeongin was turned away, in front of the table, but he wasn’t touching anything on it, just standing there, like a sim left idle. He was chewing on the fingers of his left hand. The ear Minho could see was still blushed.
There was, a very faint, kind of nasal snort. Minho forced himself to look away from Jeongin, and saw Jisung, laid fully back against his pile of pillows, eyes closed and head lolled to the side a little, empty fruit cup and spoon cradled in his lap. He was sleeping, or pretending to. Minho didn’t really care. The heart monitor showed his little squiggly line still spiking up and down, so he was alive either way.
He looked back at Jeongin, who lowered his hand away from his mouth. “The room next door is empty,” Jeongin whispered. His bottom lip was shiny with spit.
Minho stared at him, and then felt a smile spread, slow and sharp, across his face.
——
Perhaps the kind of cab drivers who picked people up from hospitals knew better than to try chatting, because this one, unlike the one of the night of the heist, took Chan’s destination without a word and got him there in complete silence, only the radio playing gently in the background. Perhaps he just saw how tired Chan looked; he caught sight of himself in the reflection of the darkened window and even in almost black-and-white he looked exhausted.
The taxi let him out a couple of blocks from the house, and Chan walked back with his arms loose at his sides, just in case, keeping to the lights of the streetlamps. It was late enough that it would have been dark even in the summer but in the winter like this, it was the kind of dark that seemed— sucking, every open alleyway feeling like a black hole that no light could penetrate. He was used to this city, and knew that he was one of the things that should be feared in it. And yet, all the same, he was a little unnerved by the dark.
A relief then, to be home, to let himself in the back door and make his way up all the stairs, to the apartment, where the kitchen light had been left on for some reason. No darkness here, just clean countertops and the lingering smell of food. Everything was still in here, though; nobody had been around for a while, that much was clear.
He took his shoes off and padded silently down the hallway to his bedroom. He heard the sound of the hairdryer as he approached, but he was still a little surprised when he opened his bedroom door and found Hyunjin sitting on the floor in there, Felix sitting on the bed behind him, drying his hair off. Hyunjin looked at him, without saying a word, his eyes darkly shadowed still. He looked like he needed to sleep for a full twenty-four hours, and Chan kind of hoped he managed something like that.
Hyunjin had clearly showered; probably Felix’s work. Even from the doorway, Chan could smell the rose scent of the body wash that Hyunjin favoured, a much milder scent than the apple one that Jeongin had been using for the past year. He was wearing clean pyjamas, a matching set, dark green flannel that looked warm and comfortable. He sat patiently as Felix held the hairdryer above his head, turned down to the lowest setting, possibly to soften the noise a bit.
Felix gave Chan a smile, looking tired himself. It had been an early morning and, Chan had no doubt, a long day spent looking after Hyunjin as best as he could. Chan had been getting updates via the others wherever possible but for the first time he’d really wished that Felix had a phone so that Chan could message him directly. Wherever Hyunjin’s phone had been left in his bedroom before the job, he’d clearly not looked at it. Probably just as well, with his concussion.
“Hello, you two,” Chan said, voice pitched to carry just over the sound of the hairdryer. He shut the bedroom door behind himself and started taking his coat off, glad to have the thick material away from his body now.
“Hey, hyung,” said Felix. “Sorry, we’ll be done in here soon, I think.”
“It’s okay,” Chan said. And it was, it was always okay, to see the two of them like this. Felix’s hand carding gently through Hyunjin’s hair as he dried it, very carefully avoiding the healing head wound Hyunjin had. Chan would have liked to peek at it himself, see what it looked like. He could not imagine that it had been pleasant for Hyunjin to wash his hair with it, but he did look better, now that every inch of his skin had been cleaned off.
“Minho-hyung and Jeongin got there okay?” Felix asked. He must have felt the way Hyunjin stiffened slightly against his legs, Chan certainly noticed it happening, but Felix didn’t show any indication that he had. Felix got away with this kind of thing, Chan thought. Chan was beginning to get the feeling that Felix had been pushing Hyunjin ever since he got here, not shying away from the harder subjects, or from things Hyunjin didn’t really want to talk about, the way Chan always had done. He’d always operated on the principle that Hyunjin would come to him if he wanted to talk, but perhaps there’d been stagnation in that. Maybe not; Hyunjin had clearly been doing a lot of work all on his own.
“Yeah,” Chan said. He’d taken his coat off and hung it back up and now felt a little bit at a loss. He went to the bed and hovered for a moment, before he sat down next to Felix. Hyunjin, who sometimes didn’t like it if people sat behind him, didn’t move. “I’m not sure how Minho is going to cope in the hospital all night, but at least Jeongin is with him.”
Felix turned off the hairdryer. The silence was— loud, it was the only way to describe it. “Does Minho-hyung not like hospitals?”
“No,” said Chan. He hadn’t been fully aware of it, and when Jeongin had said it a few days ago, when they’d gathered there for the aftermath of what had happened to Jisung, Chan had assumed that he’d just been making up an excuse for Minho. But it had been obvious when Minho and Jeongin first got there that Minho was not happy. His jaw had been tense enough to break a rock on.
Felix hummed under his breath. He ran his hand slightly through the ends of Hyunjin’s hair, maybe testing the dryness, before he said, “And how’s Jisung doing?”
Hyunjin scowled at the floor but didn’t turn that face on Felix. There was something going on here that Chan couldn’t quite see all the strands of, a push and pull between them that he thought had maybe been going on for longer than he’d known. It was unusual to see Felix pushing so hard at something that he knew would make Hyunjin uncomfortable. Unusual for Felix, in particular, but unusual for them all — nobody pushed Hyunjin if they could help it.
“He’s okay,” Chan said, trying to match Felix’s casual tone, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Hyunjin, who, despite the dark expression on his face, was leaning slowly back against Felix’s legs. “He slept a lot of the afternoon away. The pain medication they have him on has him pretty out of it, but he seems to be doing well.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and as he was digging it out, Felix nodded, smiling growing wider. “That’s good,” he said. “I’m really glad to hear that.”
Hyunjin let out a soft huff of breath. He was leaning properly back against Felix now, and a lot of the annoyance had dropped away leaving only tiredness behind. Properly clean like this, his hair dry and soft around his face, the bruising was very obvious. His poor boy, his face black and blue, the nicks and cuts red with healing. What a long few days it had been for him.
What a long few days it had been for Chan, too. The text message was from Seungmin, short and to the point as per Seungmin’s usual style: it’s all ready. bring felix down with you.
Whatever was on his face must have been obvious, because Felix, his thumb rubbing small circles into an increasingly slumped Hyunjin’s temple, said, “What is it, hyung?”
“It’s just Seungmin,” Chan said. “He wants to see me and you downstairs. It’s about— it’s about your father.”
Felix’s hand went still, his eyes flicking to Chan’s, before he resumed his small movements. Chan couldn’t blame him. He’d avoided any kind of reminder, these last few weeks, that Felix was the Magpie’s son. If asked, he might have said it was for Felix’s sake, to not bring up painful memories — I stopped being his the moment I became yours, he’d said, and Chan remembered those words daily. But in reality, it had been a selfish urge, and he didn’t think it had been doing any favours.
“Okay,” Felix said quietly.
Chan tucked that loose piece of hair behind Felix’s ear and then hunkered down in front of Hyunjin and ran his hand through Hyunjin’s hair, making sure to avoid where his head wound was. Hyunjin, very half-heartedly, batted at his wrist, but didn’t actually knock it away. He looked most of the way to asleep already. “Precious one,” Chan said gently. “I think it’s time for bed for you.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Hyunjin said, but his lips smacked a little with tiredness as he spoke and the words were slightly indistinct.
Felix laughed softly above them. “Is that going to be your new comeback for everything?”
“Yes,” Hyunjin grumbled. When Chan straightened up and held out a hand, despite Hyunjin’s grousing, he took it and let Chan tug him upright to his feet.
He wasn’t sure if it was the shower, the warmth of the apartment, or if Felix had managed to get some actual food into Hyunjin, but Hyunjin was fading fast. By the time Chan got him to his room, Hyunjin was almost tripping over his own feet. Usually Chan would just see him off at the door but today he felt an urge to do more than that. Perhaps it was witnessing even the small parts of the fight that he’d had this morning, maybe it was because Hyunjin had spent the day at home and Chan had been used, these past couple of days, to being with him all day and able to see for himself that Hyunjin was fine.
So instead of wishing Hyunjin goodnight at the door, he stepped inside the room, slowly in case Hyunjin told him to get out. But he didn’t; he just wriggled under the covers and looked at Chan with an odd, expectant expression. He looked childlike, for once. He looked— like the boy that Chan had once tucked up on a couch in a small, downtrodden apartment. His face had been bruised then, too.
Chan pulled the covers up around Hyunjin’s chin and then leaned down to kiss his forehead. He could have made it a joke, could have said something in an attempt at getting Hyunjin to giggle. Instead he just said, “Goodnight, Hyunjin. I hope you sleep well. I love you.”
Hyunjin made a sleepy noise and then, softly — “I love you too, hyung.”
Chan blinked back tears. He said nothing else, just turned off the light and shut the bedroom door after himself. In the hallway, Felix waited, his eyes full of a gentle kind of understanding and sympathy. He stepped up close to Chan and pulled him in so that he could kiss both of Chan’s cheeks. “Hyung,” he said, barely even pulling away, his breath so warm against Chan’s cheeks. “Let’s go see what Seungmin wants and then we’ll sleep too, hm?”
They held hands on their way downstairs, Felix’s warm in his despite the coldness of the air. They were not even at the coldest point of the year, yet. But it was cold enough, and Chan was glad to step into Seungmin’s workshop, where the space heater was doing its best against the cold concrete that made up so much of it.
Seungmin was alone in there, and wearing what looked like three layers, and a blanket over his lap. “Hyung,” he said in greeting. “Felix.” He was wearing his glasses. They were all tired at this point it seemed.
“Hi, Seungmin,” said Felix. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, “Where’s Changbin-hyung?” A pause, before he added, “I haven’t seen him since lunch, did he go out?”
Seungmin was squinting at him but he just said, “He’s sleeping.”
“Oh,” Felix said. He was looking at Seungmin, a little pink for some reason. “Well, that’s good. He deserves it.”
“If you say so,” Seungmin said. He motioned them closer. “Here,” he said, as the two of them came up close enough to see his computer screens. Chan couldn’t make sense of a lot of it — email set-ups and Daum blog posting interfaces and a whole lot of pictures and papers. Seungmin had been keeping him up to date on what he was finding, what they could use, but the specifics of how and when to release it had been something discussed between Seungmin and Minho. Chan was more of a good old fashioned heist kind of criminal.
“This is the most damning stuff I’ve been able to find thus far,” Seungmin said. “There’s more, but trawling through it is going to take a while longer and both Minho-hyung and I agree that it’s better to take advantage of all the news stories about Lee Jaerim in the aftermath of Blackbird’s getting blown up. So I set it up and now it’s good to go.”
Felix looked at the screens. His expression was— not quite empty but certainly not filled with anything in particular. His face, when discussing his father, alternated between gritty determination and sad bleakness. A determination to see it through, Chan thought, but it was the bleakness that worried him more. He worried that after it was over, once Felix no longer had this thing he was working towards, he might find himself at a loss of purpose.
“I won’t do it unless you tell me it’s okay,” Seungmin said to Felix, who looked away from the screens to look at Seungmin, his expression not changing. “He’s your father, and you deserve to control what happens to him. Because you know as well as I do, Lix, that there’s no coming back from it once I release all this information to the world.”
Felix blinked. It was like watching him settle back into his skin — one moment he was the empty outline of Felix, and then he was Felix again, just a serious, pale one. “You’ve never called me Lix before,” he murmured, and then before Seungmin could say anything about that, he added, “Do it. I want this to be over.”
Seungmin watched him for a few seconds in silence, not turning to do anything. His own face was serious — not as unusual for Seungmin, but this was tinged with something grim, something— steely. “Okay,” he said. “It’s going to take a while to get all this uploaded. You two should head to bed, I’ll let you know how things go.”
Chan heard the dismissal for what it was, but he had something he wanted to say first, something he’d been wanting to say for days now. “Seungmin-ah,” he said, before Seungmin could turn around to his computer and set everything in motion. “Thank you, for your work on this. And thank you, too, for all your work on the job itself. It wasn’t easy, but you did a fucking amazing job.”
“Hyung,” said Seungmin, with a little sigh.
“No,” said Chan, “let me— say this. I don’t know everything that went on, all the details of it, but I know that for our part, without you there able to talk me through it, I don’t think Felix and I would have gotten out of that alive.” He felt Felix shiver beside him. Chan had been trying to push Felix’s plea for Chan to kill him rather than letting him get taken to the back of his mind, but it was not something he would ever forget. It was mostly thanks to Seungmin that that had not had to be an option. “You saved us both, you saved Jisung’s life, and I know you probably did just as much for Minho and his team. We would have been helpless out there without you, and it was a lot to ask. Probably too much to ask. So I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate everything that you did.”
He reached out, very much without thinking about it, and ruffled Seungmin’s hair. Felix would have leaned into the touch, Jeongin would have whined about not being a baby. Hyunjin would have either tolerated it or tried to scratch him, depending on his mood. Seungmin, for his part, went very, very still in his seat, his eyes going wide like Chan had just reached out and put a spider in his hair and not a hand.
“Why are you touching my head!” he said, his voice very loud, a little high-pitched.
Chan snatched his hand away. He had to fight to keep the laughter from his voice as he said, “Ah, sorry, Seungmin, just— force of habit.”
Seungmin looked at him like he thought Chan had completely lost his mind. “Hyung,” he said, incredulous and almost offended. “Get out, please.”
Chan did so, letting Felix tug him out by the hand. When the door swung heavily shut behind them, Felix collapsed into giggles, trying to muffle them against his hands, but Seungmin could probably hear them all the same. He leaned against Chan, who took his weight, easily and without needing to think. He was smiling, too, but mostly just confused at what had happened. His hand felt like it had betrayed him.
“His face,” Felix whispered around his laughter, and then said laughter was renewed. Chan held him, both arms around those narrow shoulders, feeling Felix quake against him, and had to close his eyes against the onslaught of emotion. He wouldn’t have been able to explain why he was crying, if he let himself do so, and Felix saw.
It’s almost over, he thought to himself, his arms full of the man he loved, the son of his mortal enemy. It’s almost done.
Chapter 28
Notes:
sorry i lied about replying to comments. it will happen again.
i was going to say something about "bit of a shorter chapter this time" but this is still longer than any normal person would think to write. this fic was supposed to be 400k. we are clowns.
thank you all for your patience on these updates ♥
chapter specific warnings: talk of past child abuse, along with the usual warnings.
also, in case you missed it, we posted a lil snippet on twitter of a cut scene from ch 27 that continues jisung's adventures with his fruit cups and minjeong being minjeong.
Chapter Text
The cot was very small. Even Jeongin, who liked to sleep wrapped around Minho like an octopus, found it cramped. Hyunjin must have been sleeping like a vampire in a coffin, ramrod straight and with his hands crossed over his chest. There was only one pillow and the blanket was as narrow as the bed. Jeongin’s ass was totally uncovered, a draft he felt very keenly, and he thought Minho probably wasn’t covered fully, or even mostly, despite the fact that Jeongin was basically laying on top of him.
He huffed, trying to wriggle nearer to Minho, as if to make them smaller, but Minho was very firm and Jeongin couldn’t possibly squish their bodies any further together than they already were. It was early, the sun barely up. If it was up. The greyish light coming in made it hard to tell. He wanted to go back to sleep.
Minho’s lips brushed over his forehead, his body shifting slightly under Jeongin’s. “Baby boy,” he whispered, a sleepy rasp to the words. “Let me get up, so you have some room.”
Jeongin clutched tighter, and felt Minho’s sigh more than he heard it, Minho’s chest moving under his cheek. “What time is it,” Jeongin whispered back, not wanting to wake Jisung.
He felt Minho move, lifting an arm, looking at the watch on his wrist presumably. “Nearly seven.”
That was not as terribly egregious as Jeongin had thought. It was almost a time, were this a few months ago, he might have forced himself out of bed to go plead with Minho to make him breakfast. He’d grown used to Minho’s indulgence though, used to being allowed to cuddle and laze in bed until well after sunrise.
He groaned softly and lifted his head, peering overtop the edge of Jisung’s bed. Unsurprisingly, Jisung was deeply asleep, his mouth lolled open, softly snoring.
“He out?” Minho asked, still in that same whispered voice.
“Yeah,” Jeongin replied, laying his head back down on Minho’s shoulder, studying his face from up close. He’d never tire of it. “Did you sleep?”
Minho blinked slowly, a lazy sweep of his dark lashes. “Yes.”
Jeongin tapped the tip of Minho’s sculpted nose lightly. “Don’t lie to me,” he said, and Minho smiled a little.
“I did,” Minho insisted softly, gently. His brown eyes were warm with affection. “Not much, but I did.”
Jeongin harrumped. He traced along the bridge of Minho’s nose, then down, over the dark smudges under his eyes, across the grooves of his scarred cheek. “Maybe I’ll get up and let you rest a little more,” he grumbled, enjoying the peachy softness of Minho’s skin under his fingertip.
“No,” Minho said, flat and hard as if Jeongin had hit concrete.
Well, it had been worth a try. He kept up his gentle tracing, watched the way it seemed to lull Minho into a light trance. Then he asked, “Why do you hate hospitals so much, hyung?”
All that had begun to unspool in Minho wrenched tight again. Jeongin bit back a sigh. Minho grabbed Jeongin’s hand, stilling it, and then brought it down over his sternum, where he held it lightly. “Too many people,” he said, eyes gone cold. “Too much noise. Too many entrances and exits.”
“Not secure,” Jeongin said.
“Yes.”
Jeongin absorbed that, humming in acknowledgement. That made sense, from Minho’s perspective. Like Seungmin, he took their safety seriously. And like Seungmin, he did not like being out of control, having variables he couldn’t keep track of.
But as reasonable as that answer was, Jeongin couldn’t shake the sense there was more to it. Minho’s edginess in this place also made him— small, somehow. It wasn’t the usual kind of buzzing energy Minho held in situations of stress.
So he asked, “Is that all?”
It was somehow surprising that he could actually see, on Minho’s face, the internal warring about whether or not he was going to lie right now. If he did, Jeongin wouldn’t push it. But he’d know.
Minho had been staring up at the ceiling, thoughts flickering behind his irises, and now he closed them, frown notching his brow. He exhaled roughly. “No.”
Jeongin squeezed his hand, feeling the strong beating of Minho’s heart under his wrist. “Will you tell me?” he asked softly.
Minho’s eyes were still closed, and now his jaw was tight, the muscles shifting as he clenched his teeth. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he eventually said.
“Okay,” Jeongin murmured, soothing and careful. “You don’t have to.”
As far as he was concerned, that was that. But as the seconds ticked on, nothing in Minho relaxed, his body strung with tension beneath Jeongin’s. Suddenly Minho’s hand moved to grip Jeongin’s wrist, hard, and then the next thing Jeongin knew he was on his back on the cot, landing firmly enough that he felt the springs bounce, the cot rocking unsteadily. Minho rolled atop him, pinning his legs down, his wrist still in Minho’s grip, pressed into the pillow beside Jeongin’s head. Minho’s free hand snaked under Jeongin’s sleep-shirt, splaying flat along Jeongin’s side, his ribcage, feeling Jeongin breathe.
Jeongin did nothing, bit back his sound of surprise, let himself be arranged. There was a feral gleam to Minho’s eyes, that wild intensity that often heralded a mauling. But Minho didn’t descend on him — Jeongin was a little glad, because rutting together four feet from an unconscious Jisung was a bit hedonistic even for him.
Maybe Minho felt the same way. Maybe that was what had rendered him still, even if it was a tight stillness. The instinct was there, Jeongin knew, even if he hadn’t been able to see it in Minho’s face, he knew. It was a pattern that had steadily unfurled, obvious once Jeongin knew what to look for.
There were ghosts in Minho’s past, clawing, angry spectres that scratched at him, tried to drag him back. Jeongin could see them when he looked into Minho’s eyes sometimes, could see the way he was haunted. In those moments, Minho often reached for him with rough, bruising hands. He would crush his body into Jeongin’s, teeth sharp and tongue insistent. He’d fuck Jeongin with a mindless kind of frenzy, animalistic, and Jeongin got to watch as— as the pleasure suffused through Minho and he returned to Jeongin, as Jeongin’s touch chased away the shadows. Until Minho’s eyes were warm and full instead of cold and hollow.
It wasn’t healthy, probably. The way Minho was clearly using physical connection, sex, to anchor himself in the now, forcefully turning himself away from the hell of his past by using Jeongin’s body as a blunt kind of tool. Jeongin didn’t mind it, per se, being used in this manner. But he could recognise it for what it was now, where he hadn’t before.
He watched Minho above him, the rapid flickering of his eyes, the fast and shallow way he was breathing. He wanted to reach up and touch Minho again, but Minho still held one of his wrists pinned, and he wasn’t sure if trying to touch wouldn’t result in Minho skittering out of reach. It might soothe him — but it also might tempt him, and right now they were not in a place where they could see this all the way through.
The machines hummed lightly, Jisung’s breathing a soft kind of snore in the room. In some ways, it was nice to not have silence. When there was silence, it made everything so much more potent, the tension thick enough that Jeongin sometimes felt like he could lap it out of the air.
As fast as he’d moved before, Minho dropped his head, his forehead bumping against Jeongin’s collarbone. Finally that trembling stillness evaporated, and his hand on Jeongin’s wrist went loose. Jeongin tentatively brought his other hand up to stroke along Minho’s back, up and down, nails scratching lightly.
“I drowned in the bathtub when I was a kid,” Minho whispered suddenly.
Jeongin stilled. “What?”
“They had to resuscitate me.” Minho’s voice was muffled against Jeongin’s shirt, soft under the hum of the machines. “I died, they brought me back, and then I died again in the ambulance.” He lifted his head again, meeting Jeongin’s eyes, but he was— not Minho. His face was empty, eyes devoid of emotion, dull like scuffed marbles. “Did you know you can drown out of water?” he asked, and Jeongin repressed his shiver at the strange sense of imitation in Minho’s voice. Someone pretending to be human, a machine injecting inflection. “Two tablespoons of liquid in your lungs can kill you.”
“I— didn’t,” Jeongin said, working desperately around his own discomfort to actually process Minho’s query. “That’s awful, hyung, I’m so sorry. How— how old were you.”
Minho wasn’t blinking. “Eight.”
Jeongin— had been trying, desperately, to remain calm, neutral. Like he had in the rare instances Hyunjin made mention of an aspect of his past. He’d never been good at keeping his emotions off his face, and so it was true now — he frowned before he could stop himself. Eight was a bit too old to be drowning in bathtubs, surely. In a pool he could understand but— that was very odd. “Did you fall asleep?” he asked, voice incredibly small. “In the tub? Where was your father?”
At last, Minho looked away, his eyes drifting off Jeongin’s face and onto the pillow. It was like he had to go deeper into himself to find the answer Jeongin wanted, had to actually stop and think, and there was no room in him to do anything else. His face still had that terrible blankness. “He gave me CPR before the ambulance arrived.”
“Oh.” How awful, how very awful. He’d never seen any pictures of Minho as a child, but he could picture him. Smaller, his face rounder, probably with those dark circles under his eyes, hereditary. Black, feathery hair and tiny hands. Jeongin imagined him pink with life, and then grey and cold on a bathroom floor, soaked in water and lips blue. It made him feel sick. “You must have been terrified.”
Something about the words, about the tremble in his voice, made Minho’s eyes snap back to his, and finally some— some of him returned to his features. His eyes, previously dulled, suddenly had a small spark of life. “I wasn’t,” he said, and Jeongin’s frown deepened. He hadn’t been afraid? “Don’t feel sorry for me, baby boy, I did it to myself.”
What did that mean. “What?” Jeongin asked, lost, but Minho was shaking his head, like he was clearing it. Waking himself up, rousing.
“I don’t deserve pity for this,” he said, hard but not empty, more like— angry. But he didn’t seem angry at Jeongin. This was directed at himself. “I especially don’t deserve your pity. It’s always been— my fault. But when I was little I didn’t understand.”
Cryptic, unhelpful nonsense. Jeongin knew his confusion was written all over his face, lips parted as he blinked. He replayed the conversation trying to make sense of it, and realised Minho didn’t answer his question, about falling asleep, about how it happened. He didn’t answer and then he said—
Jeongin grabbed Minho’s face, very firmly, more firmly than he usually handled Minho in these moments. His thumbs dug into Minho’s cheeks, fingertips pressing into the hinges of his jaw. He forced Minho to look at him. “Did you try to kill yourself when you were eight years old?” he demanded, louder than he’d intended.
He watched Minho go pale, then flush, colour washing away and then into his face blotchily. He saw, too, that flicker of a desire to lie. “It wasn’t like that,” Minho said weakly.
Jeongin stared up at him in horror. “Then what was it like!” he said, pitching high, hysterical, and Jisung snuffled, and the both of them went quiet, listening to see if he’d fall back into slumber or wake. After a few moments it was clear he’d gone back to sleep, his breathing soft and even again.
Much quieter than before, Minho said, “It just— it wasn’t like that.” His face softened a little as he looked down, gaze raking over Jeongin’s stricken face. Jeongin wanted to look calmer, didn’t want to make this about himself, but he just couldn’t dampen the emotion in his eyes. “Baby boy, I told you, you don’t need to worry about it.”
Jeongin’s chest moved quickly, his breathing coming short. No wonder Minho hated hospitals if the last time he was in one was when he was recovering from a suicide attempt.
He worked to keep his face from crumpling, trailing his hands down the sides of Minho’s neck, grasping his shoulders. With a gentle tug he drew Minho down, scooting over and rolling onto his side. For a moment he thought Minho wasn’t going to come, but then Minho obediently laid down on his side too, facing Jeongin. There was very little room like this, their hands curled up to their chests, all entwined, legs tangling. Their noses nearly brushed.
“Hyung,” Jeongin whispered, studying the honey of Minho’s irises from up close. “What happened. Please.”
He could sense the way Minho was wearing down, like soft stone against the eternal crashing of the ocean. He swallowed, thick, Jeongin could hear it. “I told you— before,” Minho rasped. “That I was an angry child. That I couldn’t control it. I needed a firm hand, was all. But discipline isn’t— it isn’t easy to bear. Which is the point. It isn’t easy but it’s our duty to bear it, when we deserve it. And I did deserve it. I was just too weak, too young, to understand that.”
Jeongin’s breathing wasn’t steadying out, and his heart felt— light, sickly so, like it was made out of gossamer and unable to pump blood properly. “What discipline,” he asked with strained desperation. “What are you saying.”
Minho stared at him for a long, silent moment, studying him almost, and then he sighed heavily, gaze dropping. “I shouldn’t have said anything at all, you’re just going to be upset,” he said, like that was— that. He put his arm around Jeongin, holding him nearer, petting at his hair. Jeongin’s breathing was loud and rattling a little, his body trembling. “Hush, it’s fine, hyung’s fine. I’ve told you, I’m fine. My past isn’t your concern.”
“You were eight,” Jeongin gasped, hands tangling in the front of Minho’s shirt, “you were a baby, and you tried to drown yourself? To— to escape discipline? Who was hurting you?”
“No one,” Minho said, calm, soothing, soft. His nails scratched gently at Jeongin’s scalp. He wouldn’t meet Jeongin’s eyes. “I told you—”
Understanding crashed into Jeongin. “It was your father, wasn’t it,” he said, and Minho’s mouth snapped shut. “What was he doing.”
Another heavy sigh. “He was trying to help, baby boy.”
“By doing what, hyung,” he said, and then quickly added when Minho opened his mouth to reply, “And if you say by disciplining you, I’m going to start screaming and I won’t stop.”
Slowly, Minho’s mouth closed, and at last, he looked at Jeongin again. Whatever he saw in Jeongin’s eyes made him go sombre, quiet for a drawn out moment. “It varied,” he finally said, and Jeongin exhaled shakily. “Depending on— it varied.” He lifted his hand from Jeongin’s hair to instead rub his thumb into his own temple, squeezing his eyes shut. “The bathtub, the— water.” His hand dropped, the motion conveying— surrender, somehow. He let out a long breath and then admitted, “He’d hold me under. I didn’t like it.”
“He held you. Under the water,” Jeongin bit out. The horror left him barely able to speak.
Minho was so earnest as he met Jeongin’s gaze. “He wasn’t trying to hurt me,” he said, almost imploring, and Jeongin might have laughed, if he didn’t feel like he was drowning too. “He always pulled me up if I started going unconscious. The drowning was my fault. My choice. I didn’t want to— I didn’t hold my breath. I just inhaled the water.” Something like shame settled across Minho’s face. “It was weak of me, I—”
“Weak?” Jeongin choked out shrilly. “Weak for an eight year to not want to endure any more abuse?”
“It wasn’t abuse,” Minho said, surprisingly staunch. It was a horror anew to realise Minho actually believed that. “He never hit me. He was trying to fix me.”
“It is abuse, it’s torture,” Jeongin insisted. He felt like his throat was going to close up. He couldn’t breathe, and his eyes stung with tears. “That’s— awful— that’s—”
“I needed it,” Minho said, strikingly gentle. “I deserved it.”
“There isn’t a child on earth that deserves that!” Jeongin cried.
“Baby boy, you’re going to wake Jisung—”
“M’already awake,” came a mumbled response.
Minho startled, panic flashing bright and agonising across his features before he wiped it clean. He sat up, rolling off the cot and onto his feet. Jeongin was left laying there, eyes forced open and wide to try and stop the gathered tears from falling. He was gasping for air, clutching the blankets to try and get himself under control.
“How much did you hear,” Minho asked, his voice deliberately deadened.
“Just snatches,” Jisung said, small. “Sorry. I may be a melon head but I do have functioning ears.” A pause. “Well. One functioning ear. I didn’t hear much though, I promise.” He sounded sleepy, words slurring a bit.
Jeongin pushed himself up into a sitting position. He desperately wanted to continue their conversation, wanted to ring every sordid detail out of Minho like he was an overflowing sponge, but there was no way to do so without privacy. And Jisung overhearing some of the conversation had very clearly spooked Minho, who was already stuffing his feet into his sneakers.
“I’m going to scrounge up breakfast for us.” Minho tugged on his jacket, hiding his rumpled sleep shirt. His sweats were black, the colour concealing the wrinkles well enough.
Jeongin wanted to stop him. But he didn’t do so. Let his poor, wounded love collect himself in the way he saw fit.
Minho left the room, and Jeongin, for the second time that morning, found himself grateful for the humming buzz of the machines, the muffled bustling of the hospital beyond the door.
“Were you lying,” he eventually queried into the quiet. “About how much you heard.”
Jisung sighed, heavy. “Yeah,” he admitted, avoiding Jeongin’s eyes. “I wanted to interrupt earlier but I couldn’t find a place to do it.”
Jeongin nodded, his head hanging down. He wanted to cry, wanted to find a corner and weep. Instead, he stumbled to his feet and went to Jisung’s bedside where he proceeded to carefully climb in beside Jisung — he moved the blanket so there was enough slack that his weight wouldn’t pull it, wouldn’t put any pressure on jisung’s poor battered body. Jisung lay still and silent as Jeongin curled against him, his forehead against the bony harness of Jisung’s shoulder, Jeongin’s knees lightly knocking against Jisung’s thigh. His hand gripped Jisung’s sleeve, the material of the hospital gown stiff, thin.
“I’m not crazy, right?” he asked, voice almost a whisper, just a bit too loud for it. “That— what he was describing— it’s—” His voice was a choked thing. “It’s—”
“Hell,” Jisung said, surprisingly vehement, angry in a way Jeongin didn’t often see with Jisung. “I hope his father is in hell.”
Jeongin was silent for a moment, the two of them laying there. He wondered what expression Jisung was making. He lifted his head to look, and saw that Jisung was staring up at the ceiling, and he was scowling. But underneath that was a kind of emptiness that Jeongin did see sometimes in Jisung. He’d never known how to ask about it before. They didn’t do that, he realised suddenly. There were so many things in this family that nobody asked about out of privacy but— maybe that just meant that people didn’t know they could talk about it.
“Your father was a shithead, too, right?” This was pretty common knowledge, at least, although the specifics were— elusive to Jeongin. He had only ever heard these things secondhand, overheard from Chan and Changbin or Jisung himself. Casual little mentions dropped in conversation, usually self-deprecating comments on Jisung’s end that Jeongin had to puzzle out. It had added up, at least in Jeongin’s mind, to an understanding that Jisung’s father had been abusive.
“It was my step-father,” Jisung said, his voice toneless now. “But yeah.”
He didn’t turn his face to Jeongin’s, although he must have known Jeongin was looking at him. Jeongin watched him for a moment. This face, his hyung, really had almost been lost to him. The thought of what he must have gone through in childhood pained Jeongin. He wished everyone could have had a Chan to help them. “You didn’t deserve that,” he said. “You deserve love and soft things.”
Jisung did tilt his face at that, fixing Jeongin with a look, his chin doubling with how his head was sitting. “Ah, Jeongin-ah,” he said, on a slight sigh.
“You do,” Jeongin insisted. “I don’t want you to be hurt any more. I don’t want any of us to be hurt any more.”
Jeongin couldn’t remember his own parents. He knew, somehow, they’d been good people though. It felt like his brain hadn’t been able to hold onto the specific memories, all of it washed away with time, but the knowledge of their goodness, their kindness, their love of him, had remained. He wished all his hyungs could have had that.
Jisung sighed again. “I’m okay,” he said. Perhaps that would have been more believable if he weren’t in a hospital bed, or if there wasn’t still that distant, hollow look in his eyes, not quite left yet. “I think Minho-hyung definitely has me beat in the trauma awards, to be honest.”
Jeongin, so gently, so carefully, lay his hand across Jisung’s stomach, over the bandages. “You’re a close contender,” he said. He’d heard about the scars on Jisung’s back; he’d have some on his front now too. “I love you, hyung, you know that right? We all love you so much.”
Jisung turned pink. It was so nice to see his face with colour, with life, blooming suddenly. “I know,” he said. “I do. I love you all, too.”
Jeongin really wanted to say more, but a lot of the words were not his place to reveal. Jisung’s confession, so obviously sincerely meant, had made the tears come back to his eyes and this time he didn’t stop them, the first sliding down Jeongin’s face as he lay back down, tucking his head back against Jisung’s shoulder. After a few moments, Jisung’s head lolled to the side, and he rested his cheek against Jeongin’s hair. His hand came and rested on top of Jeongin’s, smaller but warm. So warm.
They stayed like that, neither of them moving, neither of them speaking. The minutes ticked by, the sounds of muffled bustling outside the room, blurry people going by the mottled glass set into the door. Jeongin cried for a few minutes, the sound of that quiet; he’d learned to cry quietly somewhere along the line. Jisung didn’t try to comfort him, he just lay there, his breathing deep and slow.
Neither of them had moved by the time the door opened again and Minho came in. His face was— set, almost. Less like he had composed himself naturally and more like he’d pulled it onto him like an armoured mask. A nurse trailed in after him, a little surprisingly. Minho didn’t react to her, which suggested he knew she was going to follow him in.
Jeongin sat up, rubbing his arm across his face to wipe it clean, whilst Jisung stirred a little. He looked like he may have been falling asleep. The nurse, a little younger than some of the others, smiled at the two of them and said, “Good morning.”
“Hello,” said Jisung, which Jeongin echoed, more quietly. Without needing to be told, he slipped off the bed, and let the nurse approach. By the time he was on his two feet, she already had Jisung’s wrist in her hand, taking his pulse carefully.
Jeongin left her to it, trusting that Jisung was in, if not capable hands, at least ones that would not cause more damage. He had more pressing things— Minho, by the table at the window, where their empty food cartons had been put back into their bags the night before, ready to take home. He was looking away from the others in the room, his face turned to the window.
Jeongin went to him. He did not give a single fuck about anyone else seeing them. He wedged himself into Minho’s arms, kissing him right on the mouth. Minho’s arms went tight around him, and his mouth was stiff under Jeongin’s for a few moments, before he softened into it. Then Jeongin moved his mouth up and whispered, “I love you,” into Minho’s ear, barely breathing the syllables out. “I’m never fucking letting anyone lay hands on you again.”
Minho let out a little breath of his own, something only Jeongin would hear. “Baby boy,” he said.
“I’ll kill anyone who tries,” Jeongin said. Fervent, like a religious worshipper in front of their god. “I’ll rip them open.”
“I love you too,” Minho said. He pulled back so that they could look at each other. What intensity was in his eyes now. Did he see the same in Jeongin’s eyes, that same conviction? Minho rested his forehead against Jeongin’s for a moment. “How could I not love you?”
Even now, those words thrilled Jeongin. And underneath, in this moment, there was— pain, at the thought of all that Minho had gone through. He’d sensed that bleeding wound in Minho and he was not sure if this was what that was, or if that was simply part of it. Another thing that had left his hyung hurt, another part of the puzzle. He did know one thing though, one thing he felt with a deep conviction.
I’m going to flay your father alive.
——
Felix was in the bathroom when he heard the buzz of Chan’s phone on the bedside table, the sign of an incoming text. Chan had, miraculously, shockingly, still been sleeping when Fellix had wriggled out of the circle of his arms and went to the bathroom to pee, but that buzzing would have woken him up. He was not the kind of person who would sleep through something like that.
He washed his hands, looking at himself in the mirror. He had woken with his face pressed to Chan’s bare chest, the best kind of pillow, and so there were no pillow lines, but his face did still look slightly puffy with sleep. If Chan’s phone hadn’t gone off, he’d been planning on crawling back into bed, tucking himself back into the warmth of Chan’s hold.
But instead, when he came out of the bathroom, Chan was awake, laying in bed with his phone held up so he could squint at it. With the blackout curtains pulled firmly closed at the window, it was still dim and dark in the bedroom, and Chan’s phone screen lit up his face with remarkably white light. He didn’t look at Felix, as he tapped out a reply to whatever text had come in, as Felix went to the bedside table and turned on the lamp there.
The light was soft, especially after Felix had been in the considerably harsher light of the bathroom, but Chan still grunted a little at it. He dropped his phone on his chest and looked at Felix, still squinting his eyes against the light. He looked like a disgruntled poodle, with his hair curly around his face, the bedhead considerable. Felix climbed back onto the bed, over the covers, his legs tucked up underneath himself, and ran a hand through that hair. “Good morning, hyung,” he said.
“Morning,” Chan said. He sounded the same as he looked, barely awake. A true joy, to see this version of Chan, the one who had not had time to pull himself together, the one that hadn’t had coffee and food and hadn’t even brushed his teeth. But even like this, he sat up a little, so he could tug Felix closer and press his mouth to the corner of Felix’s, a chaste touch.
His phone lay in his lap now. Felix glanced at it, curious who had texted so early in the morning, suspecting that he knew but not quite wanting to ask, either. If it wasn’t Minho or Jeongin, then it was probably someone involved in Chan’s business ventures, both savoury or not, and Felix felt such an odd urge to just— not engage in any of that beyond what he had to.
He wanted out, he’d realised along the way. He would always be in, just by virtue of who he found himself in love with, these people who he had considered family for a while now. But he wanted to be out of everything else, to exist without any of it hanging over him. And sometimes he worried that if he asked too much about what Chan was up to, he’d get pulled into it too far.
But Chan noticed the look at the phone and said, “It was Minho, texting me. They’re letting Jisung come home today.”
Felix was silent for a moment, his fingers twisting in the bedsheets. It seemed fast, to him, had seemed fast yesterday when it had first been mentioned as an option. He’d had visions of Jisung languishing in the hospital for weeks until he healed, but of course they would want him out of there as soon as possible, to free up the room for other people who needed it. It would be better, too, to have Jisung home, where they could look after him.
“That’s good,” he said, when his silence had stretched a little too long. “That’s really good.”
He meant it, for all that it seemed like his response was weak. He wanted Jisung here with them, wanted him where he and Hyunjin could, eventually, hopefully, talk it out. It was just that everything was— complicated. And he still wasn’t sure, even now, exactly how he felt, knowing that it was his job, his quest for revenge against his father, that had almost lost Jisung his life.
Chan watched him in silence. His eyes were filled with a soft expression that Felix found difficult to parse, he just knew that it made him squirm inside. It was a similar expression to the one that Felix had once scolded him for, for looking too helplessly in love, but this was— more than that. It was a more settled kind of thing.
He would never be happy for the way that it had happened, but he was so grateful that Chan knew the truth about him. What a miracle, to be loved so completely by this man.
“I’m going to go get Jisung’s bed set up,” he said, instead of saying anything else, instead of opening his mouth and letting his melting, heated heart spill out over his lips.
Chan looked away from him for the first time in order to rub a hand over his face, groaning. “Okay,” he said, his voice a little muffled behind his palm. “I’ll go shower, I guess.”
“Yeah, you need it,” Felix said, just for the small delight of seeing Chan’s eyes glare at him from between his fingers.
Changbin had been the one last night to go buy an air mattress, the best one he could find on such short notice, along with a little air pump for blowing it up. What’s the point of your loud voice if your lungs aren’t strong enough to blow that up, Seungmin had said when he’d seen it, and Changbin had grabbed him into a headlock that Seungmin barely fought against, and Felix had sat there and watched it and thought, now how the hell did I miss this for so long.
The air mattress had been left in the living room in the box, along with new sheets that Changbin had picked up, and all the spare pillows they could find, including some taken directly from Jisung’s bed. Felix got the deflated mattress out of the box now, shivering a little even in Chan’s sweatshirt, unfolding it into the space that had been made by Chan and Changbin moving the couches and coffee table aside.
It took him a while to figure out how to use the air pump. He was good at computers but things like this escaped him; it felt like something Seungmin would be good at, his engineer’s brain, but Felix was just someone who liked coding. It was a relief to finally have the whole thing set up, and to set the air pump whirring, and watch the mattress slowly rise.
The sound of the air pump was so loud that Felix missed the noise of the door opening in the hallway, so it was only when Hyunjin came into view that he realised Hyunjin was awake and had come out. He was dressed the way he so often was in the morning, covered from head to slippered toe, his hood pulled up over his hair. He often dressed like this, especially now, when the air was chilly, the heating not yet working its magic.
But it was more than that, Felix thought, looking at Hyunjin. Not just that it was cold, not just that it was early morning. Something like Hyunjin was hiding — but not quite that either. Hyunjin, Felix was realising, covered up more the more vulnerable he was feeling. It was no wonder half of his wardrobe was hoodies.
“Hi,” Felix said, over the air pump. Hyunjin grunted a little at him, which Felix didn’t take personally. Hyunjin didn’t seem fully awake, now that Felix was actually looking at him. His eyes were open but only just. Felix would have asked if the pump had woken him up but this was just Hyunjin in the morning: a zombie shuffling around until enough time had passed that his brain came online.
He watched Hyunjin sit on the couch, perching right on the very edge, a little bit like he was planning on getting up imminently. But he didn’t, he just stayed sitting there, as the air mattress slowly inflated. Felix looked to see if there had been any improvement overnight, but it was very hard to tell. Hyunjin just looked tired, even now.
They sat in silence, even after the mattress was fully inflated and Felix unhooked the pump and quickly stopped the air from escaping out of it. Hyunjin didn’t move as Felix set that aside, didn’t move as Felix started unfolding the sheets. Felix wasn’t even sure if under normal circumstances, Hyunjin would have helped; it was difficult to tell with Hyunjin. It was not that he was selfish so much as it was clear that he was not used to lifting a hand to do anything that Changbin or Chan couldn’t get to first. The times he did rush to take something out of Felix’s hands seemed to have more to do with him not wanting Felix to be burdened than anything else.
This time though he just sat and watched. It was not until Felix was arranging the pillows that he spoke. “He’s coming home today?” he said.
That much should have been obvious, but Felix didn’t point it out, or tease Hyunjin for being a little slow today. It wasn’t Hyunjin being slow, he knew. It was Hyunjin coming to terms with reality. “Yeah,” Felix said. “Minho-hyung and Jeongin are bringing him home.”
Hyunjin didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t actually have any kind of reaction that Felix could see. He sat still and tired, the bruising on his face dark, the cuts red with slow healing. He was looking at the air mattress blankly, and whatever thoughts were running through his mind were not ones that Felix was privy to.
He could ask, he knew. He could force it into the open, make Hyunjin talk about it. There didn’t seem to be much point, at least not right now. He looked at Hyunjin and saw only someone who needed to rest.
He finished placing all the pillows in the perfect spots and then got to his feet, making a soft noise under his breath as his knees protested it a little. Hyunjin watched him approach, and didn’t protest when Felix gently pushed the hood of his hoodie down so Felix could see all of his face. His hair was a mess under there; perhaps it hadn’t been fully dried the night before when Hyunjin slept. Felix tried to smush it down a little, mindful of the still-healing head wound. “Are you hungry?” he asked. Hyunjin made a small motion that could have been a shrug. Felix stroked his hand over the top of Hyunjin’s hair. “Why don’t we eat together, then?”
Silence for a few seconds. Then Hyunjin sighed, and leaned into Felix’s touch. “Okay,” he said.
——
Jisung had been unconscious for most of his stint in the hospital, but even just the day or so he’d been awake was— enough. He was ready to get out of here, though he wasn’t particularly looking forward to the process. It was almost certainly going to be an ordeal.
The nurses unhooked the IV from him and slid the needle out, leaving behind a cotton ball and a strip of beige medical tape. The catheter was pulled out, which was a sensation so singular and strange Jisung could not have possibly hoped to imagine it. His poor dick, his poor cold dick, his poor hand, bruised where the needle had sat.
Minho had to go fetch his prescriptions, antibiotics and, hopefully, strong painkillers, so it was Jeongin that helped Jisung sit up, helped turn him so his legs were dangling off the edge of the bed. The hospital gown was short, baring his pale legs, his knees which had been skinned. Jisung couldn’t remember the last time he’d had skinned knees — it might have been in his actual childhood.
“Here, hyung,” Jeongin said, tearing open a plastic package and pulling out what looked like clothing. Pyjamas. “Let me help—”
Jisung hadn’t really thought about asking for clothes. He had, for some reason, already been resigned to the idea of being driven home in his hospital gown, the back gaping open and his ass bared to the world. This was certainly preferable.
Jeongin carefully undid the ties of the gown, and then pulled it away from Jisung’s body, leaving him very naked. He looked down at himself, the bandages starkly white even against the paleness of his skin, the bruising along his legs, his chest. He’d already had goosebumps but a new wave of them washed over his body.
Jisung wondered if he looked like some kind of sickly, undersea creature. In this bright place, the lighting so cold it was almost blue. He felt— translucent. Like wet tissue paper.
Jeongin knelt, and his hand was hot, almost, as he grabbed Jisung’s ankles, one after the other, feeding his feet into the pyjama bottoms. He had to help Jisung stand for a moment, while he pulled the bottoms up the rest of the way. They had evidently forgotten underwear. It didn’t really matter, he supposed. The bottoms were fluffy and soft, navy blue with brown teddy bears all over.
Jisung sat back down as soon as he could, his stomach twinging uncomfortably, legs feeling weak enough to give. He couldn’t really lift his arms for the top, so Jeongin had to kind of wrangle it around him with that limited movement in mind. The top was navy blue too, but there was only one teddy bear, peeking out of the pocket on the left side of the chest. Fleece lined; Jisung immediately felt so much warmer.
The pièce de résistance was a pair of brown fluffy slippers with teddy bear heads, which got jammed onto his feet with great ceremony.
“Ah, hyung, you look really cute,” Jeongin said, smiling as he surveyed his work. He’d been a bit wobbly all morning, his eyes red-rimmed. Jisung was taking his lead from Jeongin and ignoring it.
Jisung might normally do some aegyo after such a compliment, but all his energy was going into staying upright and not flopping face first onto the linoleum. “Did Changbin-hyung pick this out,” he asked, a little breathless.
“I think it was supposed to be a Christmas present,” Jeongin said, tossing the empty package and tags into the bin.
No more quips came to mind. Jisung contemplated laying back down. The slippers were new, so there was no worry about dirtying the bed — and he was about to leave and hopefully never come back anyway.
Before he could decide whether or not to move, the door opened, a bit jerkily, because Minho was brute forcing a wheelchair into the room ahead of himself. Another thing Jisung just— hadn’t thought about.
Minho parked the wheelchair right next to Jisung, scooping up the large white paper bag that had been sitting on the seat. “Nice outfit,” Minho said, one corner of his lips curling, looking more like a sneer than anything else with the way his scars warped his face. But his voice was almost warm.
“Yes, I’m adorable, I’m well aware,” Jisung said absently as he eyed the wheelchair with some trepidation. He wasn’t sure how to go about getting onto his feet, and then lowering himself so far down.
“Do you need help, hyung?” Jeongin asked, rhetorically, because he was already there, offering Jisung his arm for support. Jisung took it, Jeongin’s slight height advantage on him feeling wider today, because Jisung couldn’t stand up straight. He had to hunch, curled protectively over his stomach.
It did hurt, lowering himself into the wheelchair. Even with Jeongin’s steadying hands, it hurt. He hissed, resting his hand instinctively on top of the bandages under his shirt once he was sitting back. His head swum a bit with the pain of it, but it quickly faded off when he stopped moving.
Jeongin was watching him, all glittering eyes and a soft, pouting bottom lip. Minho touched Jisung’s shoulder, fingertips squeezing over his collarbone.
“Let’s get you out of here,” Minho said softly, and then wheeled him slowly out of the room.
The hospital was bustling, and Jisung didn’t realise how medicated he still was until he was in motion. He felt like he was on the swaying deck of a ship, not being smoothly rolled over perfectly even flooring. His depth perception was flickery, things zooming nearer and then away like his eyes had become a camera lens. It was disconcerting, and a relief when they stopped in a wide lobby.
“Wait here,” Minho said, like Jisung was capable of making a run for it. When Minho came into view, he was looking at Jeongin, which— yeah, that made more sense. Jeongin was the only one between the two of them possessing an ability for brisk movement. If Jisung tried to walk he would give himself another concussion. “I don’t want to take him across the lot; I’ll just bring the car around.”
“Okay, hyung,” Jeongin said, setting one hand on the handle of the wheelchair, keeping it steady. Minho took his bomber jacket off, the red one Hyunjin was always eyeing with avarice. He slipped it around Jisung’s shoulders with casual indifference, while Jeongin said, “Hyung, I could give him mine—”
“It’s fine, baby boy,” Minho said, already sauntering away, to the huge automatic doors. “Stay put.”
It was cold outside. Jisung could tell from the colour of the sky, from the way he could see Minho’s breath begin to puff out of him as he crossed over the concrete and then out of sight.
Jeongin sighed. Then, with the same care and gentleness he’d been exhibiting all day, he helped Jisung actually put his arms into the sleeves of the jacket. It was still warm from Minho’s body heat.
They weren’t waiting long, but it felt like a while. The lobby was chilly, more so than Jisung’s room had been, and gusts of cold air kept hitting them every time the doors opened to let someone in or out. Jisung’s wobbly vision wasn’t helping things; even seated like this, he felt a little bit like the room kept moving every so often. But eventually Jeongin said, “Oh, there he is.” And then Jisung was being pushed through the sliding glass doors, and the full force of the winter air hit him. He was glad for the jacket, then.
Minho idled the car in front of a red curb, and jumped out of the driver’s seat as they approached, opening the back door. Jeongin stopped them just shy of the curb, and Jisung stared at that open doorway, knowing that getting into that car was going to suck. He scooted to the edge of the chair, a sharp pain jolting through his stomach. Not a fuck I ripped my stitches kind of pain, but a decided unpleasant tugging kind of pain. He winced, feet sliding off their little stirrups and onto the icy asphalt.
Minho grabbed his upper arm; Jeongin grabbed the other. They hauled Jisung up, through no strength of his own, and then wrangled him into the backseat of the car. It wasn’t graceful, and Jisung had to bite his bottom lip to keep his pathetic little noises in.
“Sorry, sorry,” Jeongin muttered the whole way through. He bent to look Jisung in the eyes, once Jisung was actually sitting in the backseat. “You okay?”
Jisung exhaled shakily. He could feel a cold sweat tickling his hairline. He felt a little sick. “Yeah.”
Jeongin did his seatbelt for him, correctly assuming Jisung would not have been able to reach and twist for it. Then he shut the door, going around to the passenger seat. Jisung put his hands atop the lap belt, snug against the padding of his bandages. He really hoped they weren’t in a car accident. If any pressure got put on his wounds, he would definitely vomit.
Minho, shockingly compassionate human he was turning out to be, drove slowly and carefully, likely with Jisung in mind. Jisung realised he hadn’t even known where they were, which hospital, which part of the city. Even now, out of the hospital and driving through the city, he still couldn’t quite place it. The world whizzed by, and his eyes were like a camera set on a low frame rate. It was all indistinct, impossible to parse.
The sunlight was nice, though, even crisp and cold as it was. He turned his face up towards the sky and closed his eyes, and before he knew it, they were home.
There was no wheelchair here. They probably could have stolen the one from the hospital, but maybe they’d done enough crime for the week. Jisung poked at his seatbelt until it came undone, and then fumbled open his door, at which point he could only contemplate the black tarmac of their little parking area. The way to the back door had never felt so long.
A shadow fell over him — Minho, blocking his view, blocking his way out. Wordless, he hooked his hand under Jisung’s knee, gently swivelling him so his legs were dangling out of the car. His toes brushed the pavement, cosied away in fluffy slippers.
“Up,” Minho said, offering his hands, and Jisung took them, before leveraging himself into a standing position with Minho’s strength doing most of the work.
Like at the hospital, he could not stand up fully, his back hunched to prevent pulling on his stitches. He tried to take a step forward, and it was shuffling, short. A ninety year old man from a nursing home could probably beat him in a race.
“Hmm,” Minho said, and then he was moving, bending. One hand slid down the backs of Jisung’s thighs, the other hooked around his waist.
Every hair on Jisung’s body stood on end. “What—” he said, and then his feet weren’t on the ground. Minho lifted him with a small grunt of effort, drowned out by Jisung’s startled cry of pain.
Minho stilled, solid under all Jisung’s weight. Jisung had immediately stuffed his own knuckles into his mouth, biting down to keep from making any other noise. His ankles had crossed, legs pulled up more than the— the carrying position demanded. He was still tense; he was hurting himself. He had to work to unclench his muscles, breathing through his nose.
“Sorry,” Minho whispered, and after a moment, Jisung shook his head, a little. He could not speak yet.
“Hyung?” Jeongin said, and even with his eyes closed, Jisung knew the sudden warm touch on his upper thigh was Jeongin’s hand.
Jisung lowered his hand and opened his eyes, made himself relax, lean into the solidness of Minho’s chest. “I tensed, and wow, you know, my abs are fucked, not what I meant when I said I wanted to be shredded,” he said, trying to laugh, but it came out gasping.
Jeongin didn’t smile. He looked at Minho’s face, gaze above Jisung’s head. Some silent communication was happening.
Jisung dropped his head down so his temple was resting on Minho’s shoulder. This was weird, he decided. Might as well lean into it. He lifted a single foot, pointing his toes. “Do I weigh no more than a dried leaf, noble sir?” he asked. His voice was still so weak.
Minho had been tense. Maybe as tense as Jisung had been, when he’d first been lifted. But he relaxed beneath Jisung after that wobbly joke, his arms no longer feeling like iron bars under Jisung’s knees, behind his back. “Shut up,” he said.
“Oouu,” Jisung said, like a puppy forlornly howling. He gave a theatrical little shiver. It wasn’t entirely affectation; the air was making his nose and ears sting, fingernails turning lilac. He pressed his cold nose to the rushing warmth of Minho’s neck, his pulse. “Gallant sir, won’t you—”
“Get the door,” Minho said, and Jisung assumed the skittering footsteps he heard was Jeongin scrambling to obey. He normally wouldn’t antagonise Minho like this, but being deathly wounded gave him something of a pass it seemed. There was something in him that did kind of wish Minho would toss him in the big dumpster though. It would feel more normal. If Jisung paused too long to think about what was happening right now he felt a little like his brain might break.
The concrete column of the stairwell was not really any warmer than outside had been. Jisung lifted his head, peering around like he’d never seen any of it before. What a miracle to be here again. What a strange miracle.
Seungmin’s workroom door opened, and to Jisung’s horror, Chan, Changbin, and Seungmin all came out, one after another. Jisung’s toes curled inside his slippers, feeling all at once the utter ridiculousness of his position.
“We’re back,” Jeongin said, unnecessary, with a smile that felt a little forced but that he pulled on anyway.
“With my noble steed,” Jisung added, patting Minho’s chest. It was quite— cushy. Minho glanced down at him, with no expression, but Jisung carefully removed his hand all the same, because a tiger could only be pushed so far.
Changbin, though, beamed at him, and Chan’s face, previously solemn and expectant looking Jisung over, cracked into a smile. Seungmin didn’t laugh, but Seungmin didn’t usually laugh. There was a pleasant little glint in his eyes though. Maybe.
Jisung smiled. “Heh, hehe,” he said, then cleared his throat. He shifted, ready this time for the inevitable movement as he was returned to his feet when Minho put him down.
Minho did not put him down.
“There’s no way he can manage these stairs,” he said instead, flat.
Jisung stared at the side of his face. The mortification that had been a faint shadow at the fringes of his mind was making itself truly known now, a steady creeping of warmth along the back of his neck.
“That’s why we’re here,” Chan said, expression growing serious once more as Changbin stepped forward.
For a moment, Jisung was sandwiched between Minho and Changbin, feeling their arms shift under him. Then they stepped apart, and Jisung was in Changbin’s hold now, not Minho’s. As easy as that.
Because it was Changbin, Jisung felt brave enough to sling an arm around his shoulders. He wanted to say something flirty, bat his lashes at Changbin, but everyone was watching them so intently. Chan had his hands out in a way that suggested he’d been ready to dive and catch Jisung, if Changbin had fumbled him. Seungmin was scowling, and Minho had a matching kind of concentrated expression on his face. Analysing.
Analysing Jisung. Looking out for any signs of pain. God. Fuck. Almost dying was the worst, actually. If you’d asked him a few weeks ago he’d have said he’d milk the shit out of this kind of situation. But this fervent, genuine care and attention was making Jisung want to shrink and shrivel into a ball of lint.
“Careful going up the stairs,” Chan said quietly as Changbin walked over and they began their ascent. It was a lumbering ride, and Jisung tried not to wince. The swaying shifts in gravity were not fun, but he could tell Changbin was being very careful. He was warm, warm in a way that Jisung’s brain wanted to call virile, but that was gross when applied to Changbin.
When they arrived at the second floor landing, Jisung again expected to be put down. But they breezed past his door, Changbin saying, a little strained, “I can manage one more floor, then you’ll have to take him, hyung.”
“My room? Is there?” Jisung said, pointing at the door already shrinking away from him as they climbed more stairs. The others trailed after them, ever watchful.
Changbin was moving a little slower now, but he didn’t feel unsteady at all. His breathing was even, forcefully even. Jisung could feel the strong pounding of his heart where their bodies were pressed together.
“We’re not leaving you alone in your room, there aren’t even any cameras in there,” Seungmin sniped, nasal and short.
“You need rest,” Chan said, gentler. Jisung peeked at him over Changbin’s shoulder. Chan smiled at him softly. “Don’t worry, we’ve got it all sorted.”
Agonising. Truly agonising. He was going to become the communal chia pet in the living room. They were going to have to take turns helping him stand to pee.
When they reached the third floor landing Changbin’s breathing was a bit faster, and Jisung could feel the strain in his body. His arms muscles were like rocks against his back, under his knees. Like Jisung had climbed into the arms of a stone statue, warmed under the summer sun.
“Here,” Changbin grunted, and Chan came forward. They did the same kind of shifting transition Minho and Changbin had done earlier, arms changing around, Jisung rocking unsteadily until Chan had a good grip on him. Chan didn’t feel quite as steady as Changbin or Minho for some reason, something lighter to his frame, something lithe in spite of all his honed muscles. Jisung pressed a hand over Chan’s sternum, his pounding heart, and felt only hard bone where Changbin was probably plush.
“I gotcha,” Chan said, grinning right in Jisung’s face, eyes warm. “You okay?”
“Sure,” Jisung mumbled, because he was wearing teddy bear pyjamas that would suit a three year old and his boss was princess-carrying him up a staircase.
It would have been expected for the others to snicker, to make fun. That would be embarrassing but at least it would be normal. They didn’t even do that. Changbin followed Chan closely, his hand on Chan’s lower back. Jisung wanted to make a kissy face at him, the kind that would usually get him socked in the arm. But Changbin was staring at him so soppily that all Jisung could do was turn his face into Chan’s shoulder and blush furiously.
He needed his IV of drugs back, he needed copious amounts of morphine. Put him back in the coma, actually, this was un-fucking-bearable.
Chan, mistaking his action as hiding pain, said, “We’re almost there, Jisungie, I’m sorry— Jeongin-ah? Can you get the door?”
Jeongin darted around the both of them to input the door code, and then they were stepping into the apartment. It was immediately warmer, and Jisung lifted his head, blinking around.
Everything looked the same, which made sense, but felt weird, somehow. Felix and Hyunjin were sitting at the kitchen table, side by side, Hyunjin picking at a bowl of colourful cereal. Behind them, turning from something on the counter, was a girl, pale with long dark hair. Jisung blinked at her, and she blinked back.
“You’re back!” Felix said, standing and coming around the kitchen table to greet them, mouth splitting into a wide smile.
Jisung smiled back, shyer than usual, and Hyunjin dropped his spoon into his bowl with a clatter. He got up, wordlessly, and stalked out of the room, vanishing into the hallway. Jisung had to work to keep his smile from flickering, the expression feeling very tacked on. It didn’t hurt, that reaction from Hyunjin, but it still didn’t feel good.
Smoothly, like he hadn’t noticed Hyunjin storming out, Felix said, “We’ve got the air mattress all set up, you should—”
Jisung craned to look around as Chan fumbled a bit, trying to take off his shoes without using his hands. The couches in the living area had been moved aside to make room for a mattress, sitting on the floor with a big, plush blanket atop it, and more pillows than Jisung knew they owned stacked at the head. It looked like a nest for some small, burrowing creature, bedding down for winter.
“Ah,” Jisung said, his whole face feeling hot as Chan began to lumber toward it.
Someone’s hand was on Jisung’s ankle, the little sliver of skin between the slippers and the pyjamas. It was a steadying kind of touch, and when Chan knelt clumsily to set Jisung down on his new bed, he saw it was Changbin. The hand slid up his leg, helping Chan manoeuvre Jisung into place.
Jeongin tugged the blankets down, and Chan took Jisung’s slippers off while Changbin tucked his legs under the covers. The bed was soft, the sheets crisp and new, and the pillows were plump enough that Jisung was only partly reclined on the pile of them. It was much more comfortable than the hospital bed had been, more spacious too.
They were all staring down at him, squinting or expectant or soft. Jisung fought not to squirm.
“Are you okay?” Chan asked, kneeling on the floor now, hand on Jisung’s shoulder. “Do you think all that moving ripped any stitches?”
He gave the question some consideration. His stomach felt hot, a throbbing, pulsing kind of pain. But there was nothing new, nothing sharp. “I don’t think so, hyung,” he said.
“Maybe we should check?” Changbin said, standing but bent over a bit. His voice was obviously fretful.
Seungmin, standing at the foot of the mattress, arms crossed, said, “We’re not supposed to mess with his bandages unless we’re changing them.”
“But what if he’s bleeding!” Changbin argued.
Jisung sighed, tugging up the hem of his pyjama shirt. As warm as it was in here, the air felt cool on his skin as he bared his stomach. There was a large rectangle of pristine gauze taped across the softness of his lower belly, concealing it nearly entirely. He worked a corner of that tape with his thumb nail, until Chan stilled him, putting his hand atop Jisung’s.
“It’s okay,” Chan said. “Maybe you shouldn’t...”
He trailed off, unusual for Chan. Jisung looked at him for a few moments, thinking how odd it was, to consistently see Chan so out of his depth. This hyung that always confidently took charge in their business endeavours, rendered fearful and nervous over a bandage.
“I want to check it,” Jisung said, which was true enough. Mostly he was curious what it looked like; he hadn’t had a chance to see it for himself yet.
So Chan lifted his hand, and Jisung resumed peeling up an edge of the tape until he could take hold of it between his fingertips, pulling it and the gauze up in one, until the wounds were bared.
Jeongin inhaled in a hiss, but Jisung didn’t look up to see his expression. He didn’t look at any of their expressions.
There was a little bit of new blood, bright red on the inside of the bandage. But all his stitches seemed to still be intact. It was— a mess, truthfully. Black strings knotted and holding Jisung together, the wounds twisting and ugly, uneven. He’d have raised, gnarled scars once he was all healed. The skin around the wounds was reddish, flushed with the effort of recovery.
He’d never forget being stabbed, the agony of it, the animal fear. But it was strange, out of body almost, to be in this living room, this apartment he knew so well, and to look down at himself and see such a drastic difference. Such obvious evidence of violence, his skin puckered and tied like meat at the market.
He would do it again. It wasn’t even a question.
“It’s healing,” Minho said, and Jisung glanced up and up at him. His face was a mask of neutrality. “Cover it, and don’t touch the interior of the gauze while you do.”
Jisung hadn’t let go of the edge he was holding, and he carefully replaced it back down. The tape was sticky enough that he didn’t feel the need to try and press it down anew, but Jeongin knelt and very gently ran his thumb around the entire periphery of the gauze, making sure the tape wouldn’t budge. The entire area was so tender that Jisung felt the touch tenfold, but it wasn’t painful, not really. He was just very, very aware of his stomach.
“No kiss for me?” Jisung asked as Jeongin rocked back on his heels, just for the vicious joy of watching Jeongin flush bright red. If he was going to lay here embarrassed, he would drag at least someone else down with him.
Chan slid Jeongin a confused little look, and Jeongin glanced back at him before immediately looking away again. Jisung watched Chan actively decide not to ask.
Changbin grabbed the blankets and tugged them over Jisung’s legs, up to his lap, and Jisung pulled his top down to cover himself again. It was warm in here, the stinging of his cold ears steadily decreasing. Tiredness tugged at him, his body so weary.
