Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Yoojin had never truly regretted it.

Well, not quite. He had reconsidered it the first time, and the second time, and the third time and the many, many times after that. But it just paid so well, too well for him to ever consider seriously stopping. So he’d simply grit his teeth and got it along with and soon it just became another kind of normal, just another job in a string of taxing and thankless jobs that he could disassociate mid-way through the second he got on his back. There was no use regretting it and feeling sorry for himself, he’d thought, not when it allowed him to keep paying rent, to buy groceries, to keep Yoohyun safe and happy and well-fed. 

He had never wanted Yoohyun to find out of course, had, in fact, taken great pains to hide it from him, had painstakingly covered up hand-shaped and mouth-shaped bruises and carefully washed clothes stained with blood and…other fluids only when he was certain he was alone. He knew he should probably come clean at some point, but he simply couldn’t bear to see Yoohyun’s wide, trusting, admiring eyes fill with disgust and revulsion, couldn’t bear for him to avoid Yoojin’s filthy, stained hands and start distancing himself from the hyung he had once so admired.

It wasn’t fair to Yoohyun not to know, he knew. Here he was loving him, freely touching him, promising him that they’d stay together forever, without knowing to what depraved lengths Yoojin had gone to keep their household afloat, how low he had sunk in his quest to make sure Yoohyun was comfortable and well taken care of. He would think Yoojin was filthy and disgusting, and really would he be wrong? Would he be wrong to discard him for it the way one discards a used, dirty tissue after it has fulfilled its purpose? No, of course he wouldn’t be. But it would hurt. 

So bad. 

So he had simply decided to keep it a secret. Nobody needed to know. It wasn’t like this was permanent anyways. Soon Yoohyun would graduate high school and go to college and then he’ll get a nice paying job and a girlfriend and his own apartment and Yoojin would be able to get on by with just a couple of minimum wage jobs.

And then the dungeons happened. 

Maybe he should have come clean then. But then again would it have changed anything? Probably not. It would have probably only hastened the demise of his already rocky relationship with Yoohyun who was now living god knows where and doing god knows what while dodging Yoojin’s calls. It seemed, for a while, as though this might be it. With no extra mouth to feed he can get by just fine on his regular jobs, and there are no crazy ex-clients banging on his door either. For a moment he thinks that he might truly get away with it.

Until he wakes up one day to find what he’d done plastered on every headline, completed with pictures and interviews. Distantly, through the haze of nauseating horror and panic, he recognises the name of the man in the interview, one of his old regulars, Gang Ji-hun. He had seemed nice, almost sweet, he recalls faintly. He hopes the story was worth a lot of money at least.

He gets fired from his jobs. All three of them. 

Of course he does. Hiring the publicly reviled older brother of S-Class hunter Han Yoohyun was one thing, but hiring the despised older brother of the Haeyeon Guild Leader with a prostitution scandal plastered across every screen? Yeah, that would make sure that no employer would ever approach him with a ten foot pole. Bleakly, he realises that what he had once considered to be his temporary emergency plan was starting to look like his only viable plan. And that…that was terrifying.

Yoohyun doesn’t talk to him anymore. He’s not surprised when he sends Suk Simyeong to yell at him instead, not answering any of his calls and cooly saying to journalists that “he doesn’t have an older brother”. He’s not surprised but it still hurts. 

Yoohyun, I’m sorry, he wants to cry, I’m sorry your hyung isn’t the man you thought he was I tried so hard to be that for you.

I didn’t want to, he wishes he could explain, I really, really didn’t want to. But I didn’t have a choice Yoohyun we were going hungry and I couldn’t even afford to keep the lights on anymore! Yoohyun don’t you remember?

I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please don’t throw me away like this, Yoohyun I’m still you’re hyung I haven’t changed, Youhyun please .

His pleas fall on deaf ears. Literally as Yoohyun changes his number and leaves him scrambling, screaming and crying from the mind numbing pain of it all. 

His plan to go see the awakening broker is a desperate one. One borne of a desperate desire to be better, to have Yoohyun see that his hyung can still be someone, can still be useful, can still be kept around. 

He considers himself lucky, perversely enough, when the awakening broker only takes money from him and nothing more before disappearing and leaving him alone in the dungeon. He doesn’t even have the willpower to fight with Kim Sunghan whom Yoohyun asked to come save him for some reason when he barges in. He grasps him firmly by the forearm, dragging him behind him once he’d cleared the dungeon, and he focuses instead on staying here and not retreating in his mind the way he reflexively does when a man bigger and stronger than him grabs him and starts manhandling him around.

All of this just to awaken as an F class. He thinks he would have preferred being eaten by the monsters in the dungeon. That would probably have been less painful than having this last lifetime  so brutally ripped away from him.

And that’s when the anger kicks in.

How could Yoohyun just…just leave him like this?! Sure what he had done was shameful and disgraceful, but surely Yoohyun understood that Yoojin had done it all for him? That he’d subjected himself to it, over and over again, for years, just so he could ensure that Yoohyun got a warm meal every day and shoes that didn’t pinch his feet and medicine whenever he was sick? Surely he deserved something. If not his love or his respect like he had once aspired to have then at least some basic civility. A call on New Years. A meal together once every year to vaguely catch up. A nepotism-acquired minimum wage job so he could keep putting food on his table. Something.

He turns to dungeoning out of spite.

Oh, so you think your hyung is just some whore do you Yoohyun? You think he’s too useless, too filthy to acknowledge in public is that it? You won’t even turn back to repay the favour he did, won’t even acknowledge what he did for you? Fine.

The pay is pretty good all things considered. And it’s not that much more dangerous than working the streets alone like he used to. Working alone from a shady street corner had had its disadvantages, mostly when it came to safety, but it had also had one undeniable advantage which was that he could collect a hundred percent of the profits that he made. So what if working alone compromised his safety? He had barely even been in danger those few times; the bullet had barely even grazed him, it was fine. He got to keep all of the money he made and didn’t have anybody to hound him to work the streets when he was sick and demand to get paid in “other ways” like he’d often see pimps do.

The people aren’t overly friendly, but he’s used to it. Most people give him a wide berth when they realise who he is, but the people who accompany him on his illegal dungeon excursions usually tend to be, if not approving, then a bit more sympathetic, having themselves usually also come out of poverty and understanding the desperate struggle to survive.

“I understand why you did it.” Cho Ha-yun had said, taking a long drag of her cigarette and passing it to him amicably as they take a smoke break after their semi-successful dungeon raid. “I have a little brother too and when it came down to it I did whatever I had to do to keep him fed.”

“Did he appreciate it at least?” He took a drag out of the cigarette and passed it back to her.

She snorted.

“Not one bit.” She breathed out a puff of smoke. “But they never do, do they?”

No, they certainly did not.

He doesn’t get to see Yoohyun when he has his accident, when he’s laying in a hospital bed, in horrible pain, contemplating whatever pitiful options he has left. Suk Simyeong swings by to tell him off, lips curled in a sneer like Yoojin is something he can’t even bear looking at, let alone speak directly to. He dares to ask for Yoohyun, delirious as he is on pain meds and the look Suk Simyeong sends him tells him everything he needs to know.

He’s not allowed the comfort of Yoohyun’s presence, even now. 

Finding work after his accident is even more difficult. The disabled and disgraced elder brother of the Haeyeon Guild Leader? Yeah right. Even illegal dungeon raids are now more difficult for him to get.

Yoohyun does not reach out to him and he does not try to contact him either. There’s no point after all. Yoohyun had risen to heights previously unimaginable and had simply shed him off the way one sheds a jacket when one outgrows it. There’s nothing else to say. He takes all of his bitterness, his grief, his love and shoves them down. They had never done anyone any good anyhow. 

And then Yoohyun, that stupid, infuriating idiot that he had loved beyond mesure, that he loved beyond mesure still, not sure if he even knew how to stop loving him, dies. 

Yoojin had thought that he knew heartbreak. He thought that he knew pain. 

He was a fool.

The sheer despair that fills him at the sight of Yoohyun, the boy he had loved and resented, but never ever more than he loved him, dead breaks something in him, shatters some part of him that he didn’t even know could be shattered. The howl he lets out is more animal than human, a howl of pain and anguish he didn’t even know he could still feel. 

The memories flood him all at once. Happy memories at first, of the two of them together when they were younger, and then sad ones. He sees Yoohyun, reading the headlines and the shock, the horror painted on his face. He sees him try, against all odds, to help him from the shadows. He sees him send him to rehab when he notices how much he’s been drinking, send Kim Sunghan after him several times when a dungeon raid goes wrong, send Suk Simyeong when he was injured so he could report back to Yoohyun on how Yoojin was doing.

He had been such a fool.

He had tried so hard, despite everything, to be filial, to repay Yoojin. Of course he had to stay away, how could he have come near Yoojin or publicly associated with him when such an association would tarnish his reputation as well as the Guild’s forever? How could he have extended Yoojin a helping hand when he was so filthy and disgraceful? Even after everything, even after he had brought him nothing but trouble, Yoohyun had still tried so hard to help him and make sure he was alright. He had been so filial, so dutiful and Yoojin had been nothing short of an ungrateful brat, refusing to see Yoohyun’s side and digging his heels in the mud, refusing to understand.

He doesn’t even remember killing the Lauchitas. One second it’s standing there, menacing, towering over them, and the next second it’s gone, charred to a pile of ashes. He barely registers any of the rewards and titles he gets. His brother is dead, dead. What does he care about anything? What is left for him to do other than lay down next to him and quietly wait to die as well?

It is only the sight of the wish stone that stops him from doing just that.

Do you want to turn back time? It asks him.

There was only one answer he could give.

Chapter Text

When he opens his eyes he’s back in his old apartment, the one he had left for a smaller apartment once he’d realised that Yoohyun was never coming back. He rushes to grab his phone, checking quickly for any news about Yoohyun, hands shaking wildly, and breathes a sigh of relief when he sees the headlines about Yoohyun having just completed a successful dungeon raid. He feels the manic edge ease as he reads about how well Yoohyun had done, how quickly and easily he had cleared the dungeon and how well that boded for Haeyeon. 

Only when he has made sure that Yoohyun is fine and breathing and alive does he turn to look at the date. Was it before or after…?

A quick internet search shows that he has gone back to before that damned article had gotten published, exposing him and all of his darkest secrets. He takes a deep breath.

He had asked to be taken “before everything went to shit”. Apparently the wish stone had decided this was when that was.

Should he attempt to stop the story from coming out? He could. A vague plan is beginning to take shape in his head. He still has Gang Ji-hun’s address from the time he had invited him back to his place. Breaking in and getting rid of all of the evidence probably wouldn’t even be that hard, but then what? He could stop this story from coming out, but could he stop the next one? Or the one after that? Or the one after that? 

He ends up going after all, breaking in Gang Ji-hun’s home in the middle of the night and stealing all of his electronic devices before wiping them clean and dumping them in the Han river. 

It’s useless, he knows. At some point someone would try to dig up dirt about him and would figure out the truth. He is merely slapping a bandage on a massive gaping wound. But what else could he do? If he could delay, even slightly, his complete and utter demise then he would. At least this time he would be more prepared.

He waits. Anxiously checking his phone every few minutes, biting his nails raw and smoking cigarette after cigarette. 

Yoohyun would hate this, he thinks absent-mindedly. He had caught Yoojin smoking once, when he was beginning, and had started sobbing, the kind of heart-wrenching sobs that twisted his whole face, crying that Yoojin was going to get lung cancer and die and leave him all alone. Yoojin had quickly put out the cigarette and rushed to embrace him, apologising and promising to stop. He hadn’t stopped, but he had stopped smoking in the apartment. The second hand smoke wasn’t good for Yoohyun anyways.

But now there’s no more Yoohyun, so he chain smokes in his apartment to his heart’s content. Anxiously checking the internet to check on how Yoohyun is doing and whether his life as he knows it is over yet.

Weeks pass with no news stories about him, apart from the usual nonsense about his and Yoohyun’s relationship, before he starts to calm down slightly. He’s still on edge, rushing to check his phone whenever a notification appears on his phone, but he’s more resigned now, less frantic. 

His decision to go to the awakening broker this time is motivated by pragmatism. The story will leak. This he knows for sure. It might take weeks or months or even years but someone will definitely leak it at some point. And when it does he will have to resort to dungeon raids of dubious legality, just like in his first go-around. It makes sense to get a head-start. Yoohyun had disliked it, just like he had disliked everything about him at the time, but if he didn’t do this then after the story broke his only other option would be… 

This was better.

He picks a different awakening broker, one he is reasonable sure wouldn’t simply take his money and leave him to die in a dungeon. 

He anticipates that Yoohyun might try to send Suk Simyeong or Kim Sunghan to stop him. He doesn’t expect Yoohyun to come personally. 

It hurts, to have it finally confirmed that the reason Yoohyun had stayed away from him was because he had found out and couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him as a result. But that hurt is immediately overshadowed by the fact that Yoohyun is here. How long has it been since he last saw Yoohyun in person? Since he last had a really conversation with him? Discounting the final incident which didn’t bear mentioning, it had been eight years. He feels his hands shake with barely concealed longing to reach out and hug him and make sure he was real and not just a figment of Yoojin’s desperate imagination. 

“Hyung!” Yoohyun bursts in, “you can’t-”

A complicated expression briefly flashes across his face.

“Are you smoking again hyung?”

For a brief moment he feels like a child getting caught smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in the bathroom by their parents. 

“What do you want Yoohyun?” He asks instead.

“You can’t go to the awakening broker.” He says tersely, cigarettes briefly forgotten.

Yoojin sighs.

“Yoohyun…”

“You can’t!” He’s trying to make himself sound stern but this time Yoojin can hear the barely concealed worry beneath it and he folds like a wet tissue. “Don’t you-”

“Alright.”

“What?” 

“I said alright. I won’t go.” 

He couldn’t bear to cause trouble for Yoohyun once more. It would be difficult for him, but he might awaken anyways. And until the story leaks he could simply take more jobs and start quietly saving up. And if he had too then…he had already done it before, he could do it again, if he really had to. As long as he was making the least trouble for Yoohyun, as long as he wasn’t making too much of a nuisance of himself, he could do it. He owed him that much.

“Oh.” Yoohyun is clearly taken aback, having clearly expected a long, drawn-out fight. “I…okay. That’s good then.” He looks at him intensely. “You really won’t go?”

“I won’t I promise.”

He nods slowly before extending his hand.

“Give them to me.”

“What?”

“The cigarettes. Give them to me.”

“Yoohyun.” He groans.

Yoohyun didn’t say anything, merely left his hand extended and waited patiently until Yoojin caved and put his half empty box of cigarettes in his waiting hand. He slipped the pack in his coat pocket and nodded solemnly, like he had just accomplished some important mission.

“Alright.” He looks around suspiciously, as though to check for hidden cigarettes around the apartment. “I’ll get going then. Don’t-”

“Yoohyun,” he stops him. This is his chance, the chance he has dreamed of having during his first life but never got to. “I…I’m sorry.”

“Hyung?” His eyes are wide and confused. One day though he would know, and when he did Yoojin hoped that he remembered this apology.

“I’m really sorry I-”

“What did you do?” He asks quickly, immediately on high alert.

Yoojin shakes his head and instead moves to hug him. It’s unbearably selfish of him, he knows. But he can’t help it. Can he really be blamed for wanting to hug Yoohyun one last time, before he realises what Yoojin really is and becomes too disgusted to even look at his face?

Yoohyun freezes, eyes wide, before his hands slowly move to embrace him back.

“Hyung? What’s going on?” He mutters questioningly in his hair.

Yoojin pulls back, Yoohyun’s hands seemingly grasping onto him harder for a second before letting go.

“I love you. You know that right? You know that everything I did, everything I did, was for you right?”

“Hyung?” Yoohyun asks again, this time breathlessly, sounding on the verge of tears. 

He barely registers his own awakening, focused as he is on Yoohyun’s expression, thumb stroking the side of his face tenderly. 

“You’re still so young. I should be trying to help you instead of burdening you and yet I keep making things difficult for you. I’m sorry I made you waste time coming here.”

“Hyung…”

“I love you.” He repeats. “And I am so proud of you.”

It is only later, when they are sitting down having dinner together that he bothers to check his skills. 

Perfect Nurturer, he scoffs. As though there was anything about him that wasn’t deeply tainted. 

My Kid Is The Best, that one would be…tricky, especially with the keyword, but if he managed to get Yoohyun on the phone sometimes, not a lot, just once every few months or so, then maybe he could apply the keyword. 

He listens to Yoohyun talk while he piles food in his bowl, just like he had when Yoohyun had been too young to use chopsticks on his own. The simple domesticity of it all makes his eyes prickle with tears he refuses to shed. 

Oh but he’s going to miss this so much more now that he briefly got to taste it again. It’s for the best though.

He bids Yoohyun farewell, and promises to lay low and not disturb him anymore.

“What are you talking about hyung?” Yoohyun replies. “You’re not staying here; you’re going to come live with me now.”

…what? 

Yoojin does not unpack his bags. What would be the point? Soon enough his sordid past would be displayed on every headline and Yoohyun would simply kick him out again. Really it would be a waste of time to unpack them. He doesn’t say any of that to Yoohyun though, and instead makes some vague comments about how busy he is and how he’ll get around to it soon.

He wanders around the dorms, checking his phone periodically for any news stories about him and trying not to jump out of his skin whenever Kim Sunghan gets closer to him.

He knows Kim Sunghan wouldn’t hurt him. Not like that at least. He never has before no matter what Yoojin had said or did. But it’s hard to turn off the part of his brain that instinctively goes on high alert whenever there is a man bigger and stronger than him that gets too close.

His quest for another bodyguard is definitely not motivated by that reason. Definitely not. 

He does have another motive though. After all even if he’s only here temporarily shouldn’t he try his best to make himself useful? To be an asset to Yoohyun and his guild? Maybe then after everything is said and done Yoohyun will at least have something positive to remember him by.

He finds Bak Yerim working at her uncle’s restaurant, thin and scrawny and looking at him suspiciously as he lays down his offer. Good. She should be suspicious. Strange men who corner you when you’re alone and at the end of your rope offering you a way out usually don’t have good intentions. In his experience at least.

“Will you be my guardian ahjussi?” She asks him once he’s finished explaining the terms of the contract to her.

He feels his entire blood turn to ice, his half-smoked cigarette falling from his frozen hand into the ashtray.

“No.”

“But-”

“Absolutely not.” He repeats as sternly as he can, hiding his shaking hand beneath a napkin.

“Why not?” She pouts. “I want ahjussi to be my guardian. I won’t sign unless you say yes.”

He closes his eyes and sighs.

“Trust me you don’t want to be associated with me too much.”

“Why?”

“Just…just trust me okay? It won’t do you any good in the long run to have your name attached to mine.”

She squints like she doesn’t believe him, mouth set in a firm line.

“Don’t worry,” he says in an attempt to reassure her. “I won’t let anybody take advantage of you, not even my brother and his guild. And I can still be there for you if you want behind the scenes it’s just…it’s just better if we don’t associate publicly too much. That’s all.”

“But didn’t you say you wanted me to become your bodyguard? Won’t we be associated either way?”

“Don’t worry,” he hand-waves her concerns away, “we won’t be seen in public much together. The bodyguard thing is just a formality, I won’t actually ask you to do any of that. All you have to do is tell Yoohyun that you’ll be with me and then you can just do whatever you want. Plus,” he leans over and taps one of the clauses on the contract, “you can get out of the contract and cut all ties with me whenever you want no questions asked.”

“How do you know that I won’t just have you awaken me and then dump you immediately after?”

“I guess I don’t.” He smiles ruefully. “But I’ve made contracts with bad people before and I don’t think you’re one.”

“But-”

“Just trust me. You don't understand right now but I'm doing this for your own good. You'll be thankful for it one day."

Bak Yerim’s expression falls for a second before she takes on a more determined expression.

“Alright I’ll sign on one other condition then.”

“What is it?”

“I want us to talk about you becoming my guardian again after the one year period is over.”

“But-”

“I won’t sign anything if you don’t say yes.” She sets her mouth in a firm line and he can clearly tell that he isn’t going to win this one.

“Alright.” He concedes. It won’t matter anyway. There’s no way the story won’t break out before then and by then Yerim won’t want anything to do with him anyways. He’ll even do her the courtesy of not bringing this particular clause of the contract up once that happens.

“Great!” She smiles. “Then please take care of me from now ahjussi.”

He would try. 

God he would try.

Confronting Yerim’s uncle hadn’t gone nearly as well as he’d hoped. He’d known that angry men was one of the things he was weak to, but he had hoped that his new fear resistance skill would help with that. Obviously not though if his clammy, shaking hands had been any indication. Apparently the skill only works to suppress higher ranked beings’ auras and prevent him from getting intimidated by their rank difference.

What a useless skill. He laments.

He’d gotten Yerim out fine though. And her uncle wouldn’t be bothering her any time soon if he knew what was good for him. Plus she’d awakened as an S-rank! A very successful evening overall, despite that minor mishap.

Yoohyun hadn’t seemed very pleased when he’d introduced Yerim as his new recruit/bodyguard but he hadn’t protested much until Yerim had started talking about how Yoojin was basically her guardian and how soon enough he would be her real guardian and then Yoohyun had gone off on her saying that that would never happen and how Yerim was the one who would be gone in a year. 

Children, he’d thought fondly as he watched them argue. That lasted for all of three seconds before Yoohyun started sniffing the air like a bloodhound and looked at him accusingly. 

“Hyung were you smoking again?”

Damn it.

“No.” He lies.

“Yes he was!” Bak Yerim that traitor says. “You shouldn’t smoke ahjussi it’s not good for your health. Aren’t you just an F-class?”

Those damn brats, he thought fondly as he forked over his cigarette pack to Yoohyun.

“You better not be smoking these.” He scolds Yoohyun like a hypocrite.

“I don’t.” He reassures him seriously, and puts them in his back pocket. He exchanges a look with Yerim and they seem to come to some kind of truce as they nod to each other once before they both go back to heckling him about his smoking habit. 

I’m really, really going to miss this.

Meeting Myeongwoo had been pure chance. As though the universe itself had decided to give him a break and had offered him his accidental meeting with Myeongwoo as compensation. 

Myeongwoo was nice, earnest, hard-working, and was in possession of one of the most amazing skill he had ever seen. He would flourish perfectly well on his own with just a little bit of nudging on Yoojin’s part.

Best of all, he didn’t immediately snitch to Yoohyun whenever he caught him catching a smoke break outside, though he did look at him so sadly that he found himself putting out his cigarette all on his own without even being asked. Peace had also gotten in their weird mission to steal Yoojin’s cigarettes whenever he could. It was the only time Yoohyun and Peace seemed to get along at all though, so he supposes he shouldn’t complain. 

He hadn’t meant to start taking care of Peace. Originally he had only meant to help Yoohyun gain another asset by helping to tame Peace and now here he was taking care of a multiple of baby monsters with vague plans to raise more for other guilds. He had tried to have this burgeoning entreprise of his be as unassociated with Yoohyun as he could make it considering they were brothers. There was no need for both of them to fall together. 

He had tried to quell the whole thing from the start, the higher you rose the harder you fell after all, but he couldn’t seem to keep a grip on the situation the second it came out that he could raise beast mounts. Suddenly, everyone wanted one and was offering him outrageous sums for one. 

He just hoped he could raise them well and collect his money before the truth came out and they all severed their contracts with him. Sure, by then he would be publicly reviled again, a social outcast, but this time if he played his cards right he would have the benefit of being a very rich social outcast. He would be able to quietly move away and start over somewhere else. Maybe London? He had always wanted to go to Europe. 

“Are you planning a vacation Yoojin-ssi?” Myeongwoo asks him, gesturing at his phone which was open at a “top 10 things to do in London” article.

