Chapter Text
Fingertip sliding down the edge of the first photograph, Jongin moves through the scene slowly. He breathes it in, the crisp autumn breeze with its faint notes of Nanjing’s city smog, hears the rustling of the breeze through the garden’s foliage. The body is not slumped, but lain gently against the wide truck of an evergreen tree, outcast amidst the treeline of reds, gold and burned orange. The corpse is dressed in black, the only splash of colour the maroon lapel of the blazer and the hints of discolouration around the mouth. It’s the wideshot, composed like a painting; whoever set this scene has a painter’s eye.
The close ups are all parts of this greater whole, the colour of the eyeballs and the further discolouration of the skin, the half-bitten apple that appears to have fallen from the corpse’s hand and rolled on the ground. Only, it is perfectly upright and the exposed flesh, while yellowed-and-brown, is free of dirt or grass. Clean, practically smiling for the camera.
They say the devil is in the details, but Jongin’s is nowhere to be found.
“It wasn’t him,” he murmurs. Relief bursts through the shell containing the shock, the sadness, but he knows better than to let it show on his face. Better to reflect the muted horror he can’t remember how to feel, and let the room around him return.
Nothing is constant like the clacking of keys, the electric hum of too many computers working at once. Blue-light glows, monitors lighting the room where the sunlight streams in through the gaps between shutters isn’t enough. Chanyeol has no shadow in this light, yet Jongin can feel something of him cast over him, a shadow of concern as he hovers, pacing behind him. Feels that before he feels the throbbing of his index finger, a paper cut from the photograph’s edge. His own blood ebbs from the top corner of the picture to mix with the autumn leaves.
Baekhyun stands beside the whiteboard, watching Jongin fail to react. The weight of his gaze is worse than the sound of Chanyeol’s pacing. Solemn, unusually - understandably, given the circumstances. Jongin meets his eyes as he withdraws his stinging finger and mind from the scene of the crime.
“This isn’t Taemin’s work,” Jongin says, drawn-out and quiet.
Baekhyun raises an eyebrow. “You can see the apple, can’t you?”
The bitten apple, red skinned and glistening. Jongin sees the apple, and the message it sends on the surface. Death awaits those who know what they shouldn’t. Death, or worse. It’s loud, so loud it’s almost screaming at him, trying so hard to distract from the subtext.
“The forbidden fruit, the garden of Eden. You want to tell me this isn’t your…” Baekhyun pauses, like something sticky and tacky is stuck on his tongue. The words it could be cycle through Jongin’s mind. Assassin? Fascination? Field of study? “-your… subject’s work?”
“I know. I know what it looks like,” Jongin swallows. “It’s all very him on the surface.”
He knows he sounds crazy. An assassination with a biblical bent is Taemin, at least it should be. Twenty-three kills confirmed and thirty-six suspected, all of them with the same theme - the same flair. And Jongin, Jongin knows every kill by rote, by heart. The pictures are stored in a black box, somewhere in his mind he can always reach.
Under his shirt, his lower-left abdomen throbs; the singing of a pink, angry line.
“But the M.O. is too similar to another case,” Jongin says, calm and confident. “ And he isn’t self-referential like that. Repeating a theme isn’t his style. Even if it was, originality would be the key in a homage.”
Jongin hears himself almost second-hand, how calm he sounds, how rational. The logic seems clear, easy to follow. But Baekhyun pursues his lips, brow furrowed with lines of worry. And Chanyeol paces faster, almost stomping. Radiating restlessness, rage masking the sorrow.
“He’s not here, Baekhyun. I don’t see Taemin in this. I see someone who wants us to think it’s him. That’s what worries me,” Jongin says, mind racing with the what-ifs and the lead-heavy question of why?
“That’s what worries you?” Chanyeol erupts from behind them, “Jongdae is dead. Jongdae was murdered, and that’s what you want to focus on?” Chanyeol says, “The Cabal killed our friend. What does which goon they sent matter?”
The corpse, Jongdae’s eyes are almost covered by his bangs in the first photo, the shadow of leaves obscuring his face. Jongin feels callous for thinking aloud; nauseous at the sound of his name.
“It matters,” Jongin mutters, biting off any end to the sentence the way it naturally forms. He wants to say, it matters because Taemin wouldn’t want the game to be over. He loves the chase too much to break the rules, to hit them where it hurts.
The terrible, terrible death; throat closing and foaming from the mouth, choking on your own bile. The cold, the cold skin of a corpse and eyes that hold nothing. Jongin stares at the crime scene pictures and tries to see Jongdae. Brilliant Jongdae, sharp but sweet.
It matters because it’s a paradox. Taemin would never.
“We must have been getting close to something important,” Baekhyun finishes the thought Jongin left hanging in there with the right answer. With the thoughts that Jongin knew he should have been having, the thoughts that lay under the hurt. “That’s why it matters, if what Jongin says is true. They’re trying to misdirect us, and we need to know why.”
Chanyeol crosses his arms over his chest, all that fire simmering down to a muted resentment the more Baekhyun speaks. When Chanyeol sighs, it is as if some intangible promise has been made. An invisible conversation of micro-expressions and thoughts conveyed through the eyes, an understanding Jongin is thoroughly left out of.
“That’s a big if,” Chanyeol relents.
“I’ll prove the theory,” Jongin says, a promise of his own. A nod that says, I’ll have the files on your desk in an hour.
It’s a lie. There is no way to quantify the time it’ll take to lay out the connections his mind made in no time. A mix of hunches and memories and details that seem insignificant, the pattern they fell into was a second language he had to translate.
But it does the trick. There are audible sighs from the back of the office as Chanyeol leaves without boiling over, Baekhyun following behind him quickly.
Jongin looks around at all the people pretending to be paying attention to their work. He lingers on Sehun, frozen by the copy machine and Kyungsoo typing at his steady speed. Minseok is nowhere to be found, though he’d been by the doorway when it all started.
Jongin wonders if it’s hardest for Minseok, left waiting so long for his field partner’s call. A call that never came. He’s glad Minseok left. Glad Minseok didn’t hear.
The desk-chair squeaks as he sinks into it, hunching over the desk with his head in his hands. There is nothing in the hollow expanse of grief but ugliness, a clawing need to keep working.
None of his professions, none of his superiors ever mentioned this part - not even Suho. The damage Jongin was driven to do to himself, all from the drive to do good. The pressure to serve the ‘greater good’. The nation. Squeezed in the grip weight of more than just the world, than witnessing the constant flow of terrible crimes done by all sides.
Catch the killer, put away the criminal. Good can triumph over evil, if we work hard. These things we latch on to for our own piece of mind, Jongin feels them all flying upwards and out of his reach.
He finds the more he thinks, the more he lacks the ability to define what is right. The more he is sure, the root of his obsession is no longer the desire to right some intolerable wrong in the world.
Kyungsoo’s hand brushes against his shoulder for a few seconds, a gesture that would have seemed incidental coming from anyone else. Even the fleeting affection provides some measure of comfort, pulls him back from the brink of spiralling into the clouded recesses of his mind - where no answers were to be found.