Everyone was still looking at him, he could sense it. He avoided their eyes, smoothing the blanket over his lap.
“Do you need anything, hyung?” Jeongin asked, the love in his voice too much to bear.
“You can’t look at any screens for a while with your concussion,” Seungmin said, still flat and— almost aggressive, maybe. Aggressively passive. “I got the television and speaker system in here hooked up to the internet and loaded up a bunch of audio books. Music is probably off the table for a while, because of your ear.”
“We’ll keep you from being bored,” Changbin said, patting at Jisung’s leg under the cover. It was actually one of the few body parts that didn’t hurt. His left shin.
Jisung looked around at them all, one by one. “There is one thing,” he said, his voice more wavery than he’d intended.
Chan grasped his hand, engulfing it in warmth. “Of course,” he said, like he was willing to try to pull down the moon if that was what Jisung requested. “What is it?”
“Can you guys see her?” Jisung asked, raising his free hand and pointing at the girl drifting behind the crowd of them. Her hair was a bit stringy with dampness, eyes alert and dark in her face.
The others all turned, immediately looking at the girl, which Jisung supposed was answer enough. She flushed, startling a little, and then Felix was looking back at Jisung and saying, “Yeah, sorry, I forgot you haven’t met her. This is my noona.”
Jisung closed his eyes, melting into the pillows at his back. “Oh, good,” he said on a sigh, grateful that, if nothing else, his near-death experience hadn’t suddenly granted him the ability to see ghosts. That just would have been one thing too many.
——
It was good to be home, to finally have all of them under one roof again. The straining tension in Minho’s back and shoulders could begin to unwind, like there’d been metallic shards all jammed up in the gears and moving parts of his body, and now they’d been removed and finally every motion was no longer a struggle.
They weren’t out of the woods yet though, this he knew well. But maybe they never truly would be, in this city, this line of business.
The sound of the printer working was clunky, grating. Minho leaned back against the work table, his elbow braced on the wood as he watched paper after paper get spat out of the little machine. It was a veritable mountain by the time it was finished, and Seungmin took it and then deftly split it into two piles which he tucked into two manila folders.
“This is just in the last twelve hours?” Minho asked as he took both folders, eyebrow cocking dubiously.
“It’s been covered pretty heavily by the mainstream news, and also a handful of celebrity bloggers and true crime nutsos picked it up as well,” Seungmin said, scathing in a deadpan kind of way. His glasses were a little smudged, the rims thick and dark. Minho would never tell him, but he thought Seungmin looked his most handsome in his glasses. “The masses love rich people drama. I think the explosions just add to it. It will only catch further fire from here.”
Minho hummed. This was a hefty stack of papers. By the time he got through it all, Seungmin would likely have a whole new packet to hand him. “Keep me posted,” he said simply, walking out without another word. He sensed Seungmin grinding his teeth at his lack of gratitude, but that was Seungmin’s problem for expecting it.
He climbed the stairs to the third floor, where the PC room felt remarkably cold and unused for once. They didn’t spend a lot of time in there anyway but these past few days even Jeongin’s television room had gone undisturbed. The door to Chan’s office was, for once, slightly ajar, but Minho still knocked, a polite rap of knuckles, and waited for permission to enter before he pushed the door the rest of the way.
Chan looked up at him as he came in. He had a news show pulled up on his computer screen, one of the mainstream shows, but muted, so that the newsreaders spoke silently. The ticker underneath their faces said LEE JAERIM CAUGHT IN FURTHER CONTROVERSY. There was a heavy book open on the desk in front of Chan — some accounts, maybe, from the look of it.
“I’m just delivering this,” Minho said, before Chan could say anything. He held up one of the folders Seungmin had compiled for him. “Kim Seungmin said it’s everything that’s blown up in the last twelve hours. I thought you might like a copy of it.”
He came forward and dropped it onto the edge of the desk. Even halved from the original pile, it still made a remarkable thump against the wood. “Thanks, Minho,” said Chan, already moving the book he had been looking at away so that he could pull the folder towards him.
Minho nodded, and turned to leave the room, his own folder in his hands. He wanted to look through everything, see if he could get a read on where things might be heading, what the mood of the general public might be. Something like that was unlikely to be the downfall of the Magpie in itself — it was the nastier elements that Lee Jaerim would need to be careful of — but it would be interesting to see if the tides of popularity turned against him.
“Minho,” said Chan from behind him. “Do you have a moment?”
Minho stopped, just in front of the door, and turned on his heel so he could face Chan again, who was getting to his feet. Minho didn’t say anything, just stood there, waiting. There was a strange sense of deja vu that he couldn’t quite place, standing here like this.
Chan came around the desk and leaned against it, arms folded across his chest. They were loose, though, his stance not defensive. Minho wasn’t sure what he was expecting to be told or asked, but it wasn’t what Chan said, which was, “I wanted to apologise to you again.”
It threw Minho off so badly that he said, “What?” out loud before he could stop himself.
“I already apologised for the way I treated you, after you got together with Jeongin,” Chan said, like Minho’s little outburst wasn’t anything. He sounded so sincere that even already Minho felt something shiver up his spine. “But Jeongin kind of wrung that apology out of me, and whilst I was sincere enough, I didn’t really fully feel it when I gave it. So I’m saying sorry again.” His eyes were like a pin holding Minho to a board. “Because I finally get it, now. I— see you. I misjudged, and I’m sorry.”
Minho blinked. In some ways this was more of a torment than being frozen out had been. It made him feel a kind of emotion he preferred to never feel. A curled up child wanting a comforting touch. “Hyung,” he said, voice coming out a little weaker than he’d intended. He cleared his throat. “This is behind us.”
Chan stared at him for a long drawn out moment, perhaps cataloguing the way a blush was working up from Minho’s collar, over his throat and along his ears. “Okay,” Chan finally said, the corner of his mouth twitching with a repressed smile. “But I did also want to commend you, on all the planning you did for the heist. It was excellent work, through and through.”
Minho’s neck was hot. “Jisung almost died.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t a fault on your end,” Chan said. Remarkably breezy, or maybe just dismissive, like blaming Minho for Jisung’s injuries had never even occurred to Chan, not like it had to Minho. “All things considered? You did a spectacular job. Your end of things went off without a hitch — if you don’t count Changbin’s ear, which I don't think we can reasonably hold you responsible for. And Hyunjin and Jisung’s entry into Blackbird’s went smooth as butter. It was an excellent plan, Minho. You did well.”
Minho was, quite honestly, going to burn up into a crisp. Jeongin would probably be quite upset if that happened. “Thank you,” he managed.
Chan’s mouth was still twitching with that repressed smile, only he seemed to be losing the fight against it. Minho wasn’t sure if Chan had ever looked at him like this, like he thought Minho was— cute, maybe? “You can go,” he said. What a fucking relief.
“Thank you,” Minho said, and turned and fled without another word.
He was halfway up the stairs to the apartment before he remembered that his original plan had been to go back down to his room to review the information pack. The conversation, though, had thrown him so completely off balance that he had almost fallen back, on autopilot, on an urge that he had once repressed and now didn’t need to, which was: check on Jeongin. And so that was what he was going to do.
He let himself into the apartment, the welcome warmth washing over him. Bright sunlight streamed in from the windows, squares of it landing across the wood of the kitchen table. The murmuring of voices cut off as he entered, but other voices continued, softer, background noise — the audio for some movie, coming through the speakers in the living room. The soundtrack was light and sweet, something Minho vaguely knew.
Both Jeongin and Jisung turned to look at him as he toed his shoes off — a habit he’d gotten into now that the apartment felt less like space he was treading in on. Jisung was still on his air mattress, mop-headed amongst his floof of blankets and pillows. Jeongin was sitting beside him, feet on the ground and knees tucked together.
The television screen was off. A strange detail, Minho thought, and then remembered Jisung shouldn’t really be looking at screens, let alone squinting at one from across a room. Cute, that Jeongin was just letting the audio play.
“Hyung!” Jeongin said, brightening, and then his face fell comically. “Oh my god, what happened?”
Minho, in the process of setting his pile of papers down on the kitchen table, stopped to blink at Jeongin blankly. “Huh?”
“You’re bright red!” Jeongin said, getting to his feet in a quick scramble and then scampering over.
“Ah,” Minho said lamely as Jeongin finished coming over, eyes wide and worried. His gaze flickered quickly over Minho’s face, an examination that made Minho’s fading blush return. “Chan-hyung wanted to speak to me.”
“Oh.” Jeongin’s open expression of concern morphed into one of suspicion. He looked, in spite of the obvious tiredness lingering to him from an emotionally exhausting day, like he was waiting for Minho to reveal something that would necessitate him going down and giving Chan a scolding. “What did he say?”
Minho looked past Jeongin, back at Jisung on his makeshift bed, who was unabashedly staring at them. When he caught Minho’s eye, he dropped his head back, looking at the ceiling and saying loudly into the air, “The melon head isn’t listening. He can’t even understand language.”
That was not reassuring to Minho, did nothing to quell the embarrassment or vague annoyance prickling in his gut. But Jisung was still staring at the ceiling, so he missed the way Minho’s eyes narrowed.
Jeongin touched him. Light fingertips against his stomach, just under his ribs. “Hyung?” he said softly.
Minho let that touch ground him, let it jostle him loose from his thoughts. “Hyung apologised again,” he said, matching Jeongin’s quieter volume. “And said I did well. Planning the job.”
Jeongin made a low noise of understanding, drawing it out as his expression morphed into something— pleased. “You did,” he said, staring straight into Minho’s eyes as he did it. Minho wanted to flinch, to look away, but he held that contact and felt himself getting redder and redder for his effort. A smile spread across Jeongin’s face. “Aw. Cute.”
Minho juddered away from him. He reached out, a little blindly, for the back of his usual chair, using it to steady himself. “I just— did— what I was supposed to,” he stuttered out, staring down at the paperwork on the table, feeling Jeongin’s amusement like warm rays of the sun.
From over Minho’s shoulder, Jisung called out, “Have you always been this domesticated and I missed it because I was scared of you?”
Minho glared at him, pointed daggers, in a way that a month or so ago would have had Jisung quaking in his gay little boots. But now he just lay against his pillows, unashamedly goggling at them. “I thought the melon head wasn’t listening,” Minho said, as disdainful as he could manage in his current state. Jisung blinked placidly at him and then stuck his tongue out a little. “You—”
Jeongin pressed all along Minho’s side, shutting him up more effectively than anything else could have. He was warm, and he put his hand back on Minho’s belly, but this time he didn’t let it rest there. He slid it up, over the swell of Minho’s pec, until it was pressed flat over Minho’s sternum. He’d be able to feel the way Minho’s heart was going faster, lighter than usual.
“I’m glad Chan-hyung said it,” Jeongin murmured, leaning in. His breath tickled at Minho’s neck, and his gaze was flickering between Minho’s eyes and Minho’s mouth. “Because you deserve to hear it. You work so hard, and you’re so smart, hyung.”
Minho swallowed, mouth feeling dry. His skin prickled with heat, a swooping kind of warmth in his stomach, gathering between his legs. “Stop,” he said.
Jeongin smiled, tipping his head to the side. “Or what?”
Jisung made retching noises, growing in volume as Minho and Jeongin just stayed where they were. Then he quietly said, Ow, under his breath, which served him right. Minho’s grip on the back of his chair was so tight at this point his knuckles had gone white.
Vaguely, at the back of Minho’s mind, he was glad for this moment. The normalcy of it. He’d worried this morning that he’d fucked something up irrevocably. That Jeongin would look at him differently, treat him differently. Or Jisung, however much of the conversation he’d overheard. That they might pity him, or think he was weak, or foolish. He hadn’t fully known what reaction to expect, and in some ways the strength of Jeongin’s response had both surprised him and yet, not.
But this— this. Jeongin was looking at him the same as always. That mischievous smile, those tender eyes.
It felt good. To not have it be a secret anymore. Something in Minho felt lighter for it.
He played into Jeongin’s little game, leaning in, their noses brushing. “Behave, brat,” he ordered quietly, watching the way Jeongin’s eyes sparked molten. “Or poor Jisung is going to pop a stitch.”
“Yeah,” Jisung whined, while Jeongin turned prettily pink, his gaze finally dropping as he stepped away from Minho. With the loss of proximity, Minho could finally loosen his deathgrip on the chair. “Won’t anyone think of me.”
“Oh, hyung,” Jeongin said, approaching Jisung again. He cooed a little. “I’m sorry, did you need something.”
Jisung stuck his bottom lip out in a pout that was grumpy more than anything. “Don’t start that,” Jisung said, but he moved his leg a little when Jeongin sat down on the mattress again, making room. “I know I’m stuck in the communal area but please, mercy.”
The words made Minho glance to the upper corner of the room, where the little black dome of a camera sat. Jeongin was laughing softly, and then he whispered something, too quietly for Minho to hear. Jisung replied, and Minho couldn’t make out the words, but he could hear the put upon cadence.
He finally let himself sit in the chair, and used the cover of the table to adjust himself in his pants as covertly as possible.
Not long after, the keypad chimed and Changbin walked in, curly hair frizzy and a little wild. Like this, you really had to look hard to notice the piece of his ear missing. At first glance it kind of just looked like his hair might be covering it. He gave Minho a squinty, speaking kind of look, and Minho blinked back at him blankly.
Flatly, Changbin said, “Seungminnie sent me. He said Jisung needed to be saved from the two of you.” His tone was accusatory. Minho wondered where he’d been. Judging by his hair, he’d been napping in Seungmin’s room.
Jisung began to say something, but Minho cut him off. “I don’t know what Kim Seungmin is talking about,” he said, thumbing through the papers within the file. Jisung spluttered a little. “I’m working.”
“They were making the eyes,” Jisung argued, plaintive. “And he was doing the voice.”
Changbin sighed, flopping down onto one of the couches. “Don’t worry Jisung, I believe you. Hyung’s here now.”
Minho bent his head to the papers, intent on actually doing some work, while Jeongin sweetly said, “We stayed overnight in the hospital with him! We can be trusted.”
“You made the eyes then too,” Jisung said, voice turned musing. “But yeah, I guess they mostly behaved.”
Minho leaned the rest of the way down and let his forehead rest on the table.
——
Hyunjin had known that Jisung was going to be set up in the living room; it was to be expected, when his bedroom was kind of removed from theirs, and with the thicker walls between Jisung’s room and Minho’s, they might not know if he needed help. He knew all these reasons rationally, and maybe deep in his heart he even approved of them, but— it was too much. He did not think he could cope.
He sat on his bed, where he had been for perhaps the past ten minutes, listening to the sound of Jisung’s voice drifting from the living room. If he hadn’t lived here long enough to know that the walls in the apartment, unlike the ones downstairs, were almost laughably thin, he might have thought he was imagining it — an auditory fantasy, courtesy of a brain that could not give him a break. But it wasn’t a fantasy. Jisung was out there, on the mattress that Felix had set up, and Hyunjin could hear him. He couldn’t hear the words but he knew Jisung’s voice.
A relief, to hear Jisung’s voice. Home again, where he belonged. And a torture, to hear it, and to feel every time the upset bubbling inside himself still.
He knew he would have to go out there eventually. He needed to go out there now, his stomach rumbling with hunger. He could not hide himself away in his room for the rest of time — if nothing else, it was likely to drive him crazy, because he knew what the same four walls for too long did to him. Even now he could feel it, the itching restlessness that came from feeling trapped.
It was, perhaps, silly to think of himself as such. He knew what it was to be really trapped, to have a locked door and barred windows, to know that even if he could get through that door, someone would stop him before he could get out of the building. He felt trapped here, like this, all the same. He could physically leave, he knew that, but if he did so, Jisung would be there. Jisung would be there, laying in his bed, with his big eyes, round cheeks, the four knife wounds to the gut where he had saved Hyunjin, and he could open his mouth and say Hyunjin’s name, and Hyunjin would—
He stood in a flurry of motion. He could not bear it, these pale walls, the feeling of the bedspread under his hands, the scent of the paint and flowers in the air. He grabbed a coat and his wallet, and at the last second remembered to pick up his phone, charged for the first time after the job. It had almost been surprising to turn it on and find no new messages, but of course, how could there have been— the only people who knew this number lived with him.
It was Jeongin’s voice he heard when he first stepped into the hallway, saying something that made Jisung laugh, and then, a moment later, say, “Ah, fuck, Jeongin, don’t be funny, okay?”
“I’ll do my best, hyung,” said Jeongin.
When Hyunjin appeared in the room, the conversation— dropped. It was not just Jeongin there, but Changbin, and Minho, too, washing dishes. Maybe he had made food for them all, and Hyunjin had not been invited. He looked around at Hyunjin when he first arrived, but then so did everyone else: Jeongin on the couch, a book in his lap; Changbin on the other couch looking at a tablet, closest to Jisung; and then lastly Jisung himself, tucked into his bed, reclining on a pile of pillows.
Hyunjin cursed the bloodline of whoever had given him those teddy bear pyjamas.
“Hyung,” said Jeongin brightly, like nothing was wrong. It was the same way Felix had acted when Jisung had first been brought up here, and it grated on Hyunjin. He was not sure if he wanted his upset acknowledged in some way, or if he wanted them to call him out on it. “You missed lunch, but there’s some leftovers, if you want them?”
“No,” said Hyunjin, bluntly. Jisung was looking at him, looking up from his sickbed, and he had that expression on his face. How many times had Hyunjin seen that expression from Jisung, the one that said, I know you’re angry at me and I am so sorry for that. Too many times to count, for reasons both valid and not. How many times had Hyunjin made Jisung make that expression for no reason other than Hyunjin was not a functioning person.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t look at any of the people in that room for any longer. He swept to the front entrance, shoved his feet into his sneakers, and then left as quickly as possible. So quickly, in fact, that he had to pause on the landing a flight of stairs below in order to actually shove his feet properly into his shoes. The wall, when he leaned against it with his hand, was almost shockingly cold.
He was just stomping out of the back of the building when he heard the footsteps in the stairwell. He didn’t look back to see who it was, but it didn’t surprise him when he heard Changbin’s voice calling, “Hyunjin-ah, wait for hyung!”
Hyunjin didn’t stop, mostly because it was too cold to stop walking, but he did slow down enough that Changbin easily caught up to him. It was almost a repeat of yesterday in the hospital, except Hyunjin felt less angry and Changbin was, very visibly, less freaked out. Maybe, with hindsight, Changbin’s obvious panic yesterday would become a funny story for Hyunjin. It could not be that right now.
“Where are you going?” Changbin asked. He had fallen into step with Hyunjin now, keeping up easily, as they came out of the side alley of the building and started down the sidewalk. He’d apparently ducked into his room and grabbed a coat for himself, a puffy thing that was shorter than Hyunjin’s which went down to his knees, and he stuffed his hands into his pockets as they walked.
“Cafe Bichon,” Hyunjin said. He had not, truthfully, fully planned on going there until this moment. There were any number of places he could go right now for food, but he had pulled the name of the cafe out of the air and so now he would dedicate himself to going there. At least he could get coffee, and salt bread, and soak in the atmosphere of a place where nobody knew what he was.
“I’ll go with you,” Changbin said, even though it was hardly close, but then he already was walking with Hyunjin. He’d come out of the house simply to walk with Hyunjin.
Was it because he was worried about him? Worried about Hyunjin out on these streets alone, or worried about what it was that Hyunjin might do?
Maybe it didn’t matter. He’d needed to get out of the house but now that Changbin was here, Hyunjin found that he didn’t mind the company. For someone so usually loud, Changbin knew when to be quiet, and so he was now for a while as they walked. The sky above their heads was cloudy, the air misting in front of them. They walked past a mother with her baby in a pushchair, the daughter dressed in a pink padded snowsuit. Changbin waved at her, and she blinked back at him.
Hyunjin waited until the mother and child had gone out of earshot again before he said, “You know what happened at the hospital now, I guess.”
Changbin glanced at him and said, “Yeah. Uh. Chan-hyung told me last night about it.”
Hyunjin nodded. He assumed Felix had told Chan, who had in turn told Changbin. Changbin looked a little bit like he was expecting Hyunjin to protest, but Hyunjin wasn’t too bothered by it. The gossip made his skin itch but he was used to these people looking after him, and this was just an extension of that.
But still— “Then you know,” he said, almost a whisper. “You know how I feel about Jisung.”
A pause, in which Hyunjin wished he could take even those meagre words back. To unspeak them, to have never confirmed such a thing out loud; how was it so completely different to say something like that to Changbin, who he had known for years, who had been like a brother to him, compared to with Felix. And yet it was different. Maybe the difference was that Changbin was a brother to him.
“Yeah, Hyunjin,” Changbin said eventually. “Seungmin told me about that.”
“Oh,” said Hyunjin. That— confused him. He was not sure why it would have been Seungmin to tell Changbin that, but it was true that Seungmin had put together the truth of his feelings a while ago. “Did he tell you about it before the job?”
“No, he only told me about it yesterday,” Changbin said, with a soft huff of laughter. “I didn’t know about it at all. I was— surprised, to say the least. I never would have guessed it.”
Now it was Hyunjin’s turn to glance at Changbin, not sure if Changbin was joking or pretending but Changbin seemed serious. Hyunjin had started to think that everyone knew how he felt about Jisung, that everyone had known, because nobody had seemed all that surprised about it. Nobody had questioned him in the hospital about quite why, exactly, he was clinging so hard to a sleeping man’s hand. “You didn’t wonder?” he asked. “About why I— why I’ve been the way that I have been?”
“No,” said Changbin. His voice was warm, understanding. “I just thought you were feeling guilty about what happened in Blackbird’s.”
Hyunjin hunched further into his coat, his shoulders rounding as he shoved his hands further into his pockets. “I do feel guilty,” he said, his voice small and almost lost over the sounds of the cars driving past.
Changbin stopped. “Hyunjin-ah,” he said. Hyunjin came to a stop, too, turning to face where Changbin was looking back at him. His voice, when he spoke again, was not just warm and understanding, it was so full of a kind of love that Hyunjin craved and often thought he might be unworthy of receiving. “What on earth do you have to feel guilty about?”
What a laughable question. Hyunjin had so much to feel guilty about that it felt like a lead weight around his neck, cutting off his airflow every time he thought about it. He didn’t say anything, avoiding Changbin’s eyes, and then he kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other.
For another short time there was nothing but the sound of their footsteps, not quite in tandem. Hyunjin knew that Changbin would just let the subject drop, the way he always did when things were cutting too close to the bone for Hyunjin emotionally. So Hyunjin made himself continue. “He got stabbed because he was protecting me.”
The response was instant, like Changbin knew what he was going to say. “That doesn’t make it your fault.”
“No, hyung, I—” Where to begin, where to start. He didn’t want to talk about it, in all honesty, because it was going to be hell to explain, to make the words fit, to choose the right ones after so long of not even thinking too hard about it. But he could tell that once he started, it was going to come rushing out of him like a deluge, just like how it had been to tell Chan everything all those years ago.
He had to start further back through. He had to explain it all.
“You know,” he said, “that I go on my— trips with Jisung.”
Trips was the wrong word, it was not the right word at all, but he couldn’t think of how to word it even inside his head. Still, Changbin just nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“You never ask about those,” Hyunjin said. Until Chan had caught him sneaking back into the apartment a few weeks ago, there’d been a very polite fiction around the whole thing that it wasn’t happening. Neither Chan nor Changbin ever said a word. “You never— you’ve never asked why I take Jisung along. Didn’t you wonder?”
Changbin shrugged his shoulders lightly. “Sure,” he said. “But I thought it might just be private. Something you didn’t want to share with hyung. That’s allowed.”
“That’s not it,” Hyunjin said. But he didn’t elaborate more, because he didn’t think he could explain to Changbin why it was that he took Jisung. It was hard to articulate it even to himself sometimes, everything that surrounded that choice. It would have been impossible before now to even talk about it like this, because even to just bring it up would have been pointing to the elephant in the room.
“When I kill them,” he said instead of any of that. “The men who— hurt me.” He wished there was another way to say that, too, but the only other way would be the truth, and he couldn’t say it, not to Changbin: the men who raped me. “I cut their throats. I take my knife, and I slit their necks, and I make sure that they see that it’s me. I watch them recognise me.”
“Hyunjin-ah,” said Changbin softly.
“It’s like— it’s power,” Hyunjin said, trying to keep his voice steady. “It’s the power I didn’t have when I was a kid. I get to control whether they live or die.” Not that he ever let them live, not any of them. He always made sure that they were dead before he left whatever residence he’d snuck his way into. He always watched the life leave their eyes. “It’s not just knowing that they won’t ever get to hurt me anymore. It’s that I’m making sure of it.”
It was the intimacy of it that he’d always relished. How up close and personal a person had to be to cut a throat, stab a lung. How much slower the death could be like that. Sometimes, when he pushed a knife into a carotid artery, he thought here is your violence paid back. He was not blind, after all, to the— symbolism of it: the penetration, the hurt, the violation.
Changbin was silent. He didn’t stop walking, and so neither did Hyunjin. He was almost afraid to look at him, afraid of what he might see on his hyung’s usually loving face. “I can understand if it seems— bad,” he forced out. “If I— if you disapprove or think—”
“I don’t disapprove,” Changbin said, so firmly and emphatic that it cut Hyunjin off completely. He looked across almost instinctively and found Changbin looking back steadily. “You deserve to have that power back.”
Tears sprung, perhaps not so suddenly, to Hyunjin’s eyes, and he furiously blinked them away, wanting no more of it. “When we were in Blackbird’s,” he said. “When— I took it with me, to Blackbird’s. The knife that I use to slit those men’s throats. And when Jaerim’s goon attacked me, it was that knife that I reached for. And he took it from me like it was nothing.”
There was a small sigh from Changbin, again barely audible, but Hyunjin heard it all the same. It wasn’t a sound like he was judging Hyunjin, more like something made in sympathy, but Hyunjin wasn’t sure that Changbin really got it. In fact, he was certain Changbin didn’t.
“He used that knife to stab Jisung,” said Hyunjin. “He took the knife that I use to kill the people who— violated me, in every way possible, and he used it to violate Jisung in turn. And even if I could get that back, get the knife itself back, I can’t— I can never use it again. Not after it was used to hurt Jisung.”
Changbin stopped again. The look he gave Hyunjin now was so serious, so solemn, that it almost made Hyunjin flinch away from him. “That still doesn’t make what happened your fault.”
“It was my knife,” Hyunjin whispered.
It sickened him, a constant gnawing nausea in his stomach that had nothing to do with the concussion. He could see it when he closed his eyes, that ship-deck-swaying image of the blade disappearing into Jisung’s body. His blade, sharpened so lovingly, cleaned of blood so attentively, used against the man Hyunjin had kept his love for so close to his chest that nobody but Felix had seen it for so long. Hyunjin kept thinking about the aftermaths, when he’d rinse the blade off in the bathroom, the dirty blood of those men swirling pinkish into the drain. He could clean the blade physically, but he couldn’t clean it, in the true way. A blade that had touched the lifeblood of evil.
And now that blade had been inside Jisung, the blade that had touched the insides of those men— had been in Jisung’s body too.
He wanted to go back, to that night. Wanted to return to his bedroom before he even went downstairs, wanted to have left his knife in his bedside table so that it could never be tainted by what had happened, couldn’t taint anything else in turn. Because he knew, now, that he could never go back. It was not even just that knife; he didn’t think he could ever use a knife to kill one of his rapists ever again. Without that, without that power that he’d seized for himself, he thought he might always be the person that he was before: scared and shaking, nothing more than the naked child on the floor of a locked bedroom.
“It’s not your responsibility,” Changbin said. “Nobody blames you for what happened, nobody possibly could. And it’s not your— fault, either, that Jisung took that knife for you. That’s— that’s something that he chose to do.”
That made it worse, that made it so much worse. Didn’t Changbin see that? Hyunjin already knew it, anyway, he knew that it had been Jisung’s choice. “He shouldn’t have done it,” he said wretchedly. “I— I didn’t want it, hyung. I didn’t want that.”
Changbin shrugged again. It was again not mean, not dismissive, but just an acceptance of things being what they were. “If I know Jisung,” he said, “he would do it again.”
Hyunjin knew that too. The tears were back, and he was starting to feel like he was fighting a losing battle. “He shouldn’t,” he said, the choked back sob clear in his throat. “He should— ever since he came here, I’ve been nothing but a blight on his life. I’m awful, awful, and he still—”
He still loves me.
“Hey, hey,” Changbin said, stepping up close and trying to cup Hyunjin’s face. “Don’t cry, dumpling, it’s okay. You’re not a blight on anyone’s life, how could you say such a thing about someone I love so much?” Hyunjin just sniffled at that. “You’re our Hyunjin, and we love you. And there’s no way Jisung thinks that either.” Changbin stepped back a little too look at him again, peering up at him. “Let’s go get some food in you, okay? Hyung’s hungry, so I bet you are too, and it’ll all— it’ll be better after you eat something.”
How like Changbin to think like that. It came across as simplistic, perhaps, but Hyunjin knew better by now. It was not simplistic to focus on basic needs — have you eaten enough, have you slept enough, here, drink some water. It was how Changbin took care of them, and so he was trying to take care of Hyunjin.
He was probably right, too. The world probably would seem— easier once he had food inside him. It had done at the hospital, when Jisung had been asleep.
He wiped at his face, although no tears had actually fallen. “Okay, hyung,” he said.
They walked the rest of the way to the cafe in silence, Hyunjin’s hands back in his pockets, Changbin’s arms swinging by his sides. Hyunjin realised he had lost track of the days a little bit but it presumably was not a weekend, because when they got to the cafe, it was pretty empty, just a handful of people sitting around with their drinks. It was almost overly warm after the cold outside.
Hyunjin looked up at the menu, although he knew it basically off by heart by now. This was the cafe he had come to the morning of their rappelling practise, and he had stood in this spot and thought, I’ll get Jisung a drink, and there had been such a sense of excitement about it, in doing something nice to Jisung for once.
The practise had been for nothing in the end. None of them had ever thought of a window that didn’t open, it seemed.
“What do you want, Hyunjin-ah,” Changbin said, cheerfully and brightly, already pulling his wallet out of his pocket. He waved it in the air. “Hyung will buy you whatever you want.”
Even through the misery choking in his lungs, the sight of that made Hyunjin smile, just a little. Changbin beamed back at him, so obviously pleased to see him smile that it made Hyunjin’s usual snarky reply die in his throat. “Okay, hyung,” he said instead. “Thank you.”
——
The walk up the stairs from his workshop to the apartment was, in all honesty, the absolute worst thing about living in this building. Seungmin had once thought, when he moved in here, that he’d get used to it, but he never had done. Probably he didn’t do the trek often enough for his body to build up tolerance to it — he imagined Changbin, by this point, could take all these stairs without any hint of strain. Seungmin, on the other hand, had made a habit of avoiding it as much as possible.
But there were needs that must be taken care of, and thus it proved, incessantly, with the need to eat. If it were really up to Seungmin, he’d just live off whatever snacks he could keep in his workroom, or what he could store in his fridge. This both appealed and did not appeal for the exact same reason: if he did that, he’d have no excuse to ever leave. And sometimes, surprisingly, he did actually want to leave.
The stairs though — Chan should have chosen better all those years ago. At least a shorter building would have sufficed.
He let himself into an apartment that was dimly lit — someone had found a lamp from somewhere and set it up near Jisung’s bed, so that the light would be softer, and if he lay back, he wouldn’t be staring directly up at the lights inset in the ceiling. Jisung wasn’t laying back, though, he was propped mostly upright, and when he turned to see who had come into the room, Seungmin saw that there was an open book in his lap. One of Jeongin’s comic books, from the looks of it.
He was alone in there, too. That made sense, it was late. Seungmin was actually surprised Jisung was awake at all. Whenever Seungmin had checked up on him on the cameras as the day progressed, Jisung often seemed to be sleeping. But then maybe that was why he was awake now.
“Hey!” Jisung said brightly, like he was genuinely pleased to see Seungmin.
“Hello,” Seungmin said. He focused on taking his feet out of his slippers and putting them neatly to the side of the entryway. He was not like Minho; he would not antagonise Hyunjin by wearing his dirty workroom shoes, slippers they may be, into the apartment itself.
The floor up here was heated anyway. It was lovely, to step onto that, after the concrete floor outside.
“Are you eating?” Jisung asked. “There’s leftovers, I think. Minho-hyung cooked dinner for us.” He laughed a little. It was the laugh that Jisung always let out when he was about to make a joke that he knew might not land well. “If I’d known Minho-hyung would make food for me because of it, I might have gotten stabbed sooner.”
One of the others might have scolded him for that joke, or given him big, sad eyes about it. Hyunjin, being the way he was right now, probably would have yelled at him for it. Seungmin just ignored it in favour of poking his head into the fridge, where there were indeed leftovers, although none of it was anything Seungmin wanted to eat. They were, he saw, things that were easily digestible, flavourful things that would not be too hard on the stomach all the same. Perfect things for an injured man.
He closed the fridge again. Perhaps there was cereal he could have. He could take it downstairs, crunch on it to his heart’s content, wash out the bowl in his bathroom and then let it sit there until Changbin grumbled that he was taking after Jeongin with his water glasses and brought it back up for him. With cereal he wouldn’t even have to cook.
It had been— a long day. Not just Jisung coming home, and all the things around that, but after his break from that, he’d sat at his computers for long, long hours and watched as everything picked up momentum at a pace that had surprised even him. They had wanted to take advantage of the Magpie being in the news already but Seungmin had thought, initially, that it might take a little time for it all to kick off.
Not so. The fall out had been immediate. Nothing was juicier, he had been reminded, than a good scandal, and this was not so much a scandal as a real life crime drama happening in real time. Of course people were paying attention.
He looked back at Jisung, who was looking at the book in his lap. He was frowning a little, but Seungmin didn’t know if that was because of the story or because it was hurting him to do so. “Should you be reading that?” Seungmin asked. He didn’t want to have gone through all the time and effort to have set up his audiobooks only for Jisung to make himself worse by actually reading.
Jisung shrugged a little. “I’m mostly just looking at the pictures,” he said. “Besides, you’re allowed to read if you have a concussion. I watched a documentary one time.”
“You watched a documentary about concussions,” Seungmin said. He came out of the kitchen now, and padded to the living room. He was not sure why. He did not usually linger so much up here, especially not when there was work to be done, but being here with Jisung was, frankly, comforting. It was soothing a buzzing feeling inside of him that he hadn’t realised he’d been feeling all this time. “Just out of interest or?”
“I had a concussion when I was younger,” Jisung said, in that vague way he always spoke about things that had happened in his childhood. “I was interested in it, so I looked into it when I got older.”
Seungmin didn’t say anything to that. The thing he’d never told Jisung was that Seungmin knew that — he knew because he’d seen Jisung’s hospital records, when he was doing his background check, after Jisung first joined them. He’d done a far more in depth check on Jisung than he’d done even on the others, since they had known absolutely nothing about Jisung when Chan had decided to give him a chance. He found the records, the times Jisung was taken to a doctor; fewer times, Seungmin suspected, than he probably should have been, but considerably more from the time he had turned eight and his step-father had come into the picture. Seungmin had seen the concussion record then.
He’d never told Jisung that he’d done that. There were many reasons for that, but part of it was that if he told Jisung, he suspected the others might ask if he’d done the same for them. Seungmin did not particularly relish having to look Minho in the eye and tell him that yes, he’d seen the prison records: all of them, the arrests and the sentences and the stretches in solitary. He did not yet know if Minho would take it as part of a normal thing, Seungmin doing these checks, or if he’d consider it a breach of his wall-like privacy.
Seungmin sat on the edge of the couch. Jisung watched him and then he grinned, a little crooked, as he closed his book and set it aside. “What’s this!” he said. “Kim Seungmin come to keep me company this time?”
He sounded delighted; he sounded playful. It did something to Seungmin, to hear that tone in Jisung’s voice. It made his heart— clench, listening to Jisung joke around, just like he would have done before, if Seungmin had given this same indication that he wanted to spend time with him. Or maybe not, because Seungmin would never have done that, before he had carried Jisung’s bleeding body out of a burning building.
He didn’t rise to the joke, though. He just said, “How are your dressings?”
Maybe Jisung didn’t expect any kind of reaction from Seungmin, because he didn’t even seem disappointed by it. “They’re fine,” he said instead. He lay back a bit against his mass of pillows. “Chanbin-hyung came and changed them for me before he went to bed.”
Seungmin absorbed that. Changbin had gone to bed, which meant he was probably not going to be coming to join Seungmin, but then that made sense — he could hardly sneak back into the apartment at 4am if Jisung was sleeping here in the living room. Changbin had also, it seemed, learned something about wound care, if he was the one changing the dressings. Seungmin didn’t know if that was an old knowledge or a new thing. He could imagine, only too well, Changbin asking one of the nurses at the hospital to show him how.
“That’s good,” Seungmin said.
He should get up, get his cereal, leave for his workroom again. He still didn’t know why he hadn’t — wasn’t it proof enough in front of his very eyes that Jisung was okay? But he didn’t move for another second or so, and he came to regret it, because the next words out of Jisung’s mouth were, “Seungmin-ah, I really wanted to— say thank you. For what you did that night.”
Hives, instantly, all over Seungmin’s body. “Jisung—” he started.
“No, Seungmin—” Jisung struggled back upright. “I know, I get it, I hate it when people thank me for stuff too, but just— I need to say it, please let me talk to you about it.”
Don’t, Seungmin wanted to beg. Please don’t. He’d already had to talk about it all with Changbin, who he was at least more open to emotional conversations with. The thought of it with Jisung, knowing the kind of sincerity that was to come, was unbearable.
There was a silence, which Jisung seemed to take as the acquiescence that it was. “I don’t remember everything,” he said, so solemnly. “But I remember that you came and got us out. It was— very brave of you.”
First Changbin, now Jisung. The word felt like it had been bouncing around his head for hours now, like one of those old screensavers on computers. He still wasn’t sure how he actually felt about it, this idea that he had been brave in what he did. It still didn’t feel brave to him, so much as risky, and ill-planned. Even if he’d have done it again, without question, without hesitation.
Instead of saying any of that, he just shrugged.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Jisung said insistently.
“I couldn’t have just— left you,” Seungmin said. Even if he’d taken a moment to think about it, he would not have been able to live with himself if he hadn’t gone to help.
“You could have,” Jisung said, very matter-of-fact, utterly without judgement. “And if you had, I wouldn’t have even been upset or angry about it.”
No, Seungmin thought, sardonic but without humour. You would have been dead.
Jisung’s mouth quirked into a smile, half a grin, that was only barely amused; it was not really there in his eyes, which were just as serious as before. “Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to be mad, huh. Because I would have been dead.” He was silent for a moment while Seungmin tried to not stare, thrown off by his thoughts being so perfectly mirrored. Then Jisung said, “I would have died if you hadn’t come for me.” His voice was as serious as the grave. “And so I need to say thank you for that. It’s thanks to you that I am still alive.”
Seungmin was silent again. He was fighting the urge to bundle his hands into his lap, to twist them into his sweatpants, to allow some physical indication of his discomfort out. He didn’t usually feel this need, because usually he either was not in a situation like this, where he was being forced to confront emotions in this way, or if he was, it was with Changbin, and he could just glare about it. He didn’t want to glare at Jisung, not even a little bit. Not after what he had seen, not after he knew, intimately, what it was like to scrub Jisung’s blood off his skin.
He wanted to protest, too, argue against Jisung’s point, but he couldn’t even do that. He knew it was true. He got the sense, from what he had picked up from the nurses and the medical chart that he had taken a look at at the bottom of Jisung’s bed, that if he’d hesitated like everyone expected him to have done, they might have ended up getting Jisung to the hospital too late.
Jisung shifted on the bed, turning so that he could look at the darkened, empty hallway where the bedrooms were. For a moment he just looked at the darkness, his face set into an expression that Seungmin sometimes thought he’d noticed on Jisung’s face more than the others might, because he saw it on the cameras: a desolate expression. Then he looked at Seungmin and said, “And thanks to you, Hyunjin is still alive.” He took a breath, far more unsteady. “Seungmin. Thank you for coming for him. I remember— I didn’t know if you’d bother coming, I didn’t really think about it at the time. I wouldn’t have blamed you for it. But when I saw it was you, when I realised— it was comforting to know that even if I died, he would have someone to lead him out of there.”
“I wouldn’t have left you,” Seungmin said. His voice was a little rough, in a way he wasn’t going to examine too much. “Even if— even if you’d been dead, I wouldn’t have left you there. You needed to be with us.”
Jisung’s eyes, which had been drifting back to the hallway, snapped to Seungmin’s. He looked shocked, very visibly shocked to hear those words. Seungmin wasn’t sure if it was because Seungmin had included himself in this us, or if it was because Seungmin had included Jisung in it. Seungmin had never, not even in the beginning, really understood why it was that Jisung put himself so firmly on the outside of everything that happened. Seungmin knew why he had done it himself all these years, but Jisung was actually likeable, friendly and playful. He clearly craved and valued the connections he had here. So there was no need to set himself on the outside.
“You belong with us,” Seungmin told Jisung. He was having to force the words out, and he could only hope that it was coming across how he wanted, that it was not insincere. “I wouldn’t have left you there to burn or rot. I would have brought you home.”
The two of them looked at each other. Jisung was blushing a little bit, pink across his cheeks. For a moment, Seungmin felt it, the perfect understanding between the two of them: neither of them knew what the fuck to do with this kind of honesty between them. Neither of them were built to withstand it. And yet they were experiencing it all the same, they understood each other all the same. And then the moment passed, and Jisung opened his mouth, and Seungmin said, “If you make a stupid joke right now, I will stab you a fifth time.”
Jisung laughed, full-bodied, and then winced and held a hand over his stomach. “Me, make a dumb joke?” he said, a little breathless, probably from pain. “That doesn’t sound like me, Seungmin-ah.”
Seungmin was going to react, but before he could, his phone went off, a chiming sound. He would have just ignored it except it did it again, immediately afterwards, and a third time. He was still fumbling it out of his pocket when it started going off constantly, the little chiming bell filling the room. His hands were a little unsteady and by the time he silenced it with a muttered curse, Jisung was looking at him with a raised eyebrow.
“I would have always bet money on you being a phone on permanent silence kind of guy,” Jisung said.
“I am,” Seungmin said. Silent no-vibrate, except for when it was important, except for a handful of numbers he’d programmed in or— moments like this, where he’d set up special alerts. And those alerts were screaming at him now, the news flooding through his phone, the text bold in black and white.
“Fuck,” he said. The feeling inside of him could not possibly be described, except to say that for a second he felt something so close to panic that his head spun.
“Fuck, what?” Jisung asked, and Seungmin barely heard him. There was an awful rushing in his ears, fingertips tingling.
He surged to his feet. “I have to tell Chan-hyung,” Seungmin said, tripping away from a spluttering Jisung. “I have to tell hyung.”
——
Chan was already in bed, most of the way to asleep, when the knock on the bedroom door came. Felix, curled up against his chest, made a soft noise, almost like a questioning chirp, and squinted his eyes open again. Chan hadn’t realised Felix was asleep until that moment; he’d thought, like Chan, that Felix was mostly just dozing. But the disgruntled look on his face was that of someone being rudely woken up.
The knock came again on the bedroom door. Chan felt— sluggish, maybe, lulled into slowness by Felix against him. Not so long ago a knock at his bedroom door at almost midnight would have sent him out of bed immediately, but now it took Seungmin’s voice, a little higher than usual, a little rushed, saying, “Hyung, it’s me,” to have Chan moving.
Felix sat up, covers pooling in his lap, as Chan got out of the bed, shivering as the cool air of the room hit his mostly bare skin. “I’m coming, Seungmin,” he called, as he took a moment to grab his t-shirt from the top of the laundry basket where he’d put it fifteen minutes earlier. Usually he might not bother, not even with Seungmin, but the sense of urgency in Seungmin’s voice made Chan think that maybe he wanted to be dressed for whatever was about to happen.
Outside the door, Seungmin looked frantic, too. Only the fact that Seungmin was here, in person, and not down in his workroom whilst the alarms blared loud, kept Chan from his own panic. Seungmin’s eyes, though, were wide, and when he saw Chan, he gestured with the phone he was holding and said, “Hyung, it’s Lee Jaerim, it’s—”
He caught sight of Felix, then, as Chan stepped out of the room. Something passed over Seungmin’s face, a spasm of emotion, and his words cut off. This was unlike Seungmin, who usually did not care to interrupt himself or spare another person’s feelings in this way. But he was silent, for a moment, as there was the sound of rustling from behind them; Felix, sliding off the bed too.
“What is it, Seungmin,” said Chan, heart racing in his chest. He didn’t know what the answer would be, and worse than that, didn’t know what he wanted the answer to be. At the very least, to not have been exposed, to not have their family under threat, to—
“He’s dead,” Seungmin said. Heavy, flat; the words like the tolling of a bell in the distance, solemn and unforgiving. “Hyung. The Magpie’s dead.”
A soft noise from behind them. Chan turned, feeling like he was in a daze, and found Felix on his feet, looking at them. He swayed, just a little. Chan reached out, slid an arm around his waist, and pulled him in, close, tucking Felix right up against him. Felix pressed in so close to him it was like an echo of the night before outside Seungmin’s workroom. Felix was shaking again, but not from laughter this time.
It’s almost over, Chan had thought just last night, and had not known how true that would be.
“How?” he asked Seungmin, over the top of Felix’s head.
Seungmin was watching Felix. He looked torn, like he really didn’t know how to feel about this — but then that made sense, considering Seungmin had lost his father, too, a high profile event in and of itself. Chan’s brother, Changbin’s grandmother, Jeongin’s parents; they had died without stir, just another life lost in the world, but not so, for Seungmin. You could google his name and find news articles on it. Chan had often wondered, over the years, why Seungmin didn’t work under a pseudonym. Changbin had apparently asked, once, and reported back: he just gets angry when you ask.
After a few seconds, Seungmin’s eyes flicked to Chan’s, and he blinked, as if he needed to recall the question. Then he said, “Ambushed at a private airfield north of the city. It looks like he was trying to escape the country. It hasn’t hit the news just yet, I got notified of the police reports. His entire entourage was slaughtered.”
Silence for a moment. Nothing but the sound of Felix’s breathing, too loud and shaky. Chan held him and tried to think, but it was impossible. He could not think, he could not— work out what to say or do. The Magpie was dead. He had waited for years for this moment. Lee Jaerim was dead. And yet it had not been at Chan’s hand, not properly. It had not been him who had taken the man’s life, not been him who had pulled the trigger.
Lee Jaerim had died without ever knowing the reason Chan hated him. It was not until this moment that Chan realised he’d always thought he’d be able to tell Lee Jaerim that. To say, this is for Jun.
He felt it, when Felix started to cry. His shoulders started to shake, and there was a sob muffled right against Chan’s shoulder. Chan’s arms tightened around him without conscious thought, and then loosened enough to not be literally crushing him. Seungmin, looking at Felix again, said, “Hyung. What do you want me to do?”
Chan didn’t know. He literally couldn’t think. The world seemed at once freed and huge and unknowable. “Let the others know,” he said, after a few moments. “Text them. Don’t— don’t wake them up. It will wait until morning. It will all— wait until morning.”
Seungmin nodded. The frantic energy was gone from him now, replaced by something tired, something lethargic. He needed sleep, after the work he had done these past few days, and he seemed a little shocked, in the same way Chan was. It had happened faster than any of them expected, although they had all expected this. This, or for Lee Jaerim to have successfully fled. Maybe Seungmin felt some of what Chan felt: a sudden sense of being adrift.
“Okay, hyung,” he said though, and as Chan drew Felix back into the bedroom, Seungmin retreated back down the hallway. Right before the door closed, he heard Jisung’s voice, louder than maybe it should have been for the hour, saying, Are you serious right now, he’s dead?
The door closed, clicking shut. Felix was still crying, and now, away from prying eyes or ears, Chan drew him back so that he could look at him. Felix lifting his hands to try to cover himself, but Chan got there first, trying to wipe away some of the worst of it. “Felix,” he said, voice quiet. “Lix. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” Felix sobbed. His hands were clutching Chan’s wrists, not like he was going to pull Chan away, but more like he was holding onto Chan to ground himself. “I don’t know, hyung. It’s over, isn’t it? He’s— it’s really— it’s over.”
It was over, it was over. Not with a bang, but not with a whimper, either. Jun and Narae, avenged, and now Chan did not know what came next. Tomorrow he would have to wake up and make decisions, figure it all out but tonight he didn’t know at all. He did know one thing, though. “It’s over,” he said, still quiet. “He’s dead. He can never hurt you again, Felix.”
Felix broke down again. His sobbing echoed around the room. Chan pulled him back in, tucked Felix’s head under his chin, and rocked them slightly side to side. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing more to say. Lee Jaerim was dead. Chan could only hope he had suffered before he went.
Chapter 29
Notes:
this took longer than expected but life sure has been happening and also it's 30k so like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
but seriously thank you all so much for your patience and understanding on this. we're really on the final stretch now!!
don't look at the chapter count changing. just. don't look at it.
chapter warnings: hyunjin has a major panic attack in this chapter and we are in his pov when this happens. he both talks and thinks more explicitly about what he went through in the past.
there is also more specific talk about minho and jisung's past childhood abuse in this chapter.
Chapter Text
Felix roused fully from sleep to an empty other half of the bed and eyes that felt like he had bathed them in grit. The former did not surprise him, if only because he had the faint memory of Chan murmuring to him, his mouth brushing over Felix’s forehead. He had not surfaced enough to hear, much less remember, the words, but the feeling of it had stuck with him.
The latter wasn’t surprising either. He’d cried himself to sleep last night, Chan’s arms around him. He probably looked a fright, his eyes swollen and red. Hyunjin had once said, after he’d watched Felix weep over a sad drama, that Felix looked pretty even when he cried. Felix didn’t think he would look pretty right now.
No matter; he didn’t want to look at himself anyway. He avoided doing so in the mirror when he dragged himself into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, gaze set firmly to the side. He didn’t look at himself as he washed his face, bathed his aching eyes in cool water, trying to bring himself some comfort. He didn’t look at himself at all, and he wasn’t entirely sure why he was so determined not to.
He didn’t look like his father. He looked like his mother, everyone had always said so, and when he was a child, especially before she died, it had been such a point of pride. After she’d died, it had been something he hoarded, every mention of her, every sentence that seemed to tie them together. He’d looked in the mirror plenty after that, trying to see her features in his, trying to remember her better; trying to fix her image in his brain without the need for the photographs that had been almost entirely removed from the house.
As he got older, looking like his mother had stopped being a comfort and became a yoke around his neck. He should have looked more like his father: broad shouldered, broad face, smaller mouth. He was glad, now, that he did not.
When he padded into the hallway, there was almost silence, except that Jisung was snoring in the living room. He was not particularly loud but it was still very audible. He sounded, at the very least, like he was getting good sleep, which Felix was grateful for. Jisung had been sleeping a lot since he came home, but Felix wasn’t sure if it was deep rest. He had been too easily disturbed.
Felix did his best to not disturb him now as he knocked on Jeongin’s bedroom door. Jisoo’s bedroom door, he supposed, although it still technically belonged to Jeongin, even if he seemed to have had no interest in the room these last few weeks. He kept his knock quiet, but it was enough. Jisoo, like Felix himself, had learned over the years to sleep with an ear out for noises like that.
The door opened after barely a few seconds. His sister stood, in her pyjamas, but her hair neatly pulled back into a ponytail, looking at him with such a clear, steady expression that he felt like he might start crying again. “Noona,” he said.
“I saw,” she said, before he could figure out the words himself. “On the news. I saw.”
She held the door open without another word, motioning him to come inside. He did so, hearing the door click shut quietly behind him. He’d been inside Jeongin’s bedroom a handful of times, usually just poking his head in to see if Jeongin wanted to bake with him or watch something downstairs. The room had always been messy, clothes not in the laundry basket, empty cups or snack wrappers left lying on the desk. It was considerably neater under Jisoo’s care. She’d even made the bed.
She skirted around him and sat on the edge of the bed, facing him, and patted the mattress next to her. Her eyes were still so steady. “Come and sit with me,” she said.
He sat. If he didn’t look anything like their father, Jisoo did. Not exactly the same, certainly prettier than their father had been, but she did not really have any of the delicate beauty that Felix, and Narae, had seemed to have inherited. Maybe that, too, was where she had inherited the sense of poise that she seemed to be showing now.
It wasn’t the first time he’d thought it, and it never stopped being something he felt ashamed for thinking, but it came into his head now: she would have been a worthy heir to him.
“What are they saying?” he asked softly. “On the news.”
“That he was shot,” Jisoo said, tonelessly. “At the airfield. They didn’t really have much, I think the police are trying to keep the journalists away from the whole thing as much as they can.”
“It’ll get out,” Felix said. “It’s too juicy for it not to.”
She nodded. Underneath the composure she seemed a little tired. Perhaps she’d woken early and seen the news and been unable to get back to sleep. She had her hands folded in her lap, perfectly steady. Felix’s hands, twisting the hem of his sweatshirt, were trembling.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said, but his voice cracked on the last word and he was crying again. Nothing hysterical, nothing too much, but just a slow drip of tears down his face. Weeping was perhaps the word, except that was for things that were sad, and he was not sad. He did not know all that he was feeling, but sadness was not part of it.
“Yongbok,” she said, sighing. She lifted her hands to start dabbing away the tears with the long sleeve of her pyjama shirt. As casual as her style had been in other areas, her pyjamas were all matching sets, and this one was soft cotton, worn with age. Felix let her pat at his face, although the tears didn’t really stop. His eyes hurt so much.
“I should have done it earlier,” he said, shuddering, his voice so thick that it almost rumbled out of him. “I should have— been braver and did this earlier. That way Narae would be alive.”
It was, and always would be, the biggest regret of his life. That he had only had the guts to do something after she was already dead. He had been sleepwalking through a life of misery all those years, knowing only how to obey, how to fold himself into the image his father wanted, do his best to keep his head down and please him as best as he could. Knowing, the entire time, that it was utterly futile.
He had not thought to rebel, not thought to break free, until he had watched Narae die. It should not have taken that loss. It should not just be him and Jisoo here, sitting here like this, with the weight of their father lifted off them. She should have been with them.
“Maybe,” Jisoo said. She sighed again and took her hands away from his face, even though he had not really gotten himself under control. Maybe she realised how pointless it was. In recent years he hadn’t shown it to her, but he had been a crybaby even as a child. “Or maybe we would have died with him, at that airfield, if you hadn’t been able to get us out. Maybe she would have died anyway, if he had insisted on her marrying that awful man. Or maybe it would never have gotten this far, because you were the one who was dead.”
“I should have tried,” he whispered.
“You could not have,” she said. “Don’t you see, Yongbok? He— we knew it, Narae and I, we knew what he would do to you. We heard him, some nights, hurting you, beating you. He did that on purpose, he made sure that we knew that he could hurt you, so that we were too scared to do anything about it.”
“I know,” he said. “I— I know, but you still—”
“We could not have done anything to save ourselves without putting you in danger,” she said. “And you could not have done anything to save yourself without the same thing. Christ, Yongbok, he gave you a black eye once because you helped me set the table for dinner. Do you realise what he would have done if he caught you these last nine months.”
Felix did. He had always known, because he had seen it before, with people his father thought had betrayed him in some way. He had been made to watch, his eyes fixed forward, trying his best to not actually see the torture, the slow painful death occuring in front of him. He had not been able to block up his ears, had not been able to ignore the screams, the begging, the eventual pained gurgling.
When he thought back on it, he had to admit that given a choice between being returned to his father and being killed by Minho, at least Minho would be relatively fast about it.
“I wish I had been different,” he said. It felt shameful to say this out loud. It felt childish. “I think that’s what this feeling inside of me is. Grief, but not for him, never for him. Just— it should have been different.”
“We deserved more,” she said softly.
They sat in silence for a long time after that, Felix trying to stop his tears and just about managing it, Jisoo waiting him out patiently. When was the last time she cried, Felix wondered. He was not sure he’d ever seen it, not since their mother’s funeral.
Eventually, after he’d scrubbed at his face with his own sleeve, his eyes so sore he was thinking he might go get ice packs for them, he said, “What are we going to do about the inheritance.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t even know what it actually says in the will, if I even can inherit anything. Until we know that, there’s no point in speculating too much. I don’t know— I’ll be honest, Yongbok, I don’t know if I personally want to have his money. I know enough to know how he got most of it.”
Felix knew even more than she did, and he felt somewhat the same way. Money that he stole from his father was one thing, it felt like it was evening the playing field, but the idea of inheriting all of it, of it all being passed down to him by virtue of his birth, didn’t feel right. It wasn’t even like he planned on keeping any of the money they’d stolen, not now. He didn’t need it. Chan or Jisoo could have his share of the cuts.
“The security of it would be nice, but it’s blood money. Either way,” she said, very briskly; sometimes she was so matter-of-fact in her manner that it was almost painful for Felix, “I think it’s best that I get set up in Busan as soon as possible. I can’t keep taking up space in this house. I’m sure having your older sister around is cramping your style.”
Felix gave her a weak smile. “Noona,” he said. “I really like having you here. I’m glad we get to— see each other.”
Her face softened into a smile, and she reached out and tucked some of his hair back. Felix almost flinched from the touch, it was so reminiscent of Chan’s ongoing habit, but she was tucking a chunk back on the other side of his face. “I’m glad to see you too, Yongbok-ah. I’m glad that you’re healthy and well. Your hair is too long, though.”
It wasn’t, Felix wanted to say. Maybe it wasn’t long enough, in fact, maybe it wouldn’t be long enough until it was past his shoulders and nobody who looked at him would ever think that he was masculine, that he was his father’s heir, that he was anything other than who he was. But she meant well, she meant concern, and so he just nodded. She was his sister, but she understood only the parts of him that she could know around their father, after all.
“We can get you sorted for Busan,” he said. “I’ll talk to Chan-hyung, and Seungmin. They’ll be able to figure it all out. I’ll let you know how it progresses, I’ll keep you up to date.”
It was her turn to nod. Then she got to her feet, stretching a little bit. She held out her hand, which he took, and she tugged him up to his feet. “Come on,” she said. “Noona will make some breakfast. And I’ll make enough for your stabbed friend.”
“He has a name,” Felix said.
“Sure,” Jisoo said.
——
Felix had been crying, was the first thing that Minho noticed, holding the door to the workroom open for Jeongin to enter with him. Nothing surprising there. He was sitting next to Chan on a stool, the two of them pressed side to side, Chan’s arm around Felix’s back as if he wanted to do nothing more than to tug him straight into his lap but couldn’t, because a single stool wouldn’t balance with that kind of weight on it.
The second thing Minho noticed was that Jisoo had not been crying, which did not surprise him either. It would have on maybe the first day, but not now, not with that solid backbone in her that Felix did not seem to have. Felix must have had something to him, to survive the years of being the Magpie’s son, but whatever that had been had fled him the moment he had been somewhere seemingly safe.
Jisoo didn’t strike Minho like that. That backbone was a part of her the same way her hair was black and her feet were small: genetic, hard-wired into her. Minho respected her for it.
“Hello,” Jeongin said to the room at large, as he was inclined to do, but where usually his greetings were bright, cheerful things, this was decidedly subdued. That probably had something to do with the feeling of the room at large, which felt, very much, like someone had died.
Minho had woken at just after six, his body adapting back to his usual early wake up time after the confusion of the last few days, with Jeongin’s body a dead weight against him, slack with sleep, head against Minho’s chest. He was almost used to this now — almost, not quite though, because the joy of it, of feeling Jeongin there with him, was so acute that his brain shied away from being able to fully acknowledge it. He had felt around for his phone, now kept within easy reach for times such as these, and discovered— mild chaos.
His notifications and alerts for news about the Magpie had worked, so much so that he had found himself a little annoyed that Seungmin had not alerted him about it himself, until he discovered that Seungmin had messaged him about it, almost as soon as the news had apparently dropped, and it had just been lost in the noise on his phone.
He had sat up when he saw the news, straight upright, dislodging Jeongin, who had, somehow, woken up from it. Hyung, he’d mumbled, in sleepy betrayal, his hand reaching out as if to snag the hem of a t-shirt or something, except that Minho had been shirtless. It’s too early.
The Magpie’s dead, Minho had said, and then it had been Jeongin who sat bolt upright.
In some ways, Minho had not expected this — this sombre atmosphere, the quiet mood. On Chan, at the very least, he had expected something more along the lines of vicious jubilation, or glee of some kind: his mortal enemy slain at last, and Chan had to do very little of actually getting his hands dirty. Minho didn’t know if it was because of Felix or something else that had Chan looking the way he did, serious and contained. He didn’t look like a man who felt inclined to celebrate.
“Hello, Jeongin,” Chan said softly. “You don’t have to be here, you know?”
That was what Minho had said to Jeongin, after the message had come in from Chan asking for the meeting. Minho had gotten up to wash his face, change into suitable clothing, and Jeongin had done the same. Minho’s words had gone unheeded in much the same way Chan’s did now — Jeongin gave Chan a blank little look, and tightened his hold on Minho’s hand, like he thought someone might try to physically separate them.
It was Minho who did that though, nudging Jeongin forward a little. “Go and sit down, baby boy,” he said.
Jeongin huffed under his breath, but did as he was prompted, not around the workbench like the rest of them, but instead he went straight to the couch and curled up into a corner of it. He had stolen a pair of Minho’s sweatpants again, trying to claim that he couldn’t go bother Jisoo to get into his room for his own clothing. Minho hadn’t really protested it much. Sitting like that, legs tucked up on the couch, there was a solid inch of ankle showing where the sweatpants had ridden up. They wouldn’t have done that on Minho. He wasn’t going to look too closely at that.
There was no Changbin — he was to watch over Jisung, stuck like an upside down turtle in the living room. There was no Hyunjin either, which did make Minho raise a mental eyebrow. He would have thought that Hyunjin would be glued to Felix’s side right now, fussing over his angel baby or whatever ridiculous nickname he could come up with. But he wasn’t here, and it didn’t seem like they were going to bother waiting for him.
Minho took a stool and then looked, a single eyebrow raised, at Seungmin, still sitting in his desk chair with a blanket over his legs. He looked tired, and probably rightfully so, considering the news that had come in, but he would be needed for this meeting. With a sigh, Seungmin picked himself up out of his chair and padded to the workbench in his stupid dog slippers and took one of the stools.
Chan cleared his throat. “We need to figure out,” he said, “exactly what it is that we’re going to do, in the light of Lee Jaerim’s— death.” He looked at Seungmin. “Has there been anything new since last night? The news still seems unsure of what went down.”
“There’s been chatter,” Seungmin said. “Nobody has taken credit for it — or, nobody credible has stepped forward to claim responsibility. A few smaller groups are trying to claim they did it, but nobody believes it.”
“There’s no chance it could be one of them?” Chan asked.
“Well, considering that most of them are also trying to say they’re the ones who blew up Blackbird’s, I don’t think it was them,” Seungmin said dryly. “Besides which, their operations are too small to be able to pull something like this off. It seems more likely that they’re simply trying to increase their reputation in the face of the upcoming power struggle.”
Chan sighed. “Keep an eye on it and send over anything interesting to me. I think whoever is responsible will be whoever immediately starts gunning for Jaerim’s position as top dog.”
“It’s possible that whoever that is is someone from Jaerim’s inner circle,” Seungmin said quietly. “At the very least, it seems likely that someone leaked his plans on escaping the country.”
“If someone from his inner circle is expecting to simply take over Jaerim’s position, then I suspect they’re in for a rude awakening,” Minho said. “Anyone trying to keep control of this empire intact is going to fail miserably. The assets are nothing without the power behind them.”
He could see how it could be appealing, the illusion of power that such a route gave. Minho had no doubt that there were those in Lee Jaerim’s employ who had no love for the man — in fact, he figured that most of the people in his higher circle of business probably actively despised him. It was a deceptively seductive way to rid yourself of someone you disliked, freeing everything up for the taking.
“We knew it was going to be messy,” Chan said. He didn’t sound overly calm about it, but he did sound like what he was, and what he had been this entire time: a man who had made his peace long ago with the things he would have to do and cause in order to keep the people he loved safe.
“And we knew it would likely get brutal,” Minho agreed. “What concerns me is the speed of it. Like Seungmin said, it suggests that the leaks are continuing to come from inside the house, so to speak. Which means that neither Felix or Jisoo-sshi are safe.”
Jisoo rolled her lips together. Felix startled just a little, as if this conversation had been happening mostly around him and he had zoned out a little bit. “You think they would come after us?” he asked.
“I think it is highly likely that they are looking for you, at the very least.” Minho said bluntly. “It is well known that the Magpie had a family. Whoever killed him is probably someone who knew about you two. You probably met them, especially you, Felix. It is very likely that they will be gunning to remove you from the equation too.”
Chan’s hand tightened where it was curled around the top of Felix’s arm, like he could keep him safe by just keeping him close enough. Truthfully it had worked out for them once in the past, so Minho didn’t fully blame him for it. Felix looked pale, shaken, but it was hard to tell if that was due to Minho’s words, because he’d looked mostly like that since Minho had walked in.
“My suggestion,” Minho said, “is that we remove the two of you from the equation first.”
There was a pause. Minho ignored the exasperated look Seungmin gave him, and the way Chan looked a little pale now too. He knew why, knew too why Felix was looking at him in that way, all big eyes and damp kitten demeanour. Possibly there was only one person in the room who wasn’t thinking of that time in Chan’s office, Felix on the floor, Minho willing to do whatever it took to keep this family safe.
Jisoo, who had not been there, had never seen it, and did not seem to know anything about it, said, “I presume you’re not going to actually kill us.”
“No,” Minho said. He did not add obviously not because well, perhaps it was not so obvious, to the people in this room. “What I mean is that we can fake your deaths. It has started to hit some of the news sites that bodies were removed from the Magpie’s residence the night that Blackbird’s was bombed. I’ll admit I was expecting the man to remove those guards secretly, but if he was trying to, it did not go smoothly. People are aware of it now. I think we can use that to our advantage.”
“This is starting to sound like it’s going to be more work for me,” Seungmin grumbled.
