Chapter Text
The last person to call him Ravi is Hyuk, three minutes before the raid. They share a smoke at the window as the deal goes down, all flimsy nonchalance while they grip their knives inside their jackets. Wonshik counts his breaths to stay calm. The seconds of each inhale, of holding the smoke in his lungs, of sighing it out again.
These are the seconds, grains of sand in an hourglass that will never be turned over again, in which Hyuk is still his family, and Ravi would kill for him.
Taekwoon will call him by his name again, finally, he thinks. But he doesn't stick around to find out how it sounds on his tongue.
Past security, his passport tucked in his back pocket and his mouth still sour with cola, he finds Taemin waiting for him.
Not right away, of course. He’s not obvious about it, his nature would never allow that. Wonshik hovers in the vicinity of baggage claim though he could fit all of himself in a carryon with room to spare and has nothing more to collect. He scans without urgency instead of calling Taemin to ask where he is, and eventually he finds him seated along a wall, the sprawl of a family with children rifling through their luggage obscuring him. He has his legs crossed, tablet resting on one knee, but he’s staring back at Wonshik and he waggles his eyebrows in greeting. Pleased with himself, like a cat.
Up close, he thinks it wasn’t just clever camouflage. Taemin looks different in his suit, demure government gray to match his tidy, irreproachable haircut. His face isn’t so hungry as when Wonshik knew him. He can’t find the starved angles he remembers. Taemin was young, then, and so was Wonshik, but they were never the same.
“You’re wearing a tie,” he says thickly, foggy with jetlag. “Clown.” The way the time zones have stacked together, he spent the better part of a day in the air and still arrived at nearly the hour he departed. Time travel.
“Should’ve shaved before you left,” Taemin assesses. He doesn’t offer to take his bag. “Looks like you’ve been licking the inside of a coffee filter.”
Five years doesn’t feel so long, suddenly. He’s the same Taemin who would leave his stale little apartment in the middle of the night for a run, the front door unlocked, while Wonshik still had his pants down.
The sun is high but Wonshik, who couldn’t bring himself to sleep on the plane, somehow passes out in the back of the cab as it brakes and lurches through traffic. He wakes when Taemin shakes his elbow and nearly forgets his suitcase in the trunk. He knows a little English, enough for kilos and grams and purity, but Taemin’s easy patter with the driver goes over his head like a wave.
The apartment is small, cleaner and airier than the matchbox over a hidden tattoo shop that he’s called home for the past three years. Lots of plants in the windows. A sentimental part of him wants to smile at that. Taemin’s old place was like a coffin, maybe because he was never there long enough to keep anything alive.
Then he smells seared meat and acid surges from his gut up to his throat.
“Oh, you made good time.” The man who steps out of the kitchen is Korean. He’s as tall as Wonshik. His face is clean cut handsome, his posture upright, and in a foggy, elongated moment of unreality he’s eating up the distance and ducking his head politely to Wonshik before he kisses Taemin’s cheek. Quick, absent. With the ease of familiarity.
But Taemin is staring back at Wonshik, his mouth twitching something too small and knowing to be a smile. “Jinki didn’t tell you.”
“Deputy Director Lee must have forgotten.” He shouldn’t be surprised that Taemin lives like this. Even years ago he operated under a halo of protection, talked about Jinki and Jonghyun like insufferable older brothers and not the most fearsomely respected officials of their generation.
“Maybe he thought you didn’t have any room to judge,” the man says, low and mild. Beside him Taemin shrugs, unrepentant. As if to say he answers to a higher power than intelligence officers or Wonshik’s privacy.
The man introduces himself as Jongin, wrestles Wonshik’s bag from his shoulder with a surprisingly strong grip, and directs him to the bathroom down the hall to freshen up. He’s sunny, but stubborn— he talks like he expects to be heard.
Taemin leans in the doorway, loosening his tie as he watches Wonshik splash cold water on his face and chafe himself dry. “Jinki probably thought getting you somewhere safe was more important than whether you’d be comfortable with my boyfriend.”
“Or he thought we might actually talk to each other before I got here,” he huffs, amused despite himself. “What did you tell him?”
Taemin blinks. It’s a small, human tell. He never had those before. “Everything. I tell Jongin everything.” He shifts his weight as if to leave and grant him some privacy but pauses, hand on the frame. “We’re getting married. You can hold your congratulations.”