There’s a soft thud on the desk, the clink of a mug sliding against his glass full of empty pens. Jongin inhales, coffee tar-black and thick hitting him in full force before he’s even taken a sip.
He opens his eyes and lets his hands fall to his lap. Kyungsoo pulls a nearby office chair over and sits down, facing Jongin.
“Are you sure?” he asks, quiet enough that it stays between the two of them. Kyungsoo makes eye contact while waiting for an answer, serious and deliberate despite the magnifying effect of his round-rimmed glasses.
Jongin nods. “Positive.”
The silence is perfunctory. Steam wafts up from the coffee, fresh and hot and over-brewed, bitter and disgusting. From its presence, he gathers Kyungsoo made up his mind long before he sat down. The consideration in his expression a performance, for Jongin’s benefit.
An odd kind of kindness, in this paranoid place.
“That’s good enough for me,” Kyungsoo inclines his head, not quite a nod - just acknowledgement. Acceptance. “It’ll be good enough for Baekhyun too, once he stops to think.”
It’s an effort to pretend he isn’t clinging to these words for comfort, assigning each one a significance, a weight out of sync with the quiet monotone they’re spoken in. The touch, the coffee, the steadfast words. Support from Kyungsoo, never one to do or say more than is necessary, is something Jongin isn’t sure he’s worthy of.
He pauses to process, to try and find the right thing to say to the belief he’s not sure he deserves. Jondgae’s face flashes behind his eyes, living and dead, and Jongin swallows the questions that rise with the image like bile.
‘Why don’t you blame me? Why don’t any of you blame me for this?’
“Thanks,” Jongin offers instead, with a weak smile.
Kyungsoo quirks his lip in return, more a grim twitch than a smile. As he stands he slides a red folder across the table, fresh-printed paper poking out one of the corners.
“Drink your coffee.” Kyungsoo’s hand on Jongin’s shoulder is a little firmer this time, halfway between a clap and a squeeze, but gone in an instant.
The acrid coffee has Jongin wrinkling his nose. Even at the best of times, when it’s smothered in cream and sugar, he struggles with the taste. But from Kyungsoo, he sees it for what it is. Tough love.
Nobody is sleeping tonight.
Kyungsoo is back at his desk before long, code reflecting in his glasses. Jongin watches him type away in impassivity, while he traces an endless circle on the envelope unopened.
Taemin would like the colour. Bold red, promising danger, excitement and alarm. Jongin turns back to face his desk and opens it, fingernails marking the paper clenched between his fingers. Held fast to the file with a paperclip, Taemin looks up from the gloss-printed picture with a smoulder like he’s posing for Vogue instead of his own arrest. Even younger, even in black and white, even after staring at this single and only picture of the killer for years, Jongin can’t figure it out.
Is he proud of the twenty-three murders they have definitively linked to him, their reports sitting under his picture? Or is that glint in his eyes, dark but so alive, intended as more of a taunt? Teasing the rest of his kill count left undiscovered? Thirty? Forty? How many details has Jongin missed? How much has that cost them?
A dull ache throbs behind his eyes as he scans the criminal's file, sliding off his own words. He lifts the page to find the Eden murder underneath. The real one.
- Rural Japan.
The victim hangs by the neck from an apple tree, a bitten apple stuffed in his mouth. Beneath the burn of the too-clean rope and amidst the bruises, his throat has been slit. Spotless rope, an excess of it; around his neck, coiling below his dangling feet like a snake.
“I wasn’t subtle back then, was I?” Jongin hates the way his mind can reconstruct the words, the tone, the sound of his voice as Taemin’s lips are hovering close to his ear. “To be fair, it was my first and they told me to send a message. Knowing too much, digging too deep, opening your mouth to take a bite - all that will get you is dead.”
Jongin shakes the voice away. He stares at the gore like it’s an old friend who can bring him back from the edge of the cliff. And it is, in a way. A necessary reminder of what he’s fighting against.
The thin white paper of the personal file flutters downwards as Jongin’s fingertips slip from it, Taemin’s picture landing askew. For all his sins, he’s still a pawn in someone else’s grand scheme. Someone else’s knife.
“What have you done?” He murmurs, gaze flicking from Taemin to Jongdae’s death spread out on the board in the centre of the room. “Why do they want you out of the picture?”
He can think of a few explanations, none of them full nor good. The one he fears the most comes in flashes of colour, almost violent: Taemin’s combat boots on his dashboard, the sound of Taemin’s breath hitching in his throat as he slides his gilded blade into Jongin’s abdomen. The note stuck to the table, lime green paper, Taemin’s terrible handwriting all over it, like some kind of apology for leaving him to bleed out on the hotel carpet.
Jongin tries just to think of the names. Names that lead to bank accounts on the Cayman Islands, the conspiracy’s slow unravelling in their hands. Names that come from nowhere, according to the files, the systems - hunches, guesses, anonymous sources.
The last name, Lay, three letters scribbled in English - the trail of money Kyungsoo found using it led them right to Nanjing and Jongdae’s end.
If the Cabal found out Taemin is the reason the investigation is making progress, casting the shadow of death over the information he gave would make sense. Making him a prime target, and the hunt for him a perfect way to keep the team distracted from getting closer to the truth of their conspiracies, finding the pattern and reason in their killings and dealings.
Taking a sip of the nauseating coffee, Jongin tries to rally the part of himself that cares about that truth. Surely he still cares about justice? About good and evil and saving the world, catching killers and preventing disasters - his purpose. His reason.
All he can find is its absence. And something else, something stirring under the grief and apathy. It’s this that breaks through enough to make him start writing. The strength of it shakes him, a feeling from the depths of him.
So long as he doesn’t give it a name, he can sleep at night.
---
Meanwhile, in Tokyo
The buzz of soft chatter flows through the hotel bar like a current, carried by excellent acoustics and the lukewarm jazz from ambient speakers. Loud enough to create the illusions of privacy, like your own words are lost in the blur of sound but not so loud that it’s uncomfortable.
Tapping his fingers on the mahogany of the bar, Taemin imagines many interesting conversations could be overheard here. It’s just bad timing, that to his left is a businessman swirling whisky in his glass with a sullen stare and to his right are empty barstools.
Waiting’s alright. He counts three accessible exits and considers vaulting up from the bar onto the ceiling beams to escape out of the skylight. There is of course the possibility that the giant glimmering chandelier would come loose if he used it for momentum in his leap, crashing to the ground in a chorus of screams and shattering glass. How much of it would embed itself in the skin of strangers? How long would it take for red-and-blue lights to flash and swirl through the hotel lobby?
Taemin sighs. Waiting is agony. There’s no escaping this conversation, not really. Not if he wants to survive. He quickly goes back to watching the grand double-doors out of the corner of his eye, pretending he isn’t waiting for someone.
Ten slips through the door right on the tail of a group of five, well timed not to be noticed. By all accounts, he shouldn’t turn heads. His suit is well fitted, but boring black-and-white and his hair is dark and slicked back. Everything from his posture to the mid-tier fabric of his suit screams perfectly average businessman - on the handsome side, beautiful if you look closely. To most, there’s nothing outside of that description.
