Catch me if you can

by rainyfridays

Summary:

"Come out. You're worth more alive, sweetheart. You know that."

"You bounty hunters … are always so loud. Did no one teach you how to sneak?"

Or the one where space bunny Seonghwa has the biggest bounty in the galaxy over his head and Hongjoong makes it his very personal mission to catch him​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.

Notes:

I’ve been writing this since NASA came out and I finally managed to write this yayyy

I really liked writing this it was so fun

Twt: hoejoongie

The bounty was three hundred thousand credits.

 

Three hundred thousand. Hongjoong had read it three times to make sure he wasn't hallucinating from the recycled air on Sector 9's orbital station, because three hundred thousand credits for one target — alive, unharmed, preferred — was the kind of number that made a person's hands go a little funny.

 

He'd read the file.

 

Park Seonghwa. Species: Athari — one of those rare outer-rim alien races that looked almost human if you didn't know what to look for. Age: unknown, which was typical for Athari, who had a complicated relationship with linear time. Last known location: everywhere, which was the problem. Occupation: listed as none, which meant the file compiler had given up trying to categorize whatever exactly it was Seonghwa did. Physical description: tall, pale, black hair, black ears — the soft rounded kind that marked him as Athari — and eyes that the file described as "distinctive."

 

There was a photo attached.

 

Hongjoong had looked at the photo.

 

That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.

 

Three hundred thousand credits.

 

Then he'd closed the file and started packing.

 

 

The bet had been Yeosang's idea, technically.

 

"Whoever catches the space bunny," Yeosang had said, with the specific calm energy of someone announcing the weather, "goes on a date with my sister."

 

"Your sister," Hongjoong said.

 

"She saw the bounty posting," Yeosang said. "She thinks whoever catches him must be impressive enough to date. Her words."

 

"That's—" Wooyoung started.

 

"She is fully on board," Yeosang said. "I checked. Three times. She specifically requested this arrangement. I don't understand it either."

 

"I'm in," said Mingi immediately.

 

"Obviously I'm in," said San.

 

"I was in before any of you opened your mouths," Hongjoong said.

 

He did not particularly need a date with Yeosang's sister. He needed the three hundred thousand credits and the professional satisfaction of catching the most elusive target in the outer rim, and the date was simply the cherry on top of what was going to be a very satisfying operation.

 

That was what he told himself.

 

He still thought about the photo sometimes when the ship was quiet.

 

 

The first time Hongjoong almost caught him was on Vela-3.

 

It was a market planet — the sprawling chaotic kind, covered in stalls and noise and the kind of crowd that swallowed people whole. Hongjoong had a tip from a contact, solid enough to trust, that the bunny had been spotted near the eastern trading district buying — of all things — fruit. Apparently Athari had a thing for fruit. Hongjoong had filed this information and proceeded.

 

He'd spotted the ears first.

 

Black, soft, slightly too large for a human but somehow exactly right on him, visible above the crowd — Seonghwa was tall, taller than Hongjoong had expected from the file, and he moved through the market with the easy grace of someone who knew exactly where they were going and was entirely unconcerned about anything else.

 

Hongjoong had started moving.

 

He'd gotten within fifteen meters. Ten. He'd had a clear path, a solid angle, his hand on his stun cuff—

 

Seonghwa had turned around.

 

Not the way people turned around when they sensed someone behind them — the panicked, reactive pivot. He'd turned slowly, like he had all the time in the galaxy, and looked directly at Hongjoong across ten meters of crowded market.

 

And smiled.

 

It was not a small smile. It was the full thing — warm and bright and devastating, the kind of smile that short-circuited several of Hongjoong's processes simultaneously — and then he'd lifted two fingers in a small wave, tilted his head so his bunny ears caught the light, and stepped sideways into the crowd and was gone.

 

Hongjoong had stood there.

 

What.

 

He'd shoved into the crowd after him and lost him in approximately four seconds. Gone. Completely, totally gone, like he'd dissolved into the market noise.

 

"What the—" Hongjoong spun, scanning. Nothing. "Are you kidding me—"

 

Somewhere to his left he heard, very faintly, what might have been a soft laugh.

 

He stood in the middle of the Vela-3 eastern market and felt something he was not going to identify yet and thought about three hundred thousand credits very deliberately.

 

 

He updated his file.

 

He added: fast. Faster than the briefing suggested. Aware of pursuit before visual confirmation possible — either enhanced senses or very good instincts. Possibly both.

 

He also added: smiled at me. Which was unprofessional to note but felt relevant somehow.

 

He stared at the photo again.

 

He closed the file.

 

 

The second time was on a refueling station above Mirax-7, three days later.

 

Hongjoong had gotten smarter. He'd come in from a different angle, different ship, different jacket — he'd done the full approach, methodical and careful, tracking the signal his contact had flagged to a maintenance corridor on the station's lower deck.

 

He'd found him.

 

Seonghwa was sitting on a crate eating something — some kind of fruit, orange and small, and he was eating it with total concentration, legs dangling, ears relaxed and soft, looking for all the world like someone who had nowhere to be and wasn't concerned about anything.

 

Hongjoong watched him from the end of the corridor.

 

Okay. Okay. He doesn't know I'm here. I have the angle, I have the cuffs, I have twenty meters of clear corridor and no crowd to disappear into. This is it. This is the moment.

 

He started walking.

 

Quietly. Carefully. With the specific contained patience of a professional who had done this many times.

 

He was ten meters away when Seonghwa said, without looking up from his fruit: "Different jacket. Nice try."

 

Hongjoong stopped.

 

"You changed the ship too," Seonghwa continued, conversationally, like they were having a chat. "That was good. But you walk the same way."

 

"I walk—" Hongjoong stopped himself. "I walk fine."

 

"You walk like you own whatever floor you're on," Seonghwa said. He looked up then, the big dark eyes catching the station light, and the smile was back — smaller this time, more private. "I noticed it on Vela-3. You've got a very—" he tilted his head, bunny ears tilting with it, which was doing something to Hongjoong's cardiovascular system that was not acceptable— "confident walk."

 

"Thanks," Hongjoong said, before he could stop himself. "I mean—"

 

Seonghwa grinned. He hopped off the crate.

 

"See you around, bounty hunter," he said.

 

"Don't you dare—" Hongjoong lunged.

 

Seonghwa dropped through a maintenance hatch in the floor that Hongjoong had not clocked, had not even registered as a hatch, and the panel slid shut behind him with a soft definitive click.

 

Hongjoong stood over the hatch.

 

"Are you fucking serious," he said, to the floor.

 

From somewhere below — muffled, but audible, and distinctly amused — he heard soft laughter.

 

He pressed his forehead against a nearby wall.

 

He stood there for a moment.

 

"Three hundred thousand credits," he said. To himself. To the wall. To the universe, which was clearly testing him. "Three hundred thousand credits. That's all this is."

 

He went to find the other access hatch.

 

 

He found his contact at a bar on the upper deck and sat down and said: "Tell me everything about Athari hearing."

 

His contact looked at him. "Enhanced," she said. "Four times human range. Why?"

 

Hongjoong thought about Seonghwa sitting on a crate completely relaxed, hearing him coming from twenty meters away with no visual confirmation.

 

"Just curious," he said.

 

He updated his file.

 

He added: can hear me coming. Will hear me coming every time. Need to rethink approach entirely.

 

He stared at the photo.

 

He thought about the bunny ears tilting toward him in the maintenance corridor, the way they'd caught the light.

 

He closed the file very firmly.

 

 

The third time he lost him was the most embarrassing.

 

He'd spent a week on it. A full week of planning, of rethinking approach, of working out how to account for the hearing advantage. The answer he'd landed on: don't try to sneak. Don't try to be quiet. Come in as noise and chaos and make the quiet the trick.

 

He'd found Seonghwa on Dust Station Omega, which was exactly as miserable as it sounded — a trading hub that smelled like engine fuel and bad decisions, populated by the kind of people who had reasons for being somewhere no one would look.

 

He'd walked in loud. Boots heavy on the grating. No attempt at subtlety. He'd tracked Seonghwa to a back corridor near the fuel depot and he'd walked right up to it and turned the corner and—

 

Seonghwa was there.

 

Leaning against the wall, arms crossed, one ear tilted in Hongjoong's direction. He looked at Hongjoong with an expression that was approximately eighty percent amusement and twenty percent something that might have been appreciation.

 

"Coming in loud this time," Seonghwa said. "That's new."

 

"Trying something different," Hongjoong said.

 

"It's interesting," Seonghwa said. "You're interesting."

 

Hongjoong blinked. "I—"

 

"Also you've got backup coming in from the south entrance," Seonghwa said. "Which you arranged before you came in loud, so you'd have an angle I couldn't hear. That was actually very clever."

 

"Oh," Hongjoong said. And then, because he couldn't help it: "Thank you."

 

"You're welcome," Seonghwa said pleasantly. "Unfortunately I heard them arrange it in the docking bay twenty minutes ago when they arrived."

 

A pause.

 

"Of course you did," Hongjoong said.

 

Seonghwa smiled. The warm one, the full one, the one that did the thing. "You'll get there," he said, with the energy of someone genuinely encouraging, which was somehow worse than mockery. "You're very good. Better than anyone else who's tried to catch me."

 

"That's not—" Hongjoong pointed at him. "That's not reassuring, you know that?"

 

"I know," Seonghwa said, and he was grinning now, soft and smug simultaneously, and one of his ears flicked toward the south corridor where Hongjoong's backup was presumably still approaching. "Tell your friends I said hello."

 

He was gone before the sentence finished. Just — gone, moved through the space between them so fast Hongjoong's eyes couldn't track it, and by the time he'd spun around there was nothing.

 

"Son of a—" He bit down on the rest of it. Breathed. "Every fucking time—"

 

His backup appeared from the south corridor. Wooyoung, out of breath, with San behind him.

 

"Did we get him?" Wooyoung asked.

 

Hongjoong looked at the empty corridor.

 

"No," he said.

 

"Was he here?"

 

"Yes."

 

"And we didn't—"

 

"He heard you arrive," Hongjoong said. "Twenty minutes ago."

 

A silence.

 

"He has good ears," San said.

 

"He has exceptional ears," Hongjoong said, with the energy of someone building slowly toward an emotion he hadn't categorized yet. "He has the most exceptional ears I have ever encountered in my career and I am going to catch him if it kills me."

 

Wooyoung looked at San. San looked at Wooyoung.

 

"You okay?" Wooyoung asked.

 

"Fine," Hongjoong said. "I'm completely fine. Let's go."

 

He walked back to the ship.

 

He thought about the word interesting and what Seonghwa had meant by it, and then stopped thinking about it because it wasn't relevant.

 

 

The fourth encounter was not a planned approach.

 

Hongjoong had a tip — cargo bay on a transport vessel, Seonghwa spotted an hour ago, confirmed still aboard by thermal scan. Good tip. Solid setup. He'd gone in alone because the last two attempts with backup had failed and he was adapting.

 

The cargo bay was dark when he stepped inside. Crates stacked high, shadows making shapes in every direction. His visor painted the space in green-tinted infrared and he moved through it slowly, blaster low, pulse steady despite himself.

 

His visor pinged.

 

Target detected.

 

"Come out," he said, keeping his voice smooth, easy, the professional register. "You're worth more alive, sweetheart. You know that."

 

He was scanning the crates, tracking the thermal signature his visor had flagged — behind the far stack, unmoving, probably pressed against the wall—

 

A soft thump landed behind him.

 

Warm breath brushed his neck.

 

Hongjoong froze.

 

"You bounty hunters," a voice murmured — gentle, amused, dangerously close to his ear, "are always so loud. Did no one teach you how to sneak?"

 

He swallowed hard.

 

This is bad.

 

He dropped from above. He was above me. He was never near the far crates, he faked the thermal signature somehow—

 

He’s very close and he smells like something I don't have a word for and this is extremely bad.

 

"I can sneak," Hongjoong said offended, which was the sentence that came out.

 

"Mm," Seonghwa said. Still close. Still amused. "You really can't."

 

"I—" Hongjoong started to turn.

 

The sound of a different blaster — different caliber, different direction, from outside the bay — cracked through the dark and Seonghwa moved.