He shrugs.

“Maybe.” 

“I’ve never been out of the country either. Maybe we could go together?” He sounds so hopeful and excited that Yoojin doesn’t have the heart to tell him no, that that would never happen, that Yoojin was merely preparing for his future life as a, hopefully very rich, social pariah.

“Sure.” He says instead. 

“Have you ever been abroad?” 

He shakes his head.

“My parents used to travel abroad a lot though.” 

He had resented them at first when he was younger, had resented their absence, then he’d grown to like the days spent alone when it was just Yoohyun and him. And then they’d died and he’d went straight back to resenting their absence. It wasn’t fair of him, he knew, but in those early days, when everything had been so hard and he was desperately grasping at straws for a way to keep them fed and housed he had desperately missed the financial safety they had provided him, the image of a normal, happy, average middle-class family he hadn’t known he needed until he no longer had it. He missed it desperately and then felt horribly guilty for missing his parents’ money and not his parents themselves. 

Myeongwoo seems to sense that this is a sensitive topic and says no more on it. 

“Now that I’ve gotten my skill thanks to Yoojin-ssi I will definitely pay you back. This trip will be on me.”

Yoojin can’t help but snort. Myeongwoo is really such a good, dependable person. It’s really too bad that he can’t be his friend the way he so desperately wishes he could, but Yoo Myeongwoo deserves better than a fake relationship built on lies and an explosive secret.

“If you say so.” He says and pretends like Myeongwoo’s answering smile is real and that he is truly the kind-hearted benefactor Yoo Myeongwoo believes him to be. 

The press conference goes all wrong. 

They were supposed to show off Yoo Myeongwoo and his new skill. He shouldn’t have even been there. He wouldn’t have bee if Myeongwoo hadn’t begged and pleaded with him to also be there. 

He should have known that Myeongwoo would pull something like this when he insisted so much on him coming to the press conference. But really can he be blamed for not expecting this? He had thought that he was coming to see Myeongwoo get publicly recognised for his skills and to see Yerim get her first S-class weapon, not…not…

“And lastly, I want to thank my friend Hunter Han Yoojin, for his invaluable help and support. The word ‘saviour’ isn’t enough to describe all that he’s done for me. He will always have my gratitude and support in the future.”

He feels himself freeze with dread as every single camera in the room turns its lens at him.

He can already tell that this is the photo they’ll use in the future article they’ll write. He can see it so clearly.

Underage prostitution scandal! Beast Tamer Han Yoojin’s scandalous past revealed!

And underneath it this picture of him in his suit, staring shell-shocked into the camera with Peace on his lap. 

“I…” 

Why would Yoo Myeongwoo do this?! Wasn’t this way too much?! He’d already told Myeongwoo the truth about their first meeting so why was he still acting like this?

He knew why of course. Myeongwoo didn’t know. He didn’t know how damaging it was to attach himself to Yoojin so publicly, didn’t know that Yoojin was just a stone that sunk all those he cared about despite his best intentions. He was simply a good person, trying to repay the person he felt had done him a favour. He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. 

No matter how he looks at this wasn’t this very bad? When Myeongwoo found out the truth wouldn’t he be terribly angry at him for deceiving him? He had already anticipated that Myeongwoo would feel betrayed when he figured out the truth and would quietly cut ties with him,  but now that he had publicly tied himself to Yoojin in such a way, now that he’d tied his reputation to his like this, wouldn’t he be much more angry and bitter when he figured out that he had boarded a sinking ship?

Myeongwoo is simply staring at him, eyes full of gratitude, and Yerim is smiling and nodding approvingly from his side, twirling her new spear in her hands. Even Yoohyun is standing at the side looking calmly at the proceedings. Only Kim Sunghan who is sitting right next to him notices that something is wrong.

“Han Yoojin-ssi?” He whispers, brows furrowed, carefully angling his body so that he’s not looming over him, “are you alright? Do you need to leave?”

“I…” He repeats, mouth dry.

Luckily for him Myeongwoo smoothly changes the topic back to his weapons and people stop pointing their camera flashes at him in favour of photographing the star of the hour.

“I’m just going to go outside for a second.” He mutters to Kim Sunghan once he can feel his legs again. “Don’t come after me it’s fine I just need to take a quick smoke break. Don’t tell the kids please.” 

He flees before he can hear Kim Sunghan’s protests and barely makes it to the trashcan outside before he vomits.

Fuck.

Chapter Text

The first time he sees Han Yoojin he is vomiting in a trashcan outside the building the press conference for the new item maker hunter was being held in.

He pushes himself up, arms shaking, before slumping back against the wall, forehead beading with sweat. He takes out a packet of cigarettes and puts one to his mouth, struggling for a brief moment with his lighter before the flame catches. Smoke curls out of his nose and mouth as he inhales mouthfuls of smoke from his cigarette.

He looks terribly tempting and vulnerable, huddled in the corner with his cigarette, slowly pulling himself together. It’s a fascinating sight. He vaguely recognises the man as Guild Leader Han Yoohyun’s older brother. It’s his first time actually seeing the man, considering he has refused all interviews and meetings, even going so far as to snub the meeting various guild leaders had set up to get to evaluate his skills. He’d left them an email address and bank account coordinates as a means of getting in touch with him and Sung Hyunjae couldn’t help but find it charming, a sentiment which had apparently not been shared by Choi Sukwon and who had called him an “arrogant bastard” and gotten soundly beaten by Han Yoohyun for it.

He wonders briefly what has shaken him so badly, considering the iron-clad nerves it must have taken to send a bunch of S-classes such a response. It is especially interesting to him because Han Yoojin, for all of his shaky, jittery limbs, has not turned to look at him even once, as though completely unaware of the fact that an S-class had been staring hungrily at him for the past several minutes, as though his overbearing aura didn’t even bear noticing.

How interesting.

He can’t help but find himself inexplicably curious about this man. After all he has scarcely known Han Yoojin for a handful of seconds and he has already seen him carefully put himself together with practiced ease and the process had been utterly fascinating.

He seems to be at the end of his little routine, that seems to very precisely last as long as his cigarette did, as he straightens up and puts out his cigarette before dropping it in the conveniently located trash can. Just as he drops it, he sees Kim Sunghan rush out of the doors towards him.

“Han Yoojin-ssi!” He rushes to his side and Han Yoojin lets out a barely perceptible flinch before deliberately unclenching his muscles and turning to look at Kim Sunghan. “Are you alright? I was worried you've been out for so long.”

“It’s been,” he looks at the poor excuse for a watch he has on his wrist, “four minutes Kim Sunghan-ssi.”

“Let’s get inside.” Kim Sunghan answers instead, shooting an uneasy look at Sung Hyunjae who responds with a mocking wave. It seems that Kim Sunghan is not as immune to his aura as Han Yoojin is. “The Guild Leader was looking for you.”

“Sure. I just finished my cigarette anyways. Let’s go.”

“Han Yoojin-ssi shouldn’t be smoking so much,” Kim Sunghan starts on what is clearly a well-rehearsed argument, “it’s not good for your health it-”

The rest of Kim Sunghan’s tirade gets lost as he enters the building, Han Yoojin in tow, clearly not listening to Kim Sunghan talk about the dangers of smoking. Han Yoojin has not turned to look at him once during the entire interaction despite his aura having attracted the attention of every single person in the vicinity.

Finally, something interesting.

The second time he sees Han Yoojin he is taking a walk through his guild’s rooftop gardens with Kang Sooyoung and his little monster pet. He seems much more relaxed than the last time he saw him, which is strange considering he was coming fresh off a kidnapping attempt. What could have possibly been more distressing to him than that?

Han Yoojin tenses when he finally notices him standing by the flower bushes, like a prey animal noticing it is being stalked by a predator. However, unlike any prey animal with a modicum of self-preservation instincts, Han Yoojin does not immediately try to run away or make himself smaller and unassuming. Instead he straightens himself, spine set in a rigid line, yet his movements are still oddly fluid, as though imbibed with some practiced, staged gracefulness. The smile Han Yoojin sends him is nothing short of flirtatious, yet even that seems somehow practiced.

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi,” his voice is pitched lower than Sung Hyunjae would have assumed on first glance, “thank you so much for allowing me and Peace to wander around your guild’s rooftop garden. It’s truly a sight to behold.” He says, eyes roaming over Sung Hyunjae’s figure. He can’t help but preen under the inquisitive gaze.

“But of course,” he extends a hand and Han Yoojin stares at him almost confused for a second before extending his hand for a handshake. He flips his hand over and lays a delicate kiss on his knuckles. "The honour is all mine. I'm thrilled beyond measure that Han Yoojin-gun is enjoying these humble gardens.”

There is an adorable flush on the back of Han Yoojin’s neck as he quickly snatches his hand away.

So used to flirting but not used to being flirted with? How peculiar.

He shepherds Han Yoojin to the table he has carefully prepared for the occasion, filled to the brim with drinks and snacks.

“Have some tea.” He pushes the steaming hot cup he has just poured towards him, making sure to brush his finger along the outside of his hand. “Be careful it’s very hot.”

“Thank you Sung Hyunjae-ssi.” He gingerly takes the cup and pretends to take a sip before putting it down. Is he afraid it might be drugged? Well considering he was just kidnapped he supposes he can't blame him.

“I almost forgot,” he takes the dragon wing bone out of his inventory and tosses it to the fire lion who has been standing guard menacingly to the side. “Carnivore high-class monsters love dragon wing bones. I was fortunate enough to acquire one on my latest dungeon excursion and thought it might make a fitting gift.”

Han Yoojin watches the little monster go wild for the dragon bone and his face splits into a wide smile. Ah. So his other smile had been fake then. He had already suspected this but it was still nice to have his theory confirmed. This is what Han Yoojin looks like when he is truly delighted. He finds the difference is blinding, and cannot help but wonder wether the dongsaeng who claims to love Han Yoojin so much has noticed the difference. He immediately begins to think of ways he can force that smile out of Han Yoojin again. He has already deposited a steady amount of cash in his bank account. Should he double it? Maybe triple it?

“Thank you Sung Hyunjae-ssi.” Han Yoojin says, puling him out of his musings. “Peace seems to really enjoy their gift.”

“Think nothing of it.” He waves of the thanks. “I’m just glad to see that Han Yoojin-ssi is doing well. I was worried after the kidnapping.”

“Hm?” He tilts his head to the side almost confused for a moment. “Oh right the kidnapping.” He says with surprising lightness, like the incident is so insignificant that he couldn’t even be bothered to remember it. “It’s very kind of Sung Hyunjae-ssi to worry but I’m alright. There was no need for you to take time out of your busy schedule to come check up on me.” He smiles, this time a fake smile.

“But of course I must.” He replies, deploying his own fake smile in return. “After all Han Yoojin-ssi is the man who is going to be raising my baby.”

He expects Han Yoojin to splutter and get embarrassed again, instead his smile gets more crisped and his left eyebrow starts twitching minutely, though his expression remains otherwise unchanged.

“I see you’ve talked to Moon Hyuna-ssi.”

“We were all cc-ed in the email she sent you.”

“I see.” He smiles and says no more, instead pretending to take another sip out of his tea cup.

“But I’m not just saying this for politeness’ sake. Surely Han Yoojin-ssi has realised the position he is in.”

His expression breaks for a second as confusion flashes across his features before his plasticised smile returns to his face.

“Oh?”

“Han Yoojin-ssi is the only beast tamer, in the country, perhaps even the world, the patron of an S-class hunter and heavily associated with the only blacksmith in existence.” The longer list grows the more Han Yoojin’s expression hardens as his knuckles turn white from the strain he is clutching the edge of the table with. “There is nobody in the world who can compare to you right now.”

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi thinks very highly of me.” His voice is faint and almost shaky.

“All of the guilds are dying for a chance to speak to Han Yoojin-ssi. No matter what you say or do I’m sure they’ll be eager to comply.”

“That’s…I…”

“Truly there’s no need to be so modest. No matter how selfish and stubborn you are what can everyone else do but fall in line?”

Han Yoojin’s smile does not move from his face but his hands do start imperceptibly shaking. He quickly hides them under the table.

“I would never do something like that. Wouldn’t that just be recklessly endangering my safety?” He takes out a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. “Am I allowed to smoke here?”

“By all means.” He watches Han Yoojin struggle with his lighter for a brief moment before he takes out his own lighter and hands it to him.

“Keep the lighter.” He tells him once he tries to hand it back. “Consider a token of my deep affection.”

Han Yoojin snorts.

“Alright then.” He pockets the lighter with ease and there’s something almost refreshing about a gift being so easily accepted and not having to fight tooth and nail like he does whenever he tries to gift Officer Song something, though with him the fight is half the fun anyways.

“So Sung Hyunjae-ssi thinks I should start acting recklessly with no regards for my personal safety?” He questions again once he’s taken a couple of drags out of his cigarette.

“Who would dare to touch you?”

The question draws another snort out of him as he takes another drag out of his cigarette but he does not elaborate.

“Once the plans we’ve been discussing about having a high ranking monster guarding you come into fruition you will be virtually untouchable.”

“I’m sorry, the plans to do what now?”

So Han Yoohyun hadn’t told his brother after all. He'd suspected that was the case. The relationship between the two brothers never fails to bewilder him. They both seem terribly attached to each other yet are constantly trying to keep the other at arm’s length for some reason. Han Yoohyun seems to have given up on this lately, instead choosing to make his over-protectiveness of his hyung well known, while Han Yoojin seems to be clinging on to the facade that him and his brother are not actually as close as they are for dear life. 

“The plans to have a high ranking monster as an additional bodyguard for you. We’ve been discussing them during the last few meetings. Has the young master not mentioned it?”

“No. He hasn’t."

The mention of his brother seems to have snapped Han Yoojin out of whatever flirty customer service role-play he was doing. He seems almost jarred for some reason, like his brother being brought up had been like some kind of electric shock to his nervous system.

“Oh my. I hope I haven’t made things awkward for you and the young master.”

“You haven’t.” He says and refuses to ask any of the questions Sung Hyunjae can clearly see he is dying to ask.

“I think Han Yoojin-gun is going to be very important in the coming years. After all, the dungeons are only going to get harder from here on out. The beast mounts you raise will soon become indispensable.”

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi gives me too much credit. I hope I don’t end up disappointing you.”

“I don’t think you will.” He gets up. “Come, let me drive you home. It’s late.”

Han Yoojin hesitates for only a moment before putting his hand in his extended one.

“I hope Sung Hyunjae-ssi doesn’t expect more favorable negotiation terms just because of this.” He grumbles while getting in the car.

“But of course not.” He smiles, holding the door open for him like a valet would.

The drive is surprisingly quiet after that, with Han Yoojin seemingly looking out the windows. It would all seem quite normal were it not for the furtive, calculated glances Han Yoojin was throwing him every few seconds, as though calculating wether the risk he was planning to take was worth it or not. Finally, he seems to come to a decision, taking a deep breath and looking at him with slightly more intention this time.

That’s when he strikes.

Like a bolt of lightning, his hand shoots out to grab him by the back of the neck, aborting whatever attempt he was going to make. He is not particularly concerned about what Han Yoojin was planning to do, but he is rather curious as to how Han Yoojin would react to getting caught in whatever it is he was trying to do, to having his life literally in Sung Hyunjae’s hands.

Han Yoojin grows still, very still, so still that Sung Hyunjae suspects that he might have stopped breathing entirely and his eyes are blown wide yet his hands are surprisingly steady and so is his voice when he says:

“Isn’t Sung Hyunjae-ssi being very contradictory? What happened to me being able to act the way I wanted with everybody being forced to bow to my whims?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” He replies. “I haven’t done anything have I?”

Han Yoojin looks up at him through his lashes contemplating before he responds.

“No. Neither of us has done anything.”

“Exactly.” He releases the grip he had on his neck.

The rest of the ride is just as quiet as the beginning, except Han Yoojin is now looking straight ahead, still terribly still. His reaction is not abnormal considering the circumstances but there is stil something just a little off about his reaction that he can’t quite place.

Finally, they make it to their destination and to his surprise, Han Yoojin does not bolt the second he opens the door, instead letting him help him out of the car.

“Well, well, well. Kim Sunghan-ssi. Suk Simyeong-ssi. What a surprise.”

The two of them are standing there, arms crossed, looking distinctly unhappy.

“Your bouquet.” He hands him the flowers he had forgotten in the car and watches with delight as Han Yoojin accepts it under the shocked gaze of Kim Sunghan and Suk Simyeong.

“I hope Han Yoojin-ssi will also accept this small gift.” He says as he reveals the earrings he had bought for him.

“Thank you Sung Hyunjae-ssi.” He carefully takes the gift from his hands. “I will be looking forward to our cooperation then.”

“But of course,” he replies, relishing in the constipated looks Kim Sunghan and Suk Simyeon are sending him. “After all you are raising our Sooyoung’s dragon. We at Seseong are all in your debt.”

He leaves another kiss on the back of Yoojin’s hand. Just because he can. Just so he can see the back of Yoojin’s neck turn red again and hear the indignant splutter of Kim Sunghan and Suk Simyeong behind them.

“I hope to see Han Yoojin-gun very soon.”

Sung Hyunjae is used to people being afraid of him. He is used to people being attracted to him. He is even used to people being both. He is even used to people pretending to be attracted to him while actually being terrified of him. But whatever Han Yoojin is doing is utterly foreign to him. It is clear that Sung Hyunjae’s presence makes him uneasy somewhat and yet that does not seem to deter him from his flirting which manages to carry a subtle air of artificiality to it, like the smile of a waiter who’s been working a long shift or a hotel lobbyist forced to take the night shift. He cannot, for the life of him, tell wether Han Yoojin actually finds him attractive and he finds that this fact bothers him more than it should. Han Yoojin’s opinion shouldn’t matter to him, Sung Hyunjae’s objective attractiveness has never been in doubt. And yet whenever he interacts with Han Yoojin he finds himself questioning wether Yoojin finds him attractive.

The almost coquette-ish tilt of his head, the way his eyelashes flutter, all of it seem almost carefully choreographed, almost like a well-rehearsed song and dance that is now muscle memory to him. Only the presence, or even the mere mention, of one of his various children will manage to throw him off kilter enough that his flirty facade drops. It’s an utterly fascinating phenomenon.

But what truly confounds him, what makes him confused and, dare he say it, offended, is how Han Yoojin reacts to other people exactly the same as how he reacts to him. He will not deny being proud, but surely he is scarier than Park Hayool? The man is as threatening as a puppy! Surely him grabbing Han Yoojin by the forearms and gushing about how he is his “biggest fan” does not merit the same reaction as Sung Hyunjae, strongest S-rank in South Korea, if not the world, grabbing him by the back of the neck?

It does not escape him that Han Yoojin has that reaction to nearly every single man apart from his brother, regardless of their rank. In fact, rank differences barely seem to affect him. Moon Hyuna’s aura does not intimidate him no matter what she does and neither does Bak Yerim’s although that probably has more to do with her being his adopted child despite him very stringently denying it. The implications of such a thing are also not lost on him, as he carefully files them away to be further examined later.

Suk Simyeong seems to elicit a particular response in Yoojin he soon notices. It’s barely noticeable, but there’s a certain wariness he carries around him that he doesn’t with others, not even Kim Sunghan. It’s odd and he resolves to keep a close eye on Suk Simyeong just in case.

His various attempts to get closer to Han Yoojin, to peel back some of the layers to get at the juicy center within, are what lead him to accept the quest to go into the dungeon to help level Kim Sunghan up, odd considering Kim Sunghan seems to make him uncomfortable by his very presence, though he is doing an admirable job at hiding it, and the fact that Kim Sunghan was part of his brother’s guild who he, in Han Yoojin’s own words, is completely unaffiliated to.

Seeing Han Yoojin interact with his children is fascinating. He seems to forget his own assertions that they are “not that close, barely affiliated” and scolds them like a father scolding his misbehaving teenagers. The fact that they listen to him, and of their own free will at that, is what is truly surprising. Han Yoohyun could burn his brother to a crisp if he so chose without even blinking and yet here he is letting himself get publicly scolded in front of his fellow guild leaders. How he expects anyone to believe that him and his brother aren't terribly close is beyond him.

Apart from that he seems content to sit in the corner and observe. His eyes are mostly fixed on the young master with an incomprehensible mixture of longing and guilt and grief swimming in them. He does not interact much with Kim Sunghan who he is ostensibly here to help apart from a few courtesies and well-meaning platitudes here and there and he does an admirable job pretending that Sung Hyunjae is invisible to his great delight.

When the final boss appears and Han Yoojin proves himself to be even more useful and fascinating than he had first thought, he laments, not for the first time, the fact that Han Yoojin is a person and not an item he can buy and then keep tucked into his coat pocket, lovingly maintained and carefully polished. The urge to simply kill all the others while the doubling effect is still in place and take Han Yoojin for himself is strong. It wouldn’t be effective in the long run, he knows, but oh how tempting it is.

He ends up gently transferring his precious item into Han Yoohyun’s arms and following him at a brisk pace as they make their way to the hospital.

“Your hyung seems to have terribly poor self-preservation instincts.” He tells him jovially as they watch Han Yoojin get taken away by a team of doctors.

“Hm. That’s fine.”

“Is it?”

“Hyung can do whatever he wants. I’ll protect him.”

“How nice. I thought the two of you wound’t be that close due to his insistence that the two of you were barely affiliated but I'm glad to see such a strong bond between brothers.”

He can tell he’s hit Han Yoohuun's sensitive spot by the way his jaw tightens and his brow furrows.

“You should leave Seseong Guild Leader-nim.” Han Yoohyun grits out. “There’s nothing for you to do here.”

“On the contrary,” he sends Song Taewon a quick text message letting him now where they are. “I think things are just about to get interesting.”

Chapter Text

Han Yoojin is very odd, Song Taewon concludes as they drive back from the hospital to the newly built monster rearing area. He appears, on the surface, to be relaxed, but there is an undercurrent of nervous tension coursing through his body that becomes apparent when you take a second look. Song Taewon would simply assume he was reacting to his presence if it were not for the way he seemed to react the same, almost shiftily, with everyone he talks to.

He doesn’t mean to scare him, not really. He just needs Han Yoojin to see, to understand, how dangerous these S-classes he has surrounded himself with are. How quickly they could turn threatening with nothing he could do to stop them.

He doesn’t end up having to do anything. The second he abruptly gets up Han Yoojin flinches backwards so violently he falls backwards, coffee mug smashing on the ground.

“Oh no your coffee!” He says mournfully, quickly getting up and looking around for tissues to mop up the spilled coffee with.

Song Taewon immediately feels a deep chasm of guilt open up inside him. He hadn’t even done anything yet. All he’d done was get up a little quickly and that had been enough to send Han Yoojin reeling backwards with a full-body flinch.

Clearly his nerves were frayed and who could blame him? Living with all of those S-classes would be taxing on anybody’s nervous system, let alone an F-class.

The situation must be a lot worse than he thought, he realises with dawning horror. Suddenly Han Yoojin's insistence that he and his brother were not close and his insistence on moving out of the Haeyeon Guild dorms the second his building was complete take on a much darker turn. What had Han Yoohyun done to his poor hyung? How had he tormented his poor F-class brother behind closed doors?

“I’m sorry.” He apologises, bowing deeply.

“What? No don’t be sorry! I’m the one who should be sorry, I spilled your coffee everywhere. Don’t worry I’ll make you another one right away!”

“There’s no need.”

“No, no I insist.”

Song Taewon watches as he mops up the rest of the coffee the best he can and immediately gets started on making him another cup of coffee.

The ease with which Han Yoojin manages to pull himself together, pretend like nothing happened and that everything is fine, only further confirms his suspicions. This must be a frequent occurence then, so much so that he is used to putting himself back together again after in record time.