But Taemin knows he isn’t the only one who sees the truth. It goes beyond Ten being handsome, there’s something within him that draws the gaze of people attuned to the room. The people-watchers, and perhaps just those with a good intuition, have a sense of Ten. The aura of charisma he can’t quite keep suppressed. The sense anyone in the world would bend and twist for him, if he asked.
There has always been something about Ten. That’s why they gave him to Taemin, of course. Creatures of a kind.
Taemin smiles at him before turning back to the barkeep.
“I’ll have your fruitiest cocktail, please. For my friend,” Taemin speaks in perfect Japanese and gestures vaguely towards the approaching figure and smiles prettily at the bartender who already thinks he’s the prettiest thing in the room. He is, however momentarily, fulfilled by the knowledge the lovely lady will go to great lengths to make the most-fruit-filled concoction possible. An innocent accomplice in his heinous scheme.
“You’re in trouble,” Ten singsongs in Korean, looking more smug than he should be. His nondescript walk transforms into a swagger for a few steps before he slides onto the bar stool, legs swinging in childish glee.
Taemin chuckles. “I’m always in trouble. Tell me something I don’t know.”
Ten smirks, the spitting image of the cat who got the cream. Goading and gloating in his way, Taemin only pretends to begrudge him. He remembers being younger, when it still felt good, pockets lined from the fresh kill.
“So you haven’t heard,” Ten says.
Taemin meets his feline eyes, and raises his eyebrows. He weathers the pause for dramatic effect, rapping his fingers against the bartop faster as an outlet for the restless curiosity.
“You received all the credit for the Nanjing affair,” Ten purrs, leaning in. “Your precious investigator is heading up a task force to bring you in, to top it off.”
He asks with his eyes, almost taunting - does it hurt?
And it doesn’t hurt, not even a little. It simply cannot be true.
Taemin rolls his eyes as an outward answer. “Impossible.”
“Impossible? Impossible that the student should surpass the master? Maybe make for a better you than you do. I studied,” Ten claims, and it’s almost true.
True, that he taught Ten almost everything he knows about killing for money and more. True that Ten learned too well, even the skills Taemin tried not to teach.
“Of course, you’re incredible. In many ways you have surpassed me. I’m sure you could have fooled the world if we existed in it outside of classified files and hushed up news reports.” Taemin says, watching for his student’s reactions. Years ago, Ten wouldn’t have been able to suppress the way such praise lit him up from the inside. He’s too good now, Taemin observes, at snuffing out his own light. But it lingers, in the frantic energy around him, that touch of wilderness in his eyes. Taemin would know it anywhere.
A slow death isn’t at all like a light being snuffed from eyes. The darkness comes up from somewhere within, swallowing and smothering and pulling the dying thing down into a place of absolute nothing. The soul doesn’t leave, it simply ceases to exist. And you’re watching, perhaps your hand still bruising the neck of the mark, body rushing with pleasure or horror or a sick mix of both.
Ten kills slowly, like Taemin used to. It isn’t a comforting thought.
“But?” Ten gestures, rushing him along.
“But Jonginnie would never,” Taemin says, breathy and soft. It’s like a whisper, a prayer - only it’s a fact. “He’d never ever mistake your work for mine, no matter how good you get. It’s just not possible.”
It was clear from the pictures in the paper and flashing across the international news that he’d studied the wrong part of Taemin. The kill history, his methods, the composition of his scenes. The poison apple, it was delightful, a camp kind of villainous that would have Taemin’s name all over it if not for certain details.
Details Jongin wouldn’t miss.
Taemin tries not to think about Jongin. He hopes the subject will drop or morph into something else, a description of the corpses Ten left in China or the art he saw while he was there. Anything else.
But Ten grins, still smug and crowing over his perceived victory. A neat little murder in an autumn garden scene, Taemin could admit it was half decent mimicry.
.
“Don’t be so sure. Turns out it’s not hard to mimic one’s mentor, especially not when you have such a… signature style.” Ten’s tone turns from light to low and secret-filled again, the smugness draining from it the more he speaks. The more he thinks. “And the information is legit, you know Mark’s good for it. A taskforce just to catch you, again. You know what those agencies are like when they lose one of their own. Out for blood.”
Questioning, are you? Taemin wants to ask, Why they’d want the heat on me? Is the Cabal so sure that Taemin can avoid capture? Afraid of the NIS’ response if they find out there is more than one assassin working for their faceless agenda? Is anything ever that simple?
“Of course. And who better to lead the charge than my nemesis?” Nemesis. The title lingers, sticky on his lips like he has almost lied. Taemin envisions the way Jongin’s eyes darken when he’s reading over case files and remembers the charm of his laughter. Seoul, Jongin’s gasp against his lips as Taemin’s blade parted skin. He was so gentle, like a lover, even with the knife. He’d never been that gentle before, never has since. Nemesis just doesn’t feel right.
But it’s not wrong either. The implication of obsession, of being diametrically opposed and yet revolving around each other. Inescapable, consuming, ever moving towards their eventual collision.
Taemin thinks about Jongin all the time.
“Of course his bosses assigned the Taemin expert to hunt Taemin. None of that means he believes I did it. He simply wouldn’t,” Taemin adopts a casual air.
He tries to frame it in a way his protégé will understand all the while phrasing it so it can be overheard by those few who could happen to listen. Someone is always listening.
“Say, a lifelong scholar of Monet mistook a Renoir for one of Monet’s paintings. It just wouldn’t happen.” Corpses become hanging paintings, crime scenes framed in grand gold to contrast the gore, the ghastliness. Taemin envisions Jongin inspecting The Nanjing Affair, taking in its autumn colours and meticulous detail. Imagines him turning away, hiding his smile behind his gloved hands like a secret. A forgery on the museum wall that only he could spot.
Not that Taemin would ever call Ten a forger, not with the other truth that sits between them unsaid. Ten is too much of an artist not to put himself into a kill, no matter how clear the orders were that it had to look like Taemin’s work.
“Jongin knows me. Knows my work down to the angle of my brushstrokes. He’s my scholar. Not even your best imitation will get past him, because you’re not me,” Taemin explains, knowing his calm comes off as vaguely unnatural as his confidence.
It’s silent between them, scrutiny plain in Ten’s gaze. Looking for the lie, wanting to find deception. He sighs when all he finds is Taemin, the honest killer.
“And here I told Key he was exaggerating when he said you were losing your mind,” Ten leans back, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re delusional.”
“That’s hardly news,” Taemin smiles, knows it’s too sweet, in perfect symmetry. “Name one sane person in our line of work. You can’t, can you?”
Silence is telling, when the rest of the room is alight with chatter.
“When did you see Key?” Taemin changes the subject, because he’s nothing if not merciful.
“At the airport. He’s on his way back to Paris,” Ten says, sliding his hand into his jacket. Out comes a postcard, slid onto the table. Ten’s delicate fingers rest on the corner, as if he worries Taemin will snatch it away. Fair.
It’s a landmark like always; a tower lit up on a waterfront, city lights reflecting on the ocean, calm and still in the night. ‘Greetings from Macau,’ is written in English across the clear but starless sky.