Pivoting too fast, he clocks his shoulder hard on the wall to grab Taemin’s sleeve. That wouldn’t have hurt once, but he’s so thin now, everything hurts. “Congratulations,” he says, and means it. “You deserve it.”
Even with the suit and the tie and the haircut, Taemin looks young when he smiles. “I don’t, really. But thanks for saying so.”
“The case won’t be prepared for trial for a few months, at the very least,” Jinki said. He didn’t like being called by his title, not in private. Maybe that’s why he asked Wonshik out of doors and away from the weight of his office, bearing paper cups of terrible burnt coffee. “You’ll have more commendations than you know what to do with. You must be ready to go home.”
After days of statements, repeating himself until the words ran together, he was feverish and lost in his own skin. He hadn’t known it was morning again until they stepped outside. When his tired eyes settled on nothing he saw Taekwoon in the sea of agents on the scene. After the raid. Everything will be before and after the raid now, he thought.
Taekwoon’s agency windbreaker made him look broad, respectable. The misting rain hung curls in his hair. He didn’t have to cast about searching for Wonshik at a distance, he didn’t even need to meet his eyes. Taekwoon held him in his orbit like a moon, a satellite. Like an extension of his own body.
Wonshik stared across the sunny courtyard thick with irises until his vision blurred and he couldn’t make out what Jinki was saying beside him. Every time he blinked he expected to wake up and stare at the same water stain in his ceiling as he had for the past three years. To gather himself to lie. Then Jaehwan would call and pass along an address, and Hyuk would hang off his arm, and One Eye would tell him to get a haircut.
He tried to imagine reaching out to brush the back of Taekwoon’s hand, tracing the veins like rivers. He tried to picture sitting at his mother’s table and looking her in the eye.
“I’m not,” he said thickly, and Jinki was quiet. “I’m not ready.”
When he met Taekwoon, the pair of them granted an empty office to get acquainted, he reminded him of Taemin. Not a resemblance but something like a scent, like humming a melody when he’d forgotten the words. Some backwards math of lethal angles and opaque expressions.
But you sort of look like the guy I used to fuck wasn’t an icebreaker, not with the handler who was about to be Wonshik’s only lifeline. Who never once told him everything will be fine or I won’t let you get hurt.
When he stretches out on the sofa bed, a spring digging at his spine, he hears low murmurs through the bedroom door. He can’t make out the words.
“Eat more,” Jongin frowns at him, putting away a mountain of eggs and rice while Wonshik picks at his bowl. “Taemin says if you don’t put on some weight you’ll fall through the floorboards and we’ll be sweeping you out of the basement.”
In the shower he can feel his ribs and the jut of his hipbones. This past year he’s hardly been able to sleep, or eat either, the mouthfuls he forced down tasting like ash. It was easier subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, lean and hollow and watchful.
They aren’t alone together long, thankfully. He doesn’t know how to talk to the man who makes Taemin happy. But an hour and a half after Taemin straightens his tie and departs for the consulate, Jongin glides off to rehearsal and leaves him in merciful quiet. Wonshik scrapes the remains of his bowl into the garbage disposal.
If Taekwoon were watching him this would never fly. He’d claim he’d ordered too much meat, as if he couldn’t eat an entire cow on his own, and he’d shovel food into Wonshik’s bowl until he snapped at him to stop.
“You look like a skeleton,” he’d say. “You’re hurting my eyes.”
“Better,” Taemin says, and adds another plate to the barbell while Wonshik wheezes for breath, flat on his back like a corpse ready for autopsy. In the early light, Taemin looms over him, unmoved. “Look at you, almost strong enough to fight a wet cat. Maybe a kitten.”
Before he went undercover, before three years of his life turned inside out, he made his arrangements with his handler. Emergency contacts, flags, and standing appointments. The first Wednesday of every month meant matinees at an old theater, and then there were football matches at the weekends when Ulsan played at home. The bars change, but the ritual is the same.
“I like this guy more than the keeper they had in the first half,” Wonshik might say, hardly following, just to watch Taekwoon’s lip curl.
