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In 2015 Kim Seokjin is twenty-six and works for Seoul PD, miserable in his long hours mostly pushing papers around with nothing to show for it, but he gets selected for a special training program that puts him through the physical paces and then, in a special subunit, his intellectual ones almost wasted by the previous position. Every few months, he moves departments, learning more and more, but the more he does, the more he cannot talk about what he does.
“We’re special ops now,” one of his partners says. “When I was little I always wanted to be a spy.”
Seokjin does not delight in secrecy, but he has no one to keep secrets from. It is part of the balance in his life, an equation he never had to figure out.
He is then neither miserable nor happy.
In 2017 he meets Jeon Jeongguk, age twenty-three. He’s young and does a bit of everything because he can’t decide and he’s good at a lot. He’s up for meeting Seokjin at random times on random days even when Seokjin doesn’t have a set schedule, that’s not how special ops work, and Jeongguk never pushes him on it. Doesn’t assume the worst, that Seokjin can’t hold down a job or he’s sneaking around on a wife at home. Seokjin puts all those fears to bed and then takes Jeongguk to bed too.
He is happy then, for maybe the first time ever.
Jeongguk is fun and easy to get along with; they meet because Jeongguk thought it was a booty call and Seokjin thought the guy was just looking for a friend because they were in a gaming cafe. Who comes to a gaming cafe dressed for the club looking for a hookup?
Jeongguk.
In truth, Jeongguk is the sort of person who is open to everything and anyone. He’d dated men and women unlike Seokjin who dated hardly at all, had preferences in bed but also continually urged Seokjin to try things on him or for him. They went to bed together, dined together, gymed together. Jeongguk could best him in push ups but usually not pull ups. He could keep up with Seokjin out for a jog along the river. Jeongguk could rile him up and make Seokjin feel something, more than just the one or two things - he inspired Seokjin but also irritated him at times, made Seokjin look forward to the future but also keep him up at night with worry for his health and the amount of salt he ingests on any given day.
In 2019, Seokjin asks Jeongguk to marry him. “But hyung, we can’t get married!” he laughs, sweet bunny smile for him. Seokjin kisses his hands.
“We could, just the two of us, and we’ll know what it means.”
Jeongguk agrees, happily, and moves in the very next day but in name only - his things already live there, Seokjin need only legally add his name to the lease. Jeongguk orders a tiny cake and they wear suits - something foreign to Jeongguk but habitual for Seokjin from work but Jeongguk does not know the nature of Seokjin’s business.
“Mr. Secret Agent,” he’ll joke, kissing him when Seokjin needs to spontaneously leave. “I love you, be careful Mr. Secret Agent!” He always giggles about it, no idea that he’s closer to the truth than not. Seokjin can’t tell him, not just legally, but also for his physical safety.
But it never ceases to amuse Seokjin that between the two of them, Jeongguk is the one most people would expect to win in a fight, but Seokjin has killed almost fifty men in approximately thirteen different ways now.
Seokjin is happy.
For maybe the first time. He has so much more than he ever thought he would, even if really all he has is Jeongguk, but Jeongguk seems content to be his everything. Seokjin finds himself in a home instead of between four walls for the first time ever, his husband happy to do all the decorating. He even takes on the other domestic chores like the shopping, cleaning, errands. Seokjin always tells him he doesn’t need to - the simple fact of his job is that it pays well, it pays well to put your life on the line most days, so Seokjin could hire someone to do all those things, but Jeongguk insists he enjoys it, and the early mornings when he comes home after working for three days in a row, in another country for part of it, he opens the fridge to find neatly boxed meals with labels and drawings on them.
I think you’ll love this fusion pasta I made, but it must be warmed up on the stove, not microwave! Jeongguk’s neat handwriting commands. There’s a scribbled face of someone slurping noodles on the note with it, and all around him are signs of what Jeongguk’s been up to for the past week.