Minho ignored him. “It is easy to fake a death certificate, although slightly less easy to file them onto the government records, but then,” he said, eyeing a still pale Felix, “I suppose it is lucky that we have someone with the skills Felix has. The death certificates go up, we tip off the press, just like we did this last time, and now Lee Jisoo and Lee Yongbok, children of Lee Jaerim, are no longer on this earth either.”
There was a long silence, all of them absorbing the idea. Truthfully Minho didn’t have all the bits and pieces figured out yet, the specific hows and whys. He didn’t know what death certificates looked like, he didn’t know how easy it would be to get into the registry records. This was just the bare bones that had come to him in between finding out how the Magpie had died, and being called down to this meeting to figure out their next steps.
“It could work,” Chan said, slowly. “And if nobody is looking for either of them, because they believe them dead, then it would keep them both safe, even with Jisoo down in Busan.”
“We’d have to give her a whole new identity,” Seungmin said. He said this like it was something difficult, like he didn’t create new identities for them all on a regular basis.
Jisoo was frowning, just a little, just enough to be obvious. It was a thoughtful frown. “If we do that,” she said, “we’ll forfeit the inheritance.”
“Yes,” said Minho. He had suspected this might be a sticking point, for Jisoo at the very least. “You’d no longer have access to any of his money, or his property, or his assets. Truthfully, Jisoo-sshi, I doubt you would have had access to any of it anyway. If he truthfully wrote you out of his will, or wrote it in such a way as to exclude you, then there would be no recourse for you. The money wouldn’t pass to you regardless.”
“Yongbok though— he might need it—”
“I don’t want it,” Felix said. It was the first time he had spoken since Minho had come into the room. His voice was wavery, but he sounded like he meant it, truthfully and completely. “Please, noona. You didn’t want it, and I don’t— I don’t want anything from him either. I don’t want to gain anything just by virtue of being his son.”
His voice broke on the last word. Chan turned to him, putting his mouth to the hair just above Felix’s ear, and murmured something so quiet that even Minho, who was listening, couldn’t quite hear it. Felix closed his eyes but didn’t otherwise lean into the touch. Chan lifted his face up and said, “We won’t be going after the inheritance. It would take too long to claim, if he’s no longer in the will. It’s all a poisoned chalice, regardless. It would need to be portioned off, sold to the highest bidders, and there’d be no way to do any of that without thrusting Felix into the limelight.”
“Doing it anonymously would be very difficult,” Seungmin agreed. “Possible, but— difficult.”
None of them needed to say it — they all knew Felix didn’t want difficult. As far as Minho could tell, Felix wanted nothing more than to putter around baking and cleaning and getting fussed over by Chan and Hyunjin. He still didn’t even have a phone. There was no way Chan was going to push him into doing something he didn’t want to do.
For the very first time, Jeongin spoke, from his place on the couch. Minho had known he was paying attention, because he had brought nothing to keep himself otherwise occupied, and he had sat there watching the entire conversation with a blank, but focused, look on his face. But now he spoke, asking, “If there’s no heir, what does that mean.”
A nightmare, from Minho’s perspective. A total free for all over some of the best assets this city had to offer.
“It’s going to leave a massive power vacuum, for one,” Chan said. “Nobody is going to be the top dog anymore, and everyone is going to scramble to take over the different openings that just got created. Besides that, he had a giant empire in this city, even just the amount of property that will become available for sale will shift things. Blackbird’s may be a dud right now but if someone has the money to make it worthwhile, it’s a prime target. Everyone is going to want to snag a piece of the pie.”
Including Chan, that much was obvious. Minho didn’t blame him for it — they made good money with their various jobs, but the true money still lay in legitimate business, of which Chan only had one at this point in time. He could see, in Chan’s eye, the calculating look of a man already planning on how to get what he wanted.
“I don’t want to be here for it,” Jisoo said. “I don’t want to watch everyone fight for scraps of my father’s businesses. If Minho-sshi thinks that it’s best that we disappear, then perhaps that is truly for the best. I don’t want to put myself in danger to scratch and claw for what is, effectively, blood money, but at the same time it chafes a little that I put up with that man for so long and have nothing to show for it.”
“Noona can have my portion of the money from the job,” Felix said. “Will that be enough, to get her set up?”
“Yongbok, don’t give your money away,” Jisoo said, at the same time that Chan said, “Felix, of course we will give your sister money to cover it, you don’t need to give her your portion. We can do this for her.”
Minho stifled a sigh. He was surrounded by bleeding hearts.
“Hmm,” said Jisoo. She looked at Seungmin, who looked back, eyes owlish behind his thick framed glasses. “I don’t suppose you could forge a college diploma.”
Seungmin sighed and rubbed his thumb over his temple, as if he had a headache brewing. The skin between his eyes was pinched, too, like he was in pain. But when he spoke, his voice was mild and calm, and all he said was, “What major do you want to be?”
——
It was not that Jisung didn’t like Changbin. That was not it at all. In fact, in normal circumstances, Jisung would probably have been delighted to be getting so much uninterrupted time with his hyung that didn’t involve the two of them trying to (lovingly) beat the shit out of each other. What Jisung did not like was being babysat by Changbin.
“Hyung,” he said. “You know I can be left on my own, right?”
Changbin hummed under his breath, very non-committal. Jisung was a little offended by that. It wasn’t like there was anything he could actually do that was dangerous here, like this, stuck in his little bed of pillows. The most he could probably do was rip a stitch which— would be pretty unpleasant, actually.
“Hyung,” he said again.
Changbin marked his place in the book that he had been reading and then lowered it fully into his lap, so that he could look at Jisung with a raised eyebrow. “What?” he said.
So many things. Jisung was not entirely sure why he felt so on edge, so twitchy this morning. Perhaps it was the news from last night, perhaps it was the fact that he knew a meeting was happening about said news right now and he was not involved in it. Not that he expected to be involved in it, since it wasn’t like it really had anything to do with him, but the fact that he was probably being excluded on the basis of being an invalid and not on the basis that he was just some guy was rubbing him decidedly the wrong way.
“When did you learn to read,” he said, instead of saying any of that.
Changbin rolled his eyes. “I’m full of many tricks,” he said. He didn’t even sound annoyed, not even the fake annoyed he usually projected at Jisung. It was genuinely setting Jisung’s teeth on edge. “I can walk on my hands too.”
That caught Jisung off-guard. “What, really?” he asked.
“No,” said Changbin, and he opened his book again to the page he’d been reading.
JIsung groaned and let his head fall back against the pillows. He was, he could finally admit it, just a little bit bored by now. It really didn’t make any sense, considering he had been known, on his days off, to lay in his bed and do nothing the entire day but watch videos on his phone and eat whatever snacks were close at hand. He did a fine job of not moving for days on end, when the urge took him. But this— this was intolerable.
He could not watch the television, could not watch a movie. He kept putting on the audiobooks that Seungmin had loaded up for him — almost all of them highly interesting, and things that Jisung had not ever read — but his tiredness kept causing him to fall asleep not too far in, and then waking up some time later with no idea what he’d missed. Changbin, it seemed, was here to watch over him, and not necessarily to actually keep him company.
There was silence for a little longer. Changbin turned a page in his book. Jisung put a hand over the stitched up surface of his stomach and thought about pressing down, just to see how badly it would hurt, and then thought better of it. Changbin said, “Are you hungry?”
Jisung glanced across at him. Despite the sound of the page turning, Changbin was looking at him, and seemed to have misunderstood why Jisung was touching his stomach. “Not really,” he said, lifting his hand away again. “Jisoo-noona made us breakfast.”
She’d been an average cook, not that Jisung really had any room to criticise; she hadn’t had to make him any food, after all, and he was grateful that she had, considering he’d thought she was a ghost when they first met. She’d referred to him, through the entire conversation, with some nickname that referenced his stab wounds, which had clearly mortified Felix, but delighted Jisung, who had laughed hard at one of the names and hurt himself. She was a hoot. He almost wished she’d stay.
Changbin hummed under his breath. “Has Hyunjin left his room yet?” he asked. His voice was very, very casual, like the question wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Like there wasn’t this huge lumbering elephant in the room with them, that Changbin was having to peer around to look Jisung in the eyes like that.
Jisung swallowed. “No,” he said. Or at least, not that he’d seen. It was very possible that Hyunjin had left before Jisung had even woken up, although unlikely, going by Hyunjin’s usual sleep patterns. Jisung had woken fairly early, too, when Jisoo and Felix came into the kitchen to cook. Felix had apologised at least four times for it.
Changbin hummed again. He marked his place in his book, dog-earing the corner — Jisung was glad to see it, because someone had once called him a heathen for that — and then set it to the side. “Well, I haven’t eaten,” he said. “So I guess I’ll make something for me and Hyunjin.”
Jisung might once have said something about Changbin trying to poison Hyunjin but the joke, right now, left him with a sick feeling in his stomach. Changbin wouldn’t react anyway, just like he wasn’t reacting to any of Jisung’s needling, and so instead Jisung just sat there, quietly, as Changbin bustled around the kitchen and made a simple breakfast: eggs, scrambled, toast on the side.
He wasn’t hungry, but the smell of the food in the room was nice, at least. Even now, a few days out, sometimes it felt like he could still smell the antiseptic of the hospital. He zoned out again, wishing he could read, wishing he could have his phone. He’d take Jeongin’s DS at this point, and play an aeons old Pokemon game, if it relieved some of the boredom inside of himself.
It didn’t take long for Changbin to finish, and he portioned the food out onto two plates, but didn’t sit down to eat his yet. Instead, he got a fork out of a drawer and then took it, and one of the plates, into the hallway, to knock on Hyunjin’s door. There was, for a very long moment, no response. If they hadn’t both known full well that Hyunjin was in there, it might have seemed like he was out. Jisung supposed that it was very possible that Hyunjin was still sleeping, though.
He wasn’t: Changbin raised a hand to knock again but before he could, there was a call from inside the room of, “Who is it? Go away.”
“It’s hyung,” said Changbin, very evenly, like he hadn’t heard the second part at all. “I brought you some breakfast. Come out and eat with me?”
Another pause, shorter this time. “No,” said Hyunjin, without opening the door. Even muffled from another room, his obvious annoyance rang loud and clear.
“You need to eat,” Changbin called back. “It’s just eggs, I cooked them how you like.”
Silence again, but this time for long enough that it was clear Hyunjin wasn’t going to answer. He certainly was not going to come out and eat, that was for sure. Jisung thought about him, in his room. Was he still in bed, curled up under the covers? Or was he at his desk, covered in his sketchbooks and drawings, pencil in hand. That image was hard to picture right now.
“Hyunjin-ah,” Changbin said. “At least come and get this plate of food.”
There was nothing. No response whatsoever, but the silence was surly, somehow, the silence of someone making a point. Changbin lingered there by the door for a few more moments, like he was holding out hope that Hyunjin would come out and get the food, but even he gave up eventually.
“I’ll put it in the fridge,” he said, to a Hyunjin who may or may not have been listening. “When you’re hungry, you can just heat it up, okay?”
He came back into the living space and put the plate down on the table. He seemed— defeated, in a way, and he sighed and scrubbed his hand against his face. His ear was gruesome, an awful mass of scabbing. Jisung hadn’t realised, right away, what he was seeing when he looked at Changbin. In the hospital he’d been too distracted, and it hadn’t been until he’d come home that his brain had finally registered it.
What happened, he’d asked, in a stretch of silence before Jisung had inevitably gone to sleep. To your ear?
Got shot, Changbin had said, with a casual shrug. But it wasn’t casual, not in the slightest bit, and for the first time it had hit Jisung that he genuinely didn’t know what had happened on any other part of the job. Hyunjin had been hurt, Minho had been shot, and the news that so had Changbin had almost taken him into hysterics. He’d almost wanted to demand if Felix was hiding an injury too.
But Changbin looked tired, and Jisung hated that it was because of him. It was his fault that Changbin even had to worry about Hyunjin like this. If Jisung wasn’t here, he would come out, he would eat with Changbin like he needed to. He wouldn’t scurry around when he went to the bathroom, like he was afraid, if Jisung saw him, they’d be made to talk to each other. It wasn’t fair, and it was Jisung’s fault.
“You can move me back downstairs,” he said. His hands rested against his chest, curled up a little. He’d been laying like that a lot, unable to keep his hands on his stomach like he usually might do when he was on his back in this way. There was something about his hands positioned like this that made him feel— pathetic. Maybe it was just that this was how a dog might lie, exposing their belly to their owner. Trusting that they would be petted and not— exactly what had happened to Jisung, actually. Run through.
Changbin didn’t answer, not right away. Instead he got his plate and he brought it to the coffee table, where he sat down on the floor, opposite Jisung. It warmed Jisung, to see that, although he’d never say it out loud to Changbin. It would have been weird, if there was only two of them in the room, and Changbin ate at the table.
Changbin put a mouthful of eggs in his mouth, chewed and then swallowed, before he said, “You’re not moving downstairs.”
“Wouldn’t it be better?” Jisung asked. One of his hands fell to his side so he could twist his fingers in the duvet, tugging one way and then the other, back and forth and back and forth. “Like— you can just put me in my room, it’ll be fine, won’t it? Hyunjin shouldn’t be stuck in his room like this. It’s not fair on him.”
Changbin sighed and put down his fork. It took a lot to get Changbin to abandon food in the middle of eating. Jisung’s urge to fidget grew exponentially seeing that. “Jisung-ah,” Changbin said, with that kind of patience that came with a healthy side of condescension. “It’s not fair to you to move you downstairs.”
Jisung blinked at him. “I’d be okay,” he said. And he would be, providing someone brought him food every once in a while.
“You can’t get to the bathroom by yourself,” Changbin said. “You can’t get up from that bed without someone helping you. If something went wrong, if you ripped one of your stitches or something, how would you let us know?”
“I’d have my phone—” Jisung said.
“And what if you couldn’t reach it?” Changbin asked. He was looking at Jisung with such seriousness. His eyes were so intense sometimes that Jisung, right when he’d first joined, had been as scared of Changbin as he had been of Minho. “Never mind the fact that you’re not supposed to be using your phone. What if you fell in your shitty bathroom and none of us realised because we weren’t able to hear you calling for help. No, Jisung, you’re not moving downstairs. You’re staying right there, where we can look after you, until we’re confident you can look after yourself.”
Jisung was silent. He did not know how to process that; he didn’t even know where to start. He hadn’t realised, not really, that so much thought had gone into all of this, that they’d been thinking about all these possible things that could go wrong. He, truthfully, had not. He was used to looking after himself. He did have to admit that the thought of bleeding out in his tiny, pink-stained bathroom was not appealing.
“But Hyunjin—” he said, because that was what it always came down to for him. But Hyunjin.
“Hyunjin will have to get used to it,” Changbin said, very firmly. “You’re not doing anything wrong, or hurtful to him. You’re allowed to exist in a communal space. He can’t have his way, not in this.”
Jisung had had many moments over the past few days of thinking he’d probably actually died because that was the only explanation for this bizarre, Twilight Zone-esque world he seemed to have woken up into, but this was the most intense of that feeling. As far as Jisung had seen, Changbin gave Hyunjin his way in basically every possible thing. Hyunjin’s word was, and always had been, the law in this house, and Jisung knew, too, that Hyunjin’s comfort came before anything.
It was like when Hyunjin had threatened to leave if they threw Felix out. The conversation had been over the moment Hyunjin had opened his mouth to issue the ultimatum. So why on earth, how on earth, was Changbin prioritising Jisung now?
Changbin was watching him still. He didn’t look like he was particularly happy about whatever he was seeing on Jisung’s face. Jisung looked back, feeling lost, outside of his body a little bit. His brain was not running at full capacity at all, and there was a selfish part of him, a part that he hated, that truthfully didn’t want to be locked away in his bedroom. The boredom, the loneliness, would be intolerable.
Changbin picked up his fork and shovelled egg into his mouth. “Hyunjin isn’t going to starve,” he said. “He’ll come out to eat eventually.”
Jisung didn’t have it in him to smile. “If you say so, hyung,” he said tiredly. He was trying, without showing it, to wriggle down into his blankets so that he was laying more flat. “He’s very stubborn.”
“He doesn’t do well with being hungry,” Changbin said.
There was a pause between them, a moment where they both— took that in. The two of them knowing, perfectly well, why Hyunjin didn’t like to be hungry. Jisung wanted to struggle to his feet and go and beg Hyunjin on his knees to come and eat something, anything, but moving seemed impossible right now, and getting more so with every passing second.
Changbin sighed. “Go to sleep, Jisung,” he said. “Hyung will try to not wake you with the dishes.”
“It’s gross when you refer to yourself in the third person,” Jisung mumbled, through a mouth already halfway to sleep. Changbin just huffed at him. Jisung wondered if this was going to be the case forever between them: Changbin, softly and weirdly indulgent. He really couldn’t get used to it.
All the same, he did as he was told. He shut his eyes, and went to sleep.
——
Jeongin tucked the blanket he had stolen off the back of Seungmin’s couch more firmly around his legs, cuddling in closer to the corner between arm and back. The couch really was so uncomfortable. He had to shift around to find a position where something, either a spring or a lumpy part of the cushion, wasn’t digging at him in some way.
He made a mental note to thoroughly test out any couches that he wanted for the apartment he was slowly building in his mind for him and Minho. He’d been planning on buying stuff mostly online, but now he saw a very real need to go in somewhere and sit to try them all out. He couldn’t stand a couch like this one.
Somehow, more than being allowed on a job, the idea of inspecting furniture felt like the most adult thing he’d ever done in his life. Banal. Domestic. It was novel, almost, and he used the image and sensation of it to distract him for a few minutes until his mind began to drift again.
He opened his phone, the screen brightness turned all the way up so he could see it under the harsh workroom lights. Behind him, Seungmin was typing, classical music playing so softly it was almost a susurration, turned to white noise.
Minho had gone upstairs, beckoned by Chan. The cogs of this machine they lived in continued to turn. Jeongin felt like he was something tiny and leaden trapped inside a giant clock, standing still while everything churned and ticked around him. Everyone was busy, had their designations, while he stood still physically, and his mind felt like a numbed down maelstrom.
He needed something to do. Needed someone to come and scoop his mind, goopy and slick, out of his skull and put it to work. Keep it busy.
In his lap, his phone had gone dark. His own forehead was reflected in the darkened screen. He stared at it until his vision went blurry, unfocused. Until the images in his mind were so vivid, it was like he was actually seeing them.
Water. Bright tile. Tiny fingers with the nails clipped short.
The door to the workroom shoved open with a clatter, and Jeongin’s head whipped up, his smile snapping on without any real feeling behind it. Like whoever was controlling his body had flipped a switch, as easy as turning on a light.
It was Minho sweeping into the room, and at the sight of him real warmth came to turn Jeongin’s smile into something more genuine. “Hyung,” he said, even as Minho’s delicate features were twisted into a light scowl. It wasn’t directed at Jeongin. Minho had been perpetually scowling all day.
“Baby boy,” Minho said. He had a jacket on, Jeongin noted, and his boots. “Chan’s sending me out with Changbin. A money drop.”
Jeongin did not let his smile slip. “Ah, alright,” he said, shoving the blanket off himself and getting to his feet. “That shouldn’t take long, right?”
Minho’s expression softened a bit, and he held his arm out. Jeongin obligingly came and fit himself against Minho’s side, nudging his hand under the back of Minho’s jacket so he could press his palm between Minho’s shoulder blades. Even through the sweatshirt he was wearing, Minho was so warm, thrumming with vitality.
“I’ll be back in less than an hour,” Minho murmured, pressing a lingering kiss to Jeongin’s temple.
“‘Kay,” Jeongin whispered. Minho stepped away, their touches parting and then dropping, before Jeongin suddenly said, “Ah, hyung, can I use the range? While you’re gone.”
The flicker of curiosity that had brightened Minho’s face dropped away, furrowing back into that scowl. “Why?”
Jeongin shrugged, making a show of nonchalance. “Practice,” he lied. “And I’m kind of bored.”
Minho stared at him, flat and thoughtful, before slowly saying, “I don’t think going down there alone is a good idea, baby boy.”
Disappointment flowed visibly though Jeongin, but truthfully he could see the logic in that. He was accident prone, and guns also sometimes just— had severe malfunctions. Jisung had warned him of that many times during their training, full of horror stories he’d read about. There would be no point in arguing the point right now. He just— really hadn’t wanted to be left idle with Minho out of the house.
“I can watch him,” Seungmin’s voice broke over them. Jeongin looked over at him, found Seungmin tipping his head towards his monitors. “I’d be doing that anyway.”
Jeongin grit his teeth over the distinct knowledge that he was being babysat. There was nothing new there, after all. He turned wide, hopeful eyes on Minho in innocent expectation.
The corners of Minho’s mouth were doing the thing, the tight thing, but he sighed and pulled his keys out of the pocket of his jacket. With quick dexterity he removed a single key off the ring and handed it to Jeongin. “Lock it all up when you’re done,” he said with careful reproach. “Don’t leave it a mess.”
Jeongin gave him his best smile, all dimples and crescent eyes. The key was cold in his hand, so cold it felt like it could burn a hole in his palm. “Thank you!” he said, dipping forward and kissing Minho’s soft cheek, like a bird would dart forward to claim a breadcrumb. “Be safe, okay?”
“I will,” Minho promised, ears red. “You too.” He shot Seungmin a speaking glance over his shoulder, stern and meaningful, and then left the room.
Jeongin looked at Seungmin too, smiling sweetly when Seungmin looked back. Wordless, Seungmin shook his head a little and turned back to his computers.
The key was slowly warming up the longer he held it in his hand. As Jeongin made his way down to the basement, he examined it. Silver, very bright and crisp. A little smaller than the average house key. There was some kind of marking at the head, done in scuffed permanent marker, too worn off now to make out what it had been.
Jeongin would know it now. When Minho put it back on his keyring, Jeongin would know which one it was. He did not like having these thoughts, did not like being— devious with Minho. Tricking him, manipulating him. But it was the only way.
When he unlocked the gun cabinet, he found their M16s from the heist in it, but none of the ammo. So Jeongin grabbed his usual Glock instead, pulling down a small box of magazines. He looped a pair of ear protectors over his arm and took the lot back to the metal table.
There was a muffling of his senses beginning as he watched his hands work. Like a blanket had been tossed over him, deadening him down. Protectors on, gun loaded. Jeongin raised it and shot. Again and again.
It wasn’t true, what he’d told Minho. He didn’t need the practice, and he wasn’t really bored. That was not the right word for his mental space right now. Less boredom and more— a sense of waiting. Anxiety at the fringes of his mind. Keeping him alert for some nebulous event, suspended in time. Thoughts in a looping spiral.
No, this was nothing more than a desperate attempt to get out of his own head. To lose himself in the motions, the sensations. The strain in his arms as he resisted the recoil, the judder in his hands, the muffled shots beyond the protectors. Familiar, rote. Something he was good at, something that he enjoyed doing.
Unfortunately, it seemed he was good enough at it now that he no longer needed to think. His body just— acted, leaving his mind to wander. Like he was washing the dishes, or folding the laundry.
He pulled the trigger and held it down, hands clenching hard. It only sent off one bullet. Jeongin longed for the M16, wanted to unload, bullet after bullet until the cork mannequin was carved in half. It wasn’t enough, this wasn’t enough. He put the handgun back on the table and then leaned down, bracing his hands down on the shiny metal. The cold immediately seeped into his palms. He breathed, slow and deep through his nose.
The rush of blood in his ears could be mistaken for water, gushing out of a faucet. A dull roar.
Rage was a new emotion for him. He was not particularly accustomed to anger anyway, and especially not in this way. This felt— pure. Not pure like good, or innocent. Pure like unadulterated. Flowing from the source. A scarlet fruit pulled straight off the vine, noxious and poisonous and uncompromised.
It was becoming rapidly untenable to live beside. He did not know how to control it when it felt like it was suffused through him, turning him into something else.
Was this how Minho felt in his rages, he wondered. Not out of control, but— narrowed. Like Jeongin’s entire consciousness was being turned into metal, sharpened into a deadly point.
That moment in the PC room all those years kept floating to the forefront of Jeongin’s mind. When Minho had been on top of that man and looked over, blood splashed on his face, meeting Jeongin’s eye. There had been no frenzy in that moment; it had felt calm, almost. Focused.
Jeongin found he, too, wanted to dig his thumb into an eye socket, feel the pad of his finger squish into a skull. He wanted to feel the body jerk under himself, feel the chest heave with a scream.
He snatched the gun back up, squeezing the trigger over and over again. Pieces of cork went flying, chunks of it, until one of the mannequins didn't even have a head anymore and the magazine was empty, the gun clicking.
What was Seungmin thinking, watching him, Jeongin wondered. The thought made him want to jam another magazine into the gun so he could shoot the fucking cameras. He understood the desire of the others to— keep watch over him, protect him, but he wished he had some privacy. Any at all. Especially now.
He raised his gaze to the mannequin, the crescent lump that had once been a head. He wondered what Minho’s father looked like, if they resembled one another. He wondered if that would make a difference, if it would tamp down on his rage, coming face to face with the man and finding he had Minho’s face, just an older version.
After a moment, he shook his head to clear out the images. It doesn’t matter, he thought, taking the gun back to the cabinet and locking it in.
If the resemblance was too much, Jeongin would just kill him in the dark.
——
Minho’s finger tapped against the steering wheel. The movement was so unusual, restless and staccato, that Changbin’s eyes kept being drawn to it, away from the world outside the car windows. He was used to Minho sitting, and standing, perfectly still, his body a living statue. Changbin had never been able to work out where that kind of body control came from.
It was missing now, as they sat at some traffic lights, waiting for them to turn green. Minho’s body was a bunch of repressed energy, but not the kind that Changbin sometimes saw, the kind that seemed to be born from suppressed violence. This was very clearly nervous energy, and it was putting Changbin a little on edge too.
“Hyung,” Changbin said. Minho didn’t look at him directly. Instead, his eyes flicked to Changbin’s, quick and glancing. “It’ll be fine.”
Minho didn’t give a response to that. Maybe just as well, because Changbin himself wasn’t entirely sure what he was referring to — the drop, which would certainly be fine, or the people back home, which is probably what was causing Minho’s stress.
Changbin, it had to be said, wasn’t feeling particularly great about leaving everyone there. They had Chan, and Jeongin in a pinch, but without Jisung there was a distinct lack of fighting power in the building. Usually Changbin wouldn’t be so bothered about it, or at least less concerned, but they’d just blown up a casino a few days ago. There was concern there.
Not that the city itself seemed to have been affected by what had happened. There was something incredibly bizarre and surreal, to be sitting in this car with most of an ear missing, and simply watch, through the window, as the world went on with normal life around him. In this area of the city, there was a mix of high rise apartments, nice office buildings, and older, more-run down businesses. Families walked down the street, their small kids running ahead, dodging between university students.
Changbin had slightly lost track of time over the past few days and it hadn’t been until he’d noticed the lack of children over the age of six out and about that he’d realised it was a weekday. All those students were hard at work studying, or, if they were anything like Changbin had been, sleeping their way through class.
Thinking about school hurt sometimes. He wasn’t sure why, when he hadn’t even liked it, but it just did; maybe the sense of missing something he’d never really had a chance to have. He’d wanted to ask, once or twice, if Seungmin had liked school, but never quite worked up the courage, unsure if it would upset or annoy him. He thought if he asked now, that wouldn’t be the case. Seungmin might not want to answer, but that was different.
It was a simple enough task that they had been given: take money to a drop-off point, payment for the information that they were being fed about the ongoing Magpie investigation. Chan had given Changbin the money in his office, a hunk of cash held in a brown envelope, nondescript, if unsophisticated. And so now he and Minho wound their way through the city, a convoluted path that took up time that neither of them wanted to spend away, but necessary when Seungmin couldn’t track all of the footage. Eventually they headed up north, to the much older areas, the outskirts where people lived and nothing much else happened. There was very little up here other than apartment buildings, little marts, family-run restaurants, and a handful of convenience stores, the purple CU signs too bright in the landscape.
The location they’d been directed to was one of those streets that came off the main road at an odd, forty-five degree angle, the building on the corner wedge shaped and awkward. The street was quiet, which made Changbin uncomfortable, but decidedly run down, which made him less so.
“The alleyway behind the gopchang restaurant,” Changbin murmured, reading from the instructions that Seungmin had printed out for them. It had been one of the few things about their set up that Seungmin had actually praised them for when he first joined, that they always looked up directions beforehand and never used GPS devices on the jobs themselves.
The restaurant looked dingy, and it was hard to tell if it was even open or still in business. They drove past it slowly, and then Minho stopped right in front of the alley, which was just wide enough to hold the dumpster for the restaurant, probably shared with the kimbap place on the other side which at least looked like it had seen a customer this decade.
He kept the engine running. Changbin got out, face ducked down just in case there was an actual working camera around here. He skirted around the dumpster, into the dimness of the side street, the sun at an angle that didn’t reach between the buildings, and then tucked his little paper bag of money half-under it, on the side away from the street where it would not be seen unless you were looking for it. He was very glad for the fact of it being winter, because if it were summer, he would have disturbed all number of cockroaches doing that.
Back in the car, Minho almost didn’t wait for the door to be closed again before he started to drive. Still slow, like there was no rush, like there was nothing untoward going on here, trundling down to where the street opened up into another city side street, all of these roads crossing each other in confusing ways. They didn’t really have directions for the way back, other than the knowledge of how they got there. Minho took a right, seemingly at random.
Changbin relaxed a little as they got further away from the drop location. He was a little turned around, to be honest, with all the turns Minho was taking, but he trusted that Minho at least knew where he was going. If he didn’t, they’d find their way to something familiar at some point. It was a big city, but they knew it pretty well.
By the time they did make it out onto streets that he recognised more, it was late enough that there were elementary school kids out and about, walking from school with their backpacks on, waiting in gaggles at crossings that Minho, unlike most of the other drivers, stopped at. Two of the children waved at them in thanks. Changbin had to fight the urge to wave back.
At the third crossing Minho stopped at, Changbin almost snapped. Don’t you want to get home, was on the tip of his tongue, held in only because he knew that if he said it, it would come out horribly churlish and passive-aggressive, in a way that he never usually was. But he’d been almost relying on Minho’s impatience, his desire to get back to Jeongin, to fuel a mad rush home.
Instead, Minho seemed almost like he was taking a pleasure trip. A meandering journey meant to be as innocuous as possible.
Changbin forced himself into stillness, reaching for the well of patience that didn’t always come naturally to him. He told himself, as he had done so many times over the years, that there was no point in rushing; life happened to you regardless. All the same, he felt an increasing sense that the more he left Seungmin on his own, the more he would get into some kind of trouble, of his own making or otherwise. It caused a feeling of anxiety inside of him that he had never, not in his entire life, ever really felt. He had not even felt this way about leaving his grandmother alone overnight when he worked jobs, even when she was particularly frail and forgetful. Maybe that was because he had known that their neighbours would look after her, if she did manage to wander outside.
With Seungmin, there was no such luxury. And Changbin had never once thought that Seungmin, of all people, would be a person he had to worry about getting himself killed.
He cleared his throat. Minho’s attention— sharpened, in a way that was very hard to actually place. He had a way of very obviously paying attention to a person without actually looking at them — and, vice versa, ways of completely disregarding a person whilst looking right at them.
“When Jeongin ran into that building,” Changbin said. Minho’s hands tightened around the steering wheel, so hard that the leather creaked and his knuckles went white. Even when they relaxed, they were not quite as relaxed as they had been. “Sorry, I just— you really would have shot me, wouldn’t you?”
Minho turned his face towards him and blinked a couple of times, rapid-fire. Not like he was confused, or unsure, but more like he thought Changbin was an idiot. “Yes,” he said. Then he turned his face back to the road.
“Yeah,” Changbin said. “I thought so.”
He was quiet for a minute or so, trying to put his words together in a way that made sense. Seungmin had told him once that Changbin was good with words, better than me, but Changbin didn’t think he was. He was good with people, but not necessarily words, and Minho was a hard person to be good with.
“Seungmin went into Blackbird’s,” he said eventually. “To get Jisung out. I thought he must have met them outside but he— went in, he found them in there, after the bombs went off.”
Minho didn’t say anything, eyes on the road. He’d seen the pictures, Changbin knew he had, in the news articles: the half-demolished building, most of the third floor destroyed, the glass front, once glittering and opulent, blown out completely. Glass on the street, the entire place still smoking slightly in some shots. The people photographed with blood on their arms and faces.
“That was very stupid of him,” Minho said.
Anger spiked in Changbin, the way it only ever really seemed to nowadays when it came to Seungmin. There was the ever present desire to defend him no matter what. The nicest part about Minho knowing about their relationship was that he no longer had to swallow his tongue. “He saved Jisung’s life,” Changbin said, terse.
A quick, darting glance in his direction; again that feeling like Minho was calling him stupid with just his eyes. “I never said it wasn’t brave,” he said. “Stupidity and bravery often go hand in hand. And yes, he saved Jisung doing it, and saved Hyunjin too. It was still stupid.”
Changbin stared at the side of his face. Unmarked, on this side. A pristine, sharp profile. “Stupid like Jeongin was stupid?” he asked, testing almost.
Minho’s hands tightened again. This time they didn’t loosen. “Jeongin was more stupid,” he said. “Almost entirely stupid. He takes risks. Doesn’t think things through. I should— should have figured out a way to do the job without him.”
“He was good, other than that,” Changbin argued, feeling the need to defend their youngest member. “He did well, hyung. We all take risks when we’re young.”
Changbin certainly had, through the years, him and Chan both, even though they’d both had people at home waiting for them, relying on them. They had taken on the jobs that the older guys they worked with hadn’t wanted, the messier, dangerous things, desperate to prove themselves. And then later, setting up on their own, they’d had to take whatever work they could get.
They’d been lucky, some of those nights. So damn lucky that sometimes Changbin had thought that it must be his grandmother watching over them, keeping them safe. It seemed like the only explanation for why they had always, always managed to make it home to Jeongin and Hyunjin.
“He’ll know better for next time,” he said.
Minho— laughed, if the noise he made could be called as such. It was a laugh in the most technical sense. “Right,” he said. “Next time.” And then, before Changbin could ask him anything else, or probe further, he said, “I wouldn’t have killed you.”
“What?” said Changbin.
“I wouldn’t have killed you,” Minho repeated. He gave Changbin another one of those quick, darting glances. “When you grabbed me to stop me going to get Jeongin. I would have shot you somewhere non-lethal. Just to make you let go of me. I wouldn’t have wanted to kill you.”
The most fucked up part about it was that Changbin was actually touched. Minho was perfectly capable of killing him, and in the moment, Changbin had really no doubt he would, so knowing that even then, Minho had been in control of himself, even with his panic — well, that said a lot about how Minho viewed him, Changbin thought.
Changbin had been used to being Chan’s right hand man through the years, but he’d gotten used to Minho’s presence too. Chan’s left hand man, if such a thing existed, or perhaps Chan’s shadow council. Changbin had always been grateful for Minho, who knew so much more about the world than he did, even with all of his experience, who was smart and meticulous and could plan jobs so much better than any of them. He’d wondered, sometimes, if Minho thought of him in the same way: a friend, more than anything.
It was all so strange. The ways in which people were connected, or made connections. The way he’d met Minho all those years ago and mostly just been scared. The way he’d met Seungmin less years ago, and mostly just thought, this guy’s scrawny as hell.
“I didn’t know it would feel like this,” Changbin said, in a rush, unable to hold the words back anymore. “To know that he’d been in danger, even though he’s fine now. And I think about— what if I’d been there, watching Seungmin run into that building, would I have been stupid and gone in after him, like you did, with Jeongin? And I know I would have. And maybe I’d have shot whoever tried to stop me too.”
Minho made a little humming noise, not like he was disinterested, or not listening; in fact, the noise seemed to indicate that he was listening. But he didn’t say anything, and Changbin felt torn between a deep mortification at spilling his guts so readily to Minho, of all people, and the greatest sense of relief that he could. That Minho knew the secret, and so Changbin didn’t have to hide.
It hadn’t been hard, to start with, keeping their relationship a secret. It had been more physical than anything, after all, the two of them fucking in Seungmin’s little bedroom. Changbin hadn’t once even thought that it was an issue that he was, essentially, lying to Chan by withholding this truth. It was personal and private and he had a right to that, surely, with everything else he gave to Chan.
It was hard, now. It was starting to be near impossible to pretend like he wasn’t in joy-filled agonising love with Seungmin.
They pulled onto their street, and then around the back of the building, into their little parking lot, where the van still sat, fake licence plates removed and blood still on the metal flooring. Minho parked in a way that they didn’t have to look at it, which was nice of him. It wasn’t until he had turned the engine off that Minho spoke again.
“When you tell Chan-hyung,” he said, quietly, “I think Jeongin will be very happy for you.”
Changbin smiled, wry. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s just hope Chan-hyung feels the same.”
——
The quiet knock on Hyunjin’s door had him slamming his sketchbook closed in exasperated disgust. He had been trying, for close to an hour now, to draw something, anything, and instead he had just been sitting looking down at the empty page of his sketchbook in a state of frozen indecision. And now, even that seemed out of reach.
“Go away, hyung,” he shouted at the door.
“I am not a hyung,” came Jeongin’s voice in response.
Hyunjin turned in his chair to stare at the door. He had been certain it was Changbin, here to bug him again about eating or something equally useless as that. He would never have guessed that quiet, careful knock had been Jeongin. “Come in?” he called, unsure if he was being tricked or not.
But it was Jeongin who pushed open the door and lingered in the doorway, looking at Hyunjin with a serious expression. Hyunjin didn’t think he had ever heard Jeongin knock on a door like that, particularly not on Hyunjin’s bedroom door. It was always a thump, like he’d misjudged where his hand was in relation to the wood, and gone too hard.
He expected, also, for Jeongin to actually come in, as requested, but Jeongin stood there and asked, “Are you free?”
Hyunjin looked down at the cover of his sketchbook with a sigh. “Yeah,” he said, motioning to his bed. “I’m free.”
Jeongin shut the door just as quietly as he’d knocked, and when he sat on Hyunjin’s bed, he didn’t sprawl his way across it, but instead sat normally, one foot coming out of his slippers to tuck up underneath him. Hyunjin turned in his chair to face him, a pencil in his hand still. He needed something to fiddle with.
He wasn’t sure what to make of the atmosphere in the room. Neither was he sure of what to make of the Jeongin on his bed, who was contained in a way he’d never been before — but not in a good way. Hyunjin had spent such a lot of time wishing that Jeongin could be a little less clumsy, a little more mature, perhaps, but now that this seemed to have happened, he sometimes wondered if he’d been wishing on a monkey’s paw. A mature Jeongin, but one who seemed out of Hyunjin’s reach in so many ways.
Maybe it wasn’t just Jeongin, though. Hyunjin felt like there was a barrier between him and the rest of the world right now. He was looking at Jeongin and seeing him, but not really feeling him in the same way. Hyunjin had only ever seen this in movies or on shows, but he felt a little bit like he was seeing everything like a funhouse mirror: distorted, wobbly, out of touch with reality. If he reached out to hold Jeongin’s hand, he’d probably miss.
Hyunjin expected to sit in silence for a bit, or— he didn’t know. He was tired, his head hurt from focusing so hard on the paper for so long. He couldn’t have opened the conversation if he’d wanted to. Jeongin needed to be the one to do it, and so he was, but instead of the expected small talk, Jeongin said, “Hyung, can I ask you something about your trips to kill the men who hurt you?”
The pencil dropped from Hyunjin’s fingers and clattered against the wooden flooring. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Hyunjin wailed about the broken lead inside it. The Hyunjin in the room with Jeongin, though, had gone pale; he could feel the blood draining away. “You know about that?” he asked, voice a little shaky. “How did—”
“I know,” Jeongin said. He was so steady. Hyunjin hated that, in this moment. “I didn’t, for a while, but I heard you sometimes coming back in at odd hours in the morning, when you normally wouldn’t have left the apartment. And I heard Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung talking about it. That’s when I knew.”
Hyunijn did not quite know what to say. It was not, as it usually was, from a lack of thoughts; instead he had so many questions that they were overwhelming. Why did you never ask me about it before? Why did you never let me know you knew? Do you judge me for it, the way nobody else seems to? Do you know any more details of my life that I’m unaware of?
But what came out of his mouth, in the end, was a very tired, “What is it that you want to know, Jeongin-ah?”
He’d never thought this conversation would come up with Jeongin, and so he didn’t have any real expectations of what it might entail. But he thought that it was probably something to do with Jisung. He expected Jeongin to ask, why did you always take Jisung, that question finally, finally out in the open.
But instead, full of endless shocks, Jeongin just said, “How do you find the men in the first place?”
Hyunjin was in enough of a dissociative state, a trance almost, that he was able to simply step over his continuing shock. “I recognise them,” he said. “I have them all— in here—” He motioned to his head. “I usually follow them to their car and get their licence plate. Seungmin is the one who tracks them down for me.”
He wished he could explain a bit better. It was often not until he laid eyes on one of his abusers that it hit him, like unlocking a memory deep inside himself. But of all people, Hyunjin had never spoken to Jeongin about any of these things. At first, that had been by design: Chan and Changbin had carefully kept him from saying anything around Jeongin that would have put any unfortunate images or knowledge into Jeongin’s head. Then Hyunjin had become aware enough to not say anything around Jeongin of his own accord. Then it had simply been a habit.
“Seungmin-hyung is the one who tracks them down?” Jeongin asked, frowning but in a way that looked more thoughtful than anything else. “Do you ever just have like— a name, or something like that?”
“Sometimes,” Hyunjin said. “If I’ve overheard it in a conversation.”
That was less rare than he’d thought it might be, and sometimes it made it uncomfortable, out in public, to realise just how often other people could use your name in a conversation. One time he’d managed to get a name because a cashier at a store had announced it when handing a debit card back. Sometimes, failing that, he would just follow whoever it was home. He’d once got clean across the city on the subway following a target, almost missing the last train back.
“How do you get in their house?” Jeongin asked. “Won’t most of them live in apartment buildings?”
“Some of them,” Hyunjin said. “Not as many as you’d think. Most of them were— rich.”
There was a part of him watching this conversation from completely outside his body, floating near the ceiling in the corner, watching it all: Jeongin sitting on the bed, serious and drawn, no longer the innocent boy who had held an umbrella over Hyunjin’s head in the rain. Hyunjin, on his desk chair, bruising on his face. He wondered if the bruising matched what he’d had the first time Jeongin saw him. The thought made him feel a little sick.
But he’d told the truth, although he hadn’t known it at the time, when these men were nameless monsters in the doorway. These men were usually wealthy in some way, with the funds to be able to buy their way past a taboo. Most of them, Hyunjin had found, did live in houses, in nice areas of the city. The ones who lived in apartments lived in giant complexes, not the run-down villa apartments in their area of the city.
“But if they didn’t live in houses, if they lived in apartment buildings, how did you get in?” Jeongin asked.
Hyunjin sighed, crossing a leg over the other. “I didn’t,” he said. “If they had an apartment, I’d wait for them to come out.” Sometimes he’d had to lure them out, but usually it had just been a waiting game. Those were always more dangerous, because he couldn’t always do it under the cover of night like he usually preferred. “Jisung would—”
He stopped. The elephant in the room, pulled out into the open. The thing he didn’t want to talk about, and he was the damn fool who had brought it up in the first place. But Jeongin wasn’t looking at him with the sympathy or curiousity that Hyunjin expected. He wasn’t even looking at Hyunjin at all. Instead, he was looking at the floor, chewing on the edge of his thumbnail. It was just slightly less than his usual habit of chewing his fingers when he was nervous or scared.
At the silence, though, Jeongin did glance at him, and say, “What did you do when they came out?”
“Wait to get them alone,” Hyunjin said. “Jisung helped subdue them, when I wasn’t able to.” Jeongin nodded, and still didn’t even comment on Jisung being brought up. For the first time, the thoughtful way he was looking made Hyunjin’s brain actually engage. “Jeongin,” he said, “why are you asking me these things? What is this about?”
Jeongin looked at him with that same steady expression as earlier, but when he spoke, his voice was so breezy-casual it felt almost offensive. “Oh, no reason,” he said. “Thanks for telling me, hyung, I’ll get out of your hair now.”
He bounced up to his feet and left the room with such haste that Hyunjin was still processing what he’d said when Jeongin was out the door. Hyunjin was left with the distinct impression that there was something he’d missed — which there had to be, because if he took it on its surface, Jeongin’s questions had been purely about the logistics of murdering a man.
He should probably go tell Chan. Tattling, technically, but he’d tattled on Jeongin for less. But he didn’t really feel any need to do it, the way he might have once wanted to, or felt like he needed to. Even the knowledge that Jeongin probably could murder someone if he wanted to wasn’t enough to rouse Hyunjin up from his seat. Jeongin was grown now, and Hyunjin would be the worst kind of hypocrite to tell someone what Jeongin was possibly getting up to.
His hands were shaking, he realised, and for a moment the thought felt as detached as Jeongin might want to kill someone had been, and then emotion returned to him. He almost cringed away from it, the sensation as harsh as the lights in the hospital had sometimes been on his aching eyes. His hands were shaking, his breathing tight in his chest, and in his head he could see it, the knife, cutting the throat of this man, another man, all those men who had put their hands on him—
And then, plunging into Jisung’s body, the giving skin of his stomach—
He put his head down between his legs and tried to remember how to breathe. It was okay, he tried to tell himself, mouthing the words to himself. It wasn’t gone, it was not done and over— he could fix it still, he knew, he could make it work for him again. There were still options.
He sat like that, trying to remember every single one of the breathing techniques he’d read about over the years, until the shaking in his hands was probably imperceptible to people who weren’t looking for it. And then he pushed himself to his feet, and went to find his phone, dead and forgotten somewhere.
——
Seungmin had noticed, very early on, that Felix was an ideal person to have with him in the workroom: he was quiet, disturbed no one, and got on with his work in an efficient, dedicated kind of way. He had spent long hours in the lead up to the job working on his explosives, creating careful little lethal packages, and there had been a few times where Seungmin had almost forgotten he was there in the first place.
Jisoo was, somehow, even better than Felix. It was not just that she, too, knocked on his door whenever she entered, or that she asked, polite as anything, before she used his bathroom. She had spent the last day or so working through information he had loaded onto a USB for her, plugged into a spare laptop he had lying around, and had not complained once about being bored. She had sorted out the wheat from the chaff, and had brought him a number of documents that had ended up making it in the initial drop.
Some of the stuff Seungmin had held back, because it didn’t seem so important. He had wanted things that he could drop to keep the pressure on, if things weren’t moving as fast as they wanted. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with all that now.
Without anything else to really do, Jisoo had continued with her work. Seungmin got the feeling that she enjoyed it more for what she was discovering than anything else. Felix had stayed with her mostly in an attempt at keeping her company, and had been roped into giving some context for whatever it was that she was reading.
Felix knew more about his father’s business than Seungmin would have expected. Certainly more than he’d ever really given them information about — he had told them what they needed for the job that he had asked them to run, and not really spoken about it more than that. Rather than a conscious effort to keep things from them, it seemed more tied up in his disinterest in talking about his father at all. Even his answers to Jisoo’s questions were given quietly, given reluctantly.
Looking between the two of them — Jisoo focused, absorbing the information with obvious intelligence, and Felix, squirming in his seat, looking tired — it was not hard to see who the actual successor to the Magpie should have been.
Felix had a tablet, and Seungmin was not entirely sure what he was doing on it. He trusted Felix, of all people, to be sensible with it, and so he hadn’t pressed too much. When Seungmin had walked past him to get something out of one of the plastic bins on a shelf, Felix had just been watching a video without sound, with subtitles. Dogs, of some kind. Seungmin hadn’t glanced much more than that.
Seungmin himself was trying to keep track of the chatter online, both on Naver and in other, less savoury parts of the net, over the sudden vacuum of power this city found itself with. Public perception of the Magpie’s death seemed— shocked more so by the violence of it, as details had started to leak online, but there were a lot of people who didn’t seem very surprised by the fact of his death.
The underbelly of the city had already begun fighting for bits of the pot. Seungmin himself had received a number of messages to the burner phones that he used for arranging business, reaching out to contacts for information, or for sourcing hard to find items. There were a lot of people out there right now who were trying to set themselves up as the next Magpie, the next biggest player, and more than a few of them wanted Seungmin on board.
If he’d ever been motivated by money, he’d have been tempted by some of the offers coming his way. He never really had been, though, other than the need to pay off the debts and keep his mother afloat. He’d managed the former, somehow, and kept the latter going long enough for her to remarry another, different rich man. Now his money just sat in various savings accounts under fake names, building interest.
It had never been about money. He couldn’t have said what it was, that took him from one team to the next — curiosity, perhaps, or maybe just the promise of interesting work. Chan had certainly not offered him the most money all those years ago, but his work had seemed interesting. It had seemed like it would keep him busy, keep his brain fully occupied always. Too much spare time to think had always been a problem for Seungmin.
His phone buzzed on his desk, his actual phone, the one he used only for the team. He took a quick glance at it, just to check who it was, and then felt a trickle of something like fear go down his spine when he saw it was a message from Hyunjin. He had thought Chan, with a request for information, or Changbin, with something inane. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of Hyunjin. He simply hadn’t.
He picked up his phone and keyed it open. The text was coded, cryptic; not understandable to someone without the knowledge that Seungmin had. It made his stomach sink to somewhere around the piping underneath the concrete floor. Usually he would have been able to keep any of that off his face, but the text was so surprising to him that clearly it showed, because Felix said, “Seungmin? Are you alright?”
He glanced up. Felix was peering at him from his perch on his stool, concern on his face. He was too perceptive, Seungmin sometimes thought. A learned trait, he assumed, from years of watching his father, trying to gauge the right way to move or talk or do. Seungmin, who didn’t particularly like being perceived in any way, didn’t much mind it from Felix. Maybe that was because Felix would never use it for any reason other than this: checking Seungmin was okay.
“I’m fine,” Seungmin said, as crisply as he could manage.
Felix nodded, looking unsure but not like he was inclined to press the matter. He turned back to his videos, or whatever he was doing now. Jisoo, who had also glanced up at Felix’s question, focused back on her screen. Without the attention on him anymore, Seungmin re-read the text message from Hyunjin.
We agreed on after. It’s after.
He breathed out carefully, taking in the words. He knew what it was that Hyunjin was asking him for: the address of a man that Hyunjin had come to him about, a week or so before the Blackbird’s job, when Seungmin had been stretched thin with preparing, and had not had time to do any extra searching. Hyunjin hadn’t even asked him to. He had said, Can you get me this after? and Seungmin had said that he would.
Of course, at the time, he could not have known it would be like this. Hyunjin injured, concussed and unwilling to be treated for it, Jisung with four stab wounds to the abdomen, unable to go with him. Seungmin had no doubt that in the absence of Jisung, Hyunjin would go alone. It was like him, to do that. He got tunnel vision, sometimes. He couldn’t always see the ways there were other options.
Once upon a time, Seungmin would have just done as he was asked. He would have found the information Hyunjin was asking for, without questioning or really thinking anything of it, and sent it over. It wouldn’t have mattered to him that Hyunjin was injured, that he was going to be walking into a potentially awful situation, without the person he usually took as back up. It would have been not his circus, not his monkeys.
Now the thought of this made him feel physically sick. He had never said no to Hyunjin in the past, because he had never wanted to block Hyunjin’s desire for revenge; Hyunjin had a right to it, and it was important, in so many ways. But Seungmin could not be a part of this, he would not have a hand in guiding Hyunjin there.
But how was he supposed to say no, outright no, without Hyunjin cutting him out of the loop in future? He had said that he would.
A quick glance at the screens showed that the car was still not back. Changbin and Minho would probably be working their way back right now, provided everything had gone according to plan. Seungmin wished that he could track them, that he’d thought to keep an eye on them through the city cameras, so that he could know when they were likely due back.
He wanted to talk to Changbin. Everything in him demanded it: to sit Changbin down with him and tell him everything and watch Changbin take it in, process it. He didn’t want to figure this out on his own. Even just a few months ago, he might have seen that as a kind of weakness, and maybe it was, but the truth remained that he wanted to talk to him about this. A decision seemed impossible on his own.
When he was younger, when he’d had nothing, no money nor friends nor contacts, relying only on himself had been the only thing possible for him. He had learned to make all the decisions for himself; he’d made those decisions and taken all the steps forward that he’d needed to, and he’d never allowed himself to regret anything, no matter how badly it may have gone wrong in the end.
He would regret this, if it went badly.
He steeled himself, and thumbed open the phone screen where it had fallen back asleep. Hyunjin’s message felt almost accusatory on the screen, like it knew what he was doing. It took him mere moments to type out the response, and a full minute to actually send it. When he did, it was a relief to set the phone aside again, where he could not see any reply that came through.
I’ll look into it and get back to you.
——
Chan hadn’t been lying when he said that he’d known the aftermath of what they did would be— messy. In fact, he’d relished the idea, relished the thought of hitting Lee Jaerim right where it was going to hurt him most, the big shining crown jewel of his rotten empire. Learning the truth about the vault, the information they’d find within it, had merely upgraded messy to brutal. There had been no other way for it to go, with the players on the field.
Still. That didn’t make it all that easy to look at face on. To know that the things that were happening were a direct result of his own actions.
The knock on the office door was light, a slight rap of knuckles. The kind of knock of someone who wasn’t sure if he was interrupting, even though Chan had texted Seungmin to ask him to send Felix up in the first place. “Felix,” he called, “come in.”
The door pushed open and it was Felix on the other side, pale as he had been that morning too. His eyes were a little red rimmed, the lines of his body tired, but he worked up a smile for Chan when he saw Chan sitting behind his desk. He did not look like he had been actively crying in the few hours since Chan had seen him last, at the very least.
“Hyung,” he said. His voice seemed deeper than normal, rasping just a little bit. Chan hoped he wasn’t getting sick. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yeah,” Chan said. In every manner of the phrase Chan had been wanting to see him again: wanted to know Felix was doing okay, wanted to know how he was holding up. Wanted to see him the way a sunflower turned to sunlight, the way a heat-baked desert might suck up a long needed rain. He set his computer to sleep and got to his feet, motioning to the couch. “Come and sit with me.”
Felix nodded and came properly into the room, letting the door shut with a soft click behind himself. He was wearing his sneakers but he slipped them off his feet as he sat down so that he could bring his feet up and tuck them underneath himself. The show of smallness, of— vulnerability in this room, where so much had passed between them over these last few months, made Chan’s heart ache.
He sat down next to Felix, closer than he would have with any of the others, letting his knee press against Felix’s leg, turned into him so that they could look at each other. He took one of Felix’s hands in his own; it was very cold, fingers like ice, and he said, starting to rub them between his palms, “Is it cold down in Seungmin’s room?”
“No,” Felix said. “Not really.” He touched the back of Chan’s hand with his other hand, and it was just as cold. Chan hissed and took that one between his palms too, trying to warm them up. Felix didn’t stop him, but he did say, “It’s not really that I’m cold.”
Chan hummed under his breath. As he worked to bring some of the warmth back into Felix’s hands, slowly Felix seemed to slump over, further against the back of the couch and then further into Chan’s space, his body curling towards Chan like a comma. His eyes, so obviously tired, stayed on Chan’s face, like he was drinking in Chan the way Chan wanted to drink him in too. He had been restless last night, and Chan was not sure how much sleep Felix had actually managed to get.
It was Felix who eventually asked, “What did you want to talk to me about, hyung?”
Chan felt a small pang of shame. He had been putting it off, ever since Felix had come into the room, wanting to keep this quiet between them. Not wanting to upset Felix any more than he had already been upset. He had seen, these past few days, all the ways that Felix had stepped up to handle things: looking after Hyunjin, handling him in a way that Chan could not seem to; he had prepared for Jisung’s arrival too, and quietly taken care of everything in the background before Chan had even thought to wonder about it.
Last night had changed that. When Chan had come up for breakfast and found Felix eating with his sister, there had been none of that composure seemingly left in Felix. It would come back, Chan knew, but right now Felix reminded him very strongly of the Felix that had first arrived, the one who had seemed so completely breakable. Chan did not want to cause more pain.
But still— he knew better. He knew the strength that lay in Felix. Chan had to believe in it.
“I’ve learned some information about your father’s death,” he said. He let Felix’s hands go in favour of just holding one of them, threading their fingers together and squeezing. “It is— unpleasant. But I think that you, of all people, have a right to know about it, and so I don’t want to coddle you and keep it from you. That wouldn’t be fair of me. But equally, if you don’t want to hear about it, then I won’t speak of it. I will just handle everything as I can, and you won’t need to be involved in any way.”
Felix watched his face. His head rested on the back of the couch, and after a moment, he squeezed Chan’s hand, a mimicry of the way Chan had done. “Thank you,” he said. “Whatever it is that you want to tell me, I would like to know. I don’t want to run from this.”
He was so brave, this precious thing of Chan’s. He had been brave all his life, Chan knew, a boy born to a father who had wanted an entirely different son, and so Chan understood entirely the ways in which Felix did not want to have to be brave any longer. Soon, he thought to himself, a silent promise he would strive to keep. I’ll give him perfect peace soon.
“If you want me to stop at any point,” Chan said to him, “just let me know.”
Felix nodded. The sound of his hair against the material of the couch didn’t sound particularly comfortable. Chan resisted the urge to reach out and put his hand between the two. “Tell me,” Felix said.
Chan took a breath. “Your father,” he said. There was a brief spasm over Felix’s face, the same way there always was whenever Chan referred to Lee Jaerim in that way; a different look to whenever he referred to Lee Jaerim by name and avoided any reference to Felix’s relationship with the man. Chan didn’t know, even now, what was the correct option to take. “One of my contacts in the metropolitan police force was able to get me a copy of the police reports and the initial coroner's report.”
“That seems— fast,” Felix murmured.
“A high profile crime like this requires a fast turnaround,” Chan said. “They are trying to get ahead of things but that doesn’t seem to have worked out. Truthfully, I doubt they will ever actually solve it, and I think they already know that. Too much chatter online but not enough evidence at the scene. Whoever did this simply unloaded some kind of automatic into everyone in the private hanger.”
Multiple someones, with multiple guns, according to the police report, and Chan was inclined to believe it, judging by the number of bullet holes found in every one of the bodies. Chan was giving Felix the information he needed to know but there was perhaps no need to go into too much detail; he would leave out that it appeared extra care had been taken with Lee Jaerim. That he had been shot, likely whilst already dead, until his body had seemed almost more hole than anything else.
Felix closed his eyes. He pressed his lips together, and his hand clutched tight to Chan’s, as if grounding himself through that. Chan let him, and didn’t reach for him beyond this. This was a conversation they could not have with Felix in his arms, and he knew that Felix was aware of it too, by the way he didn’t reach out for Chan in turn. He held himself away, and said nothing, as if he knew there was more.
“Your father’s girlfriend,” Chan said, and watched Felix flinch, watched what little colour there was on his face drain out until even his freckles seemed bleached away. He opened his eyes though, wide with the horror he knew was coming. “The one he brought back from Shenzhen with him. She was with him at the airfield when he was murdered.”
“She died?” Felix whispered.
“Yes,” Chan said steadily. Shot, just like the rest of them, which was a— small mercy, perhaps. Fast, if painful. “But there’s more. She was pregnant, Lix. Not far along but— pregnant, all the same.”
Felix’s eyes filled immediately with tears. “Fuck,” he whispered. He pulled his hand away from Chan’s so he could scrub at his face, although the tears were not quite falling yet. “That poor woman. That poor, poor woman.”
There was a wealth of empathy inside of him that Chan was constantly in awe of. Chan should maybe learn something from him, something about— forgiveness, or understanding. Grace in suffering. Chan had never had the knack of it, never learned how to do it. His suffering, his grief, had always just left him angry, the kind of anger that turned into reckless revenge.
He’d been sitting with his anger most of the day. Anger, or maybe regret, or some mix of that and more, that he could not quite put into words. He had been sitting here looking through all the papers he had been sent and he had been looking, somehow, for evidence of Lee Jaerim’s suffering that the clinical reports did not provide. He could extrapolate, he could use his imagination, but it still did not feel like enough. He wished instead that he had been there, so he could see the moment Lee Jaerim knew he was fucked, knew that he would die. He wanted to have photographic evidence of the pain on that man’s face.
All things he could not have. Things he may not have ever had, when he hadn’t made any plans to be the one to kill the man. Indulgent fantasies, that’s all they were, and maybe a little childish, perhaps, things left over from long, lonely nights in the group home, listening to the other boys in his dorm room snore and snuffle in their sleep, his brain occupied only with his pain and anger. He’d never quite grown past that.
He had not even, truthfully, given much thought to the woman who had died, other than thinking about how much it was going to pain Felix to hear about. He was right, of course, but he felt a small amount of shame, now, seeing the way Felix reacted. That poor, poor woman.
“Was it a boy?” Felix asked, voice muffled slightly by his hands.
“Yes,” Chan said. “She was just far along enough to know.” Felix sucked in a breath, in a way that said quite clearly that he was trying to not actually cry. “Lix,” Chan said, unable to bear it any longer. He reached out, put his hands carefully on Felix’s upper arms, and when Felix didn’t flinch or shake his head, he pulled Felix towards him, until Felix was almost in his lap.
The hard part was over, now. He had said what he had needed to say. All Chan could provide was comfort, now.
But Felix still didn’t cry. He tucked his head into Chan’s shoulder, face turned towards his throat, and he breathed heavily, but there was no corresponding dampness on Chan’s skin. His hands came around Chan’s body, until it was not so much that Chan was holding him and more that they were holding each other. Chan liked that, he liked that a lot.
“It shouldn’t have been like this,” Felix said eventually. “Not for her, or for— Narae, or the other women, that noona talked about, the one he made get an abortion. The control he had over them all. It shouldn’t have been like that.”
“And you,” Chan said gently. “He wielded control over you, too.”
“I’m glad he’s dead,” Felix said. “But I wish others hadn’t died in pursuit of that. I know that’s naive, I know but— it is how I feel.”
It was naive, it was as childish an impulse as Chan’s fantasies about killing Lee Jaerim himself, but Chan understood. On anyone else, it would have seemed unbearably naive, but on Felix, it was not. It was just how Felix was. If he could, Chan would whisk him away to a place where nothing of this world Chan was operating in would ever touch him again.
“I know,” Chan said softly. “I know.”
Felix tucked his face more closely into Chan’s throat. Chan stroked his hair, carefully and slowly, rhythmic motions as the time ticked past and neither of them made any move to part, or indeed do anything whatsoever. Chan had maybe had enough of reading the reports, of torturing himself with what could have been. He thought it was a losing game but he was entertaining thoughts of soothing Felix down into a nap right here on the couch. Chan would cover him with the blanket and let Felix use his lap as a pillow.
It was not to be. Eventually, there was a knock on the office door, and then, as was his way, Changbin stepped inside. Chan had not realised he was back at all. “Hyung,” Changbin said, and then, “Oh, god, sorry. I’m always interrupting.”
“It’s okay,” Chan said quietly. He didn’t let go of Felix, and Felix, for once, didn’t immediately pull away, and didn’t even lift his face up in the slightest, like he was perfectly willing to just stay there even when Changbin was in the room. “How did it go?”
“Fine,” Changbin said, very shortly. “Hyung, I need to talk to you.”
Felix made a noise that was probably a sigh; it certainly sounded put-upon, but it was so quiet that it was either only meant for Chan’s ears or maybe not even then. “I’ll go,” he said, and only then did he sit up. He was still pale, although his nose had joined his eyes in redness, like the tears had truly been extremely close to falling for a long time, longer than Chan had realised. Chan missed the press of his body like a phantom limb.
“Actually,” said Changbin, “Felix, can you stay?”
Chan looked at him properly, for the first time since Changbin had come into the room, not distracted now by the weight of Felix against him. Changbin looked agitated, upset; not like anything had gone wrong on the money drop, but he was obviously and visibly distressed all the same. Not many things made Changbin look like that. Chan could count the number on one hand, in fact.
“What is it,” he said, with his heart sinking in his chest. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Hyunjin,” Changbin said, audibly strained. He was slowly rubbing his palms together, a rotating motion. It was a dry sound in the otherwise quiet of the room.
“Hyunjin?” Chan echoed, dread sitting like lead in his stomach. This must have to do with Jisung, surely. Hyunjin had been a sullen hermit since he’d come back. Chan didn’t know what he’d do if Hyunjin was pitching some kind of fit. At his side, Felix was far too emotionally drained to try and help wrangle Hyunjin right now. “Is it about Jisung?”
“No,” Changbin said. The door had swung mostly closed behind him, and now he put a hand on it and pushed it the rest of the way, so it latched. When he turned back to them, his mouth was set in a grim line. “No, it’s not.”
——
Jisung had only been out of his induced coma for a few days, and had been home for even less of that. Even still, he was already utterly sick of sleeping so much. He felt like it was all he did, every movement leading to a kind of fatigue he'd only ever experienced when he had the flu once in middle school.
The keypad beeping jerked him into wakefulness, so abruptly he found himself very disoriented. He lifted his head and looked around, finding he was — or, had been — alone. Changbin must have left him, under the assumption an unconscious Jisung was not a Jisung that could find trouble. He felt like he had fuzzy memories of other people skulking around the kitchen quietly, but he’d not come awake enough to really say for certain if that had been real or a dream.
Now, it was Minho who came into the apartment, and if it hadn't been for the door beeping, Jisung might not have woken up, Minho was so quiet. Jisung struggled a little upright, ignoring the way his stomach ached at moving, and looked at Minho, who was taking his shoes off. Jisung didn't think he'd ever get used to that.
Their eyes met. “Melon head,” Minho said, tone flat. “It is time for food. And medication.”
“Oh,” said Jisung. He supposed the others were taking shifts to look after him. Changbin was off duty. There was a rush of relief in realising this meant that his hyung wasn’t going to be compelled to spend every waking hour at Jisung’s side, but also another deeper kind of mortification rose up at the idea of Minho, of all people, taking up the mantle even for a little while.
Jisung eyed the windows. The sky outside was dark, but at this time of the year, that could mean it was late afternoon or the middle of the night; there was simply no way of knowing. His phone was still in his bedroom, dead by now. He hadn't asked for it to be retrieved for him. He couldn't look at it anyway, but more than that — he was tired of everyone having to do stuff for him.