Taemin hums, underlining the words with his finger. He remembers the rush of clinking coins, the colours and lights of the slot machines, a vulgar kind of bright like an imprint of the back of his eyelids from the last time he’d killed there. The ceiling fan the mark hung from was gilded with real gold, same as the baroque trimmings on the wall.
“Interesting,” Taemin murmurs, “When are you leaving?”
“We’re leaving in the morning. What, did you think this was a social call?” Ten asks.
“You say it like it’d never happen but your husband is always asking me over for dinner,” Taemin teases, delighting in the way Ten’s narrow at the casual reference. There is something lovely about being an inescapable fixture of Ten’s life, when he so hates to be known. “Ah look, your drink is here.”
The bartender wields her prettiest smile for the handsome foreigners, sliding the creamy-looking cocktail decorated so lovely with fresh berries in front of Ten. Finely sliced strawberries, plump blueberries and a smattering of raspberries atop the cream. Even the cocktail umbrella has a strawberry pattern, such lovely attention to detail.
Taemin thanks her sweetly in Japanese, and if she notices the abject horror plain on Ten’s face - she is too polite to comment.
“I hate you,” Ten scowls, pushing the cocktail across to Taemin with both hands.
“You love me,” Taemin crows. Nothing sweeter than the truth, except perhaps the berries Ten wouldn’t be eating. Taemin steals a blueberry, which only makes Ten look more repulsed, staring hatefully at the drink with a wrinkled nose. Cute.
The postcard is in Taemin’s breast-pocket in the blink of an eye. He stretches and stands with a small sigh of delight.
“Mm, delicious. Oh, and give Taeyongie my love when you call tonight. I bet he misses you. Enjoy your drink,” Taemin says, giving Ten’s shoulders a squeeze on his way to the door.
He only half-hears the insult, pointedly in English. (He’s fairly certain it was ‘I hope you choke’, carried away with the soft jazz as the door closes behind him)
Alone in the hotel elevator, Taemin hums to himself. He slips a hand inside his jacket and pulls out the postcard, turning it over, eyes scanning over the string of numbers like a barcode, the key to unlock the mark’s file on the database, tedious tasks for future Taemin. Much, much less interesting than Kibum’s pretty handwriting, clear to hear in his driest of tones:
‘Play nice, children.’
Something unpleasant turns in his stomach, despite the fondness the voice invokes. Jealousy? No, it’s less ugly; more like a mix of nausea and caution. Taemin checks his phone, no missed calls, no messages, nothing from Kibum warning him about the job - no tips, no secrets. Nothing from Minho either, no ‘good luck’, no ‘don’t be messy’.
Silence. Which is always terrible, but wouldn’t be unnerving if Ten wasn’t fresh off being ordered to frame him. If Jongin and his pack of NIS dogs weren’t on his back and out for blood. Laying low would make the most sense, laying low in Tokyo just like his handlers told him to.
No jobs for a while, Taemin. Not after the last one.
He half expects to find one of his handlers waiting for him in his hotel room, waiting with an explanation. The elevator dings as it hits floor eleven, and the hallway carpet’s muffling of his steps doesn’t make them feel less heavy. He holds his breath as reaches his room, swipes his keycard and listens as the lock opens with a beep and a click.
He slips inside, soundless as he closes the door. There’s no music, no tv-static - so no Kibum. And Minho’s breathing is so loud he would have heard it from the entranceway. He checks the bathroom just in case, tensed and ready to pounce - but there’s nothing.
Taemin floats by the crisp white sheets and artistically vacant vague-blob paintings on the wall, kicking off his slippers on his beeline to the balcony.
Secondhand smoke rises from the balcony below his, thick and tar-like on his inhale but making such pretty spirals in the air, against the sea of city lights. Laughter rises too, from the street below. A sliding door opens, and the clinking sounds of pachinko spill out onto the street, somewhere between pinball and a sea of poker machines. Office windows with lights left on, distant humans inside them like ants in an ant farm.
Taemin looks over his shoulder as the wind blows the smoke through his door, sweeping up the thin white curtains, making them flutter.
He closes his eyes, keeping the image of the street below in his mind. A single car passes on the street below, splashing gutter-water onto the pavement.
It isn’t raining in Tokyo anymore. But it was raining in Busan. It was raining in Busan on the day he met Jongin.
---
Seoul
Jongin stares out the gap in the shuttered blinds, one hand falling idle on the copy machine. He hears its struggling chugs and sputters from a distance; like he’s underwater, and the printer jam is somewhere above the surface.
Outside, he watches the rain fall. Spit, more like it, the skies only the lightest grey. It shouldn’t be enough to send his mind six years back to the streets of Busan.
The skies were darker that day, a deep spectrum of grey that rippled from-near black to almost navy, angry clouds hanging low in the sky. The rain pelted down, and it felt in the moment like maybe someone in the heavens was suitably offended by the murder scene that Jongin had just left. His leg brushed against the police tape as he looked out at the crowd on the opposite side of the road. A sea of black umbrellas ambling in different directions, only a scant few looked curious about the parked black and plateless cars, the police tape around the office building. Those who looked glanced quickly and discreetly, before pretending to be incurious again.
The Jongin of 2015 couldn’t understand why anyone would be wilfully ignorant, or only passably curious. The thrill of the search for the truth overturned everything, even the horror of the scene through the rotating doors behind him.
He remembers that thought, for its youthful arrogance as much as it being preserved in amber as the last thought he had before he saw the face of his future.
A man stepped out of the Starbucks across from the office building, out and into the rain. His bright blonde hair stood out in the sea of black and grey coats and umbrellas, but the colour was just the beacon. The flash of light to attract the eye so the viewer could take in the rest of the piece; the homage to the divine in the face of a man.
‘If I ever imagine an angel, they will have your face.’
The irony of Jongin’s past self’s thoughts isn’t lost on him.
Nor is the memory of the way his heart seized as the stranger didn’t turn away. He looked. He walked to the edge of the pavement, parting the sea of people like it was only right they should move for him, and stood there. Simply taking in the scene, his gaze flitting from the cars to the police tape, dragging up Jongin’s body until their eyes met.
The stranger smiled, carefree and almost childish in its sweetness. Jongin doesn’t remember if he smiled back. He might have, struck dumb as he was, thinking he was having his movie moment - locking eyes with a perfect stranger across the street. That famous moment of connection, the one that turned black and white worlds to full colour or made it seem as if a couple in a packed ballroom danced alone. Moments that weren’t supposed to be real, modern fairytales.
A truck roared through the narrow road, blocking the view and shattering the moment as a spray of muddy water hit Jongin. Mud splattered against the hand he used to shield his eyes. He looked back in time to watch the stranger disappear, sparing him a smirk over his shoulder.
Jongin wouldn’t know for weeks that he was right about one thing. It was the beginning of something cinematic, something that didn’t happen to ‘normal’ people. He knows he got the genre wrong, but couldn’t find the right one if he wanted.
Horror, thriller, action, romance, fantasy. Taemin can’t be defined by any one of them, not wholly. The space he occupies should be black and white, he flashes behind Jongin’s eyes in a swirling tornado of every colour imaginable.