The easel with a prepped canvas on it, drop cloth in place but not a speck of paint there yet. A series of thin ropes held up in knots along a wooden beam horizontal on the wall that will soon be macrame of some kind, not to be confused for the jumble of black wires nearby on the floor that belong to a gaming station. Jeongguk’s favorite laundry softener sits out on their breakfast bar, too close to their little espresso maker but then again, it’s only Seokjin who drinks coffee.
In their bedroom, Seokjin silently slips into bed. Jeongguk rolls into his open and waiting chest with a groan. “You’re such a creep,” he says, smacking his dry lips. “Always creeping up on me.”
“You married this creep,” Seokjin might say, any morning or evening like this when Jeongguk is already or still in bed.
It’s the best though, because it means Seokjin wakes up with him.
Outside of Jeongguk’s closest friends Jimin and Taehyung, another gay couple who Seokjin worries about almost as much, no one knows that he is married. Yoongi, the closest Seokjin has to a work friend in his unit steadily looks at Seokjin’s ring finger one day even though he isn’t wearing a ring, can’t wear a ring while working, and there is Hoseok, a field medic who Seokjin knows almost as well, and when Hoseok warns him about certain medications that require someone to monitor him, Seokjin assures him he will be looked after. Some men would lie about it, so Hoseok can’t be sure, but he doesn’t press Seokjin any further.
He supposes there is Namjoon as well - Namjoon was from the before times, a high school friend who he kept in touch with over the years at the other’s insistence and hard work.
He has to be grateful for Namjoon when it all ends, because it means someone else is there at the funeral other than Jimin and Taehyung.
Neither of them have much in terms of family, but Jeongguk, in a position where he can spend his time how he wants, volunteers at various causes. It’s why he’s there, so far from home, alone, on a night like most while Seokjin works. If he had a job that let him go home every night, maybe Jeongguk wouldn’t have stayed out so late, maybe he would have been cooking dinner or playing a game online with Jimin, he could have been doing anything but waiting on the side of the road for a bus in a remote area with no CCTV because Jeongguk thinks it’s silly for him to take their car if there's a bus that can get him where he needs to go.
Seokjin picks up a call from him around nine that evening. “Hyung,” Jeongguk whines on the phone. “It’s already so cold!”
“Which coat are you wearing?” Seokjin asks, biding his time because it’s a stake out and he has seemingly unlimited time for this call as long as his partners watch and listen to the monitors. He stepped inside the restroom and locked the door so he could have privacy, but it’s only Yoongi and Jongwoo anyway in the surveillance room currently.
“Wearing hyung’s navy coat,” he replies quietly, almost shyly, as if after six years together Seokjin thinks of anything as his. Everything he owns is Jeongguk’s by extension.
“Aish, Jeongguk-ah. That’s too light for a night like tonight!” Seokjin scolds him, and he knows that if any of his coworkers heard him, they would stop and stare at the ease and emotion he speaks with, unaccustomed to any intonation from him.
“I’m fine, hyung. Shouldn’t be waiting too much longer.”
“Why don’t you call for a car, baby? I don’t want you to get sick.” Seokjin already makes a list of all the things he will pick up from the pharmacy on the way home, things to ward off illness and items in case he does fall ill.
“It’s fine, I think I can see headlights coming my way!” Jeongguk’s voice warbles; in the country where he is, it must be very windy. “I love you! I’ll see you soon, hyung.”
“Love you too, baby,” Seokjin says quietly, then hangs up the phone because Jeongguk disconnected already in preparation for the bus.
Funnily enough, there was a time before, when Jeongguk called him very late at night, back when they were dating and serious enough he kept a tooth brush and a spare set of clothing at Seokjin’s but before he moved in, and Jeongguk didn’t say it, never wanted to admit it, but he was scared. He was walking home alone and asked Seokjin to stay on the line with him, and Seokjin, on his end of the call, not only kept his voice calm and constant, but immediately picked up Jeongguk’s cell reception so he could track him all the way home since he was unable to immediately go to him.
But it wasn’t like that, this time.
This time, whenever it was that Jeongguk first felt fear, he had to endure it on his own. He never got the chance to call out for help, and Seokjin never spoke to him again.