“Han Yoojin-ssi,” he starts, shoulders subconsciously hunching in on himself to make himself smaller, voice as gentle as he knows how to make it. “It’s alright.”

“Hm?” He hums questioningly, placing a cup of coffee in front of him, fake smile plastered on his face.

“I’m saying it’s alright. I understand how…how frightened Han Yoojin-ssi must feel right now.”

“Frightened?” He frowns quizzically.

“I know perfectly well how terrifying a single S-class can be to lower-ranked people, let alone several. Han Yoojin-ssi must have felt terribly alone and scared all this time. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to be there for you earlier.”

Han Yoojin is blinking at him almost owlishly but Song Taewon goes on.

“But I’m here now. And I promise I will protect you. I won’t let any of them ever harm you.” He says seriously

Han Yoojin flushes pink.

“Oh! Um…I…thank you!” He squeaks. “Um…but I’m fine! I don’t…I don’t need to be protected really I’m-”

“I understand, but Han Yoojin-ssi truly does not need to worry.” He puts his hand in his jacket pocket, movements slow and exaggerated so as not to startle him, pulls out his business card and slowly slides it over to him. “This is my phone number. I hope you never need it, but if Han Yoojin-ssi ever feels unsafe, for any reason whatsoever, at any time, at any place, please call me immediately and I will come.”

“Oh, thank you.” He takes the card. “But I-”

“I have troubled you enough.” He gets up, slowly this time, making sure to keep his hands visible. “I will be on my way now. Please contact me if you have any problems.”

“Wait,” Han Yooojin says, “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I-”

“I will make sure on my end nobody bothers Han Yoojin-ssi.” He carries on. Of course Han Yoojin wouldn't trust him. That would be like asking a zebra to trust a lion. If anything, the fact that Han Yoojin doesn’t trust his words shows that he still has some self-preservation instincts. But it’s fine. Han Yoojin does not need to trust him for Song Taewon to protect him. “Please don’t worry about Sung Hyunjae. I will deal with him for you.”

Han Yoojin is looking at him with wide eyes, mouth slightly open, hands clutching the card with barely shaking fingers.

“I…You don't have to do that. Officer Song-nim is too kind, but I don’t want to trouble him unnecessarily.”

“It would trouble me more to know that Han Yoojin-ssi is alone and in danger.”

“I am not in danger.” He says, “You don’t…you shouldn’t be troubling yourself with things like this you’re busy enough with your job.”

“Protecting Han Yoojin-ssi is part of my job.” He tries to reassure him. “Just as much as doing dungeon raids is. As the only S-class public servant in the country it’s my job to make sure that no other S-class abuses their authority and starts hurting lower ranked individuals.”

“But-!”

“I’m afraid I must go now. But I hope Han Yoojin will remember to call me if he ever needs help. I will always show up no matter the location or the time of day.”

“Officer Song is too kind.” He says, something inscrutable in his eyes, “I hope he will not come to regret his offer one day.”

“I won’t.”

He turns around and leaves, making sure to make his movements slow and unhurried as he feels Han Yoojin’s piercing gaze on his back.

“You didn’t even drink your coffee.” He hears Han Yoojin mumble as he closes the door behind him.

Han Yoojin is falling apart.

He’s doing a frustratingly good job at hiding it, but Song Taewon can still tell. His behaviour gets more and more reckless, he becomes more and more twitchy, smoking cigarette after cigarette after cigarette, the smell clinging to him like a second skin.

He is always on his phone, brows furrowed, hands crisped, fingers ever-so-slightly shaking as he scrolls through the news. It almost feels like he’s waiting for something, though Song Taewon cannot imagine what it is.

“Han Yoojin-ssi remembers what I said yes? If Yoojin-ssi is in danger he can always rely on me.”

Han Yoojin looks at him, really looks at him, piercing eyes staring into his soul, but says nothing. He nods solemnly, hands clasped around his phone before leaving, presumably to smoke another cigarette while scrolling through his phone.

He never seems to have it out of his hands these days, he can’t help but notice, and if he does it’s because he’s too busy lighting a cigarette.

“Is Han Yoojin-ssi okay?” He finally asks Han Yoohyun one day.

“No.” Han Yoohyun answers.

“Why?”

Han Yoohyun is silent for a moment before replying, voice oddly quiet.

“I don’t know.” He clenches his fists, nails digging so hard into the soft flesh of his palms that he starts to bleed.

“I see.”

He goes to Yoo Myeongwoo next, Yoojin’s friend whom he seems hell bent on avoiding like the plague for some reason.

“Have you noticed anything odd with Han Yoojin-ssi these past few days?”

“I have.” He answers, face grave. “I’ve tried talking to him about it but he won’t even acknowledge that anything is wrong.”

He sighs.

“He stopped eating my food.” He mumbles, face pitched in an unhappy little frown. “He…he wouldn’t eat it at first. And I understood really! There are so many people after Yoojin, of course he wouldn’t just eat any food right? But then one day he had a bit and I know he liked it. I could see it! And sure he wouldn’t eat it every single time but still! But now he’s just…stopped. Completely. He only eats food if his brother made it, or if it's from the convenience store.” He looks at Song Taewon.

“I’m…a really bad friend aren’t I?” He chuckles unhappily. “Yoojin-ssi’s done so much for me and yet I can’t even find out what’s bothering him.”

Song Taewon wishes he could say something comforting but he’s never been particularly good at that. He hums thoughtfully and nods, which he hopes conveys his thankfulness as well as his sympathy and leaves Yoo Myeongwoo to brood in peace.

His unfortunate third choice is Sung Hyunjae. He doesn’t like It, but surely if anybody would know what’s wrong with Han Yoojin-ssi it would be him right?

“I’m honoured Officer Song came to me for information,” he says, “unfortunately I don’t know anything either.”

“Really?” He asks. He can’t quite bring himself to believe it. Doesn’t Sung Hyunjae know everything? Doesn’t he have people investigating everyone he deems suspicious?

“Really.” He leans back and smirks. “If Song Taewon-ssi asks I could launch a discreet investigation for him. It would cost you of course.”

"No need.”

“Come on Officer Song! Just have dinner with me one time, anywhere you want, my treat. What do you say?”

“No. And I hope I don't have to remind Sung Hyunjae-ssi that stalking and invading civilians’ privacy is illegal.”

“Oh of course. I would never dream of doing something illegal.” He pretends to shudder in horror.

He shakes his head in exasperation (he’s going to have to keep an eye on that doesn’t he?) and makes to leave before Sung Hyunjae freezes him in place with his next sentence.

“Have you considered asking him what’s wrong?”

“He hasn’t even told his brother.”

“Yes,” Sung Hyunjae acknowledges. “But that doesn’t mean he won't tell you. Unlike Han Yoohyun you are not his charge.”

“Why don’t you ask him then?”

“Well it’s not the same is it? I’m not his sworn protector am I?”

He feels himself blush.

“I…What?”

"Didn't you promise to protect him anytime anywhere for any reason? Who could remain unmoved by such a bold declaration from the nation’s guardian S-class? If you ask him more directly he might answer.”

“What nonsense.” He says after finally regaining his senses. “I already offered twice, if he was going to tell me he would have. Since it seems you don't know anything I will be taking my leave. I will remind Sung Hyunjae-ssi once again that invading a private citizen’s privacy is illegal and will result in immediate action by the Hunter's Association."

“Oh don’t worry,” Sung Hyunjae waves his concerns off. “I won’t. Honestly. It would ruin the fun.”

At that moment Song Taewon gets a phone call summoning him to an emergency work meeting and making him leave before he gets the chance to ask Sung Hyunjae what he meant by “the fun”.

Han Yoojin is looking at him.

His eyes are fixed between his shoulder blades at all times, scanning him, assessing him. Several times he starts a conversation with him only to immediately abort it and run in the other direction instead. This song and dance would be almost funny if he wasn’t so concerned. Instead it feels like they are standing on the precipice of some formless, unspoken thing.

He’s waiting, for what he doesn’t know yet, but he’s made peace with it for now. Instead he spends his time making sure that Sung Hyunjae bothers Yoojin as little as possible, chases off a truly absurd number of reporters and recruiters from the Hunter’s Association, and quietly commiserates with Yoo Myeongwoo every few days just to check that nothing else has happened.

He’s a little surprised when he finally gets the phone call.

It’s late, almost midnight, and he’s just come back from work when his phone starts to ring. He looks over and almost drops his cup of water on the ground when he sees Han Yoojin’s name. Quickly, before he can change his mind and hang up, he puts his glass down somewhere and rushes to pick up.

“Hello?”

The silence on the other end makes the hairs at the back of his neck stand up.

“Officer Song?” The voice on the other end finally answers after a long pause.

“Yes it's me. What’s wrong?”

Han Yoojin takes a deep steadying breath.

“I…I was wondering if Song Tawon-ssi’s offer is…is still on?”

“It is.” He answers quickly. “Are you in danger? Where are you right now?”

“I'm not in-” he stops. “I…I’m not in danger. Not…not exactly anyway. Not immediately.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I…” He can almost hear Han Yoojin shaking from here. “I was wondering if Song Taewon-ssi would do me a favour?”

“Of course.” He says immediately. It occurs to him afterwards that he probably shouldn’t have agreed so quickly to an unspecified favour, but he can’t bring himself to regret it.

Han Yoojin seems discomfited by his quick and easy acceptance, as though he’d expected resistance or even scorn.

“Oh. Thank you. I…I didn’t…”

“What is the matter?” He asks again.

“I…Not over the phone. Could you meet me in the convenience store in front of your house?”

He doesn’t wonder how and why Han Yoojin has his home address as he agrees; it seems like a vastly inconsequential and unimportant detail at the moment.

He quickly splashes water on his face and combs his hair before going down to the convenience store.

At first he thinks he is here early, until he spots a figure hunched in the back. The man, Han Yoojin he notices dimly, is huddled away in a hidden corner of the convenience store, hood up, hunched over the table, cigarette between his fingers and ashtray with two cigarette stumps in from of him. There is an unopened chicken sandwich on his table and he recalls Yoo Myeongwoo's laments that Yoojin had stopped eating his food and was now only eating either his brother’s food or food that came from the convenience store.

He buys himself something from one of the shelves, not even looking as he pays and goes to sit in the seat opposite Han Yoojin’s.

“Han Yoojin-ssi.” He greets.

Han Yooijn jumps, almost dropping his cigarette, before he turns around.

"Officer Song.” He says, almost surprised. “You came.”

“You called me.”

“Right,” he takes another drag out of his cigarette, "I did.”

“What’s wrong?”

Han Yoojin opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again, as though struggling to find the words.

Finally he sighs deeply as he puts out his cigarette.

“If…if I tell Officer Song something in confidence do you promise not to tell anyone else?” He’s fully looking at Song Taewon now, eyes sharp and piercing, pining him in place. He wonders if this is how F-classes feel whenever a higher ranked hunter looks at him. He feels almost trapped beneath his gaze, intense as it is.

“I would.”

Han Yoojin nods, as though he doesn’t really believe him but has no choice but to put his faith in his words anyways.

“I need Officer Song’s help with something.”

He pauses for a moment, as though reconsidering one final time before steeling himself. He takes out his almost empty pack of cigarettes and proceeds to light another one, vaguely familiar lighter flashing in and out of his vision. He breathes out a cloud of smoke.

“I’m being blackmailed.”

Chapter Text

The first text had been a shock.

In hindsight, he really should have expected something like this. Instead he’d almost let himself get comfortable, almost let himself forget that this was all a mirage that was doomed to come crashing down on his head at any given moment.

I know what you did. The first text reads, sent in the middle of the day on a random Tuesday.

Whore. A second text immediately follows, just in case he wasn’t sure what the first one was about.

Thankfully he is alone, and so nobody sees the way his face pales and how his entire body starts to shake. He collapses somewhere on the floor, text becoming blurry as his eyes fill with tears.

Dammit why did he let himself get used to this? He knew, he knew, that it was all pointless and yet he'd still let himself get closer to Yoohyun and now everything was going to fall apart and it was going to be so much worse than last time. At least last time there was only Yoohyun to be disappointed in him. Now there is Yerim, who idolises him despite his best attempts at discouraging it, and Myeongwoo who had publicly irrevocably tied himself to Yoojin, and Kim Sunghan who was barely starting to see him as not a complete screw up this time around, and Sung Hyunjae who seemed to think he had some value, even if only as an item. He could bear it, he thinks, if he knew Yoohyun would stand by him anyways, but he knows that that is nothing more than a pipe dream.

He stays there, on the floor, shaking, clutching his phone and staring at the screen hard, as though he hoped the texts would randomly disappear if he stared at them long enough, until he hears the sound of someone coming.

Quickly, in smooth, long-practised moves perfected through the years, he stands up, stops his shaky limbs through sheer force of will and quickly makes sure there are no tear tracks on his face before turning to greet whoever had just come home with a smile.

“Ahjussi are you here?” Yerim asks, softly closing the door behind her.

“In here!” He answers, voice calm and composed.

“What are you doing?”

“I was just thinking about making something for dinner.” He lies.

“Can I help?” She asks, throwing her backpack on the couch and bouncing over to him.

He should say no. He needs to stop indulging so much and start putting more distance between them, he can't keep going on like this he's just going to end up harming everyone around him and-

"Sure." He says instead, and relishes in her answering smile.

Damn it.

For a while after that there are no knew texts, but he knows better than to relax. Now that he feels the slowly ticking timer nearing the end he starts to frantically kick his plans into motion. He has no time anymore. Risks are going to have to be taken if he’s going to accomplish what he’s been setting out to do. Yoohyun is in a much stronger position now than he was before, Yerim is settling nicely and building a good reputation, Myeongwoo is establishing himself as a household name, Kim Sunghan is an S-class, and Suk Hayan’s research is steadily advancing. There are only a few more loose ends to tie before he can quietly extricate himself.

But he…he doesn’t want to leave.

It feels horribly selfish to even think it, knowing how upset Yoohyun would get at him once he found out the truth and how this would hurt everyone's reputation and good name. But he can't help but endlessly yearn for it.

He feels a sick feeling of relief flood him when he sees the subsequent text messages: half-insults and half-blackmail attempt. Good. He could work with blackmail. Blackmail meant he still had some time.

He feels slightly guilty as he wires a not inconsiderable sum of money to the bank account coordinates he had been texted. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that that would work forever, but it was a decent temporary solution until he managed to figure out who this was and deal with them appropriately. He would like to avoid committing any more murders, but he was grimly resolved to the fact that he would probably have to anyways. He couldn’t get caught now. Not when everything was still so precarious. Once he was sure that Yoohyun was standing firmly at the top, once he was sure that Yerim and Myeongwoo and all the others were thriving, once he had finished raising all of the dungeon monsters that had been entrusted to him, then he could quietly fade in the background and be nothing more than a long-faded stain on Yoohyun's reputation.

It is only after a month of frantic investigation and three more payments that he admits defeat. He will not be able to find out the identity of this mysterious blackmailer by himself, which means he will have to get someone else involved if he wants to resolve this.

He considers giving up, quietly moving to some no-name rural town where they don't even have internet and letting everything go up in flames behind him. Only the thought of how difficult and humiliating such a thing would be for Yoohyun makes him stay.

The list of people that could help him is remarkably short, and the ones he would actually trust to help him are even shorter. In the end there is only one possible choice He would rather poke his own eyes out than ask Yoohyun and see his face twist itself in disgust and disappointment, Myeongwoo does not have access to any ressources he himself does not, Sung Hyunjae is too much of a wildcard to risk involving in something so delicate (even though he would be the most efficient at dealing with this, he begrudgingly acknowledges), and Kim Sunghan and Suk Simyeong would just throw him straight out the guild without even blinking an eye.

So really the only sensible option is Officer Song.

And yet he cannot bring himself to call him, so unused to asking for help that the motions are utterly unfamiliar to him.

Does he just…pick up the phone and call him? It can’t possibly be that easy can it?

The fear, instinctive now, at having anybody know rears its head whenever he picks up the phone. What if Song Taewon tells everyone? What if he can’t help him? What if he can help but doesn’t find helping Yoojin to be a worthwhile use of his already limited time? What if Yoojin daring to imply that Song Taewon would help someone like him makes him angry?

He could probably manage to keep Song Taewon from blabbing. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would spread malicious gossip just for fun. He probably doesn't even have time, they really do overwork him too much don't they?

He tries to reason himself into asking for help and then immediately reasons himself out of asking for help. Finally, he cracks, and dials the number.

Whatever, even if the worst happens at least it will be on his terms.

“Blackmailed?!” Officer Song asks, brows furrowed in concern.

Yoojin sighs and nods, hands clutching his phone.

“I’ve been receiving these...weird messages trying to extort me for money.” He says, resolutely not meeting his eyes. "I was wondering if Officer Song might help me figure out who was sending them? I’ve tried looking on my own but-”

“I see. Han Yoojin-ssi did the right thing coming to me.”

"I did?” He blinks.

“Most of the time victims of blackmail will feel too ashamed to contact the authorities and get help. I'm glad Han Yoojin-ssi felt that he could trust me enough to report this to.”

“Oh.” He wonders if he looks as wrong-footed as he feels. He was half-convinced that Song Taewon would send him packing once he realised that Yoojin was not being menaced by an S-class like he thought he was that having him sit here calmly, taking out a notepad so he can take notes like this is just a regular case, feels both reassuring and oddly dream-like.

“May I see these text messages?” He asks after the silence has stretched on for too long.

Fear grips him instantly, freezing him from head to toe.

“No.” He answers immediately, shaking hands clutching his phone closer to his chest, as though worried that Song Taewon would try to rip it from his grasp.

Song Taewon frowns.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist. They’re a key piece of evidence that I’ll need to be familiar with so I can proceed with the investigation.”

Yoojin doesn’t answer, merely clutches his phone tighter and tries to calm his racing heart.

He knew this would happen. He knew. He’d even prepared himself for it, or so he thought. So why was he freezing up now?

“I hope Han Yoojin-ssi knows that whatever is in those text messages would be strictly confidential.” Song Taewon says in what is probably supposed to be a reassuring tone of voice but which does nothing to make his hands shake less.

“I…” He takes a deep breath. This is it. His one chance at framing this in a way that makes him look as good as possible, considering the circumstances. Excuses flash through his mind:

I didn’t want to-

I was scared-

We were starving-

Raising a child is expensive dammit-!

He takes a shuddering breath.

“After…after my parents died,” he starts, “I was…we were...things were…difficult for a bit. It turns out that traveling all over the world is quite expensive.” He chuckles humourlessly. "And when they died we…there wasn’t as much money saved as we had thought. There wasn't any money saved really once we’d used it to pay off all the debt and the funeral expenses. Did you know that shipping corpses from overseas is really expensive?”

Song Taewon doesn’t say anything, merely listens on quietly.

“After everything was said and done we were left with a debt of a little over 50 million won*.”

Song Taewon lets out a pained hiss at that.

“I dropped out of high school so that I could work more jobs but it just…it just wasn’t enough.” He pauses. “I had to…do things…that I’m not very proud of to pay it back.” His voice does not crack at the end, it doesn’t.

“I see.” Song Taewon says, voice oddly soft, but he can barely hear it over the wild pounding of his heart and the mad rushing of blood in his ears.

This is it then.

Wordlessly, he hands his phone to Song Taewon, eyes fixed downwards so he doesn’t have to look at his face when he realises what exactly Yoojin had to do to keep him and Yoohyun alive.

A beat passes and then he hears an almost deafening crack.

“I apologise. It seems I’ve accidentally broken Han Yoojin-ssi’s screen.” Song Taewon says, voice frighteningly calm.

“Th-that’s alright.” He takes the phone back.

Awkward silence hovers between them for a few minutes, neither of them knowing what to say to break it. Finally, Song Taewon clears his throat.

"We will probably not be able to track whoever it is through their phone number." He starts, “It’s likely to be a burner phone, but I’ll still try. We might have more chances with the bank account coordinates though.”

Yoojin nods and patiently waits for the other shoe to drop.

“I…” Song Taewon stops, “I would appreciate it if Han Yoojin-ssi kept me updated on any potential new developments.”

…is that it?  He thinks, almost incredulous. That can’t be it, can it?

Thoughts fly through his head unbidden, theories getting assessed and dismissed, ideas getting brought up and shut down, until he finally arrives at the conclusion he was looking for.

Oh. I see how it is.

He steels himself, pushing down the vague feeling of nausea down and lifts his head, looking Song Taewon in the eyes.

“I would never presume to take advantage of Office Song-nim's time like that.” He says, sliding closer to him so that they are now pressed thigh to thigh.

“It’s not taking advantage." Song Taeown protests. “I-“

“Is there…anything that Officer Song-nim would like in exchange for his help?” He puts his hand on Officer Song’s forearm and watches with faint amusement as his face turns crimson and his entire body stills.

“What..?”

He gently runs his thumb over Officer Song’s wrist and looks up at him through his lashes.

“I would be happy to offer some of my...services in exchange for-”

Officer Song tears his arm away and flinches back so hard he falls from his chair and lands crashing on the ground.

“You…I…We…” he stutters, face crimson.

“Officer Song?” That's a weird reaction to being propositioned, he thinks. He feels his stomach sink.

“I wouldn’t…I would never do something like that.” He answers more calmly while getting up.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

“I’m sorry.” He apologises, breaking out in a cold sweat. “I didn't mean to insinuate that-”

“Han Yoojin-ssi doesn't have to…to pay me back for my help.” He quickly says. “I don't expect…I never expected Han Yoojin-ssi to do anything in return for me. When I offered to protect him at any time I meant it.”

Han Yoojin blinks. Nobody has ever offered him unconditional protection before. He feels wrong-footed in a way he's not sure how to come back from. 

“I will proceed with the preliminary investigation on my end, and then I will contact Han Yoojin-ssi again when I have more news. Please be careful in the meantime and call me if you receive any more messages."

He leaves before Yoojin can have a chance to react to that, leaving him dazed and confused in the empty convenience store.

Stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Of course Officer Song wouldn't sleep with him, he groans, turning over in his bed. People must throw themselves at him every day. Hell even Sung Hyunjae wants him if his hungry gaze was any indication. Why would he take a cheap whore when he could have literally anybody else?

He grabs his phone and reflexively checks it for new messages, breathing a sight of relief when he finds none and putting it back on the nightstand.

“Hyung?” Yoohyun pokes his head in the room cautiously. “I just made dinner do you want some?”

The idea of eating anything hasn't appealed to him in weeks now, stomach too busy being tied with anxiety to feel hunger. A refusal is on the tip of his tongue when he notices the barely perceptible frown on Yoohyun’s face as well as his white knuckled grip on the doorframe.

“I’ll come out and make myself a bowl in a second.” He says in what he hopes is a reassuring tone.

Yoohyun’s frown deepens.

“Is hyung going to have dinner in his room again?"

He smiles awkwardly. He had been trying to take whatever meals he could stomach down in his room, as a preliminary way of putting some distance between him and the others. This was only mildly successful, as Yerim seemed to have absolutely no qualms with breaking his door down and flopping down dramatically on the couch in his room to have her meals with him and he could never bring himself to chase her out.

Yoohyun is quiet for a moment before sighing, shoulders slumped resignedly.

“At least let me fix you a plate and bring it to you then.”

“No!" Yoojin jumps up. "There's no need for that I’ll-"

He gets interrupted by his phone ringing insistently on the bedside table where he had left it. Quickly, so quickly that he feels himself sprain something, he runs to grab his phone, almost dropping it once from how shaky his hands got.

It was Song Taewon.

"Hello?" He answers immediately, heart in his throat.

“Hello, Han Yoojin-ssi. Is this a good time?”

“It is. Any news?” He asks, hyper-conscious of Yoohyun who was still standing at the doorway, listening in attentively.