And like that truck that sped past in the Busan rain, he’s hit by cold water. He remembers that Jongdae is dead.
Just like that, he can see in black and white again. Taemin is a darkening shade of grey.
“Hyung? Hey, hyung?” Mark’s voice cuts through, hesitant like he’s been calling out for awhile. “Excuse me, Jongin-hyung, The printer’s working again.”
Jongin turns around and finds Mark hovering by the copy machine, hands behind his back.
“Are you, like… okay?” Mark winces the moment the word leaves his mouth, and “Ah sorry that was a stupid question, no one’s okay today. But like, if you need anything, or if you want to talk or anything, I’m right here.”
“I’m alright, but thank you,” Jongin manages a smile, because if nothing else, Mark is sweet. Genuine. Jongin crouches to grab his fresh-printed papers, and catches a hint of ink-stained fingers hidden behind Mark’s back. “And thanks for fixing the printer.”
“’S nothing,” Mark pauses, the calm before the ramble. “It’s like, what I’m here for. Junior staff, basically a glorified intern. Not that I’m complaining, I’m not! Everyone starts out like this after college. Well, you didn’t, but you’re like, a genius - and anyway I know I’m mad lucky to be here, and, you know…”
Mark pauses, pressing his lips together. Brows creased like he’s thinking over a particularly difficult problem. A wave of calm subdues the toxic storm that had been brewing, ready to burst. The paper is still warm in his hands, but Jongin doesn’t look to check if it printed correctly, not yet.
Maybe he can spend these few precious minutes not thinking about murder and worse, and actually try to be a good person.
“Just ask what you want to ask. You know I’ve always got time for you,” Jongin says, suppressing the urge to ruffle Mark’s hair. It’s easy to think of him as a kid, looking moon-eyed up at the Real Intelligence Officers.
“It’s just, uh,” Mark starts, looking anywhere but at Jongin. “There’s a lot of talk of a taskforce, and I was just wondering, are you like… are you really going back out in the field?”
Jongin nods. “If they want me to.”
This is the first he’s heard of a taskforce, but it’s not a surprise. He’s been buried in his report since his argument with Baekhyun, ignoring the way most of the office turned corpse-cold when he looked their way, chatter stopping dead.
“Oh, they want you to. Head office wants you to lead it, or at least that’s what Sehun-hyung said. But like, are you gonna be okay with that? They say some pretty crazy stuff happened last time,” Mark trails off, and his widened eyes are a window to all the half-truths and wild rumours circling the building about that mission. August 29, 2019, the one that put him in the hospital.
As obsessed with secrets and rumours as the intelligence divisions were - a single, unifying commonality- Mark has never asked about it.
Jongin has to admit, the kid has it down. All the tricks to making people feel safe to open up to him, down to seeming absolutely harmless.
“I have to be okay with it, Markie,” Jongin says, careful to sound neutral. “It’s been more than a year, anyway. It’s about time.”
“But you don’t have to prove anything, okay? All the other names from your lead checked out, there’s no way you could have known it’d be a trap.” Mark keeps going in his way, quiet and encouraging. The very face of earnest determination.
“Some people argue the stab-wound might have been a give away,” Jongin says wryly, a little disappointed when Mark is too in his own head to laugh.
“Yeah but… they’re not right to blame you, is all I’m trying to say. It wasn’t your fault. It would have been irresponsible not to investigate,” Mark nods decisively, sounding awfully convinced of himself.
“You’re too good to be working in a place like this,” Jongin says, and he means it. Even if he knows it to be a lie.
“But aren’t we all supposed to be good? Making the world a better place and everything.”
“Supposed to be, maybe. But spies are all scoundrels,” Jongin winks, and there it is.
Mark presses his hand to his mouth to muffle his laugh, eyes bulging. He clears his throat, and puts on his best serious business expression to ask, “Even Baekhyun?”
Jongin smiles, even though his blood runs cold. Mark doesn’t know the half of it.
“Especially Baekhyun.”
---
Objectively, the envelope in his hands has no right to feel lead-heavy. A small selection of photos and a few pages of analysis, a year's work surmised in an hour.
The wall-to-ceiling window at the end of the hallway floods it with natural light, and the metal name-plate on Baekhyun’s office door glints silver in the distance. As Jongin gets closer, he spots that the door is ever so slightly ajar - and slows his steps as Chanyeol’s voice bursts through the silence, loud and full of fire.
“Can’t you see it?!”
Creeping closer, Jongin hovers with his back against the wall, shoulder just shy of knocking into an abstract painting. He quietens his breathing and closes his eyes, listening to restless pacing against the floorboards.
Chanyeol is almost begging, pleading his case to an uncharacteristically quiet Baekhyun. The image of Baekhyun’s small frame leaned back in his big black desk chair with Chanyeol standing over him is amusing enough in the eye of his mind to add a layer of detachment when he hears his own name as a hissed whisper.
“Jongin has to be taken off the case! He needed to be taken off the case after the day he got stabbed by that psychopath!”
The scar sings again, the memory of Taemin’s knife parting his skin always simmering under the surface; ready to be summoned at any moment, alongside the phantom brush of his lips.
“He needs therapy,” Chanyeol’s plea is impassioned, and Jongin can’t help but smile. It’s not like he can argue, or would. Therapy would be nice. “Hell, he needs way more than that. He needs, therapy and rest and time and-”
“We don’t have time,” Baekhyun interjects, and where Jongin expected sternness there’s none. Exasperation, perhaps even fatigue, emotions Jongin has rarely heard in his voice. “I don’t have any time to give him, not now. Not after this.”
Jongdae’s name hangs unsaid in the air, and Chanyeol’s erratic footsteps come to a sudden stop.
“Are you serious? You saw the look on his face out there, when he was looking at the pictures. The way he talked… I don’t know what the fuck that was, but it wasn’t our Jongin.” The more he speaks the more deflated he sounds, like the anger is being squeezed out of him so the fear tinged sadness can emerge from underneath.
I was never your Jongin, Jongin thinks at first. But perhaps, maybe he was. Longer ago than he’d cared to admit, back when the original team filled the office with their chemistry, Suho leading the charge before his big promotion.
“When was the last time you heard him really laugh?” Chanyeol asks, and the long pause speaks volumes. At least a year ago, maybe longer.
It had been easier to laugh before the big investigation began, fresh out of college and high on feeling special. The lucky one, chosen over thousands to work in a division that didn’t exist. Getting scouted for the NIS had been a dream come true, secret meetings like something from a movie. Real secret agents, spies and secrets.
Things were different, before people started to die.
“I know, I know,” Baekhyun says, so softly Jongin strains to hear. “You’re not wrong.”
It stings, the sear of a different kind of knife. Hearing his friends sound so defeated about anything would hurt, but this isn’t just anything. Defeated, in the face of Jongin's supposed change; seeing trauma like a chrysalis, pretending this butterfly isn’t who Jongin was always meant to be. The true self, sleeping and stirring somewhere deep inside him.