“If his last words were I love you, then at least there is that,” Taehyung said to him at the memorial, his fingers reaching for Seokjin nonstop even as he continually side stepped him. “I know. I know they were. He always ended his calls with an ‘I love you.’”
For some reason, Taehyung and Jimin think Seokjin works in IT - high risk security for the country, which, in essence, is true. Just not the IT part.
It makes it all worse somehow that no one knows the depth of Seokjin’s guilt, because he could have stopped this. If he knew, if he was there - Seokjin would have killed that man before he ever so much as looked at his husband.
And it makes Seokjin furious now to look across the room of scant mourners. Jeongguk was so loved.
Seokjin loved him so much.
But there’s just the handful of them to look at a photo and stand stiffly in suits with nothing to say.
Nothing hurts more than not just thinking of him experiencing an agonizing death, but also that no one knew for hours. For hours, not until Seokjin had a chance to glance at his phone and realize he never got a goodnight text from Jeongguk, and when he looked at the location of his husband’s phone, it had never moved.
Seokjin knew then.
“Yoongi.” His voice was calm. Even this would make him angry later, but he is a well worn tool. “I need you to call in some favors for me.”
He found the phone easily enough at the bus stop. It isn’t even in a bush or obscured in any way - it’s sitting out near the gutter waiting for anyone to pick it up, still mostly charged because Seokjin instilled one thing in his husband over the years.
Nothing else of Jeongguk is left behind.
For the next two days, Seokjin himself oversees perimeters and organizes search efforts, even if it goes against every protocol. No one’s gonna stop him. Yoongi stays close to him, a silent tail and perhaps a better friend than he ever realized.
He tries to stop him, when the cries come out. Seokjin didn’t think he could feel more chilled than he already did, standing knee deep in water coming off the runoff from a small ravine nearby. He already knew, but the cries - oh god, the cries.
He can’t get his feet to work at first, knees dropped out from under him and he’s wet everywhere - from the dirty stream water and his ugly tears. Yoongi tries to catch him, stop him from going to him, but he can’t. Seokjin was top of his class in every physical marker, still holds a couple of records. He pushes his way through the crowd gathered in one spot, ignoring the flashing lights that grow nearer. How did the media get here? Seokjin will come for them too, he will hunt down every copy of every newspaper sold if they - if they -
He sees what they see.
Seokjin loses everything, including time.
Time after that wouldn’t mean the same thing anymore. No one to come home to, no one to make a future for. What is time for? It isn’t for himself.
His department gives him leave, of course - bereavement. It’s only long enough to cover the memorial and funeral period, after that he has to make a choice, but the choice is easy, of course.
“If you want to come back, you’ll have to be reevaluated,” his boss tells him. He sounds bored, but bored is the best these men can often do. Seokjin is just like every other man in his unit - when they leave, they don’t usually come back, for one reason or another, and everyone suspects the exact reason why he won’t be coming back.
“Relinquish your badge and weapon at the door,” he says, and that’s that, but Seokjin already has an arsenal at home.
“You know what you’re doing?” Yoongi asks him quietly, the only one to give him a true goodbye, even if Hoseok mutely pressed into his hands a parting gift.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Yoongi says, and what he means is, don’t get caught.
“You know me.” Seokjin shrugs, and Yoongi nods.
“I do. That’s why I’m letting you walk away now.” He also gifts him something upon parting; a file.
Yoongi likes to work with hard copies.
At home, Seokjin adds his friend’s intel to what he’s gathered so far, and since he has no use for a kitchen anymore, he strings it all together across every flat surface. It helps to see it all laid out like this in a way he can walk past everything, touch everything.
There wasn’t much left to hold in the end, what they found. Seokjin had him cremated because Jeongguk had no family to speak of that would show up; it was his decision, and it would have always been his decision, but he didn’t have anyone there when it was done. It was just him, and the bits and pieces of his husband.
They gave him the bag of Jeongguk’s belongings at the time of death. There were only the shreds of material that once constituted clothing inside.