“I’m afraid I didn't get all of the relevant information from Han Yoojin-ssi yesterday. Would you mind dropping by my office so we can discuss it further? I apologise for asking you this when it’s already this late but-“

“It’s fine!” He assures him, wilfully ignoring the sinking feeling in his stomach. “It’s not like I had any plans." He says wryly.

Yoohyun’s lips thin into a grim line as he continues listening, grip so tight on the doorframe that it has started splintering.

“I’m glad. Does Han Yoojin-ssi need me to send him the address?”

"No need. I already have it. I should be there in no more than half an hour." He starts shrugging on his jacket and putting on one of his shoes.

“Very well. I will see you soon then." Song Taewon responds before he hangs up.

"Why did Officer Song just call?” Yoohyun asks, arms crossed.

“He needs my help with something." He lies, looking around for his other shoe

The lie comes easily to him, just as it always had. Lying to Yoohyun is almost second nature by now; the lies slip out fully formed before he’s even realised it.

“Now?” Yoohyun's frown deepens. “But it's dinner time.”

“I’ll eat something on the way.”

“But-”

“I’m sorry I have to go.” He says after finally finding the other shoe and slipping it on. “I’ll try not to be too long.” He lies again before slipping out the door.

Even with his F-class hearing he can still hear the sound of Yoohyun breaking something in the apartment.

He hopes it's not his doorframe.

Song Taewon’s office is tiny and cramped, overrun as it is with piles of paperwork. He awkwardly apologises for the mess and carefully clears out the piles of files from one of the chairs so that he can sit on it.

“Thank you once again for coming so late.” He says, carefully rearranging his piles of paperwork to avoid them spilling everywhere.

“I should be the one thanking Song Taewon-ssi for agreeing to help me.”

"Of course." He says like it is the most natural thing in the world, like there was no possibility of him even refusing. “I’ve started investigating into the bank account but there's a lot of red tape we have to cross first. Don’t worry," he adds hastily when he sees Han Yoojin’s startled expression. “I haven’t mentioned your name anywhere in any of the paperwork I’ve filed.”

He lets out a breath he didn't realise he was holding.

"Thank you.”

Song Taewon nods.

“I was actually hoping you could provide me with some more information so that I could start investigating on my own while these administrative procedures are ongoing.”

Yoojin gulps and forces himself to relax.

"What does Song Taewon-ssi want to know?”

Song Taewon looks away, awkwardly shuffling his documents in his hands.

“I was wondering if...that is to say…I know that sometimes…Has Han Yoojin-ssi ever made a list of any kind, of people who…"

“Are you asking me if I have a little black book?" He asks, eyebrow raised.

Song Taewon looks away, a little cowed.

"I don’t.” He says. “Little black books are for expensive prostitutes. People who sleep with politicians and judges and CEOs. Not for people who gave blowjobs in dark alleyways for the cost of a convenience store hot meal.”

Song Taewon frowns, mouth turned unhappily downwards.

“I see.” He takes out a sheet of paper. “If possible I would like Han Yoojin-ssi to write the name of every single one of his clients that he can remember.”

“Do you think it will help?”

“It would.” He says.

Han Yoojin shrugs and starts rummaging around for a pen.

“If Han Yoojin-ssi could please also add the date when he first started seeing each person next to their names that would be very helpful.”

“How would that help?"

“It would help me know which men I need to arrest for having sexual relations with a minor."

“Officer Song.” He sighs. “I understand that you’re trying to help me and I'm very grateful, but we should be focusing on figuring out who is the one blackmailing me.”

“This is equally important."

“The list Officer Song wants would require much more than a single sheet of paper.” He says point-blank, and watches with morbid satisfaction as Song Taewon barely represses a flinch back.

“I see.” He opens a drawer, takes out an entire fresh stack of blank papers and puts it in front of him. “Use as many as you need.”

“You…” Yoojin sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I don't have time for that. We need to stay focused-”

“We are. There might be a potential lead there." Song Taewon justifies.

He’s not wrong. Objectively speaking Yoojin knows he's not wrong. But-

I don't know, I don't remember, don’t make me think about it again, please, please, please.

He takes a deep breath.

“I don’t…remember all of them. I…it was a long time ago and…”

“I understand.” Song Taewon answers, voice oddly soft. “Just write whatever names you remember.”

“Alright.” He picks up the pen, fingers only shaking slightly, and starts writing.

He feels shame bubble up every time he adds a name, so thick and cloying it feels like it's choking him. Song Taewon, mercifully, doesn't say anything as he racks his brain trying to remember names. The truth is he knew remarkably little about most of his clients. Most of them didn't tend to give out their full names and adresses before employing his services. As such he really only has twelve names to put on the paper Song Taewon had given him.

He can't bear to look Song Taewon in the eyes as he hands him the paper.

“Thank you." he says, taking the paper from him, carefully angling his hand so that their fingers don't brush. “I will be sure to investigate those leads thoroughly and report back to Han Yoojin-ssi should there be any new developments.”

He nods jerkily.

“Right. Thank you.”

Song Taewon pauses.

“Is...Does Han Yoohyun-ssi know…? About-”

“No!” He jerks up, eyes wide. “You can't tell him." He hates the way his voice sounds: shaky and scared, but he can’t keep the terrified edge out of it, as he clutches his sleeve. “Please." He breathes. He’s not begging, he’s not. He learned a long time ago that begging was useless and that it was better to brace himself for the blow instead, and yet he can’t seem to keep the pleading note out of his voice.

“I promised that day I wouldn't betray Han Yoojin-ssi’s confidence didn't I?" He says, hand awkwardly hovering in mid air, unsure as to how to dislodge Yoojin's white-knuckled grip from his sleeve.

“So you won't tell him?" He asks just to confirm. "Or anyone else?”

"I promise. Han Yoojin-ssi should do it on his own terms whenever he chooses to.”

He chuckles humourlessly and lets go of Song Taewon's sleeve.

If he had his way Yoohyun would never find out and would keep going on through life as he was now, blissfully unaware, still thinking highly of Yoojin. It’s impossible, he knows. But can he really be blamed for fighting tooth and nail to keep him like that for just a little while longer?

“Thank you.” He whispers, letting out a deep breath. "I should get going then. Unless Officer Song needed something else?”

Song Taewon looks at him for a moment, pondering, gaze inscrutable, before shaking his head.

“That'll be all for now. I’m sorry I brought Han Yoojin-ssi here so late. I know we probably could have done this over the phone but-"

“No I'm glad we did this in person too." Yoojin reassures him, putting his jacket back on. "In the future it would be best if we tried to keep phone calls and texts to a minimum and stuck to meeting in person."

"I understand.” Song Taewon nods and opens his mouth before pausing awkwardly. “Has Han Yoojin-ssi had the chance to eat dinner before coming here?”

Yoojin shakes his head, confused.

“I thought this might happen." He grabs a wrapped sandwich from the bag resting at the foot of his desk and hands it to him. "I got it from the convenience store for you. I figured you might not have had the chance to eat before coming here.”

Oh.

Wordlessly, Yoojin takes the offered sandwich. He feels a warm feeling bubbling up in his chest, unfamiliar in a way that throws him off-kilter.

“Thank you.” He says finally. “I hope Officer Song isn’t planning on staying too long? It’s getting quite late you really should be resting at home.”

Officer Song hums in a way that lets him know he wasn't planning on going back home any time soon. Yoojin sighs and quickly says his goodbyes before leaving, not wanting to impose on Officer Song any longer.

When he finally comes back home there is a shiny new doorframe at his bedroom entrance.

Chapter Text

Anger is not a foreign feeling to him. He is well used to the way it thrums under his skin, hot and electric, the way his blood feels like it’s buzzing in his veins, itching to go out there and fight and punch and kill. He is, however, equally used to repressing these beastly instincts, cloaking himself with the more demure cover of a civil servant.

Anger does not begin to cover what he is feeling right now. It feels both too small and too big a word to describe the cocktail of emotions he is feeling right now. There is anger yes, but also grief, and horror, and gut-churning rage.

He tries to act as unobtrusively as possible. The last thing Han Yoojin needs right now is an S-class hovering threateningly over his shoulder, dogging his every footstep.That would be enough to set any normal person off, let alone one so on edge. Because no matter what Han Yoojin says or how relaxed he tries to act it’s obvious once he knows. The plastic smile plastered on his face, no matter what, the hands, constantly moving so that nobody would notice the minute trembles wracking them, the smell of cigarettes clinging to him like a second skin, recently often accompanied by the smell of beer.

Han Yoojin appears, for all intents and purposes, to be free-falling into the abyss, fully intent on colliding with the ground below with nothing to cushion or slow down his fall.

His gentle questioning and prodding proves endlessly frustrating. Getting names, details, locations, from Han Yoojin is like trying to wring water from a stone. He will reveal no more details than strictly necessary, as though in some attempt to shield him from the more sordid details.

He is not very successful though. The vague snippets Han Yoojin accidentally slips out are more than enough to horrify him.

“I am a little surprised though.” He’d told him once, when they were going through profiles of potential suspects in his office. “Han Yoojin-ssi’s criminal record is very clean. Did the police never catch you?”

He freezes, and Song Taewon finally understands the expression “frozen like a deer in headlights” as Han Yoojin’s eyes go wide and his entire body goes terribly still.

“Once.” He finally says, voice hoarse.

“Oh?”

“I…convinced them to let me go without writing me up.”

“Convinced them?” He stops in his tracks as he feels another fresh wave of nauseating horror wash over him as he realises what exactly “convincing them” probably entailed.

He’d known that the police had their fair share of issues. He was a former cop for a reason after all. But this was…if he understood what Han Yoojin-ssi was implying correctly then…

“Does…does Han Yoojin-ssi remember what precinct this was?” He asks, voice choked.

He looks him up and down for a brief second.

“…no.” He says before turning back to their previous task.

He feels his blood still frozen in his veins. He doesn’t know wether Han Yoojin is lying or telling the truth, but either way he knows it’s useless to insist when he’s already said he can’t remember something.

All independent research he tries to do on this particular incident is fruitless. There are no paper trails, no digital files, and no evidence except for the way Han Yoojin had looked when he’d said the phrase “convinced them”, the far off look in his eyes, his white-knuckled grip. He will simply have to wait then, until Han Yoojin feels comfortable or desperate enough to confide in him, like he had the last time.

He finds he is becoming quite good at waiting.

He receives the call in the middle of the night and answers automatically without thinking as he cracks open another file from his impossibly large pile of files thanks to Sung Hyunjae’s latest property damage-filled excursion.

“Officer Song speaking.”

“Officer Sooooong…..heeeeeyyyy….” The voice drolls out the other end, words slightly slurred.

"Han Yoojin-ssi? What are you doing at this time of night it’s,” he checks his watch, “two in the morning?”

“Oh you know. Just…thinking. And drinking.” He chuckles humourlessly as he takes another sip of his drink.

“Are you alright?” He settles for asking.

“Hm? What?” He mumbles, clearly not listening. “Officer Song do you think…do you think that maybe I should just…I should just go away?”

"Go away?”

“Yeah like…like just…just go away y’know? Somewhere far. Where I don’t know anybody. And nobody knows me.”

“Han Yoojin-ssi-”

“Just like, just like run faaaar away, y’know. Like…like Greenland. Nobody knows me in Greenland. Probably. It…it would be better right? For everybody?”

“What are you-”

“I mean,” he goes on, “the blackmailer can’t get me in Greenland.” A pause. “Can he? Fuck maybe he can.”

“Where are you?” He asks, closing his file with a resounding crack and putting on his coat. “I’m coming to get you.”

“Hm? No I’m fine.” He hears shuffling behind him. “Excuse me!” He calls for somebody. “Can I have another one of these? ”The sound of ice sloshing in a glass is what steels his resolve, as he leaves his office.

“Han Yoojin-ssi where are you?” He asks again.

“I don't know.” He mumbles, taking another sip of whatever it is he has just ordered more of. “Can’t remember. Some bar I think. Not far from the dorms.”

That’ll have to be enough then, he thinks resolutely as he starts his car, sagging in relief when it immediately starts up instead of spluttering uselessly for several minutes beforehand.

He finds the bar in question on his fourth try. He is particularly thankful that Han Yoojin-ssi hadn’t been in the last bar with its sticky floors and flickering lights and dubious location between what appeared to be a strip club and a foot massage parlour that was definitely a money laundering front of some kind.

The bar Han Yoojin has chosen to frequent is nice, clean, spacious, mostly empty due to it being the middle of the week with only one or two other patrons.

Han Yoojin-ssi himself is crumpled up at the bar, nursing a drink in one hand while cushioning his head on his other arm, face slightly flushed and eyes peacefully closed, almost like he was sleeping. In front of him there is an ashtray with a frankly ridiculous amount of cigarettes in it.

“Han Yoojin-ssi?”

He hums, not opening his eyes.

“Han Yoojin-ssi.” He says again, hand reaching to gently tap him on the shoulder.

Right before his hand can make contact with his shoulder Han Yoojin jolts awake, as though alerted by some ingrained sixth sense, and flinches backwards, arm accidentally knocking over his almost empty glass.

“Officer Song. It’s you. You came.” He says, after catching his breath for a second, hand combing his hair back from his forehead. “Startled me for a second there.”

He chooses to ignore why exactly Han Yoojin had been so hyperaware of strangers touching him, even in this state, and instead carefully leans over to right the knocked over glass.

“Are you here for a drink? They make great vodka sodas.”

“I’m here to pick Han Yoojin-ssi up.” He answers instead.

“‘m not that drunk.” He protests. “I-”

“Finally got a friend to join you?” The bartender interrupts, subtly positioning herself in between them. “I told you drinking alone gets old eventually.”

“Jiyu-noona don’t tease me.” He whines, smiling charmingly at her.

Jiyu-noona laughs, mopping up the spill with her towel.

“So. What’ll it be?” She asks him.

“I apologise for the confusion but I will not be drinking. I am only here to pick up Han Yoojin-ssi.”

“Is that so?” Her gaze scans him up and down. “Yoojin?”

“Yeah.” He confirms, rubbing his hands on his face in a vain effort to sober up slightly. “Yeah it’s fine I know him. He’s…he’s a friend.”

“A friend.” She looks at him more sharply for a second before her gaze flits back to Han Yoojin.

“Yeah. Just…bring me my tab so I can pay please?”

She nods and returns moments later with the bill, featuring four beers and five vodka sodas.

He shuffles around awkwardly for his wallet for a while, and just as Song Taewon is about to take out his own card to pay, never mind that he can’t afford to pay for so many drinks at a nice place like that, he finds it, brandishing it out with a flourish and throwing a handful of bills on the table.

“I’ll go get your change.”

“Nah no need.” Han Yoojin says, jumping out of his seat and immediately stumbling as he looses his balance, hand clutching the table fro keep steady. “Just keep the rest as a tip.”

She shakes her head, almost disbelievingly.

“Thanks.” She finally says. “Be safe alright?”

Han Yoojin does not answer, merely throws a thumbs up at her over his shoulder as he stumbles to the exit, Song Taewon in tow.

Song Taewon does not reach out again. Instead he hovers around cautiously, carefully intercepting potential obstacles and moving them out of the way so that Han Yoojin-ssi does not bump into them. Finally, after what seems like an eternity, they are outside, and Han Yoojin collapses against a wall, head thrown back to let the wind hit his face, eyes closed and face concerningly pale.

“Han Yoojin-ssi? Are you alright? Do you need to go to the emergency room?”

“Nah, I’m fine.” He answers, a wildly unconvincing statement coming from him, “I just…I just need a moment, give me a moment alright?”

He fiddles with his coat pockets for a while until he pulls out a cigarette and puts it to his mouth before Song Taewon can protest. He keeps turning over his pockets for a while more until he fishes his lighter out and lights said cigarette. The lighter looks awfully familiar for some reason but he cannot pinpoint why exactly that is.

“Want one?” He asks, holding his pack of cigarettes open for him.

“No thank you. I don’t smoke.”

He mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “figures” before closing his eyes again and exhaling, smoke curling out of his mouth and nose in soft spirals. He finishes his cigarette, shakes his head one last time before dropping the stub on the ground and putting it out with his heel.

“Do you feel better?” He asks, taking in his unsteady gait and rugged cheeks.

Han Yoojin nods.

“A little. Cigarettes always help me sober up a little.” He certainly sounds more coherent even if he’s not exactly walking straight yet.

“Do you want to wait a while longer before getting in the car?”

He shakes his head.

“I've already troubled Officer Song enough. I shouldn’t keep him out so late.”

“I’m not troubled.” He assures him, opening the car door and helping him get inside.

This time the car takes a while to start and he feels his face heat up in embarrassment as he keeps turning the ignition key. Finally, the car roars to life, and he turns the heater up as he starts making his way back to the dorms.

“Officer Song didn’t have to come out here so late.” He finally says after a long stretch of silence. “I would have managed to get back on my own.”

“I know.” He answers, but does not elaborate. He does not know why exactly he has abandoned the enormous pile of paperwork waiting for him in his office, only that it seemed unthinkable for him that he should have done otherwise.

“Jiyu-noona was going to call me a taxi.” He insists. “There really was no need for Officer Song to come this far. I’m sorry.”

“You and the bartender seem quite familiar. Jiyu-ssi was it?” He asks, not-so-subtly changing the subject.

“Yeah.” He leans to the side to rest his head against the cool glass of the window. “We…before…I know her from…you know.” He makes a vague hand gesture before stopping. “Wait no that’s not what I meant. She wasn’t…she wasn’t like me.” He clarifies, voice turning slightly offended on Jiyu-ssi’s behalf when the words “like me" exit his mouth. “She was a bartender. Pretty good one too. Worked at this little dingy place that was definitely illegal that I used to pick up guys sometimes. She was always nice to me so I recommended her for another job at a better place.”

“I see.”

“She was really nice. Tried to look out for me and stuff. I think she felt bad 'cause I was young. She’d give me a little hand signal if she noticed that somebody had slipped something into my drink y’know? That was nice of her. She’s so nice.” He mumbles, face smushed into the glass.

“How…how nice.” He chokes out, hands desperately gripping the steering wheel. Han Yoojin-ssi would not admit to any of this sober, probably not even under pain of death. It feels…wrong somehow, to listen to him drunkenly mumble when he is clearly in an impaired state. Some part of him wonders if he would be more amenable to sharing information now than he was the last time he asked, less tense, less ashamed, but he cannot bring himself to take advantage of this soft, vulnerable version of Yoojin the way he imagines so many others might have.

“Han Yoojin-ssi should go to sleep.” He says instead. “I will wake you when we arrive.”

He hums something affirmative-sounding and closes his eyes.

It only takes him three minutes before his breaths are evened out and his brow is smooth. It is only now that he has seen him sleeping that he realises how much tension Han Yoojin must hold in his body every day, for him to appear so small and peaceful in sleep.

The ride back is quiet, interspersed with vague mutterings from Han Yoojin, though thankfully most of them seem to be about more mundane things like forgetting to pack lunch, and running late to appointments.

Soon enough he is at the dorms.

“Han Yoojin-ssi wake up we’ve arrived.” He says once he can see the building in the distance.

Han Yoojin does not budge, simply turns the other way and keeps sleeping. He could try jostling him awake he supposes, like he had earlier at the bar, but the image of Han Yoojin startling awake, flinching away from him is still firmly ingrained in his mind. Instead he opts to circle the building a couple of times until Han Yoojin awakens on his own.

It is only after the third time he’s circled around the building that Han Yoojin startles awake.

“I fell asleep?” He asks, a little confused. “That’s weird. I don’t-” He snaps his jaw shut.

I don’t usually fall asleep around other men, is probably how that sentence was going to end, if Song Taewon were to guess.

“Han Yoojin-ssi looked very tired.” He offers. “I’m glad he was able to get some rest.”

Han Yoojin nods as his uncoordinated hands start fumbling with his seatbelt.

“Have we been here long?”

“We have just arrived.” He lies, leaning over and helping Han Yoojin unbuckle his seatbelt. “Does Han Yoojin-ssi need me to help him get upstairs?”

“No need.” He says. “Thank you for the help Officer Song I truly appreciate-” The rest of his sentence gets lost as he takes one step outside the car and immediately proceeds to loose his balance and almost falls flat on his face.

“Han Yoojin-ssi!” He quickly gets out of the car. “Are you hurt?”

He shakes his head.

“No it’s fine.”

"Let me help you.” He insists, offering him an arm for support.

He looks at him for a moment, quiet, contemplative, haloed in the soft light of the parking lot, like some kind of dangerously vulnerable fallen angel.

“Officer Song really is very handsome.” He says ruefully breaking the silence, hand not quite touching the side of his face. “It’s very unfair.”

He feels the back of his neck heat up.

“I…We should get going.” He says, turning around to lock his car in hopes of hiding his flustered blush.

“Hm.” Han Yoojin hums in agreement, hand quickly dropping by his side.

And so they begin their trek to Han Yoojin’s apartments, Han Yoojin’s arm looped with his as he stumbles his way forward.

The second he steps inside he can hear the sound, though muffled, of Han Yoohyun yelling, immediately followed by Bak Yerim yelling right back.

“He’s been missing for hours! ” He hears Yoohyun yell through the walls. “It’s past four in the morning and he isn’t answering his phone! I don’t care that he said he was going out and not to wait up for him I’m going to look for him.”

“This is all your fault!” Bak Yerim yells back. “I told you we should have him followed but nobody listened to me!”

“Everybody please calm down.” Yoo Myeongwoo says. “He’s been gone for hours he could be anywhere. We should call the police and file a missing person’s report first before we do anything else.”

"Hyung hates the cops!" Yoohyun protests, sending a vague feeling of dread creeping up his spine. "He told me that I should never trust them and that they were useless at their job."

"What do you want us to do then?" He hears Bak Yerim retort.

“What’s with all the yelling?” Han Yoojin grumbles, head lolling to the side, brows furrowed. “Why aren’t they in bed isn’t it really late?”

“They’ve been worried about Han Yoojin-ssi.” He explains once he realises that Han Yoojin’s hearing is probably not good enough to pick up on the subtleties of the conversation.

“Worried about me?” His nose wrinkles in confusion. “Why? I left them a message.”

He sags a little bit into him as they make their way out of the elevator and down the corridor, as though his legs were on the verge of giving out.

“I think they would have preferred you called to let them know you were okay.” He says as he hefts him up a little bit. He’s tempted to ask if he can carry him inside. It would certainly go a lot faster, but he doesn’t think such an offer would be well-received. Besides, he can’t imagine the reaction he would get if he walked in carrying a highly intoxicated Han Yoojin in his arms.

After some more fumbling he finally manages to fish his keys out of his pocket and opens the lock.

He hears absolute silence on the other side as the door slowly creaks open.

“Ahjussi!”

“Hyung!” Han Yoohyun yells after a beat, rushing to his side faster than the blink of an eye. “Hyung are you okay?”

“Yoohyun-ah don’t yell please.” He mumbles, “I told you not to wait up for me why are you awake?”

“It’s four in the morning.” He answers, eyes slightly frantic as he looks Yoojin up and down for any visible injuries. “And you weren’t picking up the phone where were you?”

“‘Was just having some drinks. Called Officer Song and he came to pick me up.”

Han Yoohyun looks at him, as though he’s just realised his presence.

“You called Officer Song?” And not me? He can almost hear the faintly desperate question through the tight grip he has on his older brother.

“Didn’t want to bother you.” He shrugs. “I already…I already do enough of that.”

“Hyung I-”

“‘m tired.” He interrupts. “I’m going to bed.” He turns to Song Taewon. “Thanks for the ride Officer Song.” He gives him a clumsy two finger salute before he starts to stumble his way to his room.

He suddenly stops in his tracks and turns to look at Bak Yerim, who has been standing in the corner of the room, looking at Yoojin with big watery eyes.

“Yerim-ah it’s a school night why aren’t you in bed?”