He’d missed the day, that was for certain. Slept through it. Even knowing he didn’t have any tasks that needed attention, it felt— bad. Wasteful. All this time and he wasn’t doing anything useful or fun, and on top of that he was clogging up the mechanisms with his presence in the living room.
He started trying to get up, elbows tucked underneath himself. His stomach protested even harder than before. His medication had definitely worn off, so Minho was right there, and he couldn't help but hiss in pain.
“Jisung,” Minho said, from the kitchen. Jisung twisted to look at him again and found Minho frowning at him. Once upon a time — a couple of weeks ago, even — Jisung would have found that look intimidating, wondering if Minho was angry with him. Now he saw the clear concern, the worry there. “What are you doing? If you need something, I will get it for you.”
Jisung paused, surprised. “I was getting food,” he said.
Minho rolled his eyes, obviously and without shame. He wanted Jisung to know, very clearly, how stupid he thought Jisung was. “I am going to make you food,” he said. “You are going to lay there and be good.”
Jisung blinked at him. Then he said, “Yes, daddy.”
There was absolute silence between them. Minho looked at him with no expression on his face, and yet somehow the look managed to convey such intensity that Jisung was surprised his skin wasn’t flayed off.
“Right, yeah,” he said hastily, shrinking down into his pillows again. “Yeah, no, it felt wrong coming out of my mouth. Sorry! Won’t do that again!”
Minho didn’t respond. He simply let out a little sigh and turned to go to the kitchen to start on the food.
Jisung lay there, listening to the sounds of the movement in the kitchen. He felt awkward, to just be laying like this, not lifting a single finger for himself. He had not expected to be fussed over to this extent. And he would not have expected the fussing to— last. Surely they couldn’t be planning on doing this for the next few weeks. Surely. This was already beyond the pale. Minho cooking for him was almost too much for Jisung’s poor, sloshy brain to take. He had genuinely thought that Minho was reminding him that it was time for food just to keep Jisung on a time schedule, not because Minho planned on making it for him.
It made Jisung want to fold himself up into a tiny little ball and roll under the couch, where nobody could look at him or talk to him, where nobody would even notice him until the yearly cleaning session came around and they moved the couches to vacuum. By then they might have even forgotten about him entirely.
He was drifting a little bit when Minho appeared at his side, a bowl of something in his hands. Jisung squinted at him, the lights overhead too bright, and then tried to sit back upright. The discomfort and pain was even more by now, and he hissed again, wishing he could hold the sound in but it was a futile effort. It was funny, he thought, how he had experienced so many different types of pain in his life and yet his body never quite adapted.
“Here,” Minho said quietly. He put the bowl down on the coffee table — it was full of soup, Jisung saw, filled with shredded chicken — and then he helped Jisung sit up again. His hands were firm and impersonal, but they lingered as he made sure Jisung was secure. Only once Jisung was upright, and no longer having to hold back gasps of pain, did Minho move the bowl of soup and a spoon into his lap and say, “I’ll get your meds.”
Jisung looked down at the soup in his hands. It, frankly, smelled amazing, and he could sense that he was hungry — his stomach actually rumbled, which seemed a clear sign — but he’d been discovering, these past few days, just how much pain could ruin an appetite. It took a lot of effort for him to raise the spoon to his mouth and start eating.
He’d only managed a few mouthfuls when Minho returned with his pills and a glass of water for him. Jisung expected to just be handed them but instead Minho folded himself down onto the floor next to him and said, “Here. You should take them with your food.”
Changbin had been like this too, earlier. Nice. Jisung hadn’t known how to outright tell him to stop without seeming ungrateful, and he didn’t know now, with Minho, who felt far murkier than Changbin did. He really, truly, did not know what to do with a Minho who brought him his pain medication and sat down on the floor with him. So instead of thinking about it, he just took the pills.
Minho set the water on the coffee table and sat for a moment, watching Jisung continue with his soup. His expression, usually hard to read, wasn’t so hard right now, up close and personal in this way. He looked pleased that Jisung was eating. “Good,” he said, when it was clear that Jisung was not going to stop, or throw up, or push the food away otherwise. “Do you want some bread? I think we have a roll somewhere.”
“No,” Jisung said quietly. He focused on the spoonful he had in front of him and didn’t look at Minho. “I’m okay, hyung.”
“Hmm,” said Minho, like he was thinking of getting Jisung a roll anyway. He stood up, pushing to his feet with a small noise of not quite pain. He was hurt, Jisung remembered suddenly. He kept forgetting amidst all the— brain fog, he supposed, and then remembering again suddenly. It was like he had a baby’s concept of object permanence. The medication and pain and general feeling of mortification kind of kept him only paying attention to a surface level stream of consciousness. At least— he hoped it was just all that, and not something to do with the concussion. He really didn’t need to add permanent brain damage to his list of issues. His brain was enough of a mess without that.
But he remembered now, and before it could sink back under another pile of thoughts, he decided to ask about it. “Hyung,” he said, as Minho turned to go back to the kitchen. “How’s your wound?”
Minho stopped again and looked down at him. His face was once more unreadable, his eyes dark. “It’s fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Easier said than done, but Jisung could take a dismissal when he heard it. Other than that small sound, there was no sign that Minho was in so much as discomfort, never mind pain. So Jisung just had to take his word for it. He continued to eat his soup, listening to Minho bustle about the kitchen. Maybe he was making food for himself, or for Jeongin, or maybe he was just preparing to clean the dishes, because Jisung could hear things clanking together every so often.
“I’m sorry I overheard your conversation with Jeongin,” he said.
He wasn’t really sure what it was that made him say it. He remembered the wound so he remembered Jeongin tending to it, then remembered waking up and hearing them speak. But it was too suddenly blurted, too out of nowhere, and more than that, it was a topic that he knew Minho probably wouldn’t have wanted him to ever broach. Minho seemed like the type to sweep it all away under the rug, where it could never see the light of day, and it made Jisung’s chest ache a little, because he was the same way, and he’d never realised that they were similar in this exact way.
It was like with Felix, he’d realised, the more he’d turned what he’d learned about Minho over in his head. Felix, who Jisung had not known was a kindred spirit, and who probably still didn’t know himself about Jisung’s own past abuse. Jisung had always thought that what was fucked up about Minho stemmed from prison, and he suspected almost everyone did, except for maybe Seungmin, with his background checks.
Jisung knew Seungmin knew about him. He’d never asked Seungmin, but he knew. Hospital records, however, didn’t show the true picture of a childhood.
Minho didn’t say anything. The silence was kind of excruciating. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” Jisung continued. “I just— I’m sorry, hyung. For invading your privacy like that.”
Silence again. Jisung struggled a little to twist around so he could look at where Minho stood next to the island. He wasn’t looking at Jisung but instead down at whatever was on the countertop, which Jisung couldn’t see at the angle he was at. His expression was— empty. Jisung had to bite the inside of his mouth to stop himself from saying anything more.
“It’s okay,” Minho said eventually. The weirdest part was that despite the look on his face, his voice sounded almost normal. If Jisung hadn’t been looking at him, he might have thought that it genuinely was okay. Part of Jisung wanted to believe the words because Minho, he knew, never said anything he didn’t truly mean, and so if he was saying it was okay, then that surely did mean that it was okay. But Minho’s face, his face — Jisung recognised that look, somehow.
“It’s just,” Jisung said, before he could think better of it, before he could keep his mouth shut like he probably should have done, “I know what it’s like, you know? To have a father like that. Or, well, a step-dad,” he amended. He never wanted anyone to think he was related to that man. “My real dad wasn’t shitty. Or maybe he was, I don’t remember him. He left, after all. So maybe he was shitty too.”
Minho moved in a way that almost looked like a flinch, and looked up, finally, at Jisung. Jisung wished that he really could read Minho better, but he’d spent a long time avoiding looking Minho in the eyes, and so he didn’t have the practise. Minho was too good at keeping his face empty and blank, and he was doing that now. When he spoke, his voice was a little rough. “Your dad left,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jisung said, “when I was a kid.” A toddler, in fact, too young to have any memories of the man who had, by all accounts, given him the cheeks that his mother had sometimes pinched when he was a child. He’d thought, back then, that it was affectionate, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. His entire childhood before his step-father appeared, when it was just him and a mother that he had thought loved him, had taken on a kind of greasy film, uncertainty laid over his memories. He couldn’t be sure of what was truth anymore.
“I see,” said Minho. What he saw, Jisung didn’t really know, but Minho looked away again, at the counter. His jaw was tense.
“What you said in the hospital,” Jisung said. “What I— overheard. You didn’t deserve that, hyung.”
“You don’t understand,” Minho whispered.
“I do,” said Jisung. He set his bowl aside. He didn’t feel as agitated as he thought he might, having this conversation. If he’d tried to have it right after the hospital, he might have been. Maybe it was the pain medication finally kicking him, actually, relaxing him. Although he didn’t feel relaxed per se. “I didn’t go through that exact thing, but I get it, hyung. You know that I get it.”
Minho didn’t look like he knew that. Minho looked a little bit like he was astral projecting out of the room, and a little bit like he wanted to tell Jisung to shut up. He could have done, Jisung knew, and Jisung was actually surprised that Minho wasn’t doing so. The implicit permission was making him feel brave; it would get him into trouble, he knew. He forged ahead anyway.
“You know he used to put his cigarettes out on me?” he said. Minho’s head jerked to face him again, obvious horror written on his face. “Yeah. He’d chain smoke in the house, and if I made too much noise, he’d use me as an ashtray. Put out the stubs against my back.”
To this day, he couldn’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke. It was odd, how that was the thing that stayed with him, when he could go to a barbeque place and grill meat without any kind of reaction. But cigarette smoke, the awful acrid smell of it, made his skin feel too small for his bones, made his heart race like it was going to beat right out of his chest.
“Jisung,” said Minho, seriously and softly. “That’s awful.”
Jisung fought against the urge to downplay it, or make a joke of it. He had learned to do that, because it kept people from prying too hard. It kept people from wanting to see what was underneath the playful, light surface, to where Jisung was sometimes afraid he was still— ugly and twisted, still that angry boy who had clawed at anyone who tried to treat him kindly.
“Yeah, it was,” he said instead. “It was awful. I used to try so hard to be good, in the beginning. I tried hard to be quiet and well behaved and not give him a reason to be mad at me. But he didn’t need a reason. He just wanted to hurt me.”
It had taken him so long to see that, and when it finally sunk in, it hadn’t really made it any better. It felt, in many ways, like it was easier to imagine that he had brought it on himself through some wayward act, than to come to terms with the fact that sometimes people were just— evil. His step-father hadn’t even hated him, as far as Jisung could tell. He had just wanted to hurt someone smaller and weaker than himself, and Jisung had been the perfect target for it: defenceless, small even as a child, and stuck living in the same house.
It had not been Jisung. It had never been his fault. And he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that it had not been Minho’s fault either.
Minho kept looking at him, in that serious way. But he still hadn’t told Jisung to stop, or simply walked out without a word. He just stood there.
“When we found out who Felix’s real dad was,” Jisung said, confidence growing, “back when we found out that he was abused by his father, I remember thinking it was so strange that there was a connection between us. I never spoke to Felix about it but— I said some stuff to you back then, hyung, that I realise now was cruel. I thought you didn’t understand what it was like, but you did.”
“What happened to you,” Minho said, voice low but cutting through Jisung’s words with finality, “and what happened to me were totally different.”
“You’re right,” Jisung said. “It was different. It’s always different, the specifics. I’ve never asked Felix this but I bet his father never used to put cigarettes out on his back, but my step-father never tried to drown me.” He watched Minho open his mouth, perhaps to protest the idea that he had been drowned, and then he closed it again. Jisung pressed on before there could be an interruption. “But it doesn’t matter, the specifics, it doesn’t matter the form. Hyung. You were a child.”
Minho sighed and lifted a hand and scrubbed it through his hair. The look he gave Jisung was a little condescending, not like he was looking down on Jisung, but like he thought Jisung was— young. Like maybe Jisung was still the child he was trying to convince Minho he had once been. “You don’t understand,” he said, again.
“I do,” Jisung said, again. Oh, he understood. He understood that Minho had been made to believe that he deserved what happened to him, that he had internalised every single piece of it. He’d seen some of that realisation come over Jeongin’s face too, in the hospital, when the full truth of Minho’s confession had sunk in.
Minho, who had spent years in prison, and yet who acquiesced to Chan’s authority in every situation. Who might protest, throw his arms up in outrage, but had always, as long as Jisung had known him, ultimately done as he was told. Minho, the leashed animal, all bark and no bite.
Once Hyunjae had said, laughing, that he wished he had something to entice Minho over to his side. I don’t think I’d be able to keep him under control like Chris can, he’d said. At the time, Jisung had laughed and agreed but now he wondered if Minho wouldn’t be as tame for Hyunjae as he was for Chan. If it wasn’t something specific to Chan and instead— something specific to Minho.
“No matter what you did,” Jisung said. “No matter what kind of shit you used to get up to. You were a child and you didn’t deserve that.”
“Jisung—”
“Hyung, you could have been setting kittens on fire and your father still had no right to try to fucking drown you.”
Minho flinched for real this time. Jisung was breathing too heavily, he realised. He hated it, when he got angry, hated it more than anything, although he thought his anger was justified right now. He thought someone had to be angry on Minho’s behalf, because it was clear that Minho wasn’t going to be angry for himself.
There was silence. Jisung focused on his breathing, trying to will the anger into something calmer, something more productive. Nothing good had ever come of his anger. There was no point in letting it out aimlessly. But it was hard, to have no outlet for feeling this way, stuck on this bed, his stomach stitched together in a way that sometimes if he moved too hard he worried that he might split back open and spill his insides out over the clean floor.
“I wasn’t,” Minho said, after a while.
“You weren’t what?” Jisung asked.
“Hurting kittens,” Minho said. He sounded a little upset that Jisung would think such a thing. His gaze was almost reproachful. “I wouldn’t do that.”
All the emotion drained out of Jisung in an instant. He felt an odd urge to laugh, an urge to cry. “No shit, hyung,” he said.
Minho moved, very suddenly, in a way that might have made Jisung flinch not too long ago. He didn’t know if he was used to it, used to Minho, or just too tired to really react, but he just watched as Minho came over to him, face held empty again now, and held out his hand. Jisung, after a moment, handed over his mostly empty bowl. Minho looked at how much he had eaten and made a little noise in his throat that sounded displeased, but not enough so that he insisted Jisung eat more. He just took it back to the kitchen.
Jisung settled back into his pillows, so tired that it was like he was pushed back there by a weight. It always seemed to come on him like this now, especially after medication and food. The tiredness was so extreme and so quick that it felt a little bit like being dragged under a riptide. His eyelids were closing without permission.
“We should start a shitty dads club,” he said, half-mumbling it. “You, me, Felix. Seungmin too, huh.” He trailed off, thinking, and then rapidly lost every train of thought almost as soon as it ran through his head.
No response came. Jisung fought down the growing need to say something more, anything to get another reaction, but that was more like something he’d do to Changbin, and maybe Minho deserved time to process. Maybe Jisung should let him be, when Minho had made him soup and been nice to him, and listened to him without telling him to shut up this time. He hadn’t even called Jisung a melon head throughout the entire conversation. That was very nice of Minho, actually.
“Thank you for the soup, hyung,” he said, wriggling carefully back down into his blankets.
Nothing but the sound of rushing water as Minho washed out the bowl. Jisung felt himself start to drift, letting himself be tugged under by the allure of rest, of painless, dreamless sleep. He was almost there when the tap shut off and he heard Minho’s voice, quiet but there, say, “You’re welcome, Jisung.”
——
Hyunjin had long since given up even the pretence of productivity by the time night fell fully over the city. He’d closed his curtains against the darkness and abandoned his easel at his desk in favour of laying splayed out across his bed like a starfish. It wasn’t nearly late enough for him to sleep even on an ordinary night, and tonight he wouldn’t have been able to manage it anyway. All he could do was lay there, listening to music until the sound became too much, overstimulating, and then he pulled his earbuds out and was left with nothing at all. Nothing but his heartbeat, pulsing in his throat, a cold pit of anxiety gnawing in his gut. He worked to breathe, to calm himself. At his sides, his palms were clammy, gross.
It took time for the voices in the living room to stop, Jisung’s loud cadence mixing with Minho’s softer one. More time still, once that silence had fallen, for Hyunjin to hear the light creaking of Chan coming down the hall, finally heading for bed.
He waited, until it was late enough that even Seungmin would have gone to sleep, to rise from his bed again.
It was muscle memory at this point, plucking out his outfit from his wardrobe. Rote in his mind, always the same. And thank fuck for that, because he wasn’t sure he’d ever been so— spacey, before one of his outings. He was drifting, in a bad way, in a way that he normally didn’t on any kind of job, but especially not on one of these nights. He was usually focused, honed to his purpose.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. This wasn’t what it was about. It was about— how he’d become something more. He was still that something, surely.
You can do this, he thought, but what came out of his mouth, whispered like a fervent prayer, was, “You have to do this.”
He left his room, closing the door gently behind himself. His footsteps were light, careful, silent as a cat. As an assassin.
The apartment was dark, lit only by the moonlight coming in silvery blue from the windows. When he got into the living area, he thought don’t look, but he could not stop himself from glancing at Jisung’s makeshift bed. Beneath the plush piles of blankets, Jisung’s body was not at all discernable, his mop of hair a vague, dark smudge on the pillows. When Hyunjin paused, for the barest moment, he could hear the soft sound of Jisung breathing.
He swallowed, throat feeling thick.
You have to do this.
The beeping of the apartment lock was loud in the quiet of the darkness. Hyunjin paused on the landing, waiting, and then when he heard no stirring from within the apartment, he made his way down the stairs.
He stopped, as usual, on the second floor landing. Though unlike usual, he wasn’t here for Jisung himself. He reached for Jisung’s door handle — if it was locked, that would send all his plans for the evening grinding to a screeching halt. There was a part of him, deep down, that wanted the door to be locked. But even as the thought whispered at the back of his mind, a wave of anger washed it away. Anger at himself, mostly. Anger at the world.
The door wasn’t locked.
Hyunjin almost swayed when he went inside Jisung’s bedroom. The smell of it was so very Jisung, his hair and his skin and his clothes, familiar by now. There were shoes and clothes scattered around, the bed unmade. Jisung hadn’t been in this room since before the heist, and this was the mess he’d made, getting ready for it. Getting ready to go out and almost die.
If he had actually died, then this room would have become a memorial. How awful it would have been, to have come home to all Jisung’s things, this obvious evidence of him having lived, but for the person himself to just be— gone.
Hyunjin’s breathing was loud in the stillness, ragged and raw. He hated it, hated the loss of control. Nights like these were supposed to be all about control for him. He worked to quiet himself, to press the fear down, down.
You have to do this.
He went to Jisung’s nightstand, opened the top drawer. A handgun sat inside, just as Hyunjin remembered. He picked it up gingerly, uncomfortable with it in his hand. But if he was going out without backup, he needed— something. Just in case.
There was a holster in the drawer as well, meant to go around the waist. Hyunjin hiked up his hoodie so he could thread the holster through his belt loops, then he settled the gun into place, snapping it in securely. When he tugged his hoodie back down, it was baggy enough at the hem to cover the slight bulge of the gun at his side.
He’d thought it would make him feel better. It didn’t, not really.
But it wasn’t like Hyunjin was a stranger to discomfort, to fear. “Get over it,” he whispered to himself, shutting the top drawer and then opening the second. There it was — the knife. The knife Jisung had given him, all those weeks ago, when that man had come in and gone for Seungmin.
Just keep it, Jisung had said.
Had he bought this with Hyunjin in mind. Jisung didn’t normally use knives. Hyunjin closed his fingers around the hilt, weighing it in his hand. A little bigger than he was used to, but a good weight. This— this settled him. Just a little. Just enough.
He slipped the knife into the large pocket-pouch at the front of his hoodie and then left Jisung’s bedroom behind.
Seungmin’s workshop door was closed, and though light shone around the edges, Hyunjin could hear nothing from within. He hoped Seungmin was asleep. Though it didn’t much matter if he wasn’t, because Hyunjin was pushing open the back door of the building, heading out into the frigid air. He was free, he was free and he could not be stopped.
Their car sat parked next to the door, but Hyunjin bypassed it. He had never learned to drive formally, and while he was pretty sure that if he had to drive somewhere he could manage it, tonight wasn’t the night to test that theory. It made things a little more— arduous, than usual. Being without on-command transport. But it was not insurmountable.
He walked around to the front of the building, heading down the block and to the busier, wider streets. Over here, there were restaurants open, twenty-four hours. Many of them had huge plastic tents set up outside, and beyond the warbly cellophane Hyunjin could see people sitting at low tables and flimsy plastic stools, eating greasy gopchang and drinking soju. The emerald green of the bottles glimmered like jewels in the yellow lights of the establishments. Voices rose and fell as Hyunjin walked, men shouting, women laughing. A man hunched over a pile of garbage bags and heaved while his friends cringed around their smiles.
Hyunjin went to the curb, looking toward oncoming traffic. Without the buses and trains running, it was the golden hour for taxi drivers, especially in these areas. Many of them were occupied, but he’d scarcely been waiting fifteen seconds before one slowed and swerved in for him.
He got into the passenger seat, in the front. “Hello,” the driver greeted him, “where to?”
Hyunjin read out the address he’d put in his notes app, nearby the one Seungmin had sent him, his screen glowing blueish in the small space of the cab. And then he turned his phone off. In the darkness, it took a while for Hyunjin to stop seeing those little phantom pulses of light, for his vision to clear and adjust.
It didn’t really matter. He didn’t know where he was going, had only a vague impression of it. An area on the outskirts of the city he’d never been to before. South. When they got on the highway, he leaned his head against the window, feeling the vibrations.
He wished Jisung was with him.
Hyunjin squeezed his eyes shut and let himself drift.
It was not a short drive. By the time the taxi trundled off the highway and began to weave through smaller streets, Hyunjin was at once both calmed and yet more anxious than he’d been before. It was a churning, unpleasant kind of fear, bundled up under a layer of numbness. He felt like a machine. He felt like a ghost.
“Uh, this is it,” the driver said, a little unsurely. He was a paunchy man, jowly, with a lot of stubble. But when he looked at Hyunjin, his eyes were concerned, flickering from Hyunjin’s face to their surroundings as he pulled the car to a stop.
Hyunjin glanced out the window. This area was— quiet, dark. Surprisingly few streetlamps. He hadn’t really expected it to be so out of the way, but it was what it was.
“Thank you,” Hyunjin said, handing over enough bills to cover his fare. He declined the change, getting out of the car and then waiting for the driver to pull away, red brake lights fading around the corner, before he let himself walk.
The longer he walked the more he realised this neighbourhood was— strange. It looked like it had once, maybe fifty years ago, been an affluent sort of area. One storey houses with trim yards walled in with cinder blocks that went higher than Hyunjin’s head, black iron gates. The road was sloped and winding, and where once it had been pristine it was now cracked and lumpy with erosion, weeds sprouting out from the cracks in the asphalt. The high walls that encased the homes were splattered with stains and graffiti. Many houses had one or both gate doors missing, exposing the weathered homes within to Hyunjin’s eyes, the overgrown gardens and peeling paint.
Above him, a street lamp flickered. Hyunjin kept his hands deep in his pocket, his fingers curled around the handle of the knife. Jisung’s knife. His heart was going fast, pulse thick in his throat. The anxiety in him, already unusually heightened, was spiking sickly. He didn’t like this. Something wasn’t right.
Hyunjin slowed, almost wanting to turn back. But the fear, the acrid tang of it, was like— before. He couldn’t give into it. He couldn’t. He had to do this.
It was so quiet. At this time of night it was normally peaceful in these kinds of suburbs, but this total silence was unnerving. None of the windows of the homes were lit up, but more than that, even the outdoor porch lights were off, the lights over the gates. It made seeing the numbers nailed into the walls difficult, but eventually Hyunjin reached his destination. House number 2028, the zero lopsided and out of place because one of the nails holding it up had disintegrated.
The gate was ajar. Hyunjin stared at that, for a long moment, unease squirming in the pit of his stomach. He pushed the door of the gate the rest of the way open, wincing at the stretched out, grinding squeak of it.
The yard was untidy. Weeds sprung up everywhere, the cement pathway hidden under a thick layer of brown leaves and frost. He stepped carefully through the archway and into the yard, a barren tree obscuring parts of the moon in spindly, inky lines. The ground crunched beneath his feet, no matter how lightly he stepped.
But, as he stopped in the middle of the yard, surrounded by snow and dry, dead foliage, he was beginning to realise that did not matter at all.
The house had no front door. Just an open, dark archway. A gaping kind of wound. The windows were boarded up — or at one point had been. The wooden planks were falling away from where they’d been nailed, like that errant number beside the gate. Beyond the boards the glass of the windows was shattered. Graffiti covered huge swathes of the walls, no longer bright but bleached from the sun.
There was no one here. There had not been anyone here in years.
Hyunjin’s breath puffed out of him as pale, visible steam, coming fast and hard. He was shivering, or maybe just shaking, his whole body weak and out of his control.
“No,” he whispered, swaying forward a single stumbling step. It was like that empty front door was a black hole, sucking him in. Some terrible compulsion, forcing him forward even though he knew he would not find what he sought here.
Before he could get any closer he heard, over the rush of blood in his ears, a distant kind of rumble, a hum. He turned from the house as the sound grew nearer, until beams of light shone from beyond the gate, the telltale crunch of pavement beneath tires.
I should hide, he thought, but it was faint and far away. He should, he should, but instead he stood there, frozen. Every joint felt locked up, like he’d become stone, become ice.
The car stopped, just in front of the gate, and then idled. After a moment Hyunjin heard a door open and then close, the car swaying as someone got out.
And then a person, a man, was in the open gate, blocking out the headlamps, his shadow long across the yard.
It was Chan. He was in all black too, padded coat falling down to his knees, the faux-fur lining the hood fluffy around his blank face. He came into the yard and then just stopped. No expression, no words. He just stood there and met Hyunjin’s eyes, an ever familiar mask of neutrality.
Hyunjin knew that look. He’d seen it a few times, over the years.
In their old kitchen, the watery yellow light bulb above their heads. You can’t have another, he remembered Chan saying gently but unusually firmly, taking the fifth candy bar out of Hyunjin’s hand. You’ll get sick.
Or when Hyunjin had been in his shower phase, boxing himself into the bathroom to bathe in scalding water three or four times a day. I can’t let you, Chan had murmured. Look at your hands, they’re cracking, they’re bleeding.
It was that look. The look of a man battening down the hatches. The look of a man who knew the necessity of his actions but hated them all the same. The look of a man who was denying someone he loved something he knew they deeply desired.
Hyunjin breathed. It was like the air had gone thin. No matter how fast he inhaled, his brain felt— sloshy. Dim.
“Do you know what he did to me,” Hyunjin said, voice a rasp, like dry leaves skittering across concrete.
Chan’s expression didn’t shift, but his jaw visibly tightened. “Hyunjin,” he said. Soft. Always so soft.
“He would put me on my knees first,” Hyunjin said, panting like he’d been running. He stumbled away from that black hole of a front door, heading more deeply into the yard. Chan simply watched. “I always tried to get him to finish like that. Better in my mouth than—”
“Please,” Chan said. Hyunjin was close enough now to see the agonised sadness in his eyes. “I know.”
He didn’t know. He— knew, in that there was little, by this point, that Hyunjin hadn’t told him. But he didn’t know. It wasn’t just knowledge, for Hyunjin, it was memories. Sight, sound, smell, feel, taste. The roughness of denim under his hands, the hard floor under his knees. The— smell— the taste—
Hyunjin bit the inside of his cheek hard enough that all he could taste now was copper. It was better than the memory. “I have to kill him,” he said. His quivering hand still clutched at the knife, hidden away in his pocket. His voice was shaking just as hard as the rest of him. “I have to. You can’t take this from me. I need it.”
“Not tonight,” Chan said, utterly implacable in a way he so rarely was, with Hyunjin. “Not like this.”
And what could Hyunjin do, if Chan put his foot down— he could do nothing. Chan controlled all of Hyunjin’s resources. Seungmin would not help, if Chan ordered him down. None of them would help. And Chan could take his money too, prevent him from hiring someone else.
“Hyunjin.” A name, all Hyunjin had had of himself for so many years, spoken with such tender love. Hyunjin turned away from Chan, toward the derelict garden. “You’re hurt. You’re not— thinking straight. You could be killed.” A pause, then, very quietly, “You could be raped again.”
Hyunjin was crying. The tears were hot, hot as the scalding showers, flowing down his face. “Again?” he choked out on a sob that turned into a terrible mockery of a laugh. The moon wavered, indistinct through his tears. “For the thousandth time, you mean?”
He strode forward, shoving hard at a display of potted plants, long since withered and browned. The metal shelf went tumbling over, sending the terracotta pots onto the ground, where several shattered. Dirt sprayed out, muddy and cold. The sound of it all was jarring, echoing in the empty space around them.
Was that why Seungmin had chosen this place. Houses to delay Hyunjin’s suspicions, but utterly devoid of all life. No one, nothing, to hear Hyunjin’s anguish. Surprising that this place hadn’t been demolished for apartments. It must have taken time for Seungmin to find a neighbourhood so abandoned. No wonder he’d taken so long to reply to Hyunjin’s text.
“Does it matter?” Hyunjin said, loudly to match the sound of breaking ceramic. There was a picnic table, it had a few more pots, some jars for preserving food. He shoved at those too, picking one up and fully flinging it across the yard, so it shattered near Chan’s feet. “Once more, again, again.” He grabbed the edge of the picnic table and upended it fully. Mud and leaves splattered across his shins. “Who cares,” he sobbed, grabbing at a bird feeder and missing, the tears in his eyes too thick to see through in the dimness. He went down to his knees, the cold immediately leaching through the denim of his pants. He pressed his balled up fists to his stomach, hunching over.
Who was he. This body, this body had never felt like his own. Right now he felt like he was outside himself, disconnected. Watching, feeling, but alien in his own skin. Hyunjin, Hyunjin, Hyunjin, he was a painter, he loved— sweet bread. Long baths. He loved Felix’s hair under his palms and Changbin’s arm entwined with his. The soft curve of Jisung’s cheek, the rounded way he smiled. That was Hyunjin. That was himself, he tried to remember. Tried to know it.
It was so far away. How could he get it back, how could he slip that skin back on, when everything was cold. When there was concrete under his knees again. When he’d lost his power, and his abusers were free.
The yard was boxed in. He was in a locked room. Grey walls. Darkness. A light he had no access to. Who am I.
The polka dot umbrella was a memory. That boy with the dirty shoes was of the past. The past. Which past? Hyunjin remembered eating melon ice cream with a woman whose face had long since faded. It was all in the past, all memories.
Hyunjin was in a tiny locked room. He had never left.
He threaded his hands into his own hair, gripping hard, unkind. The pain— was real, piercing through the fog, but bad. He tugged harder, and harder still, the frustration building like a bubble until he screamed, inarticulate with rage. Shocking, that sound. Raw and vibrating through his chest. He did it again, and then, nearly a shriek, he cried, “This isn’t fair!”
The dry crunch of leaves gave Chan’s footsteps away, growing louder. “I know,” Chan said, and Hyunjin— paused, as he realised Chan was crying. The strained, damp sound of it. “I care. I care. I know how much you need this.” His voice had grown nearer, the polyester shuffling of Chan’s padded coat close now. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Hyunjin.” His voice broke. “But I can’t— I can’t—”
Hyunjin let his hands fall, resting open and limp on his thighs. He raised his head, suddenly exhausted. Chan’s face, shining with tears, was very close. He’d knelt beside Hyunjin, not touching, so careful not to touch. The moonlight glinted off the wetness on his face.
Moonlight.
Hyunjin let his head loll back. He was under the open sky.
How big it was.
——
Changbin turned a circuit board over and over in his hands, half-nervous movement and half-looking at it to see if he could work out what it was supposed to do. It was a pointless exercise, since he thought it was probably just a random component of something that Seungmin was working on, but it was occupying his mind a little bit.
It was late. Late enough that real, true tiredness had begun to set in, his eyes heavy with it. Seungmin himself had gone to bed, a clear sign of just how tired he was after the past few days of long hours keeping track of everything. He hadn’t bothered asking Changbin if he’d join him. He’d known that Changbin wouldn’t sleep.
Now he had the workroom to himself, with the high ceilings and cold, concrete walls. The only screens still switched on were the ones with the camera feeds, squares of footage of the apartment and the street outside, everything very quiet. Outside, the streetlamps cast white circles on the pavement in the grainy image. Inside, nothing seemed to move except for Jisung, up in the living room. He was asleep but he kept moving, shifting, like he wanted to turn onto his side but knew, even unconscious, that he couldn’t.
Changbin had watched him, for a while, and then started his fiddling with the stuff that was left out on the workbench. As welcome as he was in the space, he usually didn’t touch much in the room. Most of it simply went over his head, materials for contraptions that he didn’t understand. He didn’t need to — that was why they had Seungmin.
Before Seungmin had joined them, all of these tasks, every single little thing Seungmin took on, had either been something they handled themselves or, more usually, contracted out to others. None of them had liked that, the extra potential leaks. Once Seungmin had come on, he had taken over everything without even needing to be asked. He’d ask probing questions like, what’s your process for vetting the people you take on jobs, and they’d had to admit that there wasn’t really much of a process beyond word of mouth, and he’d said things like, Jesus Christ, and just handled it.
Sometimes Changbin wasn’t sure what they had been doing, before Seungmin and then Minho joined them. Muddling along the best they could. Looking after Jeongin, and then later Hyunjin, trying to make a name for themselves in this city.
He put the circuit board down and pulled his tablet closer. When he unlocked it, it opened to the last thing he’d been working on, the beginning of a job for an old client, someone they’d been working with since before Hyunjin had even come. The potential job had come in before they ran Felix’s, and Changbin had been tasked with putting together the preliminary plan for Minho to fine-tune, but Changbin had been finding it difficult to focus on it in the wake of the Blackbird’s job. His heart, he suspected, was not entirely in it right now.
The words blurred; he focused. The words blurred again, and focus came much slower. When the workroom door pushed open slowly, Changbin sat up, startled out of a slump that he hadn’t realised was most of the way to asleep. For a moment he thought Chan and Hyunjin must have come back and he’d missed the sound of the car out back, but it wasn’t: it was Jeongin. The idea of Jeongin awake in the middle of the night was so bizarre that Changbin just blinked at him.
Jeongin looked tired, too. He was wearing sweatpants, a sweater that didn’t look familiar, which meant perhaps that it was Minho’s. His hair was sticking up a little bit, like he’d been sleeping or rolling around in bed trying to sleep before he’d gotten up and come downstairs. He didn’t look very surprised to see Changbin there.
“Hyung,” he said. He let the door close behind him, for once not letting it slam, carefully making sure it closed with next to no sound. He padded further into the room, his worn sneakers quiet on the floor. “Where’s Seungmin-hyung?”
“Sleeping,” Changbin said. “He went to bed about an hour ago.”
A flash of disappointment went across Jeongin’s face. “Oh,” he said.
“If it’s urgent, I can go wake him?” Changbin offered. He didn’t particularly want to do that, not just because Seungmin was grumpy as a goose when woken up out of nowhere. He didn’t want to do it because he didn’t want Seungmin’s rest disturbed at all. But if Jeongin needed something, Changbin would take the fall for him.
“No,” Jeongin said, quickly. “It’s not urgent, it can wait.”
He didn’t move to leave though. He’d retreated to bed at some point in the evening, him and Minho disappearing behind Minho’s bedroom door without much of a word to anyone, except that Chan had mentioned Jeongin saying goodnight to him. Changbin didn’t have any actual interest about what went on behind that closed bedroom door, but he was curious about the way in which the two of them had, apparently, decided to move in together. Giving Jisoo Jeongin’s room had seemed like such a logical thing to do.
It made Changbin feel a little sad, in a way. It felt a little bit like watching someone fly the nest, he guessed, even though they were all still in the same building together. It was just a lot harder to go bother Jeongin when he wasn’t in his bedroom just across the hallway. A lot harder to go and push open the door and watch him breathing, heavy and snuffling in his bed, and know that he was safe.
In the workroom, Jeongin stood, and whilst he wasn’t chewing on his fingers, they were twisting into his sweatpants, another little nervous gesture. His face was empty. He looked a little bit like Minho when he stood like that, with that non-expression on his face, but while Changbin was used to it from Minho, seeing it on Jeongin disturbed him beyond measure.
“Jeongin-ah,” he said quietly. Jeongin’s eyes met his, but there was barely anything more there than there had been before. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what,” Jeongin said, a little blankly. Changbin had never had such a hard time reading his voice before. He could not tell if Jeongin genuinely didn’t get it or was faking it.
“Whatever it is that’s on your mind,” Changbin said. “Hyung will listen.”
Jeongin just— looked at him. He’d been like this, since they’d come back from the vault, or more accurately, since they’d come back from the hospital: withdrawn, quieter even than usual, and prone to these moments where it felt a little bit like he’d retreated into his own head. It did not feel like the dissociation that Changbin had so often seen on Hyunjin. It felt instead like Jeongin was turning things over in his mind and there wasn’t much left for powering his body.
Changbin knew what it was like. He’d been there himself: the way it felt after you finished your first job, the high of success mixed with the adrenaline crash of it being over. And he knew, too, how it felt after you killed your first man. How it felt to feel the weight of that crime on your shoulders. Jeongin, at least, had not seen any of those men that closely.
The first man Changbin had killed had had a mole on his upper lip, but Changbin couldn’t remember if he had been tall or short. It was odd, the things a brain remembered.
“No,” Jeongin said, eventually. He was quiet, but firm. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Something about the way he said it made Changbin say, “You don’t want to talk about it or you don’t want to talk about it with me?”
This time, Jeongin’s eyes held— pity. Not the kind that would set Changbin’s teeth on edge, the kind that was shown to him after his grandmother died, or how teachers would look at him, sometimes, when he said his parents died when he was young. It was the pity of someone who knew that what he was going to say would hurt, and was sorry for it.
He didn’t need to say it. Changbin would take pity on him in turn. “It’s okay, Jeongin-ah,” he said, before Jeongin could open his mouth. “Hyung gets it.” Then, in an attempt at lightening the mood, or maybe just soothing his own, confused heart, he said, “You should go back to bed before Minho-hyung comes down and threatens me for kidnapping you.”
But Jeongin didn’t leave. After a moment, he came forward, properly into the room, and slid into one of the pulled-out stools around the worktable. When they’d first moved the entire set up in here, Jeongin had still been small enough that his feet dangled considerably. Now they almost reached the floor.
“It’s not because it’s you,” Jeongin said. “It’s not specific to you, hyung. I just— I have things I want to keep private.”
Changbin nodded slowly. He understood that, in the abstract, and the past few weeks had shown that Jeongin had many things he had, in fact, been keeping very private. In reality, it just made Changbin sad all over again. When Jeongin had been younger, when all he had were Chan and Changbin, he’d told them everything: every little thought that came into his head, speaking aloud without a care, trusting that the two of them would listen, even when it was inane or dumb. Changbin had learned that from Chan, when it came to Jeongin: the importance of engaging.
“I never had that,” Jeongin said. “Growing up. I’ve never had privacy, even when we moved here. You and Chan-hyung, and Hyunjin-hyung, you all got to have your secrets and your private lives. You got to be adults. And I never had that.”
Changbin felt a little bit like he’d been struck. There was no resentment in Jeongin’s voice, no sense of unhappiness or anger or bitterness. He just sounded so matter-of-fact that it almost made it worse. “Jeongin,” Changbin said, barely more than a whisper.
“I didn’t mind it, for a long time,” Jeongin said, “and I don’t think I mind a lot of it now. I know it’s how you all show that you care about me. But even my relationship with Minho-hyung, it’s never been allowed to be private the way the rest of you got.” He reached out and covered Changbin’s hand with his. His hand was larger than even Changbin’s, at this point. “I’m happy that you and Seungmin-hyung have had that privacy. But just like that, there are things that I think, and want, and care about that I want to just— keep to myself. I don’t want to have to share them with the people I don’t want to share them with.”
Changbin had to clear his throat. At least he could pretend the tears prickling his eyes were from tiredness if pressed. He turned his hand upside down so that he could grip Jeongin’s, nothing at all like the childish way they had held hands in the past, fingers threaded together. Thirteen year old Jeongin giggling as Changbin made their hands swing as they walked down the street. This Jeongin was so much older than that, his eyes so much less naive, and his grip so much stronger.
“Yeah,” Changbin said. “I get that. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me.” Jeongin squeezed his hand. It made Changbin add, in a little rush, “I just— I just wanted you to know that you could tell me, if you wanted to. If you needed someone to talk to, someone to help you. I will always be there for you, for that, Jeongin. Always.”
“I know,” said Jeongin. Simply, easily, like he had never doubted such a thing. Like the fact of Changbin’s unwavering support was so understood by him that Jeongin took it for granted. “I love you, hyung.”
A rare gift, to hear that from Jeongin. “Hyung loves you too, Jeongin,” Changbin said, voice rough, almost embarrassingly so.
Jeongin squeezed his hand again. Then he let go, and got back to his feet, shivering a little. “Minho-hyung’s looking for me,” he said, and sure enough, when Changbin glanced over his shoulder at the screens, Minho was out of his room and headed downstairs, a little fast, like he was just stopping himself from running. “I’ll go intercept him and take him back to bed. Goodnight, hyung. You should sleep soon.”
“I will,” Changbin said. “I just— have something to do first.”
Jeongin didn’t pry into that. He looked even more tired now, like the hour was truly catching up to him. Without another word he slipped out of the workroom. Just before the door closed after him and blocked out most sounds, Changbin heard Minho’s voice say, baby boy, why are you awake, but he didn’t hear any response from Jeongin.
He watched though, on the cameras, as Jeongin pulled Minho into a brief, if tight-looking hug, and then the two of them climbed the stairs back up to Minho’s room. Jeongin held his hand the entire way, leading a step or two ahead, Minho following after. The push and pull between them was something Changbin didn’t think he’d ever understand, so he wasn’t going to bother hurting his brain by trying. Especially not at — he turned on the screen on his tablet — almost two in the morning.
He would wait up, just a bit longer, for Chan’s text that everything was okay. And only then would he let himself go and try to fit himself into Seungmin’s narrow bed with Seungmin’s narrow body.
——
Chan fiddled with the heater for the hundredth time, twisting the little dials on the console before finally just putting them back where they’d been before. The little clicks were audible over the hum of the engine, and he forced himself to put his hand back on the steering wheel. He wasn’t used to silence like this in the car. The radio off, no chatter from one of his boys. Just Hyunjin in the passenger seat, shivering and sniffling.
When he stopped at a red light, Chan reached behind his own seat, straining and pawing around the footwell of the backseat, until he found the water bottle he’d brought along. He straightened and then held it out to Hyunjin in wordless, helpless offering. Hyunjin, who’d been angled away from him, turned to look at what was poking him in the arm, and then glared a watery, pinkish glare at Chan.
“You’re dehydrated,” Chan said softly. The skin of Hyunjin’s lips had that tight, matte sort of sheen that spoke of his body’s desire for water.
He watched Hyunjin war with himself, face all dumpling squished, before he took the bottle with nary a sigh. “Why bother stopping,” he muttered instead of a thank you, twisting the top off the bottle.
Chan didn’t need to look out the window to know the light was still red. In the darkness, the red shone into the cab of the car, a faint wash of colour. “Light’s red,” he said, needless.
“There’s no one here,” Hyunjin snapped, angling away from Chan again. He took a sip of the water, and then another, longer draught, like he realised exactly how thirsty he was after the first swallow.
Chan heaved a sigh. The streets really were empty, no one on the sidewalks, no cars to risk hitting even if he did decide to run the red. Eerie, to be someplace so quiet and still. Like a movie. It was probably more common outside the city, but Chan had never really experienced anything except for bustling, bright city life.
The light turned green, and Chan let them roll into motion so he wouldn’t jostle Hyunjin, trying to be subtle about the way he was guzzling down that water. How many times through the years had they played this game, Chan pretending to not notice Hyunjin taking something he needed or wanted that he had insisted he didn’t. Hyunjin had gone through a terrible phase when he had first learned that he could refuse something without being punished for it. He had, for about two weeks straight, refused to eat anything other than pizza, and so they had bought him pizza, not wanting him to go hungry at all, until he had admitted defeat, done in by all the grease.
It had never lasted. It wasn’t part of Hyunjin’s natural personality, not like it was for Jeongin, and so it had always fallen apart. But nobody ever called him out on it, so Chan didn’t now, as Hyunjin drank most of the water, curled up in the passenger seat.
He held the water bottle in his lap as Chan drove through the city streets, his head turned to watch out the window. They were unfamiliar to Chan this far out, so they must have been totally strange to Hyunjin, and Chan expected Hyunjin to comment at some point, for him to realise that they were not passing anything remotely familiar, but whatever he was looking at did not seem to be actually registering with him.
Chan knew the way without directions, even if the streets were strangers to him. He had sat for too long looking at maps of his city to ever truly get lost, to not know his way around. And the destination he had in mind was more than that besides, more than just a point to which to get to. He thought, sometimes, that he could find it on foot.
He stopped at red lights, paused at stop signs; Hyunjin didn’t say anything, like he had given up on a lost cause. There were many words Chan could say to him but he held them back. He let Hyunjin have his silence and his tired, sullen anger. Chan wasn’t sure he could actually find the words, anyway. They felt— inadequate, somehow, after what he had witnessed.
Changbin had offered to come out and do this. He could wrangle Hyunjin too, could calm him, could listen to him rail and cry and hold him without being clawed to pieces. And maybe Chan should have stayed home, continued to manage all his bribes and informants, the texts and emails and calls. A constant, never ending tide of things that needed his attention. But this had felt just as important, just as deserving of his own hand, directly getting involved. Family over business, whenever he could manage it. Even on a day like today. Even today.
The truth was though that sometimes Chan really wondered if he was making things better. He knew that between the two of them, him and Changbin, they had done something to help Hyunjin, but so much of it had been simply flailing in the dark.
So much of his life had been that. It was maybe a miracle that he had managed this much. He had managed to fumble his way to his revenge and he was trying hard to not look at the collateral he’d left along the way.
Eventually the streets turned familiar, at least to Chan. Hyunjin would recognise none of these places. When they stopped, it was down a smaller street, boxed in on one side by a large, run-down apartment complex, and on the other a squat, equally run-down building that was attached to a fenced-in basketball court. Chan pulled the car up to the curb on the side opposite the community centre and cut the engine.
Without the sound of the engine running, everything was very, very quiet. As poor as this part of town was, this was still a residential area, and there were not many cars or much of anything to disturb the peace of the night. When he glanced at Hyunjin’s face, Hyunjin looked confused. “Where is this?” he asked.
Chan didn’t answer. “Come on,” he said.
It was cold outside the warm car, and he was wearing padding but Hyunjin wasn’t, so he could maybe not keep them out here for too long. He thought Hyunjin might protest, or make more demands, he seemed in that kind of mood, but perhaps he sensed Chan’s mood in turn and so he followed Chan out of the car and across the street to the chain-link fence that enclosed the court. It had, against all odds, been broken in places.
Hyunjin peered through the fence, his face squishing as he squinted at the court and then at Chan directly. “Where are we?”
“Community centre,” Chan replied, perhaps obviously. He leaned against the fence, the aged links giving a little and cupping his back.
Hyunjin looked at the fence and his face squished further. He straightened from his hunch, evidently deciding there was too much rust and dirt for him to lean against the fence too. “Why.”
Chan didn’t answer right away, even with Hyunjin’s foot tapping lightly against the concrete, impatient. He wanted the words to be right, perfectly formed. He finally unstuck his jaw and began to softly speak. “When my brother died, I never had a body to bury or cremate. The police didn’t care about him while he was alive, and they certainly didn’t care about him dead. They weren’t going to bother wasting resources searching for the corpse of a street kid.”
Hyunjin’s foot had stopped its tapping, and Chan got the impression he was paying closer attention now. Even at Hyunjin’s most petulant, he would never belittle Chan in a moment like this.
“We would come here sometimes,” Chan continued, looking back over his shoulder. The place looked the same, the paint faded and chipped in different ways than he remembered, but the shape of it all was the same as his memories. “Play basketball. Or he’d sneak me into the pool in summer.” He found himself smiling a little, unconsciously. It faded off his face as he turned forward again, eyes on where the curb dropped down to the street. “After he died, I didn’t have anything of him. No photos, just some tatty clothes. Anything he had that he could sell, he’d sold, trying to keep food in our mouths. So when I want to remember him, I come here. It’s been a while. Longer than I’d like.”
There was a big crack in the sidewalk, the sort that often was caused by a tree root, but there were no trees planted along this street. It had been there always, from the first time he’d been brought here. Sometimes they’d be playing ball and they’d hear someone on the other side of the fence eat shit when they tripped on the uneven pavement. Chan ate shit once himself.
He stared at the crack, just off to the side of their feet, as Hyunjin asked, quieter than before, “Why did you bring me here.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about revenge today,” Chan said, a confession almost, but easily spoken. “What it means to have it, or to go without it. If its meaningfulness is diminished if it wasn’t exactly as you wanted. If it wasn’t at your hand.” Chan looked at Hyunjin, close enough to touch if he wanted, but too far to feel any of his warmth. He had his hands jammed into the pocket of his hoodie, shoulders rounded against the cold. Loose strands of his hair swayed over his face in the light breeze. Huskier, Chan said, “You’ve got a lot of revenge to take.” Hyunjin’s gaze dropped, the dark sweep of his lashes hiding his eyes, and he shifted his weight. “The Magpie was only one man, but I do think I understand you, in this. The feeling of— incompleteness, I guess. Or of being trapped? Walking around with that niggling feeling at the back of your head that you’ve forgotten something. Something that needs tending to. And you can’t really be you again, until it’s done.”
“I’m not sure it’s like that, for me,” Hyunjin said slowly and without any bite. As if he was examining the words like they were something he was finding only as he was speaking them. “I don’t seek them out. I probably could. I’m sure there is some way to get hold of even a partial client list, for the Macaque Syndicate. But I don’t— it’s not about revenge.” He’d begin to speak faster, and he looked at Chan again, eyes a bit red-rimmed but clearer now. “Not the way you’re describing it. It’s my choice. I could find a list, go down it and kill everyone on it. But I’m choosing to not. Those men get to live because I’ve decided it. Their lives are mine. There’s something— fateful about it, for me. To only go after the ones whose paths cross with mine again. Which I know kind of contradicts me saying it’s my choice — is it destiny who decides, or is it me. But I like— I like feeling like I am fate. Like I’ve become something more now. And that’s why they have to die, after meeting me again.”
Hyunjin paused, his mouth slowly closing as he frowned in thought. It was clear he wasn’t done speaking, so Chan waited, absorbing what had already been said, digesting it. This was the first time Hyunjin had ever spoken about this to him, and it was— different, to Chan’s line of thinking. Which made sense. He and Hyunjin were very different people.
Eventually Hyunjin huffed, mouth twisted as he shook his head and said, “I don’t know, I don’t think I’m explaining it well.” There was an edge of frustration there, but nothing too bad, and he shrugged a shoulder as if he was physically rolling the emotion off his back. “It just makes me feel powerful. And I need that. More than just the base concept of revenge. I need that power. Or I’m not— me anymore. This me. The hand of fate. I’m just—” He cut off again, lips pressing together hard and making a grim line.
“Hyunjin,” Chan said quickly, almost blurting it out, before he stopped and reigned in the instinctive drive to rush to comfort. Hyunjin met his eyes, expectant.
Chan really didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“I don’t want to say the wrong thing,” he said the thought aloud, and watched as the line of Hyunjin’s mouth softened into a small smile. It was a fond, exasperated look. Barely there but there enough. Chan let his own face soften. He loved Hyunjin so much, and he desperately wanted to help rather than make this worse. Carefully, he said, “You are you. There is no divide. You will always be the boy who was taken captive. But that does not mean that is all you are.” He pushed up from his slouched position against the fence and instead stood and turned to look over the court again. The metal of the chainlink was cold, almost bitingly icy, when he hooked his fingers into it. “We are all our past selves,” he murmured, almost able to see the ghosts on the black pavement. “I am still the twelve year old who just lost my brother. I am the fifteen year old killing a man for the first time. I’m the nineteen year old wondering how I’m going to feed all the people relying on me. But I am also the twenty-five year old standing victorious over my oldest enemy.”
He made himself look away from the phantoms of his past, at Hyunjin instead, cheeks going splotchy pink in the cold breeze. He didn’t look angry, or upset. There was a thoughtful sort of pensiveness in his expression. Chan said, “We are a compilation of every single day we have lived. You can’t slide backwards, the way you’re afraid of. There is nothing, no power on earth, that can strip you of the days, months, years, of distance behind you. There are thousands of Hyunjins, between that boy and the one I am looking at now. They can’t be erased.”
Hyunjin’s eyes were a little wide. “I never thought of it like that,” he admitted in a whisper. He swallowed thickly. “I don’t think— even putting aside the— the power aspect. I don’t know how to let them live. Once I’ve seen them again.” His voice quavered on the words, unsure, and he looked at Chan like he thought Chan might condemn him for them.
“I’m not asking that of you,” Chan reassured him quickly. He would never ask that of Hyunjin, he didn’t think anyone with any heart to give could ask such a thing. A little more dryly, he added, “I don’t want them out there, either. I just— I don’t want you to put so much of yourself in this. So much of your— recovery, I guess. I know this is about taking back your power, but in some ways— if your power is so dependent on them, their lives or their deaths, then isn’t that also letting them have power over you? Haven’t they had enough of that?” His voice was gentling more and more with every word, coming a little closer to Hyunjin as he spoke. Hyunjin, who was visibly chewing on the inside of his mouth now, looked unsettled. When their bodies were almost touching, Chan held his hand out, and after a pause Hyunjin pulled one of his pale hands out of his own pocket and slid it into Chan’s. His fingertips were cold, and he was shaking a little. “Could you let hyung help you?” Chan asked softly, head tilting to the side. “If they’re dead either way and it’s your decision, your doing, does it matter if it is directly at your hand? Does it matter that they don’t know why?”
Hyunjin inhaled, and the sound was jagged. “I don’t know,” he said, the words blurring together. “I don’t know. Something about the idea of— it being any of you, feels bad. Really bad.”
“Okay,” Chan said readily, squeezing Hyunjin’s hand for a moment before he let it go. He sadly wondered how much of Hyunjin’s refusal to involve them was shame, shame for something Hyunjin had no need to be ashamed of. But it wasn’t Chan’s place to demand an explanation. He didn’t need one. “We could hire someone, though. Hyunjae has people in his employ who I’d trust to get the job done. We wouldn’t have to tell them why.” He waited a beat but Hyunjin didn’t respond, the corners of his mouth downturned with sadness. He was miserable, his poor boy. Chan could hear the love in his own voice as he murmured, “This is only if you want. Hyung is just trying to help.”
That seemed to crack something in Hyunjin. His face crumpled, and a sob hitched out of him. “I wish I was a different person,” he said, twin tears falling plump and clear down his face. “I wish this had never happened to me.”
Chan could do nothing but watch him. “I know.”
If Chan could grant Hyunjin that wish, he would, but he couldn’t. He could do a great many things, with his influence and money, but that was not something he could give. Though he wished he could. He used to dream it out sometimes, imagine going back in time and saving Hyunjin before he could be taken. Even if it would have meant Hyunjin would have never come to them, never known them, Chan would pay that price.
Hyunjin curled in on himself, weeping, hands wiping at his face. “Can we go home?” he asked, wobbly.
“Yeah, baby, yeah,” Chan said, already putting an arm lightly around Hyunjin’s shoulders and guiding him toward the car. “We can go home.”
The interior of the car had cooled considerably while they’d been gone, but it was still noticeably warmer than outside. Chan shut his door in a hurry, as did Hyunjin, trying to keep as much of that warm air inside. As soon as he turned the key in the ignition the heater began blasting, and Chan pulled away from the curb to take them home.
In the passenger sheet Hyunjin shivered and sniffled into the quiet, but even though it seemed, on the surface, to be the same picture as before, Chan could tell this was a different kind of crying from earlier. It was why, when the curiosity became too much, he felt like he could carefully ask, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but you always came on these trips with Jisung.” Chan didn’t think he imagined the way Hyunjin tensed. “I know he’s not an option right now, but— why not wait?”
Silence. Hyunjin shifted, fidgety. Chan heard him swallow. “I— Changbin-hyung didn’t talk to you?” His voice was a little meek.
“I mean, not about this, no,” Chan said. Changbin had told him about tonight’s venture, and not given any indication there was more to be said.
Hyunjin shook his head, like he wasn’t going to answer, but he still spoke. “I needed to.” There’d been a strange, stuttery pause after the word needed, like Hyunjin’s brain had misfired and he’d had to grasp for the right word to follow it. When he continued to speak, it was with that same slow, oddly pausing quality. “It felt like it couldn’t wait. I felt like I was spiralling. I felt like if I didn’t do it now then I— I don’t know, I’d never be able to do it again?”
Chan glanced at Hyunjin, his features lit in odd shapes by a passing streetlamp. Their eyes caught for that brief moment, Chan knowing his concern and confusion was visible on his face.
Hyunjin huffed a little. “Jisung— got stabbed with my knife,” he said, and when Chan glanced at him again, still confused, he imploringly added, “The knife.”
Ah. Chan didn’t speak but he did exhale audibly in sudden understanding. Looking ahead of himself at the road, he couldn’t see Hyunjin’s face, but he could make out the pale shape of his hands in his peripheral, twisting around one another.
“I feel so— guilty and sick and angry and awful,” Hyunjin said, wet and raspy. He’d almost stopped crying, but his throat was thick with tears. “Thinking of what I used that knife for, and then what it did to Jisung— made me feel so scared of the idea of touching another one. And then that scared me too. Because if I can’t kill my rapists, I’m— well, you know. I wanted to erase that. I wanted to remind myself that I— I’m not— powerless. I wanted to take it back again. For me, for Jisung.”
Chan bobbed his head in a nod. That did make some things come together a bit more, in Chan’s mind. Hyunjin wasn’t usually recklessly impulsive in this way. Some of it could be written off under the concussion, but a lot of it was just the— emotional trauma, for lack of a better way to say it. The job had been hellish for Hyunjin, and Chan swallowed hard at the lump of guilt lodged in his throat.
Hyunjin took a deep, hitching breath, then blew it out steadily. Bracing. “But you’re right,” he said, more sure, steady. “I shouldn’t— it’s a bad thing to do. Stupid. To go without backup, when I’m hurt. It just felt so dire. It felt like I was going to crack, if I didn’t. And I couldn’t ask any of you to come with me. I just— it has to be Jisung.”
There was a stark, shocking amount of raw emotion in Hyunjin’s voice as he spoke the last sentence, breaking like waves over the syllables of Jisung’s name. He wondered how he hadn’t noticed Hyunjin’s feelings for so long. Wasn’t he supposed to be their leader, their family, attuned and perceptive to their emotions? How had he not noticed Hyunjin was so, so in love. His boy, his precious boy, who he’d despaired might never be able to love and be loved the way he deserved.
“He’ll get better,” Chan said, hands clutching the steering wheel so hard the leather creaked. “He’ll get better and then you can decide, how you want to proceed.”
“Yeah.” Hyunjin scooted down so he was slouching more thoroughly into the seat, leaning against the door. It didn’t look comfortable but it was a less tense position. He whispered, “Thank you, hyung.”
Chan really was going to melt into goo. “You don’t need to thank me,” he said, sounding as soppy as he felt. “You never have.”
Hyunjin gave one final, mighty sniff, and then more briskly asked, “What about you, hyung. What about your revenge.” Chan tipped his head a little in silent question, and Hyunjin elaborated, “You’ve waited a long time, would you settle for— less? Or different. Than what you wanted.”
Wasn’t that a question. “Well,” Chan mused, puckering his lips out in thought as he drew the word out. “I always— I wanted him dead. But today I’ve been thinking a lot about how, even though I never planned it this way specifically, I did always think I’d be the one to actually kill him.” It was kind of nice, to have said it aloud. This unspoken desire he’d been harbouring, and somewhat mourning today. Slowing to stop at a busier red light, he explained, “The Magpie probably didn’t remember Jun, at all. The lives of those under him were no more than— ants, I imagine. That’s the type of man he was. So I wanted to kill him, and I wanted him to know why.” Chan smiled, wistful and crooked and maybe a little cruel. “He’d have hated that. To know I was taking his life as payment for the life of someone he probably would have considered worthless in comparison.”
Hyunjin blinked deep, luminous eyes at him. “You’ve given up on that?” he asked quietly.
The light turned green, so Chan could only glance at Hyunjin with confusion in small broken bursts. “I mean—” he stuttered. “I can’t kill a dead man.”
A pause. “The Magpie’s dead?”
Chan blinked ahead at the road, the brighter streets, the dark sky with all the stars hidden in the city lights. He fought down the sudden urge to laugh, but he did smile as he said, “You’ve really just been holed up all day, huh.” He wondered if Hyunjin had even eaten. It was highly likely he had not.
“I— guess, yeah,” Hyunjin said, slow and wondering. He was quiet for about two blocks, processing, before he asked, “Lix?”
Again, that distinct feeling that someone had taken a ray gun and turned Chan’s insides to mush. Of course Hyunjin’s first question wouldn’t be for the gory details, but instead about Felix’s wellbeing. “He’ll be okay,” Chan assured him, because Felix would be. Without judgement, he asked, “You really didn’t know?”
“I was wondering why you were talking about him in the past tense,” Hyunjin said, with an air of stung dignity that had Chan smiling.
The conversation could have ended there. They lapsed into silence, and weren’t far from home now. But Hyunjin was clearly thinking, turning something over and over in his mind. Hyunjin spoke, slow and musing and almost halfway to himself, “You didn’t get to do it yourself. You didn’t get to tell him why.”
“Yeah,” Chan said, all that there was to say.
“How does it feel?”
Exhilarating. Awful. Like he’d been chasing something through the ages and only realised as he’d caught it that all that time with his eyes fixed forward and the world blurring by that he hadn’t been running, he’d been falling. And as soon as he’d closed his fingers on it, he’d hit the ground with brutal stopping force.
“Like it’s over,” Chan said, quieter than he’d meant to. “Maybe not the exact way I wanted, but it’s over.”
They pulled onto their street, driving over a little ditch in the road, the car rocking. As they approached their building, Hyunjin said, “The one. The one I was going to kill tonight. Send someone for him. I’ll— I’ll see how it feels. I don’t want him to live any longer.”
Chan inhaled deeply. “Okay.”
He could do that, he thought as they got out of the car, rushing to the back door of the building. He could call Hyunjae and arrange something. A hit, and maybe a meeting too in a few days or weeks. They would need to get their ducks in order amidst all this chaos. He wondered what Hyunjae might say about the attack on the Magpie’s holdings, what he might speculate. If he had maybe already figured out that part had been Chan.
Yes, a call to Hyunjae was in order.
They climbed the stairs, all five thousand of them. Chan kind of wanted to thank Hyunjin for trusting him with an aspect of his vengeance, something that was clearly so personal, but he didn’t want to make Hyunjin uncomfortable. He also didn’t want to hear his voice echoing around the stairwell, waking the whole household up. So he held the words in, and just gently guided Hyunjin into the apartment with a hand on his elbow.
The two of them had been as quiet as any humans could be, but the door had beeped and chimed when they’d come in, and even though Chan worked to ease it shut, it chimed again when it closed and auto-locked. The kitchen and living room were dark, only the little light over the oven on at this time of night, and Chan saw Jisung stir from his mass of blankets at the noise.
“Mmph?” Jisung mumbled, sleep husky. He pushed the blanket down from where it had been pulled up nearly over his whole face so he could squint at them. One hand lifted to blearily rub at his eye. “Hyung?”
“Hey, Jisung-ah,” Chan said softly, padding nearer once he’d toed his sneakers off. “Go back to sleep.”
Jisung blinked up at him, face swollen and a little flushed from sleep. He then peered past Chan, to Hyunjin, who was still in the process of yanking off his boots while ignoring them. Something flickered across Jisung’s face, some agonised thing, when he took in Hyunjin’s appearance. It wasn’t a pining kind of stare, but Chan didn’t know what else it could be, either.
“Did you— go out,” Jisung asked, voice very, very small. He was still looking around Chan at Hyunjin, finally free of his shoes and quickly approaching, making for the hallway.
Surprisingly, Hyunjin stopped, hand coming out to rest against the corner wall. “I was going to,” Hyunjin murmured, and Chan watched pain flash bright through Jisung’s eyes, and then Hyunjin finished the sentence with, “alone.” The pain guttered out, but the essence of it remained on Jisung’s features. Something hollowed out, haunted. Hyunjin flicked a glance at Chan and then ultimately turned away from both of them. “Chan-hyung stopped me. I’m going to bed.”
“Night, Hyunjin,” Chan whispered, but he didn’t think Hyunjin heard him. He lost sight of him in the darkness of the hallway and the sound of his door latching was so soft, Chan almost didn’t hear it in turn.
He looked back at Jisung, who was just staring blankly at the spot Hyunjin had been standing in. It clicked very suddenly. He thought Hyunjin replaced him with me, Chan realised. He thought because he’s injured, Hyunjin just discarded him like a malfunctioning part.
It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. Chan stood there, like an idiot, unable to move or say anything, unable to reassure Jisung in any meaningful way that wouldn’t break Hyunjin’s confidence. Hyunjin would’ve gone out alone rather than take anyone else with him even though it put him at risk, he wanted to say. He’s just trying to make things right again the only way he knows how. He could never replace you and that’s part of his agony.
Chan said none of it. Eventually Jisung blinked, turning tired eyes on Chan again. “Hyung?” he mumbled.
“Go back to sleep, Jisung,” Chan said again, and then wearily made his way back to his room.
Chapter 30
Notes:
happy penultimate chapter! happy almost two years since we started posting this fic! i need to go back and shake the us of june 2022 like "you do not KNOW how long this fic will end up".
in the time since we last updated, we got married!! hopefully the next chapter won't take as long, since getting married took up the whole of april
chapter trigger warnings: discussions of child sexual abuse and general child abuse; graphic descriptions of violence (nothing out of the ordinary for this fic)
Chapter Text
The fire was near.