“The teams switch sides at the half,” Taekwoon would sigh. He had the right demeanor for these meetings, out in the open. Face always bored and remote, voice so muted he forced you to lean in to hear him. In oversized sweaters and painted on jeans he could pass for some indolent, professionally pretty boy lost in the wrong part of town.
They would meet at the corner of the bar, any bar, and place bills under their glasses in a pantomime bet. Nearly two hours for a match, and Wonshik only needed a fraction of that to report, to communicate in densely vague questions and curt answers. He wondered if Taekwoon made this their ritual just to grant him more time, more rest. But he didn’t want to ask just in case he stopped.
So he would watch the condensation on their glasses, and Taekwoon’s long hands, and he’d watch Ulsan’s new striker on the screen and pretend not to understand formations until Taekwoon grumbled and explained again.
Taekwoon always wore his hair too long for regulation, falling past his ears. For lack of a better distraction from his crackling nerves, Wonshik would rib him about his vanity. His soft hair, his buttery leather jackets, his silver rings.
Once, when Wonshik called him for an urgent meeting, they crowded together under a doorway while the rain poured down in sheets. Wonshik’s teeth chattered, and not from cold. Taekwoon had raked back his wet hair and just for a moment in the dim he could see a scar slashing along his scalp. Deep, as if gouged in.
When they met, Jinki having tossed a single packet of chips between them like a peace offering, Taekwoon had said what makes you think you’re ready for this ? So toneless and unimpressed that Wonshik wanted to grab him by the collar and yank him face first into the table until he was spitting out teeth. He wanted to rip his shirt down the middle and see if he was as sleek all over as his long unmarked throat.
Maybe when it’s your ass on the line you can tell me what you know about it, he’d snapped back, and Taekwoon never corrected him.
“Stop flinching,” Taekwoon said in the rain. His lashes were wet, like strokes of ink. “Do you think you’re being followed?”
“You could sound a little worried,” Wonshik had bitten off, and all he could see was One Eye pausing, a brow arched too casually, asking where Ravi was last Saturday. They couldn’t reach him, he said.
“Well isn’t it obvious,” Taekwoon had shrugged, minute. Eyes scanning the wet empty road with no symptom of urgency. “If someone is watching us, then I’ll put my tongue in your mouth. What?” he murmured when Wonshik coughed. “You think you don’t give yourself away? You stare at men too much. If they haven’t guessed already, they will sooner or later.”
“What about you?” Wonshik flattened his hand over Taekwoon’s diaphragm through his damp sweater, feeling the contraction of his breath. Taekwoon had a talent for getting him like this, so angry he couldn’t shut up. “You think you don’t give yourself away?”
“Take your hand off me,” Taekwoon sneered, and so he did.
Apparently, Jongin’s dance company is a big deal. They keep him busy with rehearsals for the fall season every day but Monday. On Mondays he and Wonshik are alone in the apartment, and magnanimously Jongin will suggest walks, or taking coffee to the dog park nearby.
“You’re awfully tolerant letting me stay here,” Wonshik comments when Jongin is through making lovelorn noises at a Pomeranian.
“Not like Taemin’s never had to get over being jealous,” Jongin shrugs, sidestepping a woman jogging at speed with a stroller. “Let he who’s never slept with his coworkers cast the first stone, right?
“Don’t get me wrong,” he continues three blocks later, as if without pause. “I’m not a saint. If I thought he’d ever been in love with you, then you wouldn’t be here.”
“What did he say about me?” Wonshik asks at last. Reflexive, like picking a scab. Did Taemin compare him to a dog, he wonders, quick to follow instruction and eager to please.
Jongin pauses in the middle of the sidewalk and eyes him seriously. He has a sweet face, bright eyes like a kid. No wonder Taemin brings him coffee in bed and rubs his sore feet at night.
“He said he could trust you,” Jongin tells him. “I don’t know what you were working on back there. But he said you were brave.”
They lean against a wrought iron fence for a very long time, holding empty cups patterned in Greek key, watching the road. Until the lump in Wonshik’s throat subsides and he blinks the sting of sunlight from his eyes.
“Don’t be brave,” Taekwoon would say, eyes on the match, lips barely moving. “Pretend I’m on your back, calling you an idiot.”
A sudden banging is what batters him awake like hammer meeting nail. It must be the apartment next door, because Jongin doesn’t glance up from his stretches on the living room floor.