He wonders if Baekhyun is acting for Chanyeol’s sake, thinking surely he must be. In the tense silence, all the moments Baekhyun coaxed his hidden potential out from within. The hand on his shoulder in the early hours of the morning, the voice of encouragement dark and soft, murmuring. Baekhyun nurtured his obsession, the way his brain makes connections, light zipping across a circuit-board. Impulse, instinct, Baekhyun has honed him just as much as that fateful night, and Taemin’s slim, sharp knife.
“You had him evaluated, right?” Chanyeol speaks with a spark in his voice as he starts to pace again, brogues against the floorboards. Jongin watches his shadow block and reveal the light streaming through the crack in the door, again and again. “After the incident.”
“Of course I did,” Baekhyun says, and it’s not a lie.
In the silence that follows, Jongin remembers the beeping of the heart rate monitors and the stark white of the walls. The psychiatrist sitting beside his hospital bed, even more uneasy about the questions he refused to answer than she was about the blatant lies.
“What do you remember about the night you were attacked?” She had asked, and the whole room heard his heart rate spike, the beeping alarmingly fast.
“Can I see the report?” Chanyeol asks, and Jongin lets one memory fade into another. Baekhyun in front of the paper shredder, destroying the last original copy.
“It’s buried, I don’t know-“
“Bullshit. Don’t give me that crap, I know you. So I’ll ask again. Can I see his psych evaluation?” Chanyeol’s earnestness contrasts nicely with the farcical nature of the report on file. Tweaked to show the just right amount of trauma and shock, and a clear roadmap to recovery.
Whatever it takes, to keep the team together. To keep the talent on the hunt.
“You trust me,” Baekhyun phrases it not as a question but a regurgitation of rote fact, uncharacteristically serious. Sincere.
Chanyeol is silent, for a long moment. Jongin can only imagine what he sees, likely staring into those eyes that seem so vacant and cold under their sparkle, finding some warmth beneath the void that only he can see.
“With everything.”
“Then trust me with this. We need him and you know it.”
There’s a thud, presumably Chanyeol’s hands hitting the front of Baekhyun’s desk as murmurs. And it seems the moment, the natural conclusion.
Jongin knocks on the door. A light push and it creaks open, through the widening gap he catches Chanyeol’s nose brushing against Baekhyun’s as he jerks away, picks up a file from the desk as if he’d been leaning to examine it.
It might have worked, if Jongin had been a second later - and if Chanyeol had not been flushed down to his neck. From the guilt of the conversation or the almost-witnessed kiss, who could say. Leaning back against his plush leather swivel-chair, Baekhyun is stone-faced.
“Shut the door behind you,” Baekhyun says, a crack in his mask as his eyes flit to the still-panicked Chanyeol. The smallest hint of a smile.
Jongin nods and grabs the handle, closing it with a gentle click. When he turns to face them both, the envelope slips from under his arm and onto the floor.
“Ah, there’s our Jongin,” Chanyeol chuckles, as the folder skids across the floor, papers spilling from it. “Still so clumsy.”
Baekhyun sounds so fond when he says, “It’s a gift.”
It turns Jongin’s stomach. The sight of him scrambling for papers on the floor, he can imagine how it must seem restorative in some way, after everything he said. He’s always been clumsy, in the everyday ways. He’s wondered if it’s the cost of his supernatural focus, the way his mind can block out the world in the pursuit of perfection, of revelation.
Chanyeol squats down to help him, of course. A little too late, but it’s still nice. Clumsy Jongin, good-natured Chanyeol and Baekhyun who can always laugh, no matter how dire things get.
Shaping the papers into a neat little stack, the edge of a photograph digs against his paper cut through the bandage.
Maybe it is a gift. Or maybe he’s just fucking clumsy.
“The whole case history is here,” Jongin says. He stands up and heads for Baekhyun’s desk, sliding the file across to him. “But I’m shocked you need it.”
“That’s the thing,” Baekhyun smiles like he holds all the cards, like he should be stroking a white cat in the centre-frame of some spy-film.
A smile that shifts from all-knowing to inviting, eyes alight and drawing the room into their mystery. He smiles like he’s sharing all his secrets with whoever he’s looking at, giving the world to you and you alone. Even now, Jongin finds himself entranced. Even though he knows better.
“I don’t need it. Oh, I’m sure you put plenty of work into the report, I’m sure it’s marvellous. But I’m not going to read it, because I don’t need convincing,” Baekhyun grins.
Where he finds the energy to carry on like it’s some grand game, Jongin isn’t sure. When he breathes in, there’s a heaviness to the inhale, the pressure of fatigue pushing down on his chest. The certainty he won’t be getting much sleep mingling with the desperate need to get to the point.
“Don’t give me that look,” Baekhyun tuts, “I needed you to put on a show for the office, and time to talk Chanyeol around. It’s important that nothing said here and now leaves this room, understand?”
“Yes sir,” Chanyeol salutes, lazy but not mocking. Playful, like Baekhyun has chased all the shadows out of his mind.
Jongin’s silence feels pronounced, like acknowledgement that Baekhyun doesn’t have that effect on him anymore. That he’s not ‘their’ Jongin.
Baekhyun claps his hands together. “Our official stance is that we’ve identified the killer as Taemin, and we’re forming a team to track him down.”
“And our unofficial stance?” Jongin prompts, jaw set and rigid.
“It wasn’t a fucking coincidence that the day after Jongdae tells me he knows who Lay is, he winds up dead. We’re picking up where he left off, boys. He left us with a real chance to get one over Cabal and we're taking it,” Baekhyun announces, anger imbuing his tone for the first time, anger and authority. “We’re going to crash a party. Get me everything you can on Zhang Yixing before 3am. Our flight leaves at 4.”
Zhang Yixing, Jongin remembers his face from the cover of a dozen magazines; from Forbes to the tabloids. A name to the three scrawled letters Taemin left him like a last minute love note, black ink on hotel paper on the bedside table. Proof it had all been real. Lay. Not just a meanginless alias as so many insisted, not a wild goose chase. Swallowing back rising bile, Jongin tries not to feel relieved. Tries remember a living face, a smile. Not the killer's, not the autumn leaves of Nanjing, but Jongdae who always believed him. Who never stopped digging, until found a contact at the end of a disperate trail of money and blood. Jongdae had given them Zhang Yixing the night he died. It hardly mattered now, Jongin assured himself, that Taemin couldn't have killed him.
Following the lead was the only factor of any importance. Falling down the rabbit hole, wherever it would lead.
“Where are we headed?” Chanyeol asks, before Jongin could get the words out.
And there’s no reasonable logic behind the way his gut clenches, the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. The creeping dread of sensing somebody watching, somebody is waiting. If he glanced behind him, he’d find a certain silhouette.
Jongin doesn’t turn to look. The door is closed, there’s no one else in the room but the three of them. The spectre is somewhere in the back of his mind, head thrown back in laughter.
Wherever it is, you’ll be there, Jongin thinks, suppressing a shiver.
Why does he feel so sure? Why does his stomach sink when Baekhyun announces,
“Macau.”
---
Tokyo
Taemin closes his eyes.