 

Not away from Hongjoong. Against him, fast, pressing into his side like he'd decided Hongjoong was the safest thing in the room, one hand gripping his arm, and Hongjoong had approximately half a second to register this before a second shot came in and Seonghwa made a sound.

 

Not a loud sound. A small, bitten-off, sharp sound.

 

And then he stumbled.

 

Hongjoong caught him. Automatically, without thinking about it, hands finding his arms and taking his weight as his knee buckled.

 

"What—" He looked down. At Seonghwa's face, which had gone from amused to pale in under a second, and at his leg, where a blaster burn ran across the side of his knee — not a direct hit, a graze, but deep enough, the fabric scorched and the skin beneath it raw and angry.

 

Seonghwa's jaw was tight. His eyes were — not scared, not quite. But close to it. Closer than Hongjoong had seen from him, which was saying something.

 

"Who—" Hongjoong started.

 

The cargo bay door opened and he saw.

 

Chan.

 

Bang Chan, specifically — bounty hunter, outer-rim sector, known for three things: results, efficiency, and the fact that he played by rules that Hongjoong found personally offensive. He operated on a philosophy of "collected" that had nothing to do with the target's wellbeing, and the smile on his face as he stepped into the cargo bay was the smile of someone who had been waiting for an opportunity and had just found it.

 

Something moved through Hongjoong's chest.

 

Something fast and hot and extremely specific.

 

"Kim Hongjoong," Chan said pleasantly. "Didn't expect to see you here. Step aside?"

 

Hongjoong looked at him.

 

He looked at Seonghwa's hand still gripping his arm, the tight set of his jaw, the way his weight was off that knee.

 

Absolutely not.

 

He shot my bunny.

 

Wait—

 

"Step aside," Chan said again, still pleasant, stepping closer.

 

Hongjoong raised his blaster and shot at him.

 

He missed. Obviously he missed — he hadn't aimed, he'd just pointed and fired out of pure reflex — and Chan moved and Hongjoong was already moving too, one arm going around Seonghwa's back and under his knees, and he picked him up.

 

Seonghwa made a sound of pure outrage. "What are you—"

 

"Hold on," Hongjoong said.

 

"Put me DOWN—"

 

"I said hold on—"

 

He ran.

 

He shot behind him without looking — he heard Chan curse, which meant he'd gotten close — and Seonghwa was, incredibly, simultaneously being carried bridal-style out of a cargo bay and still managing to sound indignant about it.

 

"I can walk—"

 

"Your knee is shot—"

 

"It's a graze—"

 

"Hold still—"

 

He hit the docking bridge at a run, ship in sight, Chan's footsteps behind him at a distance that was not enough distance. He shot behind him again. Missed again. The door of his ship slid open on approach and he got through it and hit the close panel with his elbow and heard the seal catch.

 

He dropped Seonghwa — gently, more gently than the situation suggested he had the presence of mind to be, onto the bunk in the back — and went straight for the cockpit.

 

He got the ship out of dock in forty-five seconds.

 

He probably broke six regulations doing it.

 

He did not care even slightly.

 

 

They were in open space, far enough out that Chan's ship couldn't follow without a long burn, when Hongjoong finally let his hands stop moving.

 

He sat in the pilot's chair.

 

He breathed.

 

He thought about what had just happened — the cargo bay, the shot, the sound Seonghwa had made, Chan's smile — and felt the hot thing in his chest do another pass through him, slower this time, leaving something specific behind.

 

He got up.

 

He went back to the bunk.

 

It was empty.

 

Of course it was.

 

Hongjoong stood in the middle of his own ship and looked at the empty bunk and felt the specific complicated emotion of someone who had expected this and was still somehow surprised by it.

 

"Alright," he said, to the air. "Come on, bunny."

 

Silence.

 

"I know you're in here." He looked around. His ship was not large — a mid-range scout vessel, enough for a small crew or a solo operator doing long-haul work. There were not many places to hide. "Your knee needs looking at, sweetheart."

 

Silence.

 

"I've got a kit," he said. "Medical grade. Come on."

 

Nothing.

 

Hongjoong exhaled. He crossed to the storage cabinet under the bunk, pulled out the first aid kit — white case, full kit, he kept it stocked — and set it on the floor in the middle of the ship.

 

Then he stepped back.

 

He crossed his arms and waited.

 

Silence for a long moment.

 

Then, from behind the storage panel in the far corner — a panel that Hongjoong had not previously considered as a hiding space and was going to need to rethink — a small sound. Movement. And then Seonghwa appeared from a gap that a person should not have been able to fit into, folding himself out of it slowly, one arm wrapped around his own knee.

 

His face was still pale. His eyes, when they found Hongjoong, were wary — the animal wariness, the thing underneath the cocky ease, the real thing.

 

They were wet at the edges.

 

Not crying. Not quite. But close enough that something in Hongjoong's chest went completely quiet.

 

He didn't say anything.

 

He didn't move.

 

He just — waited. Let Seonghwa look at him. Let him take the measure of the space between them, of the fact that Hongjoong had stepped back and was staying stepped back.

 

Seonghwa's eyes went to the first aid kit.

 

Then back to Hongjoong.

 

Then to the kit again.

 

He moved. Slowly, keeping his weight off the bad knee, crossing to the kit and lowering himself to the floor beside it with a careful precision that spoke to how much the knee was hurting. He opened it without looking at Hongjoong.

 

His hands were steady. More or less. They shook slightly when he peeled back the fabric near the wound and got a look at the actual damage, and he made a small sound — bitten off, barely audible — and his jaw went tight.

 

Hongjoong bit his own lip so hard he tasted copper.

 

He watched Seonghwa work. The kit had what it needed — antiseptic, burn gel, gauze — and Seonghwa applied them in a sequence that suggested he'd done this before, which was its own specific miserable thought. He was not doing a terrible job. He was not doing a good job either — the angle was awkward, he kept tensing when he touched the wound directly, and twice he had to stop and breathe through what was clearly significant pain.

 

Hongjoong stood there and did not move and felt approximately terrible. He wanted to help but he was sure that Seonghwa wouldn’t let him.

 

The kit came flying at his face without warning.

 

He caught it on reflex. Blinked. Looked at Seonghwa, who was looking back at him with red-rimmed eyes and a glare that had a significant amount of feeling behind it.

 

"Stop staring," Seonghwa said.

 

His voice was rough. Still had the warmth underneath it, the particular quality of it, but rough.

 

"Sorry," Hongjoong said.

 

A pause.

 

"Are you going to take me in?" Seonghwa asked. Not with the cocky lightness from before. Just — asking. Direct and quiet and with something underneath the directness that Hongjoong recognized as the specific courage of someone preparing for an answer they didn't want.

 

Hongjoong looked at him thinking about three things:

 

Three hundred thousand credits.

 

Chan's smile when he'd stepped into the cargo bay.

 

The sound Seonghwa had made when the shot grazed his knee, small and bitten-off and not meant to be heard.

 

He thought: no.

 

He didn't say it yet. He wasn't going to say it yet. He shrugged instead, slow and casual. "Going to pick up my friends first," he said. "We'll figure the rest out."

 

Seonghwa's face did something.

 

It was fast — gone almost before it arrived — but Hongjoong caught it. The hope leaving his eyes. The specific deflation of someone who had been holding something and just let it go. He looked back at his knee and didn't say anything, and something in Hongjoong's chest made a sound like a cable snapping.

 

He was not going to take him in.

 

He had decided. Right now, this second, looking at Seonghwa on the floor of his ship with his knee wrapped in gauze and the hope draining out of his expression — he had decided, and it was done, and he wasn't going to examine it too closely because if he examined it too closely he was going to find something he wasn't ready to name.

 

He took a step toward him.

 

Seonghwa pressed back against the wall immediately, shoulders going up, bunny ears going flat — and the ears, flat, with that expression, was almost enough to undo Hongjoong completely.

 

He stopped. Grinned instead. Let the grin do what it needed to do, let it be the thing between him and the something he wasn't naming.

 

"You know," he said, "no one else is going to have my bunny." He tilted his head slightly. "You're mine. That's just how it is."

 

Seonghwa stared at him.

 

Then, slowly, his ears went from flat to something more complicated — not up, not down, somewhere between. His face went through several things. Landed on a glare, but not entirely — the glare had warm edges.

 

He also went very, very pink.

 

"You're insane," Seonghwa said with wide eyes.

 

"Probably," Hongjoong agreed. He stepped back. "Get some rest. Your knee needs it."

 

He went back to the cockpit.

 

He sat down.

 

He stared at the stars for a long moment.

 

Did I just say mine?

 

I am in so much trouble.

 

 

He wanted to pick up Wooyoung and San and Mingi from the rendezvous point at Relay Station Forn two days later.

 

Two days in which Seonghwa had not left the back of the ship — had stayed in his corner, sleeping and waking and watching Hongjoong with the cautious attention of something wild and wounded that hadn't decided about the situation yet. He'd eaten what Hongjoong left for him. He hadn't said much. His knee was clearly improving because by the second day he was moving on it with less care, but he hadn't tested it on the ship's ladder or anything requiring real weight yet.

 

What he had done, increasingly, was come forward.

 

Not all the way. Not to the cockpit. But from the back corner to the mid-ship area, sitting against the wall with his knees up and watching Hongjoong at the controls. Then, by the second morning, to the floor just behind the copilot's seat, close enough that Hongjoong could hear his breathing.

 

He hadn't said anything about it.

 

He'd just kept his eyes on the controls and grinned to himself every time Seonghwa moved three inches closer and pretended he hadn't.

 

By the time they hit Relay Station Forn, Seonghwa was sitting in the copilot's seat.

 

Hongjoong had looked at him sideways and said nothing.

 

Seonghwa had looked out the viewport and said nothing back.

 

It had been, strangely, one of the more comfortable silences of Hongjoong's recent career.

 

 

"You smell," Hongjoong said, on the third day.

 

Seonghwa's bunny ear twitched. He was in the copilot's seat — his seat, apparently, as of twenty-four hours ago — with his legs pulled up and one ear pointed at the comms and the other at Hongjoong.

 

"I beg your pardon?" he said.

 

"It's been three days," Hongjoong said. "Since you changed. Or showered." He kept his eyes forward. "Offering. The ship has a shower. You can use it."

 

A silence.

 

"You're trying to get me to go to the back of the ship alone," Seonghwa said and oh god, was he pouting?

 

"I'm trying to tell you that you smell," Hongjoong said. "Take it as you will."

 

He could feel Seonghwa looking at him. The particular quality of it — assessing, turning something over.

 

"I'll also give you a shirt," Hongjoong said. He reached behind him without looking and pulled one off the stack he kept in the side storage — plain, dark, one of his — and held it out.

 

Seonghwa looked at the shirt.

 

"It's clean," Hongjoong said.

 

"I know it's clean," Seonghwa said, with slight indignation. He looked at it a moment longer. "You're much shorter than me."

 

"What the— I’m not that short! It'll fit. I wear them oversized."

 

Another silence.

 

Then Seonghwa uncurled from the seat, taking the shirt, and Hongjoong thought: okay. Good. He turned back to the controls.

 

He heard Seonghwa stand.

 

He heard the pause that followed.

 

And then — because apparently three days of being relatively good had used up whatever patience Seonghwa had — he heard the very deliberate, very slow sound of a shirt being removed.

 

Hongjoong turned.

 

He couldn't not. The sound of it was specific and the pause had been specific and every instinct he had turned him around before he'd made a decision about it.

 

Seonghwa had his arms raised, shirt halfway over his head, and he took his sweet time getting it the rest of the way off — slow, like he was in absolutely no hurry, like he had all the time in the galaxy and intended to use every second of it.

 

The shirt came off.

 

And Hongjoong's brain went completely, totally offline.

 

He was — the file had said physically distinctive, which was the most dramatic understatement in documented record. Long and pale and lean in a way that was somehow both fragile and not, the architecture of him the kind of thing that didn't have a register in Hongjoong's existing vocabulary. His skin caught the cockpit light and held it. His waist was — Hongjoong's hands did something entirely unauthorized, an involuntary grip-and-release against the armrest, imagining the span of his palms around that waist, the way it would feel to pull him back, to press his thumbs into the soft dip of it and drag him close and push him down on his cock—

 

He swallowed hard.