Smoke and concrete dust filled Jisung’s vision, rendering his surroundings indistinct, worsened by the undulating light of the flames and electrical wiring laid bare. His head spun, depth perception gone to shit. The smokescent was sharp in his nose whether he was inhaling or not.
He couldn’t move, couldn’t feel his body, but he was moving, somehow, was crashing against a wall, around a corner, into a blown open hallway. He knew what he would see before he saw it, before the smoke cleared enough for him to make sense of what was ahead of him. The bulky form of a man, and under him, Hyunjin, bloody and frightened. This is a memory, Jisung thought, then, No, a dream. His abdomen pulsed in faint pain, dread heavy in his limbs.
When he made to step forward he found he still had no feeling, no control of his body. Anxiety began to claw at him as he tried, desperately, to put one foot in front of the other, to stop the descent of that man upon Hyunjin, and yet their forms never drew any nearer. This wasn’t how it went. This wasn’t how it happened.
He’d been standing, and now he wasn’t. His cheek was pressed against the cold, gritty floor, and blood ran thick and black through his fingers as he lay curled up, putting pressure on his stomach. No. He could not move, could not close his eyes. Hyunjin was a small distance away, partially obscured by debris at this angle, and that man— that man, with his knife, dripping red, Jisung’s blood— this was no longer a memory, but Jisung still knew what was about to happen, his brain giving it to him like a closed loop. He knew and so it would happen and he could not stop it.
Wake up, he thought desperately, heart beating madly in his throat and eyes pinned wide open. The man fell upon Hyunjin’s prone form, arm raising and then coming down. A concrete slab blocked Jisung’s view of Hyunjin’s upper body, his face, but he could see Hyunjin’s legs, splayed around the man’s body, his feet kicking, shoes squeaking against the tiles as he tried in vain to escape— his hands, forearms, fingers spread and reaching upwards, trying to shield himself— and then Hyunjin’s visceral, desperate screams, tearing through the crackle of the flames and the shrill screeching of the alarms, louder and louder every time the man raised his arm, blade pouring blood, and brought it down again.
On and on, an endless screech of noise and horror. Wake up, wake up. Hyunjin’s feet stopped their frantic movements, legs falling slack, while blood seeped across the floor as if from a garden hose, flowing.
“Wake up.”
The man continued to stab him, rhythmic, like a machine, and the screams had cut off but still somehow echoed amidst the alarms, the wet sound of the blade penetrating Hyunjin’s already pulverised flesh overtaking them.
Wake up. “Jisung.”
The breaking of the dream was like coming out from underwater, his face pushing through the surface tension so he could gasp in a lungful of air — clean air, free from smoke. His eyes snapped open, and he jerked violently, his chest heaving as if he’d really been held under, holding his breath.
In his stomach the pain was sharp and insistent, a sudden sensation that had been muffled in his sleep. He clasped a hand over it, pressing, gaze darting around.
Hyunjin was kneeling beside Jisung’s makeshift bed, a creased sleep-shirt swamping him, eyes tired. His skin was silvery grey in the moonlight, hair dark as ink. “Hyunjin,” Jisung gasped out, every breath feeling— fought for, dragging. He made to sit up and that hurt, which— yes, he was injured, he was injured and he was home and it was the middle of the night.
“You were dreaming,” Hyunjin said, his voice and face blank but— soft. Soft voice, soft features. “It was a dream.”
“Yeah,” Jisung panted, tears having sprung to his eyes from emotion as well as pain. He sank back against his pillows, staring up at the flat white expanse of the ceiling, because he could not bear to look at Hyunjin’s face just yet. “Yeah, a dream. A dream.” A shameful dream.
Hyunjin didn’t speak, but he didn’t leave either. As the bleariness of sleep faded and Jisung’s brain actually began to come back online, that shame really came to the forefront, like a shattered seashell dropped in by an incoming tide. He wondered if Hyunjin wanted an explanation, didn’t know how to give him one that wasn’t foul.
“I’m okay,” he said into the quiet, when he could speak again around his thumping heart. “I’m okay.” He let his head tip, heavy and limp, so he could look at Hyunjin again. Still that blankness, beautiful and out of reach. “Thank you for waking me up.”
Hyunjin stared at him, lips parting and chest expanding like he was about to speak, but he didn’t. He just exhaled, long and audible, almost a sigh, and looked away as he got to his feet. “You were making a lot of noise,” he said, turned away now.
Of course. “I— sorry,” Jisung said lamely. “I woke you?”
“No,” Hyunjin said. He bent, picking up an empty glass from the coffee table and brandishing it a little. “I came out to get some more water and— heard.”
Jisung nodded a little, the back of his head rubbing on the pillow. Hyunjin looked almost as out of it as Jisung felt, and his cheeks were splotchy with the warmth of sleep. It wasn’t dawn yet, but in the winter that didn’t necessarily signify much. Hyunjin couldn’t have gotten more than three hours of rest by this point, though. The rest of the house was very obviously still slumbering.
“Sorry,” Jisung said again. “I’m alright.”
Hyunjin stared down at him, an odd echo of a few hours prior when he’d come in from— his not-mission, with Chan. Glittering irises in the darkness of the night. Then he headed to the kitchen, wordless, and Jisung, who’d felt a little like a mouse under the gaze of a cat, lost some of the instinctive tension holding him hostage.
His stomach really hurt. Not a new hurt, just a worn off painkillers kind of hurt. He needed to get up, take more. He also, he was steadily realising under the pain, really needed to pee. Which was just— fantastic. When he blinked, his eyes didn’t want to come back open, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep like this. Fuck, he was so tired.
The sound of the faucet running really wasn’t helping Jisung’s bladder situation, as Hyunjin filled up his glass. Jisung bit off a groan as he got his elbows under himself, trying to push up into a sitting position. The air mattress had begun to lose some of its firmness and it was becoming something like a glue trap, soft and smushy and very hard for Jisung, in his weakened state, to rise from.
The water stopped and Hyunjin sighed heavily. “You’re not supposed to be getting up on your own,” he said, voice pitched low, just loud enough to carry to Jisung’s ears. “What do you need.”
Jisung stilled, guilty, as he looked across the open expanse between them and found Hyunjin watching him. “I— I need more pain meds,” he mumbled. “And I need to pee.”
Hyunjin didn’t say anything, nor did he move right away; he just kept staring at Jisung. Then he sighed again, putting his now-full glass on the counter and making his way back to Jisung’s bedside.
“Sorry,” Jisung whispered as Hyunjin gripped his forearms and Jisung gripped his back, fingertips biting into Hyunjin’s cool skin while Hyunjin helped to leverage Jisung up into a sitting position. Slowly, Jisung swung one leg, then the other, over the side of the air mattress so his socked feet were pressed to the floor.
Hyunjin was so steady under Jisung’s hands, which had begun to shake a little. “Stop saying sorry, you little fool,” Hyunjin murmured, and Jisung grit his teeth, ducking his head.
Getting to his feet was hell without the meds. Hyunjin pulled and took as much weight as he could, but Jisung still had to use his own strength to balance, to stand, and the pain of it made him feel dizzy, feel sick. “Fuck,” Jisung gasped, trembling properly now. His body prickled all over with a cold sweat.
Hyunjin did not rush him, just stood there, the two of them clasping forearms, a steady rock for Jisung to lean on. “Should I wake Changbin?” Hyunjin asked, uneasiness thick in the words. “He could carry you.”
Jisung shook his head and then abruptly stopped when that made him really feel like he was going to topple over. “I can walk,” he said, breathless. Jisung was keenly aware of his own hands, his palms pressed against Hyunjin’s bare skin.
He wondered how much of Hyunjin’s current discomfiture was due to that. How much was Jisung’s confession, hanging heavy between them, a leering weight Hyunjin could not help but be aware of now. So heavy and searing that Hyunjin would rather lock himself in his room and starve than be near him.
I’m sorry, he wanted to say, but Hyunjin had told him to stop saying that. There was nothing else to say, though, was there?
He was afraid, too, that if he opened his mouth right now, what would come out would not be an apology, but instead a selfish, unforgivable question: why did you go out last night without me? Was the answer not obvious, standing like this, barely even able to be on his feet without the fear of passing out? He was useless to Hyunjin right now.
But it was more than that. He was too afraid to ask the question. He had been afraid last night, too, watching Hyunjin come in dressed in that awfully familiar outfit. It felt like he had been given an answer all the same, an answer whether or not he could bear to look at it. An answer to a question that had always haunted him, whenever he thought about Hyunjin taking him, and only him, on his missions with him, and never the others. Not important, Jisung was not important, not in the way that mattered, and yet here was Hyunjin, showing him kindness like this. Helping him where no one would blame him for refusing.
So Jisung was silent— well, wordless. He was not silent, as they steadily walked to the bathroom, Hyunjin going backwards, Jisung taking tiny, slow steps. He breathed audibly through his nose, lips pressed shut, eyes fixed on the floor, on his own shuffling feet.
Hyunjin came with him into the bathroom, and Jisung released him when they got to the toilet, bracing a hand on the wall instead. “Uhm,” he said, feeling a bead of sweat drip along his temple.
“I’ll wait outside for you,” Hyunjin said, quickly, and moved out of the little room. “Don’t pass out, okay?” he said around the closing edge of the door. “I’ll be mad at you.”
“You’re always mad at me,” Jisung mumbled. The door closed — not all the way, Hyunjin left it open a crack. He’d be able to hear Jisung pee. That was just going to have to be one more brick in the every growing pile of humiliating things Jisung had endured since this all began.
Jisung peed, putting every ounce of thought in his short little body into not fucking passing out, because if he did he’d have his dick out and just— no. Terrible enough to faint, but worse when it would be Hyunjin dealing with it. Hyunjin seeing Jisung on the floor with his dick flopped out above the waistband of his teddy bear pyjamas was too cruel a fate for the universe to dole out even upon Jisung.
He flushed, and then managed to shuffle to the sink all by himself and give his hands a cursory wash. Hyunjin came into the room, silently, and helped Jisung dry his hands, so very— gentle. He was going to make Jisung cry, with this tender attention. Then they began the trek back into the living room.
“We’re almost there,” Hyunjin said quietly, eyes heavy with obvious concern on Jisung’s face.
Jisung had glanced at himself in the mirror while washing his hands. Pain had rendered him pale, almost sallow, and damp with sweat. His hair was a greasy mess. Pathetic. A pathetic sight. He did not want Hyunjin to see him like this, but— another brick, Jisung supposed.
Don’t pass out, don’t throw up, don’t pass out, don’t throw up, was Jisung’s mantra as they reached his bed once more.
“You’re doing well, Jisung,” Hyunjin murmured, and Jisung couldn’t bite off the sob that bubbled up. He clamped his mouth shut against it.
But he could not keep quiet as they began the tricky, clumsy process of getting Jisung down almost all the way to the floor. It was a long way to lower himself, and he shook, and shook, and even with Hyunjin taking a lot of his weight, Jisung could not do it. After several struggling moments filled with whimpering, he collapsed, body giving out. He fell backwards, the bed cushioning him, and cried out as the sudden shift in position hurt his wounds.
Hyunjin sucked in a sharp breath, following him down. “No—” His hands came, unbidden, to Jisung’s stomach, pressing down— not painfully, not meanly. Just an even pressure, holding, steadying. His eyes, when Jisung found them through his own swimming vision, were wide, almost wild.
This was not the first time they’d been in this position.
“Hyunjin,” Jisung said, breathing hard from the pain and exertion. “Hyunjin, it’s okay.”
Hyunjin was frozen above him, both hands still on Jisung’s stomach, over the thick layer of gauze. His chest moved in a small, restricted rhythm. Jisung lay there, tiredly, and wanted to draw him down, hold him. Run his hands through Hyunjin’s sleep-tousled hair, comfort him, promise to never leave him. As if— that would be welcome. As if Hyunjin wanted that.
“Hyunjin,” Jisung said again. He wrapped a hand around Hyunjin’s wrist, wincing internally about how sweaty and gross his own palms must feel against Hyunjin’s skin. “Hyunjin, there’s no blood.” He pulled Hyunjin’s hand up, after a flicker of resistance, and held it up between them. “See?”
Hyunjin looked at his own hand like it was a foreign object, unable to make sense of it. He stared, and stared, unblinking. God, Jisung thought mournfully, what have I done to him. Hyunjin already had enough trauma, he didn’t need to be haunted by Jisung almost dying in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” Jisung said. Nothing else to say.
A blink. Another. Hyunjin’s hand closed, tugging out of Jisung’s grasp. Slowly, his other hand slid off Jisung’s body. “Stop,” he said, hands clenching in Jisung’s bedding, “fucking saying that.”
Jisung bit his bottom lip against the words on his tongue. I’m sorry.
Anger, that black, stormy rage, came down on Hyunjin’s features as if Jisung had spoken the words aloud. And then he was gone, stalking away, into the kitchen. The lines of his body were long and lean. He must have been cold, without a hoodie on. Jisung shouldn’t have asked him for help.
The sound of the pill bottle rattling was what made Jisung realise Hyunjin was— still looking after him. He pulled another glass out of the cabinet and filled it with water, rubbing a hand roughly over his face as he did so. Guilt, always susurrating under Jisung’s skin alongside his blood, bloomed unpleasantly in Jisung’s gut. How tired Hyunjin must be. Had he had a nightmare too, was that why he’d woken before the sun and come out to get water. Jisung couldn’t ask.
When Hyunjin came back his face was schooled into blankness once more. “How many pills?” he asked, and doled two out when Jisung told him. He handed them over, and then helped Jisung tip up just enough that he could sip at the water without spilling it all down his front. His hands were a little more efficient now, less willing to linger. That was fair enough, Jisung supposed.
“Thank you,” Jisung said, so utterly spent now as he sank back into his pillows that even with the pain, he thought he might fall into sleep. His eyelids dragged shut as if they’d been weighted.
The sound of the glass being set down upon the coffee table came to him, and then the plastic pill bottle. But no clothing rustling, no vibrations of footsteps. He cracked an eye open and saw Hyunjin was still kneeling beside him, watching.
“Mmn?” he asked.
“Are you sure you’re okay,” Hyunjin whispered. He swallowed hard, eyes darting to the vague lump of Jisung’s stomach under the blankets.
“Jus’ hurts,” Jisung mumbled, putting a hand over it. “Meds’ll help.”
Hyunjin leaned forward. It’s like in the fire, Jisung thought blearily. But darker. No flames to light the way. Just moonlight, Hyunjin’s face indistinct and lovely as it came closer.
He pressed a kiss to Jisung’s forehead, dry and chaste. Jisung’s heart skipped a beat, and he couldn’t help gasping a little. “I’m sorry, Jisung,” Hyunjin said softly, pulling back. Pity. A gift for a broken, reaching heart.
“You don’t have to do that,” Jisung said, mouth unwieldy and rounding incorrectly over the words. “You don’t—” He cracked around a yawn. “I told you—”
“Shut up,” Hyunjin said, soft but firm. Jisung closed his mouth. “Little fool, I’m so angry at you.”
Jisung knew that already. “Sorry,” he sighed out, eyes closed again. Hyunjin huffed. Maybe a laugh. Maybe not.
Weight. On his stomach. Nothing too heavy, but decidedly— present. A hand, perhaps. But Jisung’s were down at his sides. He couldn’t look to check.
Someone was crying. Damp breaths, a sniffling nose. It was faint. He didn’t know who could be crying. Could it be himself? He remembered the fire, remembered Hyunjin’s screams. His body was out of reach.
The last thought he had before sleep took him, was a small plea for no more dreams.
——
Minho, through the years, had trained his body well. He would not wake when there was someone outside yelling drunkenly down on the street, but would stir immediately if there were footsteps on the other side of his door.
This, though, was a new sound, and his brain had been at a halfway point, unsure if it wanted to come to attention or not.
Soft whimpers, sad little snuffles. More than the noise, it was the vague, shifting movement against Minho’s body that drew him out of slumber. His disorientation didn’t last long, it seldom did when an outside force woke him up. Very quickly he knew it was Jeongin that he was feeling, hearing.
“Baby,” Minho rasped, propping himself up on his elbow and squinting through the darkness at Jeongin’s sleeping form. Jeongin’s face was crumpled into a frown, the corners of his mouth downturned. His fingertips were tangled in the front of Minho’s sleep-shirt, clenched. Minho could see his eyes darting around under his closed lids. He put a hand on Jeongin’s shoulder, shaking him lightly. “Hey, baby boy, wake up.”
Jeongin made a soft, high noise at the back of his throat, tucking his chin down. It took a little more shaking to get him to come awake, and when he did it was with a start. He flinched, inhaling sharply as his eyes came open. Immediately tears flowed down his face, like his eyelids had been holding them back. Alarm struck through Minho, making his blood feel too thin.
“Hyung,” Jeongin warbled, before Minho could say or do anything, and then Jeongin’s face crumpled properly and he collapsed into Minho, burying himself against Minho’s chest as he cried.
Minho was at a bit of a loss, but he held Jeongin tightly, lips pressed to the crown of Jeongin’s head. “You’re alright,” he murmured, figuring that would always be a soothing reminder. He rubbed a hand along Jeongin’s spine. “I’m here, you’re safe, it was just a nightmare.”
Jeongin clutched at him, mindless. “You were hurt,” he whimpered. “You were hurt and I couldn’t help you.”
Minho felt the words like a gut-punch. How many times had he had that same dream, but about Jeongin instead. How many times had he woken in this very bed, panting and with his eyes stinging with tears.
He swallowed, mouth feeling dry. “No,” he said, hoarse. He brought his hand up, ran it along the back of Jeongin’s head, cradling it so Jeongin had to tip his face up. His cheeks were splotchy pink, smeared with dampness. Minho dropped a kiss onto his forehead. “Baby boy, I’m safe, I’m whole.” He fumbled, grabbing Jeongin’s hand and bringing it over his side, over his healing wound. “It’s nothing, I’m alright.”
Jeongin hiccuped, gulping back more sobs. He shuddered against Minho’s body. Awful, to see evidence of Jeongin’s feelings for him manifested in this way.
“I love you,” Jeongin gasped. His eyelashes clumped together with tears. “I love you so much.”
“I know,” Minho murmured, because he did. He really did. Not for the first time, he wondered if it would be better if Jeongin didn’t love him so much. He had certainly not earned this fervent concern. This lovely boy who felt grief in all its cutting brightness at the mere idea of him being harmed.
He watched Jeongin try to regain control of himself, the visible way he wrestled over his breathing, still hitching with residual sobs every time he inhaled deeply. “Hyung,” he said, the word cracking a little, though the tears had stopped flooding. He looked up at Minho, under eyes smeared with water, shiny, and his irises so big in his face. “I want to kill your father.”
Minho swiped his fingertips under Jeongin’s eyes, clearing away the evidence of his tears. The words made him feel tired, weary. “Don’t carry anger on my behalf, baby boy, it’s too heavy for a heart like yours,” he murmured, and Jeongin surprised him by pulling away a bit, shaking his head.
“No, hyung, I—” he said, the words congested, sticky with it, but more firm and alert. “I mean I want to. I mean I— I want to find him. I want to kill him.”
Minho blinked. Jeongin didn’t, his eyes focused on Minho’s expression, darting over his face. It took several moments for Minho to unstick his jaw, and when he did, all he could eke out was the word, “No.”
Jeongin frowned. “But hyung—”
“No,” Minho growled, the upper line of his teeth bared. There was a slow panic rising in him, filling him up at the cost of everything else inside him, bullying his internal organs out of the way, squashing them to the walls of his body until he felt suffocated, tight in his own skin. “You’re not to go near him, understand?”
Jeongin cringed away, eyes wide, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t promise, and Minho grabbed him fiercely by the shoulder, shaking him.
“He is dangerous,” Minho said, frantic and angry with it. “You cannot— you—”
“Hyung, hyung you’re holding me too tight,” Jeongin said, grabbing at Minho’s wrist, and it took a moment for the words to filter through the screeching static in Minho’s mind.
Minho relaxed his hold, joints feeling stiff and unwieldy. “You cannot go near him,” he said, babbling almost, a broken record. It was the only thing he could think, over and over. Jeongin could not go near his father. The idea of the two of them in the same room threatened to break something in Minho that not even prison had managed to fracture in him.
“Okay,” Jeongin said, still wide-eyed, still— frightened. Looking at Minho like he was seeing something that scared him, for the very first time. Minho was too out of his mind with panic to even feel dirty about it. “I won’t, I won’t go near him.”
“Promise,” Minho demanded. Somewhere in all of this, he’d gotten on top of Jeongin, pushing him back against the mattress. Looming.
“I promise,” Jeongin said quickly. Placating. He was holding very still.
Minho breathed, raspy and rough, through his mouth. Jeongin said nothing more, did not move, just watched him, alert and careful.
The adrenaline was leaving Minho, a rapid wash away. He’d gone from feeling too tight in his body, stiff with it, to the opposite — like the calcium of his bones had gone gelatinous and translucent, barely able to hold himself up. A sudden weakness, his head going sickly light.
He rolled off Jeongin, sitting on the edge of the bed, and then quickly got to his feet. He stumbled to his bathroom, knees barely hitting the floor before he was retching into the toilet. Nothing came up, at first, but then the violence of the heaving dragged up yellow bile, burning at the back of Minho’s nose. It made tears squeeze out of his eyes.
Once the nausea spell had passed he spent a few minutes shivering on the floor of the bathroom, slumped against the wall. He felt so cold, icy almost. The panic had made him sweat, and it was clammy on his skin. He wanted to dissolve, wanted to float apart, his atoms scattered to the wind. Jeongin did not come for him, and on the one hand Minho was grateful, as he didn’t want Jeongin to see him like this. But on the other, he wondered if he hadn’t fucked something up irrevocably tonight.
Eventually he had to get up. He could not hide in the bathroom forever. There was mouthwash on the counter and he took a swig of it, nearly gagging again when he had to bend to spit it out. His face was greenish-pale in the yellow bathroom light, and when he left the little room his legs still did not feel entirely solid underneath him.
The light in the bedroom was on. Jeongin was sitting on the edge of the mattress, knees drawn up, and when Minho emerged he got to his feet, tentative. He did not come forward, just stood there, hands clutched together over his stomach.
The shame was faint. Minho was too wrung out even for that. “Baby boy,” he said, because he needed to say something, but words had never been his talent. His hand twitched, coming up slightly in a weak, reaching motion.
If Jeongin had flinched away, it would have fractured Minho. Other people were scared of Minho, but not Jeongin. Not Jeongin. Please, never Jeongin.
Jeongin did not flinch. He came rushing forward, throwing himself into Minho’s arms, like he had simply been waiting for permission. Like it was Minho who was the frightened one, needing mindful handling.
Minho slumped against him, forehead lolling into the perfect curve of Jeongin’s neck and shoulder. “Hyung,” Jeongin said. A long pause, holding one another, Minho inhaling the scent of him. Then Jeongin said, “I found the wound, didn’t I.”
Even spent as he was, Minho felt a little kick of anxiety. “Jeongin...”
Jeongin hushed him gently. He patted over Minho’s back. “I would have been more careful, if I’d known,” he said, like Minho wasn’t— crazy. Like his reaction wasn’t totally unacceptable.
Minho pulled back, not too far, just enough so they could look at one another. Jeongin’s eyes were red-rimmed from his crying, from his nightmare. Had he dreamt of Minho as a child, was that why he had suddenly—
“You promised,” Minho said, uneasy.
“I won’t go near him,” Jeongin said, each word firmly enunciated, and Minho’s lashes fluttered as he swayed with relief. Jeongin’s hand came up to cup his face, and his palm was dry and warm where Minho’s cheek was clammy and cool. “He deserves to die, though, hyung. Would you be upset if he did?”
Minho didn’t know the answer to that question. It was an abstract concept. Yes, no. He was never going to see his father again, if he had any say in the matter. Him being alive or dead didn’t signify. “I don’t want you to dirty your hands,” Minho said tiredly. True enough, even if that wasn’t his primary motivation in not wanting Jeongin to get revenge on his behalf. “It’s in the past.”
Jeongin swept his bangs off his forehead, out of his eyes. “Would you be mad at me,” he asked, soft and so sweet.
Minho met his eyes, imploring. “You can’t go near him.”
“I won’t.” Another promise.
Minho chewed on the concept a little, adding, “I don’t want any of the others near him either.”
“Okay,” Jeongin said, readily enough. He was still speaking so quietly, soothing. It was lulling Minho in calmness, turning him away, almost, from the reality of what they were discussing.
“I don’t want to think about this,” Minho whispered, which almost definitely made him a coward, but, well. He’d been running from his father for years, refusing to think about him, out there somewhere. Locking all of it away, over a decade of his life tidily out of sight. He didn’t want to open that box. Not if he could help it.
Jeongin hummed. “Okay,” he said again.
Minho would not broach the subject again, and he did not think Jeongin would, either. Back under lock and key it would go. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
There was an odd clarity in Jeongin’s gaze. A foreignness. Sometimes Minho looked at Jeongin and it was— Jeongin in shape and voice, but like someone else was staring out through his eyes. Minho didn’t know this person. It frightened him, a little.
Jeongin leaned forward and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I love you,” he murmured.
Minho shivered, tipping into the kiss, and then his phone went off, a rhythmic vibration. His alarm. It was later than he’d realised.
Jeongin sighed a little, and Minho pulled back as he said, “I need to shower.” He needed to rinse the sweat off, the smell of fear.
When he met Jeongin’s eyes, it was just Jeongin again, peering at him in the morning dimness. “I’ll shower with you,” he said, which would normally be a pleasant offer, but right now Minho felt— so very tired, and the day would not wait for him. But maybe Jeongin saw it in his face, maybe he just knew, because he added, “I want to wash your hair for you. Let me? We don’t need to talk.”
And so Minho nodded, and Jeongin entwined their fingers, tugging him gently into the showers.
——
It was still quite dim outside by the time Changbin trailed out after the others into the parking lot out back. Less to do with the time, since it was well after sunrise even for this time of winter, but because there was a heavy layer of cloud cover and the sun, thin and watery, was struggling to break through. It would rain later, or snow, probably. It was fucking cold enough for it.
Changbin hadn’t bothered to really dress for it, either, standing outside the back door in his sweatpants and sweater, shivering as he watched Felix, leaning heavily against Chan’s side, stifle a yawn against the back of his hand. He looked tired — everyone looked tired, truthfully, except for Jisoo, who looked like she was getting the best sleep of her life since she’d come to them. Good for her, Changbin thought vaguely, as he watched her climb into the back seat of the car.
Minho looked the most tired, though, his ever-present dark circles so much more pronounced than usual that it was a little alarming. He seemed functional, at least, and when Chan had asked him if he was okay to drive, he had very tersely said that he was. It had been quite clear that questioning him further would not be appreciated.
Jeongin had come to see him off, the two of them by the driver’s door of the car, standing too close together and murmuring to one another, Minho’s face turned away so that Changbin couldn’t see his expression. Jeongin, though, looked soft and very sleepy, his face a little puffy. He was smiling just a little bit at whatever Minho was saying.
Chan turned to Changbin and, an arm slipping around Felix’s waist, said, “Are you sure you’ll be okay when we’re gone?”
“Yeah,” Changbin said. It was, perhaps, the third time Chan had asked him that question. “If you ask me that again, I’ll start taking it personally.”
Chan scowled, and then harder when Felix snorted with laughter. “I’m just—”
“We’ll be fine, hyung,” Changbin said. He understood where Chan’s concern was coming from, though, He’d felt it the day before, out with Minho, knowing that Chan was at home alone without him. The only one capable of really defending anyone, unless they could get a gun into Jeongin’s hand with haste. But nothing had happened yesterday, and Chan was only going to be gone for a couple of hours.
“Dongwan’s offices are just down in Jamsil,” Chan said, like Changbin didn’t know that. He’d been to their lawyer’s offices before, to accompany Chan when he had to sign the deed for Maniac. Dongwan was a very nice person that intimidated the hell out of Changbin, who was never more aware of the failings of his middle school level education than when he was with people who had advanced degrees hanging on the walls behind their heads. He was glad that he was not the one who had to go to this meeting that Chan had arranged for Felix and Jisoo, to see if anything could be done about the potential will, to see what would be likely to happen if they were still named on it. “Call me if anything comes up. Or Minho, he’ll pick up when we’re in the meeting. I asked Seungmin to set up all the alarms when we’re gone, so that should be fine, but—”
“Hyung, Seungmin probably already set up the alarms,” Changbin said. “They’re going to yell at me when I go back in. Would you leave already, it’s cold as fuck out here.”
Chan looked like he wanted to say something else, but Felix patted his chest, gloved hands making an oddly muffled noise on Chan’s padding. “Come on, hyung,” he said. “We’ll be late.”
It was only this that got Chan to move, finally, getting into the passenger seat of the car as Felix got into the back with his sister. Minho, after accepting a brief, remarkably chaste kiss on the cheek from Jeongin, got into the driver’s side, where for a moment it looked like he was glowering at Changbin through the windshield until he started the engine. Changbin gave him a little wave and watched as Minho almost startled, like he had not realised Changbin was actually in front of him.
Jeongin came and stood by his side in silence as the car pulled out of their little parking lot and down the side alley. He was dressed slightly more for the weather, in at least a padded coat — Minho’s, Changbin thought he recognised it vaguely — but when Changbin pulled open the door, he stepped inside with a thanks, hyung, shit, it’s cold.
It wasn’t much better in the hallway, to be fair, and Changbin had no feeling left in his fingers at this point. He thought, for a moment, of Seungmin’s workroom, with his space heater, but Changbin had other plans for his morning. Seungmin had seemed distracted earlier anyway, when he had first sat down in front of his computer, and had barely seemed to notice when Changbin had left to meet with Chan. Changbin could let him work.
He walked with Jeongin up the stairs, and left him on the second floor, where Jeongin slipped back into Minho’s room with a quiet goodbye. He seemed distracted, too, in a strange way, preoccupied with his thoughts once more. He was no longer smiling like he had been with Minho outside the car.
Jeongin hadn’t brought up last night, hadn’t said a word about it, and Changbin hadn’t known how to talk about it either. Jeongin simply felt like yet another person Changbin didn’t know how to help, didn’t know how to understand. It was starting to make him itch to not be able to help.
Instead of worrying about any of that, though, he went upstairs, where there actually was someone he could help: Jisung, on his air mattress in the living room, awake when Changbin came inside. One of the audio books Seungmin had downloaded for him was playing quietly, something fantasy by the sounds of it, but not something that Changbin recognised. Not that he would have, he wasn’t exactly a reader.
Jisung twisted to see who it was that had come in, and didn’t seem surprised that it was Changbin. “Hey, hyung,” he said, very chipper. “Did the others leave?”
“Yeah,” Changbin said. He slid off his shoes and into his slippers and walked into the room, rubbing his hands together to try to get them warm again. It was very warm in the apartment, the heat radiating up from the floor. Jisung must be very toasty indeed. “Did you eat?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jisung said. He fumbled with something next to him and then the audio book turned off, the narrator’s voice cut off mid-sentence. “Felix made me some toast and eggs, which was very nice of him.”
Changbin wasn’t sure if Felix would think it was nice of him or just the bare minimum of looking after their invalid, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he just asked, “When did you last take some pain pills?”
Jisung’s face frowned in thought. He was awake but since he’d come back from the hospital, it was clear that thinking and remembering stuff was not an easy thing for him. His poor, battered brain doing the very most. “I’m not sure,” he said eventually. “This morning, sometime? Um. Hyunjin helped me take some. I don’t know what time that was.”
Changbin’s eyebrows raised before he could catch himself. “Hyunjin helped you take some,” he repeated.
“Yeah,” Jisung said. He rubbed the side of his face, like admitting to this embarrassed him somehow. “I had to pee. He was getting water, so he helped me. Which was very nice of him.”
Again, Changbin would quibble with that being anything especially nice, but it was Hyunjin, so perhaps there was room there for the surprise. A quick glance at the hallway, however, showed that Hyunjin’s bedroom door was firmly closed now. Changbin hadn’t seen him when he came home last night, and could have no idea what kind of mindset he was in. Chan, in his office that morning before everyone else had gathered to leave for the meeting, had said, I got through to him, somehow. He’s going to let me give Hyunjae a call.
Changbin sighed. He came and stood beside Jisung’s bed, looming over him. Jisung tilted his head back so that he could look back up at Changbin, mouth pulled wide into a smile, a little bit shit-eating, a little bit like he was actually just happy to see Changbin. His cheeks looked very squishy, like that.
“I can see up your nose,” he announced.
Changbin sighed, before he hunkered down onto his haunches, and watched Jisung startle just a bit, like he thought Changbin was attacking him. But Changbin just came down to his level so that he could properly look at him. After days of not washing, the effects were certainly beginning to show. Jisung’s hair was greasy, stuck down to his head, and at this closer distance, there was a decided— smell. Jisung might not have been doing much moving these past few days, but even so it was a long time to go without washing.
“If you want, I’ll help you take a bath,” he said.
Jisung lit up so visibly at the offer that it almost hurt Changbin to look at. That mix of surprise, gratitude, and honest pleasure on Jisung’s face, the look that Changbin had never really catalogued before this, before he had fully come to realise that Jisung— really didn’t expect any of them to help him.
Yesterday, when Jisung had said that they could move him down to his bedroom, Changbin had, for a split second, thought he must have been joking. Then he’d realised that no, Jisung was not joking, and if Changbin had asked him that, are you joking right now, Jisung would have gotten upset. But it had just been so ludicrous, to Changbin, to think of shuffling Jisung downstairs to languish in his bedroom where none of them could help him, just so Hyunjin could eat some eggs.
You should value yourself more, he had wanted to tell Jisung. You should have more faith in us.
“A bath would be great,” Jisung said enthusiastically. “I have sweat in places I didn’t even know I had glands.”
Changbin could well imagine. “Well, I’ll help you wash your back,” he said, “but any crevices, you’ll need to take care of on your own.”
Jisung’s obvious excitement didn’t dim any at that; he seemed really, genuinely stoked to take a bath. Changbin couldn’t blame him for that. Jisung flung his covers back, revealing his pyjama-clad legs, and then shuffled so that he was sitting on the edge of the air mattress— which, now Changbin was looking at it, needed blowing up again. He could do that later, after he had Jisung cleaned up.
It was not an especially easy task to get Jisung up off the floor, even with the meds in his system. The air mattress fought against him, as did Jisung’s legs, wobbly underneath him from all the time that he wasn’t using them. It was like this every time Changbin helped him up even just to pee. We should have asked for a catheter for you, he’d joked once, and Jisung had flinched like he thought Changbin was going to stick one in him right there and then.
But they took it slow and steady, Changbin hauling him up as carefully as he could. Jisung was still breathing heavily with it by the time he was upright, but he hadn’t swooned, or turned too pale, so Changbin considered it a success. He hooked an arm around Jisung’s waist and together they shuffled to the bathroom, down the hallway that had never seemed that long until Changbin did this exact thing multiple times a day, a snail’s pace trek.
By the time they got to the bathroom, though, Jisung was already panting a little bit. He tired so easily now, exhausted by every single little thing he seemed to do, and it made Changbin pity him in a way that he didn’t think Jisung would really appreciate if he knew. The doctor had told them that it would take months until Jisung was back to relative normal, that the wounds he had suffered would take a long time to heal, so it wasn’t like Changbin hadn’t known that it would be difficult. But there was knowing, and there was seeing it in action.
Maybe it wasn’t quite pity. Maybe it was a kind of guilt, the same kind of guilt that Changbin thought Chan felt when he looked at Jisung, tiny on his mattress in the living room. Months of recovery, for something that had happened on a job that Jisung had had so little personal stake in. At least he was alive. At least there was that.
He helped Jisung sit down on the closed toilet lid before he started on the bath, letting the water run for a while to get it suitably warm. “You’re not going to be able to take a proper bath,” he said, over the sound of the water hitting the tub. “We can’t let the wounds get submerged. But I’ll help you wash your hair and stuff.”
“I really don’t care how we do it,” Jisung said. He had his hands pressed over his stomach, the way he seemed to do a lot when he was sitting upright. Changbin wasn’t sure if he was even aware he did it, or if it was his subconscious feeling the pain and trying to hold himself together. “I just want to be clean.”
If Changbin had really thought about it, he would have thought to do this sooner than now, but there had been so much going on that it had slipped his mind. Anyone other than Jisung would have asked, though; even timid Felix would have broached the subject with someone, even if just to ask for assistance getting into the bathroom in some way. But Jisung hadn’t asked for anything, not once, this entire time.
Changbin filled the tub until there was just enough hot water so that he thought it would suitably cover Jisung’s lower body without touching his healing wounds. If he needed to add more or drain some, so be it. He avoided using any of Hyunjin’s bath salts, or digging out the old bottle of bubble bath that was in one of the cupboards, this was not that kind of bath. Once that was sorted, he returned to Jisung still sitting on the closed toilet.
“Let’s get you undressed,” Changbin said gently, and then, rather more sternly, “Don’t you dare make this weird.”
“I won’t make it weird,” Jisung said, which sounded exactly like someone who was imminently going to make it weird would say. He was quiet though, as Changbin carefully helped him out of the pyjama shirt, avoiding where the dressing was pressed over his stomach. Under his shirt, Jisung was very pale, the skin of someone who really didn’t spend any time outdoors where the sun could actually get to him. Despite the relative broadness of his shoulders, Jisung was still small, a natural state of being. Not just short like Changbin was, but small, with his waist and narrow hips. Frankly, Changbin thought Jisung could probably do with skipping leg day less often.
It was not until Changbin had helped Jisung up to his feet and was starting on the process of stripping him out of the pants that Jisung said, voice a little high pitched, “You know, yesterday I called Minho-hyung daddy, that was weird.”
Changbin’s heart went a little— soft, at how Jisung was clearly having a little bit of a freak out about being naked in front of him. Changbin himself was a little surprised by how not freaked out he felt about it. Maybe it was because his feelings towards Jisung were so entirely platonic, maybe it was just that Jisung was so vulnerable right now, but Changbin felt completely normal as he helped Jisung step out of each leg of the pyjamas, face dangerously close to Jisung’s soft cock. He didn’t even feel any kind of urge to glance at it.
He did say, “Why the fuck would you say that to him?”
“I don’t know!” Jisung said. It was clear that only the fact that he was having to brace himself with his hands on Changbin’s shoulders was stopping him from cupping his hand over his crotch. “He was being all forceful, it just slipped out. It was a joke.”
“It’s hard to tell sometimes if you’re brave or just stupid,” Changbin said. That was a joke and Jisung made a protesting hurt noise in the same vein, but Changbin knew, now more than anything, that Jisung might be stupid sometimes, but he was above all else brave. Changbin owed Jisung so much, for everything he had done to protect Hyunjin in Blackbird’s.
The last thing to do was to remove the dressing from over Jisung’s stomach. Changbin had been slightly dreading this part, just because he had seen what Jisung’s stomach looked like just a few days ago when Jisung had checked it in the living room. And sure enough, after he had very, very gently pulled the tape away from Jisung’s skin and removed the gauze, the wounds were— ugly. Hard not to be, when a person had been stabbed four times, the edges of each cut stitched back together. Changbin had once had butterfly stitches and this was not the same thing — this looked like a person held together by string.
But the wounds looked— good, at least. Changbin didn’t really know what to be looking for, exactly, but the skin around each wound was red though not too inflamed — the red of healing, rather than infection. There didn’t seem to be any signs of infection at all. Changbin had woken up that morning in Seungmin’s bed to find that his ear had been irritated in the night and left smears of pus-blood over Seungmin’s pillow. He had expected Seungmin to be angry, to bitch at him for it, but Seungmin had made him sit there while he cleaned the wound carefully.
Your pillowcases, Changbin had said, and Seungmin had murmured, his hands gently wiping antiseptic over the scab of his ear, They can be washed.
Changbin set the used dressing aside to be thrown in the trash and then took Jisung by the forearms again. His bare feet made very little noise on the tiled bathroom floor as Changbin walked him slowly to the tub, just the slight smack of his soles on the surface. He had made for a pitiful sight anyway when he moved, but naked it was especially— empathy inducing: his skinny legs, his fucked up stomach, the greenish tinge to his face. All of his energy and focus clearly going into staying upright, so that he didn’t speak a single word the entire time.
One step up into the tub, then another, Changbin’s hands steady on him the entire time. He had been in front of Jisung as they walked, but now he slid around Jisung’s body so he could better support him. He’d seen the scars on Jisung’s back before, the small circular cigarette burns that had made Changbin feel sick the first time he’d noticed them. What he had never seen, and only just noticed as Jisung lowered himself down into the water, was a flash of what looked like a tattoo on Jisung’s lower back, low enough to have properly been hidden under his sweatpants every time he’d been shirtless in the past.
“Is that a tattoo?” he asked, mostly interested, but also a little amused — he hadn’t been able to actually see it, but it was very low on Jisung’s back, and seemed to have been writing of some kind.
Jisung, almost sitting down, twisted his body in a way that could not have been comfortable for him, almost flailing out of Changbin’s hold. “Don’t look at it!” he wailed. “Don’t talk about it!”
“Christ, okay,” Changbin said, gripping Jisung’s forearms hard to stop him from falling or otherwise hurting himself. He got Jisung properly in the tub, legs stretched out in front of himself. There was sweat on his forehead, although Changbin wasn’t sure if that was from the strain of getting into the bathtub or if it was because of his stress over the tattoo. The water level was good enough, coming up to just cover his crotch but not anywhere near the bottom-most stab wound. Changbin gave himself a mental pat on the back. Then he said, “Why, is it your ex’s name?”
Jisung squinted at him. His hair really did need to be washed. “Worse,” he said darkly.
Changbin really wasn’t sure what could be worse than that. He’d known someone, an idiot who had worked on a crew with him and Chan back when Changbin was still in middle school and Chan was— middle school aged, at least. The guy had been around eighteen, and got his girlfriend’s name tattooed across his chest, big, blocky script that spanned all the way from left to right. He had shown off to everyone about it, stripping down to display it for all to see, and then she had dumped him three weeks later. Changbin had thought the tattoo was so ugly that he didn’t even blame her for it.
He dropped the subject for now at least. He fetched the plastic cup that lived on the sink counter — something that belonged to Hyunjin, although Changbin was never sure what he used it for — and filled it with water from the tub. Jisung lowered his head, hair falling forward, but Changbin first poured the water over his skin, across his shoulders and down over his chest. “We’ll wash you first,” he said, “and then I’ll do your hair.”
They worked quietly again, most of the sound in the room that of the water splashing and lapping against the edges of the tub as Jisung moved. Changbin offered to actually wash him, contrary to his previous words, but Jisung shook his head and took the soaped up loofa from him. He scrubbed it over his arms, his chest, and then hesitated over his stomach.
“Leave it,” Changbin said softly. “It’ll be fine.”
Jisung nodded. The expression on his face was hard to make out. For all that he seemed to constantly touch his stomach when the dressing was on and he was clothed, it was very clear that he did not like to look at it like this. Changbin understood that — he had been having shocks of confusion every time he looked in the mirror and remembered that it was not a weird shadow over his ear but actually part of it missing. It was gone, and it would be gone forever now.
Jisung would have the scars from this forever too. It was impossible to not have, with wounds such as this.
After Jisung had scrubbed himself down — and Changbin had averted his eyes as he cleaned his more private areas — Changbin helped to wash all the suds away with the plastic cup again. The water looked murky after they were done, and there was what looked like black dust floating on the surface in places. The aftermath of Blackbird’s that had been missed by whatever rubdown Jisung had been given in the hospital. Changbin had taken maybe two baths in his entire life and even he knew the water wasn’t supposed to look like this.
“Ew,” said Jisung. His heart didn’t sound into it, though. He said it like he knew he should. He mostly sounded tired again.
“I’ll drain it,” Changbin said.
Jisung sat there as Changbin did just that, draining all the dirty water away, using the cup to clean off the sides of the tub and make sure it was all gone. Jisung started shivering a little as he worked, cold with the heat of the water gone. This time Changbin let the water get a little hotter before he put the plug back in and let the tub start to fill up to the same level as before, clean and slightly steaming.
“I’m sorry, hyung,” Jisung said quietly, as the water thundered against the bottom of the tub.
“Why are you saying sorry,” Changbin said, even though he knew exactly why. Never a burden, their Jisung. Never someone they had to worry about, and Changbin had never really questioned that, because he was also someone that others usually didn’t have to worry about. This whole ordeal, though, had started to make Changbin question whether Jisung had truly never had issues or if he’d just made sure nobody ever saw them. He seemed to find it genuinely, excruciatingly embarrassing to be looked after.
Before Jisung could respond with something stupid, Changbin said, more softly, “How are you feeling about all of this, Jisung-ah?”
“About what, hyung?” Jisung asked. “About being naked in the tub in front of you?”
“No,” Changbin said, without letting any irritation into his voice. “About how the job went, about how Blackbird’s went.”
Jisung was quiet for a moment before he shrugged, a small movement. “Okay, I guess,” he said. “I did my job. I kept Hyunjin mostly safe, in the end.”
Changbin shouldn’t have been surprised by the answer but he was. More than surprised, he was a little upset by it. “That wasn’t really what I was asking, Jisung,” he said.
Another shrug. Jisung’s face, looking at him as the water level rose in the tub, was pale and tired-looking, his cheeks soft but a little hollowed out, eyes too big for his face right now. “I should have probably realised the windows didn’t open,” he said. “Or paid more attention and tried to cover Hyunjin in the blast. If I’d done that, he maybe wouldn’t have his concussion right now.”
Only the fact that Jisung had a concussion, one bad enough to have caused concern of permanent brain damage, kept Changbin from reaching out and rapping his knuckles against Jisung’s stupid thick skull. “What kind of brain cells do you have in that head of yours,” he said. Jisung had the audacity to look hurt by that. “Jisung. You could not have done anymore than what you did. You should not have even done what you did do. You almost died.”
“If it hadn’t been me, it would have been Hyunjin,” Jisung said. “How could I have faced you, or Chan-hyung, if I’d let it happen to Hyunjin instead of me?”
He sounded so sceptical that Changbin was not sure if he should be offended on his own behalf or on Jisung’s behalf, because his lack of self-worth was truly disquieting sometimes. He reached over and turned off the taps, and said, into the sudden silence, “Neither of us would have demanded that you die in Hyunjin’s place, Jisung.”
Jisung did not seem like the words were making any sense to him. “So you would have been fine if I had made it home from the job and Hyunjin died in that place instead?”
Fine? No, Changbin would not have been fine, if Hyunjin had died that night. The mere concept of it scared him so much that just talking about it in the hypothetical like this made him feel sick with misplaced grief. It had almost happened, too, which made the feelings so much closer to the surface.
“If Hyunjin had died,” he said, “it would have been like losing the sun from my life.” A grief he would have never, truly, recovered from, a grief that would be renewed every morning when he woke up and realised he would never see Hyunjin again. “But I would never have said that you should die in his stead. I would never have wanted that.”
Jisung looked unsure, looked torn, like he wanted to believe Changbin badly but couldn’t quite get there. You should value yourself more. A truth that was proven over and over again with Jisung, and Changbin didn’t know how to get through to him. He felt a little bit like they’d failed him somewhere along the way.
“Just because Hyunjin matters to us,” he said, very firmly, “doesn’t mean that you don’t matter to us too.”
“I—”
“Lean forward and close your eyes so I can wash your greasy hair,” Changbin commanded, picking up his cup again.
Jisung did so after a moment, lips rolled together to paleness as he hunched over. His hair was so dirty and limp that it didn’t even really fall forward properly as he did so. Despite the briskness of his words, Changbin kept everything as gentle as the washing had been, as he poured the water over Jisung’s head, two cupfuls to make sure that it was properly wet.
He chose his own shampoo, a basic mint one that he had gotten in the grocery store, rather than touch Hyunjin’s expensive one or Jeongin’s citrus scent. He worked the shampoo into Jisung’s hair once, washed it out, and then went back for a second go. Jisung sat there through it all without a word, leaning forward with his forearms braced on his thighs, shivering every so often.
It was not until Changbin had rinsed Jisung’s hair out a second time and was working some conditioner through the strands that he went back on his word and looked down at Jisung’s back to see what his tattoo actually was. Changbin had been right; it was writing, plastered across the dip of spine just before where Jisung’s ass started. A tramp stamp, he believed it was called in common parlance, and in looping, obnoxious text, it read LUCKY YOU.
Changbin had to bite the inside of his cheek so hard that he was surprised he didn’t fill his mouth with blood. It was almost worse than the girlfriend chest tattoo. He could understand now why Jisung had not wanted him to look at it. If Changbin had a tattoo like that, he would have had it lasered off years ago. It took a long, long time before he was able to regain enough composure to keep his voice mostly steady as he said, “You’re right, that tattoo is worse than having your ex’s name.”
Jisung twitched all over. “I told you not to look at it,” he said, but he wasn’t annoyed. He sounded tired, but not tired like before, not a mental tired. A physical tired, like all the movement and heat and careful washing was catching up to him. He sounded like he was five minutes away from falling completely asleep.
“Of all tattoos,” Changbin said, starting on rinsing the conditioner out, “what made you think that one was a good idea?”
“I was sixteen,” Jisung said. He kept his head bowed but turned his hands around so he could hold them palm up, as if to say, what can you do. “I thought I was hot shit, with summer job money and a fake ID. That’s the thing when you’re sixteen, hyung, you don’t do things thinking, what if one day when I’m twenty-two, I’ll be sitting butt naked in a bathtub whilst my hyung washes my hair, and he’ll see this tattoo and then I’ll have to drown myself in the bathwater from embarrassment. No, I was thinking, I hope the next guy I fuck thinks this looks cute, and you know what, he did.”
Changbin let the silence sit for a moment, just to be a shit. “Are the women into it, too?” he asked, with a morbid sense of curiosity. Thinking of anyone fucking Jisung made him feel deeply uncomfortable, in the same way he knew Jisung would feel thinking about Changbin fucking someone. But he’d seen Jisung leave Maniac with many women over the last couple of years, and he’d always slightly wondered about what was going on there.
“More than you would possibly expect,” Jisung said flatly.
Changbin laughed, unable to help himself, and Jisung lifted his head and glared at him. The effect was completely ruined with his wet hair hanging limp around his face; he looked like a pathetic half-drowned chipmunk. “Come on, come on,” Changbin said, holding out his hands. “I think we’re done here. The bathwater is too shallow to drown yourself, anyway.”
“You can drown in half an inch of water,” Jisung said. Changbin didn’t bother asking how he knew that. Jisung took Changbin’s hands, though, and let himself be levered up, just like with the air mattress. It was worse than that had been, though, with the slippery surface of the tub, and Jisung’s much shakier legs now. The pain pills were clearly wearing off a bit, too, because he kept making grunts of pain with each step out of the tub and onto the tiled floor.
Changbin towelled him off, making sure his stomach in particular was completely dry. He had Jisung sit on the toilet again while he went and fetched the new dressings, and the new pyjamas, fluffy like the last ones but blue with pastel unicorns all over them.
“Where the hell are you getting these pyjamas!” Jisung cried when Changbin brought them into the room. “Is this just an exercise in humiliating me? Also, can’t I have boxers or something?”
Changbin ignored the question about where he was getting the clothing, because it was funnier to watch Jisung squirm about it, but he did say, “It’s hard enough for you to go to the bathroom when you’re just wearing one thing on your bottom, never mind two layers. If you want some underwear, though, I’ll go downstairs and get you some.”
“No,” Jisung said, grumbling. “It’s fine.”
Changbin replaced the dressing over his stomach, taking great care to make sure it was as perfectly done as the last one had been. Then he helped Jisung into the pyjamas, once again not saying anything as he hunched down so he could help guide each foot into the legs. He pulled the shirt over Jisung’s head and then rubbed at his hair again with the towel to dry it off some more.
By the time this was all done, Jisung was swaying on his feet. His eyes kept closing on a blink that got longer and longer. Changbin said, “Want me to carry you?”
He should have just done it, though, because Jisung’s eyes flew open and he said, high-pitched again, “No! I can walk!”
Highly debatable. By the time they were back in the living room, Jisung was shaking from the strain, and also clearly half a minute away from sleep. Changbin wanted to blow the air mattress up for him, but he didn’t want to help Jisung onto the couch only to have to wake him up again to move him. It would have to wait until later, then, during dinner, when he could get Jisung sitting up on the couch to eat whilst his bed was inflated once more.
For now, though, he lowered Jisung very, very carefully down onto his bed. Jisung’s body was like a wet noodle, all limbs that didn’t seem to coordinate in ways Changbin needed them to. He was beyond relieved to get Jisung laying down without any incident. He was not surprised, though, when he pulled Jisung’s duvet up over his legs and turned to ask if Jisung was okay, and found Jisung already asleep, mouth slackly open.
Changbin watched him sleep, filled with fondness that he usually would never let Jisung actually see. It would be too weird to show it, when that wasn’t their relationship. But he felt it all the same, and so, after a moment, he reached out and closed Jisung’s mouth for him.
——
Seungmin was sitting, as he always was, at his desk, staring at his computer monitors. He had a niggling headache sitting like a lump in the space between his eyes, but that was pretty usual too. Slightly less ordinary, but something he was rapidly growing accustomed to, was the chatter and chaos being displayed on his screens.
He’d always been kept busy through the years but the sheer volume of information he’d been having to sieve through since the Magpie job was truly unprecedented. It was a veritable firestorm — no pun intended — of news articles and broadcasts, influencers and true crime bloggers, piling and piling upon each other. And amidst that, in the grungier, mouldering lines of data, were the smaller or stupider gangs in the city trying to take credit, for either Blackbird’s or the death of the Magpie. Some were crowing about it, and some were dropping whispers, hints to help boost reputation.
It would be best for Seungmin to find who had actually killed the Magpie and get the police to chip away at their power for them — whoever had done it had no doubt been one of Jaerim’s more involved allies, someone who had been particularly screwed over, and who also had the means to pull off an assassination. Beneficial, then, to take them out too. But barring that, they could do the same to one of these other groups, and tack on the Blackbird’s job with it; if they wanted credit so badly, they could have it, and all the legal repercussions that would come with it.
In the corner of his workshop his combination washing unit was whirring fiercely, using centrifugal force to squeeze out all the extra moisture in his pillowcases. Seungmin had run them through the wash twice now, with extra hot water, in the hopes of getting out all of the blood and lymph Changbin had smeared on them in the night. Seungmin should have been annoyed, or grossed out, and he wasn’t, really — maybe he was annoyed, but not because Changbin was hurt. More so because Changbin wasn’t letting a doctor fix him up at all. Wryly, Seungmin reflected he had no real leg to stand on in that regard. He hadn’t seen a doctor since— he was a minor. It had been a paediatrician. So he couldn’t throw stones about being allergic to hospitals.
He looked at his security monitor. Changbin was in the apartment, washing dishes, the rubber gloves going up to his elbows nearly glowing, they were so yellow. The rush of water was pleasant, and he could tell Changbin was moving carefully, trying not to disturb Jisung. His eyes drifted over, to another feed, this one the hallway of the apartment. All the bedroom doors were open except Hyunjin’s. Seungmin didn’t think he’d seen Hyunjin at all today, not since he’d gotten up and plopped down into this chair. Not a new or strange development, Hyunjin holed up in his room, but it still niggled at Seungmin. He wondered— no, he knew Hyunjin was upset. The question was how much, and to what extent that anger was aimed at Seungmin.
He wondered if Hyunjin felt betrayed. That thought was a particularly discomfiting one. Hyunjin, who gave his trust so guardedly, had blindly accepted Seungmin’s false direction. More than that, for the very first time, Seungmin had, effectively, tattled on him.
Seungmin sighed, so distracted that he didn’t see Jeongin coming down the stairs until he was at the door. Even though he caught the movement on the screen, just barely, he hadn’t had a chance to process it. So when Jeongin shoved the workroom door open, Seungmin jumped, and then looked over his shoulder a little peevishly.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said in greeting, coming to stand beside Seungmin’s desk chair. He just stood there for a beat, staring at Seungmin and looming oddly; odd because Jeongin had the stealth of an elephant in a china shop, barreling on even in spite of glares or stilted awkwardness or just plain good sense. “Hyung,” Jeongin finally said again, eyes sombre, “I need something from you.”
Seungmin maybe should have met his serious levelness with the same kind of energy. But his mood was on the spikier side, and there was some caustic amusement in him, rising up at Jeongin’s words. Someone coming down here because they needed something from him? Unprecedented. “Of course you do,” he drawled. “You never come down for anything else.”
That glittering darkness disappeared from Jeongin’s gaze, blinked away, and then he was scowling in a very Jeongin-esque outrage. “Hey!” he cried. “Yes I do, I come down just to hang out with you all the time!”
“Is that so,” Seungmin said, perfectly blank.
Jeongin stamped his foot. “It is,” he said, eyebrows so low over his eyes he looked like a cartoon. He half turned away, taking a step nearer the door, and then stopped, glaring at Seungmin. “Now I don’t want to talk to you.”
Despite the words, he didn’t make any more moves to leave. Seungmin raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, unfortunately for you, if you want something from me, you have to talk to me.”
Jeongin puffed his cheeks out. “Hyung,” he said, pouting, and Seungmin had to admit he was very cute. But he wasn’t going to say so, and he kept his face impassive, stare flat. He watched Jeongin decide his pride wasn’t worth it, but he still gave Seungmin betrayed little glances as he begrudgingly said, “I need you to give me Hyunjae’s number.”
“Hyunjae?” Seungmin echoed. That had not been anything on his radar. “Our weapon’s dealer?” Still pouting and scowling, Jeongin nodded. Seungmin was not sure what to make of the request. “If you need a new gun,” he said slowly, “you should go through Changbin or Minho.”
The affected pout and scowl melted away, slowly, leaving behind a notch in Jeongin’s brow, a more serious gleam in his bright fox eyes. “I don’t need a new gun,” Jeongin said, and it was— moderated, like Jeongin was not, for once, stamping all over porcelain, and was instead taking care. Something about that, more than anything, had Seungmin’s alarm bells ringing, and badly.
“Then why do you need to talk to Hyunjae,” he asked.
Jeongin didn’t avoid his eyes, didn’t fidget or stammer. He just stared. He stared like Seungmin was a puzzle, or a barrier in his path, and Jeongin was trying to figure out how to get around the problem. It was, actually, a little unnerving.
“I want to hire him to kill someone for me,” Jeongin finally said. Seungmin did not react; instead he went very still, going the opposite way. A non-reaction so strong it became a reaction. Difficult to say if Jeongin noticed, because he seemed to be thinking, now. Slowly he said, “Though I don’t know if he does that sort of thing. I assumed he did, Chan-hyung has talked about his— side businesses. But if he doesn’t— do you know anyone else who does?”
It took a moment for it to filter through that this was a direct question and would need answering in some capacity. “Jeongin,” Seungmin said slowly, the name almost a bracing reminder to himself who he was talking to. Jeongin. This boy did not feel like Jeongin. “Who do you want to have killed?”
“Hyung, that isn’t really your business,” Jeongin said, and it wasn’t scathing, wasn’t sharp. More weirdly, it was gentle, but not— in the way Jeongin was often gentle. The gentleness of an adult softly reprimanding a child they loved. It was an odd tone, out of Jeongin’s mouth.
Odder still the way it seemed to fit, right now, with this Jeongin, his posture and his body language.
Seungmin felt like the words should have angered him, but he was too confused and unsettled to be angry. “It is my business, when you’re involving me.”
Jeongin tilted his head to the side, like he was further examining his problem. “I’m not involving you,” he said, simply. “Hyunjin-hyung said you track people down for him, so he can go kill them — but I’m not asking that. I just need a phone number, so I can pay someone else to track him down and kill him.” He blinked once, slow, all liquid predator eyes. “I have the money. And If Chan-hyung trusts Hyunjae, he must also trust his abilities, his— discretion.”
Who are you and what have you done with our Jeonginnie, Seungmin wanted to ask.
What came out of his mouth was, “No.”
Jeongin looked a little taken aback, and then a flash of anger, sharp and bright, rippled over his features. “Hyung—”
“You have to ask Chan-hyung,” Seungmin said, embodying that wall Jeongin was treating him as. Flat and tall, bricks and mortar. He would not budge.
“That’s not fair,” Jeongin bit back, hands clenching at his sides. “This isn’t a job thing, it’s a personal thing. I shouldn’t need to always ask Chan-hyung for permission about my own decisions.”
Seungmin’s chair had slowly swivelled mostly to face Jeongin, and he turned the rest of the way now. “Yes, this isn’t a job thing, it’s a favour,” Seungmin said. “And not one I am comfortable giving without knowing more information.” Jeongin opened his mouth to protest, but before he could, Seungmin continued, “It’s fine if you don’t want to tell me the details, that’s your choice. But then it’s my choice, too, to say yes or no. And I’m saying no. So you need to ask someone else; Chan-hyung, or Changbin-hyung.” Or Minho. But Seungmin had a sneaky suspicion Jeongin was keeping whatever this was from Minho, which made him even less inclined to go with it.
Jeongin’s eyes narrowed into slits, like little daggers. “Fine,” he said, sounding a lot more like Jeongin, sulky and young. And then he left, just barely not stomping as he went. The door slammed in his wake, not because Jeongin had pushed it, but just because that was what the door did.
Seungmin sighed, pressing his thumb between his eyebrows, as if rubbing at his skull would diminish his headache. Whatever this was, he just didn’t have it in him to deal with it.
——
It was later than expected by the time they got back from the lawyer’s office, late enough that they had gone to Lotteria to get lunch. There had been, briefly, talk of going inside the restaurant to eat, and if Minho hadn’t been there, that was probably what they would have done, sitting at one of the high-top tables, Felix and his sister and his lover, and what a weird experience that would have been.
It had been Minho who put a stop to that. Hyung, he’d said, very tense. I will get us food. But I can’t eat inside a fast food restaurant.
On anyone else it might have seemed like a piece of snobbery, but not on Minho. The mere idea had clearly put him on edge, and Felix thought about Minho in a restaurant like that, one with all the windows onto the street, the brightly cheerful cashiers, and thought, No, we shouldn’t torment him like that. A Lotteria in Jamsil was not the place to test Minho’s limit in dealing with the outside world.
So instead Chan and Felix had gone inside to order, and then in the back seat, Felix and Jisoo were sitting trying their best to eat their food in a moving car. Jisoo had her ketchup dipping sauce balanced on her knee, trying to avoid spilling it all over the upholstery. Felix kept eating one fry, and then wiping his fingers off on a napkin. Something about the grease was making his skin crawl. Perhaps he was the one who was a snob.
Chan wasn’t eating yet. He held the other bags of food in his lap, a portion for himself, and for Minho, who had not seemed to have ever seen a Lotteria menu before Chan had looked it up on his phone for him, and then a portion for Jeongin, which Minho had tacked on at the end. He kept glancing across at the bags in Chan’s lap like he couldn’t quite understand what he was smelling. It was possible that he’d never had Western style fast food before. When he was cooking, Minho only ever seemed to make Korean food.
“God, this is disgusting,” Jisoo said, with great relish, right before taking a huge bite of her cheeseburger.
“Snob,” Felix muttered to her.
She snorted, and swallowed, probably before she was meant to. There was nothing ladylike about her like this, nothing at all of the daughter their father had tried to mould her into being. “Once, when I was six, I asked if we could go to Mom’s Touch for dinner,” she said. “Dad told me that I might as well ask him if I could inject crack into my veins. I didn’t know what the fuck that even was. Who says that to a six year old?”
“An asshole,” said Chan from the front seat.
Jisoo pointed at him with a fry, not that Chan was looking back to see it. “Exactly,” she said. “God, I’m so glad he’s dead.”
Felix kept quiet, took another sip of his Cider. The meeting with the lawyer had gone about as expected. He had been a middle aged man, handsome in the vague way that didn’t stick in the mind, and he had greeted the two living children of the Magpie with indifference, like it was nothing to him who they were. Chan had told him that his lawyer was discreet, but he hadn’t really known what that meant until he was in the office itself. It was very clear that this was a man who knew when to keep his friends close and his enemies ignorant of his existence.
The man had not known anything of what it said in Lee Jaerim’s will, but he’d been able to give them a breakdown of what was likely to happen now that Lee Jaerim had died without any kind of heir to claim his empire. Much of what was said had gone over Felix’s head, or more, he had zoned out through most of it, but Jisoo had listened carefully. She’d spoken of going to law school when they were younger, and then stopped one day and never brought it up again.
The one part that had stuck in Felix’s mind was Dongwan saying, sounding a little like the idea pleased him, “Once they start selling off that property, it’ll be a bloodbath.” He had looked at Chan and added, “You’ll come to me to draw up the title deeds, right?”
Chan, at his most enigmatic, had smiled blandly and said, “I wouldn’t dream of going elsewhere.”
Now, Felix looked at the side of Chan’s head, the curve of his cheek in profile the only feature he could really make out. He was saying something to Minho about their food going cold. They’d pulled onto the street their building was on, the sky a pale grey above them.
It was a relief to get out of the car, to be back in the cool, stale air of the hallway inside the building. Chan handed Minho his and Jeongin’s food, and Minho disappeared up the stairs with it without another word. Jisoo, saying something about making herself useful, disappeared into Seungmin’s workshop. Felix didn’t bother asking what, exactly, she was helping with. It was enough to know she wasn’t bored.
Without needing to speak, both Felix and Chan started climbing the stairs, keeping pace with each other. Chan, still holding his own food, said, “You didn’t finish your food yet, do you want to come eat with me in my office?”
“No,” Felix said quietly. “I’m going to go speak to Hyunjin.”
“Ah. Okay,” Chan said, the air between them suddenly turning a bit stilted. Hyunjin’s— Hyunjin-ness was casting a looming pall over the whole house. Felix remembered the previous night, the scheming and the worry. The way it was beginning to wear on even him.
So, yes, he needed to try talking to Hyunjin. Felix didn’t think Chan had spoken to Hyunjin at all today; they’d left the house earlier than Hyunjin would have usually been awake.
The silence between them dragged on, and just before they hit the third floor landing, Felix blurted out, “Hyung. You’re going to buy something that belonged to my father, aren’t you.” He hadn’t known how to bring it up earlier, certainly wasn’t going to do so in front of the lawyer, and then it felt too— disquieting, to put it into the tiny space of the car. In this huge column of concrete, the awkward silence, it belonged a bit better.