At that, Yerim launches herself at him, sending him stumbling several steps backwards as she appears to attempt to try to crush their bodies together by the sheer force of her hug.

“Where were you?” She sniffles. “I was really worried.” She buries her head in his shoulder.

Yoojin softens, shoulders un-tensing, arms carefully going around to hug her back.

“‘m fine.” He whispers, voice hoarse, hand awkwardly patting her head. “Next time I’ll keep my phone on okay?”

Reluctantly, she unwinds her arms from around him.

“Now go to bed.” He tells her in what is probably an attempt at being stern. “Try to catch some sleep before school tomorrow.”

"I don’t need sleep I’m an S-class.” She grumbles before dragging her feet to her bedroom, eyes darting back to look at Yoojin as though she were afraid he would vanish if she took her eyes off him for too long.

"Go." Yoojin says softly. "I'll see you in the morning alright?"

She nods once before going in her bedroom, shutting the door softly behind her. Yoojin nods once contently when he sees her close the door before taking another stumbling step towrads his own room.

“Yoojin-ssi let me help you.” Yoo Myeongwoo says, sweeping up beside Yoojin to replace Song Taewon’s place as his living, breathing crutch.

“Myeongwoo?” He blinks owlishly at him, as though he has just noticed him there. “Did I keep you awake too?”

“We were worried.” He says, echoing Song Taewon's earlier words, gently guiding Han Yoojin’s unsteady figure towards his room.

Han Yoohyun looks at his brother, uncertainty flashing through his expression, as though debating wether to run towards his brother or not, before he steels his face and turns to look at Song Taewon.

“You know something.” He says.

Song Taewon does not answer.

“You know something.” He repeats, anger and desperation flashing in his eyes at once. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know anything.” He lies.

“Liar.” He hisses, grabbing Song Taewon by the front of his jacket. “I know you know what’s going on with hyung now tell me or I swear I’m going to-”

“I don’t.” He insists.

“He’s always texting you. Or calling you. Or waiting for you to text or call him.” He accuses. “He’s clearly…he’s clearly confided in you.” He spits out, jealousy coating his every word like venom. “Don’t play games with me or-”

“Or what?” Song Taewon asks. “You’re going to set fire to the building? With Han Yoojin-ssi inside? You’re going to start a brawl instead of letting him sleep?”

Han Yoohyun grits his teeth and doesn’t answer.

“Even if I did know something I would not say it.” Song Taewon continues. “If your brother had confided in me then I would take his secrets to my grave.”

“How wonderful.” He spits out, grip slackening on the front of his jacket.

“I’m afraid I must take my leave.” He shakes himself free of Han Yoohyun’s loosened grip. “Tell Han Yoojin-ssi to call me once he feels better.”

“I will find out!” He yells. “I will!”

“I know.” He answers. “But it wouldn’t be my place to tell you either way. Perhaps if you ask Han Yoojin-ssi he might tell you.” He says, but even as the words leave his mouth he knows that they are not true. If Han Yoojin had his way Yoohyun would never know and would keep living out the rest of his life in blissful ignorance of his brother’s sacrifice.

Han Yoohyun snorts.

“Then you don’t know him at all. Perhaps he really didn’t tell you then.”

Song Taewon turns to leave.

“I’m going to find out.” He repeats, this time less sure, voice slightly wavering.

Song Taewon does not answer as he turns to leave, ignoring Han Yoohyun’s piercing stare on his back.

He hopes Han Yoojin-ssi gets to tell him himself.

Chapter Text

Having Noah around is as nerve-racking as it is a boon.

The ever-present threat of his older sister might loom faintly in the distance but still, it's nice to have another young boy Yoohyun's age here. He's always desperately wanted for Yoohyun to have a friend of his own, somebody he could depend on and confide in that wasn't him. Back then he had been so worried that Yoohyun would be lonely, that Kim Sunghan and Suk Simyeong wouldn't be enough to keep company to a young man as introverted as his Yoohyun-ah who's always preferred to stay inside studying at the kitchen table while he cooked dinner rather than go out with the other school boys, no matter how many times Yoojin had thrust more pocket money at him in the hopes that he would go out and make a few friends.

Noah's skills are undeniably useful too. He had been Sung Hyunjae's chosen pawn, so it's not too surprising. He hopes that Sung Hyunjae doesn't take too much offense at the fact that he has stolen him away. Or if he has that he only takes it out on him.

As for Riette...he doesn't want to think about her.

A hot, heavy body on top his, wandering hands, words spoken in a sultry tone that he'd barely heard over the sudden buzzing in his ears...no, he shake his head, he really doesn't want to think about this.

He doesn't remember how he got her off him. It's not like he could have budged her if he'd tried. It was almost like she had just been toying with him, the way a cat does with a mouse before it eats it.

A small part of him had wanted to call Officer Song after she’d left, but he’d managed to resist the impulse, stopping his shaky hands from dialling his number. It was late, and he was probably busy. He was already bothering him plenty, there was no need to call when nothing had even happened.

Sung Hyunjae is surprisingly magnanimous when it comes to the loss of his dragon transforming S-class.

"Just come to my help three times and we'll call it even." He says instead. "How about that? Aren't I fair?"

"What could the Seseong Guild Leader possibly need my help with?” He asks, flicking some ash from his cigarette into the ashtray.

“Han Yoojin-ssi is a man of many talents.” He says, eyes roaming hungrily over him. “I’m sure I can think of something.”

He freezes.

He was talking about his powers…right? He didn’t, he couldn’t know right? If he had known he would have said something, done something, to make it known. …right?

“You…” He sighs. What use was there wondering about it? If Sung Hyunjae knew and wanted to take advantage to blackmail him into doing him favours what could he even do to stop him? “Very well.”

“Wonderful!” He smiles. “I would like to cash in my first favour now please!”

“Oh?”

“Seseong has recently acquired a new dungeon.” He goes on. “Would Han Yoojin-ssi do me the honour of accompanying me there? We would have such fun! We could go on a picnic, we could get rid of some pests, we could have a romantic stroll under the moonlight. So many opportunities.”

He feels something inside of him unfurl. So he didn’t know then. That was good. He wouldn’t be still having this weird back and forth with him if he knew.

“Alright.” He says.

“Perfect.” He grabs the hand he had been laying on the table and lays a soft kiss on his knuckles that makes him blush involuntarily. “I will call you when my preparations are in order.”

Sung Hyunjae calls in his first I.O.U. a few days later, when he decides to drag him along on a dungeon raid. Or, if he was to be believed, on a romantic picnic date.

"Isn't the view beautiful?" He asks once they get there, arms spread to gesture at the lake.

“It’s fine.”

“Han Yoojin-ssi is hard to please.” He notes with a smile, picnic basket held in the crook of his arm.

“Am I hard to please or is Sung Hyunjae-ssi not trying hard enough?”

Sung Hyunjae laughs at that.

"So how is our good friend Office Song?" He feels himself stiffen at the question.

"He's doing well." He says, eyes looking anywhere but at Sung Hyunjae.

“Is that so? He seems awfully busy these past few weeks.”

He hums but doesn’t answer. He wishes he had a cigarette he could smoke right now but he was only allowed standardised equipment in the dungeon.

“Officer Song is always busy.” He retorts.

Sung Hyunjae hums but does not answer for a moment, simply admiring the scenic view.

“Han Yoojin-ssi is also very busy.”

“These are busy times.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help Han Yoojin-ssi must not hesitate to ask.”

“I’m still repaying my debt to you from taking Noah. I’m afraid I can’t afford being in any more debt to the Seseong Guild Leader.”

“What debt?” Sung Hyunjae waves him away. “I always take care of my items.”

He tsks.

“I told you to drop the possessive.” He says without any heat.

Sung Hyunjae smiles and extends his palm to Yoojin, waiting patiently until he put his hand in his.

“Why shouldn’t Han Yoojin-ssi belong to me?" He presses a soft, almost reverent kiss to his knuckles. “I guarantee I can top any other offers that have been made to you.”

“Stop being weird.” He snatches his hand back, oddly relieved when Sung Hyunjae lets his hand go without a fuss. “I’m not for sale.” The words feel foreign on his tongue. He had usually been on sale after all.

Sung Hyunjae pouts.

“What a pity. Are you sure you can’t be convinced?”

He smiles, almost involuntarily, one eyebrow raised.

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi is going to have to try a lot harder than that.” The flirting is almost automatic, a reflex he somehow can’t get rid of. It feels easy, comforting, to retreat back behind his well-practiced plastic smile and meaningless flirtatious lines. “I’m not cheap.” A lie. He had been stupidly, ridiculously cheap back when he had been selling himself on the street. He’d been too desperate for cash to risk turning away clients by charging more, but Sung Hyunjae doesn’t need to know that. It’s oddly gratifying to have someone willing to throw so much money at him.

Sung Hyunjae raises his own eyebrow and takes a step closer.

“Oh? I’m rather short on cash at the moment I’m afraid. Does Han Yoojin-ssi take…alternative methods of payment?”

He feels his heart start racing and yet the usual tell-tale feeling of disgust, the urge to get away and scrub his skin raw, isn’t there. Instead he feels an odd, almost fluttery feeling, almost like what he imagines a teenager might feel like when their crush smiles at them from across the classroom. The feeling is foreign enough that he falters in his well-practised flirting performance.

“I…”

Before he can gather himself and remind himself that this is all just a performance, a meaningless act that he’s put on thousands of times before, he hears a loud bang in the distance.

“Ah. The entertainment is finally here.” Sung Hyunjae says, turning around to shoot the incoming MKC guild members an amused glance. He kisses the back of Han Yoojin’s hand again. “I hope Han Yoojin-ssi will enjoy the show.”

“That depends on wether Sung Hyunjae-si gives me something worth looking at.”

Sung Hyunjae laughs at that, delighted.

“Am I alone not worth looking at?”

“What’s there to look at?” He says like Sung Hyunjae isn’t ridiculously attractive.

“Han Yoojin-ssi is so mean to me.” He answers, still smiling wide.

And this, he thinks, is why his flirty performance with Sung Hyunjae is always a little bit meaner than he’d usually allow himself to be. He likes it, enjoys it even when he lets a little bit of his true self show, when he levies a cutting remark against him that he would have never dared even think in front of a client, lest it somehow show on his face. It’s almost freeing in a way. This mask is probably the closest he’s ever felt to being himself in the presence of a man like Sung Hyunjae.

“Sung Hyunjae!” Choi Sukwon yells. “Enough with the flirting and get down here already!”

The happy smile slides off Sung Hyunjae’s face in an instant as he turns to face Choi Sukwon with a look of what can only be described as bloodthirsty on his face, as though angry at their little play being interrupted.
“Oh but of course. I would hate to be the one holding up the show.” He jumps down into the middle of the combined group of MKC hunters and begins what is probably less of a battle and more of a bloodbath.

He can’t help but be envious. Sung Hyunjae is so strong, and rich, and powerful. Nobody could ever make him sell himself like he’d been forced to in order to survive. Sung Hyunjae had never had to submit to someone more powerful than him in order to live, has never had to fawn and cater to someone else just so he could put food on his table.

His train of thought is interrupted by the sound of someone landing behind him and suddenly his entire world grinds to a halt as he locks eyes with Riette.

He doesn’t remember how he got in the tower, he doesn’t remember anything really past locking eyes with Riette and feeling a white-hot flash of fear.

"There you are," she croons, "I've been looking all over for you, you know?" Her hand brushes the shell of his ear and it takes everything in him not to flinch away at the intrusiveness of the touch. It's pointless after all, he knows this well by now. "I can't believe you took my brother like that honey that's really-"

Her hand reaches to touch his cheek but before her fingers can make contact he hears a choking sound and looks down to see a thin, golden chain, wrapped around her throat.

"My, my," Sung Hyunjae chirps from the window, "what's going on here?"

Riette cannot answer, of course, as the chain appears to be fully choking her, cutting off her air flow.

"I..." He takes a deep breath and  quickly haphazardly pulls himself together. This too he is used to. "The show was too boring so I decided to leave. I'm leaving you a very bad review later." 

Sung Hyunjae pouts, the chain winding even tighter around Riette's throat.

"But Han Yoojin-ssi left before the best part!"

Riette makes a choking noise from next to him, collapsed on the ground and desperately clawing at her own throat for air.

"This trip was very disappointing." He goes on. "I'm afraid I can't give your tour guide services more than one star."

"Han Yoojin-ssi must allow me to redeem myself later."

"I want to leave." He says suddenly, the words coming out of his mouth before he can think better of them.

"Of course," Sung Hyunjae nods, "allow me to get rid of the trash before we leave." And with a flick of his wrist, Riette has gone flying out the window at literal lightning speed.

She would probably be fine, Yoojin thought as he watched her sail through the air, disappearing in the blink of an eye. And if she wasn't...well that was Sung Hyunjae's problem wasn't it?

"Now we can leave." Sung Hyunjae says after watching Riette's figure disappear over the horizon.

He extends his hand to Yoojin, like a picture-perfect prince from a storybook. He can't help the little flinch that racks through his body at that. It's subtle, a barely perceptible, half-second shift in his demeanour, but Sung Hyunjae notices it and quickly brings his hand back like he's been scalded.

Sung Hyunjae looks at him for a moment, expression stormy, almost like he's scrutinising him, like he's trying to see under his skin.

"Well," Yoojin says once the silence has stretched long enough to be awkward. "Are we going to stand here all day? The Seseong Guild Leader might have a lot of free time but I'm very busy." He reaches his own hand out to Sung Hyunjae who hesitates for a second before taking it.

"What could I possibly have to do that's more important that hanging out with Han Yoojin-ssi?"

"Well I have many more important things to do than hang out with Sung Hyunjae-ssi."

He feels weird, out of his body almost. He's used to the feeling, the weightlessness, the heaviness in his limbs, the way he can't string a thought together and just lets his body go on autopilot.

That's good. It would help him stay put together until he is alone again. It wouldn't do to have what would frankly be an embarrassing breakdown in front of Sung Hyunjae.

Unfortunately for him, he is violently thrust back into his own body the second they pass through the dungeon gate.

And suddenly he feels it, the roiling nausea that had been on the back-burner comes in full force, his skin feels awful, slimy, dirty, and the urge to scrub and scratch at it until it bleeds is suddenly so strong that he curls his hands into tight fists in a vain attempt at sating the urge he knows will not go away until he has scrubbed his skin raw in the shower.

“Hyung has been gone for a long time.” Yoohyun says, accusingly.

“Has he?” Sung Hyunjae responds. “I’m afraid we were too busy enjoying each other’s company to look at the time.”

“What have you done with hyung you-!”

“Oh many things. I put on quite a show for him. Alas, Han Yoojin-ssi did not-”

"Get back." He tells Sung Hyunjae, interrupting whatever weird stand-off he is having with Yoohyun.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm going to be sick get ba-"

The rest of the sentence is lost as he cannot stop himself anymore and vomits right on Sung Hyunjae's expensive, probably custom-made Italian leather shoes.

"Oh dear." Sung Hyunjae says.

"Hyung!" Yoohyun shouts and rushes over, former posturing forgotten.

"I told you to get back." He says to Sung Hyunjae. "It's not my fault." He feels his hands shake and stops them through sheer force of will, fingers curling into Sung Hyunjae’s sleeve as he uses his forearm as a crutch. "It's not my fault." He says again, more desperately.

"Of course it's not." Sung Hyunjae says, voice quiet. "I-"

"I'm calling the hospital!" Yoohyun says, shoving himself between Sung Hyunjae and Yoojin and giving him his own forearm to lean on.

"Don't be stupid." He scolds him, gently pushing back his forearm. "I just ate something bad. What are you doing getting all worked up hm?”

He takes the tissue Sung Hyunjae offers him with a muttered thanks and wipes his face.

“I’m going home.” He says, desperately pushing the nervous jitters that have started to rack through him. “You two have fun with,” He gestures between them vaguely, “whatever you were doing.”

He only makes it three steps before he hears his phone start to ping wildly as the buildup of messages that hadn’t been able to reach him when he was in the dungeon start coming in.

With frankly impressive speed, he pulls out his phone and spends the entire drive back to the dorms sorting through his messages with shaky hands.

Han Yoojin has not received an invitation to Sung Hyunjae's birthday party.

Good. That's good. He tells himself sternly. He shouldn't be going anyways, it's better for him to lie low and keep his distance from everyone and…and…

Dammit why does this feel so bad?

This is nothing really compared to what he went through, what he will go through, once his secret gets revealed. It’s the gentlest of snobs. Sung Hyunjae probably hadn’t even meant anything by it. He’d probably simply forgotten. Or maybe he hadn’t thought Han Yoojin important enough to invite. Or maybe he’d realised something about him during that infamous dungeon raid that had him make the conscious decision to snub him in this way.

He remembers Sung Hyunjae’s piercing golden eyes, scrutinising him, looking almost through him, as he seemed to come to some conclusion. What conclusion Sung Hyunjae has come to he does not know. It cannot be the truth because Yoojin’s life as he knows it isn’t over yet, so Sung Hyunjae must not have found out the truth.

“It’s a very annoying affair." Song Taewon tells him, probably in some vain attempt to comfort him. It doesn't work, but still, it’s nice having someone try to soothe his hurt feelings like that. He can’t remember the last time someone did that.

It's just odd is all, but he has more pressing things to worry about than not getting invited to the popular kid's birthday party like he is a teenager.

The blackmailer has been suspiciously quiet these last few days. Usually he would get at least a message every three days, sometimes more, but this last week everything has been quiet. Too quiet almost. Enough to make him even more on edge.

He is so busy worrying about that that he is a little taken aback when Sung Hyunjae does give him his invitation.

"I apologise for how late this is." He tells him as he hands him an invitation, written on paper that feels expensive somehow. "I simply needed to think about some things."

"Oh?" He runs his finger along the side of the invitation. "What things?"

"Nothing for Han Yoojin-ssi to concern himself with."

"Sung Hyunjae-ssi is very bold thinking that he can invite me last minute like this. Maybe I have other plans."

"Then I can simply push the party back to a day where Han Yoojin-ssi is free."

"You can't just push back your birthday party." He shakes his head, a little amused.

He is starting to get fond of Sung Hyunjae, he realises with a start. That is dangerous. Sung Hyunjae is not someone he could keep even if he didn't have a ticking time bomb under him, threatening to implode his life at any moment.

"Of course I can.” He shrugs. “It’s my birthday party isn’t it.”

He sighs and starts searching in his pockets for a cigarette.

“I think I have a couple of hours I can spare to go to Sung Hyunjae-ssi’s birthday party.” He says, lighting his cigarette.

“I will look forward to seeing Han Yoojin-ssi then.”

“Before, I forget,” He hands him the bags full of obnoxiously pink yarn he had picked out as a gift. “I came here to deliver your birthday present.”

“A birthday present? For me? How thoughtful!”

He laughs when he sees the hot pink yarn, delighted.

“How did Han Yoojin-ssi know I liked to knit?”

“Lucky guess.” He throws the cigarette stub and puts it out with his heel. He had thought the gift might make him laugh. “I’ll see you at the party.”

“You will.”

Sung Hyunjae’s birthday party is extravagantly luxurious.

It is just as glittering and shining as he had thought it would be. There are tiny little appetisers that are made to look pretty and not to fill anybody, and ice cold champagne being passed around and live violinists and a host of other things that his brain can’t even begin to wrap itself around.

He grabs a flute of champagne off a tray and, under Song Taewon’s concerned gaze, immediately downs the whole glass.

“Han Yoojin-ssi shouldn’t drink so much.” He finally tells him after he sees him down a third glass.

“This isn’t even the strong stuff.” He whines. “Sung Hyunjae is so stingy.”

Song Taewon says nothing at that but instead gently takes the now empty champagne flute from Han Yoojin’s hands.

He feels frazzled, barely held together at the edges, like one good tug would send him spiralling. There is just too much of…of everything really. It’s as though Sung Hyunjae had decided to enter a hedonism competition and was aiming for the gold. It’s a stark difference from his life before, where he had worked himself to the bone for three days straight in grimy alleyways so he could afford to buy Yoohyun a bigger pair of boots.

“Yoojin-ssi,” Song Taewon asks when he notices the blank expression he is no doubt sporting. “are you alright?”

“Hm? Yes, of course.” He forces himself to smile. “Have you seen Sung Hyunjae-ssi? I should probably go greet him.”

“I think he was on the balcony overseeing the pool.” He gets up. “I will come with you.”

“No need.” He waves him off. "I will manage on my own.”

“There are a lot of people. Drunk people.” He says meaningfully.

“And now I am one of them.” He says, downing another champagne glass and tumbling over to where Sung Hyunjae should be.

There’s something about Officer Song that makes him feel weird. He’s never had somebody in his regular life who knows, somebody he interacts with frequently and in more mundane contexts. The two facets of his life he has always carefully kept apart are slowly merging together in a way that he can’t help but try to squirm away from, despite how kind Officer Song has been. Even if he thinks Yoojin is disgusting he has never let it show, never treated him with anything other than respect and diligence. That is weird in its own way. People who knew, clients, police officers, bar and motel owners, even Yoohyun, his own flesh and blood, didn’t just treat him like this. It rankles something loose in him that he doesn't care to examine.

He takes another flute of champagne and starts his search for Sung Hyunjae.

The remnants of Sung Hyunjae’s burning yacht illuminate the night sky with a soft, warm glow as they sink deeper and deeper into the waters below.

“Han Yoojin-ssi are you hurt? Do you need me to call an ambulance?” Song Taewon frets next to him.

“No I’m alright,” he says, eyes not leaving the burning yacht, “Thank you Officer Song.”

“Hyung!” Yoohyun points, “your hand!”

He looks down to find a small burn, the size of his thumbprint, on his hand.

“I didn’t even notice it.” he lifts his hand to look closer at the burn. “It doesn’t look that bad. I’ll put something on it when I get home.”

Yoohyun doesn’t answer, instead taking out a healing potion and wordlessly handing it to him.

“Don’t be silly, keep them for when we really need them don’t waste them on me.”

“It’s not silly.” He insists, mouth pinched. “Hyung is hurt.”

“It just a small burn it’s not a big deal. I probably burned myself worse while cooking.”

“Ahjussi that's not a very convincing argument.” Yerim replies.

They keep up the argument as they slowly make their way to the convenience store. He hasn’t felt like eating anything in weeks, but he can't bear to say no to Yoohyun’s big, sad eyes when he presents him with a triangle kimbap.

Suddenly Sung Hyunjae materialises, as though out of thin air, with his infamous red coat draped over his shoulders, and completely soaking wet.

“I hope the party was entertaining enough to make up for the disappointing show last time.” He takes the empty seat opposite his.

“It was alright.” He says. “I might be convinced to bump your rating up to two stars.”

“My, my, how wonderful. Thank you Han Yoojin-ssi.”

He extends his hand and waits patiently until Yoojin puts his own hand in his. He brings it up for a kiss before stopping mid-way and shaking his head in disapproval at the small burn mark on his hand.

“Han Yoojin-ssi should really be more careful.” He says, taking out a healing potion from his inventory and dousing his hand with it before he can even think to protest.

The healing potion is clearly a high quality item, and the small burn on his hand disappears in a matter of seconds, leaving only smooth unblemished skin behind.

“Better.” He says, and lays a soft kiss on the place the burn used to be.

“Let go of him right now!” Song Taewon and Han Yoohyun yell, almost in unison.

Quickly, Yoojin snatches his hand back, finding no resistance as he slips his hand out of Sung Hyunjae’s warm, gentle grip. He feels the tips of his ears turn red. Sung Hyunjae’s weird fixation with kissing his hand always made him feel flustered in a way he can’t remember feeling before.

And suddenly Sung Hyunjae is sliding his phone towards him, empty name field staring back mockingly at him as he understands what exactly Sung Hyunjae is asking him to do.