 

Seonghwa turned around.

 

Slowly. With tremendous intention. The smirk arrived before his eyes did — fully formed, deeply unfair, the kind of smirk that knew exactly what it was doing and had been doing it on purpose since the shirt came off.

 

He looked at Hongjoong.

 

Hongjoong looked back at him because he was physically incapable of doing anything else and also possibly had forgotten how.

 

Then Seonghwa pulled Hongjoong's shirt on.

 

It was enormous on him, sliding off one shoulder, hem hitting mid-thigh, and he should have looked ridiculous and he looked—

 

He looked—

 

Hongjoong wanted to fold himself into the instrument panel and never come out.

 

Fuck. He looked so hot.

 

Seonghwa sat back down. In the copilot's seat. With that smirk settling into something softer and worse. He pulled his legs up and tilted his head and watched Hongjoong with the patient amusement of someone who had just won something significant and was happy to wait for the other person to realize it.

 

Hongjoong turned back to the controls.

 

He stared at them.

 

I am a professional. I am a decorated bounty hunter with a seventeen-mission clear rate. I have operated in active combat zones. I have negotiated with warlords. I have—

 

He felt the shift in the seat next to him. The warmth of someone leaning slightly closer.

 

Then Seonghwa leaned across the space between the seats, brought his face close to the side of Hongjoong's neck, and breathed in.

 

Slow. Deliberate. Like he was cataloguing something.

 

Hongjoong's hands went white-knuckled on the controls. His breathing did something complicated and entirely inappropriate. Every single process he had redirected itself toward the warmth at his neck and the slow exhale that followed the inhale and the fact that Seonghwa was still there, still close, not moving away.

 

Seonghwa pulled back.

 

Looked at him.

 

"You're turned on," he said. Conversationally. The tone of someone noting the outside temperature.

 

"I'm—" Hongjoong's voice came out wrong. He cleared his throat. "I'm flying the ship."

 

"You want to fuck me," Seonghwa said, in exactly the same tone.

 

Hongjoong's jaw dropped.

 

He turned and looked at Seonghwa — at the smirk, at the bunny ears up and forward and attentive, at the shirt hanging off his shoulder — and felt his entire self-concept do something complicated.

 

What happened to his shy bunny? Was he ever shy? Was the cautious corner and the slow approach and the not-quite-meeting-his-eyes all — was it—

 

"Did you play me?" Hongjoong said.

 

Seonghwa's smirk curved. "Partially," he said, easy as anything.

 

"You were—" Hongjoong pointed at him. "The whole time. The hiding and the coming forward slowly and—"

 

"I was scared," Seonghwa said. Simply. "And then I wasn't. And then I noticed you." He tilted his head. Both ears forward now, attentive. "You're interesting, bounty hunter."

 

"You keep saying that—"

 

"It keeps being true."

 

"I was going to—" Hongjoong stopped. The sentence had no good ending. He turned back to the controls. "You are so—"

 

"Turned on," Seonghwa said helpfully. "You are so turned on."

 

"I am going to drop you on the nearest inhabited—"

 

"You won't."

 

"I absolutely—"

 

"You won't," Seonghwa said. Warm. Certain. Final. "You said so yourself. I'm yours, remember?"

 

Hongjoong opened his mouth.

 

The docking bay door opened.

 

 

It opened because they'd hit Relay Station Forn, which Hongjoong had completely lost track of in the last four minutes of his professional and personal dissolution, and the boarding lock had engaged on approach and now the door was cycling and in approximately four seconds—

 

Wooyoung came through at volume.

 

"FINALLY," he announced, at a decibel level that suggested he had been saving it up. "Do you know how long we've been waiting at this station, I've eaten the same meal three times—" He stopped.

 

He looked at Hongjoong.

 

He looked at the copilot's seat.

 

He looked at Seonghwa, who looked back at him with calm dark eyes and ears at a polite neutral position and Hongjoong's shirt hanging off one shoulder.

 

Wooyoung's mouth dropped open.

 

San came through behind him, did a full sweep of the room in one second the way he always did, and stopped moving so abruptly that Mingi walked into his back.

 

"Ow," Mingi said. Then looked past San. Then also stopped.

 

The three of them stood in the doorway of Hongjoong's ship and stared.

 

Seonghwa looked at Hongjoong.

 

Hongjoong looked at his friends.

 

He thought about explaining. About everything — the cargo bay, Chan, the knee, the two days, the coming-forward-slowly, the shirt, the sniffing, the you want to fuck me said like weather commentary—

 

"Surprise?" he said.

 

Wooyoung pointed. At Seonghwa. His hand was shaking slightly. "That," he said. "Is the space bunny."

 

"Yes," Hongjoong said.

 

"The space bunny. With the three hundred thousand credit bounty. The one we've ALL been—" His voice was going up. "The one you told us you were handling—"

 

"I am handling it," Hongjoong said.

 

"He's in your copilot’s seat," Wooyoung said. "Wearing your shirt—"

 

"It fits him."

 

"It's OFF HIS SHOULDER—"

 

"That's just how it sits—"

 

"Hongjoong." Wooyoung stepped fully into the ship. He looked at Seonghwa. He looked back at Hongjoong. Something moved through his expression that was either horror or understanding and Hongjoong wasn't sure which was worse. "What is happening."

 

San, who had recovered faster than the other two, crossed to Seonghwa's seat and crouched down to eye level. "Are you okay?" he asked, quietly. The real question. The careful one.

 

Seonghwa considered him. "He shot at someone who hurt me," he said. "Then he carried me out of a cargo bay. Then he fed me for two days."

 

"He carried you," Wooyoung said.

 

"Bridal style," Seonghwa said. And glanced at Hongjoong with the corner of his mouth doing the thing.

 

Hongjoong looked at the ceiling.

 

Mingi had sat down on the floor at some point. He was looking at Seonghwa with the expression of someone doing very slow arithmetic. "So are we," he said carefully, "turning him in or...?"

 

"No," Hongjoong said.

 

Flat. Simple. Not open for discussion.

 

"Hongjoong—"

 

"No," Hongjoong said again. "Nobody is touching him. That's final."

 

The silence was significant.

 

Wooyoung stared at him. "Nobody," he repeated. "Nobody is touching — Hongjoong you have been chasing this man for three weeks. I watched you run face-first into a closing blast door on Vela-3—"

 

"That door closed early—"

 

"—and now he's sitting in your ship wearing your clothes and you're—"

 

"It's a recent development," Hongjoong said. "The situation has evolved."

 

"Evolved," Wooyoung said. "Into what—"

 

Hongjoong looked at Seonghwa.

 

Seonghwa looked back at him. Ears forward. Eyes dark and warm. The shirt still off one shoulder. The smirk smaller now, something underneath it that was softer, less performed.

 

He thought about three weeks and the market on Vela-3 and the smile across the crowd and I don't want to catch him and he shot my bunny and the hope leaving Seonghwa's eyes in that one awful moment.

 

I know exactly what this evolved into and I am not saying it out loud in front of Wooyoung.

 

He looked back at his friends.

 

"The situation has evolved," he said, "into: he's staying. That's it. That's the whole thing."

 

Wooyoung made a sound that had no letters in it.

 

San stood up from his crouch beside Seonghwa and looked at Hongjoong with the specific expression he used when he understood something that hadn't been explained to him and was choosing not to say what it was.

 

Mingi, still on the floor, raised his hand. "What about Yeosang's sister," he said.

 

Everyone looked at him.

 

"The bet," Mingi said. "Whoever catches the space bunny goes on a date with—"

 

"Call Yeosang," Hongjoong said. "Explain that Seonghwa is not available for exchange."

 

Seonghwa.

 

Did he just say his name? 

 

He ignored the eyes boring into him and turned away.

 

"And what," Wooyoung said, with tremendous precision, "do I tell him is the reason for that."

 

Hongjoong looked at Seonghwa.

 

Seonghwa looked back at him, head tilted, one ear angled toward Hongjoong like it was listening for something specific.

 

"Tell him," Hongjoong said, "that I caught my target." He paused. Let the pause do the work. "And I'm keeping him."

 

The noise Wooyoung made rattled the instrument panel.

 

Seonghwa laughed.

 

The real laugh — full and warm and unguarded, the kind of laugh that changed the shape of a room. His ears went up and his eyes crinkled and he tipped his head back slightly, and Hongjoong felt it land in his chest and stay there, warm and permanent, the kind of thing you didn't get back once it arrived.

 

There you are.

 

My bunny.

 

I've been chasing you for three weeks and you were here the whole time, just waiting for me to stop trying to catch you and start trying to keep you.

 

I should have figured that out on Vela-3 when you waved at me.

 

He faced forward. Started charting their next course. Wooyoung was saying something very loud to Mingi. San had sat down on the floor near Seonghwa's seat, apparently deciding this was his space now, and was asking him quiet questions that Hongjoong couldn't quite hear.

 

Seonghwa answered them.

 

His voice, in the background of the ship's ambient noise and Wooyoung's ongoing commentary, was warm and specific and — Hongjoong let himself register it, the quality of it filling up his ship — exactly right.

 

Seonghwa's knee nudged his under the console.

 

Hongjoong didn't move his leg away.

 

He felt Seonghwa look at him from the corner of his eye.

 

"Interesting," Seonghwa said, quietly. Under the noise of their friends. Just for him.

 

"Shut up," Hongjoong said.

 

Seonghwa smiled.

 

His bunny ear tilted toward Hongjoong, soft and warm, and stayed there.

 

Hongjoong kept his eyes on the stars and thought about three hundred thousand credits and a bet he'd never cared about and a photo in a file and a smile across a crowded market and thought:

 

Worth it.

 

 

This was good.

 

This was really, genuinely, exceptionally good — Seonghwa's knee warm against his under the console, the ship full and loud and alive with people, and Hongjoong had his hand on the controls and the stars in front of him and everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.

 

Seonghwa was in the copilot's seat. His seat, apparently. Wooyoung had stopped yelling approximately forty minutes ago and pivoted to interrogating Seonghwa about Athari hearing range with the focused energy of someone who had located a new obsession. Mingi was on the floor sharing snacks with San. Seonghwa was answering questions with the patient amusement of someone who found humans faintly ridiculous and mostly worth keeping.

 

Hongjoong was thinking about nothing complicated.

 

Nothing could ruin this.

 

The ship lurched like something had picked it up and thrown it.

 

Never fucking mind.

 

Not a small hit — a full-body percussion through the hull, deep and resonant, every light on the panel going amber simultaneously. Hongjoong's hands were on manual override before the sound finished. He killed autopilot, pulled the stabilizers, scanned for the source—

 

"What the hell—" Wooyoung grabbed the nearest fixed object.

 

"Something hit us," Mingi reported from the floor, which was the least useful thing anyone had ever said.

 

Seonghwa—

 

Hongjoong looked.

 

Seonghwa had gone completely rigid in the copilot's seat. Both hands white-knuckled on the armrests. His ears were flat — fully, completely flat against his skull, the fear position, the real one — and his eyes were wide and too bright and he was shaking. A visible, fine tremor running through all of him.

 

"Hey—" Hongjoong started.

 

The second hit was worse.

 

A sharp concussive crack from somewhere aft, and the ship listed hard to port before the stabilizers screamed and caught it. In the half-second of the list Hongjoong watched Seonghwa come out of his seat — fast, all that instinctive animal speed, the fear overriding everything else — and move toward the back of the ship.

 

I know where he's going. The panel gap. He's going back to the panel gap.

 

He wanted to go after him. Every part of him wanted to leave the controls and go after him and he couldn't, because the ship was taking fire and someone had to fly it.

 

Fix this first. Then him. Fix this first.

 

"Everyone strap in," he said, clipped and professional, the version of himself that ran on focus. "Now."

 

He pulled up the external scan and waited the three seconds it took to resolve.

 

The ship that came back on screen was mid-range combat class, no identification beacon, closing on an aggressive vector from the starboard quarter. Running dark except for its weapons array, which was very much lit up.

 

The scan ran the hull signature.