Chan glanced at him. There was no guilt or shame on his face. He looked unnervingly calm. “I want Blackbird’s,” he said simply.
It would not have surprised Felix, before the job itself, to know that Chan wanted to have Blackbird’s. It made sense, after all — the Magpie’s crown jewel, his shining glory, in the hands of the man who wanted to destroy him. It made poetic sense even now. But for Felix, the thought of Blackbird’s — the place where Jisung had almost died, where Hyunjin had almost lost him, made him feel a little nauseous. He was not sure he wanted to ever step foot in there again.
All Felix could do was nod. At the door to the PC room, Chan leaned in and kissed Felix’s temple, his lips warm and dry. And then they broke apart, Felix heading upstairs to the apartment. When he went inside, it was warm and softly lit, and Jisung was awake in his bed, but alone. He was wearing different pyjamas and his hair was fluffy with a washing, and he overall just looked so much better for it.
Jisung craned, eyeballing Felix’s hand. “Is that Lotteria?”
“Yeah,” Felix said, holding the bag up so Jisung could see it better. It was growing floppy with grease. “Do you want it?”
“Does a baboon have a red ass?” Jisung said in reply, which Felix assumed meant yes, judging by the way Jisung made grabby hands at him. He gave Jisung the oily parcel, and Jisung thanked him way too hard and enthusiastically for what amounted to a third of a burger and a handful of cold fries.
Felix left him, seeing out of the corner of his eye the way Jisung voraciously tore into the bag, like a lion with some poor gazelle. Hyunjin’s door was shut, no sound emanating from the other side. Whenever Felix went to visit Chan in his office, he always knocked and then waited to be let in. With Hyunjin in his room like this, he didn’t even bother with pretending like he was going to do the same. He knocked, once, just enough to make his imminent entry obvious, and then he opened the door without waiting for any response.
He opened the door slowly, at least, so that if Hyunjin was changing, he could yell out or something like that, but Hyunjin wasn’t changing. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, a manhua open in his lap, and his head whipped up toward the door when Felix came in without waiting, and he said, obviously outraged, “I didn’t say— oh. Hello, angel.”
“Hello,” Felix said mildly. Now that Hyunjin was aware of his presence, he came fully into the room and shut the door behind himself. He was not entirely sure how Hyunjin was going to react, in all honesty. He had not come out of his room at all yesterday and Felix had, truthfully, not felt capable of coming in here to coax him out. He hadn’t had the mental capacity to think about Hyunjin at all; he wasn’t sure he was really up for it now, truthfully, but needs must.
Hyunjin simply moved his book aside, not bothering to mark his page, like he didn’t really care, and then he patted the bed in front of him. “Come and sit down, angel, you look like you need to sit down.”
Felix did, for all he’d been sitting at the lawyer’s office and then again in the car. He came to the bed and climbed onto it and took up position opposite Hyunjin, also cross-legged, their bodies almost mirror images, except for where Hyunjin was taller and broader across the shoulders and still holding himself like he was in some kind of pain. His ribs, or maybe his head, which—
“You know you shouldn’t be reading, right?” Felix said, motioning to the book that had been set to the side. Hyunjin looked at it, and then at Felix, clearly confused. “You have a concussion, Hyunjin, a bad one. Just like with Jisung, you shouldn’t be reading anything.”
Hyunjin looked at the manhua again. “Well,” he said slowly after a moment, “the book sucks anyway.”
Felix laughed, just a little huff of sound. There was a strange atmosphere in the room, and he knew it wasn’t just in his head, a tension that he was not sure he’d experienced with Hyunjin — or at least not for a long time. Perhaps the only time he’d felt this uncertain of what to say to Hyunjin had been after Hyunjin had been mad at him for pushing him on his feelings for Jisung.
Perhaps it was his own guilt that was making him feel like that, though. He had been involved in planning last night, after all.
It was Hyunjin who spoke eventually. He held out a hand, palm up, and when Felix put his own there, Hyunjin curled his fingers around it and squeezed tightly. “Lix,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you yesterday. I didn’t know about your father.”
It was not what Felix had expected from him. “You didn’t know?” he asked.
Hyunjin shook his head slowly, gently, his hair floating around his face. “Not until Chan-hyung told me,” he said. “I missed the news. I didn’t check.”
Not surprising. Hyunjin didn’t owe him an apology at all. “It’s okay,” Felix said honestly, giving Hyunjin’s hand a gentle squeeze.
Hyunjin rubbed his thumb in a soothing back and forth motion across Felix’s knuckles. His hands were so big, but always so cool to the touch. “How are you feeling about it all?” he asked, soft and concerned, real concern. His eyes full of visible love.
Felix had to look away. “I don’t know,” he whispered. He’d been trying to figure it all out, piece it apart, but it was such a huge tangled mess. Too confusing and big for him. “Sad,” he said, and then, “Guilty about being sad. Angry. Relieved. Really fucking smug that I won.”
That startled a laugh out of Hyunjin, which was a lovely thing to see. “You did win, baby. You won,” he said around his smile. “He’s dead.”
Felix nodded, readily enough, but his face was still pouty, voice still a bit glum as he said, “I thought it would feel better than it does.”
Hyunjin squeezed his hand and gave it a little cajoling shake. “Yeah. I get that,” he said, a bit wry, and Felix wondered if that was true. “It’s because you’re such a nice person. You have too much empathy in your heart.”
That made Felix want to snort, or roll his eyes, but he didn’t do either. Trust Hyunjin to paint him in the most favourable light. “I think maybe I’m just a fool,” he said. “Noona doesn’t feel like this. She’s just happy he’s gone.”
“You’re not a fool but your empathy is—” Hyunjin thought about it, face going squishy as his mouth twisted. “Misplaced. That man doesn’t deserve it.”
Felix knew that. He didn’t have to be told. But most of the sadness and guilt weren’t about his father being dead, it was about all the rest of the stuff around it. He didn’t want to get into it all, and especially not right now. Instead, he changed the subject by saying, “I wanted to apologise to you.” Clunky, but it would do.
Hyunjin blinked. “To me? For what, angel?” His voice was bemused, mouth tilted into a baffled smile. “You don’t have anything to apologise to me for.”
“Yesterday— what happened last night,” Felix said, tentative and disjointed. He watched as Hyunjin’s face shuttered for a moment. Felix forced himself to not flinch. “I helped Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung plan it. I need to— say sorry for that.” It had been niggling at him all day, what he did, the part he played. Like with at the hospital, he’d deferred to the hyungs, but it wasn’t sitting right.
There was a long silence. Hyunjin was clearly struggling for words, struggling with his emotions, and Felix could only sit there with his own swirling guilt, in a state of mild agony. Their hands were still clasped, but limp now, laying on the bed between them.
“So you know,” Hyunjin finally said slowly. “About my trips to— kill those men.”
Yes, Felix didn’t say, but Hyunjin could probably read it off his face. Hyunjin had never told Felix, and it wasn’t like Felix had expected him to, or resented that he didn’t, but he’d been a little surprised all the same, when Chan had explained it all to him last night.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you with knowing about it,” Hyunjin said, earnest and pained, like he’d heard the turn of Felix’s thoughts.
“I know that,” Felix said quickly, leaning forward and clasping Hyunjin’s hand in both of his smaller ones. Chan and Changbin had told Felix they’d both found out about it by chance, which— spoke volumes, in Felix’s mind. “Hyunjin, I know that.”
Hyunjin’s gaze was searching. “I don’t understand why you’re saying sorry,” he said.
Hard to explain, in his emotionally exhausted state. Hard to admit. “Back in the hospital,” Felix said slowly, a little halting. “When you were— worse, when you couldn’t really function, Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung kept— talking over you. Making decisions for you. Which was understandable, but they kept discussing you like you weren’t even in the room. And last night felt like that, like we were all choosing something for you. Like you had no say in anything.”
“Ah, angel,” Hyunjin sighed.
“Don’t you mind it?” Felix asked, pressured, almost. “Aren’t you angry at them?”
Another lapse into that squishy-thoughtful face. “No,” Hyunjin said, the word lingering and drawn out. Like he was examining the way it felt in his mouth. “I was angry last night, when Chan-hyung came and got me.” He laughed, breathy and without any humour, eyes flat as chips of obsidian. It made Felix’s stomach swoop unpleasantly. “Christ, Lix, I was so angry. But everything they’ve ever done has been to keep me safe. They’ve looked after me when I wasn’t capable of it, loved me when I was nothing more than a stranger on their couch. And last night— if Seungmin hadn’t told me where to go, I would have found out on my own. And it wouldn’t have gone well for me. What Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung did, what you and Seungmin did— I don’t know. I feel like I can think again.”
Felix nodded, neck feeling gummy. He really didn’t get it, if he was being honest, but he understood that it worked for Hyunjin, so he wasn’t going to be upset on his behalf anymore. But he did say, slowly, “You only ever took Jisung with you.” That was something that had been emphasised. That this was something between Hyunjin and Jisung — and to some degree Seungmin too. But mostly Hyunjin and Jisung.
Hyunjin looked wary, all of a sudden. “Yes.”
“And he helped you,” Felix prompted, “with killing the people who hurt you.”
That wariness intensified. Begrudgingly, Hyunjin admitted, “Yes.”
“Hyunjin,” Felix began, and Hyunjin stared, like an enemy army across a battlefield. Watching and waiting and ready. Felix’s mouth was open, the words stuck, and he abruptly pivoted. “Have you ever thought about speaking to a therapist about what happened to you?”
Hyunjin’s face went slack with surprise, and then just as quickly, he scowled, nose wrinkling. “Oh, sure, Lixie,” he said, affronted but in a lighter way. “I’ll just find a therapist and tell them about all the violent murders and they’ll write notes down in their little notepad and give me some prescription to cure stabby-itis.”
Felix’s face was red and overly warm. “I don’t mean— you can leave the murders out!” he said. Hyunjin still looked dubious. “Lots of people get hurt, lots of people have— have sexual assault related trauma.” The words felt weird in his mouth, almost like he was diminishing Hyunjin’s experiences. For his part, Hyunjin’s nose was still wrinkled, like he’d smelled something bad. Felix bravely trudged on. “Lots of people want revenge, even violent revenge. You can just— leave all the actual murder out. And the crime.”
If he looked up the word unimpressed in the dictionary, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see Hyunjin’s current expression as the example photo. “Well, what about you?” Hyunjin said, pointed. “Shouldn’t you see a therapist too?”
“Probably,” Felix said, ignoring the way the words needled at him. “And maybe I will. But this isn’t about me—” Hyunjin snorted. “It’s about you. It’s about you and Jisung.” Felix clutched at Hyunjin’s hand, speaking quickly when it seemed like Hyunjin was about to sigh loudly, or tip his head back and scream. “Hyunjin, you’ve been locked up in your bedroom for days now because Jisung is out there in the living room, just because you can’t stand to look at him. Are you going to stay shut up in your room for the entire time he’s there? It’s probably going to be weeks, Hyunjin. You have a problem.”
“I leave my bedroom,” Hyunjin said, very sullen.
“Going to the bathroom doesn’t count, Hyunjin.”
“This morning I helped Jisung to the bathroom,” Hyunjin threw back, very much the verbal equivalent of tossing down a winning hand at poker.
Felix recovered quickly, blinking in surprise and then regrouping. “And did you speak to him?” he asked, watching Hyunjin’s smugness melt back into dark sullenness. “Have you spoken to him, about anything that happened? About anything that is happening right now? Have you spoken to him about the kiss?”
“No, I haven’t,” Hyunjin said, pouting and loud. He pulled his hand out of Felix’s grasp. “You know I haven’t. I can’t, Felix.”
“You can’t,” Felix shot back, “or you won’t?”
Hyunjin looked at him with a kind of betrayed shock, but not really like he was upset or about to lose his temper. It was more the way he always looked whenever Felix stood his ground on something. Like he was torn between being pleased to see Felix’s backbone and also utterly flabbergasted that it was happening to him. “Lix,” he said, bottom lip sticking out.
Felix wanted to help him, he wanted it so badly, but he was at a total loss as to how. Hyunjin had made so much progress but it was clear that Jisung was the one constant stumbling block. And him and his stupid rock-headed ways had caused a momentous setback. On top of that, Felix sensed there were a lot of things Hyunjin was simply not telling him, or not explaining well, and Felix was just a stupid boy with his own trauma and daddy issues and was not equipped to handle this at all.
“Just think about seeing a therapist, okay?” he said. “We can figure out how to talk about the reality but Hyunjin, a therapist could actually help with everything you’re struggling with. Your feelings for Jisung, the issue of sexual intimacy, all of it.”
Hyunjin shook his head. But he said, “I’ll think about it.” It was clear he was just saying that to get Felix to drop the subject, and Felix could do nothing but let it go for now, though he had the very strong urge to lean over and bite Hyunjin. He glared at Hyunjin, a pout set on his own face now. Hyunjin saw it and sighed. “Angel, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Do you want me to leave?” Felix asked, a little wobbly.
Another shake of his head. “No, I want you to stay. I want you to come cuddle with me, like before.” A scowl. “Before stupid Chan-hyung stole you from me.”
That made Felix laugh, relief that Hyunjin wasn’t mad at him flooding through him. “Let me get a book,” Felix said, scooting to the edge of the bed. “I’ll read to us both, how about that?”
“Okay, angel,” Hyunjin said softly, and Felix got up to go through Hyunjin’s collection.
——
Jeongin stared at Chan’s closed office door.
It had never felt like a barrier before, and yet, sometime in the last few weeks, that was exactly what it had become. Jeongin had never had any compunction barging into Chan’s spaces, even this one, but it no longer felt right. When he thought about it, contemplating the roughly stained wood, it wasn’t because he was worried about Chan’s reaction. He knew Chan would not be upset. The problem wasn’t Chan. The problem was Jeongin. It felt— childish, childlike, to barge through doors without knocking. And that was something he’d always known, and never cared about. But suddenly he did. Suddenly it didn’t feel— true to himself, anymore.
He didn’t, entirely, feel like Jeongin anymore. Impossible to pin down exactly when that shift had happened, but it had.
Is this growing up, Jeongin wondered, resting his fingertips lightly on the doorknob. He could faintly hear Chan’s muffled voice from the other side of the wood, half of a conversation. Or am I becoming someone else.
He pushed the knob and the door swung open.
Chan glanced over, alert, when he noticed the movement, but he visibly relaxed when he saw it was Jeongin in the doorway. He held up a finger at Jeongin in a request for quiet, and then motioned him further into the room. “Yes, thank you, at this number please, yes,” he was saying into the phone, swivelling in his desk chair, back and forth. Jeongin came in and sat in his usual place on the couch, waiting. “Any time of day is fine, thank you again.”
Jeongin was a little curious who Chan was talking to, and about what, but when Chan hung up the phone it was clear an explanation wouldn’t be forthcoming. He looked at Jeongin and smiled, putting the phone on his desk and pushing it away a little, like he was dismissing it. “Hi Jeongin,” he said, warm. “I’m surprised to see you alone.”
That was not what Jeongin had expected, and it threw him off a little. “Oh?” he said, unsure if he was being made fun of.
He was, but not meanly. Chan’s smile widened, cheeky. “I’m just not used to seeing you without Minho anymore.” His voice was sly.
Nice that Chan was in a good mood, and nice too that Chan was finally at a state where he could be playful about it, rather than— anything else. But Jeongin wasn’t in the sort of mood where he could reciprocate that energy. He smiled, thin and stiff, and said, “Minho-hyung’s making Jisung a proper dinner. I guess Felix gave him his leftover Lotteria meal, and that’s not exactly the best food for someone recovering from severe gut surgery.”
Chan laughed, the corner of his mouth tugging down in a faux-grimace. “No, but Jisung is recovering well, so maybe a few french fries is okay,” he said, gaze turning a little shrewd. “But I’m guessing you didn’t come here to file a complaint about Felix feeding grease to the invalid. What’s up?”
Jeongin was slouched back against the couch, hands folded loosely in his lap. He’d thought, over and over, all day, about how to phrase this, how to ask it. He wasn’t used to being calculating to this extent, and definitely not in relation to how he— handled Chan, for lack of a better word. Jeongin could be manipulative but he didn’t think pouting to get his way was the right angle here, not with murder on the table. And being cryptic or secretive would likely end with this going the exact same way as it had with Seungmin. Jeongin was still not a small amount peevish about that encounter.
“I wanted to ask you for something,” he said, opting not to be coy. He met Chan’s gaze. “I need Hyunjae’s phone number. I need him to kill someone.”
Earlier, when Jeongin had said that, Seungmin’s face had done that blank, flat thing it always did when he was shocked. A mask, to hide his emotions. But Chan’s expression was much more open, much more easily read. Lips parting in surprise, eyes widening. “To kill someone?” he echoed, voice cracking a little. And then he blinked some of the shock away, brows lowering in confusion. “Wait, is this about Hyunjin?”
“No?” Jeongin said, momentarily confused as well before he connected some of the dots, fast and easy. “No,” he repeated, more firmly. “I don’t want to hire him to kill someone for Hyunjin, I want to hire him to kill someone for me.” He did his best to sound level, rational. The way the others always did, when talking to clients and partners about even the most illegal things.
Chan, though, was looking at him like he was speaking tongues, like he’d grown a new head. “What? No!” he spluttered.
Anger flared in Jeongin again, just like it had done down in the workroom. His legs had been crossed but he unfolded them now, putting both feet on the ground in a bracing stance. He leaned forward, clenched fists resting on his knees. “What, so everyone else gets to go and kill people, Hyunjin-hyung gets to kill whoever he wants, but I’m not allowed?” he demanded.
He knew as the words were leaving his mouth that they were juvenile — only children cared about things like fairness. But it was true. They’d taken the Magpie job largely to satiate Chan’s blood grudge against the man, the payment and benefits had always come secondary no matter how much Chan might have tried to spin it. Felix as well, had a large personal stake in his father’s death. And no one had ever bothered to try and stop Hyunjin, or dissuade him at all. He went out for his little side quests quite a lot, and everyone else had definitely killed people up close and personal for various reasons. But poor baby Jeongin wasn’t allowed? It was bullshit.
Chan was looking at him now in that reproving way he got sometimes, like Jeongin had said something to personally wound him. “Hyunjin only kills bad people who deserve it, don’t make it sound like he’s a sociopath,” he mumbled.
That was not the point at all, Jeongin wanted to scream. “I,” he said hotly, jabbing a finger into his own chest, “am going to kill a bad person that deserves it!”
The expression on Chan’s face didn’t fade. It was like this entire conversation, Jeongin was disappointing him, and that made Jeongin even angrier. Why was Jeongin different from the others, why was he always held to different standards. Finally, Chan softly asked, “Who do you want to kill, Jeongin.”
Jeongin sighed — not a full sigh, just a heavy, unhappy exhalation through his nose. None of your business, he wanted to say, but he was employing different tactics in this conversation. So he spoke the truth. “Minho-hyung’s dad.”
That clearly startled Chan all over again. “Minho’s dad?” he repeated, incredulous. “You want to kill Minho’s dad?”
Did it really warrant such shock. They’d just killed Felix’s dad, for all intents and purposes, this wasn’t a new thing for them.
“Yes,” Jeongin said through his teeth, holding onto his calm very carefully.
A rejection did not come immediately. Instead, Chan looked like he was trying to process the entire situation, his brain kicking into professional gear. This kept Jeongin in his seat, his lips pressed tightly together. Chan’s head slowly tilted in thought, and he asked, “Does Minho know about this?
Again, with great restraint, “Yes.”
“And does he approve of this?” Level, no judgement, but with great weight.
“He told me that I couldn’t do it myself and he didn’t want anyone on the team doing it,” Jeongin listed off, sidestepping the question of approval altogether. “So I’m going to hire Hyunjae to do it.”
Chan sat back, his chair swaying and creaking a little. The fact that he still was not saying no quelled Jeongin’s temper some. Gave him hope. Chan rubbed his hand over his jaw, scratching at imaginary stubble. He sat there scratching and thinking for so long that Jeongin had begun to expect that the next words out of his mouth were simply going to be an acquiescence, but instead when Chan spoke again, he asked, “Why?”
Jeongin knew playing dumb now wouldn’t work, but he did it anyway. “Why?” he echoed.
“Why do you want to kill Minho’s dad,” Chan elaborated, every word carefully enunciated.
It was not a surprising question. It was not even a difficult question, in the usual sense. The reasons were clear and solid, justified. But Jeongin resented the question all the same. He had not worked for years to coax Minho out of his shell, cutting and abrading himself in the process, just to share that bounty with everyone else whenever they asked. Minho was his, and Minho was a very private person. The only reason Jeongin knew about Minho’s father was because Minho had trusted him with it. And it was a very specific trust, one he gave to Jeongin and Jeongin alone. Jisung had overheard, yes, but that hadn’t been Minho’s choice. He had not seemed very agitated over it, but being upset wouldn’t make Jisung forget what he’d heard. Minho was pragmatic that way. Just because he hadn’t lost his temper didn’t mean he wasn’t unhappy Jisung knew.
And that had been an accident. This would be on purpose. Jeongin trusted Chan, and he knew Minho trusted Chan, but it was not in Jeongin’s hands to decide what Minho should or should not trust Chan with.
“His father is a bad person,” Jeongin said, equally careful. “It’s not my place to say more than that.”
That did not seem good enough for Chan. “Jeongin,” he said, hand moving up now to rub at his temple, thumb moving in slow circles, “I don’t know about this.”
“Do you and Seungmin-hyung make Hyunjin-hyung detail out everything each man did to him, before you let him out into the night to do what he has to do?” Jeongin said, angry again. “Or do you just accept that he can make that decision, based on his own metrics? Do you think I am doing this lightly?” Why was it always him, only him, who seemed to understand that Minho needed protecting too. Because he wasn’t going to ever move to help himself.
Chan blinked at him, suddenly a little pale. “Did Minho’s father—”
The equivalence to Hyunjin. Jeongin was on his feet before he knew it, fairly shouting, “It’s none of your business if he was! I’m trying to— to do this in a way that is respectful of him, his privacy, how dare you ask that! Whatever the answer is, yes or no, it’s none of your business!” He whirled, finding the little black dome nestled in the corner, and pointing furiously at it. “And you,” he said, still looking at the camera, “I know you’re watching, know you’re listening, even though when I spoke to you earlier I very specifically didn’t tell you who I was going after, because it is none of your business either! You get to have your secrets and run around under our noses, everyone else gets to be fucking adults in this house, everyone except me! Fuck you for sending me up here and then fucking spying on me!”
Chan’s phone buzzed, and Jeongin whirled back around. Chan glanced at Jeongin warily as he checked his phone. “Seungmin says he’s turned the feed off,” he said stiffly, and Jeongin just stood there, breathing. Chan tapped at his phone idly, nail clicking against the screen. “Jeongin,” he began, and then stopped. He scrubbed his hands over his face roughly. “I just don’t want to upset Minho. If I sent a squad of assassins out to kill Jisung’s step-father, I think Jisung might be peeved at me for it. And that man very much deserves to be beaten to a pulp, we all know that. But it’s not my choice, even as someone who loves Jisung.”
“You want me to get Minho-hyung to sign a permission slip for you,” Jeongin asked, a little nasty, but calming down some after his outburst. “He is well aware of what I am doing. But he will never move to get justice for himself because he’s—” Jeongin bit off the rest of that sentence. Because he’s too fucked up to even understand that he deserves justice. “He does not want to talk about, or think about, his father. Which is fine. But I cannot let that man live. Not now that I know some of what he has done. Not now that I have held Minho-hyung through his nightmares.” He paused. “Not now that I’ve begun getting nightmares too, after he told me.”
Killing Minho’s father wouldn’t magically fix that, but it wouldn’t hurt, surely. Jeongin did not want to see it again. A little Minho, with messy black hair and smudged undereyes, even as a child. His hyung, his sweet hyung, who should have been held and cherished. Jeongin wished he could go back in time and scoop that child up, secret him away. It was physically painful, to know Minho, to know the ways in which he was honourable and gentle, how he chased approval and affection, without even knowing he was doing so. To imagine that in a child, looking up at a parent who instead— instead—
That morning, Minho’s fear was not unexpected, but it had been different, to all the fear Jeongin had seen in him thus far. It had scared Jeongin in turn. Not for the same reason, not fear of Minho’s father, or of Minho himself. His fear had been for Minho’s— mental state. A fear that his kind, traumatised hyung might actually be pushed too far by this. The sweater worn down to precarious thinness, now tugged on too hard. Jeongin had never had any fear of Minho, not really, but this morning something had definitely been knocked loose inside of him
A person who caused pain like that to his Minho-hyung could not be allowed to live. And if Chan wouldn’t help, Jeongin would find his way to Hyunjae however he could.
Quietly, Chan said, “I always thought it was just prison that— made him the way he was.” It wasn’t fishing, it was just a musing statement. An understandable one.
“I thought so too,” Jeongin said, still not liking the way this felt like— gossiping about Minho behind his back. But Chan didn’t mean it that way, he knew, so he worked to meet him. “I mean, I don’t think it helped, I think it was bad there too. He doesn’t like to talk about that, either.” Everyone was very well behaved. Lies, all of it, deflections. “But he’s not scared of prison like he is his father. He doesn’t panic at the thought of prison like he does his father. Hyung, do you know how terrible a person must be, to make Minho-hyung scared?”
The colour had never come back to Chan’s face. He looked thoughtful, gaze a million miles inward. Jeongin wondered what he was thinking, if he still thought Minho was— like Hyunjin. The truth was Jeongin didn’t know everything, and he didn’t think Minho’s abuse had also been sexual, but did it follow, then, that it wasn’t as bad, that he wasn’t as worthy of revenge? Minho had been tortured in one way, and Hyunjin had been tortured in another. Still, Jeongin didn’t like the idea of what Chan might be thinking right now, but he had no idea how to rectify it without explaining what he did know. And what he did know wouldn’t be comforting, anyway.
Finally, Chan looked up at him again, the space of the desk separating them. “I imagine he’s a monster,” he said softly. “But it doesn’t seem to be for Minho’s sake, that you’re going after him.”
“It’s for both of us,” Jeongin said. He made himself steady, hands fisted at his sides, nails biting into his palms. “His father shouldn’t still be alive. People who hurt children— they don’t deserve the oxygen they breathe. He’s out there, just living his life, and he shouldn’t be. For Minho-hyung’s sake, for Minho-hyung’s pain, he must die. It’s— it’s fair. It’s the only thing that is fair.” He swallowed, face twisting. “And for my sake too, yes,” he admitted. “Because I promised Minho-hyung I wouldn’t go after him myself. He was terrified, at the thought of me and his father in the same room. But I don’t know how long I can keep that promise. I need that man gone. I need this— this rage in me quieted. It’s turning me into something else.”
Something else, someone else. And the truth was, it didn’t frighten Jeongin, didn’t shock or concern him at all. It should. It really should. The way he wanted this man dead— wanted him more than dead. Worse than dead. He wanted Minho’s father afraid, as terrified as Minho must have been when he was a boy. He wanted it to be his own hands. He wanted to wrap his fingers around that man’s throat, hold him down in the frigid water of his own bathtub, bring him up for air at the last minute. Again and again and again until his mouth was frothing and his eyes were rolling, until he used every ounce of air he had to gasp out desperate pleas for mercy. And Jeongin would laugh at his purple, mottled face and hold him under again, and again, until his legs stopped kicking, until the thrashing stopped.
But Minho had said no, so someone else had to do it for him. They had to.
Chan’s eyes were big and dark in his face. He looked a little frightened. The way Jeongin should be frightened, and yet wasn’t. He stared, and stared, like he was taking Jeongin in, re-evaluating him. Maybe re-evaluating more things. Then he swallowed, loud in the quiet of the room, nodding once. He pulled a little yellow notepad to himself, jotting something down, and then ripped the paper out and held it over the desk, toward Jeongin. When Jeongin took it, he saw it was a phone number.
“There you go,” he said, a bit gruff with it. A bit disquieted. “Tell him Chris put you in contact.”
Jeongin held the little piece of paper with both hands, crisp between his fingertips. As he stared at the little black numbers emotion rose in him, too fast to hold back. He blinked his eyes but it did nothing to stem the rising sting of tears. The numbers swam, and when he blinked again a tear fell and landed on the paper, soaking in. He couldn’t look at Chan yet, could only stand there stupidly and stare down at the numbers, tears plipping down. He was holding in his hands something that was going to help set Minho free, just that little bit more.
Chan’s voice, quiet and aching and scared. “You really do love him so much.”
Something about the words out of Chan’s mouth made Jeongin begin to cry in earnest, face crumpling in that ugly way. He held a hand over his eyes to give himself a little privacy, sniffling damply. Chan acknowledging his feelings was— emotional, yes, but there was more to it. Jeongin did love Minho. He loved Minho so, so much. And he hadn’t been ready for the true extent of what love did to someone. The depths of it, the desperation. The way sometimes it felt like he had stepped too far out and hit a sudden drop in the seabed and the water was yawning vast and deep and black beneath him.
“Yes, hyung,” he whispered, shaky. “I love him so much. I would do anything for him.” He dropped his hand and managed to meet Chan’s eyes, still crying, Chan all blurry through his tears. Not an unusual sight, Jeongin was a crybaby, had always been a crybaby, but still. “Hyung, it’s overwhelming? It feels like I’m drowning, is it supposed to feel like that? Is love always like this?”
Surprisingly, Chan didn’t get up to comfort him. In some ways, through this conversation, for one of perhaps the first times ever, Chan had been treating him like an equal, like an adult. He just watched Jeongin wipe at his face and said, thoughtfully, seriously, “Yes, I think real love is like that. It can be scary, it can be— overwhelming, yes. But it isn’t a bad thing.”
“Is this how you feel about Felix-hyung?” Jeongin asked, hiccuping.
“Like it could kill me someday?” Chan said, wry and self-deprecating and maybe a little grim. Jeongin nodded. “Yes, that’s how I feel.”
“It’s terrible,” Jeongin warbled, and Chan laughed a little, gentle and breathy.
“Yeah,” he said, one corner of his mouth cocked up in a smile as he watched Jeongin cry. His eyes were fond, familiar once more. “Yeah.”
Jeongin sniffled, and sniffled again. He wiped at his face with his sleeves, until there weren’t any dry spots left. When he went up to the apartment, Minho would notice he’d been crying, and Jeongin would have no excuse for it. I just love you so much, he imagined saying to Minho, and watching the way Minho would get all red and fluttery and concerned. Unbearable.
So he stood there for long minutes, trying to get himself together. And as he did so, he folded the paper and slipped it into his sleeve, where Minho wouldn’t find it.
——
In the wake of Jeongin, Chan did not have a hope of finding his focus again. He’d learned through the years how to sit at a desk and apply focus to what he needed to work on, and truthfully he was good at it now, but it was a skill he had had to learn, in a way that he thought maybe other people didn’t have to. Or perhaps they’d learned it in school, being made to sit still at a desk. Even when he’d gone to school, it certainly had not been an everyday thing.
Chan’s true abilities didn’t lie in the kind of work done at a desk, though, and when it was difficult to sit still, it was impossible to keep himself there. He tried his best, though, sitting there for a good long time doing absolutely nothing productive or worthwhile, just clicking aimlessly through his emails. It was only after about five straight minutes of opening and then closing the same email from the alcohol supplier for Maniac about a new shipment that he gave it up as a lost cause. He needed— distraction.
He needed to do something other than sit there and think about Jeongin’s red-rimmed eyes, the sound of his voice saying it feels like I’m drowning. Something other than standing beneath the onslaught of images of Minho as a small child, in the deep shadow of a malevolent creature.
He locked the office door behind him and made his way through the PC room — a sad air of abandonment around it, completely unused these past few weeks — and into the hallway. He was not sure where Jeongin had gone, upstairs to the apartment or downstairs to his new room, but when he walked past their door, there was no sound to be heard from within.
His eyes slid a little bit past Jisung’s bedroom door, the way he had been doing ever since he had come back from the hospital that first night. Like his brain couldn’t quite stand to look at it yet. Every time it was like he was being reminded that Jisung had almost never come back to use the room again.
It was very cold in the hallway but when he opened the door to Seungmin’s workroom, he was greeted by a blast of warm air and the sound of his little electric heater chugging away. He was also greeted by Changbin, sitting at the workbench, a tablet in front of him along with a selection of the bagged jewellery that they’d taken from the vault. Seungmin, at his desk on his computer, as usual, turned his face just enough to say, “Hello, hyung,” and then went back to his screens. He had an earbud in one ear, and not the other. Chan had wondered if, given Jeongin’s outburst, Seungmin might— say more, give something away. But the dismissal was clear.
“Hey,” Changbin said cheerfully to Chan. “You needed me?”
Chan stood for a moment inside the doorway, realising that whilst he didn’t need Changbin, he had wanted to see him all the same, and instead of going to Changbin’s room or the basement gym, he had come here instead, expecting Changbin to be here. He was not sure why that was, except that Changbin had been down here so much more often than not recently, but before the thought could take real root, Seungmin looked back at him and said, irritated, “Hyung, you’re letting all the heat out.”
“Oh, sorry,” Chan said, and he stepped further into the room and let the door shut behind him. Seungmin rolled his eyes before turning again. He was reviewing some kind of security footage, a street that Chan didn’t fully recognise. The footage was going at triple speed, so whatever Seungmin was looking for wasn’t likely to be detailed.
Changbin was snickering at him. Chan came closer so he could swipe a smack at Changbin’s head — Changbin dodged successfully but almost fell off his stool doing so — and then went around the other side of the workbench so he could take the seat opposite Changbin. Changbin looked at him, first with humour, and then with a bit more concern. “Are you okay, hyung?” he asked.
Chan gave him a tight smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Fine. Just— had a talk with Jeongin just now. He’s okay,” he added, seeing worry overcome Changbin’s face and a question come to his lips, a clear indication that Seungmin hadn’t said anything to him about it. “Just— he got a little upset about something. But he’s okay.”
Changbin nodded, frowning. He said, with the air of a man offering a way out of a sticky situation, “He’s always been a crybaby.”
Jeongin certainly had, but not like this; Chan was not sure he’d ever seen Jeongin the way he had been in that office just now. It had not been the childish crybaby he had always seemed to be, bursting into tears if he stubbed his toe on the coffee table, or if an episode of his drama had something he deemed sad in it. These tears had been grown up — he had been grown up. That was unsettling to have realised. Sometimes Chan missed the nine year old who had needed only Chan.
A subject change was in order. “Have there been any new updates in the last few hours?” he asked briskly.
This was directed at the room at large and accordingly it was Seungmin who answered. “Nothing much,” he said. “Still no further legitimate leads on who actually killed Lee Jaerim. A few more minor groups have crept out to try to lay claim but there’s no way any of them have the manpower to do something like that, or the ability. Just a lot of noise.”
Chan sighed. “All they’re doing is drawing attention to themselves,” he said. “A dangerous thing to do if you’re a small operation.” Chan had always known that, and it was why he had built up his reputation slowly and steadily through the years, without making too much of a splash. He’d slid seamlessly into this world, without sticking out in any way.
“I think a few of them are in for a rude awakening,” Changbin said. “Things are going to get very messy very quickly if it keeps going like this.”
That was undoubtedly true. Lee Jaerim had been in power the entirety of Chan’s life, and he had come into that power on the back of power his own father had seized for the Lee family. This city wasn’t used to a power vacuum like this, and wasn’t used to the kind of conflict that came from so many players trying to snatch part of the game for themselves. Maybe he should feel guilty for having set this in motion but he couldn’t. He’d had his revenge, and the idiots who got themselves killed in the aftermath should have been smart enough to keep their heads down.
“If we wanted to, it would be very easy to make one of these groups our patsy,” Seungmin said. “It wouldn’t be difficult to frame them for the Blackbird’s job, not when everyone wants so desperately to be known for it.”
The thought had come into Chan’s mind once or twice, but he was glad that it was Seungmin who had first voiced it. Seungmin could get away with being mercenary, because everyone expected it of him. Chan hummed under his breath and said, “Get me a list of the people claiming credit for Blackbird’s and a list of the people claiming they killed Lee Jaerim. We’ll see how much overlap there is. There may be someone who— it’s in our best interests to frame.”
Seungmin nodded. He had a look in his eye like he was about to do just that immediately, like he had been waiting for permission. Chan wondered exactly what the chatter online was like. Seungmin looked a little bit like he did when his professional reputation was being doubted.
Chan reached out and picked up one of the bags of jewellery. There was a necklace inside it, a gold choker of what looked like diamonds to his untrained eye. It was gaudy and nothing he would buy, and yet he was struck, for a slightly wild moment, to see what it would look like on Felix’s neck. A particularly perverse thought, considering the providence of the necklace, and yet maybe that made it more appealing.
Changbin said, “Seungmin’s got the contact info for a couple of fences he’s worked with. We’re deciding which pieces to sell first.”
If it had been anyone else, he might have asked for the background check information, for a written report on the man, to know everything that Seungmin knew. Seungmin, however, was perhaps not a better judge of character than Chan so much as a far more discerning one. If he had a contact, it was not a random person he happened to know the name of. It was a person he had probably vetted more strongly than intelligence agencies vetted potential spies.
So instead of asking for any of that info, he said, “There’s no rush on that stuff. Best to let the dust settle first before we start flashing all of this publicly.”
Changbin nodded, poking at a bag that seemed to contain nothing but rings with a finger. “Honestly, hyung, I’m mostly just keeping myself occupied when I’m not babysitting Jisung.”
Chan, almost instinctively, glanced at the monitors that showed the feeds for the rest of the house, and saw that Jisung was on his little bed in the living room of the apartment, apparently sleeping. Alone, now; Minho and Jeongin must have finished eating with him and then gone elsewhere. Jisung had been sleeping when Chan had left the apartment that morning too, moving very quietly to try to avoid waking him. “How is Jisung?” he asked, feeling his heart clench looking at the fuzzy image of the boy curled up in bed.
“He’s fine,” Changbin said. His voice was casual without being flippant. “I gave him a bath while you were out, which I think cheered him up a lot, but he passed out afterwards. He’s been waking up here and there for food but otherwise he’s kind of just slept most of the time.”
“Is that normal?” Chan asked. He had no idea, honestly, but it sounded worrying.
“He sleeps a lot,” Seungmin said. He had stopped with his video footage but had some webpage open, scrolling through it, at a speed that suggested he was not actually taking anything in. Skimming it, now, whilst he listened to the conversation happening around him. “It’s very normal, he’ll be tired for a long time. I got into the hospital records—”
“Of course you did,” Chan said, with a burst of warm fondness for Seungmin.
Seungmin turned fully in his desk chair so that he could glare at Chan. Chan smiled back at him, knowing it would just piss Seungmin off even more. Seungmin narrowed his eyes at him but said, with a huff, “It’s going to take months until he’s better. Even when he’s not sleeping for most of the day, he’s not going to be able to move around too easily for a long time. He’s going to keep tiring quickly. We might need to come up with a slightly better place to keep him than on an air mattress in the middle of the living room.”
Chan nodded slowly. That was almost certainly true; if Jisung’s recovery was going to take that long, it was going to be a good while before they could safely move him back to his bedroom. Chan wanted him to at least be able to walk without much pain before that happened, never mind climb stairs.
“I don’t think Jisoo is planning on sticking around,” Chan said. “Once she’s gone, we can move Jisung into Jeongin’s room, maybe. Just until he’s doing a bit better.”
“I’ve put in a fake prescription for more of his pain meds,” Seungmin said. “The good ones for him. Hyung’s going to go pick them up tomorrow.”
“How good are we talking here?” Chan asked.
“Good,” said Seungmin bluntly. “They were stingy with them at the hospital when we left, they only gave us enough for a week. This should keep him going for another couple of weeks.”
Changbin leaned across the table, one of his hands held over his mouth like he was an old lady spreading gossip. Chan, embarrassingly, found himself leaning forward too. “Jisung said that Hyunjin gave him his pain meds this morning,” Changbin said, a little conspiratorial in tone. Chan honestly— felt his mood brighten at the words. Apparently it showed on his face because Changbin leaned back and said, “Yeah, that’s how I felt too. Apparently it was before anyone else had woken up. And Hyunjin hasn’t come out of his room since then.”
Chan felt all that lovely bright mood wash out again. He groaned and scrubbed his hand across his face. He did not know how to handle this particular element of whatever was going on with Hyunjin. Last night, on the other end of everything, when he had seen Hyunjin off to bed, he had known that he had not fixed everything. It was impossible to do something like that. Yet he knew, all the same, that Hyunjin would move forward, just like he always had done. Hyunjin had always been strong enough for that.
But with Jisung, Chan didn’t feel like he could see the— shape of this resolution yet. The idea of Hyunjin in a relationship with anyone was so out of his realm of comprehension that he didn’t know how to help it forward. He didn’t think he wanted to touch it, honestly. He had meddled with Jeongin and Minho in the worst way possible, and Hyunjin deserved a level of privacy far, far higher than anyone else in their family when it came to these matters.
“God, this is a mess,” he said. Changbin made a small noise of agreement but didn’t offer any advice on how it should be handled. They were usually on the same page when it came to Hyunjin, after all, and had been since the very early days. Changbin tended to let Chan take the lead when it came to Jeongin, but with Hyunjin, he had always had an active part. The fact that he wasn’t offering anything suggested that he, too, felt the futility of it.
Chan reached out and patted Changbin on the shoulder, in a jokingly masculine way. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but fuck, I am so glad I’ve never had to worry about you causing relationship drama.”
He expected Changbin to get fake-mad, to take it as the backhanded compliment that it was — Changbin had always been single the entire time Chan had known him. Not virginal by any sense of the word, he had gone out to find partners a lot more than Chan had ever managed, but where Chan had, sometimes, kept up a regular something with some people, Changbin never had. It had been a new person every time.
What he didn’t expect was for Changbin to look at him, then across at Seungmin, who had gone still at his computer screens, no longer scrolling, no longer doing anything. Then Changbin looked back at Chan and said, very seriously, “Hyung, Seungmin and I have been in a relationship for the past year or so.”
If Chan had heard that out of context, if it had just been him and Changbin in the room, Chan would have— laughed, maybe. Taken it to be a joke, one that was a little off-colour, maybe, but a joke. Changbin who never dated and Seungmin who didn’t like people, who never left his little room if he could help it. Chan would have assumed it was a joke because what else could it be.
Except— Changbin did not seem like he was joking. And Seungmin had turned in his computer chair so that he was facing them, and he was looking at Changbin with an expression on his face that Chan could only describe as pissy, in a way only Seungmin could achieve: pursed mouth, narrowed eyes, a general sense of wondering how in the world he was expected to put up with these people. But he was also a little— pink, just across his cheeks, and he was not denying it. He was not saying anything.
“Wait,” Chan said. Changbin was looking at him patiently, like he was waiting for Chan to get on the same page as him, whatever that page might be. “Wait, are you— actually serious?”
Changbin nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, hyung, I— I’m serious. We’ve been together since before Felix arrived.”
Actually, maybe he wasn’t looking at Chan patiently — he was looking at Chan carefully, just a hint of wariness about him. Maybe he was expecting Chan to blow up, just like he had done about Minho and Jeongin — to be fair, Chan’s track record hadn’t really given him much grace to work with. But Chan didn’t think he was going to blow up. Mostly he was having trouble wrapping his head around it.
“Wait,” he said for a third time. “So you—” he pointed at Changbin — “and you—” this time at Seungmin, who turned that pissy look onto Chan’s hand — “have been dating for a year and I didn’t know?”
“I wouldn’t really call it dating,” Seungmin muttered, at the same time that Changbin said, “Yes, hyung,” then added, “I’m sorry for keeping it a secret from you.”
Chan made a noise that was like a spluttering tea kettle. He felt like someone had taken his brain out and shook it all around and then put it back in upside down. This was even more confusing than realising that somewhere along the way, Hyunjin had fallen in love with Jisung. At least that had just been something inside Hyunjin’s mind and heart, something Chan couldn’t possibly look for; if Hyunjin didn’t want to confide in him, then it wasn’t like Chan could pry his ribs open to look.
But this— this was different from that. This was actions. This was Chan taking all the things he had always just overlooked and having to fit them back together in a new way in the light of this revelation: all the time Changbin and Seungmin spent together, down in this workroom; the way Changbin had started doing all of his work down here, claiming to have no better place for it; all the times Changbin had said, Seungmin said— in meetings. Chan had even called him out on it once — Seungmin tells you an awful lot of stuff, even stuff that is supposed to be a secret.
Chan still had never put it together. He thought maybe he never would have, if Changbin hadn’t revealed it to him. The idea that Changbin had managed to conduct a discreet love affair, whereas Chan’s own love affair had been broadcast to the entire house to see, was one of the most galling things Chan had ever had to come to terms with.
“Was it—” He had to stop and clear his throat. “Was it because I made you two feel like you couldn’t? Like you wouldn’t— be supported? I know, with what happened with Jeongin and Minho, I don’t have the best track record, but—”
“No,” Changbin interrupted, very firmly. “No, it wasn’t that, hyung, it was never that. We just wanted privacy, that’s all.” He glanced at Seungmin, and there was a strong sense of an unspoken conversation happening between them. Chan felt his head spin just looking at it. It was exactly the kind of thing him and Felix did together, and he couldn’t tell if he’d never seen Changbin and Seungmin do this before, or if he’d just never noticed it before.
Seungmin sighed. “It was just sex, to start with,” he said quietly. “I’d always kept that kind of thing secret from my teams because sometimes it goes wrong.”
Chan had to bite his tongue to stop himself from blurting out his first thought, which was, you’ve done this before? Seungmin had come to them just before his nineteenth birthday, bitter and quiet and agoraphobic. Chan had been certain he was a virgin, and had no interest in the base needs of the rest of humanity; Seungmin always gave the impression of having risen above all that.
Changbin slid off his chair and walked the distance between the table and where Seungmin sat in his desk chair. He reached out and took Seungmin’s hand, without hesitation, without any apparent expectation that he would be denied. Seungmin not only let him, he visibly squeezed Changbin’s hand back. “It became something real,” he said, “and we wanted to be able to explore it without all of you busybodies getting into our business.”
There were too many revelations in one sitting. Chan sat there for a few moments looking at their joined hands, baffled and lost, and then said, slowly, “I am very happy for you both.”
Changbin laughed at him, not his usual boisterous laugh, but a laugh all the same, as he looked at Chan a little bit like he was no longer quite so worried. “You don’t particularly sound it, hyung,” he said.
“This is a lot to wrap my head around,” Chan said. “You might as well have dropped an anvil on my head.” Changbin laughed again, and it sounded even more real than the last one. “I genuinely didn’t see any of it, none of it. I can’t believe you managed to keep this a secret from everyone for the past year.”
Another glance between Changbin and Seungmin. How had Chan never noticed that before? “Well,” Changbin said, “the thing is, Minho-hyung and Jeongin already know.”
Chan felt his ability to cope with his situation abruptly snap. Bad enough to realise that Changbin had been so discreet, the idea that Jeongin had known this secret and managed to not reveal it in any way was beyond him. He surged to his feet, hands smacking down on the workbench. Seungmin flinched a little; Changbin, who knew him so well, too well, was grinning now. “Okay!” Chan said, too loud, too high-pitched. “I’m leaving now!”
“Okay, hyung!” Changbin said brightly. “Let me know if you need me!”
To Changbin’s credit, he held his laughter in until Chan was almost out of the room, but in the brief moment right before the door swung shut, he heard the start of a guffaw. Then there was simply silence and Chan was standing in the hallway feeling like— he no longer knew which way was up and down anymore.
He climbed the stairs in a daze, his brain full only of the buzzing thought of: Changbin and Seungmin, they’re in a relationship, Changbin and Seungmin. He got back to his office without actually making the conscious decision to go there, drawn only by some instinct perhaps. He shut the door, and sat behind his desk, and looked at the darkened screen of his computer.
Changbin and Seungmin, he thought. Holy shit!
He had no idea how long he sat there for. It had been dark outside when he came into the room and it was dark when, eventually, there came a knock on the office door. That rap of knuckles was very familiar by now, and even just that little sound made warmth bloom in Chan’s chest. “You can come in, Felix,” he called.
The door opened and Felix was there, a blessed sight. He was dressed in a pair of light blue checked pyjama pants and one of Chan’s t-shirts, pilfered from the dirty laundry again — Chan remembered wearing it last week, which felt like it had happened years ago. His face had the slightly shiny quality to it that spoke to him having done some of Hyunjin’s skincare routine tonight.
“Hyung,” he said, padding into the room in his sneakers. “It’s late, won’t you come to bed?”
“Huh?” Chan said, before he unlocked his phone screen and was shocked to find that it was late. Much, much later than it had been when he first went down to the workroom. Exactly how long had he just been sitting here, staring out into nothing? “Oh,” he said, looking back up at Felix, who was leaning against the desk now. Truthfully the idea of crawling into bed with Felix sounded blissful right that moment. “Yeah, I’ll— come up.”
But Felix was looking at him with concern now, that little cute notch right between his eyebrows. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You look— did something happen? Can I help?”
“Nothing happened,” Chan said. That, clearly, wasn’t reassuring enough for Felix, because he came around the desk and, when Chan pushed his chair out a little, helped himself to Chan’s lap. Chan’s arms fastened around him, holding him there secure, as Felix’s arms looped around his neck and he leaned back a bit to look at Chan’s face expectantly. “Ah, it’s just— well, Changbin just— told me that him and Seungmin are. Uh. In a relationship?”
He expected shock, like he had suffered; for Felix to exclaim in surprise and demand to know more details. Chan wouldn’t even really be able to give him any, because now that he thought about it, he hadn’t thought to ask much at all. Changbin would have known Chan would tell Felix — and if Minho and Jeongin already knew, then that suggested that it wasn’t a complete secret anymore. But when Changbin had said that he and Seungmin had wanted privacy, Chan had been— loath to pry further.
But instead of being shocked to hear about the news, Felix just said, “Oh! He told you about that?”
Chan gaped at him. Then, at a point of absolute despair, he said, “You knew about it?”
“Only recently,” Felix said reassuringly. He ran a hand through Chan’s hair, probably frizzing it beyond any kind of hope in the process. “They didn’t tell me, I just put it together when we came back from the hospital after— the first night. Seungmin wasn’t feeling good and Changbin looked after him and called him baby. Things kind of fell into place in my head after that.”
Chan was silent. Felix stroked through his hair again, and then again when Chan leaned into the touch, silently asking for more. A little childish maybe but he wanted to be soothed. He wanted his love in his arms just like this, to be reminded once again that he could atone for mistakes that he had made in the past.
“He never told me,” he said eventually, very quietly. “He said it’s been going on for over a year now. Changbin’s always told me everything, but he never told me this. I worry that he thinks I would have disapproved.”
The truth was that Chan maybe might have done, if he’d come to know of it originally. He would not have stopped it — and certainly not in as dramatic a way as he had tried to do with Minho and Jeongin — but he would have wanted Changbin to think seriously about it. To weigh the risks of sleeping with someone on the team, to think about what it might mean if it went wrong, to consider their needs as a whole over his desire for another person. And Seungmin had been so young, too; Changbin would have needed to take care as the older party, the more experienced one.
Chan really was the worst kind of hypocrite.
Felix leaned in and kissed his cheekbone, soft and lingering. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said. “It was a secret from everyone. They just wanted something for themselves.” He smiled, then, a mischievous slant to his mouth. “Not everything is about you, hyung.”
Chan laughed, a little surprised but utterly charmed, the way he always was when Felix got sassy with him. “Thank you for the reminder,” he said. “Hyung’s big brain needs it.”
Felix hummed under his breath, before he kissed Chan’s forehead this time. “Come to bed,” he said. “I want to use your chest as a pillow.”
Chan smiled at him, sure his face was so soft with love that Jeongin or Hyunjin would have tried to throw a shoe at him if they’d seen it. Felix just smiled back. “Your wish is my command,” Chan said.
——
After Chan left, the room was filled with silence. Not a ringing kind, not an apprehensive kind, but silence all the same. Changbin looked at the closed door for a long few seconds, not sure what he would find when he turned to look at Seungmin, but when he did, eventually, work up that courage, Seungmin wasn’t even looking back. He was looking at the monitors showing all the camera feeds.
Changbin looked there too: Chan climbing the stairs, presumably to his office; Jisung in the living room, curled up under the covers of his air mattress that Changbin had, eventually, blown back up to full capacity right before dinner; Jisoo in the kitchen too now, apparently making the world’s quietest bowl of ramen. Nobody else was stirring.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when the silence grew too much.
Seungmin looked at him, then. He wondered if Seungmin really, truly understood the ways in which Changbin loved his eyes. Changbin said it to him enough, after all, but it was most often during sex, when Changbin felt— most unable to keep his thoughts to himself. He was a stereotype of a man, in that regard, and he sometimes thought Seungmin thought Changbin was just saying it.
Not true, in the slightest. When Seungmin looked at him like this, clear and straight, Changbin felt a little bit like he understood the point of poetry. Not that he’d ever write it — not that he’d ever really read it, either — but he got the sentiment all the same.
“You should be,” Seungmin said, after a few moments where they just looked at each other. “One of my pillowcases still has a bloodstain on it.”
“Not—” Changbin started, and then fell silent. Seungmin watched him, pretty eyes unreadable. The reality was that when Seungmin was angry about something, he made it very obvious. When Seungmin was even mildly irritated about something, he made it your problem. So the fact that he was sitting there, very quiet, without any expression on his face, told Changbin everything he needed to know. But he said, all the same, “I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first.”
A beat, and then— Seungmin smiled, the barest lift of his mouth but on Seungmin it was so obvious. It was a little playful, and not at all what Changbin was expecting to see. “Well, it’s not like you meant to get shot,” he said.
“Seungmin,” said Changbin, frustrated with this and barely knowing why.
Seungmin sighed, and then pointed at the godawful couch against the wall. “Come and sit down there with me,” he said.
Changbin did as he was instructed. He was full of energy, suddenly, a nervous kind that was running through all of him. Logically he knew it was to do with finally, finally having told Chan the truth, but that thought was far away. He just knew that his hands were shaking.
He expected Seungmin to sit down next to him, but when Changbin sat on the couch, Seungmin surprised him by sliding his slippers off and then fully just climbing into Changbin’s lap, knees spread on either side of Changbin’s thighs. Changbin’s hands instinctively came up to hold his narrow hips, pointed through his pyjama pants, as Seungmin settled his bony ass right on Changbin’s thighs. Things like this happened so rarely, and almost never in the middle of the workroom, that Changbin felt like the frustration had been knocked out of him through genuine shock.
Up close the effect of Seungmin’s eyes was always near unbearable, and yet Changbin couldn’t look away, as Seungmin looked at him, one of his hands coming up to rest on Changbin’s shoulder, the other cupping Changbin’s cheek. Despite the warmth of the room, and the space heater humming in the corner, Seungmin’s hand was still so cold. Changbin didn’t flinch, though; he was used to it by now, Seungmin’s icy fingers on his skin.
“It feels better, doesn’t it,” Seungmin said quietly. His eyes slid away from Changbin’s for a moment, to where his ear was scabbed over and nasty with it. But Seungmin wasn’t talking about the ear; he added, “To have told him.”
Changbin closed his eyes. For a moment all he could smell was Seungmin, the scent of his body wash; he must have taken a shower after Changbin left him that morning. “Yes,” he whispered.
It did — it felt so much better that Changbin hadn’t realised just how bad it had started to feel to keep this particular secret from Chan. It was one thing to hide it when it was just sex, just him and Seungmin blowing off steam together. Him and Chan had never really discussed that kind of thing, except for when Changbin, eighteen and a little scared of the feelings inside of him, had drunk a little too much of the cheap soju they had been sharing and had admitted to Chan that he thought he, maybe, possibly, was attracted to men.
Me too, Changbin-ah, Chan had said. He’d been much more sober, had been tempering himself where Changbin had not been, and he’d looked at Changbin very steadily and without any kind of judgement. I like men, too, it’s okay. Changbin had never felt more understood than he did in that moment. Then Chan had frowned and said, Fuck, you don’t like me, do you?
Gross, no, Changbin had said, and they’d never really discussed it again.
So sex was one thing but love? The kind of love he felt for Seungmin, the kind of adoration and full-bodied affection he felt? It was certainly not anything less than what he knew Chan felt for Felix, if expressed in a different way, and it was that love that Changbin felt the guilt about having kept secret. It had been a secret that meant something to keep.
“Good,” Seungmin said. Changbin opened his eyes again and Seungmin leaned in and kissed him. A chaste press of his lips, and he pulled further back when Changbin tried to chase his mouth to keep kissing him. He was smiling again. If the eyes were difficult up-close, the smile was almost worse. Changbin couldn’t help but smile back, a lovestruck sop through and through.
“You knew I wouldn’t mind,” Seungmin said. “You knew, that’s why you did it. There’s no point in— apologising for something there’s no need to say sorry for. It was— time. We were— I was ready for it. For everyone to know. For—”
He was struggling with the words, the way he only ever did when the words meant something, when it was his attempt to express his emotions. Changbin slid his hand up the back of his hoodie and spread his fingers against the bare skin of Seungmin’s back. It might not help Seungmin express himself, but it made Changbin feel good to feel the way Seungmin’s ribs expanded with his breath in.
“I’m tired of not having you,” Seungmin said eventually. “Hyung. I don’t want you to sneak back upstairs at 4am anymore.”
Changbin didn’t point out that he hadn’t been doing that since the night of Blackbird’s. His bedroom, as far as he was concerned, was just a place to keep his clothes. But that was not what Seungmin was saying, and Changbin understood him. He understood him perfectly.
“You have me,” he said. “And Seungmin-ah. Baby. I am so glad to have you, too. I love you.”
“Hyung,” Seungmin said on a sigh, but not like he was irritated, or exasperated. Like he was pleased to hear the words. He’d never sounded like that before, when Changbin told him he loved him. “I love you too.”
Changbin might not ever get used to those words out of Seungmin’s mouth. He’d never take them for granted, that was for certain. “We’re going to be okay,” he said, a promise to the two of them. “All of us. We made it through.”
“We made it through,” Seungmin said. There was a flash of something in his eyes, another hint of that mischief that Changbin didn’t usually see without the edge of pissy bitch with it. “Well, all of us except my pillowcase,” he said.
Your pillowcase cost 15,000 won from Coupang, Changbin wanted to tell him, but he couldn’t, because Seungmin leaned down to kiss him properly, and Changbin promptly forgot anything he had to say in favour of kissing him back.
——
There was a small gap in the curtains drawn over the window in Hyunjin’s room, sending a pane of light across his bed and onto the floor. The lamp outside on the street, a nasty shade of yellow, softened only by the distance the light was having to travel to reach Hyunjin’s bedroom.
Otherwise the room was dark. He had turned off the lights hours ago, a game, maybe, a pretence that he would sleep. He had not been sure who he was trying to fool. He had even gotten into bed, just to continue the farce, but then had noticed the gap in his curtains. He could not bring himself to twitch them closed, but neither could he sleep with that light spilling through.
He got up, eventually. Pushed the covers back off his lap, got to his feet, shoved them into his slippers. The hallway was dark too, not a single light on. Everyone else was sleeping. It was late enough — or early enough — that probably even Seungmin was sleeping.
Jisung was sleeping.
Seeing Jisung caused such a surge of emotions in Hyunjin that when he finally laid eyes on him, standing in the entrance to the hallway and looking at where Jisung lay on his stupid air mattress, he had to stop and breathe through it. The Hyunjin who had once existed in locked rooms, the one who had existed only as a vague sense of pain within a boy-shaped body, would have been shocked to know that emotions such as this even existed. He would not have thought himself capable of feeling them.
He shuffled into the room, trying to not make too much noise in his slippers. He didn’t want to wake Jisung now, and have to come up with another reason for being up. Another water glass he didn’t need in his room.
But when he came to a stop standing over Jisung’s sleeping form, Jisung didn’t stir at all. There was such a sense of— shameful disappointment in that, seeing Jisung sleeping on his stupid air mattress, snoring peacefully. No nightmares for him tonight. Hyunjin did not want Jisung to have bad dreams, didn’t want him to have disturbed sleep, but if he did have one, Hyunjin would have an excuse, then, to wake him. To touch him gently, like he had done last night. An excuse to call his name softly.
You little fool. The anger still so deep inside of him that it seemed endless, the embarrassment like a constant prickle of pins and needles in his limbs. Quieter now, at least, but present and there, holding his tongue, holding him back just enough. The ongoing, ever-present fear of what having Jisung would mean for him, the phantom ghost of a body between his legs.
Felix’s voice saying, can’t or won’t, the shame of knowing he was right, knowing that Hyunjin might not get anywhere if he didn’t open his mouth and say it. The desire to press his mouth to Jisung’s forehead again and listen to Jisung’s breath shudder out of him and wonder what it might be like to do that to his mouth. Wishing that could be enough when it had not been enough in the past. The deep, deep desire for Jisung to understand him without words.
A therapist, Felix had said. As if. Hyunjin could not say any of this aloud to someone like that. He could not explain it to a stranger, someone who would be able to dissect him and explain his brain to him. He did not want that. The knowledge that he would have to say it to Jisung made him feel like he might die.
You stupid little fool, he thought. I love you. I love you. Don’t make me say it. I love you. Please don’t make me have to say it.
Chapter 31
Notes:
It’s here! The final chapter! The evil is (mostly) defeated!!
I know we say this every time but we truly did not expect this update to take so long 🫠 we had to kind of emergency move apartments due to some maintenance neglect on our landlord’s end that caused a sudden and severe infestation of rats in the building, which !!! was untenable, and for a while there when apartment hunting we were staying in Rara’s parents’ house, which was not conducive to writing, as you can maybe imagine. If you follow us on twitter, you are well aware of the Rat Flat Saga.
But it is done! We are here!! I really hope you all like it ♥
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Seungmin was not very good at adapting to new things in his life, not when it was something good. He was excellent at making contingency plans, abandoning things when they seemed to be going wrong, and landing on his feet elsewhere, far away from the blast zone. He had learned to do that in the aftermath of his father’s suicide and it was a skill that had helped him survive numerous power struggles, the gangs he worked with all inevitably imploding once all the egos got in the way.
But when it came to the good things, Seungmin had never quite let himself believe in them. Never allowed himself to trust that way, knowing it could be snatched out of his grasp as quick as anything. He’d done a lot of work these last few months, and especially this last week, since they had told Chan about their relationship, working to overcome that.
He watched as Changbin, sitting beside him at the workbench, smothered a giant yawn against the back of his hand. The remnants of their breakfast lay on the table in front of them, food that Changbin had made and brought down for them earlier, as Seungmin performed his usual morning checks of the overnight footage. Morning had always been a relative term for Seungmin, but this week he had genuinely been performing them mostly in the morning. It turned out that it was easier to go to sleep at a reasonable hour when he knew that Changbin would not be leaving his bed in the early hours anyway.
Seungmin smothered his own yawn too, caught in that instinctual need to do so after watching someone else. Not even he could override that. Changbin smiled at him, and Seungmin glared back, which was not easy to do in the middle of yawning and therefore probably not all that intimidating.
To cover up from that, Seungmin said, “I bet Hyunjae will have something to say about your ear.”
Changbin made an aborted movement to touch his poor, mangled ear. It was healing better now, once Seungmin had started sitting him down for nightly cleaning of the wound. He had replaced his pillowcases with some dark ones ordered online, and been grateful for them, because although the wound was healing better, Changbin did have a habit of somehow scratching at it in the middle of sleeping and causing it to bleed.
It’s itchy, he’d said like a petulant child a couple of days ago, when Seungmin had woken to discover blood on his own cheek.
You sound like a petulant child, Seungmin had told him.
Now, Changbin smiled wryly. “I’d come up with a cover story,” he said, “but I don’t think that would work on Hyunjae-hyung.”
Seungmin expected it would not. Hyunjae had called Chan for a meeting a couple of days ago, offering once again to meet him at Maniac, something that had, once again, not best pleased Minho. He seemed to view the fact that Hyunjae continued to know about Maniac a personal affront and failing. But Chan had agreed, and set the date and time for them to discuss recent events.
I think he probably knows, Chan had said of the phone call. That we’re responsible for Blackbird’s at least. This, too, had sent Minho into a tizzy.
“You could tell him the truth,” Seungmin said. “Or some of it. That it got shot off, that might earn you some kind of street cred with him.”
“I don’t need street cred,” Changbin said, proudly. Seungmin made a perfect scoffing sound under his breath; it was in fact the dictionary definition of a scoff. “Hey!” Changbin said, and reached out as if to swipe at Seungmin’s neck. Seungmin could have dodged it without even falling off the stool he was sitting on, but instead he let Changbin’s hand land, flat-palmed and not painful, and then felt it relax into a loose hold, Changbin’s thumb curving around under his ear.
There was silence for a while, the two of them looking at each other. There had been a lot of moments like this during this past week, moments where it was clear that Changbin had been expecting a different reaction but was not exactly surprised by the one he actually got. Now, sitting with Changbin’s gaze warm on him, his hand heavy against Seungmin’s neck, Seungmin had that same frightening sense of being understood that had caused him, in the past, to try to ruin these moments with Changbin. To try to seize back some of the control he had felt slipping through his fingers, terrified to be lost in these emotions.
He sat there in silence, letting himself breathe through that feeling. It was okay to be understood, to have a person who saw Seungmin’s every facet and knew how to read him. In fact, it was more than okay — there was safety in this. Safety and security and acceptance and stability: all the things he’d been craving since he was fifteen, and been too scared to let himself have.
The moment could not last, though. He would not be able to stand Changbin’s sappy eyed look at this time in the morning. So he said, “You could tell him a shark ate it.”
Changbin grinned. “A sashimi chef came at me,” he said. “Mistook my head for a tuna.”
“A seagull swooped down and snatched it off your head,” Seungmin said.
Changbin pouted at him. “Are you saying that my ear looks like something from Paris Baguette?”
Seungmin pretended to peer at his good ear, and then the one that had been shot off. “Well,” he said, “if the stale baked good fits.”
That made Changbin start laughing, a giggling sound that was so at odds with the way he looked, hulking out of his shirt with the way he was sitting as he laughed. Seungmin felt a pulse of joy bright and triumphant, and with it came a smug voice in his head saying, hehe, I won!
“This is very silly,” he said, mouth twitching with his own repressed laughter, as he got to his feet and began gathering up all the breakfast plates.