This…this he could not do. This he absolutely would not recover from. Tricking Sung Hyunjae like this would be tantamount to a death sentence. At this point he might as well tie the noose around his neck himself.

He’s not good enough to be Sung Hyunjae’s item, let alone be his equal, and once his secret is out and Sung Hyunjae realises this there’ll be nothing and nobody to stop him from wringing his neck with his bare hands.

“I…” His throat is dry, he can’t breath, “I don’t…”

“Han Yoojin-ssi?” Song Taewon who is sitting right next to him asks, “what’s wrong?”

“I…”

“Han Yoojin-ssi?” Sung Hyunjae asks, eyebrows furrowed.

“Hyung?”

“Ahjussi?”

“I can’t…I don’t know!” He gets up so fast the stool he was sitting on crashes on the ground. “Do what you want!”

He makes a hasty retreat to the car he can see is parked outside, empty name field still swimming in his mind’s eye, mocking him.

Chapter Text

Something is wrong with hyung.

He knows it. Yerim knows it. Everybody knows it. And yet not a single person is able to guess what exactly is troubling his hyung so.

The failure, yet again, to protect hyung, to care for him, leaves an acrid taste in his mouth that he is now well-accustomed to. He is not good at taking care of people, he's long since realised. Things that had come naturally to other people, to hyung, didn't seem to come as naturally to him.

Hyung had always known exactly what to say, what to do, to take care of him. He knew when Yoohyun needed to be cajoled and when he needed a stern talking-to. He knew when Yoohyun needed to be comforted and when he needed to be left alone. He just…knew, somehow, without him even having to say anything. He had thought that one day, surely, he would be as good at taking care of hyung as hyung had been at taking care of him. That once he got old enough he would finally learn the magic secret that allowed hyung to take such good care of him and that he would finally be able to repay him in kind.

He knows now that that's far from the truth. The truth is that there is something wrong with him, something intrinsically different, courtesy of being an S-class, that makes it impossible for him to do what hyung did. His parents had seen it. Every teacher and classmate he has ever had has also been able to see it. Only hyung has carried on, wilfully blind to the very obvious wrong in him. And now he finds himself staring at the closed door of hyung's room, lost, as he best contemplates his plan of action.

"Hyung?" He knocks on the door. "I brought dinner."

The door opens after a few moments to reveal a disheveled looking Yoojin. Hyung looks...bad. His eye bags seem to take up half of his face, his hair is messy, and there is a sad, almost defeated, slope to his shoulders that appears more and more apparent by the day.

"What?" He rasps.

"I brought dinner." He repeats, handing him the bowl of beef stew he had made. "I made it myself." He reassures him.

He doesn't know why this obsession with only eating food him or Yoohyun had made came from. Had somebody drugged him before? Is that why he was so wary of food he didn't know the origins of? The mere thought of it is enough to make him want to scream and start tearing at his hair. Who would have done such a thing? Who would have dared? It had to have happened relatively recently. Hyung wasn't like this growing up. Granted there had never exactly been any occasion for hyung to eat anybody's cooking but his own since he refused to let Yoohyun near a stove in case he burnt himself (and isn't it ironic that he got fire powers of all things?) and they could only afford take-out a couple of times a year, so perhaps he had always been this way? No. Surely Yoohyun would have noticed something like that. He is not a good brother, no matter how hard he tries, but surely he cannot be that bad of a brother so as to miss something like that.

"Oh." Hyung looks at the bowl. "Thanks. I-"

"Are you going to eat in your room again?" He asks, defeated.

Hyung hasn't eaten with them in nearly a week now. At first Yerim used to simply disregard this and barge into hyung's room to eat with him. But hyung has forbidden even that a few days ago and it was maddening.

Why? Why was hyung deteriorating so fast for seemingly no reason? Why was he distancing himself like this? Hadn't they already resolved their misunderstandings? Was hyung still mad about that? Is that why he still hasn't unpacked any of his bags and has been living out of his suitcase for the past few months? And why did Song Taewon know and not him?

"Nah." Hyung says. “I’m not hungry right now. I’ll make myself something to eat later.”

He smells like cigarettes in a way that feels uncomfortable and suffocating. He pushes the bowl towards him more insistently.

"But I made your favorite." He protests. "There's beef in it. And I made sure not to add any tomatoes too."

Hyung has always liked beef, even though they could only afford to eat it once a year. Usually it was reserved as a Lunar New Year treat, and he would get to watch hyung's eyes light up as he portioned the two meagre portions he could afford into two bowls, Yoohyun's always larger than his, and proceeded to eat it, warm and content. And Yoohyun had sworn to himself, back in that little dingy apartment, that one day he would make enough money to be able to feed hyung beef every day three times a day. And now that he could hyung wouldn't even eat at all.

"Thank you Yoohyunnie." He smiles softly, a little bittersweet for some reason. "I promise I'll eat something later okay?"

"Take it anyways." He pushes the plate even more insistently towards him. "Just in case you get hungry."

Hyung sighs and takes the bowl from him they both know he will not eat.

"You need to eat more hyung." He insists, eyes roaming over his figure.

Hyung had never been particularly tall or large, but he had never looked quite so...diminished, before. Gaunt, tired features and protruding bones. Even back when things had been hard he hadn't looked so tired. Or maybe he just hadn't been good enough at noticing it back then. The thought sits and curdles in his stomach.

"I'm fine." Hyung answers in what he probably thinks is a reassuring tone but instead comes out incredibly weary and tired. "Don't you worry about your hyung okay?"

"You need to rest more." He says again.

Hyung smiles at that, a little sharp, a little sad.

"Don't worry. I think I might be getting a break from work sooner than you think."

"Really?" He raises an eyebrow. "You're going to take a vacation?"

"Something like that." He says, which isn't particularly reassuring. "Speaking of," he leaves the steaming bowl of food on the table in his room. "I should probably go check on the beasts. I think Comet is about to level up. Isn't that exciting." He leaves before Yoohyun can even answer, food long abandoned in his room.

He definitely shouldn't. If hyung knew what he had done he would be very upset, but well...hyung had been the one to leave the door open. That technically counted as an invitation right?

Frivolous excuse in hand, he pushes the door to hyung's room and goes inside.

The room smells stale, like cigarettes and cheap bear. He can see hyung's things, still packed in cardboard boxes stacked neatly across the wall and suitcases lined up against the wall. There is absolutely nothing in the wardrobe, or the nightstand, not even the shelves and cupboard. The room is frighteningly bare and empty. Apart from the smell and the unmade bed there is nothing that showed that hyung was living in this room.

The thought sends a chill down his spine. Hyung could just...pack up and leave tomorrow. Hell, tonight. It would take him less than an hour to have everything in a moving van and ready to go.

Don’t worry, I think I might be getting a break from work sooner than you think, hyung's voice flashes mockingly through his head.

No. It can't be.

Suddenly he feels fear, true white-hot fear flashing through his veins.

Did hyung...plan to leave? Was he still so insecure about their relationship that he hadn't known if he could unpack his things or wether he would be forced to move out again? Is he still upset about Yoohyun abandoning him the first time? Did he plan to leave first to avoid getting hurt again? He thought they had moved past that but clearly he was mistaken.

Quickly, his mind runs through the list of people hyung would leave him for. The first and most obvious choice is Song Taewon. Song Taewon, for some godforsaken reason, has been hyung's biggest confidant, the one person he had willingly let in on whatever was happening. But what would he even do with Song Taewon? Date him? The thought makes his blood freeze in his veins. He could date him from here. Why would he leave this luxurious apartment complex for Song Taewon’s shoebox apartment located in the bad part of town? Work for him? As if hyung would ever work for the government, of all things. So then who? Moon Hyuna? No way could she offer hyung anything he couldn’t. Her guild wasn’t nearly as successful as his. So then who? Who would…

The realisation hits him, slowly, and then all at once as he realises the one person who could, in fact, offer hyung something he couldn’t: Sung Hyunjae. Sung Hyunjae whose guild was bigger than Yoohyun’s despite his best efforts and who was still stronger than him no matter how quickly he tried to level up and who has been paying hyung particular attention now for several weeks.

Perhaps it’s time to show hyung how permanently Yoohyun planned for him to stick around he thinks as he starts meticulously and efficiently unpacking his suitcases.

Yoohyun hates parties. The useless small talk, the way people would try to awkwardly rub elbows with him as a way to get him to do something or another, the overcrowded rooms, the annoying music and the bland food don't do much to endear him to them either. He has long stopped attending these kinds of events, leaving them instead to the much more capable Suk Simyeong.

Suk Simyeong had seemingly been made for this kind of inane, boring event. He could make agreeable small talk about seemingly anything, always managed to talk to everybody he needed to about everything he needed to and didn't cause "an incident" by bashing people's faces in if they became too annoying which he had only done one time thank you very much.

This time is different though. This time, hyung is here. Which is the only reason he finds himself sitting uncomfortably straight in a chair in the corner of the room, watching over hyung like a hawk as he makes his rounds talking to a bunch of people in suits about the beasts he is raising.

“Well, well, well, look who we have here!” He hears Moon Hyuna crow next to him. “If it isn’t Guild Master Han Yoohyun! Finally decided to join us did you?”

“Hm.” He answers, only half-listening, eyes still fixed on hyung.

“I see your hyung-nim is enjoying himself.” She gestures to Yoojin with her chin who is currently engaging in what looks like perfectly pleasant conversation with a man Yoohyun vaguely recognises from the powerpoint presentation Suk Simyeong had vainly tried to give him on the important people to watch out for at this event.

“Hm.”

“Not a very conversational person are you?”

“Hm.” He says again, hoping to make her leave sooner. Unfortunately Moon Hyuna does not get the hint and instead sits down on a chair at the corner table he has claimed as his own.

“Ugh, I hate wearing high heels. My feet hurt so bad.”

He sends her a brief unimpressed look before going back to look at Yoojin.

“You’re an S-class. There’s no way these shoes are hurting you.”

“Hah! So you are listening to me.” She leans forward, head resting on the table. “You don’t have to keep watching him like this you know. It’s not as if he’s going to disappear.”

He doesn’t dignify that with an answer and instead keeps watching his hyung as he he dazzles the people he is talking to with pictures of his latest projects.

“He’s a strange man your hyung.” She remarks after a while.

“Strange how?” He asks, defensively.

Moon Hyuna pauses.

“Do you ever feel like he’s hiding something?” She finally settles on.

“No.” Yoohyun lies.

Moon Hyuna raises an eyebrow at him, as if to say she doesn’t believe him one bit.

“Well I think he’s hiding something.” She goes on. “You should really pay more attention to your hyung, you know. How come even you don’t know? Didn’t the two of you live alone together for years? I’d have thought there were no secrets between the two of you.”

That one stings, especially when he remembers hyung's white-knuckled reaction to finding his suitcases unpacked.

“Shut up!” He hisses, turning around so he can glare at her fully. “It’s none of your business.”

“I’m just concerned about him.” She protests. “Don’t you think he’s seemed really…depressed and erratic lately? I mean the smoking alone is concerning.”

“He’s promised to try and cut down on that.” He feels compelled to say even though he is pretty sure hyung had been lying through his teeth.

“Maybe you can get him some of these nicotine patches!” She proposes. “My uncle used them when he was trying to quit smoking and he said-”

The rest of her sentence is lost on him however, as he turns around to find hyung no longer in the same spot. His eyes dart frantically around the room, panic shooting through his body as he quickly gets up.

"He's gone."

"What?" Moon Hyuna asks.

"Hyung. He's gone."

She frowns, looking around to confirm it herself.

"That's weird. He was here just a second ago." She gets up. "He's probably on one of the balconies smoking. Let's split up so we can-" Yoohyun has already left before she could finish her sentence.

Stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He had taken his eyes off off hyung for barely a couple of seconds and now he was gone. He should never have let Moon Hyuna distract him, even if only for a moment.

He frantically opens each balcony to check, ignoring the offended squeaks of the people already on those balconies. The more hyung-less balconies he finds, the more his stomach starts knotting itself with anxiety.

Finally he spots hyung, not on the balcony but underneath it. He opens his mouth to call out to him but finds himself frozen once he processes the scene unfolding in front of him.

There is a man with hyung.

Yoohyun does not recognise him, meaning he probably wasn't important enough to warrant a spot on Suk Simyeong's extensive powerpoint. Or maybe he was, he had hardly been paying attention and anyway it would not matter considering the scene he is seeing.

Hyung is flat against a wall, cornered, eyes wide, while this strange man looms over him, holding his forearm in a vice grip. That alone is enough to freeze his blood in his veins. It is the muttered conversation he can hear however, that freezes him in his tracks.

"Come on," the very-soon-to-be-dead guy whines, "since when have you been such a tease?"

"I told you I don't do that kind of thing anymore." Hyung hisses, voice high and panicky in a way Yoohyun can't ever remember it being.

"Oh come on." He leans closer, "can't you make an exception for me? I've always treated you well haven't I?”

“Not here.” He pushes useless at his shoulders, voice weak. “Let’s talk about it somewhere more private okay?”

“Come on.” He smiles, disgusting and sickening. “Don’t you think the open sky’s romantic?”

"Please let go." Hyung begs, voice still shaky, "Please, you're hurting me let go of my arm please-"

The naked desperation makes his skin crawl. Hyung should never sound like that. Hyung had always been calm and confident and put-together, even when their parents had died and he had been struggling Yoohyun had never seen him sound like this.

He is strangely calm when he jumps down the balcony, so angry that it loops right back around to ice cold calm, and without even a second of hesitation, grabs the guy by the back of the neck, pulls him off hyung, squeezing the nape of his neck so hard it shatters in the process. He barely makes a sound as he dies, only a mildly satisfying crunch of bone. It's barely cathartic and he dies far too quickly but he's not important right now. He turns his gaze to hyung whose eyes look at the dead man with frightening emptiness.

"Hyung?" He tries, slowly, like how one would approach a scared ,wild animal. "Are you alright?"

"I didn't think anybody from back then would still recognise me." He mutters, eyes still trailed on the now cooling body. He chuckles darkly. "How stupid."

"Hyung?" He asks again, still a maintaining a careful distance from him.

"Hm?" He startles, as though just realising Yoohyun is here. "Yoohyun?!" He jumps up, looks at him, eyes wide. "What are you doing here?"

"I...I was looking for you." He finally settles on. "Hyung I-"

"Aye, aye, aye." He bemoans, looking at the quickly cooling corpse. "Look at what you've done. Seriously Yoohyun-ah I always tell you you have to be more careful. What are you going to do when I'm no longer here to clear after your messes hm? We're lucky that guy's not very important. We can probably smooth this over with some bribes.”

"Hyung..." He trails off, a little surprised by his casual tone. "That guy he was...he was trying to..."

"Yes?" He asks, looking up at Yoohyun, head tilted in confusion.

The frightening thing is that Yoohyun knows what hyung looks like when he is deflecting, when he is being deliberately obtuse, when he is just stubbornly refusing to talk about something. But this is not it. This is different. Hyung genuinely does not seem to think that something horrible, disgusting and violating has just happened to him and the thought makes something ugly churn in his stomach.

When he does not answer, hyung goes right back to fretting over the corpse, calling Suk Simyeong to bring in a discreet cleaning crew and fixing his appearance using his reflection in the fountain.

“You should get back to the party.” Hyung says, tone still light and calm, like nothing of note has happened, like there was even the smallest chance of Yoohyun leaving him alone in the foreseeable future.

“No.”

Hyung sighs like he is being needlessly difficult.

"Ah Yoohyun-ah. What am I going to do with you hm?" 

Slowly, gingerly, he takes hyung's arm, the one that bastard had dared to touch, and carefully hitches the sleeve up so he can assess the damage. 

There is a mark there, red and violent, shaped exactly like a handprint covering hyung's entire forearm, one that would definitely bruise if left untreated. He wishes he had left the man alive just so he could have the pleasure of ripping his arms off and watching him scream. Wordlessly, he takes out a healing potion and, ignoring hyung's habitual protests about not wasting healing potions on such minor damage, douses the red handprint with it and watches with a critical eye as the mark slowly disappears.

Before he can think something soothing and comforting to say the way hyung had always been able to soothe and comfort him, they hear somebody approaching.

“Hyung-nim!” Moon Hyuna calls out. “There you are! You nearly gave your brother a heart attack you know! Oh." She looks at the cooling corpse, nudging it lightly with the tip of her shoe. "Huh. Interesting."

"I did that." Hyung says, probably in some vain attempt to protect him, as though Moon Hyuna could ever reasonably believe that hyung could one-handedly break a man's neck with his F-class stats.

"You had your dongsaeng all worried you know." She playfully scolds him, shooting him a meaningful look as she lets the matter slide. "And all this time you were here.”

She moves to playfully put her arm over hyung's shoulder and for some reason the mere thought of somebody, anybody, touching hyung after what he has just witnessed makes his skin crawl and snaps some rabid protective instinct he has always vaguely known he possessed to attention.

"Don't touch him!" He snarls, hand shooting out to slap her arm away.

"Ouch!" She says, looking exasperatedly at the red mark on her arm. "There's no need to be so overprotective! I wasn't going to eat him you know." She looks at him, a little askance, but does not try to put her arm around hyung again.

"Yoohyun-ah!" Hyung scolds. "What are you doing? Apologise to Moon Hyuna-ssi right now!"

The "no" is on the tip of his tongue, but suddenly he finds that he can't bear to say no to hyung right now, especially not about something this small and inconsequential.

"I'm sorry Moon Hyuna-ssi." He parrots back, very unconvincingly.

Hyung sighs.

"I'm very sorry Hyuna-ssi." Hyung apologizes, much more sincerely.

"Don't worry about it." She waves the apology away. "Ah! That must be the clean up crew." She gestures at the three men in masks coming their way. "I'll get out of your hair then. I will be waiting for an update from Yoojin-ssi about the beasts soon."

"Yes, of course." Hyung says. "Take care."

She leaves, and hyung turns to him.

“We’re lucky it was just Hyuna-ssi who found us and not someone else. Now that the clean up crew is here we should head back to the party and-"

"We're going back home." Yoohyn interrupts.

"What? We can't! I still have to talk to the Japanese ambassador and-"

"No. We're going home."

Hyung looks at him, and whatever he finds on his face is apparently enough to sap all arguments from him.

"Fine." He acquises. "Let's go home."

This is not the first time this has happened, he concludes after several days have passed.

Hyung has been acting just as he always has. He had put himself back together too quickly, too seamlessly for it to have been his first time experiencing something like this.

If he hadn't seen it with him own two eyes he would never have known that anything had even happened. Hyung is still falling apart at the seams, was still smoking packet after packet of cigarettes, but he apart from that he has not changed. There was nothing to indicate the traumatising, violating event he has just gone through.

But if it was true, and this wasn't the first time, then how come he had never noticed anything? He has lived with hyung all his life, and he could not remember a time in his life when hyung had acted different or unusually. Hyung has always been there: strong, constant, reliable, with a seemingly never-ending supply of patience and empathy that he showered exclusively on Yoohyun. He could not be this unobservant. Surely if something like this had happened he would have noticed something was wrong, even if hadn’t been able to put a finger on it at the time, which leaves only one option: that this has happened during the time Yoohyun had stupidly, selfishly, abandoned his hyung in a vain bid to protect him.

It was all too easy to imagine: hyung, alone and defenceless, vulnerable, physically and emotionally, slightly drunk perhaps, and some…some disgusting bastard coming over and-

He’s going to be sick.

Maybe it had been the same guy both times. It would make sense. From the snippet of conversation he had heard it had seemed like they’d met before. But what if he wasn’t? What if there was some other bastard out there just walking around thinking he’d gotten away with…with…

“Hyung I think we need to talk.”

“Why is he not sending any messages where did he go?” He mutters, utterly oblivious to Yoohyun’s presence, as he scrolls his phone obsessively, cigarette in hand.

“Hyung?” He repeats, louder.

“Hm?” He jumps up and quickly slams his phone on its face, hiding the screen. “Yoohyun! Did you need something?”

“I need to talk to you about something important.”

“Okay.” Hyung says and turns his body toward him, giving him his full attention. “What is it?”

“I…” He takes a deep breath. “I want to talk about what happened that night.”

Hyung frowns.

“What night?”

He falters for a second.

“At the banquet.”

Hyung tilts his head for a second before he nods in understanding.

“Right I forgot to tell you about that. So I did manage to talk to the Japanese ambassador after all and she agreed to-”

“What? No! That’s not what I’m talking about!”

He blinks at him, confused.

“Then what are you talking about Yoohyun-ah?”

Had hyung…forgotten, somehow? Had he been so traumatised his brain had erased the memory of that night? He’d read about that happening. Or was he so traumatised he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it and simply wanted to pretend like it had never happened?

“Never mind. Don’t worry about it hyung.” He gets up.

“Oh. Okay.” He watches him go with a confused look before going back to scrolling through his phone.

It didn’t matter if hyung had truly forgotten or wether wants to pretend like nothing happened. He’d simply follow his lead for now and patiently wait until the day hyung was ready to talk about it.

In the meantime though, he has some digging to do.

Chapter Text

It is only later, that very same night, that Yoojin realises what exactly Yoohyun had been trying to hint at earlier today.

Dammit, he groans, sinking his head into his hands.

He had been so engrossed in what he had been doing that he had completely forgotten the incident, as it were. A lifetime of not discussing such things with Yoohyun, coupled with the relatively minor nature of the incident (though Yoohyun had gotten implicated, towards the end, so perhaps not as minor as that, he musses), had made it so the incident had just...slipped from his mind.

He should probably breach the subject with Yoohyun first, try to get some control back over the narrative. But then again...was there a point? His ticking clock was approaching the end. He might as well brace himself for what was to come.

Besides, Yoohyun wouldn't understand that this was the smallest indignity he has had to endure. That this was nothing, in the grand scheme of things. That yes he had been scared in the moment but if he could still walk after then how bad could it have been really?

Yoohyun would be horrified, confused, angry on his behalf. Until he learned the ruth, after which he would understand and stop caring about him altogether.

Before he can decide what to do about Yoohyun, his thoughts get interrupted by his phone ringing loudly.

"Hello? Officer Song?"

"Han Yoojin-ssi." He greets. "I'm sorry for calling you so late at night."

"No worries." He says, waving away his concerns. "I'm used to staying up late anyways."

It's only when he finishes that he realises how what he said just sounded.

You don't have to remind him you were a whore every time you talk to him. He silently berates himself. Trust me he remembers.

"I see." Song Taewon says, teeth gritted, before moving on. "I had some new development about the case that I-“

“Wait!” He rushes to put his shoes on. “Not over the phone. Are you at your office? I’ll come there instead.”

“I am at my office.” He confirms. “I’ll wait for Han Yoojin-ssi then.”

Sneaking out of the house is familiar. How many times had he had to sneak in or out of the house in the dead of night? It’s more difficult now that Yoohyun has apparently decided that Yoojin cannot be left alone outside for even a second and S-class senses to boot, but he has years of experience in not alerting Yoohyun to his movements. It would have been impossible for him to do this otherwise.

The trick is to make it look like he is still in his room, random video blasting loudly through the door of his room providing cover as he carefully makes his way outside. That ought to buy him some time before Yoohyun realised he wasn’t in his room.

He feels jittery the whole way there. Fingers tapping rhythmically on his thigh as he anxiously looks out the window. By the time he makes it to Officer Song’s office, he has smoked three cigarettes and has managed to calm himself enough that his legs are perfectly stable as he goes in to speak to Officer Song.

Officer Song is hunched over in his too little office, files piled so high they threatened to topple over at a moment’s notice. He takes a second to take him in, eye bags and ill-fitting shirt, somehow both too tight and too big at once, and undone tie and all. He looks good, handsome. He lets that thought sit with him for a moment, as he contemplates it. He doesn’t remember ever finding any of the men he’d slept with handsome, and yet now he finds himself consumed with this shapeless, formless want to…to what exactly? The want is foreign, frightening, coiling around him like a poisonous snake.