 

Two seconds.

 

The result came back and Hongjoong went very still for one specific moment.

 

"Of course," he said, very quietly. "Of course it's him."

 

"Who?" San, already strapped, leaning forward.

 

"Bang Chan." Flat. Cold. Specific. "He followed us out of Forn. He's been tracking us the whole time." He pulled the weapons array online, ran a damage check — aft panel compromised, rear shield at fifty-eight percent, left stabilizer reading yellow. "He's the one who shot Seonghwa's knee."

 

One second of silence.

 

"That guy," Wooyoung said, "is shooting at us right now."

 

"Yes."

 

"He shot the bunny and now he's shooting at us—"

 

"Wooyoung—"

 

"Let me at the rear guns—"

 

"Sit down—"

 

Hongjoong threw the ship into a hard bank, cutting across Chan's approach vector, felt the engines complain about it, didn't care. His instinct was to turn and fight — he wanted to turn around and go directly at Chan's ship and take it apart piece by piece — but he ran the numbers in the three seconds he had and the numbers were bad. Fifty-eight percent shielding. No support. Three non-combat crew and one terrified alien folded into a storage panel in the back.

 

Not today.

 

He opened fire anyway.

 

Four shots. He aimed two at the forward shield array and two at the engine housing, and he didn't wait to see how they landed before he pushed the throttle to full and ran.

 

"He's following," Mingi said from somewhere behind him.

 

"I know."

 

"He's fast—"

 

"I know."

 

"Hongjoong he is really—"

 

The hit to the left wing felt like the galaxy had reached out and slapped him personally.

 

The whole cockpit shuddered and a panel Hongjoong had genuinely never had cause to worry about before lit up red and screaming, and he felt the ship's handling go sluggish and wrong under his hands — the particular wrongness of compromised stabilizer geometry, the way it pulled left when he tried to hold straight.

 

No. No, no, no—

 

Left stabilizer fin. Compromised. Not gone but close, and the handling was going to get worse before it got better, and anything fancy was now off the table entirely. He looked at Chan's position on the scanner and he looked at his own readouts and he made the only calculation that made sense.

 

Run straight. Everything he had. Maximum burn, no maneuvering, open the distance and don't stop until Chan couldn't follow accurately.

 

He hated it.

 

He did it.

 

He burned everything in the engines and went dead straight and watched Chan's ship fall back by degree by agonizing degree on the scanner, and Chan fired twice more and both shots missed at the range, and then Chan's ship was slowing because the distance was too great and there was no point.

 

Hongjoong kept going for three more minutes.

 

Then he eased off.

 

"Clear?" San asked.

 

"Clear." He pulled the full damage report. Left wing compromised. Rear panel scorched. Rear shield generator offline. Aft structural integrity flagged. The list kept going and with every line Hongjoong felt the rage in him build into something cold and patient and entirely focused.

 

He is going to pay for every single character of this report.

 

"How bad," Wooyoung said.

 

"Bad enough that we're going to Jongho's and we're going now." He was already plotting the course — the dead-zone station, off every official map, the place only a handful of people in the galaxy knew about. Full resources. A crew who knew what they were doing. A mechanic. "We can't operate looking like this. The whole galaxy is still looking for—"

 

He stopped.

 

Oh.

 

The whole galaxy is still looking for him. I've been sitting here thinking about Chan and I completely — how did I not immediately—

 

He was already out of the pilot's seat.

 

"Take the controls," he said to San, who was the only one present he trusted with that instruction, and went.

 

 

The back of the ship was quiet.

 

Hongjoong stood in front of the storage panel in the back corner and crouched down.

 

"Hey," he said. Low and careful. "It's me. Chan's gone. We're clear, we're running to Jongho's, we're safe." He waited. Nothing. "Bunny."

 

Silence.

 

He sat down on the floor.

 

He thought about the cargo bay and the first aid kit and the slow way trust had built over two days. He thought about Seonghwa coming three inches closer every hour until he was in the copilot's seat. He thought about how fast all of that could undo itself.

 

Take your time, he thought. I've got time.

 

"I know that was bad," he said, to the panel. "I know. I'm sorry I couldn't come back here sooner. I had to fly the ship." He paused. "You're safe now. I promise you're safe, sweetheart."

 

A long silence.

 

Then, from behind the panel: a small sound. Not words. Just a sound, the kind that meant I hear you and nothing else yet.

 

Hongjoong waited.

 

The panel shifted. Seonghwa came out of the gap slowly this time — not the careful fold of someone managing an injury, just slow, the way someone moved when they were exhausted all the way through. He sat just outside the opening with his knees pulled up and his arms around them and looked at Hongjoong.

 

His ears were still half-flat.

 

His eyes were dry. He hadn't cried. But the red rim was there, the same as after his knee, and his face had a quality to it that Hongjoong didn't have a word for — stripped down, everything taken off, none of the performance left.

 

He looked young.

 

He looked like someone who had been afraid and was still coming down from it.

 

Hongjoong opened his arms.

 

"I'm sorry," he said softly. "Come here, bunny."

 

Seonghwa looked at him. At the open arms. His eyes ran the assessment — the familiar calculation, reading Hongjoong's face for the thing underneath the thing.

 

Then, slowly, like the first time, like every time — incrementally, cautiously, testing each moment — he moved forward and climbed into Hongjoong's lap.

 

He was careful about the bad knee. He settled his weight gingerly, both of them adjusting for the logistics of Seonghwa being significantly taller and Hongjoong's lap being what it was, and then Seonghwa's forehead came down toward Hongjoong's shoulder and Hongjoong brought his arms in and held on.

 

The ears were flat.

 

Hongjoong put one hand in his hair, slow and steady, and started moving it the way he had the first time. Just — present. Consistent.

 

The ears moved upward. A degree. Two.

 

"He's not going to come near you again," Hongjoong said, into his hair. Not soft and reassuring — certain. The way he said things he had decided. "I'm going to find him and I'm going to make sure he can't. And I'm going to do everything I can to get that bounty dropped entirely. All of it. Every posting, every exchange, every credit on your head." He felt Seonghwa's grip on his shirt go tight. "That's a promise. You understand?"

 

A pause.

 

Then Seonghwa said, very quietly, into his shoulder: "You can't promise that."

 

"I can promise I'm going to try," Hongjoong said. "And I don't fail things I try."

 

Another pause.

 

The ears came up another increment.

 

"That's a very arrogant thing to say," Seonghwa said.

 

"I'm a very arrogant person."

 

A sound from Seonghwa. Not quite a laugh. But adjacent to one — something that had warmth in it even now.

 

Hongjoong kept his hand in his hair.

 

We're okay, he thought. We're going to be okay.

 

 

Jongho's hideout was fully staffed when Hongjoong limped his damaged ship into the docking bay, which meant witnesses.

 

He got out.

 

He looked at his ship.

 

The left stabilizer fin had a burn line across two-thirds of its length — clean, precise, the kind of damage that came from a targeted shot rather than a glancing hit. The rear panel was worse. Heat scoring deep into the housing. A stress fracture that was going to need full replacement. He walked the full circumference of his ship in the bay lights and read every mark on it and felt the cold patient rage do a full circuit through him.

 

Every credit. Every hour. Every scratch. He's going to pay for all of it.

 

He was mid-inventory of Chan's future suffering when it landed.

 

Oh.

 

My bunny.

 

He turned and went back into the ship at a pace that was definitely a run and that he was definitely never going to admit to.

 

 

The ship was quiet.

 

Too quiet.

 

"Hey," he said, to the air. "We're here. It's safe, sweetheart." He moved through the ship, checking. The bunk — empty. The equipment corridor — empty. The head — empty. He came back to the main space and stood in it and looked at the storage panel in the far corner.

 

He crossed to it and crouched down.

 

"Bunny. Come on. We're at Jongho's, these are my people, they're safe."

 

A long moment.

 

Then the panel shifted.

 

Seonghwa unfolded himself from the gap with the careful precision of someone managing the bad knee, and straightened up, and looked at Hongjoong with the wary stripped-down face from before.

 

Hongjoong stood. He didn't reach for him. He tilted his head toward the ship door — an offer.

 

Seonghwa looked at the door. Then moved close to Hongjoong's shoulder, not touching but near, and they walked out together.

 

 

The main room of Jongho's hideout had seven people in it.

 

Hongjoong clocked them all in one sweep — Jongho, Yeosang, Yunho, and four others from previous jobs, all of whom turned to look at the door when it opened. He watched the attention snap to Seonghwa. He watched the recognition land.

 

Then the room more or less exploded.

 

"Is that—"

 

"Why is the bounty here—"

 

"Hongjoong what the actual—"

 

"The space bunny, are you kidding me—"

 

Seonghwa, at Hongjoong's shoulder, went very still.

 

Hongjoong felt it — the tension going through him, the ears pressing back — and moved without deciding to, stepping slightly in front of him.

 

Yeosang hadn't said anything.

 

Yeosang was at the back of the room with his arms crossed and his face doing the specific closed thing it did when he was assessing something and had not yet delivered a verdict. He was looking at Seonghwa with a directness that had no warmth in it.

 

Seonghwa looked back.

 

Then he took one step sideways and one step back, and tucked himself behind Hongjoong.

 

The room went briefly quiet.

 

Because the thing was — Seonghwa was taller than Hongjoong. By several centimeters. The geometry of hiding behind him was genuinely not practical and everyone in the room could see the ears above Hongjoong's head. It was, objectively and specifically, very funny.

 

Wooyoung made a choked sound. Mingi pressed his lips together very hard.

 

Hongjoong felt the warmth hit his chest before he could manage it. He turned to look at Seonghwa over his shoulder — at the half-flat ears, the cautious dark eyes, the way he'd folded himself down slightly trying to make himself smaller — and something in him went soft and stupid in a way he was going to deal with later.

 

He turned back to the room.

 

"Right," he said. The professional voice. The final one. "He's with me. Anyone who has a problem with that talks to me about it. Anyone who touches him, threatens him, or does anything that makes him feel less safe than he already does—" He let the pause sit. "I will deal with it personally and thoroughly. Clear?"

 

"Hongjoong—" Jongho started.

 

"Clear," Hongjoong said again, firmer than before.

 

A silence.

 

"Clear," San said.

 

"Clear," Mingi said.

 

"Clear," Yunho said, simply.

 

Wooyoung rolled his eyes with great feeling but nodded.

 

Yeosang said nothing. He was still looking at Seonghwa. Or trying to look at Seonghwa, around Hongjoong.

 

"Yeosang," Hongjoong said.

 

Yeosang looked at him. Something passed between them — eleven years of knowing each other, the whole shorthand of it.

 

"Fine," Yeosang said. Not warm. But contained, which was enough.

 

Hongjoong turned around.

 

He reached up — had to reach up, a fact he was filing away to be annoyed about later — and pinched Seonghwa's cheek once, short and light.

 

Seonghwa's ear flicked. He blinked at him.

 

"Shower," Hongjoong said. "Jongho's place has a real one. Go." He held Seonghwa's eyes. "I'm right outside the room. No one is going to touch you. But I need to talk to these people about Chan and I need to do it now."

 

Seonghwa looked at him.

 

He looked at the room. At Jongho, at Yeosang, at the assembled faces of people he didn't know.

 

"I don't want to be alone," he said. Quiet and direct. "I don't trust them."

 

"I know," Hongjoong said. "I know you don't. But I trust them, and I'm right outside the door, and nothing is going to happen to you in a shower in Jongho's hideout. I’m right here. You can hear me." He kept his voice even. "I need you to trust me."

 

A long pause.

 

Seonghwa's eyes stayed on his face.

 

Then, very slightly, he nodded.

 

Jongho wordlessly pointed him toward the shower corridor, because that was exactly who Jongho was. Seonghwa went, his bunny ears tracking backward toward Hongjoong until he turned the corner and was out of sight.

 

Hongjoong waited until he heard the shower door.

 

Then he turned to the room.

 

"Go ahead," he said.

 

 

They went ahead.

 

Half of them were in shock. The other half were pissed. Jongho was running some internal calculation that would eventually produce an opinion, and Yeosang was still doing the closed-face assessment, and Wooyoung was cycling between outrage and fascination in about thirty-second intervals. Yunho sat with his long legs folded under him and said nothing, which with Yunho meant he was paying close attention to everything.