At first, there is nothing. The blueprints for the Macau job should be all he sees after hours of being curled up with his laptop on the hotel bed. His synapses should be firing with ideas and strategies and back up plans, would be if his heart was in the kill.
In an ideal world, he would be able to stop thinking about Jongin. But he settles, sinking back into the feather pillows, for the world he’s living in.
There’s a surefire way to stop imagining the chance of meeting him in Macau, suit-and-suspenders with his hair slicked back, skulking through the casino crowd.
Powerful memories beat sweet dreams every time. Taemin opens his eyes to catch the hotel curtains, white and fluttering in the breeze from the open window.
His sliding door is locked shut, and he’ll be sleeping with one eye open. But Jongin’s wasn’t, all those years ago. Safe in the heart of Seoul.
---
5 Years Ago
Words can’t describe the giddiness Taemin remembers attacking his stomach like a swarm of bees, as he jumped from the fire escape onto the third floor balcony. The door to Jongin’s apartment was open though the curtains were drawn, sheer and flowing fluid in the wind. Standing behind them, Taemin imagined he looked something of a spectre, a shadow through the fabric. The midnight expanse of Seoul, the endless city lights behind him all seemed colourless and dull compared to the world through the curtains.
Kim Jongin stood with his back to the balcony, absorbed in a world made up of secrets. Unaware, the heart of his conspiracy and villain of his stories was standing right at the edge of his vision.
Watching as the golden-tan of his hands pinned red string from one picture to another in the dim lamplight, meticulously stabbing each gruesome image with pins that glinted silver between his thumb and forefinger. Headless metal things, little needles really, slim and sharp. Taemin felt full of them, prickling his skin, scratching him up from the insides. Embedded, sinking in. One foot on the balcony, the other over the threshold of his pursuer’s apartment, breath held as he was caught in the thrall of it all. So many of his murders lain out, connected before his eyes by that one set of hands. He felt it, in retrospect, even before their eyes had ever met.
Red string wrapped tight around him, leading him to this moment and leading this moment to him. At the time he resented the sensation, bitter and fixed on making his own future. Fate felt like constriction, like a collar and leash he itched to tear off and cast aside. To step back and make the descent now that he’d got what he wanted.
A glimpse through the looking glass, a second glance at the sharp-honed mind coming after him. Supposed to sate his curiosity, but instead it was stirred. Aroused, like a hunger.
For the first time in a long time, Taemin wasn’t sure what to say.
“I like your conspiracy board. It’s very well thought out,” he settled on, airy and light. He took another step inside as Jongin whirled to face him, almost knocking over the cork-board in question.
Taemin’s, “Oh, careful!” overlapped with Jongin’s cursing in a cacophony of startled sound, that stilled into an abrupt silence. A stare-down. A silent stand-off.
“How did you get in here?” Voice low and tight, Jongin narrowed his eyes, grabbing the back of the chair he’d been sitting on. Fight, over flight - much to Taemin’s delight.
“Through the open door,” Taemin said, glancing around the room. It was surprisingly bare, lacking in personal touches. It spoke of long hours and nights at the office, passions outside of the home - the only area given an attention was a desk stacked with binders and endless documents. Hardrives strewn out on the tops of paper piles when they should have been locked away in drawers, if they contained the files Taemin suspected.
“You should know better, honestly. Isn’t your type supposed to be paranoid? Locked doors and sleeping with one eye open?” Taemin tutted, shaking his head in a mock disappointment. “You could get hurt, Jongin-ah. If you’re not careful.”
“Who the hell are you?”Jongin asked, his grip on the chair in front of him white-knuckled. Modern, wrought-iron frame. It’d hurt, to be hit with. It would hurt so wonderfully well.
Granted, he possessed a startling lack of desire to hurt the investigator in return. At least it would have been startling if it wasn’t so easy to explain. Being seen, admired, pursued - these things brought so much colour to his world, vivid and vibrant. Why drain any of it away, with Jongin’s blood down a drainpipe? Messy and uninspired.
So instead of going for one of the knives in his vest, he tilted his head to the side just a little and smiled with his eyes.
“I think you can guess.”
Looking up through his lashes, doe-eyed - he smiled the same way he had the last time Jongin saw him, vapid and carefree.
“Busan,” Jongin muttered, much to Taemin’s delight. “The blonde.”
Taemin laughed, running a hand through his newly-brunette hair.
“It’s a good colour on me, isn’t it? I miss it already, but you know how it goes. New job, new colour. I’m leaving Korea tomorrow. This is as much as hello as it is a goodbye.” He pouts, like it hurts, but Jongin’s gasp is balm to the mock-pain.
“You’re with them. The Cabal.”
“Getting warmer, investigator,” Taemin grinned, eating up the way Jongin’s pupils blew wide and his every muscle tensed.
Taemin approached the corkboard, counting the scenes with a barely restrained glee. Saitama and first time he’d heard the bone-snap of a hanging as he kicked the chair to the ground, double-agent left swinging from the apple tree; Madrid, he remembered sliding the barbed-wire grown onto the businessman's head as he gasped his last like a fish out of water. Florence, Hong Kong’s, Hokkaido, a horror story held together by string and pins and one man’s burning obsession.
“Keep going, Jongin-ah. Follow those instincts of yours,” Taemin traced the red string between pictures, fibres soft under his fingertips. “You know who I am. You’ve known since the moment you turned around. You know me. You see yourself in me, or you wouldn’t have made it this far.”
For his theatre to be met with silence rather than thunderous reaction would have been annoying, if it were anyone else. But to glance over his shoulder, to see the fear in the widening of his eyes mingle with the recognition, to know the tendrils of excitement wormed in Jongin’s stomach like a dark thrill just from the way his lips parted. His eyes even flickered to the kitchen, to the knives in the knife-block, but he thought twice. He stayed still.
Cautious, in a way Taemin pretended not to be.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not here to hurt you. Actually I’m a fan of your work,” Taemin said, gesturing to the sum of all - well, most - of his violence, laid out in glossy photographs that shone a little in a light. “Thorough, well put together, all-round insightful. But on closer inspection you are missing the Cain and Abel scene, but that’s no surprise. I was forced to be comparatively subtle.”
Where fear was, light fills Jongin’s eyes; the light of sudden inspiration, of ideas and confirmation. “The Jung brothers…” He muttered under his breath, mind filling with what Taemin imagined was the image of the elder Jung heir and his pleas of innocence, despite the evidence of his crime plain in the bludgeoned state of his face - that matched the solid gold industry award found in his dead brother’s hands, covered in blood.
Some of his finer work, and now he had Jongin to appreciate it. The pleasure of watching as the pieces slotted together in his mind through the window of his eyes, so expressive. Soulful.
“You’re special, in a real way. The only one to follow the trail I left, piece it all together. The Korean government only has an edge in this fight because of your work. Not even the CCP has any meaningful leads connecting to the Cabal, any they’re the ones trying the hardest,” Taemin arrived at the end of his monologue, their gazes locked. Neither man flinched or so much as moved a muscle.
Taemin felt supernatural. Like Jongin was waiting for his eyes to flash green in the light, or perhaps vampire red. Wanting to find them soulless, devoid of humanity.