“Han Yoojin-ssi you're here." Song Taewon says, shaking him out of his thoughts. He gets up and quickly frees a chair for him to sit on.

“I’m sorry to bother Officer Song at this hour.”

“I promised to keep Han Yoojin-ssi updated on any new developments.” He replies. “And I thought Han Yoojin-ssi would want to know this. The bank finally came through with our request about the bank account."

"Oh?" He feels every muscle in his body tense in anticipation.

"Yes." He starts. "Unfortunately the bank account is not registered under a person but under the name of a company."

"What company?"

“Jin Holdings" He says.

The name sounds vaguely familiar, but before he can put his finger on it it slips through his fingers like sand.

“Jin Holdings.” He repeats, brows furrows. It's almost there, skittering at the edges of his awareness before it disappears once more.

"I'm still trying to launch an investigation into the company. But I'm not finding much unfortunately. they have no address or website and the names on the paperwork appear to be fakes. I will let you know if I learn anything else."

"I've heard that name before." He frowns, trying to recall. "I know it. I-"

"It's alright." He reassures him. "I will keep investigating on my end. If Han Yoojin-ssi remembers anything please contact me immediately."

"Alright."

"Is the blackmailer still silent?"

"Yes." He chuckles wryly. "Is it weird that I miss the messages now?"

"They provided you with some kind of clarity and control on the situation.” Song Taewon says. “It’s normal that you’d miss that feeling.”

“Hm.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have better news for Han Yoojin-ssi.” He goes on. “But I promise I am still investigating and-”

“Officer Song has been very good to me. Thank you.” He finally says. “No matter what happens I…Thank you.”

Officer Song looks at him for a moment, before slowly and carefully sliding his hand over to his, close enough that their pinkies brush but not close enough to actually touch. He feels every single hair on his body stand alert as he makes a conscious effort not to flinch back.

“There’s no need to thank me.” He says. “I was only doing my duty.”

“I know very well this does not fall under the scope of Officer Song’s many, many duties.” He chuckles dryly. “I should have gone to the relevant authorities, but I didn’t trust them like I trust Officer Song. I’ve been burdening you with my selfishness all this time. I’m sorry.”

“No.” He shakes his head, his fingers, twitch for a moment, as though he’d meant to lay his fingers over his but had thought better of it at the last moment. “I wasn’t burdened. I’m happy that Han Yoojin-ssi felt like he could turn to me for help in his time of need. I-” He looks away for a moment, as though overtaken by some sudden bout of shyness. “Han Yoojin-ssi can always rely on me if he needs something.”

He feels it again, that strange, overwhelming feeling stirring up inside him. He feels the rims of his eyes start to prickle. Slowly, tentatively, he moves his pinky, the barest of movements, but enough that his pinky is now fully resting against Officer Song’s instead of hovering just out of reach. Warm skin against warm skin.

Officer Song’s skin is warm and calloused. It does not feel much different than any other man’s skin. Except it does somehow. He feels his heart start to race as he feels the warm, bare skin against his. The touch is grounding, almost soothing, innocent in a way his brain could not truly comprehend touches could be. Officer Song looks at him, unblinking, still, as though he had somehow stopped breathing through sheer force of will, looking at him with wide eyes as their pinkies keep resting against each other.

“I…” And now it is his turn to look away, suddenly shy, as though he were some innocent virgin and not, well, himself. “I…”

Before he can’t think of what to say, the door to Officer Song’s office bursts open with a bang, flying off its hinges to crash land on the floor, sending all of the precariously balanced files tumbling in its wake.

Yoohyun is standing at the doorway eyes wide and frantic, when his eyes fall on them, his lips curl back in a snarl.

“Get your filthy hands off my hyung!” He snarls.

Song Taewon flinches back a little, as though he’d been slapped and quickly snatches his hand back. He feels the loss of the warmth of Song Taewon’s hand acutely, but before he can think about it, Yoohyun has jumped to grab him by the shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” He asks accusingly.

“I was just having a little chat with Officer Song.” He responds mildly.

“I told you not to go out without me!” He screams, “what if…what if something happened to you?”

"What are you getting all worked up for?” He asks, unbearably fond. He might as well bask in Yoohyun’s concern for the short time he had it.

“What am I getting all worked up for?” He repeats, incredulous. “You-!” His eyes fall on Officer Song and he snaps his jaw shut with an audible click. "Don't come here anymore. If Officer Song has something that important to say then he can come to you.”

“Yoohyun. I’m fine. Nothing happened. You-”

“You always say that!” He snaps. “You always say that.”

“Yoohyun I-”

“We’re going home.” He grabs him by the forearms and hauls him out of his seat. “Let’s go.”

“Hey!” Officer Song snaps, “Don’t-!”

“It’s alright!” He reassures him as he gets dragged away. “I’ll call Officer Song later!”

The last thing he sees is Officer Song’s conflicted face as he gets dragged away by Yoohyun.

To say Yoohyun is overbearing after that would be an understatement.

He had seemingly decided, overnight, that Yoojin could not be trusted alone, at all, for any reason, and had taken to watching him like it was his full-time job.

“You’re being ridiculous.” He often complained, and yet he made no efforts to truly get away from him. He wanted to luxuriate in Yoohyun’s presence, get his fill in those final few days before it was all taken away from him forever.

Because these were the final days, he had realised. He can’t explain it but he knows it, feels it in the buzzing under his skin, that this is nearing the end.

On the rare occasions where Yoohyun had to go to his actual full-time job, Yerim was the one who invariably ended up staying with him. He played video games with her at her urging and patiently listened as she tried her best to explain various memes to him.

Myeongwoo was also there, always quiet, shuffling in the background. Occasionally he would bring Yoojin something. An item he had made in the forge. A snack he had cooked specifically for him. He can only handle nibbling the very edges of the snack before leaving it, his deep-seated instinct to not eat food he wasn’t certain wasn’t laced with something rearing its head more often than not.

He gathers all the items and trinkets Myeongwoo had made for him and carefully puts them in a box, neatly filed and labeled. Myeongwoo would want them back, once he knew. It would be easier this way. When he was inevitably forced to leave he would just leave the box behind for him to find. He’d make a pretty penny reselling them too. There is a lot of stuff in that box. So much so that he is seriously considering getting a second box, just for convenience.

He should probably re-do all his bags too. Somebody had thought it was a good idea to unpack them and now he would have to do it all over again. He turns to half-heartedly glare at the offender himself, who is sitting at the other end of the couch, looking at him with such intensity that it feels like he is trying to peel off a layer of skin to better peer inside of him.

“Hyung have you been sleeping?” Yoohyun asks him randomly one day.

“What are you talking about? I’ve been sleeping fine.” He lies through his teeth. He has been sleeping poorly, even by his own miserable standards for weeks now. Ever since the blackmailer had disappeared without a trace he hadn’t been able to sleep. Too restless to get more than a couple of hours of sleep each night.

“Hm.” Yoohyun hums in a way that somehow managed to convey how much he did not believe his hyung.

The rest of the night goes on peacefully and quietly. Just him and Yoohyun in the living room, pretending to watch the news as they simply co-existed together. He’d missed this quiet intimacy most of all and the fact it was all going to get torn away from him again almost hurt more than the first time around.

“Here.” Yoohyun says, pushing a mug of steaming hot tea his way. "Hyung should drink something hot. It’s cold outside.”

He smiles.

“What a considerate younger brother.” He ruffles his hair, enjoying the privilege while he still had it. “What would would I do without you, hm?”

He takes a sip of the tea, warming his hands on the mug. It's a little sweeter than he’d usually like it, but it's just as comforting all the same. He leans his head to rest on Yoohyun's shoulder, feeling his eyelids start to flutter as he carefully adjusts his mug and-

He feels warm. Not the choking oppressive warmth of someone crushing him under their weight but the gentle comforting warmth of a parent’s embrace. His whole body feels soft and languid in a way he can’t remember it ever being.

He feels well-rested.

Too well-rested.

He startles awake, heart pounding and jumps up, quickly taking in his surroundings.

He is in his room, carefully tucked into bed, with fresh pillows under his head. Wasn’t he just with Yoohyun? He must have carried him here when he fell asleep.

…he fell asleep?

He feels a little shaky for some reason as he reaches out to the glass of water conveniently put by his bedside to get rid of the chalky aftertaste in his mouth.

Wait…chalky? Why would there be a chalky aftertaste in his…

Suddenly he feels his entire world slowly tilt off its axis as his grip goes weak, sending the cup smashing on the ground.

“Hyung?” Yoohyun peeks his head through the door. “Oh you’re awake. Do you want to eat something? I have-”

“You drugged me.” He says accusingly, voice hoarse from sleep and shock.

“What?”

“You drugged me.” This one comes out thin, breathy, and he realises with alarm that he is starting to hyperventilate.

“I didn’t.” He says. “Hyung what’s wrong are you-”

“Han Yoohyun!”

Something in his voice must show how serious he is because Yoohyun immediately folds.

“I did.” He immediately confesses. “I’m sorry hyung I was just worried about you!”

“Worried about me?” He laughs but there’s no humour in it. “What did you give me?”

“Just a couple of sleeping pills. Hyung wasn’t sleeping and I-”

“I told you I was sleeping fine!”

“You were lying!” Yoohyun bites back. “You always lie to me and…and I just want to help but you won’t let me!”

“So you drugged me?”

“You were already starting to get loopy and disoriented from lack of sleep.” He points out accusingly. “Was I supposed to wait until you developed permanent brain damage before I do something?!”

“I don't know! Maybe!”

He knows he is being unreasonable at this point but he can’t bring himself to care. He still feels shaky, bad, nauseous. His legs feel like jelly when he gets up but he manages to stumble to the bathroom through sheer force of will anyways to splash cold water on his face. He should never have turned off his poison resistance, even at home, never mind the fact that he wasn't able to smoke properly when it was on. He should have turned it back on immediately after he was done, he should have-

“What time is it?” He asks after a while.

“Two in the afternoon.”

“Two in the afternoon?! Are you telling me I slept fifteen hours?”

“Hyung needed the sleep.” He insists.

“You could have at least asked.”

“Would hyung have said yes?”

Probably not. But he refuses to admit it.

“I need some fresh air.”

Yoohyun nods.

“We can go to the roof if you like. There are new-”

“I’m going out. Alone.”

“Hyung!”

He ignores his protests as he pulls his jacket on with shaking hands and clumsily puts his shoes on.

“Hyung wait-!” He goes to grab his arm and the reaction is instinctive. He slaps his hand away, the way a cornered dog might bite, all instinct and raw fear.

“Don’t touch me!”

Yoohyun lets his hand fall immediately and takes a few steps back, hands up in what is probably meant to be a pacifying gesture, eyes wide and frantic.

“I'm sorry! I’m sorry hyung it's all my fault! Please don’t-”

“I just…I just need some space okay?” He takes a couple of deep breaths in an attempt to calm his racing heart. “I’ll be back tonight.”

“At least take Yerim with you!” Yoohyun yells at his retreating back in a panic.

He pretends not to have heard him as he slams the door behind him.

The bar is just as he remembers it: headache-inducing flickering lights and rusty door hinges and vaguely sticky floors. The bartender gives him a knowing nod in greeting when he sees him plop himself down at the bar.

“So you’re back.” He grunts, slinging his towel over his shoulder. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Thought you kicked it.”

“C’mon ahjussi. Give me some credit.”

“Weird workin’ hours." He remarks. “Isn’t it a little early in the day for you?”

“Nah I don’t do that kind of work anymore.”

“Good for you.” He turns to look at him, glass in hand. If he is surprised by his sudden urge to day drink he doesn’t show it. He’s probably seen way worse. “What’ll it be?”

“Just a beer for now. Thanks.”

“Sure.”

The beer is lukewarm and tastes like ass, especially now that he has Sung Hyunjae’s expensive craft vintage bullshit to compare it too, but it’ll do the trick. He is halfway through his third beer and sixth cigarette, and highly considering moving on to something a little stronger, when the door creaks open loudly.

“My, my, Han Yoojin-ssi. What an odd choice for a drinking spot.” Sung Hyunjae says, smiling brightly as he makes his way over to him.

The sight of Sung Hyunjae in a dingy little bar with what is definitely an expired or forged liquor license like this is so shocking that he almost drops his beer.

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi?” He blurts out. “What are you doing here?”

"I was just taking a stroll around the neighbourhood and thought I would stop by this lovely establishment for a drink.” He takes off his jacket and goes to sit on the bar stool opposite him. “I’ll have what he’s having.” He tells the bartender.

The bartender takes one look at Sung Hyunjae in his expensively tailored suit and his timepiece which could probably buy the entire bar and snorts before handing him another lukewarm beer. He sends a pointed look at Yoojin that clearly said “I thought you said you didn’t do that kind of work anymore?” before going to the other side of the bar to give them their privacy. Seeing Sung Hyunjae’s face try not to twist in abject disgust as he tastes the beer is very entertaining. In fact, he would love nothing more than to make Sung Hyunjae try a bunch of the cheap ultra-processed foods he had spent his entire life surviving on and watch his taste buds disintegrate, courtesy of the chemicals and dyes.

“Did Yoohyun send you?” He finally asks.

“Something like that.” He says and does not elaborate.

“I just needed some time alone to think.” He explains. “I apologise if Yoohyun made a fuss.”

Sung Hyunjae shrugs, the motion somehow elegant, and leans to the side, putting his elbow on the disgustingly dirty countertop.

“So, what brings a nice boy like Han Yoojin-ssi to a place like this?”

He can’t help but laugh at that. The mere idea of being described as a “nice boy” is simply to ironic for him to not laugh. Sung Hyunjae merely tilts his head at that, as though he hadn’t just used the world's corniest and cheesiest pick up line, and smiles lightly, somehow managing to look infuriatingly handsome despite the atrocious lighting in the bar.

“It’s nothing.” He answers once the laughter has died down. “I just…Yoohyunnie and I just had a disagreement is all.”

The expected mocking “oh what a pity! it seems there is discord between brothers! how sad!” somehow never comes. Instead, Sung Hyunjae keeps looking at him, expression unchanging.

“A disagreement?” He asks, encouragingly.

“Yes. He…”

There is a part of him that balks at the idea of exposing his problems to Sung Hyunjae, that wants to retreat inside himself and deal with it by drinking himself into a stupor and never thinking about it again. But there is another, greater part of him, that’s screaming at him to lay this burden on Sung Hyunjae’s sturdy shoulders. That petulant, childish part of him that wants to unburden himself, to let someone else handle it. That whines that Sung Hyunjae is strong, that he can take it, that he can fix it probably, in a way that Yoojin never could.

He gulps down the rest of his beer before gesturing to the bartender to bring him another.

“It’s silly.” He finally says, lighting another cigarette. “I…He just wanted to help me. I know that.”

“But it upset you?” Sung Hyunjae asks.

He shudders as he remember the visceral fear, the roiling nausea he had felt when he had put the dots together.

“Yes.” He confesses. “A little. Which is stupid because-”

“If it upset Han Yoojin-ssi, even a little, then it isn’t stupid.” He says.

“It’s not his fault.” He can’t help but defend him. “He didn’t know that it would upset me that much.”

“I don’t know what happened, but I don’t think that Han Yoojin-ssi should be quite so lenient. If it upset you you need to be firm and tell him so. If you can't stomach his presence for now then take as much space from him as you need. I can keep him away from you for as long as you like, even indefinitely. I'm sure Officer Song would help as well.”

“I don't need to take that much space from him." He takes another long drag of his cigarette. "He's my little brother after all."

Sung Hyunjae hums, clearly unsatisfied, but says nothing more. He drains the rest of his beer and looks at Sung Hyunjae’s barely touched bottle.

“You’re going to drink that?" He asks.

Sung Hyunjae’s disgusted expression is answer enough. He chuckles as he leans forward to swipe it from him.

“Baby.” He snorts, before tipping his head back and chugging the whole thing.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and looks up to find Sung Hyunjae staring at him with wide eyes, and swallows once audibly. For a moment, it seems like there is something simmering in the air, hot and heavy.

Sung Hyunjae breaks the spell, coughing once loudly and calling for the bill. He doesn’t try to fight for the bill, letting Sung Hyunjae pay for all five beers before they make their way outside.

The sun is just starting to set over the horizon, turning the sky shades of pink and orange as the breeze ruffles his hair. He feels a little buzzed, not quite tipsy yet but just pleasantly warm and flushed, but that’s not surprising. Even the whole six-pack of beer probably wouldn’t be enough to get him more than pleasantly tipsy. That was probably a symptom of alcoholism or something. Ah whatever. That was future Han Yoojin’s problem.

He ruffles around his pockets for a moment for his packet of cigarettes, muttering to himself under Sung Hyunjae’s amused gaze, when he sees it. Printed neatly on the side of a white van parked just a couple of blocks down.

Jin Holdings

And suddenly he remembers, with awfully crisp precision, where he saw that name before.

Chapter Text

"It's a human trafficking ring!" Han Yoojin tells him the second he opens the door.

Song Taewon blinks at him for a moment, confused.

"Excuse me?"

Han Yoojin pushes him aside, shoulder knocking into him as he makes his way inside the apartment. There is something frantic in his eyes, almost manic, that would scare him if he were even capable of feeling such a thing anymore.

"Jin Holdings." Han Yoojin replies, riffling through the pile of documents he had brought home with him.

Usually he would not be so cavalier with his files, but something tells him that trying to stop Han Yoojin now would only do more harm than good. His hands shake as he keeps riffling through his files until he finds the one he was looking for.

"There!" He points at a picture of the Jin Holdings logo. "It's them I'm sure of it! I knew the name was familiar I-"

"And how does Han Yoojin-ssi know this?" He feels compelled to ask, even though he already knows the answer.

"They almost got me once." He says, carelessly, as though that were a normal thing to have almost happened to someone. "I was too young and new then I didn't see the signs until it was too late." The easy admission freezes in his veins more than anything else. Han Yoojin does not talk about his past so freely. Not unless he were horribly pressed or under the influence. The fact that he is doing it now so freely makes every hair on his body stand on edge.

"Almost got you?" He repeats.

Han Yoojin nods, still flipping through his documents.

"Yeah. I mean I was the perfect target when you think about it. Teenage sex worker. No family to ask after me apart from an underage brother. No pimp to come causing trouble. Really it would have been weirder if nobody had tried to traffic me."

"I...You..."

"Where is it?" He throws the document he is holding to the ground, seemingly uncaring of anything else. "I know I saw it here I-"

"What is Han Yoojin-ssi looking for?" He asks, shoving the ball of lead he can feel forming in his throat down so he can focus on the task at hand.

"There was a picture of a guy! In one of the files you showed me! I know there was! I remember he looked familiar but I couldn't place it. Where is it?"

"A guy?"

Han Yoojin nods.

"Yeah. His last name was Yoo or Yoon or something like that. He had long brown hair and a goatee."

"I remember." He starts going through his files too until he finds the picture.

"Yes! It's him!" He moves forward to look at the picture better, his chest flush with his back. The close proximity makes the hairs at the back of his neck stand on edge for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Han Yoojin is apparently so far gone that the close contact doesn’t bother him the way it usually would. He makes himself carefully still so as to not startle him, the way one might with a small injured animal, and carefully tilts the picture closer to Han Yoojin’s face.

The picture is of Yoon Jiho, smoking a cigarette and leaning on the side of a white van with the Jin Holdings logo on it.

"Who is this?"

"He was the one who nabbed me off the streets that time." He mutters. He takes the picture from his hands and looks at it, pensive. Something unspeakable passes through his eyes, raw fear mixed with some kind of animal hopelessness. Whatever goes on through Han Yoojin's mind is a mystery to him, though if he had to guess it would be nothing good.

"It's him. I’m sure of it."

There is a note of finality to it, so much so that it doesn’t occur to him to question him further. He nods, gently taking the picture from his hands, making sure their fingers do not touch, so he can get a better look at this man’s face.

"Alright then."

"I know I can't prove but I-" He blinks, "Wait, what?"

"I said alright then. I will go apprehend him immediately.”

“Oh.” He blinks. “But, I mean, shouldn’t you wait for more proof?”

He should. He knows that he should, but he finds that he doesn't want to. Even if this man is not the blackmailer he still tried to traffic a teenaged Han Yoojin, and probably has successfully done so with others. The angry beast inside him that he keeps desperately leashed and muzzled has been straining to get out for too long now for him to care overmuch about procedures and evidence.

"I have enough authority to arrest people without evidence as long as there are reasonable grounds to suspect a crime might have been committed.”

“And does Officer Song have those reasonable grounds?”

“Han Yoojin-ssi’s testimony is enough for me.”

The naked shock on Han Yoojin’s face would have been funny in other circumstances, instead it makes him look heartbreakingly young.

“R-Really?” He asks, stuttering a little.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” He asks back distractedly as he starts gathering his things. Suit jacket, wallet, gun that he never uses but is still supposed to wear, badge, keys…where are his keys?

“Oh.” He hears Han Yoojin breath behind him, voice somehow breathy and wet at the same time.

“There it is.” He mutters once he finds his keys, hidden underneath one of the files Han Yoojin had carelessly started tossing aside. When he looks back up he finds Han Yoojin still looking at him, eyes wet with unshed tears. The sight is enough to stop him in his tracks. He has seen Han Yoojin in all kinds of emotional states but he has always remained remarkably composed for the most part. This is the first time he has even come close to crying, which is a feat in and of itself, and probably healthy, except he has absolutely no idea what triggered this sudden bout of emotions.

“Han Yoojin-ssi? Are you alright?” He takes a careful step forward, hand extended so he can…what? Hug him? Pat him on the shoulder? He's not sure yet, and so he keeps his arm like this, awkwardly hovering between them for a moment before he puts it back down.

“I’m alright.” He manages to say. “Thank you.”

He nods, movements awkward and choppy as he pretends to search for his wallet to distract from his awkward attempt at comfort.

“I’ll drive Han Yoojin-ssi back home first.”

That must have been the wrong thing to say because Han Yoojin flinches a little bit, mouth twisting in a grimace.

“I…um…” he takes a deep breath. “Would Officer Song mind if I waited for him here instead?”

“Oh?”

“It’s just that I…I’m having a little disagreement with my dongsaeng at the moment and I would like to avoid going home for now.”

“A disagreement?" He asks. “What kind of disagreement?”
“Nothing to worry about.” Han Yoojin-ssi says, immediately making him worry about it. “Just a little disagreement between brothers.”

It’s not “just a little disagreement between brothers”. It can’t be. Han Yoojin has always been ridiculously devoted to his brother. For him to leave the house and avoid him, even if only temporarily, meant that something bad must have happened. Very bad. The kind of bad thing that would make regular people cut off their siblings forever.

“I see.” He sighs. Well, now he knew what to focus on once this was over. “Han Yoojin-ssi is welcome to stay here as long as he needs.”

Han Yoojin looks at him for a moment, expression inscrutable.

“Don’t move okay?” Is all the warning he gets before Han Yoojin steps forward and carefully, so carefully, like he’s long out of practice, puts his arms around him in a fragile embrace.

The shock alone has him standing as still as a statue. Even without Han Yoojin’s request he doesn't think he could bear to move even a single muscle and disrupt this moment. With Han Yoojin so close he can feel how warm he is, the slight, ever-so-present, shaking of his limbs, his breaths falling across the side of his neck, soft and warm. He feels his entire body start to tingle and twitch. How long has it been since somebody, anybody hugged him? He can’t remember and neither can his body, firing off confusing signals of “too much” and “not enough” and “danger” and “closer” all at once. He could stay like this forever, he thinks, before reigning that dangerous line of thought in.

“Thank you.” Han Yoojin whispers, the words brushing past the side of his neck. “I…Thank you.”