 

Hongjoong let them run.

 

When the noise died down enough he told them about Chan. The cargo bay. The shot. The sound Seonghwa had made. (It wasn’t relevant for them, at least that’s what Yeosang said with an eye roll. But it was relevant to Hongjoong.) Picking him up and running. The two days on the ship. The attack at Forn, the wing damage, the full repair list. He was precise and thorough and he kept his voice level and professional.

 

When he finished, Jongho said: "He shot him."

 

"Grazed his knee. Yes."

 

"And he just shot your ship."

 

"Yes."

 

Jongho nodded once, the way he nodded when a decision had been made internally and didn't require further discussion. "We deal with Chan."

 

"Nobody has the right to damage the ship," Wooyoung said.

 

"I'm aware."

 

"Also—" Wooyoung stopped. He looked at the corridor where Seonghwa had gone. He shrugged. "Also he hurt him. So."

 

"So," Hongjoong agreed.

 

"Okay but—" Mingi raised his hand. "I still don't understand why everyone wants him. Like. What does he actually do? Three hundred thousand credits is — what is that?"

 

Hongjoong opened his mouth.

 

Oh.

 

He realized he didn't fully know the answer.

 

He'd been so caught up in the catching and the carrying and the two days and the copilot seat and the shirt and the knee nudge under the console that he had not, in fact, gotten to the bottom of why half the galaxy had a price on one space bunny's head.

 

He did not get the chance to answer, because the shower corridor door opened.

 

 

Seonghwa stood in the doorway.

 

His hair was damp, the black bunny ears soft and slightly water-dark at the tips. Someone had found him a shirt — too short in the sleeves, anonymous grey — and his feet were bare and his face was clean and he stood in the doorway and looked at the room with the careful tracking eyes, cataloguing each face.

 

Then he found Hongjoong.

 

He moved.

 

It wasn't slow this time. It was quick — not the full animal speed he used when running, but fast, a direct line through the room, sidestep around the low table, around Wooyoung, arriving at Hongjoong's left side and stopping just behind his shoulder.

 

The room watched this happen in complete silence.

 

Hongjoong was aware, in some peripheral and useless way, that his face was doing something. Something that Wooyoung was going to identify and document and bring up at every possible future opportunity. He could feel it and he could not stop it.

 

He looked up at Seonghwa.

 

He brought a hand up and cupped his face — both palms, the way he'd wanted to since the copilot's seat probably, and Seonghwa went very still.

 

"There's my bunny," Hongjoong said grinning, small and private.

 

Jongho made a sound like he'd stepped on something.

 

Seonghwa's ears came fully up. His expression went through something soft and quickly covered by the smirk, and his face did the faint pink thing that Hongjoong had decided was the best thing that happened in this galaxy.

 

And the tension in the room, which had been sitting at a particular height since Hongjoong walked in with the most wanted bounty in three sectors tucked behind his shoulder, broke.

 

Wooyoung laughed. San shook his head but smiled. Mingi grinned. Yunho covered his mouth with his hand. Even Jongho's expression cracked slightly at the corner. Yeosang looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone removing themselves from proceedings but not, notably, leaving.

 

Hongjoong lowered his hands.

 

"Okay," he said, to Seonghwa. "We talked about Chan. We're going to find him, we're going to deal with him, and I'm going to do what I can about the bounty from there." He paused. "But I need to ask you something."

 

Seonghwa looked at him, his pretty brown eyes narrowing.

 

"Why," Hongjoong said, "does everyone want you? Specifically. What's the bounty actually for?"

 

Seonghwa's face changed.

 

The smirk went. The ears came down slightly. He looked at his own hands, which had found each other and were fidgeting — small and nervous, the first genuine tell Hongjoong had ever seen from him that wasn't performed.

 

"Skills," he said, after a moment. "I can read people. Infiltrate. Manipulate. Certain parties wanted to use that — run jobs. Theft. Worse." He shrugged, tight. "I said no. They didn't accept that."

 

"And the bounty?" Jongho said.

 

Seonghwa's fingers went tighter together.

 

"There's more," Hongjoong said. Not a question.

 

Seonghwa looked at him. Then back at his hands.

 

"I can produce," he said, very quietly.

 

Wooyoung frowned. "Produce what?"

 

Seonghwa said nothing.

 

Hongjoong looked at him — at the downcast eyes, the tension in his shoulders, the careful way he'd said the word — and something started to come together in the back of his mind.

 

Yeosang, at the back of the room, had gone very still.

 

San frowned. "I don't—"

 

"He means," Yeosang said, measured and careful, "that he can carry children."

 

A beat.

 

"But you're—" San started, clearly confused. "I mean — you present as—"

 

"Male," Seonghwa said. "Yes." He looked up. His expression was flat and tired in a way that suggested he'd had this conversation before and found it exhausting every time. "Athari biology doesn't work the same way yours does. We can carry regardless of presentation. It's not common. But it's possible." He paused. "Certain people found that interesting. Commercially interesting. And they wanted to breed me and I said no. And the next thing I knew was that there was a bounty."

 

The room was very quiet.

 

Hongjoong looked at him for a long moment — at the flat tired expression, at the hands still wound around each other, at the ears half-down — and felt the cold focused thing in his chest expand outward into something larger and less patient.

 

People put a bounty on him, he thought. A three hundred thousand credit bounty. To breed him. To take something from him that was his. And the whole galaxy has been chasing him across dead planets and black markets and spaceports for—

 

"Right," Hongjoong said. His voice came out very even. "That's enough for tonight."

 

"Hongjoong—" Jongho started.

 

"It's enough," he snapped. "We've got what we need. We'll plan tomorrow." He looked around the room. "Everyone find somewhere to sleep."

 

He didn't wait for responses. He looked at Seonghwa, expression softening. "Come on."

 

 

The guest room was small.

 

A bunk, a narrow viewport looking out at the dark, a shelf. Functional. Clean. Hongjoong turned on the light and stepped back and Seonghwa went in and stood in the middle of it and looked around.

 

"Sleep," Hongjoong said from the doorway. "You're safe here. I'll be just—"

 

Seonghwa turned around.

 

He looked at Hongjoong with the full dark attention — the direct, unperformed version, the real thing. Then he reached out and took Hongjoong's hand.

 

Just — took it. Like it was simple.

 

Hongjoong looked down at their hands.

 

"With you?" Seonghwa said. He blinked. Wide and dark and entirely, guilefully innocent.

 

Hongjoong nearly popped a boner right there in the doorway.

 

He opened his mouth to say something responsible. Something about space and rest and recovery and not making things complicated. They just talked about breeding and this was wrong. He had the sentence ready.

 

Seonghwa tilted his head. His damp ear almost brushed Hongjoong's jaw.

 

"With you," he said again, softer.

 

Hongjoong closed his hand around Seonghwa's and walked them both to the bunk.

 

"Lay down," he said.

 

Seonghwa sat on the bunk.

 

He looked up at Hongjoong with the wide eyes and the soft ears and that smile — that particular smile, the one that lived just underneath the smirk, the real one.

 

He's going to sleep and then I'm going to step outside and stand in the corridor and be a normal person, Hongjoong thought.

 

Then Seonghwa sat up a little further, brought his knees up, and slowly — slowly, watching Hongjoong's face the entire time — let them fall open.

 

A deliberate, unhurried slide. His eyes stayed on Hongjoong's. The shirt rode up slightly at the hem.

 

"You can fuck me," he said, low and certain, with the full weight of someone who meant exactly what they were saying. "Since I'm yours."

 

Hongjoong's brain went completely offline.

 

What.

 

What the fuck.

 

He stood at the edge of the bunk and stared and his body had a response to this that was immediate and specific and not something he was going to be able to think past without intervention.

 

He imprinted, something in the back of his mind noted distantly. That's what this is. Athari imprint on people who treat them right. He's decided that I am his person.

 

Fuck.

 

You are in so much trouble.

 

"Bunny," Hongjoong said. His voice came out lower than intended. "We shouldn't."

 

Seonghwa's expression shifted.

 

The pout arrived — small, genuine, slightly devastated — and Hongjoong looked at it and felt approximately terrible. He looked lower and saw the evidence that Seonghwa was not unaffected by any of this, the line of tension visible through his clothes, and felt even more terrible.

 

You are a bad person, he told himself. You are a bad person for wanting to—

 

He moved.

 

Carefully. He crossed to the bunk and sat down next to Seonghwa, close enough that their thighs pressed together, and he looked at him — at the pout, at the dark eyes, at the damp ear still slightly water-dark at the tip.

 

He reached out and laid him back.

 

Gently. Hand on his shoulder, guiding him down, and Seonghwa went — watching him the entire way down, tracking every movement. Hongjoong moved over him and braced on one arm and looked down at him and Seonghwa looked back up and for a moment neither of them did anything at all.

 

Then Seonghwa leaned up and bit his lip.

 

Not hard. Just caught it — quick, deliberate, soft, the faintest press of teeth.

 

Hongjoong made a sound that he was never going to talk about.

 

Seonghwa's eyes were very wide and very dark and he was looking up at Hongjoong with an expression that had nothing performed about it.

 

"I would let you impregnate me," he said.

 

Hongjoong's brain produced static.

 

Pure, complete, total static.

 

He stared down at Seonghwa — at the face that had said that, at the open honest eyes that had meant it — and felt his entire capacity for rational thought make a brief departure.

 

No, he told himself, from somewhere very far away. No, you are not going to — he needs sleep and you need to be — this is not — no.

 

He took a breath.

 

"You really," he said, voice rough, "should not say things like that, my pretty bunny."

 

Seonghwa's ears went fully up.

 

Hongjoong lowered his hips.

 

He kept it controlled — slow, deliberate, the drag of himself against Seonghwa with intention but not more than this, not yet, not now — just pressure, just the weight and warmth of it, and he watched Seonghwa's eyes go wide.

 

His head went back.

 

The sound he made went through Hongjoong like a live current — high and broken and so completely unperformed, nothing strategic about it, just genuine — and his hands flew to Hongjoong's shirt, fingers curling tight into the fabric, and his legs shifted to wrap around him, trying to pull him closer.

 

"God," Hongjoong breathed. He kept the rhythm, steady and unhurried, slowly rutting against him. He brought his mouth close to Seonghwa's ear. "The way you sound. Do you know—" He rolled his hips again and felt Seonghwa shudder. "That's only for me. You hear me? Only I get to hear you like that."

 

Seonghwa whimpered.

 

"Mine," Hongjoong said. He put more weight into the next movement and watched Seonghwa's mouth fall open. "No one else. No one else is going to touch you or have you or see you like this. You are mine."

 

"Yes," Seonghwa managed, breathless, "yes, yours, I'm — Hongjoong—"

 

Hongjoong kissed him.

 

His tongue found Seonghwa's immediately, fully, the complete claim of the kiss, and Seonghwa arched up off the bunk with a sound that Hongjoong swallowed and kept. The kissing was deep and slow and Hongjoong kept his hips moving and Seonghwa was coming apart under him in pieces — the composed teasing smirking thing gone completely, something raw and real and unguarded in its place, his hands gripping Hongjoong's shirt like it was the only fixed point.

 

He put more pressure down.

 

Seonghwa broke.

 

His back came off the bunk and Hongjoong's name came out of him cracked and high and completely genuine — just his name, nothing else, said like it meant something specific — and he shook through it with his face turned into Hongjoong's neck and his hands fisted in his shirt.

 

God, I’m fucked.

 

Hongjoong followed him shortly after, breathless, his forehead dropping to Seonghwa's shoulder.

 

Silence.

 

The narrow viewport showed stars.

 

They came down slowly, breathing evening out, the room going quiet around them. Seonghwa's grip on his shirt loosened degree by degree into something that was less desperate and more simply — staying. Keeping him there.

 

Hongjoong lifted his head.

 

Seonghwa was looking at him.

 

He'd never seen this expression on him. In the whole three weeks of chasing and the days on the ship and the hideout arrival and everything — this was new. Soft and wide-open and utterly undefended, the real thing underneath everything else, with no performance left over it.