“You started it,” Changbin said, mostly through his laughter as he too got up and tried to take the plates off Seungmin. “Here, baby, just leave those, I’ll take them up later.”
Seungmin raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, obviously you will,” he said. It wasn’t as though Seungmin was going to climb all those stairs himself just to take these back. If Changbin didn’t do it, Seungmin would leave them until either Minho snapped and did it, or he could bully Felix into taking pity on him.
Before Changbin could retort to that, though, the door opened and Chan came inside. He was a little dressed up, in neat, dark grey slacks and an expensive-looking black sweater. Probably cashmere, if Seungmin’s eyes were correct, soft and silky and warm. He had silver-rimmed glasses on, too, and he’d have looked downright respectable if it weren’t for the tattoos on his hands.
He was looking down at his wrist as he came inside, where he was wearing an honest-to-god watch, heavy and clearly expensive too. Nothing on him was show-y, or over the top, the way so many people could be when they came into their wealth later in life, feeling like they needed to prove themselves, but what Chan was wearing was, all the same, a very obvious show of his wealth. It was simply the kind of look that would speak only to those who knew what they were looking for.
“I think we can start leaving,” Chan said, without really looking at the room at large, squinting at the hands on his watch. He could read it, probably. Seungmin hoped he could. “Hyunjin will be down in a minute.”
“Good morning, hyung,” Seungmin said, very loudly.
Chan did look up at that. He, somehow, seemed almost surprised to see Seungmin here, even though this was where Seungmin spent roughly twenty-three hours of every single day and had done so for the past four years. “Good morning, Seungmin,” he said. Then, to Changbin, “You ready?”
“Sure,” said Changbin easily. He plucked the plates out of Seungmin’s hands and set them down at the edge of the bench, right where Seungmin would have left them anyway. Then he leaned in, the intention obvious, and kissed Seungmin on the mouth, a chaste but firm kiss. Seungmin stood there stiffly, not exactly kissing back but not— pulling away either. Not protesting, not shoving Changbin back. Fighting the urge to let his eyes flutter shut.
When Changbin pulled back, Chan was staring at them. He looked like he’d never seen either of them before; he looked like he’d just watched a dog ride past on a unicycle. The expression on his face almost made up for the squirming, hot way Seungmin felt inside at having been kissed in front of another person.
A clatter from the hallway, loud enough to be audible, and then the door opened and Hyunjin stood in the frame. He was not dressed nicely like Chan was, or even Changbin, in his jeans and form-fitting henley. Hyunjin was wearing slim sweatpants and a hoodie, with a leather jacket over the top, either for warmth or for an odd kind of style. His hood was pulled up, covering his hair, and the shadows on his face made the lingering remains of his black eye seem darker than usual. He didn’t look pathetic at this point though, he looked a little more like someone dangerous. A little more like his old self.
He didn’t come in. He said, “Are we going or not?” and then disappeared again, his boots clomping down the hallway in the moments before the door shut again.
“It’s too early for him,” Chan said, indulgent and fond, and Changbin grinned like he, too, was charmed by it, and Seungmin thought, with an old irritation that didn’t really rankle anymore, it’s early for everyone, that doesn’t mean he can be a brat. But Seungmin didn’t really have any room to be throwing rocks at brat glass houses, so he kept his mouth shut.
“Come on,” Changbin said. He grabbed his keys from the workbench and together him and Chan left the room. Changbin didn’t look back, because he had said his goodbye, one way or another, but Chan did, to give Seungmin another one of those wide-eyed looks of goggling confusion. Like he still could not wrap his head around Seungmin as a person who kissed someone else.
Seungmin slipped into his desk chair and watched them all pile into the car. It was not until the grainy image of the car disappeared out of the little parking lot that he touched his mouth and let himself, just slightly, smile in his own, private amusement.
——
Seoul Station in the early morning was not as quiet as Jeongin had expected it to be. He’d never been here before — he’d never had a need to be — and it was a lot more chaotic than he’d imagined. He’d been to subway stations before, after all. Him and Changbin had once gotten lost in Hongdae station and almost ended up on a train to the airport. But this station, for actual trains, was overwhelming.
He stuck close to Minho’s side as they wound their way through the station, past the fast food places and convenience stores and through to where the train platforms were. If Jeongin was finding it hard to be here, Minho was almost vibrating with his dislike of this place. He walked like someone who did not care if he had to shoulder someone out of the way, and perhaps people saw that on his face, or maybe his general air was contagious, because everyone was giving them a berth that they weren’t giving anyone else.
Felix and Jisoo trailed after them: Felix tucked into a white padded coat that went down to his knees that he said had appeared in his wardrobe one morning — a present from Chan, probably — and Jisoo with a suitcase rattling against the tiled floor. It was not the suitcase she’d arrived with, that little thing, but something bigger, to fit the wardrobe that she and Felix had gone out to buy during this week. She’d thanked Chan for his generosity and then added, sardonic and dry, that she figured he didn’t expect her to sleep with him in return. Chan and Felix hadn’t been able to meet each other’s eyes for an hour afterwards.
Even at this time in the morning, the restaurants were full of people having one last meal before they got on their train for wherever their destination was. They had left before they could eat, and it was almost a relief to get away from that section of the station and out to the platforms, away from the smell of the food sending Jeongin’s stomach grumbling.
The tracks were on ground level, with a platform waiting area jutting out over some of it, so that once they went through to the ticketed area, Jeongin could see the long lines of the trains, blue and sleek, waiting for their passengers. He was used to subway trains, and the length of these platforms, never mind the trains themselves, baffled him a little bit. His life had always been so small and contained that sometimes it was shocking to realise just how many people lived in this city, in this country — there was a reminder here, in the length of the trains, in the amount of them scheduled just in this next hour.
Minho did not break his stride as he scanned the electronic boards above their head for Jisoo’s train to Busan, finding it before Jeongin could even begin to look and grinding out, “Track 10.” He sounded like his back teeth were gritted so hard that he was having trouble forming any words.
Jeongin reached out and touched the back of Minho’s hand and watched as Minho twitched, but not like he wanted to snatch his hand away. It was more like he was having to stop himself from grabbing Jeongin’s hand. Jeongin knew that if he did so, the hold would be— bruising. A man holding onto a lifeline. The knowledge of that didn’t make Jeongin want to hold his hand less.
But he didn’t have a chance to. Minho turned to Jisoo and said, shortly but very politely, “Give me your case.” This was a tone he seemed to reserve almost entirely for Jisoo, and it amused and vexed Jeongin in equal measures. He wasn’t sure if this was Minho’s default when confronted with a woman, or when confronted with someone he mildly respected, or if it was specific to Jisoo. Jeongin didn’t really want to ask, because if it was the latter, if it was because of Jisoo, he wasn’t sure how he would feel about that.
Well, no, he did know how he would feel about that. And he didn’t want to have to hate Felix’s sister in that particular way.
“Hyung, there’s an elevator,” Felix said, but Minho gave said elevator a quick, disdainful look, and then took Jisoo’s suitcase from her. There was an escalator too, but he seemed to view that with equal suspicion and instead he carried Jisoo’s suitcase all the way down the stairs and set it down and then didn’t let her take it back.
“Which carriage are you,” he said instead.
“Seventeen,” Jisoo said, accepting the loss of her luggage with ease.
Minho scanned the train cars closest to them and then took off down the open end of the platform, pulling the suitcase behind him. It rattled against the stonework, and Jeongin, trailing a little bit behind him but not too far, was charmed by the sight of him. He’d never seen Minho doing anything like this before. Of course, he wouldn’t have, since they never really went anywhere, but still— how odd, how lovely, to see his hyung rolling a suitcase around.
Carriage seventeen was practically at the end of the platform, where the tracks all headed out to the rest of the country in a mass of overlapping metal. The train doors were all open, waiting for the passengers, and Jeongin had passed a number of windows that had people already sitting in them, waiting to be on their journey. Minho came to a sudden stop right outside the open door for car seventeen, left the suitcase right there, and then took exactly five steps backwards. This, Jeongin understood instantly, was to give Felix and his sister privacy.
Jeongin went to his side, and tucked his hand into Minho’s elbow. At first he could barely do it, because Minho was so tense, his whole body held stiff and still. It was like the moment he had stopped moving he had become some kind of statue. But when Jeongin touched him, there was the usual loosening of his stance, enough so that Jeongin’s fingers could curl more easily into the space there now.
Jisoo and Felix gathered around the suitcase. They looked, for a moment, exactly how Jeongin had imagined they’d look — Jisoo standing with her head high, seeming calm, and Felix’s eyes very big, visibly trying to hold himself together. But then, after that moment passed, Jisoo swallowed, and held out her hand for Felix to take, the two of them almost clinging to each other.
There was no guarantee that they’d ever see each other again, and everyone knew it. At the very least, there was no guarantee when they’d next meet, with Jisoo trying to establish a false life for herself in Busan and Felix here, laying low in the aftermath of his father’s empire crumbling into small pieces for vultures to snatch up. Seungmin had warned them that it would be best to go a number of years without arranging to meet, lest someone draw any connection between the two of them. Minho had agreed, and all of this could have been chalked up to the usual paranoia, except that Chan, gently, had told Felix that they were right.
They could, at least, communicate in the meantime. Chan had arranged for Felix to have a phone, the shiniest latest model that Felix had accepted with sincere thanks but no real enthusiasm. He seemed to view it as something of a necessary evil. He was prone to leaving it laying around the house for someone to stumble upon, but unlike with Jeongin, it did not seem to be accidentally done. It was like he was putting it down and walking away from it when he grew tired of it.
“Noona,” he said, blinking rapidly.
Jeongin, very carefully, turned both himself and Minho around until they were facing back towards the balcony area a floor above. It was a long, straight view to it, and they could see all the people milling above there in vague coloured blobs, people coming down the escalators or the staircases. Minho, already holding himself in that tense way, seemed to almost start vibrating with the effort of being so still.
“Hyung?” Jeongin murmured to him, his voice soft and intimate, to make up for the fact that he could not do much more touching than this in public. It was likely to make Minho so much worse.
“It’s too open here,” Minho said, through clenched teeth. “I don’t understand why they built it this way. A sniper up on that level would have easy access to anyone waiting down here.”
“I don’t think the architects thought snipers would be a big problem,” Jeongin pointed out. Minho made a scoffing noise under his breath, as if to say the architects were fools, then. “Besides, if someone pulled out a sniper rifle up there, I think someone would notice.”
“People don’t notice things they aren’t looking for,” Minho said darkly.
There was no real argument for a statement such as that, so Jeongin didn’t bother. Instead, he took the chance and he lay his head, slowly and carefully, against Minho’s shoulder, tucking himself even closer to his side. He could feel even better now how stiff Minho was, how every single part of him hated that they were here, in this place, waiting whilst Felix and Jisoo said their goodbyes to each other, but yet he was here, putting up with it. He was doing this, for Felix’s sake.
The love Jeongin felt for him threatened to bring him to his knees. It was not the first time it had happened, that sensation of buckling, and it certainly was not the last, and yet he did not think exposure would ever make him used to it. It happened daily, constantly — the deep, dark sea in which he was already drowning closing another wave over his head, sealing his fate. It was not even scary anymore — he was in the water with Minho, after all, the two of them holding hands as they sunk into the depths together, and nothing was scary when Minho was with him.
“Hyung,” he said, after a little bit longer, as the number of people on the platform grew as the time for departure got closer. “Can I get Burger King to eat on the way home?”
Minho— sighed. The kind of sigh that was exasperated and irritated only because it was covering up all of the bone-deep fondness that Jeongin could hear underneath. “I suppose so, baby boy,” he said.
Someone cleared their throat next to them; Felix, standing to the side, seeming to not want to interrupt. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying, but he was not crying now. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his coat, shoulders slumped down, mouth trembling a little bit. There was no sign of Jisoo.
“Where is your sister?” Minho asked blankly. Felix motioned to the train without a word. Minho said, still blank, “I would have helped her with the suitcase.”
Felix cleared his throat again before he tried to speak. His voice was still a little thick. “She said she could manage it herself. That it was better to say goodbye— cleanly.”
He didn’t look like he felt the same way at all, but perhaps Jisoo had known the best way to go about this. No protracted goodbyes on the train platform, like something from one of Jeongin’s dramas, everyone hugging each other one by one before waving out of the train window as it pulled off. If this was a drama, Felix would have chased the train down the platform until he reached the end. Instead, they would all head home before the train had even started moving.
Jeongin looked between the open door of the train, and then at Felix, sad and small. “I’m going to get Burger King,” he offered, holding out a hand for Felix to take if he wanted to. “Do you want some too?”
Felix took his hand. His fingers were very cold. But he smiled, as best as he could, and said, “Yes, that sounds good, Jeongin.”
——
Changbin had never been a huge fan of the office at Maniac. If it had been up to him, he would have had the entire place gutted when they first took over the building: removed all the panelling, all the ugly heavy furniture, redone the entire place so that it was modern and vibrant like the rest of the club was. He didn’t have a bone of interior design in his body, but he’d thought, once or twice, that it would have been a good project to have given to Hyunjin, to keep him occupied at the time.
Chan, very understandably, hadn’t wanted to waste the money doing that, not when Maniac was, even from the beginning, meant to just be the first step on a long path of future plans for business. Chan didn’t even spend that much time here, either, which was lucky, because after about forty-five minutes of being in here, Changbin inevitably started feeling claustrophobic. Not even Seungmin’s workroom, which literally didn’t even have windows, made him feel like that.
In reality Changbin knew this place looked like what it was meant to look like — a nice office, fancy without ostentation. That didn’t mean he had to like it.
Hyunjin didn’t like it either. As soon as he walked in the door, he said, “God, I forgot how much this office sucks ass.”
“And that’s exactly the kind of attitude I need you to not show in front of Hyunjae,” Chan said to him, as he took his coat off and hung it in the little corner wardrobe he had for just that. Heaven forbid anything as mundane as jackets be showing in an office such as this. “I brought you along for a reason, and that reason was not so you could sass one of our most important business connections.”
Hyunjin rolled his eyes where Chan could see it but otherwise didn’t say anything, which meant that he knew he was acting childish. He always was a little bit childish when he was tired, or maybe just when he was with Chan and Changbin, like he didn’t have to be the Hyunjin who would look after himself, fierce and independent. He could just be the Hyunjin who had been spoiled rotten.
While Chan went around behind his desk to pick up the memos and mail that had been left there for him by the staff, Hyunjin went to the couch and didn’t throw himself down into it but there was a sense of a controlled collapse against the cushions. It wasn’t even that early, recently, but Hyunjin’s sleeping habits were what they were, and had been from the moment he’d been able to express a personality.
Changbin watched him carefully whilst not trying to be too obvious about it as he headed around to take his usual position behind Chan’s left side. Even beyond the hour of the morning, Hyunjin looked tired, dark shadows under his eyes and a sense that he was just going through the motions of it all. It was obvious that, for whatever reasons, he wasn’t sleeping well.
This past week had been hard for Hyunjin, Changbin knew. He had been quiet and withdrawn, in a way that couldn’t quite be put down to the lingering effects of his concussion. He had continued to spend most of his time in his bedroom, but he had come out for meals, or when requested, and hadn’t always disappeared back in there once he had eaten. He had, once or twice that Changbin had been witness to, spoken to Jisung; Jisung had reported to Changbin separately that Hyunjin had asked him a couple of times if he had taken his pain medication or if he needed a glass of water.
I think we’ll end up okay, Jisung had said to Changbin cheerfully, after another bath, this one tiring Jisung out far less. He’s never going to like me all that much but he’s too nice to hold a grudge against me.
This was so backwards to everything Changbin knew about Hyunjin that he hadn’t even had the heart to protest. Let Jisung placate himself however he could. Instead he had just placated himself with the knowledge that Jisung had at least stopped making noises about moving into his bedroom again.
“At least I’ll finally get to meet him,” Hyunjin said after a couple of minutes of silence, other than Chan shuffling papers. “Hyunjae, I mean.”
“You might not be that impressed,” Chan said, almost muttering, not looking up from the post-it note he was reading, a message scrawled in the distinctive writing of their head bartender.
“I’m determined not to be,” Hyunjin said scoffingly. He folded his arms across his chest. He had not removed his jacket or his hoodie, despite the relatively mild temperature in the room. Either he was making some kind of obscure point that made sense only to himself, or he didn’t feel comfortable right now. The latter was both more likely and made Changbin feel sad. “I know he’s— helping me out with my— stuff, but I’m still not happy about the shit he pulled with Lix.”
“I get that,” Chan said. “Hyunjin, you know I— understand that. But I brought you here for a reason, for a purpose. Give him a chance, okay?”
Hyunjin didn’t look like he was going to do that. But, again, instead of protesting, he just scrunched himself into the back of the couch further, moving so that he could lay his head carefully against the backrest. Maybe Changbin should have checked if Hyunjin had taken any pain medication today. Perhaps he could get him to take some before Hyunjae and the others arrived—
But it was already too late. There was a knock on the office door and Kangmo, the daytime security officer, stuck his head around it and said, “Uh, sir, your visitors are here.”
He looked a little uncertain, which probably made sense; Chan rarely had meetings this early at Maniac and certainly never with the likes of Hyunjae. It was always with people the staff would recognise, vendors for alcohol and bar snacks, for updated equipment and new shipments of glasses to replace the ones patrons inevitably broke. As far as the staff of Maniac were concerned, Chan was just a normal business owner. Hyunjae, for all he had, apparently, a respectable business front, did not pass quite so well.
“That’s great,” said Chan. “Can you bring them up?”
Kangmo nodded and then disappeared, the door swinging shut behind him. There was silence in the room, Hyunjin sitting with one leg crossed over the other, his dangling foot tapping the air in a restless fashion. When Kangmo opened the door again a minute or so later, not a single word had been spoken by any of them.
Chan got to his feet as Hyunjae’s party traipsed into the room, Hyunjae at the head, looking confident and in control. He was dressed in a tight black turtleneck, and it was not that Changbin hadn’t recognised over the years that Hyunjae definitely worked out, but it was another thing to see it so obvious in front of his eyes. The effect was obscured slightly by the long brown coat he was wearing, down past his knees and expensive-looking. Changbin suspected it was designer; Hyunjin would likely know which one.
He had the same two with him as last time. Juyeon was wearing a bomber jacket, reminiscent of Minho, with jeans and black leather boots. Coordinated, but easy to fight in if need be. Sunwoo, sloping in after the other two, had on a red hoodie and black sweatpants, baggy-legged with a rip at the knee. The shoes on his feet looked like knock-off Converse that were minutes away from disintegrating right there on the office flooring. His hair was too long, sitting over his eyes. He looked less like the twenty-something year old Changbin knew him to be, and more like someone’s sulky teenage cousin.
“Hello, Chris,” said Hyunjae, voice very mild, no edges to hook onto. Chan inclined his head in greeting. “Changbin.” Then he eyed Hyunjin, sitting on the couch, arms still folded across his chest. “Oh,” Hyunjae said, his voice showing just the briefest flash of amusement. “I see you also brought your resident delinquent.”
This caused Hyunjin to scowl deeply, Sunwoo to do the same, and Changbin to bite the inside of his cheek. After a moment, both of the resident delinquents eyed each other, and neither of them looked especially impressed with the other. Hyunjin, however, possibly had a bit of an edge — he was prettier, certainly, but the bruises made him look more impressive than Sunwoo’s sulkiness.
“This is Hyunjin,” Chan said. He didn’t further elaborate, or explain more than that, but the implication was clear that Hyunjin, like Jeongin, was not a new addition.
Hyunjae raised an eyebrow. He looked like he was in a good mood, or perhaps forcing a casual atmosphere, because he said, still almost amused, “Your team is bigger than I thought it was.”
“Not especially,” Chan said vaguely. “You’ve met more of mine that I’ve met of yours.”
“Very true,” Hyunjae said, sounding like the statement made him very happy, although he must have known this to be the case. Of all of Hyunjae’s employees or business partners or however he ran his business, they had only ever met Juyeon and Sunwoo. They knew that he had more of them, just from their own research and their own understanding of Hyunjae’s set-up. It would be impossible to do the kind of business he did with just two other people involved.
A pause, and then Chan motioned to one of the couches. “Why don’t we sit and discuss what we came here for?”
Hyunjae nodded his head and took a seat on the couch opposite Hyunjin, who was scowling at him with impressive fervour. Hyunjae ignored him expertly. Chan, when he came around his desk and sat down next to Hyunjin on the couch, patted Hyunjin’s knee as if he was trying to be soothing. It didn’t work, and neither did the careful hand Changbin placed on his shoulder when he took up his position behind Chan again. Hyunjin sat tense and clearly on edge.
On Hyunjae’s side, Juyeon sat next to him, whilst Sunwoo lurked behind the back of the couch. He seemed restless, shifting from foot to foot one moment, then pacing a little back and forth at others. It wasn’t enough to put Changbin on edge — Sunwoo had always seemed harmless enough, and Hyunjae seemed to treat him like one would treat an errant fly in the room — but his energy didn’t seem entirely at peace.
There was a moment of silence, the two groups eyeing each other across the coffee table. Chan seemed very willing to wait Hyunjae out, since he was the one who had called the meeting, and in the end it was Hyunjae who said, “I’ll be honest, I’ve been trying to think of how to talk about this the entire way here, and I think it’s best if I just address the elephant in the room. I know that it was you who blew up Blackbird’s.”
It took real control to not react to that, even though Chan had already warned Changbin that this was likely to be the case. He kept his hand on Hyunjin’s shoulder, and felt Hyunjin go very tense under him, but otherwise showed nothing. Chan simply folded his arms slowly over his chest and said, “You’d be a stupider man than I know you to be to have not put that one together, Hyunjae.”
Hyunjae let out a bark of laughter that sounded mostly startled. “I’ll take the compliment!” he said, grinning. “I was expecting you to deny it.”
A shrug from Chan. “There doesn’t seem to be much point,” he said. “You got us the guns, after all. You knew how much heat we were packing and that we were clearly planning a big job. And you know how much I hated Lee Jaerim.”
Hyunjae’s smile dimmed a touch. “Yes,” he said, more seriously. “I know that very well. And I know, also, that you have Yong— Felix. I assume he didn’t come to you empty handed in the beginning.”
For the first time, Chan didn’t really answer. There was something almost funny about his refusal to talk about Felix with Hyunjae, his jealousy of that relationship so obvious that it caused Changbin a little bit of second-hand embarrassment. Instead, after a pause, Chan just said, “The safe that you provided ended up being very helpful. Thank you for your generosity in that.”
“Ah yes,” Hyunjae drawled, sitting back in his seat. He was not going to comment on the way Chan had skimmed over the question of Felix’s involvement, then. Probably just as well. “I did wonder what that was all for. I assume that was the model Jaerim had? It was very difficult to track one of those down at such short notice, you know.”
They did know, they knew it very well — Changbin more than most, watching Seungmin get more and more tetchy about the whole thing. Chan said, matching some of Hyunjae’s lazy tone, “And here you made it sound like you just had one laying around the place.”
“Who has one of those spare?” Hyunjae retorted. “I was willing to do just about anything to make sure Felix was actually safe.”
If he was trying to bait Chan, then he got a double catch with that one, because Hyunjin roused a little bit, dislodging Changbin’s hand as he sat upright, his hood finally falling back from his face. Chan put a hand on his knee again, warningly this time, and Hyunjin did not say anything, but whatever it was on his face that Changbin could not see had Hyunjae’s attention.
He was looking so carefully at Hyunjin’s face that for a moment, Changbin was afraid that he was going to comment on his looks. If Hyunjae said that Hyunjin was pretty, there could potentially be no coming back from it. Instead, after a few seconds of scrutiny, Hyunjae said, “You look like you’ve been through the wars, delinquent Hyunjin.”
There was concern in his voice, seemingly well-meant. Perhaps he had really not seen the faded bruises until the hood had fallen away, in the awkwardly dim lighting of this awful office. His concern, however, did not seem to placate Hyunjin, who said, low and a little vicious, “I don’t like you.”
Changbin watched Chan’s hand clamp harder on Hyunjin’s knee, but it was too late for that, the words had been said. Hyunjae, however, just looked highly amused by it. “This is the first time we’ve met,” he said.
“I don’t care,” Hyunjin said. “You almost got Lix killed.”
Hyunjae’s amusement dropped away entirely. If they had been trying to land hits, Hyunjin had managed it. There was a terrible tense silence, Hyunjae looking first from Hyunjin’s face then to Chan’s, where he lingered for a few seconds. Quite what he was reading there, Changbin couldn’t know — he wished he could see Chan’s expression from this angle, wished that he could reach out and put a comforting hand on Chan’s shoulder, but that would be too obvious.
Eventually Hyunjae looked back to Hyunjin. “I didn’t mean for that,” he said, deadly serious now, quiet with it. “I would never have meant for that to happen.”
“Well, it did,” Hyunjin retorted. “It was careless and stupid, and I don’t like careless. I especially don’t like how much you know about us, when you’re so apparently thoughtless with information. You know who Felix is, you know who Maniac belongs to. You know who blew up Blackbird’s. Aren’t you here to threaten us? Blackmail us?”
Hyunjae had an eyebrow raised by the end of that. “You’re a suspicious thing, aren’t you,” he said. He was playing with considerable fire and he didn’t even know it. “Did you learn that from Minho? Anyway,” he added, a little more breezily, “I’m not here to blackmail you at all. Mostly I’m here to compliment you on a job well done. You certainly sent a hell of a message to Jaerim.”
“Not that he had enough time to appreciate it,” Juyeon murmured, mouth quirked up into a smile, which made Hyunjae laugh. It didn’t make Chan laugh, or Changbin. There was a— tension inside him that had been winding tighter and tighter ever since Hyunjae had called this meeting, an awful thread of potential knowledge that he hadn’t wanted to really look at. A picture that could be painted if he wanted to paint it, and he didn’t want to.
But he wasn’t surprised when Chan said, “Hyunjae. Were you the one who killed Lee Jaerim?”
If the surprise at the question on Hyunjae’s face was feigned, he was a phenomenal actor, because it seemed to take him totally off-guard to be asked that. Not only that, but Juyeon seemed confused, too, and Sunwoo stopped in his restless pacing to say, low like he didn’t mean to be overheard in the quiet room, “Oooh, that would have been fun.”
Hyunjae twisted to glare at him and then twisted back. “No,” he said. “I didn’t kill him. I fucking wish I’d been the one to kill him, could you imagine? It would have felt like being on top of the fucking world. But it wasn’t me.”
Changbin tried to not let out a sigh of relief at that. He would not have judged Hyunjae for wanting to kill Lee Jaerim, or even going and doing it, but the way it had been done— Changbin would have been disquieted to continue working with a man capable of such indiscriminate violence. Minho, at least, was very targeted with his.
“If it had been me, I would have done a cleaner job of it,” Hyunjae added, sneering a little. “What a mess that was. I assume you saw the crime scene photos? Whoever did that has no concept of finesse or a deft touch. Just blind anger and destruction. Jaerim loved to surround himself with people like that. It seems fitting that one of them would be his end.”
“We saw them,” Chan said quietly. “Whoever killed him did us a favour. Neither of us had to get our hands dirty to remove him from power, his own people did that for us. But their level of violence and their cavalier approach to collateral damage unsettles me. I don’t want people like that getting too much of Jaerim’s empire. I don’t want to topple him and have someone worse step into the role.”
“Is this your pitch to me?” Hyunjae asked, sounding amused. “Do you want my support as you try to take over from the Magpie? Do you want me to vote you in like we’re deciding on a class president?”
“No,” said Chan. “I don’t want to take over from Lee Jaerim. I don’t want anyone to take over. I want his control over the city dismantled and chopped up so that there is no one person who can step into that role and keep us in a chokehold again. But,” he added, leaning forward, “that’s not to say that I don’t want my share of the cake, so to speak.”
Hyunjae— smirked, a small thing but there on his face. He crossed a leg over the other and leaned fully back in his seat, almost reclining, hands cupping his knee. “What is it that you want, then, Chris?” he asked. “You’ve defeated your enemy and turned his city into a feasting ground for the vultures. What piece of his empire do you want?”
“You know,” Chan said. “You’ve already guessed it.”
“You want Blackbird’s,” Hyunjae said. “Yes, I knew that. Obviously you want Blackbird’s, and who could blame you? The crown jewel of his collection, the shining beacon of his empire. You’ll have a hell of a time with it considering you blew half of it sky high.”
Chan shrugged. “Maybe it’ll mean I get a discount.”
Hyunjae snorted, but in a friendly kind of way. “I doubt that. But if you want Blackbird’s, then you can have it. I won’t stand in the way of anything that you want from this whole venture, Chris. If there’s anything you want that I have my eye on, I’ll stand aside. I don’t want to step on your toes, that’s all.”
Chan leaned forward a little bit, resting his elbows on his knees. “What is it that you want, then?”
“There’s a restaurant over in Dongdaemun,” Hyunjae said. “Fancy place, does excellent beef. I want that. And there’s a bar near Myeongdong that I want.”
“I didn’t think you were in the restaurant or bar industry,” Chan said mildly.
“I import alcohol,” Hyunjae said. “I figure I might as well start selling the shit myself.”
Chan nodded slowly. There was nothing in that area of the city that they were interested in, a little more tourist-heavy than Chan had ever wanted to get to. Students were one thing, foreigners an entire other thing. And so Chan said, “That should be fine. I don’t have my eye on either of those things, I’ll happily hand them over to you. If you require my— assistance with any of it, I will be at your disposal.”
“Luckily, I don’t think many people will be looking at these places either,” Hyunjae said. “They’re small biscuits compared to the money Jaerim was pulling in with Blackbird’s and a couple of the clubs he was running. The truth is, Chris, that I simply don’t want to tread on your toes. What you pulled off— well.” He gave Chan a wolfish grin that did not seem to match the relatively sober tone of his voice. “I’d rather stay on your good side.”
There was something of a long silence. Chan cocked his head to the side and looked at Hyunjae, and Hyunjae looked back, and slowly the wolfish grin faded and what remained was something a bit more— sombre, a bit more like a man who had been bluffing and the facade had slightly been exposed.
The thing was, they didn’t know a lot about Hyunjae’s business other than what they interacted with. The weapons dealing no doubt brought in the bulk of his money, which meant that he was stuck in this business, relying on the likes of Chan and Changbin for his income. Precarious, more precarious than Chan’s position, with Maniac to fall back on — and that had been the entire point in getting Maniac all those years ago. An investment, for if anything went wrong. A legitimate business to bring in relatively steady money. A piece of property for Jeongin and later Hyunjin to jointly inherit if anything happened to Chan, to sell and provide for them both.
It was no wonder Hyunjae was trying to do the same thing. Relying on the people in this industry for the bulk of your income did not leave a person with that many options for if something went wrong. They were, after all, criminals, every single one of them.
“Hyunjae,” said Chan, after a long silence, sounding thoughtful, sounding serious. “We’re allies. You are on my good side, as I hope I am on yours. I don’t want us to have the kind of relationship where it’s a matter of stepping on toes, or of fear of one another. I will support you in getting whatever you want from Lee Jaerim, especially as I know the trouble he caused you in the past. It is what you deserve from that man.”
Hyunjae blinked a few times, looking at Chan like he was a stranger. Then he said, “Stop, you’ll make me cry.” It was a very bad attempt at a joke; his voice was too quiet for it. He seemed to know it, too, because he sat upright and shook his shoulders a little bit, as if to shake off any emotion still clinging to him. Behind him, Sunwoo’s slight snort of laughter went totally unremarked on. “Anyway. If we’re in agreement…?”
Chan nodded, and seemed happy to let the mood go himself. “We’re in agreement. I will invite you to the opening night, when I reopen Blackbird’s.”
“Under a new name, I hope,” Hyunjae said. “Lee Jaerim had no imagination on that front.” He pushed himself up to his feet, with a grunt as though he were elderly, although he was the same age as Chan. Chan, too, stood up, much more quietly. Juyeon followed Hyunjae’s lead with a loose kind of casual air. Changbin, looking at him, vowed to not stand too close. It was bad enough looking up at Hyunjin and Seungmin. He didn’t want to humiliate himself today.
They moved to the door, and only after a couple more moments did Hyunjin get to his feet. He came quickly around the side of the couch and leaned against Changbin’s side, not heavily but very— present. Changbin wanted, desperately, to check that he was okay, to ask about his head, to see if he was in pain. This, he knew without needing to do it, would not go down well with Hyunjin, not in front of their visitors. So instead he just put his hand on Hyunjin’s back, out of sight of everyone else, and felt Hyunjin let more of his weight rest on Changbin.
Hyunjae shook Chan’s hand at the door, a mild air of irony about him the same way there always as when he was doing something that seemed professional businessman-like, and said, “Give my love to Jisung, I hope he enjoyed that sniper rifle.”
Hyunjin went still. He hadn’t really been moving but the sudden frozen set of his limbs was obvious, and what was worse, Hyunjae noticed it immediately, his eyes honing in on first Hyunjin and then, when Changbin winced, on Changbin’s face.
“Is— Jisung is okay, isn’t he?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned about the answer. “I didn’t think anything of him not being here, but—”
“He’s okay,” said Changbin, quickly. Then, for the sake of being transparent, added, “He was injured on the job, but he’ll recover.”
He would recover, and that was a miracle in itself. He was moving by himself, able to get himself to and from the bathroom without needing anyone to help, although Changbin was still sitting in on all baths, just in case. Every day Changbin was so, so grateful to be witnessing the recovery, knowing that Jisung would get better.
Hyunjae nodded, looking genuinely relieved by the answer. Then his eyes bugged out a little again and he said, loudly again, “And what about Minho, why isn’t he here?”
“He’s fine too!” Chan said, sounding like he was torn between laughing and exasperation.
“He got shot,” Changbin said, just because it was funny, the way Hyunjae’s face looked with his eyes all wide like that. “But only a little bit.”
“Oh,” said Hyunjae. “Well, if it was only a little bit, I suppose.” He didn’t look too convinced of this, though, and when he stepped forward to shake Changbin’s hand, he said, “So what the fuck happened to your ear?”
It was so incredibly difficult to keep his laughter at bay, to show none of it in his voice or on his face, when he had Seungmin’s voice suddenly piping up in the back of his mind, a seagull swooped down. “I got shot more than a little bit,” he said.
“Jesus,” Hyunjae said, eyeing the damage, clearly noting how close the bullet had come to hitting Changbin in the head and not just demolishing part of his ear. “Well. I bet a lot of girls will find that sexy. Or guys, if that’s your thing.”
“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Changbin said. He didn’t think Seungmin found it sexy at all, in all honesty. Seungmin seemed to take careful care of his wound, which was slowly healing over, but he didn’t seem like he liked it at all. Too close to home, for him, too close to the reality in which he had watched Changbin die on the security footage. Changbin couldn’t blame him for it. There was something unsettling about seeing the missing chunk of ear whenever he looked in the mirror.
Sunwoo was still lurking mostly to the side, and after Juyeon gave them a wave and a cheerful, goodbye, Hyunjae said, “Oi, moron. We’re leaving, say goodbye to your elders.”
“Um,” Sunwoo said. He sloped forward, the same way Hyunjin sometimes walked, loose and boyish and young. “Uh, bye, I guess? But actually, before we leave, I did just want to say—”
“Sunwoo,” said Hyunjae warningly.
“— I think it’s so fucking cool that you blew up Blackbird’s like that,” Sunwoo finished.
There was a beat of silence, everyone looking at him, his shining face, the way he was smiling for the first time that Changbin had ever seen, and he looked far less delinquent-annoying and much more like a young man, the same way Hyunjin looked whenever he stopped posturing and was just sweet and silly.
“Ignore him,” Hyunjae said. “He was definitely dropped on his head as a child.”
“It’s okay,” Chan said, smiling, half a step from laughing. “I just didn’t think anyone would call it cool.”
“It’s so cool,” Sunwoo said, almost gushing. “Like, I studied all the photos I could find, and Chang—” A surprisingly unsettling twitch from Juyeon, and without looking at him, Sunwoo corrected himself with, “—one of the hyungs got me some of the actual crime scene photos and I don’t even understand how you got all those bombs up to the third floor, when you didn’t go through the casino itself, nobody saw you. And there’s no security footage left! And then you just blew it up like, kablam! I wish you’d left some of the footage just so I could have seen it explode.”
“Well, that would have been a silly risk,” Chan said, “but I do appreciate the sentiment.”
“Hyung didn’t blow it up,” Hyunjin said, piping up where he was still leaning against Changbin. He was smirking himself now, shaking his head slightly to toss his hair over his shoulder. “I was the one who blew up Blackbird’s. Hyung didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Oh my god,” Sunwoo said, eyes almost full of stars as he looked at Hyunjin, who visibly preened under the attention. “That’s so cool.”
“Hey,” Chan protested. “I may not have blown up Blackbird’s but I did get into a high speed car chase! That was pretty cool of me.”
“Were you the one that caused that six car pile up near the Sadang station junction that night?” Hyunjae asked. Chan looked at him and then very sheepishly shrugged his shoulders. Hyunjae seemed to take it as an answer in itself, and he grinned, and said, “And you wonder why I don’t want to get on your bad side.”
Chan didn’t have an answer to that, either, and he was quiet as he saw them off, leading Hyunjae and his men back through the club and out of the back exit, where the three of them piled into a very expensive looking black car, Juyeon driving, and then left without much more fanfare. Sunwoo, bafflingly, waved goodbye to them out of the backseat. Changbin didn’t wave back; Hyunjin, just as bafflingly, did.
Whatever was playing on Chan’s mind seemed to be easily shaken off once Hyunjae was out of sight, because with a sigh he turned to look at Changbin and said, “Should we head back to the house? I imagine you’re wanting to get back to Seungmin and make sure he’s okay.”
Maybe it was just because Chan was feeling the same way about Felix that he said it, trying to project onto someone else — he had not been especially happy about sending Felix to see his sister off without him, even though they all knew Minho would keep Felix safe. But Changbin was touched by the sentiment all the same, because he had been probably even less keen about leaving Seungmin alone in the house with just a compromised Jisung, and he said, “Yeah, hyung, that sounds good.”
Hyunjin, frowning at the two of them, said, “Why do you need to get back to Seungmin?”
Chan and Changbin eyed each other, Changbin feeling a bubbling kind of laughter rise up in himself. “Oh,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual and not at all like there was something deeply thrilling about having another chance to say these words aloud. “Seungmin and I are together.”
Hyunjin— blinked. Then he looked between Chan and Changbin a few times, looking confused and like he hadn’t understood the words at all. “You and Seungmin are— together? Like, you’re dating? Is that some kind of stupid joke?”
“Nope,” said Changbin. “We’ve been dating for months now. He’s going to be your new step-dad.”
That made Hyunjin smile in an uncertain way, the look on his face clearly that of someone figuring out they were being pranked but not entirely sure yet if that was the case. “Oh, okay,” he said. “Just because I hit my head doesn’t mean I don’t know when you’re fucking with me. You should have picked someone other than Seungmin, though. We all know he’s built like a Ken doll.”
“Oh, believe me,” Changbin said, a little leeringly, in a playful way. “He is not at all like a Ken doll.”
It took a moment for that to sink in, and then another moment for Hyunjin to realise that Changbin wasn’t fucking around with him, and was, actually, sleeping with Seungmin. The look of disgust on his face was acute and hilarious. “Ew!” he said, backing away so fast he nearly tripped over his own feet. He was genuinely almost gagging. “Ew, gross, oh my god, why would you say that like that! With Seungmin? You’re sleeping with Seungmin? Gross!”
“Don’t be mean about Seungmin!” Changbin called after him, pulling the car keys out so he could unlock the doors as Hyunjin stumbled towards them.
“I’m not!” Hyunjin yelled back, climbing into the back seat. “I’m being mean about you.” And then the door slammed shut, a nearby pigeon took off into the air, and there was silence.
Changbin turned to grin at Chan, who looked— a little unsettled himself. “I get it,” he said, pained and pursing his lips. “But did you have to include me in the collateral damage?” Changbin just grinned at him harder.
——
Felix watched the city go by, sipping at his chocolate milkshake. He put his feet up, lounging across the space of the backseat. His sister had been in the back with him, on the way to the train station. Her absence now was almost a physical thing. But the feeling in him over it was bittersweet. Before, he’d left her to misery and worse in their father’s house. Now, he was sending her off, to freedom and, hopefully, happiness. He would miss her, but no guilt tinged this parting. He had begun his life, his real life, and now she could too.
He’d done that for her, at least. There could be no regrets there.
In the front seat, Jeongin was chomping with methodical brutality through his meal. He’d handfed Minho a few fries in the beginning of the voyage, and Minho had chewed them like they may as well have been made of cardboard. After that Jeongin had kept his meal to himself. The radio was off, but the silence was pleasant.
It was all, steadily, settling, like a disturbed pond finally coming clear again, all the sand and mud sinking to the bottom. Everything except—
Felix inhaled deeply and expelled it in a huge sigh. He saw Minho glance back at him, and he said, “What? Are you cold? Do you need the heater turned up?”
It was a rapidfire, interrogation type of questioning that spoke of Minho’s continued anxiety. He was still on a pitch from the train station. It was cute, and Felix wondered at that — finding Minho cute. He would never have believed it just a month or so back. “No, thank you, hyung,” Felix said, shifting so he was sitting up properly again. “It’s not that.”
“What is it then?” Jeongin asked— maybe. It was heavily distorted around a mouthful of burger. Minho took his hand off the wheel to flick him lightly on the shoulder.
“Just thinking of the way everything is— healing? I guess. Settling down.” It was a little hard to articulate his thoughts. He stalled by putting his mostly-empty cup into the cupholder, wiping the condensation on his fingers off on the slippery material of his padded coat. “It’s starting to feel over, or like, something new is beginning,” he said slowly. In the front seat, Jeongin was shoving the remainder of his burger in his mouth, but he was nodding along. Felix continued, “It just all feels better, it feels— more honest, more happy. Everything except— except Hyunjin. And Jisung.”
“The melons,” Minho said darkly, and Felix blinked at the back of his head.
Jeongin swallowed, his mouthful so big Felix swore he could see the outline of the food move down his throat, like in a cartoon. “I still say we shove them in a room together and force them to talk,” he said.
Before, when Jeongin had suggested it, the idea had made Felix flinch. But things were starting to feel desperate, as the time stretched on without anything changing, for better or worse, and instead of dismissing the suggestion, he mulled the words over, lapsing into a thoughtful silence. The two in the front were happy to leave him to it.
When they arrived home, Minho and Jeongin disappeared into what was now their room, as they were wont to do, Jeongin with his arm around Minho’s, the tense line of Minho’s shoulders loosening just that fraction. The new Hyundai hadn’t been in the lot when they’d pulled in, so Chan, Changbin, and Hyunjin were still presumably at their meeting with Hyunjae.
That would mean the apartment was empty. Save for Jisung.
Felix, a plan slowly unfurling in his mind, made his way up to the top floor, letting himself into the cosily warm space.
Jisung was on the couch, book in hand. He’d gotten much better, these last couple weeks since he had been injured. He could stand for decent amounts of time, and sit up for even longer. They’d put him up in Changbin’s room, with Changbin blithely lying that he was sleeping in Jisung’s room, when he was actually in Seungmin’s. The only thing keeping Jisung in the apartment now was that, though he could do most else, the stairs were still proving a challenge. But he could go to and from the bathroom on his own, and also, slowly, make himself food. Not that they really let him do that. He was off the opioids, too, and onto over-the-counter medication now, and his colour looked so much better.
He turned alertly toward the door when Felix came in. “Yo,” he said, smiling, looking pleased to see someone.
Felix worked up a smile, closed-lipped. “Hey.” He unzipped his coat, the zipper going on and on, down to his knees, and then peeled it off, draping it over one of the kitchen chairs. It was brand new. Chan had bought it for him, to match his black one. Felix felt flushed; it was almost too warm after the climb up the stairs in that coat.
“Everything go alright?” Jisung asked, something leading in his voice. When Felix looked up, he could see curiosity on Jisung’s face. Felix was never very good at subterfuge like this, his emotions often showed through too clearly. Perhaps some of it still showed, the sadness he had felt at saying goodbye, even knowing that his sister would be finding herself this way.
He inhaled deeply. “Yes,” he said, and then marched into the living area, coming around the couch. Jisung watched him, eyes wide. “Jisung.”
“Uhm, yeah?” Jisung said, clutching his book. He looked much too scared of someone he had once easily laid out on a training room mat. His injury probably had levelled that playing field, Felix supposed.
He sat next to Jisung on the couch, not too close, not crowding him. “We need to talk,” he said.
“Ominous,” Jisung muttered. He shrank back into the cushions. “What did I do?”
Felix shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said, gaze roving over Jisung’s face and trying to see what it was that Hyunjin must see. Where Hyunjin’s love had snagged. Jisung had big, liquid eyes and full, soft looking cheeks. His mouth was small and pert. He was cute, he was pretty. But it was the way Jisung’s— Jisung-ness shone out of his face, that Felix found most attractive about him. His personality was just as much a part of his physical appearance as the actual shape of him.
“Why are you staring at me like that,” Jisung asked, voice going loud and high. Again, a little more frantic, “What did I do?”
So much. “Look,” Felix began, while Jisung looked at him like he was hiding a knife and might stab him again. “I didn’t want to get involved, it’s not my business—” Not true, not when Hyunjin was his best friend, and Jisung had dragged Felix’s name into the middle of their drama. “Well, no,” Felix corrected, aware that he was already beginning to ramble, “it is my business, because you’re my friend, and Hyunjin is my friend. But it’s not my— my place to say—” He stopped, chewing on his lip. Jisung was still frozen in his slouch against the couch, like a squirrel trying not to be seen. Felix decided to change tack, and just be blunt. “Back at the hospital, when you and Hyunjin fought. We could hear some of it through the door.”
Jisung slumped even further into the couch, like he wanted it to swallow him. “Ah,” he said lamely.
“I heard that you think Hyunjin is in love with me—” Felix watched Jisung’s face do— something, some kind of panicked spasm, but he couldn’t read everything there. He ploughed on, “And I don’t think Hyunjin properly— explained. He isn’t in love with me, Jisung. Not like that. He loves me, but it isn’t the same thing. I know what it can look like when watching us, so I get why you might’ve thought that. Hyunjin’s— open and easy physical affection with me is unusual for him, as is his fawning. But it’s not romantic, and it isn’t sexual either. I think— I think that is part of why it comes easier for Hyunjin. Because there’s no sexual desire for one another on either of our parts, so he can hold me and kiss me without his brain getting all snarled about it.”
Jisung respectfully let Felix run through his whole spiel, in spite of Felix’s halting, rambling way of speaking. His fear had dissipated into dubiousness, and now he was frowning a little, bottom lip pouted out. “You can be in love with someone without wanting to fuck them, Felix,” he said, a little— prickly, a little hurt. Like Felix had perpetrated some kind of injustice.
Felix blinked and then laughed, unable to help it. He scrubbed his hands over his face, through his hair, the sheer dramatic irony making him feel an edge of hysteria. When he finally managed to get hold of himself and looked at Jisung again, he found Jisung scowling properly now, like he thought Felix wasn’t taking him seriously, or didn’t believe him. He moved as if to open his mouth, and Felix headed him off, quickly saying, “Yes, yes you can. I know that. But what I said still stands, Jisung. Hyunjin is not in love with me romantically. I’m not going to downplay the relationship we have, because it is intense, more intense than I ever expected a friendship could be. But it’s not romantic. It’s the same love he gives Jeongin, or Chan-hyung, or Changbin-hyung, just differently shaped. The same liquid, poured into different glasses, if that makes sense.” Felix reached out, cupping Jisung’s bony knee and giving it a squeeze. “Trust me, please. Believe me.”
Jisung only looked half convinced, his face squishy-soft in its doubt. But he didn’t seem like he wanted to argue. “If you say so,” he said slowly.
“I do say so,” Felix said, with cheerful steeliness and no small amount of finality. His next words were lost when the front door keypad beeped and the door positively slammed open. It was Hyunjin who rushed in, looking wild eyed and harried.
Both Felix and Jisung startled, heads whipping around, both of them likely looking guilty as could be. Hyunjin’s gaze fell upon them and he immediately frowned, asking, “What on Earth are you two talking about?” All thought fled Felix’s head, his mind buffering, while Jisung opened his mouth, beginning to stammer something out before Hyunjin loudly said over him, “Never mind, actually, I don’t care. I have just been given some exceedingly distressing information, and I need to take a five hour nap to recover.” With that, he huffily flounced into the hallway; the door to his bedroom banged shut moments later.
Felix and Jisung sat in bemused silence for a long few seconds. Then they looked at one another. “Exceedingly distressing information?” Jisung asked. He seemed caught somewhere between amusement and worry.
“I don’t think it’s actually anything bad,” Felix said slowly. “I don’t think he’d be reacting like that, if it was.”
“Mmn,” Jisung murmured, nodding a little. “Yeah. He was reacting like he just found out Jeongin likes watersports or something.”
“Eugh. I hate the way that’s actually a likely potential answer, given what those two are like,” Felix said, and Jisung made a face, nose wrinkling in disgust. Felix laughed a little, covering his mouth. “Hey,” he said, when his giggles had subsided. He put a hand on Jisung’s knee. “Are you sleepy? I’m going to make brownies, I’d like some company. Or some help.” His grin widened, mischievous. “It’s about time you started pulling your weight around here again.”
Jisung’s expression folded into playful outrage, and he said, “Hey!” Felix laughed again.
——
The house smelled like chocolate and vanilla, sweet and warm and comfortingly familiar. The windows were frosted with condensation, steam rising in the air from a freshly pulled tray. Felix had apron strings cinched around his narrow waist, and he was humming softly as he cut into the brownies.
Jisung had his chin propped up on his hand, feeling content. The normalcy of it all was soothing, being able to just sit at the table, enjoy the atmosphere. Tucked away inside on a cold winter’s day, no longer feeling trapped, like he had to be in. The others weren’t about to let him take a walk or anything, but he was beginning to feel— normal again. Like himself. And they were beginning to treat him that way too. The long, lingering looks had mostly stopped, the incessant coddling. It was good to know he would always be cared for if he was in need of it — but he’d been so tired of needing it, of having to ask for help.
Felix looked over his shoulder at Jisung, eyes bright. “Do you want one while they’re fresh?” he asked, in that deep rumbling voice of his.
Jisung shook his head. “Nah, I’d better wait until I eat properly,” he sighed. Felix had given him the requisite helper’s-bowl-of-chocolate-chips, which Jisung had been nibbling on. Not that he’d been much help, sitting here. He wasn’t sure if it was the meds or what, but he found he started to get sick now, if he ate too many sweet things on an empty stomach.
Felix didn’t question him, or take offence, just went back to his task of plating brownies. He was very— chill. Jisung wished he could be so zen about things, or ask Felix his secret, because it wasn’t like Felix’s life had been without its own trials. Jisung had read his fair share of self-help books on anxiety, but it was one thing to rationally know there was no point tying yourself in knots over things you cannot change, versus the body’s inescapable fear instinct.
He’d felt a bit of that, when Felix had sat next to him on the couch. Felt it still, now, as he turned over Felix’s words, and more than that, his motivations.
It had always made sense to Jisung that Hyunjin might never have sex again, that any love he entered into would have to be a chaste one. A little surprising, even so, to find that he and Felix had never done anything beyond cuddling and kissing. But yes, it made sense. Jisung wasn’t sure he believed the rest of what Felix had said, that Hyunjin wasn’t in love with him. It wasn’t really Jisung’s business either way, was it. He felt embarrassed, a bit cracked open, that Felix had felt the need to clarify it to Jisung, like Jisung had any right to Hyunjin’s— affairs, because of his own feelings.
“Alright,” Felix said, turning around with a plate upon which a small trove of brownies sat.
Jisung straightened, his arm falling down to lay on the table, and as he did so his wound twinged, just a little. It did that, now. It might always do that. Scar tissue was stiff and would pull. He’d get used to it, but for now he was just always so aware of his stomach.
Felix touched Jisung’s shoulder, more of a suggestion of a nudge than anything. “Come on,” he said, and Jisung, mildly bewildered, stood up, groaning out of habit more than anything at this point. He wasn’t in pain. Felix held the plate out to him, so Jisung took it. “Let’s deliver these.”
A task. Jisung liked having a task. He followed Felix readily enough for about two steps, but Felix didn’t head for the apartment door. He headed for the hallway. “Uhm?” he said.
Felix paused, looking back at him. “Come on,” he said again. “Hyunjin likes them best fresh.”
Jisung hesitated anyway, biting his bottom lip. Hyunjin had been— better this last week. But better just meant he’d smoothly transitioned back into ignoring Jisung. They hadn’t made up. They weren’t okay. He knew Hyunjin wouldn’t want to see him.
Felix was still waiting for him. Jisung shuffled across the floor, holding the plate out when he got near enough to do so. “You do it,” he mumbled. “He doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“He does,” Felix countered, not taking the plate at all. He turned away again, and Jisung could do nothing but follow stupidly, the plate held awkwardly and warily in his hand like it might decide to bite him.
Felix knocked on Hyunjin’s closed door, bold as anything. His comfort with Hyunjin was still something Jisung envied, but more in an abstract way than before. No longer an ugly feeling toward Felix himself, and more just a painfully sore wish.
No reply came from beyond the door. Felix knocked again, saying, “Hyunjin, it’s me, we made brownies.”
Then an audible, very put upon sigh. “It’s open,” Hyunjin called, sounding morose.
Felix opened the door, and where Jisung expected him to step through, instead Felix wrapped a skinny, wiry arm around the small of Jisung’s back and propelled him forward with surprising force. Jisung caught sight of a startled looking Hyunjin, sitting on his bed, but then his vision was filled with the wooden floor as he stumbled through the doorway, barely catching himself before he tripped fully and sent chocolatey baked goods flying everywhere. “Ah?” Jisung said in total panic, still in the process of righting himself when the door slammed at his back.
Then he just stood there, clutching the miraculously saved plate of brownies in his hands, his heart hammering something fierce from his almost-fall. Hyunjin was staring at him, covers tangled around him, one of his legs sticking out like he’d been about to leap to his feet. His hair was sticking up every which way, and Jisung could do nothing but stare back.
It was Hyunjin who spoke first, a little suspicious, a lot grumpy. “What the fuck,” he said, blinking a bit blearily.
Jisung, self-preservationist he was, contemplated fleeing right back out the door. But his body was stuck, his mind stuttering like a broken engine, disconnected. “I— uhm—” He looked away from Hyunjin, seeing the brownies in his hands, and mentally seized onto them. “Brownies!” he cried, shoving the plate in Hyunjin’s direction. Hyunjin did not move, and his eyes didn’t drop from their squint at Jisung’s face. Nervously, Jisung continued to babble, “Brownies, we made brownies! Well. Felix made brownies. I just kind of sat there, mostly. I’ll just— put them here.” Hyunjin had a set of drawers near his door, so Jisung edged nearer to the piece of furniture, his saviour, and edged the plate onto the top of it. There was stuff on the dresser, art stuff. The plate kind of had to push things out of the way to sit there. Hyunjin watched Jisung in silence the whole time, a very— dangerous, seething kind of silence. Once the plate was settled and not in danger of tipping off the edge, Jisung stepped back, relieved, and said, “Yeah, uhm, they’re warm, so enjoy! I’ll just— I’ll go—”
He flailed for the door handle, blindly because he was watching Hyunjin instead of where he was going. Before he’d done more than just smack at the smooth wood of the door, Hyunjin coldly said, “Don’t you have anything else to say to me.”
“Uhm,” Jisung said, freezing, his arm still outstretched behind him. He processed the question. “I. Uh. I mean. Yes?” Slowly, he straightened, letting his hand drop back to his side. It was like Hyunjin was a snake poised to strike, Jisung instinctively being cautious. “I want to say sorry,” Jisung said, and was both relieved and deeply dismayed when Hyunjin finally looked away, his eyes fixing on the wall, jaw tight. “I know you don’t want me to say that anymore, though. But Hyunjin, that just means that I don’t— I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to make this better.”
Hyunjin swallowed, a muscle in his jaw clenching. His gaze didn’t return to Jisung, stayed on the wall. “I see,” he said, lips barely moving.
Tentatively, Jisung shuffled forward a tiny step. “If you tell me what to say,” he offered, as gently as he could, “or do, then I’ll do it.”
“I know,” Hyunjin said, still staring at the wall, words pushed through his teeth. Jisung’s offer hadn’t softened him at all. In fact, he was possibly even more tense now.
Something about that offered olive branch being so casually slapped away made Jisung annoyed. His tiredness likely wasn’t helping. “Why do you look like that,” he asked, his own unhappy defeat seeping into his tone. “Don’t you like getting your way, isn’t that your whole thing?” It wasn’t a sarcastic question, wasn't meant as a barb, but it was a mistake as soon as it came out of his mouth, he knew.
Finally, Hyunjin broke from his rigid position of staring at the wall, but he didn’t look back at Jisung. Instead he curled down, his hair falling to cover the upper half of his face. “Fuck you,” he said softly, sullen and maybe a bit hurt.
“I don’t—” Jisung said, hopelessly, helplessly. “I didn’t mean it like that, Hyunjin.”
“I don’t want to tell you what to say,” Hyunjin said, very quiet, where Jisung might have expected him to shout or curse. Jisung hadn’t liked him just staring at the wall but this was almost worse, Hyunjin curled away, his face hidden. At least before Jisung had been able to see his eyes, even if they’d been flat and cold. “I don’t need a— a puppet. It’s meaningless, like that. You just repeating what I tell you to, it isn’t real, and I want it to be real. I want something true from you.”
Something true. Jisung’s truths weren’t things Hyunjin seemed to want. “Well, the truth is I’m sorry,” he said anyway, surrender as heavy in his voice as his sincerity. Hyunjin didn’t want apologies, but it was all Jisung had. Deep down, in his heart of hearts, in his fucking soul, he was sorry. “The truth is I’m tired of things being like this between us, or— I don’t like you feeling like you need to avoid me, or knowing that you’re angry at me. At least— this level of angry. You’re always at least a little angry.” He’d had a foolish hope that Hyunjin might laugh, but of course he didn’t. Little fool. Yes, that was Jisung. Try and try again. Jisung swallowed down the burning growing in the back of his throat to continue, “We’ve always been a bit fraught, but I’m tired, Hyunjin. I know it’s selfish of me but I do just want things to go back to the way they were.”
Something about the sound of his voice, maybe the way Jisung hadn’t been able to fully conceal the beginnings of a quaver, made Hyunjin look at him again. He stared, and stared, blank but not— flat. Not like before. Just intense and fixed. “You still haven’t figured it out,” he said slowly. “Why I’m so upset.” Jisung opened his mouth to reply, to throw more guesses out, but ultimately closed his mouth and shook his head. Silence was better, maybe. Hyunjin tilted his head a little, still staring, still surveying. His voice was without accusation as he asked, “Do you remember what you said to me in the hospital? After you first woke up.”
“Uhm, yeah, kind of,” Jisung said. The memories were indistinct, like he’d been underwater the whole time. “Not word for word, but I remember.” He thought of earlier, and the tiniest lightbulb flickered to life in his head. “Felix spoke to me about it. He said— he said you aren’t in love with him—”
“I’m not,” Hyunjin cut him off. Very firm, very sure, eyes unwavering. “I am not in love with Felix.”
“Oh,” Jisung said, voice small, completely understated for what a bombshell that information was. He bit his bottom lip for a moment, mind casting out for what to say and settling on all he was good for. “Then I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for assuming.” Apologies, always.
Hyunjin inclined his head stiffly, his hands clenched in his lap. He turned his face away again, shielding his eyes.
In the ensuing silence, Jisung wondered if that was it. Conversation over, done, sorted. He was supposed to leave now.
But nothing was fixed. Nothing felt right. It all still felt broken and sharp and bad.
He couldn’t leave. He had to ask, he had to probe, he had to pry, he had to push. It went against everything he’d taught himself through the years with regard to Hyunjin. Never push Hyunjin, never ask him for his secrets, never impose. Hyunjin had been imposed upon enough. Jisung had never wanted to— to hurt him. Never.
He made himself open his mouth.
“That’s not it, though, is it,” he said, his own voice too loud in the quiet, it felt like. Hyunjin didn’t react, but maybe there was some feeling of surprise in his stillness all the same. “If it’s about the— the confession, my feelings— I told you I’m sorry, I told you it doesn’t have to mean anything—”
“I’m not angry about the confession,” Hyunjin burst out, bitter and harsh. “I’m not angry about your feelings, Jisung. I’m—” He huffed, mouth twisted in an angry mockery of a smile as he shook his head. “You don’t even see me. You say you love me but you don’t see, you don’t listen—”
“I do listen!” Jisung cried out, counterintuitive because he had to interrupt Hyunjin to say it. But he did, he was trying, he was trying so hard—
“Everything I say,” Hyunjin bit out, raising his head to fix bright, burning eyes on Jisung once more, “everything, you twist or brush off. You argue, you deny it. I say I— I—” He stopped, chest heaving and mouth pressing into a line, the corners downturning. Jisung felt so helpless.
“Try again, please,” Jisung begged. One more chance, please, just one. “I’m sorry, I’ll listen this time, I promise.”
Hyunjin flung the covers off himself, a sudden fit of motion. “I don’t want to!” he halfway screamed, surging to his feet so Jisung had to look up at him. He brought a clawed hand up to his chest, gripping at the material of his shirt over his heart. “I feel— I feel carved open, I feel like I have given you as much as I can, and it isn’t enough!”
Jisung edged backwards, his back hitting the door. “I— I—” he stammered as Hyunjin stared at him with fierce, burning expectation. His throat was closing up, he felt like he was shrinking, smaller and smaller as Hyunjin’s face shifted, conveying disgust and disappointment. Stupid, Jisung was stupid. Was always letting him down. “I— I’m sorry—”
“Stop saying that!” Hyunjin yelled, no longer just halfway screaming, and Jisung, tremulously, shut his mouth, feeling his face begin to crumple. Hyunjin shoved a hand through his hair roughly, pushing all the messy strands off from his face. He was— manic, he was furious, jerky motions and darting eyes. “I really— I don’t know what else to do, or say— I literally— I told you— what do you need from me?” The desperation in the words was rough as sandpaper, and just as abrading.
Jisung shook, leaning back against the door. He wasn’t going to be able to stop it, he knew already. Keeping his lips clamped shut wasn’t going to save anything, though he did it anyway, trying stubbornly. But the corners of his mouth were being pulled down as if by weights, a steady folding, and his vision got blurrier and blurrier until finally, on a blink, tears began to fall down his cheeks. As soon as that happened, he dropped his gaze down to the floor, ashamed and trying to compose himself, but no matter how he tried, the tears kept coming, bubbling up. His chest hitched, and he made a noise, some kind of vocalisation, audible even through his tightly clenched jaw.
“Jisung,” he heard Hyunjin say around the sound of his own heart, pounding in his ears. His cheeks felt sickly warm, and he couldn’t reply; if he opened his mouth he’d fall to pieces. He made another noise, the best he could do, a wet kind of nngh. Hyunjin came closer; Jisung could see his socked feet. He had to look away from even that, casting his gaze over to Hyunjin’s desk, his easel. There was a half finished painting there, lots of globs of blue and white and green. Hyunjin, softer but more insistent, said, “Jisungie.”
Jisung just shook his head, unable to look at him, somehow knowing that was what Hyunjin wanted of him. He could not.
How had things been bungled so badly. How did he always manage to mess up.
“Should I have died?” Jisung managed to choke out, the tears coming in a cascade, a rising tide. Like he’d thought, speaking made things worse, his chest constricting, making the words halting and garbled. “It would have been better, right? I wouldn’t have told you I loved you, if I’d known I was going to live. When I confessed, I gave up, too. I was supposed to die. I should have just died.”
Sobbing was making his wounds ache. The quiet space of the room was filled with his small, hitching breaths, and for long moments, Jisung thought Hyunjin wasn’t going to say anything at all. Wasn’t going to agree, and wasn’t going to deny.
But then he did. “Do you—” Hyunjin began, stuttering. His voice was tight in a way that meant he, too, was crying, or trying not to. Jisung couldn’t look to check, he was too ashamed to meet Hyunjin’s eyes. But the thought that Hyunjin was crying too made him feel wretched. “Do you really think things would be better, if you’d died?”
Jisung shrugged, one shouldered. Maybe he was being pathetic, wallowing in self-pity. But he was so tired. A deep, mental fatigue. He could no longer do this.
Another pause. “How could you think that,” Hyunjin said, almost a whisper, and not quite— to Jisung. A wondering, strange query, something very wrong about Hyunjin’s voice.
Jisung, finally, had to make himself look. Hyunjin was just staring at him, eyes wide, nothing there for Jisung to read except the tears sparkling in his eyes. “Don’t you?” Jisung asked tiredly. “Even a little?”
Slowly, Hyunjin shook his head, a mechanical motion, like he had hinges instead of bones. Like he wasn’t fully feeling his body. “No,” he said hoarsely, and Jisung could finally place the emotion on his face — horror. Hyunjin stared down at him, horrified. “Jisung,” he gasped out, “Jisung, I’m sorry.”
Jisung wondered at that, but was too exhausted to even speculate. He just blankly asked, “Why are you sorry?”
“For fucking this up so badly you think I want you dead,” Hyunjin cried, voice cracking. A tear fell down his cheek, glittering like a dewdrop. “After everything you— I would never—”
Hurt sincerity. Jisung shuddered in a breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, something in him relieved, distantly, that he’d been wrong, that Hyunjin was denying it. But it wasn’t an accusation he should have lobbed. He was just— just so tired. So tired. “That was mean of me to think of you, you’re right—”
Hyunjin laughed in incredulous disbelief, burst out and breathy. Jisung’s words died in his throat. “Oh my god,” Hyunjin gasped, staring at Jisung like he didn’t know him, like Jisung had done something foul. “What the actual fuck, Jisung.”
Jisung shrank away. “Sorry,” he whispered.
Hyunjin gaped at him, his chest heaving, hair mussed. Then he closed the small distance between them and grabbed Jisung by the shoulders, hard. Painfully hard, almost, giving the impression that Hyunjin wanted to shake him, and was barely stopping himself. “Why are you saying sorry,” he said lowly, a barely contained storm. He did give Jisung a shake then, just a tiny one, his hands tightening impossibly until Jisung had to gasp. “Why. You tell me you think it’d be better if you’d died, as if that wouldn’t have fucking killed me too, and now you’re saying sorry?”