“Of course." He answers, voice raspy. “It's my duty.”

Han Yoojin shakes his head, inadvertently burying his head deeper in the crook of his neck.

“I know it doesn’t mean much to Officer Song,” he goes on, “but nobody has ever just…tried to help me before. It means a lot to me, that Officer Song would even try. Thank you. No matter what happens I'll never forget this.”

He swallows and tries to answer but funds the words feel awkward and clumsy on his tongue.

Sung Hyunjae would be good at this, he finds himself thinking before banishing the thought from his mind.

"Officer Song," He asks, "what if...what if I did something bad to Yoon Jiho. Something…illegal. Something…”

“Good.” He answers, the bloodlust in his voice taking even him by surprise. Han Yoojin doesn't seem to mind though, and simply grip shim tighter for a moment before letting go.The warmth of his body is immediately missed as is the sweet smell fo tobacco and alcohol that always lingers with him. There is the barest blush on his face, and his eyes still have that suspiciously wet sheen to them, but he is smiling the barest, palest imitation of a smile and it does something to him that he does not care to examine to deeply.

“I’ll be back soon.” He needlessly reassures him, back of his own neck heating up as he leaves.

Wherever Yoon Jiho was he was dead, he silently vows as he softly closed the door behind him.

Finding Yoon Jiho proves to be remarkably easy. A couple of phone calls to local police precincts and he has the adresses of all of his usual haunts, and a list of possible accomplices to boot.

It makes something in him burn, the fact that the man who has been inflicting unceasing torment on Han Yoojin for months now is so easy to locate, that the police seemingly have a wealth of information about him just sitting in the superintendant's drawer gathering dust.

To his credit, Yoon Jiho does not try to run when Song Taewon breaks the door of his little dingy apartment without so much as a word of warning.

"Fuck." Is all he has time to say before Song Taewon proceeds to kick him so hard he goes directly through the wall.

"Little bitch." He mutters, "Can't believe he had the nerve to get you of all people involved."

"Yoon Jiho you are under arrest for human trafficking, blackmail and solliciting sex from a minor."

"Oh am I?" He coughs up globs of blood. "And what about Han Yoojin hm? Is he under arrest for killing three of my men that night? Or severing the tendon in my hand? I still can't make a fist you know!"

He does not deign to answer that question, and instead punches him, taking a sickening satisfaction in the crunch of bone and the spurt of blood. He feels the animalistic rage he has been supressing for so long course through his body, making his blood sing in a way that would usually repulse him but that he can't help but lean into out of pure rage.

"Oooh he got you good didn't he?" He chuckles. "Can't blame you. He's a good lay isn't he?"

His vision goes red and he would be hard pressed to say what happens afterwards, only that when he comes back to the entire room is painted red with blood and Yoon Jiho is laying in a puddle of his own blood, worse for wear.

"Go ahead." He breathes out. "Kill me. It doesn't matter anymore."

He feels a chill run down his spine at that.

"You stupid fucks still haven't figured it out yet? Didn't you wonder why I suddenly stopped asking for money? I already sold the story to the press! Made a pretty penny off of it too. Should be plastered on every TV screen by next morning. That'll show him! I’ll-"

The rest of his sentence is lost in a gurgle of blood as Song Taewon reaches forward with blood soaked hands to rip his throat out, effectively silencing him forever.

He looks at the now cooling corpse in front of him and finds that the usual guilt he would feel at the excessive amount of violence nowhere to be found. He can't bring himself to mind. Maybe being a monster isn't so bad if he can use it to protect Han Yoojin like this.

The last sentence haunts him, however. If the story truly is out there, in the hands of the press then what will happen to Han Yoojin, who has been so desperate to hide his secret all this time? 

He quickly takes out his phone, wiping his bloodstained hands as best he can on his now ruined clothes as he dials Han Yoojin's number.

"Hello? Han Yoojin-ssi? Yes, I got him." He tells him.

"Did he confess yet?"

"Yes. He has." He pauses for a moment, unsure of how to go about this next part.

"But?"

He takes a deep breath.

"It seems like Yoon Jiho has already sold the story to the press."

The silence on the other end is eery, for a moment it seems like Han Yoojin has stopped breathing entirely on the other side.

"Oh." He finally answers back after a disturbingly long time. "I see. That's-" His breaths start to pick up speed, getting more and more shallow. "That's...okay. I-"

"Han Yoojin-ssi? Please stay calm." 

"I am calm!" Han Yoojin exclaims in between panting breaths. "It's fine. It's..it's..." His breaths start growing faster and faster again .

"I'll fix this." He promises. "I'll...I'll fix this alright? Just stay where you are and I'm coming alright?"

The frantic breaths start going higher and higher in pitch, until they get suddenly replaced by the sound of retching and gagging.

"Han Yoojin-ssi?"

"Do what you want." Ha gasps in between breaths. "I don't care." 

The calls ends abruptly, leaving a pit forming in the bottom of his stomach. He promised Han Yoojin to fix this but what can he do, really? He feels a vague of helplessness overcome him as he realises that all of his efforts to protect Han Yoojin have been for naught, that he is powerless to protect him. And then, suddenly, like a flash of lighting in the middle of the night, the answer comes to him. He knows Han Yoojin would never agree to this if he were in his right mind. But he is not in his right mind, and the situation is too dire for anything else.

The phone barely has time to ring before the call gets picked up.

“Hello? Sung Hyunjae-ssi?" He takes a deep breath. “I need to ask for a favour.”

Chapter Text

Funny enough, Sung Hyunjae was just thinking about Han Yoojin when he gets Song Taewon’s desperate late night phone call.

It’s hard not to. Han Yoojin is a most interesting subject to occupy his thoughts. He’s full of contradictions, of mysteries, of layers he takes great delight in peeling off, only to find ever more layers hidden there beneath the surface.

He watches the phone ring for a moment, contemplative, with a vague sense of foreboding. Song Taewon doesn’t call first. Song Taewon never calls first; he reluctantly answers his calls at most but he has never initiated them himself.

“Officer Song!” He greets him enthusiastically, picking up the phone. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

There is silence for a moment on the other line before Song Taewon takes a deep, long-suffering sigh.

“Hello? Sung-Hyunjae-ssi?” He takes a deep, steadying breath. “I need to ask for a favour.”

“Oh?” Well this is unexpected. “A favour?”

“Yes. It’s…it’s important.” His voice is crisped, stilted, like he doesn’t want to be talking, like he’s second-guessing his decision as he’s making it.

“And here I was thinking Officer Song was after my delightful company.” He sighs. “But it turns out he only seeks to use me. I’m hurt.”

“It’s about Han Yoojin-ssi.”

Oh.

Oh.

“So,” Sung Hyunjae asks him, making himself more comfortable on the couch, “what is going on with Han Yoojin-ssi? Did he kill someone? Did he do drugs? Did he kill someone while doing drugs?”

“Enough.” He snaps. “This isn’t a game!”

Sung Hyunjae frowns.

“Is everything alright?” Sung Hyunjae asks, suddenly serious. “You seem…upset.”

“I am not upset.” He answers, and he can hear his jaw click audibly in barely concealed anger.

“You are.” Sung Hyunjae retorts. “What happened?”

The silence stretches between them for one heart-stopping moment, like the calm before a storm, before Song Taewon answers.

“Does Sung Hyunjae-ssi have contacts with the media?” He asks instead.

“You know I do.” He answers, leaning forward in concentration so his elbows are resting on his knees. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”

“There is a…a story set to come tomorrow morning. About Han Yoojin-ssi.” He hesitates for a moment. “Would you be able to stop it?”

“A story?” He harps on. “What kind of story?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.” Song Taewon finally answers.

“Not at liberty to say hm?” He feels that vague sense of foreboding again, like he is standing on the precipice of some formless, shapeless, life-altering thing. “Alright. I understand.” He says magnanimously. “Do you know which news network is set to release this story?”

“I don’t. I…I might have been a little…hasty, in my interrogations.”

“Oh?” Now that’s interesting. “Does Officer Song need help disposing of a body, perhaps?”

“No need.” He says. “I’ve already filed a report through the proper channels.”

He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Taewon why would you report yourself?”

“…Because I killed someone?”

He rubs his temple, incredulous. Great. Now he had two messes to clean up.

“Only you.” He murmurs, laughing slightly. “Very well then.”

“So? Can you do it?” He asks, voice tinged with anxiety.

“Of course I can.” He answers. “But what will Officer Song offer me in exchange for my services?”

“What do you want?” He asks immediately.

His eyebrows shoot up. He hadn’t expected such easy and uncomplicated approval. He had originally planned to ask for something silly, something trivial. But he hasn’t become the cutthroat business man he is today by letting an opportunity like that go to waste.

“Officer Song has to accept a gift of my choosing.”

He lets the implication lie in the air for a second. Accepting a lavish gift from Sung Hyunjae would be tantamount to accepting a bribe, no matter how you framed it. After all of Officer Song’s efforts to serve the nation and only the nation, accepting such a gift would open him up to a never-ending barrage of criticism from the press as well as from his superiors, who would fear him slipping from their grasp. And, most crucially, it would mark him as being one of Sung Hyunjae's people for all to see. It's not exactly what he wants but it'll do for now.

“Very well.” He says. “Anything else?”

Well. Who is he to not press when he has such an advantage?

“I want Officer Song to have dinner with me. At a restaurant of my choosing.”

He hums affirmatively.

“What restaurant?”

Perhaps he’d been a saint in his past life, he musses, amused, for everything he had been working hard for to suddenly fall into his lap out of nowhere.

“I’ll text you the details later.” He says. “Is Han Yoojin-ssi next to you? If so tell him he is more than welcome to join us.”

“Han Yoojin-ssi is not here, and I will be telling him no such thing.” His voice has taken on that sharp edge again.

“Oh?” He says, faking nonchalance. “Where is he then?”

He can sense him hesitating over the phone, can almost see him purse his lips in concentration before he answers.

“He’s at my apartment.”

“Your apartment?” He picks up his car keys and shrugs on his suit jacket as he starts making his way to the door. “How forward from Officer Song.”

“What? No! No, it’s not like that!”

“Don’t worry.” He says, shutting the door behind him with a resounding click. “I’m not a jealous man.”

“That’s not…no.” He insists. “It’s not like that.”

There was something a little frantic about his answer, like he was desperate to be believed, that was slightly puzzling.

So what if Han Yoojin and Song Taewon had started a clandestine love affair behind the young master’s back? That would be hilarious! His only qualm would be being excluded from the fun. But there was no explaining that to Song Taewon with his overly complicated thought process.

“Alright.” He answers, agreeably. “I believe you, it’s not like that.”

He turns the keys in the car’s ignition.

“So you’ll have no problems with me going to check up on him then.”

“Wait-!”

He ends the call with Song Taewon, triumphant little smirk on his face, and immediately starts the work of figuring out who exactly was holding dirt over Han Yoojin-ssi’s head.

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi!” The saccharine voice of the CEO of SeoulSphere News reverberates through the car speakers. “How lovely of you to call.”

He hums affirmatively. Heavens, he’d forgotten how much of a pain the man was.

“I heard through the grapevine you had a big story coming out tomorrow.” He drawls out, fingers drumming irritably on the steering wheel.

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi flatters me.” He responds, fawning. “We here at SeoulSphere News can’t possibly compare to all the big news outlets. I’m just glad one of our little stories caught your interest.”

“Oh I heard it was more than a little story.” He presses, deftly swerving between cars.

As expected, the inanely boring man whose name he can never be bothered to remember, folds immediately at the barest hint of flattery.

“Oh yes.” He confides, voice incredibly smug and self-satisfied. “Quite a big scoop, if I do say so myself. It’ll be quite the scandal. I mean who would have thought! The Haeyeon guild leader’s hyung: a prostitute! Not just that but a child prostitute as well! Quite the story, if I do say so myself.”

Everything gets horribly, terribly quiet. He has always prided himself on being calm and collected but he feels no such thing now.

It all makes horrible sense, when he thinks back to Han Yoojin, his behaviours, his mannerisms. It was like hearing the words had snapped all the puzzle pieces in place, revealing the awful, horrifying truth he’d been trying to piece together all this time.

He is distantly aware of the fact that he has ground the car to a screeching halt, that there are several cars behind him which have rammed into his car, screaming and cursing at him, but all of that feels very, very, distant as his entire being zeroes in on the words he is just hearing.

“What did you just say?”

His voice sounds frightening, even to his own ears, but somehow the soon-to-be-dead idiot on the other end of the line can’t seem to tell, because he goes on.

“Child prostitution!” He repeats, further digging his own grave, before tutting disapprovingly. “It’s sure to make big waves, since it involves high profile people. We’ve even managed to find pictures!” He brags.

“Pictures.” He echoes back, hands, gripping the steering wheel so hard it has long since warped into something unrecognisable. He takes a deep breath as he tries to tamp down on the urge within him to kill, kill, kill-

He could go over and kill this guy right now. It would feel good: the spray of blood, the crunch of bone, the terrified screams. Yes, it would certainly be extremely cathartic.

But Han Yoojin was alone right now. Who knew what was going through his mind at this very instant? It would be better to make his way there immediately. Killing this bumbling buffon could definitely wait until morning.

“Tell me, Mister Kim-” He starts.

“My name is Park-”

“Tell me, Mister Kim.” He repeats, voice as chilly and frosty as a winter’s day. “How much of SeoulSphere News’ advertisement money comes from me?”

“S-Sung Hyunjae-ssi?” He chuckles nervously, having seemingly just realised the danger he is in.

“Well?”

“W-well, Seseong Guild makes up around thirty-two percent of our-”

“That’s not what I asked.” He says, voice soft as anything. “I asked you how much advertisement money comes from me.”

“S-sir there’s really no need for this-”

“Well?”

“A-around eighty-two percent. If we combine all of Sung Hyunjae-ssi’s ventures.”

“Tell me, Mister Kim. Could SeoulSphere News stay afloat if it were to suddenly lose eighty-two percent of its advertisement money?”

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi, sir, please have mercy our employees rely on this money to feed their families.” He begs.

He almost laughs at the insinuation that he should care about SeoulSphere News’ employees or their families right now.

“We are in agreement then.” He says, tone pleasant and conversational. “Good. So you’re not a complete idiot.”

“Sir?”

“Listen here. I won’t repeat myself. If that story you just told me about ever sees the light of day you won’t live to see the next day.”

“S-Sir?!”

“From now on any story involving Han Yoojin, even if it’s just a mindless fluff piece, will have to go through me first before it’s approved for publication. Am I making myself clear?”

His voice had barely risen above a whisper, yet he was certain that the weasel on the other side had heard him loud and clear based on the loud wailing and blubbering he was hearing from the other side.

“Good. Let the other news agencies know too. I know you all keep in contact. If I see any news outlet talk about this I’m holding you personally responsible. Understood?”

“S-sir! I-!”

He disconnects the call with a resounding click and feels a split half-second of satisfaction before realising his car has effectively been totalled. With a deep suffering sigh, he gets out of the car, now fully irritated.

There is a crowd gathered outside taking pictures and videos of the car crash, though they have all kept a wide berth from his car, no doubt put off by his overwhelmingly frightening aura.

“Oh my god it’s Sung Hyunjae.” He hears a woman whisper from the sidelines.

He spares neither her nor the totalled cars behind him any mind as he starts making his way to Song Taewon’s apartment on foot.

“H-Hey! W-w-wait a minute! We need your insurance information so we can-”

The look Sung Hyunjae gives him is enough to make the man scramble backwards in alarm, yelping something that sounded vaguely like a frantic apology. He considers killing this fool for all of three seconds before thinking better of it. He was late enough as is, he couldn’t keep Han Yoojin waiting any longer.

Resolute, he makes his way to Song Taewon’s apartment, his road now clear and unimpeded.

The first thing he notices when he opens the door to Song Taewon’s apartment, flimsy lock shattering under his grip, is how dark it is. The darkness seems to stretch before him, eery and silent. He flicks the lights on and the room is submerged in flickering yellow lights from lightbulbs in desperate need of replacement.

He would almost be tempted to believe that Han Yoojin was long gone, were it not for the vague gasping sounds he could hear coming from the bathroom. Wordlessly, he makes his way there pausing, hand hovering for a moment over the handle, before thinking better of it and rasping his knuckles softly against the door.

“Yoojin-ssi? It’s me.”

He waits for a moment before he hears a thin, hoarse voice respond.

“Sung Hyunjae-ssi?”

“I’m coming in, alright?”

Hearing no words of protest, he carefully opens the door and peaks his head in.

Han Yoojin is curled up on the bathroom floors, limbs shaking, eyes red, face sickly pale. He had clearly just finished throwing up extensively and had simply curled up on the floor in despair once he was done, with no spare energy to move himself. His eyes take one look at Sung Hyunjae before taking in a shuddering breath.

“You know.”

It wasn’t a question, yet he still answered.

“Yes.” There was no point in lying after all, such things would not comfort Han Yoojin now.

“Song Taewon told you.”

“No.” He shakes his head, kneeling next to him. “Don’t blame him. He tried his best to keep your secret. I found out on my own.”

He nods, though his eyes are far away.

“I wouldn't blame him even if he had told you.” He whispers. “I could never blame him.”

“Come, it’s not good to sit on the floor like this.” He holds his hands out but Han Yoojin looks ahead, seemingly not seeing them.

“I’m tired.” He whispers, as though confessing some deep secret to Sung Hyunjae. “I’m so tired.”

“I know.” He says, fighting to keep his voice placid and calm. “It’s alright. I’ve taken care of everything. Han Yoojin-ssi doesn’t need to be afraid anymore.”

“…what?”

“The story.” He explains. “It’s already taken care of. It’ll never see the light of day, nor will any other stories like it. Han Yoojin-ssi’s secret is perfectly safe, I’ve made sure of of it.”

Han Yoojin is awfully still for a while, eyes wide, hands crisped over his knees. Sung Hyunjae sits patiently besides him on the cold, uncomfortable bathroom floor. Suddenly, like a man possessed, Han Yoojin jumps up, limbs back to shaking wildly.

“Okay.” He takes a deep, shuddering, breath. “Okay. I…I don’t…I don’t…”

“Han Yoojin-ssi?”

He takes a couple more deep breaths, his lungs weakened by a near decade of heavy smoking wheezing audibly under the strain. His wide eyes darting back and forth frantically reminded Sung Hyunjae of a trapped prey animal, desperately seeking an out.

“What do you want?” He asks when he finally has enough breath in him to make a full sentence

“What?”

“What. Do. You. Want.” Han Yoojin repeats, slower this time. “What is it? What do you want from me?”

Ah. I see now.

“Would Han Yoojin-ssi believe me if I said I was doing it from the goodness of my heart?”

“No.” He laughs, though there’s no joy in it, only a vague and sticky panic. “I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” He asks, a little aggrieved. He’d done some much for Han Yoojin, was it really that unbelievable that he was motivated by concern?

“Because I’m not stupid.” He hisses. It’s the first time he’s seen Han Yoojin anywhere close to being angry. His perfectly controlled facade crumbling like dust, exposing the raw fear that had been festering underneath all along. “Nothing is free. So. What do you want?”

“I want to help Han Yoojin-ssi.” He insists.

“Bullshit.” Han Yoojin’s breathless pants echo across the bathroom walls. He grabs Sung Hyunjae by the lapels, fingers curling desperately into his suit jacket. He magnanimously lets himself get hoisted up, though Han Yoojin’s shaking arms would barely be able to hoist up a toddler, let alone an S-class. “Just say it! What do you want?!”

He takes a deep, long-suffering, breath.

Fine then.

“Han Yoojin-ssi is a very important person. The beasts he’s raising will be critical in the days to come as dungeons become more and more dangerous. It’s better for everybody if Han Yoojin-ssi can go about his work unimpeded.” He tilts his head to the side, eyes searching. “Han Yoojin-ssi can choose the believe that instead, if it’s easier to digest than the truth.”

Han Yoojin shudders, once, twice, body convulsing, before he breaks down, hitching sobs filling his ears. Like a mountain crumbling under its own weight, Han Yoojin falls apart slowly at first, and the all at once, in full force. His sobs are quiet at first, almost silent, muffled behind his clenched teeth, before quickly moving into loud, howling sobs.

It's as though once he’d started he couldn’t stop. The floodgates had burst open, letting over a decade’s worth of accumulated pain and fear and rage loose. His spine bends with the force of his sobs until he is forced to sit back down again, head curled into his knees.

Carefully, he seats himself next to Han Yoojin, and, touch as careful and gentle as if he were handling a delicate glass sculpture that could shatter at any moment, tentatively curls his arms him.The effect is near instantaneous. Han Yoojin presses his tear-sodden cheek against his shoulder, utterly defeated and spent, and continues sobbing.

He doesn’t know how long they spend like this, perhaps a few minutes, perhaps a few hours. And it is in this position that Song Taewon finds them, when he finally returns. Han Yoojin’s sobs have died down from desperate howling and screaming to breathless, hitched sobs, though his face is still pressed against Sung Hyunjae’s shoulder, as though seeking to hide from the world there. Song Taewon’s eyes widen slightly at the sight, but he says nothing, merely sinks down next to them and waits.

Finally, after another small eternity, Han Yoojin’s sobs die down, like he’s been completely and utterly wrung dry.

“Officer Song?” He whispers hoarsely. “When did you come back?”

“Not that long ago.” He answers back. “I’m sorry I was late. Are you well?”

He shakes his head, fingers pressing to his forehead. No doubt all the crying had given him a horrible migraine.

“I’m tired.” He whispers. He sounds old and worn, like he was thirty years older than he actually was.

“Let’s get you some rest.” Sung Hyunjae proposes. “It’s no good sitting on this bathroom floor.”

He nods, and tries woozily to stand up. After having spent so long hunched over and crying, he was dizzy and stiff, a dreadful combination. Song Taewon carefully offers him his arm as a crutch. Han Yoojin’s eyelids are heavy, his head even more so. Sung Hyunjae is reasonably certain the only thing he’d consumed today were cigarettes and alcohol, and then he’d spent hours puking his guts out, hyperventilating, screaming and crying his eyes out. No wonder he was exhausted. He was probably going to fall asleep any second now-

Right on cue, Han Yoojin’s eyes roll to the back of his head and he collapses in a heap in the arms of poor flustered Song Taewon.

“Han Yoojin-ssi?!”

“Leave him” He instructs. “He’s tired himself out. Let him sleep for a while.”

He looks at him, conflicted.

“Won’t he be upset to wake up somewhere unfamiliar?” Song Taewon asks, tactfully.

“Officer Song’s apartment is hardly what I would call ‘unfamiliar’.” He says. “Besides, what else do you propose? Should we forcefully wake him up and force him back home to rest?”

He begrudgingly agrees and carefully lifts him up in his arms, before setting him down gently in the bed. Sung Hyunjae manages to find a thick, warming comforter in the closet and quickly covers him with it, carefully tucking him in. He would be more comfortable with his shoes off, but given the circumstances he wouldn’t dare remove even a single stitch of clothing off of his unconscious body.

“The story?” Song Taewon asks once they’ve shut the lights off and left Han Yoojin to rest.

“Already taken care of.” He reassures him.

Song Taewon nods, face still grave.

“I knew Sung Hyunjae-ssi would take care of it.” He says.

Though the words in and of themselves are not technically praise, the blatant confidence in his abilities warms him all the same.

“Officer Song flatters me.”

“Are you staying?” He asks.

“Mm-hm.” He nods. “I’d like to speak to Han Yoojin-ssi when he wakes up.”

Song Taewon nods.

“Very well. I will be doing some paperwork in the kitchen.”

“Is this about that man you killed?” He asked, nonchalant. “If so you don’t bother. I already took care of it.”

“Took care of it? What does that mean? Hey, come back here! What does that mean?!”