 

Then he moved his head up.

 

He pressed his nose against Hongjoong's — side to side, gentle, the softest possible contact — and his eyes were half-closed and his bunny ears were fully up and he looked like the most peaceful version of himself Hongjoong had ever seen.

 

Oh, Hongjoong thought. Oh no.

 

I've fallen for him.

 

Not the possessive thing. Not the mine of the cargo bay and the storage panel. Something else — the wanting him to stay, the wanting to be the person he pressed his nose against, the wanting to hear him ask questions with those wide eyes for as long as he'd let him.

 

"You're pretty," Hongjoong said, because it was true and the room felt like it wanted something true.

 

Seonghwa's ears went soft. "You're not bad yourself," he said. "For a human."

 

"For a—" Hongjoong started.

 

"Tell me about your first bounty," Seonghwa said.

 

Hongjoong blinked. "What?"

 

"Your first one." Seonghwa was moving — rearranging himself, shifting up and over, and then he was settling on top of Hongjoong's chest, chin propped on his folded arms, looking down at him. He made himself small, tucked and comfortable, his ear pressing lightly against Hongjoong's collarbone. His eyes were wide and genuinely interested, both ears tilted forward. "Tell me about it."

 

Hongjoong looked up at him. 

 

At the face above his — attentive, bright, the full focused want-to-know quality of it.

 

They should clean up.

 

He didn’t move.

 

Seonghwa was laying on his chest, folded on top of him like Hongjoong was the safest place in the galaxy and something about that, about the openness of it, the total unguarded trust of it, made him incapable of moving an inch.

 

He stayed exactly where he was.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

 

"It was embarrassing," Hongjoong said quietly.

 

"Perfect," Seonghwa said with a smile so soft and settled in.

 

So Hongjoong told him.

 

He told him about the first bounty — the mistaken identity, the very angry shop owner, arriving in the wrong sector two days late to find his target had been home the entire time — and Seonghwa listened with the hooked complete attention of someone watching something they found genuinely fascinating. He asked real questions. What did your face do when you realized? Did you still get paid? How long before you told anyone?

 

Hongjoong answered all of them.

 

He told him about the most dangerous mission. The one he didn't tell people about. Seonghwa's hands pressed flat on his chest, his eyes went wide, he said  no at exactly the right moments and and then? at the others, completely and specifically hooked.

 

The room got quieter as the station cycled into its dark hours.

 

Hongjoong's voice got quieter with it.

 

He noticed, at some point, that Seonghwa had stopped asking questions. That his responses had gone from words to small sounds to nothing.

 

He looked down.

 

Seonghwa was asleep.

 

 

Completely, fully asleep — folded on top of him, one bunny ear pressed flat against his chest like it was listening to his heartbeat even now, his face slack and soft and entirely undefended. His grip on Hongjoong's shirt had not released.

 

Hongjoong lay in the dark of the narrow guest room and looked at the viewport and its slice of stars.

 

I'm going to get the bounty dropped, he thought. I'm going to deal with Chan and I'm going to figure out how to make Seonghwa untouchable and I'm going to — I don't know what I'm going to do after that. I don't know what this is yet.

 

He was lying.

 

I know what it is.

 

I'm not saying it yet.

 

He stayed awake for a long time.

 

Eventually, with the warm weight of Seonghwa on his chest and the sound of his breathing and one ear pressed over his heart, he slept.

 

 

Seonghwa woke to voices.

 

He was warm.

 

For a moment he lay there in the soft grey of almost-sleep and just — existed in it. The warmth. An arm around him. A steady heartbeat under his ear.

 

Then he registered the absence.

 

The arm was gone. The heartbeat wasn’t there. He was alone on the bunk and the space where Hongjoong had been was just — space.

 

His ear twitched toward the door.

 

Where did you go.

 

Then the voices registered.

 

He had never been able to turn the hearing off. It wasn't something Athari could do — the world came in at full volume always, every frequency and he had learned over years to filter it, to let most of it become background. He was good at it. He could hold a conversation in a crowded market and hear only the person in front of him.

 

But in a quiet station in the dark hours, with no other noise to filter against — the voices came through the wall like they were in the room.

 

Hongjoong's voice.

 

That was the first thing. Hongjoong's voice, low and serious, the professional register — the same voice from the cargo bay, from the first aid kit, from I'm right here, come here, bunny. His voice, through the wall, talking to Jongho and Yeosang.

 

Seonghwa lay very still and listened.

 

Numbers first. Large ones — credit amounts, the kind he recognized from bounty postings because he had been hearing his own value discussed in numbers for a long time now. Then Yeosang's voice, something about timing, and then Jongho saying if we move fast enough and then Hongjoong again, clear and certain:

 

We use the bunny. If Chan thinks the exchange is happening he'll come to us — we set the location, we control the approach—

 

And then Yeosang: and the handoff?

 

Seonghwa’s ears were pressed flat against his head and something inside him shattered.

There was a tight feeling in his chest that he really hated and couldn’t name. New. It scared him. That was the voice of a person who had made a plan and was comfortable with it. The voice of a professional discussing a job. The same voice that had said I’m right here, come here.

 

We use the bunny.

 

He lay there.

 

He thought about the cargo bay and being carried out of it. He thought about the first aid kit on the floor and the two days on the ship. He thought about you're mine, that's just how it is and the nose press in the dark and falling asleep to a voice telling him stories.

 

He thought about every person who had ever seemed like safety and turned out to be the same as everyone else.

 

We use the bunny.

 

He didn't hear the rest of it. He didn't wait for the rest of it. He was already moving — carefully, slowly, lifting himself off the bed with the particular practiced silence of someone who had been running for a very long time and knew how to leave without being heard.

 

He didn't look back at the bunk.

 

He went.

 

 

The talk with Jongho and Yeosang ran long.

 

They were thorough — that was what Hongjoong valued about both of them, the thoroughness, the way they worked through every angle of a plan until it had no weak points left. The trap for Chan was solid by the time they finished. Clean entry, controlled location, no variables Hongjoong hadn't accounted for. Chan would come because Chan wanted the bunny and Chan was arrogant enough to think he could take him from Hongjoong directly, and that arrogance was going to be the thing that ended him.

 

It was a good plan.

 

Hongjoong walked back to the guest room feeling, for the first time since the cargo bay, like things were actually moving in the right direction.

 

He thought about Seonghwa asleep on his chest. The ear over his heartbeat. The questions about the first bounty, the wide eyes, the way he'd laughed at the embarrassing parts.

 

He was smiling when he pushed the door open.

 

"Hey, bunny—"

 

The room was empty.

 

Hongjoong stood in the doorway, his smile immediately dropping.

 

The bunk was empty. The viewport showed the same stars it always had. The room was just a room — the specific quality of a space that had recently held someone and no longer did, the absence sitting in it like a presence of its own.

 

He checked it fully. Under the bunk. The narrow closet. Behind the door. Then the corridor — the head, the equipment bay, the storage corridor.

 

Nothing.

 

He went back to the main room.

 

"Has anyone seen—"

 

The faces that looked up answered before anyone spoke.

 

"He came through here," San said, carefully. "Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes ago. We thought he was going to find you."

 

Yunho, from the back of the room, looked at Hongjoong with an expression that was carefully neutral. "He didn't look good," he said quietly. "When he came through. He looked—"

 

Hongjoong wasn't listening anymore.

 

He was standing very still in the middle of the room and running the timeline — Jongho and Yeosang and himself, talking in the main room, voices carrying through the wall in a quiet station at dark hours — and Seonghwa's four-times-human hearing, and the specific words they'd used, and which part of the conversation Seonghwa would have woken to.

 

We use the bunny.

 

Fuck.

 

He would have heard that part. He would have heard the numbers and Hongjoong's voice saying we use the bunny and he would not have heard the rest — the there is no handoff, we deal with Chan at the meeting point — because by then he was already gone.

 

Hongjoong groaned.

 

He pressed a hand over his face.

 

He heard thirty seconds of it, he thought. Maybe less. He heard my voice and numbers and we use the bunny and he filled in the rest himself. He thought I changed my mind. He thought I was going to—

 

"He heard the conversation," Hongjoong said. Flat. "Me and Jongho and Yeosang. He woke up and heard us planning and he only caught half of it and he—" He stopped. Groaned again, shorter this time, more frustrated. "He thought I was going to hand him over. He thought I changed my mind."

 

The room was quiet.

 

"He heard you specifically?" Yunho said.

 

"He has four times human hearing," Hongjoong said. "He heard everything. He just didn't hear enough of it."

 

"He went toward the docking bay," Mingi said, small. "I thought he was just—"

 

"He looked scared," Yunho said, from the back. Still quiet. Still careful. "When he came through here. More scared than when he arrived."

 

Hongjoong was already moving.

 

He checked the docking bay first — the ship, every panel and gap and corner of it. He checked the service corridors that ran the station's length. He checked the maintenance tunnels and the utility spaces and the two unused storage rooms off the main corridor.

 

He came back to the main room.

 

"He's not here," he said.

 

The room was quiet.

 

"He can't have gotten out," Wooyoung said. "The external locks are—"

 

"He got out of a locked cargo bay on a transport vessel," Hongjoong said. "He disappeared from three separate pursuit scenarios across three different sectors. He fit in a storage panel gap that I couldn't have gotten a cat into." He looked at the external dock connector. At the door that led out into the station proper — into the dead zone station, with its service corridors and maintenance shafts and the vast dark docking structure that surrounded it. "Don't tell me he couldn't get out."

 

The room had nothing to say to that.

 

Hongjoong stood very still.

 

He thought about Seonghwa in the corridor, coming out of the guest room in the dark hours of the station cycle and hearing two voices discussing numbers and leverage and the most viable option. He thought about what that would have sounded like. What it would have felt like. For someone who had been running from exactly that for — how long? How many years had someone been chasing him? How many times had someone seemed like safety and turned out to be the same as everyone else?

 

He thinks I changed my mind, Hongjoong thought. He heard my voice. My voice, saying use him, use the bunny — and he thinks I changed my mind. He thinks everything was a performance. He thinks I'm going to hand him over.

 

He heard me say it.

 

He thought about Seonghwa's face in the bunk — soft and undefended, ear pressed over his heartbeat. He thought about the nose press, gentle and unhurried. He thought about with you said simply in the doorway. He thought about I would let you impregnate me (which made his heart flutter) and he thought about how hard Seonghwa had been laughing in the cargo bay story, and he thought about the way his ears had gone fully up when Hongjoong said there's my bunny.

 

He thought about the hope leaving his eyes on the floor of the ship. The first time. The expression that had broken something in him.

 

This was worse.

 

This was significantly worse because this time Seonghwa hadn't stayed to find out. This time he'd run. And Seonghwa running meant Seonghwa was out there in a station in the dead zone with a bad knee and three hundred thousand credits on his head and no idea that the conversation he'd heard wasn't the whole story.

 

"I'm going after him," Hongjoong said.

 

"Hongjoong—"

 

He picked up his jacket from the hook by the door. He checked his blaster. He opened the external dock connector.

 

"If Chan's ship shows up," he said, without turning around, "do not let it dock."

 

He went.

 

The station corridor was empty and fluorescent and long, and his footsteps echoed off the metal grating as he moved through it, and somewhere in this dead zone station his bunny was alone and frightened and convinced that Hongjoong had turned out to be the same as everyone who had ever come after him.

 

He wasn't.

 

He was going to find Seonghwa and he was going to make him understand that he wasn't.

 

He moved faster.

 

 

The dead zone station had corridors that went on forever.

 

That was the thing about decommissioned navigation stations — they were built for function, not for human comfort, and the function they'd been built for required length. Long service corridors running the full circumference of the docking ring. Maintenance shafts connecting every level. Utility spaces that had no windows and no markings and no reason for a person to be in them unless they knew exactly what they were looking for.

 

Seonghwa knew how to hide in spaces like this.

 

Hongjoong knew that. He knew it better than almost anyone currently alive, given that he had spent three weeks failing to catch him across three sectors, and the knowledge did not make the searching easier.