In Hyunjin’s grip, Jisung couldn’t cringe away, couldn’t hide. He shook his head, mindless, new tears streaming down his face. “I’m sor—”
Hyunjin’s eyes flashed with rage and before the words were even fully out he had yanked Jisung forward and kissed him, firm. It was mismatched, Jisung’s mouth open on his supplications. Hyunjin smelled like roses. His lips were soft.
Yes. No. His want, the ache of his love, threatened to overwhelm him. Everything he’d wanted for so long. Hyunjin, warm and solid against him. Yes. But this wasn’t real. It was a bandage for Jisung’s torn apart, bleeding heart. Jisung knew pity, knew it now, kissing him with awkward firmness. No.
No.
Jisung wrenched his face to the side with a gasp, trying to arch back. When had Hyunjin gotten so strong. “Not like this,” he sobbed, suddenly overcome. His heart was beating like a drum in his chest, like a caged bird, flinging itself against the bars of his ribcage. “Not because you feel sorry for me— not—”
Hyunjin’s voice was alarmed when he spoke, Jisung unable to really look at him, too busy squirming, trying to push away and failing. “Jisung—”
“This is cruel, you’re being cruel,” he wept, still struggling in vain. He twisted— tried to twist, out of Hyunjin’s grip, and his abdomen gave a sharp throb. Jisung’s legs almost buckled, and he felt his face go white. “Ah,” he gasped out, high and pained, his hands going to clench over his bandages.
Hyunjin let him go, and Jisung had the thought, I am going to fall over, but then he was against Hyunjin’s body, tucked close, Hyunjin’s arms around his waist, supportive and tight. His head notched under Hyunjin’s chin, and he sagged there, breathing hard, chest shuddering. Hyunjin took his weight, cradled him gently. All of Jisung’s energy left him, all his emotions, too. Syphoned, suddenly. He was just a shell, just a battered little body.
“Are you okay?” Hyunjin asked softly, and with Jisung’s head tucked under his chin, ear pressed to the upper swell of Hyunjin’s chest, he could hear the words rumbling in Hyunjin’s lungs. It made him shiver a little, lashes fluttering and eyes rolling back. “Do you need a doctor?”
Jisung nudged his face further against Hyunjin’s chest. “I’m okay,” he whispered. The pain had gone as quickly as it had come. He’d just strained himself a bit.
They stood in silence, breathing, Jisung still hiccuping residually. In many ways, this did not feel real. Finally, Hyunjin said, “I want to show you something.” Jisung wasn’t sure he could handle— anything more, really. But he said, mmm, and then Hyunjin was pulling away.
He guided Jisung to his desk, an arm hooked around the small of Jisung’s back. Normally, Jisung would be asking questions, pestering, chirping, but even if he’d been mentally up to that, this silence felt— sacred, somehow. So he let himself be led, feeling floaty, almost, at how tender Hyunjin was being. Revelling in the warmth of that feeling.
The desk was real wood, and what was once a pristine surface was now covered in all colours of paint splotches and smears. Brushes sat bristles-up in mason jars, and dotted around. Scrap paper with colour swatches, a messy palette. Hyunjin shifted through the items on his desk, with the hand that wasn’t currently perched on Jisung’s waist and making him feel dizzy. He brought up a battered, well-worn sketchbook, with a creased cover, and flicked it open. Jisung dazedly noted how pretty his fingers were, flipping through the pages.
There was a loose sheaf of paper inside. Hyunjin laid it out, spreading the pieces apart, until his desk was covered in fluttering, loose paper, overlapping one another in places, but even in fragments the drawings etched upon them were discernible.
His face, mostly. Jisung’s. The rounded curve of his smile, gums visible above his teeth. His full cheeks, bunched around his grinning mouth in some of the drawings, less pronounced in the ones where he was serious. One page of just his hands, decidedly his because they depicted the ring he often wore on his left forefinger. Soft and light lines, heavier charcoal strokes. Some of the pages had splashes of watercolour, warping the thin paper.
Amidst his own likeness, the others were sprinkled. Jisung recognized the edge of Jeongin’s sharp grin, his dimples, and the swooping curves of Changbin’s morning bedhead. These people Hyunjin called his family, immortalised in graphite and ink.
Jisung stared down at these slivers, these glimpses into Hyunjin’s heart, small fragments viewed through the gaps of a tall wooden fence, just enough to piece the image together. He looked at his own likeness lovingly portrayed amongst the others’ and suddenly saw, Oh, I am a part of Hyunjin’s family. Jisung had been, these last few days, continuously bombarded with words and signals from the others saying the same thing: You are family, you are cared for. Everyone on this team loved him, found him irreplaceable. Everyone thought he belonged here, with them.
Even, it seemed, Hyunjin. Somewhere along the line, somehow, impossibly, Hyunjin had come to see Jisung as the others had. Family, maybe. Or something like.
Jisung raised his eyes, looking at Hyunjin who, he found, was already looking back at him. “Do you see?” he asked softly. His thumb was rubbing back and forth along Jisung’s spine. It was fritzing Jisung’s brain out, a little, made the enormity of what he was being presented with difficult to parse. But he thought he did see, maybe. He thought perhaps he finally had things right.
Of course Hyunjin had gotten so mad at Jisung for the implication that the only reason he stayed with Jisung in that building was guilt, that the only reason he kissed him was pity. It was because Hyunjin really did care, and deeply. Jisung could admit that, in that hospital room, when he’d placatingly said he knew Hyunjin, on some level, cared for him, it was said not because he really believed Hyunjin had a depth of feeling for him, but because he didn’t think Hyunjin liked being seen as aloof or unfeeling. In that moment, Jisung had thought that even if Hyunjin did care, Jisung was at the bottom of the list, barely on the page at all. And today, he had reiterated that all over again.
No wonder he had gotten so upset when Jisung continued to insist on his apathy. No wonder he furiously left, when Jisung accused him of only being able to perceive grief in love if he applied it to someone else. No wonder he had been so frustrated all this time.
Jisung felt the tears returning, throat thick and eyes stinging. The knowledge that Hyunjin, these past years, hadn’t been just putting up with him and did, actually, care about him, was almost too much to bear. “You care about me?” Jisung warbled, the words choked and damp.
“Yes,” Hyunjin whispered. His eyes were so big, darting all over Jisung’s face, hopeful and glittering. “Yes.”
“I didn’t— I didn’t realise,” Jisung said, as obvious as it was, needing to put it out there all the same. “I thought you just kind of— put up with me. I didn’t realise we were friends, that you considered us friends—” Hyunjin’s face did something, an odd twitch, like he was about to sneeze. Jisung quickly course corrected. “Or— family? You consider us family?”
Hyunjin still had that about-to-sneeze look on his face, as he stared down at Jisung from up close. Jisung watched him warily, sniffling a bit. “You—” Hyunjin said, and then just shook his head. He brought his hand up and cupped Jisung’s cheek, thumb swiping over the dampness there, which had begun to grow stick-tacky with salt. “Little fool,” Hyunjin sighed, and then, softer, warmer, murmured, “Little love.”
Jisung’s mouth went dry, his stomach dropping down to his toes. “Ah?” he said.
Hyunjin’s face had gone mushy-soft, and his gaze was decidedly on Jisung’s mouth. He leaned in, the motion slow, a little stuttering, like he expected Jisung to jerk away again. But he didn’t. He stood there, and let Hyunjin kiss him again, his eyes sliding shut when their lips made warm contact. His hand on Jisung’s face was trembling lightly, and his mouth— as plush as Jisung had ever imagined, as silky soft. Much nicer, now that he could appreciate it, now that he wasn’t freaking out or actively dying. A slow, tender kiss, painfully molten. Like he was saying with his actions what he could not with his words — which of course he was. Hyunjin had always been like that. It was always about reading between the lines with him.
It was Jisung who broke the kiss, gentler this time, and Hyunjin let him go. When he opened his eyes, Hyunjin’s mouth was a bit pinker, some hair floating in front of his face. He had new tear tracks down his cheeks, shining in the low light. He looked at Jisung with wide, dark eyes, impossibly vulnerable. Jisung wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Hyunjin so open.
“Jisung?” Hyunjin questioned, voice small.
Jisung’s brain was firing slowly, while at the same time being hurled through the sparkling cosmos at the speed of light. “I really am a melon head,” Jisung said, slow and dazed. He kept looking at Hyunjin’s swollen, pink mouth.
Hyunjin frowned, and said, “What?” The expression, the word, washed over Jisung, taking a long few seconds to filter through and then for him to parse.
“Minho-hyung,” Jisung said, through a mouth that felt not his own, “he said I had a melon for a brain.”
The frown cleared up like clouds making way for the sun. And then Hyunjin smiled. The effect this close was dazzling and debilitating. “You do,” he said. His thumb stroked along Jisung’s cheek, digging into the softness. “You have a cantaloupe head.” When Jisung said nothing in his own defence, just kept staring in quiet awe, Hyunjin’s smile went fond. “But maybe I do too, a little bit.”
Jisung shook his head, absently, because he was remembering he had hands, and he brought those hands up. He cupped Hyunjin’s face in turn, palms immediately wet with Hyunjin’s tears. Then he pulled Hyunjin in, meeting him halfway, lips parted in anticipation, gently wrapping around Hyunjin’s lush bottom one. Hyunjin came easy — impossibly so. All that simmering heat spilled over, mouths sliding against one another, damp and sensitive. This was a dream, a hallucination. It had to be so, because Hyunjin was even more desperate than Jisung, throwing himself into the kiss. A reckless shock of demanding, hands clutching Jisung close, tongue sweeping past his teeth. Jisung let his mouth fall open, let Hyunjin lick at his tongue, and forgot to breathe for so long he began to sway. This could not be happening, and yet it was. That was Hyunjin’s hair tickling over his knuckles, the taste of Hyunjin’s balm on his mouth. It made no sense. It was happening.
When they pulled apart they were both breathless. It was a stunning look on Hyunjin. Damp already, hair beginning to stick to the sides of his face. If his mouth had been pink before that was nothing compared to now, red and swollen smooth. Wet with spit. Jisung’s spit. His stomach swooped with a rush of desire, and then came the subsequent cold wash of guilt— except should he feel guilty, did he need to anymore? A habit years in the making, turning away every time he found Hyunjin sexually desirable, desperately trying not to notice it. But how could he not notice it, now. He had done this to Hyunjin. Jisung had. He was the reason Hyunjin’s hair was mussed, and his mouth looked utterly obscene. Why Hyunjin was panting, why there was a petal pink blush across his face.
Jisung swallowed. His mouth tasted, faintly, of strawberries. He had just made out with Hyunjin. His hands, even now, were resting atop Hyunjin’s shoulders, their bodies pressed close. “You love me?” he squeaked, it all catching up to him like a crushing wave.
Hyunjin’s obscene, swollen mouth went a bit wobbly, which was not at all what Jisung had wanted. “I said it back,” he murmured. “You lost too much blood, so you didn’t hear me. But I said it back. In the van. In the hospital. I said it so many times.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Jisung said slowly, so very dazed. “You— we— I'm me. And you’re you. I never expected anything. I never even thought it was possible.”
And now Hyunjin was frowning, and Jisung wanted to undo that, if he could, but he wasn’t sure how. His brain was decidedly not working. It was all a looping mess in his skull, an ouroboros of all he’d thought to be true, with what was happening in this moment. Diametrically opposed, it couldn’t happen but it was, it couldn’t but it was. Round and round.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin said, a little admonishing, a lot sad.
Jisung didn’t like it, the sadness. “It was just always bad, and like— fair enough, you know? I put my foot in it the first time we met because— of course I did, and after that it was— impossible,” he tried to explain, feeling the words tumble out of his mouth like— his thoughts were physical objects, bound by gravity. As if his skull was a malfunctioning gumball machine, and his dispenser-mouth opened and then suddenly words, before he could really think better of them. Hyunjin’s expression wasn’t clearing up. In fact, his frown was deepening. It should have stopped him, but instead he just desperately babbled on, “I had— had nothing for you, nothing to make it better, nothing to fix it. I’m dumb and short and awkward and loud and annoying and— okay, I’m not a fucking ogre or anything but I know I’m doofy looking. The only thing I really have going for me is I’m funny but you don’t even think I’m funny! So, yeah, Hyunjin, I’m struggling to understand, because you’ve never— you’ve never liked me. How hard did you hit your head in that blast?”
Hyunjin didn’t laugh. Hyunjin never laughed, so it wasn’t a surprise, but so much had been turned upside down today that Jisung had maybe hoped he’d get at least a chuckle. But Hyunjin just stared at Jisung in silence, frown stuck like stone over the world’s saddest eyes, and Jisung wanted to disentangle himself and walk out and maybe, actually, throw himself off the roof.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin whispered. “You’re beautiful.”
Something about the words made Jisung flinch like Hyunjin had tried to hit him. He blushed so hard it was like someone had splashed warm water on his face, a wash of heat. “Bweh?” he said, sounding not unlike a surprised goat.
“You are,” Hyunjin insisted, still frowning, eyes earnest. So very, terribly sincere. Jisung was going to explode. “I like your face, I like it so much,” Hyunjin continued mercilessly, no care at all for the fact that Jisung was literally about to cover his walls in gooey body parts. “And yes you’re loud, and you can be annoying, but— I like that too. I’d rather have you being loud and annoying in a room than have the quiet of your absence. I— I love the sound of your joy. And you’re loyal and kind and brave and giving and, yes, funny, I do think you’re funny, you’re so funny and your laugh is— is— how can you say you have nothing?”
It was a question. Jisung should try to answer it. Hyunjin was waiting, obvious expectation on his face, his gaze darting all over Jisung’s features, reading whatever it was his expression was doing. Jisung couldn’t actually feel his face properly, it just felt hot and terribly tingly. “Bweh,” he said again, a sad, confused little bleat.
Hyunjin was clearly beginning to struggle to hold onto his composure. The corners of his lips pulled down, eyes sparkling with gathering tears. It was painful to watch, the slow unravelling. “Fuck, Jisung, I’m sorry,” Hyunjin said, voice catching. His cheeks, previously mostly dried, now had new tears spilling down, and Jisung reached for his face, wiping at them, while saying no no no nonono, but it didn't stop them at all. Hyunjin sniffled, swallowing thickly. “I wasn’t ready,” Hyunjin choked out, catching Jisung’s wrist and stilling him. Holding onto him, maybe. “I knew you loved me and it— it terrified me. I’m still terrified. So I pushed you away. But I never wanted you to feel— like I couldn’t love you. Like you were unlovable.” The crumpling he’d been holding at bay finally overtook him, his bottom lip pouting out, the corners of his mouth digging into his soft cheeks in a picture-perfect sad curve. “It’s not true. You’re so— so—”
There was something there, some stone to turn over and examine at a later time. The fact that Hyunjin had known, before the fire, before— it all. He had known and that had been why he’d acted the way he had. Jisung would pick that apart later, pull it undone and figure out what it meant for his memories and his emotions.
But right now he could devote no attention to it at all.
“Please stop crying, please,” he begged. He let Hyunjin keep one of his wrists in a grounding grip, but with his other hand he kept wiping at Hyunjin’s tears, and then wiping the wetness on Hyunjin’s shirt in turn. “I can’t handle it, it makes me want to rip my own kidneys out.”
Another sniffle, but also, the tiniest hint of a smile. “Your kidneys?” Hyunjin warbled.
“Wrong organ? Bad organ?” Jisung shot off, chasing that ghost of a smile. “Would you prefer my liver?” And then, his reward — the tiniest laugh, mostly just a damp huff.
“You’re so silly,” Hyunjin mumbled, bringing a hand up to wipe at his face himself, tears clearly slowing.
Jisung felt so full of sunlight it might start shining out of his ass. “Yeah,” he said, dreamy and stupid. On some wild impulse, he reached up and tucked Hyunjin’s hair behind his ear. Some of it had been sticking to Hyunjin’s face. Hyunjin stayed still and let him, which still felt— insane. “This is insane,” Jisung said, hand travelling from Hyunjin’s ear to instead trail across his cheek, wiped free of tears but still tacky-damp. His skin was so soft, so smooth. Hyunjin dropped his own hand, to allow Jisung space to touch.
“Insane,” Hyunjin echoed, prompting.
“Mmm,” Jisung hummed idly. “You, wanting me back.” He traced along Hyunjin’s full cheek, pressed lightly, watched the dimple his fingertips made. Hyunjin stood there, letting it happen. Even softer, Jisung added, “It’s like a dream.”
Hyunjin didn’t move, as Jisung’s fingers trailed down to his jaw, the firmer flesh there, pulled tight over bone. The sharp jut of his chin, ever so slightly prickly with stubble. He watched Jisung though. Hands on Jisung’s hips, resting. He was thinking, processing.
“You should be at least a little mad at me,” Hyunjin murmured, raspy and a little wet. Jisung looked at his mouth, fingers dancing upwards, but not quite daring to touch. “Just once, you should be mad at me. For making you feel like— like this is something crazy, and not— what you deserve. For all you’ve done for me, for all you’ve given me.” He swallowed, the corners of his lips momentarily tightening. “I really am so sorry, Jisung.”
Jisung heard him, in terms of volume, but he didn’t really hear him. He’d stopped listening. The index finger of his right hand swiped lightly across Hyunjin’s bottom lip, back and forth. The motion was entrancing.
“Jisung,” Hyunjin said, firmer, louder, and in doing so, he dislodged Jisung’s hand.
Jisung blinked, meeting Hyunjin’s eyes again, feeling like he had to physically drag his own eyes up to do so. Escaping that mouth was— hard. “Huh?” he said, halfway drunk on the power, already, of being allowed to touch Hyunjin’s face, being able to look at him like this, without needing to draw back or the fear of making Hyunjin uncomfortable.
Hyunjin, in the continuous habit now of surprising Jisung, laughed. Burst out, and clearly taking himself by surprise too. Unable to contain it. Jisung did not care that Hyunjin was likely laughing at him. Hyunjin was laughing right in front of his face. Jisung was back to being in danger of exploding.
“You didn’t even hear me,” Hyunjin said, still laughing. “I’m giving the first apology of my life and you missed it.”
Jisung felt himself blushing again. “Sorry, your face is— distracting.” He paused, considered the ramifications of that sentence. “Am I allowed to say that?”
“Good distracting?”
Very solemnly, Jisung said, “Very good.”
Hyunjin’s laugh had been repressed into a smile. “Then yeah, you can say it.”
And then it was Jisung’s turn to smile. He beamed up at Hyunjin, who looked at him for a long beat and then swayed forward to kiss him again. Every synapse in Jisung’s brain lit up. Hyunjin loved him back! Hyunjin was kissing him! Hyunjin wanted him! Hyunjin!
They kissed, and kissed, Jisung bending back a little with the force of it, Hyunjin’s arm firm as steel around his back, supporting him. And then Jisung was being edged backwards, until his calves hit the bed. And then backwards still. He gasped, in surprise more than anything, as Hyunjin carefully lowered him down onto his tousled bed. This was dangerous, Jisung’s brain helpfully supplied, as Hyunjin climbed on top of him, one leg coming up so his knee was braced on the mattress, and the other—
Sirens and lights streaking through Jisung’s mind. Hyunjin’s other leg had settled between Jisung’s thighs, wedged there, already pressing against Jisung’s crotch. Jisung made a little squealing noise into Hyunjin’s mouth, his legs squeezing around Hyunjin’s thigh, toes curling in his socks.
Hyunjin pulled back. If the way he’d looked before had been bad, this was worse, so much worse. On top of Jisung, his hair falling down around his face. His expression was concerned. “Did I hurt you?” he asked.
Jisung felt hysterical. He’d lost so much blood when he’d gotten stabbed, but he’d had weeks for his body to replenish, and they’d given him transfusions besides. And right now he kind of wished they hadn’t. Because he had a lot of blood, plenty of it, and it was all gleefully cramming into his cock right now.
“Uhm, maybe a little,” Jisung lied, because he needed Hyunjin to move his leg before he noticed. Because— he didn’t think Hyunjin wanted that. The fact that Hyunjin wasn’t even thinking about it, didn’t even consider that this position could— titillate.
A strange situation, because Hyunjin could never be called innocent, not after all he had endured. And yet there was an innocence here. An obliviousness. Perhaps even a disinterest, in going any further than kissing. He didn’t think Hyunjin was hard at all. He hadn’t felt— anything, pressed up against him when kissing. Just kissing for the sake of kissing. Jisung was happy to do that. But he didn’t want to make Hyunjin uncomfortable with his own body’s reactions.
Hyunjin immediately went from mild concern to outright worry though, gaze going— down. To Jisung’s stomach ostensibly, which, he had to admit, was genuinely pulsing with soreness. But it wasn’t his stomach that Jisung was worried about right now.
“Ah, I’m alright!” Jisung said, too loud, patting urgently at Hyunjin’s shoulders until Hyunjin looked back at his face. “I’ve never been better, to be honest! Everything is wonderful!”
“Jisung,” Hyunjin said. At least now he looked less worried and more unimpressed.
“I am, really. Scout’s honour, or whatever,” Jisung said, holding up three fingers. But that felt wrong, so he switched it to four, and then that felt even wronger, so he put it back down to three.
Hyunjin kept his impassive facade up for a few more beats and then broke out into giggles. He rolled off Jisung fully, curling against his side instead. It hit Jisung then — Hyunjin was happy. He was happy in this moment, because of Jisung. Happy enough to kiss, to cuddle. To not worry. To not be scared.
He let his head tilt to the side, where he found Hyunjin watching him from up close, fond and soft. I’ll never hurt you, he wanted to promise. But he didn’t want to risk this moment. So he said it inside, to himself.
And aloud, he said, “So.” His lips curled into a smile, unable to be stopped. “This means you’re really not in love with Felix, huh?”
Hyunjin’s eyes widened, and for a moment, Jisung thought he was about to be smothered by a pillow. But instead Hyunjin laughed, his loud, terrible cackle, and rolled onto his back, so his laughter bounced around the room.
——
The knock on Chan’s office door wasn’t a surprise — he’d been waiting for Felix to come and seek him out since he had arrived back from Maniac — but what was a surprise was the fact that Felix didn’t even wait for Chan to call out a welcome. Chan was in the middle of opening his mouth to let him in when the door opened anyway and Felix came almost bouncing inside.
“Hi, hyung!” he said, very happily, as he closed the door after him and then went to the couch in a way that Chan could only describe as a step below a skip.
“Hello, Felix,” Chan said, a little amused by what he was seeing. Felix flopped down onto the couch, grabbed a pillow that had been brought in at some point from Jeongin’s TV room, and hugged it to his stomach. Just looking at his face made Chan smile, like the fool he was. “You look very happy.”
Felix hummed under his breath. “I just did something of dubious morality,” he said. He sounded much, much too pleased with himself for it.
“Oh?” Chan asked, as he shut his laptop screen and turned in his desk chair to face where Felix was curled up in the couch corner.
Felix nodded, his hair flopping into his eyes as he did it. “I shut Jisung and Hyunjin in a room together,” he said. “And then I eavesdropped on them.”
“Lixie!” Chan said, aghast. Not upset, or disapproving, necessarily, just— shocked. Shocked that Felix would have thought of such a thing, and would do a thing like that to Hyunjin.
“I know, I know,” Felix said. “I didn’t lock the door. But— hyung. It’s gotten ridiculous.”
It had gotten ridiculous. Chan had known about Hyunjin’s feelings for Jisung for a couple of weeks now, and he still hadn’t come up with any way he could interfere that wouldn’t be totally overstepping his bounds. He hadn’t, however, been able to see a way that things worked out between the two of them without someone stepping in. In some ways, it may have been easier if Hyunjin had gone back to how he had been when Jisung first joined, or even like he had been right after their conversation in the hospital — angry, prone to blowing up out of nowhere, clearly resentful of Jisung’s presence.
But he hadn’t been like that at all. Instead, he had seemed— almost resigned to the ongoing pain of it all. Chan hated seeing him like that. And he hadn’t fully comprehended, until this had all blown up in their faces, just how relatively good Hyunjin and Jisung’s relationship truly had become.
He’d failed to notice Minho and Jeongin’s shift. He’d missed Hyunjin and Jisung’s. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised that Changbin and Seungmin had managed to fly completely under his radar too; he had precedence.
He was quiet for a moment, and then he simply couldn’t help himself. “Well?”
Felix almost preened at being asked, like he had been waiting for Chan to do so, waiting for Chan to get into the mischief with him. “I think they’re working it out as we speak,” he said proudly.
The relief was— immense. Chan felt his shoulders slump, sinking a little into his chair, feeling some of the tension that seemed so ever-present inside him ease just a bit. Not fully — there was too much there to fully ease his concerns.
He still didn’t know what shape a relationship between Hyunjin and Jisung would take. He still didn’t know how capable Hyunjin was of intimacy, of the vulnerability that inevitably came from being in a relationship with someone. He wanted, more than anything, for Hyunjin to be comfortable and confident and secure, and he wanted to beg Jisung to take care with him — a pointless urge, since he knew, without even needing conscious thought, that Jisung would. He had gotten in the way of a blade for Hyunjin. He’d look after him.
That didn’t stop Chan’s urge to— get involved. But it wasn’t up to him. It was up to them, to work it out, as Felix had said.
“I don’t think any of us are really ready for what that’s going to entail,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so either,” Felix said, still cheerful. “But isn’t it exciting to find out?”
Chan wouldn’t put it exactly like that, but he was happy that Felix looked so happy about this turn of events. In fact, he looked so happy that he felt bad about asking his next question, but he wanted to know. He kept his voice gentle and said, “How did it go at the train station with your sister?”
The smile faded, as Chan knew it would do. Felix looked, for a moment, very wobbly, like all the emotions had just slammed back into him, before he regained his composure faster than Chan expected. “It went okay,” Felix said. “She made her train. She said— she said that when it’s all settled, maybe we could take a trip to Busan. All of us, or the ones who could go. She said to tell you that you could pretend it’s for business.”
There was a hopeful note in Felix’s voice, but not too hopeful. It was like he knew that this was unlikely to happen, especially not in the short term, but he would hold out for it to happen in the future at some point. And Chan had to admit that the image was nice: Felix on the beach, his freckles darker from the sun, hair damp with sea water. Some of the others there, too, Jeongin on the sand, and probably Minho with him, too, which was a weird thought to have, since a few weeks ago Chan would never have said Minho would go anywhere.
Seungmin wouldn’t go, which would mean Changbin might not either, now. What a weirder thought to have.
“That would be nice, Lix,” Chan said, for lack of anything else to say, not wanting to pour cold water on Felix’s dreams. It would be nice, too, so it wasn’t even as though he was telling a lie.
Felix didn’t ask for it to happen, though, or try to get Chan to commit to a timeline. He just nodded and settled more comfortably against the arm of the couch, shifting until he was slumped right down, like he was thinking of taking a nap or something. It was still early enough that he could do so, and Chan quite liked the idea of that — working with Felix asleep on the couch next to him.
But instead of settling further, Felix said, “How was the meeting with Hyunjae-hyung?”
“It went okay, too,” Chan said with a shrug. “He knew we were the ones who destroyed Blackbird’s. He wanted to know what it is that I want from the Magpie’s empire, but he already knew that I want Blackbird’s itself. He said he’d support me.”
Felix just nodded his head, quiet as always when the matter of Blackbird’s came up. It seemed like he understood Chan’s desire to own it, or at least accepted the reality of that desire, but he didn’t want to talk about it at all. Chan could understand that — Felix hadn’t seemed happy about going near Blackbird’s, when they staked it out, and he’d seemed very relieved to have been spared going there the night of the job. Chan suspected that after he bought the place, even if he gutted it and totally refurbished the entire venue, Felix still wouldn’t want to go there.
He was like that. He never complained, never outright said that he didn’t want something or want to do something. He just quietly pretended it wasn’t happening. It was like the phone Chan had gifted him: ignored whenever Felix could swing it.
“He said—” Chan paused and tried to gather his thoughts back together. They felt like they had been scattered since he returned from the meeting, everything not quite a concrete sentence he could express. “He said that he didn’t want to step on my toes, but he said it in a way that made it sound like he was— afraid of me. Or maybe just scared of what I’m capable of. Like he thought that if he got in my way in this, I would— destroy him.”
Maybe the scariest part of that was that Chan didn’t know what he would have done if Hyunjae had expressed a desire for Blackbird’s; the thought had never crossed Chan’s mind. He had taken it as a given that the only people who would threaten that goal were people he could easily deal with. Hyunjae would have been more complicated. But he was right, too — even though Chan knew that Hyunjae’s operation probably eclipsed his in number of people and in number of weapons, certainly, Chan could easily destroy all of that if he wanted to.
Felix was quiet, just watching him, taking in his expression, the tone of his voice. He said, after a few moments, “It upsets you.”
“Kind of?” Chan said. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, only that he wasn’t sure he liked it and he hadn’t liked it during the meeting either. “I think that I worry that— if my closest ally is scared of upsetting me in this way, perhaps I am more like— well. More like your father than I entirely like.”
Felix was silent again. His eyes, on Chan’s face, were full of— empathy, a kind of empathy that Chan sometimes thought only Felix was capable of. It was the kind of empathy that let him mourn a father who had hurt him his entire life and murdered his sister. That, simply put, was the kind of person Felix was: good down to his bone marrow.
“Do you think,” Felix said, eventually, slowly, “that my father ever gave a moment’s thought to whether or not he was a good or bad person? Do you think he ever contemplated the morals of an action, or refused to do something because it might cause pain to people who didn’t deserve it?” He shook his head, hair flopping again. “We both know he never did. He never bothered himself with that kind of nonsense. The fact that you even worry about being like my father is proof that you’re nothing like him.”
Could it be that simple? Chan wasn’t so sure, although he wanted it desperately to be so, to cling to the certainty in Felix’s voice. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking, tricking himself into believing Felix’s words because he wanted them to be true. But perhaps it was true — he knew Lee Jaerim never would have wasted time thinking about the impact he would have on anyone else. In fact, he probably preferred to cause harm if otherwise an action would be neutral.
When Chan didn’t say anything else, it was Felix who said, voice much lighter, “But Hyunjae-hyung seemed well?”
It was a little of a whiplash-jerk in Chan’s mind to come back to Hyunjae — or more, Felix asking about Hyunjae. He did not understand how it was so impossible to not be jealous here. He’d never been possessive about anything or anyone in his life before, not in the way he felt about Felix like this. But still, he swallowed it down, and he said, “Yeah, he seemed— remarkably cheerful. He wants some of your father’s property, too. A restaurant and a bar.”
Felix nodded; he didn’t seem either surprised or not about that, more like he wasn’t all that bothered. He seemed to have very little emotion over the carving up of the Magpie’s empire, except for when it came to Blackbird’s. Then he said, “Did hyung ask about me?”
It took real work on Chan’s part to keep his posture as loose as it had been. “A little,” he said. “He said he figured you had given us information for the job.”
“Mmm,” Felix said, slumping further into the cushions, but his eyes were bright and focused on Chan’s face. “And what was he wearing?”
The penny— dropped. “Lix!” Chan said, surging to his feet, and Felix burst into laughter, gleeful and so, so proud of himself for the reaction he had caused. Chan stood there for a moment, looking at him, his face alight with happiness, hands folded across his stomach, as he shook with laughter on the couch. Chan loved him more than words, more than anything he could ever imagine feeling. Underneath that was a shockingly erotic pulse of jealous vexation, the desire to make it so that Felix stopped thinking about anyone other than Chan — especially not other handsome, muscular men.
He came around the desk and then came to a stop right over Felix, looming with intent. Felix looked up at him, still giggling, but Chan recognised that bright look in his eyes, now, that particular kind of mischief. It had been rarely seen for so long but it was becoming more and more obvious now. Sure enough, when Chan stopped looming and instead lowered himself down onto the couch, boxing Felix in with his hands, Felix merely shifted until he was almost laying flat, making room for Chan to climb on top of him.
His hands came up and hooked around Chan’s neck, arms resting against Chan’s shoulders. He looked so very smug. “You are such a little minx,” Chan told him in a low voice, ducking his face down so he could nuzzle at Felix’s neck, mouth dragging against the sensitive skin there.
“Oh, yeah?” Felix asked, breathless, fingers digging into Chan’s shoulder blades for a moment when Chan let his teeth graze against his skin and not just his mouth. “Are you going to punish me?”
And, well. Chan knew an invitation when he heard one.
——
The laptop balanced on both Minho and Jeongin’s knees was hot, enough so that Minho could feel it through his sweatpants, the poor machine whirring desperately to cool itself down. Jeongin was just ignoring it, like he was used to such noises, which probably he would be, if this was how it sounded every time he used it. Minho was relatively out of the loop when it came to technology such as this — it had seemed like, for a time, every time he disappeared into a locked cell, he would emerge into a world where phones were impossibly smaller, and then, after a while, steadily bigger again. But even by his understanding, Jeongin’s laptop was old.
It probably didn’t help that Jeongin had roughly twenty thousand screens open, give or take a few. He’d apparently spent the past couple of days finding every single furniture website that existed on the internet and looking through any listing he possibly could. And now he wanted to show Minho— all of them.
“If we got this one,” he was saying, pointing a finger at a pale blue couch, big enough for three people, “then we could get this dark blue bedding that I saw, let me find it—”
Impossible, in the number of tabs he had open, and so as Jeongin cycled through trying to locate what it was that he had seen, Minho instead watched him. His profile, the soft curve of his nose so at odds with the sharpness of his cheekbones, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration cutely.
It still felt like Minho was doing something wrong when he watched Jeongin in this way. A small voice in the back of his head still whispered, you need to stop, you’re going to get caught but— caught by who, after all? Jeongin? It no longer mattered if Jeongin caught him, and indeed did in fact catch him, when he found the right listing with a happy exclamation and turned to Minho to show him, and found Minho looking directly at him.
“What,” he said, going a little pink but not drawing back, their faces quite close together now.
Minho just shook his head, unable to help the slight smile on his face. “Nothing, baby boy,” he said. He looked at the laptop screen, which was showing a bedding set, dark blue. The price was— more than Minho had known bedding could possibly cost. He looked at it and then back at Jeongin who was waiting expectantly.
“What do you think?” Jeongin asked.
“About what?” Minho asked.
“The bedding,” Jeongin said, half-exasperated, half-put upon patience. “With the couch?”
Minho gave a little shrug, no opinion whatsoever in his head. He had never given any thought to anything like this before in his life. He had the vague understanding that many children had some control of how their bedrooms were decorated growing up, but he had never had input. White walls, thin bedding, serviceable furniture he had out-grown but which had never been replaced. In prison there was no choice. Here, he had searched for ‘bedding’ on Coupang and sent the first, reasonably priced link to Seungmin and made him order it for him.
“If you like it, baby boy,” he said.
Jeongin twisted his mouth, before he turned back to the computer and clicked onto yet another tab. This one was not an individual listing but instead a page full of couches, different colours and styles and materials. “If you don’t like that one,” he said, which was not at all what Minho had said, “then there’s these ones, too, let’s look at them together?”
Minho was happy to do that, because he was happy to do just about anything if it meant him and Jeongin got to do it together. Still, though, he watched less the scrolling of the screen and more Jeongin’s face as he pointed out this one or that, the way his hands looked on the laptop touchpad, his long fingers touching the screen. The listings seemed to go on endlessly; astonishing how many couches there were out in the world. Was such an array of choice needed for such a thing?
After an indeterminate amount of couches — and Minho had no idea how many were left to go — Jeongin looked at him, face bright with curiosity, and said, “What do you think, were there any that you liked?”
“They all seem fine,” Minho said.
The bright curiosity fell away, which was a shame, Minho was sad to have caused that. Jeongin, however, was stubborn, it had been one of the first things that Minho had come to know about him, and so he rallied and he pointed out two listings on the screen in front of them: one light grey and angular, one black and leather. “Which of these do you like more, then, hyung?”
Minho looked between them. The black one looked like it might be comfortable for reading on, the grey one not so much. Otherwise, they were simply couches. He looked back at Jeongin, whose face was a more interesting thing to look at, and said, “Whichever one will make you happy, baby boy, that’s what I like more.”
Jeongin huffed, loud and exasperated but he was smiling, widely but perhaps a bit shyly, as he shut his laptop and then — rougher than it deserved — set it at the side of the mattress on the floor. When he swung himself over so that he was straddling Minho’s thighs, he was pink again, pleased by Minho’s words. Minho, who had meant them truthfully and not at all sweetly, was pleased to have caused such a reaction.
When Jeongin put his hands against Minho’s shoulders and pushed gently, Minho allowed himself to be guided back, until he was laying flat on the bed, looking at Jeongin who wriggled up until he was straddling Minho’s hips, thighs spread wide. This was not an angle that Minho was used to looking at him from.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, hands still resting lightly on Minho’s shoulders. “You can’t just always give me my own way.”
The irony of it made Minho laugh, short but highly amused. His hands came to rest lightly on Jeongin’s waist, holding him steady but not gripping him. “I never thought I’d get to hear you complaining about getting to be the boss of things,” he said, grinning up at Jeongin.
Jeongin pouted, lifting on his hands only to smack at Minho’s chest. It was extremely half-hearted though, because he let his hand rest there afterwards, clearly just a hair away from groping. The other shifted so that he was leaning his weight on his forearm on the mattress and then he leaned down fully so that he could kiss Minho, mouth plush and warm.
His hair brushed Minho’s face, soft, and getting a touch too long, Minho thought. It was pretty on him but longer than Minho thought he’d ever seen Jeongin’s hair get — not enough time for a haircut, maybe. Minho slid a hand into it to hold it back so that when Jeongin pulled away, and blinked his eyes open, it was to see Minho already looking back at him, without anything obscuring the view.
“Hyung,” he said softly.
“Baby boy,” Minho said, mimicking the tone, intimate in this large, empty bedroom. He rubbed his thumb against Jeongin’s cheekbone.
Jeongin brushed Minho’s bangs back. Something shuddered down Minho’s spine: too much, it was almost too much. “You did really well today,” Jeongin said. “Going out in public like that, and being nice to Felix’s poor sister.”
Another shudder, internal and quaking. Another mouthful of seawater, drowning but without the pain — and Minho knew how much drowning hurt. Desperate to regain some control, he said, “Why do I feel like a dog being praised for learning to sit?”
Jeongin blinked, and then grinned, lopsided and mischievous. He was close enough for Minho to kiss, but Minho didn’t. Even when Jeongin lowered his face again so that their noses brushed momentarily, he didn’t lift his head to kiss him. “Do you want a treat?” Jeongin murmured.
Minho swatted him on the ass, hard enough for the sound to almost echo in the room, despite the dampening effect of Jeongin’s pants. Jeongin yelped, a little breathless, jerking with the impact. “Don’t be a brat,” Minho said.
Jeongin pouted again, properly this time. “But you like it so much,” he said. This was true, Minho did; he had done for so long now, knowing that the shy, immature kid that Jeongin had been was now someone with such a force of personality that even Minho, damaged and intimidating to so many people, was forced to simply accept it. Jeongin’s hand carded through Minho’s hair again. “I really am proud of you,” he crooned. “My brave hyung.”
Too much, too much — Minho grabbed him by the hips and shoved Jeongin over, rolling him onto his back and then Minho on top of him in a mostly smooth movement, giving Jeongin no chance to possibly protest or fight back. Not that Jeongin did, he never did. He seemed to view this, in some ways, as a given, an inevitable thing — like he was supposed to be just like this, on his back with Minho on top of him, his hands loose curls against his head just like the first time Minho had done this to him.
“Hyung,” he said, unable to let it go even when his eyes were watching Minho’s mouth, tracking it, like he wanted it on him more than anything. Minho looked down at him, sure his eyes were glittering, dangerous. But Jeongin liked to bait the bear. “I love you.” Minho loved him too; agony, this emotion, like being scoured. “I’m proud, you’re so good, you’re so—”
He broke off with a gasp when Minho shoved his thigh in between Jeongin’s legs and pressed down against his cock. He was mostly soft, and Minho used enough pressure that it probably hurt more than anything else — but that was the point, after all, and sure enough Jeongin arched a little against the mattress and shut that mouth which said things that threatened to undo Minho, and tilted his head back enough that Minho, looking down at him, could do nothing more than fit his teeth there and bite down hard.
Jeongin did not speak again for a very long time after that.
——
Hyunjin’s heart had not stopped pounding. It struck Hyunjin, in a far away piece of his brain that wasn’t occupied with Jisung on his bed with him, as perhaps something unhealthy. Could a heart beat this long and this hard without giving out? He hoped so, otherwise he was probably fucked.
He couldn’t blame his heart, however. Not when he lay on his back, head carefully against one of his pillows and Jisung laying against him in turn. He was curled into Hyunjin, head pillowed on Hyunjin’s arm, a heavy weight, a little numbing maybe, but too welcome for Hyunjin to do anything about. But his head really was heavy — was Hyunjin’s head this heavy?
Jisung let out a little noise, not a word or anything close to it, and shifted a little on the bed, more like he was trying to get comfortable than he was in pain. He still let out a slight hiss as he did so, all the same, and then settled. Hyunjin’s arm around his waist tightened briefly, not to tug him closer but just to say he was there. This time, the noise Jisung let out was content. It sounded remarkably like the noise Felix made in similar situations.
The most amazing part of this was how muted the fear he usually felt was. He had spent most of the last two years or so being utterly terrified of letting Jisung get too close, of touching or being touched. It had been hard to explain even to himself what he had been so afraid of, other than, perhaps, the craving. He had wanted to touch and be touched, craved it like a physical ache, but the magnitude of what that would mean had terrified him enough that he had, until very recently, always flinched away.
Not now, like this. He let Jisung lay against him, none of their skin touching but their bodies connected all the same, and the future in which they had sex was so far away that he felt only a kind of a latent nervousness about it. Yes, it was still something to grapple with, something he still needed to figure out; yes, the thought of sex with Jisung still made him feel like his heart was stuck in his throat, choking him a little bit. But when Jisung was still so clearly injured the way that he was, the question of sex could be— put off longer. He could figure it out when Jisung was better.
Jisung, for his part, seemed very happy to lay here in silence, his breathing soft and just the barest bit uneven still. They had settled like this in silence too, after Hyunjin had stopped laughing and held out an arm for Jisung to lay against. He’d been tentative then, almost like he thought Hyunjin might protest or knock him away, and he’d been stiff for a while until Hyunjin had shifted and wriggled his arm under Jisung’s waist. Then he had— seemed to melt into the bed.
It had pleased Hyunjin immensely, feeling that. To know Jisung wasn’t scared or intimidated by him, to know that Jisung was trusting the comfort of Hyunjin’s body against his own. What a mess Hyunjin had made of things the last two years, what a fucking mess.
He’d known, as it was happening, that he was being— awful. He was self-aware enough to know that, to have heard the things he said to Jisung come out of his mouth and know that he was being cruel, but the cruelty had been the only way he could think of to keep Jisung at a distance. Don’t let him close, don’t let him touch you, don’t let him see into your heart, until they had ended up like this: Jisung so convinced of Hyunjin’s ongoing, enduring disdain for him that he hadn’t even believed a kiss.
There was no one to blame but himself, Hyunjin knew. He didn’t want Jisung to feel that way ever again.
He shifted, dislodging Jisung a little bit, trying to move over onto his side. Jisung moved instantly, wriggling away to lay his head on the pillow again and not on Hyunjin, murmuring, “Sorry, sorry.”
“Why are you saying sorry,” Hyunjin asked softly, easing over, getting his elbow underneath himself. Jisung always said sorry, and Hyunjin— did not think he ever really had anything to say sorry about.
“I thought— it might be too much,” Jisung said, and then he blinked, because Hyunjin was hovering over him now, propped up on his elbow, his other hand coming to a rest on Jisung’s chest. “Hi,” Jisung said, looking up at him, eyes wide.
“Hi,” Hyunjin said. It had not been too much, it was just that he had wanted to do— this. But now that he was here, it was so reminiscent of the fire that it was making his stomach swoop somewhat unpleasantly. He could see it in Jisung’s eyes that he, too, remembered this. They had been like this, there, Jisung on his back, Hyunjin hovering over him, and he could not help himself; his hand slid from Jisung’s chest, carefully down until his palm covered where the wound dressings still lay on Jisung’s stomach. Where Hyunjin had knelt and tried desperately to keep even just the slightest amount of blood inside of him.
I love you, he wanted to say. He had managed it in the van, and he had managed it in the hospital, but here, like this, in his own bedroom, looking down at Jisung’s face, it frightened him, the enormity of this emotion. The inadequacy of the words to encompass it. The inadequacy of himself, to be so scared by it, when it should be easy.
Instead of that, he said, barely more than a whisper, “I thought I was going to lose you, I thought you were going to die without ever knowing I—”
He choked on the words; a coward, for all his family liked to tell him he was brave. It didn’t matter, though, because Jisung’s eyes had gone wide and he knew, he understood. He finally, finally, was seeing Hyunjin the way Hyunjin had wanted to be seen and understood. “Hyunjin,” he said, matching Hyunjin’s quiet tone.
“It terrified me,” Hyunjin said. Even now he felt some of that lingering panic, the way he knew that if he lost Jisung like that, he would go mad. “And I thought that you knew, enough so that by kissing you, I would be simply sliding the last puzzle piece into place. That you would understand without me having to say anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Jisung whispered. His eyes darted down, over Hyunjin’s mouth, his jaw, and then back to his eyes. “For— not seeing. For what I said in the hospital.”
Hyunjin shook his head, fiercely, his hair swaying with the movement. “It was not on you,” he said. “For me, I felt like I was being obvious. The things were— little, I guess, in the grand scheme of things, but they were so hard for me that they felt huge, felt obvious and— exposing.”
It had all taken so much out of him, was the thing. Letting Jisung clean the cut on his mouth, asking Jisung about sex, flirting with him in Blackbird’s — none of it had been easy, not in the slightest. But how could it all compare after years of cutting Jisung down whenever it felt too close, of pushing him away and making him feel small and insignificant in Hyunjin’s life, all to preserve his own comfort.
He could still remember cupping Jisung’s face and telling him, After the job things will be different. He wondered, now, how they could have been different, when he still found talking about it all so difficult.
Jisung let out a noise that might have been a laugh but was barely more than a breath of air. “It wasn’t obvious,” he said, wry but gentle. “But I should have been paying more attention.”
Hyunjin shook his head again. He lifted his hand away from Jisung’s stomach and cupped Jisung’s jaw, for a moment, in mimicry of that night. Softer than he’d been, then, much more gentle. Then he brushed Jisung’s bangs away from his forehead, leaning a little closer now, Jisung’s eyes big as the moon as he looked at Hyunjin. His eyes once again darted to Hyunjin’s mouth, then away, then back, quick movements like he didn’t know if he could look for more than a second at a time.
“You can ask,” Hyunjin said. “For a kiss. You can ask.”
Had Hyunjin known how easily Jisung blushed? He did so again now, bright red all over his face, a little splotchy in places. Hyunjin liked making Jisung blush — he’d done it in Blackbird’s, that first time, and he had loved the control, the feeling of some kind of power in an area where he had never had any. He felt that now. He liked it so much.
“Kiss me?” Jisung whispered. Tone vulnerable and maybe a little overwhelmed.
Hyunjin did, he didn’t make Jisung wait or make him ask again. He dropped his head so that their mouths could slot together once more, and Jisung made a surprised noise like even though he’d asked, he hadn’t been expecting it. They kissed almost chastely, Hyunjin still figuring it out. He had some experience in this area, from nights at Maniac when he had felt up to it, and some more from Felix, but not a whole lot altogether.
Jisung wasn’t being much help. The shock of getting what he’d literally asked for seemed to have made him tense up, and he was kissing back tentatively, like he thought Hyunjin might disappear, or else jump up and run shrieking from the room. When Hyunjin lifted his head back up, Jisung had a faint frown line between his eyebrows.
Hyunjin first pressed against that line with his thumb, forcing the muscles to relax. “I know no one has ever told you this before,” he said, his fingers drifting to stroke Jisung’s hair again. "But you need to stop thinking so fucking hard. I want this, with you."
Another blink, Jisung taking in the words, and then he smiled. It was the brightest thing Hyunjin thought he had ever seen, sunshine across Jisung’s entire face, and then he laughed, and lifted a hand up to brush Hyunjin’s own hair away so that Jisung could look him in the eyes better.
“Kiss me again,” Jisung said. “I promise to pay better attention this time.”
And so Hyunjin kissed him again. He kissed Jisung like he should have been kissing him these past couple of weeks. The way he should have kissed Jisung beforehand, too, before he almost lost him. He never wanted there to be any doubt in Jisung’s mind — not now, not ever.
I love you, he said, with each fevered kiss to Jisung’s mouth. I love you, I love you. And he heard it back in every answered kiss.
——
Felix hummed lightly under his breath as he cleaned the dishes from his brownie making, hands in the hot, soapy water as next to him, Jeongin leaned against the counter and dried each dish one by one, the two of them working in easy silence at their task. They didn’t need to really speak anyway, because the television was on, playing some movie, a kid’s one, Felix thought, live action and a bit silly. The volume was turned down to not disturb anyone but still mostly audible.
On the couch, Chan was typing furiously at his phone — not like he was angry, but like he was replying at great speed to an email or something. On the couch opposite, by some sort of miracle, sat a curled up Seungmin, in an oversized sweater, to all intents and purposes seeming to be watching the movie. He had been coaxed upstairs by Changbin, through methods unknown, and then Changbin had disappeared off with Minho to go and collect the pizza order that Chan had called in for them all.
There was a reason Felix had commandeered Jeongin for this task, and not tried to ask Seungmin. Most of it was, truthfully, he didn’t quite feel up to going head-to-head with Seungmin, not over something like that. He still did not think he had most of his brain cells back after what Chan had done to him in the office. Remarkable, considering they had not thought to store any lube down there, and so Chan hadn’t been able to actually fuck him, and yet Felix still felt like his fingers were a little bit not his own.
The rest of the reason he’d asked Jeongin to help him with the dishes was that when Minho had appeared in the apartment after being summoned, he had been wearing a rumpled t-shirt and his hair looked like it had been mauled by a wild animal. He had also been leading a loose-limbed Jeongin, with a very obvious hickey on his neck and a matching look in his eye to the one Felix knew was in his own. Felix had grabbed him for drying purely to give Jeongin something concrete to focus on.
It seemed to be helping, if only because Jeongin had started humming lightly under his breath as he worked, absent but in the room, at least. It was a nice sound, Jeongin’s voice surprisingly musical, and it was like this, the two of them just finishing up, the television playing and Jeongin humming as Felix handed him the last mixing bowl to dry, when the front door to the apartment sounded and Changbin and Minho came in with the takeout.
It was a lot of pizza boxes, with other boxes of side dishes balanced on the top. Much too much food for just tonight, even for eight people, but Felix supposed they would just be rich in leftovers to go with the brownies he’d made. God only knew how much Chan had spent on all of this.
Minho and Changbin put the boxes down on the island, setting everything down carefully. Then Minho immediately turned to Jeongin and with smooth efficiency, took the mixing bowl and tea towel out of his hands and started drying the thing himself.
“Hyung,” Jeongin said, but it was not really a protest. He didn’t move to take it back and when Minho didn’t give it back, simply turning to put it away in the cupboard, Jeongin just leaned against his side as best as he could without flopping over.
Chan finished whatever he was typing on his phone and got up to come to the island. “Everything okay?” he asked, starting to un-pile the boxes so that they could be opened and spread out.
“Yeah,” said Changbin, “except the traffic was shit. Rush hour, I guess.” He sounded a little bit like he didn’t really know what that was. He didn’t help with opening the boxes, not after Felix also came over and started helping Chan. Instead, he went to the couch where Seungmin was sitting and sat next to him. He stretched one arm along the back of the couch, in Seungmin’s direction, but he didn’t touch Seungmin, who gave basically no indication that he was even noticing Changbin there. “What movie is this?” Changbin asked.
Seungmin, eyes still on the screen, said, “Spy Kids.”
“It’s for children,” Jeongin said, as though he found the concept of watching a children’s movie as an adult somewhat disturbing. Perhaps that was just his instinctive need to never be treated as a child speaking.
“I used to watch it a lot,” Seungmin said. He had his hand up against his mouth, the words a little muffled but still audible. “When I was a kid. I liked it.”
There was a pause. Felix had not heard Seungmin talk about his childhood since he’d arrived, other than to acknowledge that he and Felix had been in middle school together. He seemed like he wanted to give the impression of having appeared fully formed as a sixteen year old, making his name known as a hacker. This was probably in direct response to the fact that searching his name online brought up endless articles about his life before that point.
None of those articles ever said this though: that Seungmin had been the type of kid to enjoy watching a pretty funky looking movie.
“Ah,” Changbin said lightly, eventually. “Is that why you like tinkering with your little gadgets?”
“They’re not little gadgets,” Seungmin said, but his hand was still in front of his mouth, and this time the words were very mumbled, his tone mild.
“Oh, hey!” Jeongin said brightly. He’d wandered over to help open some of the smaller boxes of side dishes and was looking more and more delighted with every single one he opened. “Chicken wings!”
Felix hid a smile, and then felt, against the base of his spine, Chan’s hand settle heavy as he moved past him to the next box. Felix had to bite back a shudder at that feeling, his brain still mired in the syrupy-slow sensation that always came from arousal. He’d had a couple of hours to get over it by now but it was never that simple. It always seemed to linger, and every time he remembered how Chan had murmured to him, his hands stroking Felix’s hair back, it made the feeling return.
He moved away from that hand, shooting Chan a look — Chan smiled back, a little playful, like he’d done that on purpose — and then fetched the paper plates from an overhead cabinet to take to the coffee table. This, for the first time, seemed to distract Seungmin from his movie, and he reached out and snagged Felix by the sleeve before he could return to the food.
When Seungmin motioned, Felix leaned his head down so Seungmin could talk quietly to him. “This is just a reminder,” he said, voice bitchy as anything Felix had ever heard from him, “that there are cameras in the office.”
Truthfully, Felix had forgotten about that. He’d been hyper-aware of the cameras for so long, but it was true that he’d stopped noticing them after a while, that they’d settled into being almost like a friend. Almost like an extension of Seungmin, checking in whilst Seungmin’s body stayed tucked away in his workroom. But they were so small and unobtrusive in rooms that he could forget and he had, too busy being delighted at how well his teasing of Chan had been and then, later, too busy having his mouth occupied.
Still, though, there was a limit. “And this is a reminder that you can turn them off,” he said back to Seungmin, just as quiet as Seungmin had been, but he would never match Seungmin’s bitchy tone perfectly. It came so natural to Seungmin and never would to Felix. “You don’t need to watch like some nasty voyeur, you know.”
“I didn’t watch,” Seungmin said, a little louder, drawing a curious look from Changbin. He lowered his voice again. “I’m just reminding you. I was too busy to pay attention to what depravity you got up to in there.”
Felix studied him. His hair was damp, like he had taken a shower not too long ago, in the middle of the day for some reason. His mouth was a little swollen, maybe, and although he sounded caustic, there was something strangely playful about it, and his body language was very loose for a Seungmin dragged upstairs to socialise.
“You hypocrite,” Felix hissed at him. “You had sex this afternoon too!”
“I’m not berating you for having sex,” Seungmin hissed back. “I’m berating you for having sex where it could be seen.”
“It can only be seen because you put cameras in there!” Felix said, exasperated. “Otherwise it would be private!”
Seungmin huffed out a breath but otherwise didn’t say anything, probably because there was nothing he could say, no counter-argument he could give. The office would be private, if it weren’t for his insistence on having his eyes everywhere. As far as Felix was concerned, Seungmin could just learn to turn these things off.
Felix rolled his eyes at him and then went back to the island to fetch one of the pizza boxes. Jeongin had already picked up one which contained pepperoni pizza and brought it over to the coffee table. He was sitting on the floor there now, legs crossed in front of him, and he simply took a slice and bit into it without even bothering with a plate. Minho, folding himself down next to him with a noise like an old man, reached over and grabbed a plate for him.
Chan said, a little disapprovingly, “Shouldn’t we wait for Hyunjin and Jisung?”
Jeongin, through a mouthful of pizza, said, “You snooze, you lose.” Minho snorted.
Felix put his box down on the coffee table — bulgogi with mushrooms — and then sat down on the couch where Chan had vacated it earlier. He took a slice of that pizza and then settled back. Opposite, Changbin leaned forward to grab a couple of slices from each box, piling them on a plate, and then leaned back, setting the plate on Seungmin’s knee. Somehow, without Felix seeing how or when they’d done it, both him and Seungmin had rearranged themselves so that Seungmin was against Changbin’s side and Changbin’s arm was slung casually across his shoulder. Felix was impressed by how they had managed it, and how easy they made it seem, when neither of them had ever done something like that in front of the others before.
“Where is Hyunjin, anyway?” Changbin asked, after he had eaten half a slice of pizza in the time it had taken Seungmin to nibble at his.
“In his room,” Felix said, tucking his toes under one of the throw pillows.
Changbin sighed, like that made sense. “Someone should go get him,” he said, but didn’t make any move to do so. “Where’s Jisung, actually?”
“In Hyunjin’s room,” Felix and Seungmin said in unison.
“What?” said Changbin, and then, much too loud, “Oh!”
Everyone looked at each other, taking the information in. It didn’t surprise Felix that Seungmin had seen, but it did surprise him that Seungmin hadn’t called him out on what he had done to make it happen. In fact, it was Chan who said, as he carried the boxes of mozzarella sticks and chicken wings over, “Lix locked them in Hyunjin’s room together.”
“I didn’t lock it!” Felix defended himself.
“Hey!” said Jeongin, whining a little bit, slumped once more against Minho’s shoulder. “You stole my idea! I said we should lock them in a room together and you said we shouldn’t do it!”
“Again, I didn’t lock the door,” Felix said. He glared at Chan, who just grinned as he pulled one of the dining chairs over and set it up next to where Felix sat.
A door opened down the hallway — Hyunjin’s room, the only one with people still inside of it. Everyone in the living room fell so silent so quickly that it was comical. Felix, still looking at Jeongin, had to turn away for fear that he would burst into giggles. They were so silent that Hyunjin and Jisung, coming out of the room together, didn’t seem to notice for a little bit that anyone was in the room. Hyunjin had his arm around Jisung’s waist, head bent down close, and the two of them were moving slowly down the hallway.
Jisung seemed a little less spry than he had done earlier, like his medication had worn off and he was feeling some of the pain again. “I’m okay,” he said, to whatever Hyunjin had murmured to him, too quiet to make out, and then he looked up and realised that the living room was full and that every single person in there was staring at the two of them.
“Um!” he said, and blushed, bright red, instantly. Felix was not sure if it was because of just the shock of suddenly being stared at or— well, because of the way both his and Hyunjin’s mouths were red and swollen, the two of them looking like they’d been very gently punched in the lips. On Jisung it was bad enough; on Hyunjin, it looked borderline ridiculous.
They had, also, very obviously been crying, the two of them. Jisung’s eyes had the look of someone who had cried profusely, still a little swollen. Hyunjin’s were red-rimmed, obvious even with his head tucked down. They had clearly fought, and then— made up. Felix was so glad to see the signs of it that he put any lingering guilt over what he had done completely out of his head.
Hyunjin looked up and noticed them all and he, too, blushed, and was flustered and furious about it. “What!” he said, defensive, straightening upright as much as he could without taking his arm away from Jisung. Jisung sagged slightly against him. It pleased Felix immensely that he didn’t try to move away, even if that was just because he maybe couldn’t right now. “Jisung needs his pain meds!”
There was an odd, but not uneasy energy in the room. It was the energy of a group of people who wanted, very badly, to make some kind of a joke but were not sure how it might land. A buoyant feeling, a little bit of relief and joy at the relief. But at the same time, nobody would want to make Hyunjin uncomfortable by teasing him about this in the wrong way. If it were Jisung alone, the jokes would already be rolling but Hyunjin— Hyunjin made it complicated.
It was, therefore, surprising when it was Minho who broke the silence and said, “I’m sure he does, seeing as you two have probably burst one of his stitches.” This caused Jeongin, and surprisingly Seungmin, to laugh out loud, Jeongin almost cackling with it.
“I didn’t!” Hyunjin said, almost a shriek. “We didn’t do that!”
“Okay, okay,” said Chan soothingly, looking at the two of them in the hallway with such a soft, soppy expression on his face that Felix was surprised Hyunjin hadn’t started yelling about that too. He didn’t seem to have noticed. “Why don’t you come and sit down with us, you can sit next to Lix, just like you like.”
Hyunjin glared one more time at Minho, who was very obviously trying to not laugh, and then helped Jisung carefully into the room. His arm didn’t leave Jisung’s waist, his other hand supporting him. Whether Jisung needed that level of support was another matter, and Jisung didn’t seem to want to protest that he could walk on his own. He was leaning into Hyunjin’s touch like someone being given a gift.
When Hyunjin sat Jisung down, it was against the other arm of the couch that Felix was sitting on, leaving a gap in between them. Jisung sank down into the cushions, looking like someone who was not planning on moving any time soon, one of his hands pressed over his lower stomach. Hyunjin, still pink but apparently uncaring that the others were still mostly watching them — except for Jeongin, who was inhaling another slice of pizza — ran his hand through Jisung’s hair and said, “Wait here.”
Felix wasn’t sure where he thought Jisung was going, but Jisung just nodded. Hyunjin went to the kitchen, to the drawer where they kept Jisung’s pain medication. Jisung looked at the coffee table, laden with all the food by now, and said, “You guys got pizza?” He sounded out of it, not so much like he had just woken up but like he probably needed to nap for three hours, his brain not firing on all cylinders. He sounded like he was in pain. He sounded incredibly, painfully young. “Can I maybe have some pizza?”
Felix watched in real time as both Chan and Changbin melted into puddles of goop. This, he imagined, must have been what it was like for them with Jeongin, with Hyunjin, when they were both children. “Of course you can have pizza!” Chan said, already leaning forward to fetch a plate. Opposite him, Changbin had a slice of cheese pizza already in his hands and was reaching across with it. “It’s for everyone, you can have whatever you want.”
“Oh,” said Jisung. He looked down at his lap, where a paper plate with three slices, two chicken wings and a mozzarella stick sat suddenly. Then he looked across at Felix, his half-finished single slice still waiting for him, and said, “I can’t eat all of this, do you want some?”
“Share it with Hyunjin,” Felix suggested.
“Oh!” said Jisung again, much more brightly. He tilted his head as if to look for Hyunjin, who was coming back to the gathering with a glass of water and a blister pack of pills in his hand. “Hyunjin, you want to share my pizza with me?”
“Sure, Jisung,” said Hyunjin. He reached out with his free hand on his way past and ruffled Jeongin’s hair, a little roughly. But Jeongin didn’t protest, or shake him off. He just smiled up at Hyunjin, very sweet for once, and Hyunjin smiled back, looking utterly content. Then he turned his attention back to Jisung and said, “You start first, you need to eat to take your meds.”
“Okay,” Jisung said. He waited, though, until Hyunjin had sat down next to him before he lifted the pizza to his mouth and began to eat, small mouthfuls, the way he had been eating recently when he was in pain and needed to force the food down slightly.
Hyunjin put his arm across Jisung’s shoulders, the exact way Changbin was sitting opposite him with Seungmin. “Lix, you eat too,” he said to Felix, who shrugged.
“I had a brownie earlier,” he said.
“Hmm,” said Hyunjin, squinting at him, and then he turned his attention to the room at large and noticed, for the first time, Seungmin and Changbin sitting like mirror copies of him and Jisung. He pulled a face, but not one of confusion or bemusement like Felix would have guessed. Instead, he eventually said, lip curling in disgust, “I know you two are dating but do you have to be so gross?”
“Oh, we’re gross, kissy lips?” Changbin shot back, while at the same time, Jisung said, eyes bugging right out of his head, “You two are dating?”
There was, for a moment, chaos — everyone talking over each other, Jeongin asking how Jisung was the last to know, Seungmin and Changbin trying to defend themselves, Minho agreeing with Hyunjin that it was gross, Chan rubbing a thumb between his eyebrows but chuckling softly all the same, just a cacophony of voices overlapping. And Felix sat there, listening to it all, these people that he had found all on his own, and he couldn’t help but start laughing, the happiness inside of himself too much to contain. A kind of happiness that he had never, ever experienced before.
A happiness that would continue forever, so long as he had this family.
.
.
.
Notes:
Hello! You have reached the end!! 800,000 words!!! Do not reread the first chapter’s a/n and laugh at us!!!! A few things to say before we close this out:
1. I know what you are all saying. “That’s it!?” Well fear not, dear reader, it is in fact, not it, exactly. We wanted this chapter to be the end of the fic, everything coming full circle, kind of, but we do have an epilogue planned, which will be added onto this work, bringing the total number of parts up to 32. The epilogue is kind of more of a fun extra, it takes place 6 months after this last chapter does, and will be full of fluff and sop and might not be everyone’s cup of tea because of it. But that is coming. Eventually.
2. And now you might still be saying, “Okay there’s an epilogue... but hyunsung?” and oh boy!! We are writing hyunsung their own little side quest, told entirely from their povs, which will cover the incoming months and Hyunjin’s steady journey into sexual intimacy with Jisung. That will also come. Eventually.
3. It’s kind of late to be promoting this, but this fic does have a tweet associated with it for promotional purposes! There’s other fun stuff on our twitter as well, like cover art for this fic (chanlix and seungbin versions, hyunsung and minjeong coming soon) as well as extras from tboyl itself, like Jisung’s fruit cup :( and Hyunjae’s very weird much odd morning.
4. We’ve got several other long fics in the works right now, primary among them our arranged marriage space au, the shadows grow ever longer. The pairings will be the same as in the blood on your lies, so if you liked this story, it’d mean a lot if you hung around and read what we’ve got coming 🫶
And lastly, thank you to everyone who gave this stupidly long fic a chance, with its kind of odd pairings and agonisingly slow burn. We appreciate every comment, kudo, and hit ♥ and thank you to our beta, Emmi, who stuck around even when she had to write “do you really need this comma?” about 50 times per chapter. Sorry Emmi.
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