Instead he stares at Wonshik, his white knuckled grip sunk deep into the sofa. He can’t breathe. God, fuck, he can’t breathe. His lungs won’t answer him. He hears himself wheeze but there’s no air.
He doesn’t know when Jongin edges close, or when he takes his hand. When he inhales shakily and tries to let go, Jongin laces their fingers together.
“I can hear you having nightmares,” he says simply. “Sometimes— if I don’t wake Taemin up, he doesn’t remember his.”
When Wonshik is quiet, he squeezes his hand and then rises. Taekwoon moved like that, something as simple as unfolding his body made elegant and economical, but it was martial arts that made him that way, not dance. He liked explaining action movies in Wonshik’s ear at their sticky old cinema.
“Come with me, there’s a café by the studio and if you don’t mind hanging there we can go for a swim at lunch. My shorts will fit you fine.” He never makes Wonshik unpack three years of fear, of lurching awake at night when he dreamed of his door busting in and a gun in his face. Hakyeon never even liked guns, but they were in his dreams, certain as the scar across Taekwoon’s scalp.
Worse, if he starts talking he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop. He’ll try to give shape to the times when Ravi felt more real than anything in his life. Crowded on the floor sharing mountains of fried chicken with Hyuk and Hongbin and feeling warm under the weight of Hakyeon’s approval. Shaking with silent laughter while Jaehwan ran his mouth. Criminals weren’t supposed to be funny, or kind.
If he starts talking he’ll say my handler was the only person keeping me sane for three years. He checked on my family. He stitched me up. Doesn’t gratitude make you sick, he’d want to ask. Wouldn’t it make you afraid, if you thought you might confuse that with love.
Do you need me to pull you out, Taekwoon would always ask in place of goodbye. He never forgot. He always stared somewhere over Wonshik’s shoulder, as if allowing him privacy with the question. Think about it. Take as much time as you need.
Taemin says he has to look for wedding invitations, but he shrieks at his tablet and drops it on the floor when he does. There are one hundred and twelve pages of designs, he says numbly, then orders takeout and beer.
They sit on the floor and squint at templates, Jongin’s dinner waiting under a towel on the kitchen counter like a reminder to hurry home. Wonshik has no eye for fonts and thinks there are too many flowers, but Taemin is worse, says he can’t read all the looping cursive himself.
The food is good, he realizes. A creamy green curry with chicken and potatoes, so spicy it makes his nose run, good rice, and lukewarm Thai beer. Heckling Taemin’s choices over his shoulder, he’s thinking they never shared a meal together back then, not really. Taemin would call him when he was available, and he rarely needed more than half an hour of his time.
Taekwoon would eat an entire bowl of spicy chicken feet in front of him, grotesque in his enjoyment like he was demonstrative about nothing else.
“Finish mine,” Taemin says too casually, and Wonshik realizes his bowl is empty. He doesn’t feel sick. He feels heavy, and warm.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, and shovels down beef and peppers before he can question the return of his appetite.
“Hey,” he says some time later, when they’re out of beer and Jongin has walked through the front door, kissed the crown of Taemin’s head, and marched straight into the shower. Taemin makes a drowsy, inquisitive sound back. “What’s the craziest thing you ever did for somebody? For a guy,” he adds, then bites his cheek.
Taemin blinks, considering. He’s wearing a shirt for the Mariinsky Ballet, faded and too broad for him in the shoulders. He doesn’t look like he was ever a spy.
“Well I stalked Jongin for three years.” He tilts his bottle back and scowls to find it empty. “Diet stalking. Part time stalking. I told myself I just needed to know he was okay. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? You start pulling shit like that, acting like you can protect somebody. What you’re really saying is, that’s mine. ”
“Does he know?” Wonshik struggles to assemble a timeline. He never saw Taemin after he finished his long assignment in Japan. He must have met Jongin then, somehow.
“Tell you the truth, I think he’s into it,” Taemin stage whispers, only to raise his bottle when Jongin emerges, hair damp and skin scrubbed pink. “You’re so pretty!” he exclaims, and Jongin rolls his eyes and pads to the kitchen.
“So what did you do?” Taemin asks then, interested, and Wonshik blinks dumbly back at him.
“Oh, it wasn’t— it wasn't me,” he says.