 

He moved through the first corridor at a fast walk — checking doors, checking gaps, shining his light into the dark spaces between equipment housings. Nothing. He moved to the second corridor and did the same. The third. The fourth.

 

Nothing.

 

He doubled back.

 

Checked the maintenance shafts — the access panels, the ones that looked welded shut and weren't, the ones that were actually welded shut and that Seonghwa could probably get through anyway. He checked the utility spaces off the main ring. He checked the lower level, the one below the docking bay that most people didn't know existed because Jongho had never mentioned it and it wasn't on the official layout.

 

Nothing.

 

He came back to the main junction and stood in the fluorescent quiet of it and breathed.

 

Think, he told himself. You chased him for three weeks. You know how he moves. You know what he looks for. Think.

 

Seonghwa looked for exits first. Then height — he liked high spaces, the cargo bay ceiling had proved that. Then small spaces that looked unusable. He moved fast when he needed to and went completely still when he didn't, and his hearing meant he would know where Hongjoong was at all times which meant—

 

Which meant he wasn't hiding from Hongjoong.

 

He was gone. Actually gone. He'd left the station.

 

Hongjoong's stomach dropped.

 

He turned and went for the external dock connector — the one that led out into the station's outer ring, the part that wasn't Jongho's, the part that was genuinely decommissioned and dark and connected to three different docking structures that extended out into the dead zone like fingers.

 

The door was unlocked.

 

It had been locked when they arrived. He had checked it himself.

 

He's outside.

 

He went through.

 

 

The outer ring was dark.

 

Emergency lighting only — strips of dim amber along the floor, just enough to see by, not enough to see well. The air was colder out here, the recycling systems running on minimal power, and the silence was the specific silence of a space that had not held people in a long time.

 

Hongjoong moved through it with his hand on his blaster and his light cutting through the dark ahead of him.

 

"Seonghwa," he said.

 

His voice went out and came back as echo.

 

Nothing else.

 

He kept moving. Past decommissioned equipment housings, past sealed doors, past the dark viewport windows that looked out at the dead zone and its particular nothing — no stars worth looking at out here, just the between-space, the dark that existed in the gaps.

 

"Seonghwa."

 

Echo. Nothing.

 

He tried a different corridor. The amber strips were further apart here, the darkness thicker between them. He swept his light across the floor and the walls and the ceiling and found empty space and more empty space and—

 

"Bunny."

 

His own voice. The echo. The silence after.

 

He stopped walking.

 

He stood in the middle of the corridor and felt the thing he was not going to call panic do a slow circuit through his chest. He was a person who did not panic. He had been in situations that merited panic — the cargo bay with Chan, the wing hit, the escape burn — and he had not panicked because panicking was not useful and he was a professional and he did not do it.

 

He was starting to do it now.

 

He's out here, Hongjoong thought. Alone. With a bad knee. In a decommissioned station in the dead zone with no beacon and no identification and a three hundred thousand credit bounty on his head, and he thinks I'm going to sell him, and he's—

 

He sat down on the floor.

 

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

 

He thought about Seonghwa's face when the hope had left it on the ship floor. Twice now. Twice he had broken something in him, and this time it was worse because this time Seonghwa had heard his voice and drawn the conclusion and left without asking.

 

He didn't ask, Hongjoong thought. He just — left. Because of course he left. Because everyone who has ever seemed like safety has turned out to be the same thing in the end, and why would I be different? Why would he wait to find out?

 

He sat there for a moment.

 

Then he said, into the dark: "Sweetheart."

 

Not loud. Not a search-call. Just — the word, offered to the corridor, to whatever was listening.

 

Silence.

 

Then—

 

A sound.

 

Far away. Down the corridor and around a turn, at the distance that his human hearing could barely register as more than a change in the quality of the silence. But he'd spent three weeks learning to listen for Seonghwa in spaces where he wasn't supposed to be audible, and he knew—

 

He knew that sound.

 

He was on his feet before he'd finished processing it.

 

It came again — not the soft laugh from the market, not the amused murmur from the maintenance corridor — this was different, this was frightened, this was a sound being bitten back and failing — and then, cutting through the ambient station hum, sharp and unmistakable:

 

A scream.

 

Hongjoong ran.

 

He had not run like this in years. He was fast — he had always been fast, it was one of the things that made him good at the job — but this was not professional fast, not the controlled efficient sprint of someone executing a plan. This was something else entirely. His boots hit the grating and the sound echoed ahead of him and he followed the echo around one turn and then another and then through a junction and down a level—

 

He came around the last corner and stopped.

 

Five of them.

 

Five of Chan's crew, in the dead zone outer ring, surrounding one person who was backed against the wall with his bunny ears flat and his hands up and his weight carefully off his bad knee and his face—

 

Seonghwa's face.

 

God, his face.

 

He looked — Hongjoong took it in in one second, the way he took in every threat assessment — pale and terrified and so close to crying, his jaw tight with the effort of not showing more than he already was, his eyes tracking the five of them with the animal precision of something calculating exits and finding none.

 

He looked like he'd been running.

 

He looked like he'd been caught.

 

Hongjoong saw red.

 

He shot the two nearest ones before anyone had processed that he was there.

 

The other three spun.

 

Seonghwa's eyes snapped to him — wide, immediate, something that might have been relief and might have been horror and was definitely both — and in the moment that three of Chan's crew had their attention on Hongjoong and their backs to Seonghwa, he moved.

 

He ran.

 

He was limping — the bad knee, the weight distribution wrong — but he was still faster than anyone had a right to be injured, the Athari speed cutting through even this, and he was away from the wall and past two of the three before they'd turned back around.

 

Good, Hongjoong thought. Get to Jongho's. Get inside. Go.

 

He focused on the remaining three.

 

He shot one. The second got close before he could adjust the angle and swung — Hongjoong took the hit to the jaw, which snapped his head back and made the corridor go briefly white, and returned it immediately with interest. He was getting the third in his sights when something hit his shoulder.

 

Not a punch.

 

The specific bright-white agony of a blaster graze — he knew the sensation, he'd had it twice before — high on his left shoulder, and the sound that came out of him was not something he'd planned. He staggered. Got his feet back under him. Raised his blaster.

 

"Get back to Jongho's," he said, to Seonghwa who was still somewhere behind the crew of Chan. "NOW—"

 

Seonghwa was not going to Jongho's.

 

Hongjoong could hear him — the uneven footsteps, the wrong rhythm of the bad knee — getting closer instead of further away, and he wanted to scream, and also some part of him that he was absolutely not addressing right now felt something at the fact that Seonghwa was running toward him instead of away.

 

"Seonghwa—"

 

Something pressed against his back.

 

Hard. Cold. The specific shape of a blaster muzzle, and Hongjoong went completely still.

 

He turned around slowly.

 

Bang Chan smiled at him.

 

He looked — annoyingly, infuriatingly — fine. He'd come in behind the crew, waited, let them do the work, and here he was with a blaster in Hongjoong's back and the smile of someone who had been patient and was now collecting.

 

"Hongjoong," he said, pleasantly. "You look terrible."

 

Hongjoong punched him.

 

It connected — Chan's head snapped sideways, the smile disappearing — but Hongjoong's shoulder was wrong and the punch had half the force it should have had and Chan recovered faster than he should have and then his hand was in Hongjoong's collar and the floor came up and the back of Hongjoong's head hit the grating and the corridor went white again, and when it came back Chan was standing over him and Hongjoong was running the inventory of his body and finding that several things hurt more than was ideal.

 

He heard Seonghwa.

 

Close. Too close — the uneven footfall, the quick breathing — and he turned his head and saw him almost there, almost reaching him, one hand outstretched, and he looked so—

 

Chan grabbed him by the back of the neck.

 

Not gently.

 

The sound Seonghwa made — surprised, pained, frightened — went through Hongjoong like a blade. He tried to get up and his body told him in very clear terms that it needed a moment, and he watched Chan pull Seonghwa away from him by the neck like he was nothing, like he was a thing to be moved, and something in Hongjoong's chest went incandescent.

 

"Let him—"

 

"Shh," Chan said, still pleasant, and pressed the blaster against Seonghwa's head.

 

Seonghwa went still.

 

His ears were fully flat. His hands were up. His eyes found Hongjoong on the floor and stayed there — wet and wide and terrified — and he was crying, small silent tears running down his face, and he looked like he was trying not to and couldn't stop, and Hongjoong looked at him and felt everything he had in him redirect itself toward one single point.

 

Get him out of this. Whatever it costs. Get him out.

 

He got up.

 

His body screamed at him. The shoulder was bad — worse than a graze, he could feel that now, the wrong quality of the pain, the spreading heat of it — and his head was doing something unpleasant from the impact with the floor, and his legs did not want to hold him up and he made them do it anyway.

 

Chan watched him with something that might have been respect and mostly wasn't.

 

"You're going to bleed out standing there," Chan said. "Just — give me the bunny, Hongjoong. Walk away. I'm not interested in you."

 

"He's not yours," Hongjoong said.

 

"He will be. He was always going to be." Chan's grip on Seonghwa's neck hadn't loosened. Seonghwa's jaw was tight and his eyes were still on Hongjoong and the tears were still running. "The bounty doesn't care who brings him in. I need the money and you don't, not really, and this doesn't have to be—"

 

Hongjoong moved.

 

He had no blaster. His shoulder was wrong. His head was doing the white-flash thing again with the movement. He moved anyway — toward Chan, toward Seonghwa, because the only thing in the universe that mattered in this moment was the gap between them — and Chan's expression shifted from pleasant to flat and he raised the blaster and pointed it at Hongjoong's head.

 

Seonghwa made a sound.

 

"No," he said. Very clearly. "Don't."

 

Chan looked at him suprised.

 

"Don't hurt him," Seonghwa said. He was looking at Chan now, not Hongjoong, and his voice was rough from crying and completely steady. "I'll go. I won't fight. Just — don't hurt him anymore."

 

"Seonghwa—" Hongjoong started.

 

"Don't," Seonghwa said. To him. The word landing like a hand pressed flat against his chest. Then, back to Chan: "Put the blaster down. I'll come with you."

 

"No you won't," Hongjoong said. "Seonghwa, don't—"

 

"You're bleeding," Seonghwa said. Still looking at Chan. Still steady. "You need to go to the medical bay. You need—" His voice caught. Just once. He smoothed it back out. "You told me to run. When they had me against the wall, you told me to run. Now I'm telling you. Let me do this."

 

"Absolutely not—"

 

"You're my person," Seonghwa said. Steady and certain and with something underneath it that Hongjoong recognized from the nose press in the dark and the ear over his heart, the real thing, the unperformed thing. "So I'm not watching you die in a corridor for me."

 

Hongjoong stared at him.

 

Chan, to his credit, looked mildly uncomfortable watching this, which was the most human thing he'd done in Hongjoong's presence.

 

"Sweet," Chan said. "Very sweet. Are we done?"

 

He started moving, steering Seonghwa toward the docking ring.

 

Hongjoong watched him go.

 

He watched Seonghwa go — the uneven walk, the bad knee, the bunny ears flat against his skull, and just before he turned the corner Seonghwa looked back. One look. Full and direct and with everything in it — the fear and the steadiness and the something underneath and the wet tracks of the tears that were still on his face.

 

Then he turned the corner.

 

Then the docking bay door closed.

 

Hongjoong stood in the corridor.

 

I am going to get him back.

 

I need to not fall over first.

 

He looked down at his shoulder. At the dark spread of it, darker than it should be, the rate of it wrong.

 

That's more than a graze, he thought, distantly. That's significantly more than a graze.

 

He heard it — the deep vibration of a ship undocking, transmitted through the station's frame, Chan's ship pulling free of the docking clamp — and he heard the engines go and he felt it in his chest like something physical, like the cable snapping again except worse, and he thought:

 

My bunny.

 

He heard something else.

 

A second vibration — different frequency, higher — and then an impact that went through the station's frame like a struck bell, and then, through the viewport window at the end of the corridor, orange.

 

Explosion.

 

Hongjoong stared at the viewport.

 

Chan's ship — or what remained of it — was on fire in the dead zone, listing badly, clearly not going anywhere. And coming in from the docking ring side, fast and purposeful, was a ship he recognized.

 

Wooyoung's ship.