But the longer they stared each other down, the more horror faded from view. Jongin, something distant in him observed, is beautiful. Even more so as he searched with his eyes, without trace of fear or murderous intent. Taemin, in that moment, wanted the stranger to find the opposite of the monster he looked for inside him - and yet was somehow unsure that was possible. Humanity was never something he had in spades, and life had only served to slowly chip it away.
“It comes down to you, Kim Jongin. Me and you,” Taemin said, utterly lacking in the wickedness he intended. It came out like a quiet warning, soft and longing. Jongin’s lips parted in response, breathless as he waited for the end of the sentence.
I know it does. I found you, the rapture in the depths of his eyes and the glistening of his parted lips sang out, I found myself in you.
Taemin had to look away. He didn’t know he looked away too late. He wouldn’t know, until he closed his eyes later that night and found that expression waiting there, burned onto the back of his eyelids.
“We’re the heart of this mess,” he finished, an end to his monologue, murmured. An anti-climax.
“Is that a threat?” Jongin asked.
“No. Just a fact,” Taemin found his footing again, grinning a wolfish grin. He abandoned his caution and the appearance of watching Jongin as he skipped to the kitchen, flicking the switch on the half-full kettle and rummaging in the cupboards. “Would you like some tea? I think I would.”
The clinking of bland, matching modern mugs with no handles as Taemin looked for a cup that wasn’t horrifyingly uniform mixed with the slow rumble of the kettle, black matte to match with the teapot and boring cups. Taemin grabbed two despite the non-answer, just in case.
“Am I supposed to believe-” Jongin steadied himself with a breath, “If you are who you claim you are, am I supposed to believe you’re not here to kill me?”
Taemin glanced over his shoulder, dead serious.
“Believe it. I never lie.”
Turning back to the tea selection, the selection was much more robust than the stylised mugs; although most of the boxes were unopened, gathering dust and waiting for guests that never came.
“Ooh, hojicha. Excellent taste,” Taemin said, pulling out one of the few boxes of tea with frayed cardboard edges, loose leaf and half empty. “Of course, I kill and I steal and I’m a general nuisance, but I never lie. Promise.”
“You promise?” Jongin laughed, a little bitter and a lot disbelieving. But the sound was pretty, in the low and soothing timbre of his voice. Made Taemin wonder what happier laughter would sound like.
“What?” Taemin shrugged, spooning the tea leaves into the teapot. One, two, three heaped teaspoons - the kettle came close to a boil just in time to pour as he spoke. Having his hands busy helped him stay unnaturally casual in tone. “Everyone has a code, moral or otherwise. Mine is, I don’t lie. Among other things.”
The silence that followed made for perfect brewing time, with only footsteps to come after Jongin’s perplexed sigh. The hairs on the back of Taemin’s neck prickled, knowing Jongin was close; instincts throwing up a thousand ways to end it all in an instant even with the safety of the counter between them. It wasn’t logic or instinct that told him Jongin wouldn’t attack to begin with. He couldn’t place the rising calm and surety, only acknowledge it - and listen to it, let it wash over him.
“Alright then, in that case will you tell me your name?” Jongin’s frustration was worth the wait, sounded even more satisfying than Taemin imagined.
He fought back a smile as he poured the tea, a rich golden colour filling the cups. To be humoured was all he could ask for.
Near the very top of the list of things not to tell the person investigating your crimes. Taemin slid the teacup across the countertop, eyes following the rise of the steam to Jongin’s handsome face. And yet.
And yet.
“Sure, if you really want to know. But we’ll be on first name basis then, Jongin-ah. No takebacks.” Taemin looked up through his lashes, the look he’d been told to practice in the mirror back in training. Equal parts innocence and invitation.
Jongin stared down into his tea, but Taemin was sure whatever he found inside his cup was far less interesting than the show Jongin’s body put on. The contours of his throat as he swallowed, hard; the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, the flick of his tongue out to wet his lips. Tension, drawn tight in his shoulders.
“I want to know,” Jongin said, finally. He looked up and at, but not into him.
Taemin smiled with his eyes and traced a finger over smooth ceramic, circled the rim of his cup as he pretended to consider what answer he would give. There was only one, there had only ever been one - and he’d resolved to give it the moment he stepped foot on the balcony. There was that constriction again, some invisible red string making his throat close.
He waited until Jongin found the will to meet his eyes before he spoke, a small number of heartbeats. How was he supposed to resist?
“Taemin. I’m Taemin.”
“Taemin,” Jongin whispered, somewhere between shock and reverence. Questions began to form, ready to spring forth until their tea was cold, and Taemin was determined to answer them all. The night could be long, could be short, Taemin was ready to dance and play whatever games Jongin wanted just to watch him.
“Why do you do it?”
The teacup froze in motion, just touching Taemin’s lip. Not ‘who do you work for?’, not ‘why did you come here?’.
“Why do you kill?”
For the money sat heavy on his tongue, a half-truth all too tempting to say with a smirk and move along. Only, when he asked himself the question, that wasn’t the full picture.
That was just the lie he told himself to avoid answering.
Taemin took a tip of tea, swallowed it without taking the time to taste; warm and gushing down his throat. He hummed, working the puzzle of the true answer in his mind. There were a number of truths to choose from, the palatable ‘because I don’t know how to do anything else’ to the arrogant ‘because it’s what I’m good at’, none quite so ugly as the deepest truth.
“I was always headed for hell, so figured… why not make the journey a spectacle,” Taemin said, with the ease and acceptance of a born sinner. The fear that had hounded his heels growing up, gnawing him from the inside out, he could barely feel it. He would feel it again, later, fighting the visions of tracing Jongin’s jaw with his finger. But in that moment, he’d seen that fragment of himself reflected in Jongin, he’d caught it - the fire, the spark of interest and desire.
Jongin was born to burn too. Taemin relished in it, watching him hang on each word, breath so shallow his chest barely rose. Silent. Captive. Wanting.
Taemin looked beyond him, back at the wispy white curtains set aglow by the light of the cityscape that filtered through them. He imagined them as angel’s wings, jutting out of Jongin’s broad shoulders. A regal vision, descending from a brighter place with a sword of justice. Divinity suited him, a man lovelier than any mortal had a right to be.
In that moment, Taemin let the need to be struck down wash over him. Not by the hand of his father or the word of God. He wanted Jongin to be the one to do it.
---
The memory slips away in the place between alertness and sleep, but Taemin is still awake enough to smile.
Despite everything, back then he still believed. He believed that night to be the opening chapter in a story that would end in his own eventual end, in justice prevailing and order being restored to the world. He had still believed that villains and devils were destined to be defeated, righteous good and the will of God. Embodying evil was his expression, his devotion, his desperate cry to the heavens to make it all stop.
Naivety he’s glad shed as he grew up, crumpled snakeskin left to rot in the past as shades of grey painted his vision and a taste of the forbidden had him pressing his fingers to his lips in delight, learning what it is to want without repentance.
Shameless desire. He trusts it, flaring in his abdomen and blooming in his chest. Embracing it will only lead to the sweetest of dreams.