 

They came.

 

Seonghwa—

 

He thought—

 

The corridor tilted.

 

He put his hand on the wall.

 

The corridor tilted again, more significantly, and his legs made their final decision about the situation, and the last thing he saw before the floor came up was the orange light of Chan's burning ship through the viewport, and the last thing he thought was his bunny's name.

 

 

 

He woke up on his back.

 

The ceiling was familiar — Jongho's medical bay, the particular layout of the lighting strips, the ambient hum of the air system on full circulation. He ran a basic inventory: head, which hurt. Shoulder, which hurt significantly more and had been wrapped. Everything else, which hurt in the general way of a body that had been through a bad night and was registering complaints.

 

He tried to sit up.

 

His body said: absolutely not.

 

He lay back.

 

He was doing the assessment again — the ceiling, the equipment sounds, the quality of the light that said several hours had passed — when he registered the weight.

 

On his chest.

 

Warm. Specific. The weight of a person, curled and tucked, with the particular warmth of Athari running higher than human. A grip on his shirt that hadn't released.

 

He looked down.

 

Seonghwa was asleep on his chest.

 

He was — Hongjoong did a fast assessment, the way he always did, cataloguing the damage. A wrap on his knee, fresh. Bruising along the side of his neck where Chan had grabbed him, already darkening. His face, in sleep, had the specific tight set of someone who had not been sleeping easily — the faint furrow between his brows, the way his hands gripped even unconscious.

 

He was there.

 

He was there and he was breathing and his ear was pressed over Hongjoong's heart exactly where it had been before everything went wrong.

 

Hongjoong felt something move through him that was too large to identify and didn't need to be.

 

He wrapped his arms around him. Carefully — the shoulder complained immediately and he ignored it — both arms, pulling him in, holding on with the specific intention of someone who was not going to be letting go anytime soon.

 

"I'm sorry," he said, into his hair. Low and rough and entirely genuine. "I'm so sorry. You should never have — I should have told you the plan, I should have woken you up, I should have—" He stopped. His voice was doing something he wasn't going to examine. "I'm sorry."

 

Seonghwa stirred.

 

Slowly — the gradual surfacing of light sleep disturbed by sound — and then his head lifted and he looked up at Hongjoong with sleep-hazed eyes and the furrowed brows and for a moment he was just — present, just here, just looking.

 

Then he was awake.

 

He pushed himself up slightly, hands on Hongjoong's chest, and looked at his face and then at the wrapped shoulder and then at his face again.

 

"You're awake," he said.

 

"I'm awake," Hongjoong agreed.

 

Seonghwa looked at him for a long moment with an expression Hongjoong couldn't read.

 

Then he said, with great feeling: "You are so stupid."

 

"I know—"

 

"You were bleeding everywhere—"

 

"I know—"

 

"I told you to let me go and you just—" Seonghwa's voice went rough at the edges. His jaw tightened. "You were going to die in that corridor, Hongjoong."

 

"I wasn't going to—"

 

"You fainted."

 

"I passed out briefly—"

 

"You fainted," Seonghwa said again, firmly. His ears, Hongjoong noticed, were flat. The stressed position. "In a corridor. Alone. After losing — Jongho said you lost a lot of blood."

 

"Jongho exaggerates."

 

"Jongho does not exaggerate," Seonghwa said, with the absolute certainty of someone who had spent several hours in Jongho's medical bay and had formed a detailed opinion of him. "You should have let me go with Chan. I would have gotten away eventually, I've gotten away from worse, and you—"

 

"No," Hongjoong said.

 

Seonghwa stopped.

 

"No," Hongjoong said again. Simple and flat and not open for discussion. "That's not — no. You are not an acceptable loss in any version of any scenario. There is no version where I let Chan take you. That's done."

 

Seonghwa looked at him.

 

The ears came up slightly.

 

"You're very stupid human," he said again, but it had no edge in it now.

 

"You already said that."

 

"It's still true."

 

Hongjoong looked at him. At the bruising on his neck. At the dried tracks of the tears on his face that hadn't been cleaned off, the ones from the corridor when Chan had his hand on him. Something cold and patient moved through Hongjoong's chest at the sight of them.

 

"Are you hurting?" he said.

 

"Yeah," Seonghwa said, which was the most honest answer he'd ever given Hongjoong without flinching away from it. "Just my knee and … my neck."

 

Hongjoong brought his good hand up.

 

He touched the bruising on Seonghwa's neck gently — just the edge of his fingers, the lightest possible contact — and watched Seonghwa's eyes go soft.

 

"I'm sorry," Hongjoong said again. "I should have—"

 

"Stop apologizing," Seonghwa said. "Or apologize once more properly and then stop."

 

"I'm sorry," Hongjoong said, one more time, and meant it entirely. "Properly. For all of it — the conversation you heard, and not telling you the plan, and letting you think—" He stopped. "You should never have had to think that."

 

Seonghwa looked at him.

 

"Yeosang explained," he said, after a moment. "While you were — out. He told me what the conversation actually was. The plan for Chan." His ears moved. "And Jongho."

 

"Good," Hongjoong said. "I was going to tell you myself but—"

 

"You fainted."

 

"I passed out. There's a—"

 

"Fainted," Seonghwa said, and something very small and very warm moved across his face before he controlled it. "I heard part of it and I thought—" He stopped. His fingers tightened slightly in Hongjoong's shirt. "I thought you were going to sell me. I thought everything was — I thought you were the same as everyone else."

 

"I know," Hongjoong said.

 

"I ran," Seonghwa said. Like he was confessing something.

 

"I know that too."

 

"I should have—"

 

"You should have asked me," Hongjoong said. Gently. Not accusatory — he understood, he understood completely, he just needed to say it. "Next time — if there's something you hear, or something you think — ask me. Okay? Just ask me."

 

Seonghwa looked at him for a long time.

 

"Tell me the plans in the future," he said finally. "Don't make them without me."

 

In the future.

 

Hongjoong opened his mouth.

 

Closed it.

 

"Okay," he said.

 

"I'm serious," Seonghwa said.

 

"I know you are. Okay."

 

Something settled in Seonghwa's expression. He looked at Hongjoong's face — the jaw, the head, the wrapped shoulder — and then, carefully, lowered himself back down to Hongjoong's chest. He pressed his bunny ear over his heart.

 

Hongjoong felt the exhale of it — the long, slow release of something that had been held.

 

He brought his arm back around him.

 

"What happened to Chan," he said.

 

"Wooyoung shot his ship," Seonghwa said, into his chest. "They all came. Wooyoung and San and Mingi and Yunho. They fought Chan's crew." A pause. "Wooyoung was very loud about it."

 

"That tracks."

 

"Chan is in Jongho's holding cell," Seonghwa said. "Yeosang is deciding what to do with him."

 

"I have some thoughts about that."

 

"I know," Seonghwa said. "Jongho said to save them for when you were awake."

 

Hongjoong lay there.

 

He thought about Chan in Jongho's holding cell and felt a cold particular satisfaction about that. He thought about the repair bill for his ship. He thought about the bounty on Seonghwa's head and how he was going to dismantle it piece by piece until it no longer existed.

 

He thought about Seonghwa in the corridor with Chan's hand on his neck saying you're my person, so I'm not watching you die.

 

He thought about the nose press in the dark.

 

He brought his good hand up, moving Seonghwa’s head so that he was face to face with him and pressed his nose gently against Seonghwa's nose — the softest contact he could make, approximating what Seonghwa had done in the guest room, trying to give it back.

 

Seonghwa went very still.

 

He looked at Hongjoong with wide eyes and the beginning of something on his face — something enormous and bright and completely unguarded, the biggest version of the real thing underneath.

 

"You know what that means," he said. Not a question.

 

"I know what it looked like when you did it," Hongjoong said uncertain. "I don't know what it means for you. What it means in—"

 

"Athari," Seonghwa said. He was still looking at him with the enormous bright thing. "When Athari do that — the nose press — it means—" He stopped. Something moved across his face. Shy, almost, which was a thing Hongjoong had not seen from him before. "You are my person. It means I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Which for you equals a proposal."

 

Hongjoong stared at him wide eyed.

 

"I didn't know that," he said rushed and embarrassed.

 

"I know," Seonghwa said. "You did it anyway."

 

"I was trying to—"

 

"I know what you were trying to do," Seonghwa said and he was looking smug about it. The enormous bright thing was still there. "You were giving it back. It still means what it means."

 

Hongjoong stared at him.

 

He thought: I have been unconscious for several hours and I have a significant shoulder wound and I am apparently proposing to a space bunny and I have no idea what to say.

 

"Wait," he said. "That means when you did it — in the guest room—"

 

"Yes," Seonghwa said.

 

"You were—"

 

"Yes."

 

"Even then—"

 

"I told you," Seonghwa said, with complete patience, "that you were my person. That's what it means. That's what I meant." He tilted his head. His ears were fully up. "You pressed your nose against mine. That means you want to marry me."

 

"I didn't know it meant—"

 

"But you did it."

 

Hongjoong looked at him.

 

At the ears. At the bright open enormous expression. At the dried tear tracks and the bruising and the ear that always ended up over his heart.

 

Do I want to marry him? he thought.

 

He thought about Vela-3. The smile across the crowded market.

 

He thought: oh.

 

I've wanted this since Vela-3 and I have been too busy chasing him to notice.

 

He opened his mouth.

 

"You're ridiculous," he said.

 

Seonghwa's expression shifted. "You don't want to marry me?"

 

"I didn't say that—"

 

"You said ridiculous—"

 

"You are ridiculous," Hongjoong said, "and I didn't say I didn't want to."

 

He kissed him.

 

He pulled him down by the back of his neck and kissed him — with the shoulder screaming and the head still doing the thing and Jongho's medical bay ceiling overhead and three weeks of chasing and the cargo bay and the storage panel and the copilot's seat and all of it, all of it poured into the one place it had apparently always been going, and Seonghwa kissed him back with both hands on his face and his bunny ears fully up and something that felt, against Hongjoong's mouth, very much like a smile.

 

He pulled back.

 

Seonghwa looked at him.

 

With the smile. With the soft unguarded full version of it. With the ears and the bright eyes and the bruising on his neck and Hongjoong's shirt that he was wearing again.

 

"So," Seonghwa said. "You do want to marry me."

 

"I didn't say—"

 

"You kissed me."

 

"That doesn't mean—"

 

"Hongjoong," Seonghwa said, gently and with tremendous patience, "you pressed your nose against mine. In Athari that is a marriage proposal. You made the proposal. I accepted." He tilted his head. "We're engaged."

 

Hongjoong stared at him.

 

"That's not—" He stopped. "I didn't know what it meant—"

 

"But you did it."

 

"I was trying to be—"

 

"Sweet," Seonghwa said. "You were trying to be sweet. It was sweet. We're engaged." He settled back against Hongjoong's chest. Bunny ear over his heartbeat. Grip on the shirt. "You can argue about it when you're not in a medical bay."

 

"I'm arguing about it now—"

 

"You're not," Seonghwa said. Soft and certain and warm. "You're just saying words."

 

Hongjoong looked at the ceiling.

 

He thought about three hundred thousand credits and a bet that was never about the money and a photo in a file and a smile across a market and I don't want to catch him said to himself in the dark of a cargo bay a lifetime ago.

 

I caught him anyway.

 

He caught me first.

 

"You're still ridiculous," he said with a soft smile.

 

"You're still engaged to me," Seonghwa said.

 

Hongjoong pressed his nose against his hair.

 

He felt Seonghwa go soft against him — the full release, the complete ease of it — and his ear pressed down over Hongjoong's heart and his breathing evened out.

 

Outside the viewport, somewhere in the dead zone, what remained of Chan's ship drifted in the dark.

 

Inside, the medical bay was warm and quiet, and Seonghwa's heartbeat was steady against Hongjoong's ribs, and Hongjoong looked at the ceiling and felt the whole enormous improbable weight of the last three weeks settle into something that didn't have a better word than this:

 

Worth it.

 

Still worth it.

 

More worth it now than before.

 

He closed his eyes.

Notes:

They are engaged your honor lmao

Lmk your thoughts :)

Twt: hoejoongie