No one had to give Seokjin back the ring. He found that himself. He removed it with his bare hands, something his supervisors chewed him out for in such a way that maybe they would have let him go if not for his immediate notice, as if the regular police department would touch any one of them.
Time wittles down to five primary suspects. Whoever the killer is, this isn’t anywhere close to his first kill, and Seokjin spends a lot of time looking through open investigations and calling in favors.
Unfortunately for him, fortunately for the state of their country, most men amount to little more than perverts and those who lack the skill set to get away with such atrocities. The first man Seokjin confronts in his home is in the middle of watching pornography that would not be legal in any country anywhere in the world, but he made quick work of smashing in the man’s pathetic excuse of a boner before he even started his questions.
It was evident very quickly that this was not the man he was looking for.
Seokjin dropped him off at a hospital but before he could call a friend in the local sex crimes division, he overheard the blubbering cries directly from the perp himself, crying that he wanted to turn himself in.
He goes home.
Seokjin stops himself at the door.
He goes - somewhere. Not a home. This isn’t a home. What house could make a home for him now? Seokjin doesn’t even take off his shoes, he walks through the kitchen and pulls down the first suspect from the wall, crumpling up a shitty photo of him taken by a security camera in a mart and tossing it to the floor.
It’s been two weeks.
Namjoon, his sole friend left from before times, keeps calling. Seokjin gives in and meets him outside for “fresh air” at his insistance and they hike to the top of a mountain that they have to drive four hours out for. “What are men to rocks and mountains?” Seokjin asks at the pinnacle, both of them seated hip-to-hip for warmth even after the exhaustion of hiking a steep ascent.
Seokjin wouldn’t have believed he could miss warmth from a human. He used to think of himself as a loner, would have volunteered for any solo mission, no matter how long or how extreme the conditions, but then -
“Jeongguk.”
Seokjin jolts. “Do not.”
“Hyung.”
“Do not say the most cliche words imaginable, Kim Namjoon. You would hate it if you were anywhere near where I am now.”
“Whatever you’re doing -” Namjoon makes a pained motion when Seokjin’s hand fastens to the top of his. Namjoon doesn’t know what Seokjin does for a living either, of course, but he at least understands it is less of a strictly legal business. Even if Seokjin has a license to kill, maim, or torture for his government, it isn’t exactly legal, is it? And any time his government wishes to wash their hands of him, his time will come.
For now, Seokjin exploits the system the same way their agencies do. While he still can.
Namjoon yanks at his hand. The tops of Seokjin’s knuckles are busted beyond the excuse of a simple bar fight. He’s seen Seokjin with his foot cast, his ribs bandaged, and missing a couple of teeth before a dental appointment. He knows.
He doesn’t know, but he knows.
Before Jeongguk, Namjoon was his emergency contact. In his line of work, emergency contact and family to notify were one and the same.
“He wouldn’t want-”
“Kim Namjoon.” Seokjin remains seated, but his voice clearly denotes that he has risen, he is standing to leave.
“What justice can be served? What peace will you find?” Namjoon asks quietly, a pleading hand on his, and Seokjin laughs incredulously. “He’s gone, hyung, and there isn’t always restorative justice to be had.”
“Kim Namjoon,” he says, shaking his head. “You would make a terrible cop.”
Namjoon knows.
He knows Seokjin isn’t a cop either, and he especially isn’t a good one.
Seokjin moves down the list. The intel leads him to a man who lives out in Pohang, a record longer than the first sexual predator but this man has mostly battery and assault charges in addition to petty theft over the years. He at least handles the beating better than the first. Seokjin can get a little more creative with him while asking his questions. This man’s been in and out of prison already, knows Seokjin isn’t an enforcer sent by his parole officer. He has no idea what Kim Seokjin is, but he knows after he neatly removes some of his teeth that it’s only going to get harder and harder to speak, Seokjin with the pliers attached to the tip of his tongue neatly flicking off portions like a butcher trimming the fat.
He denies knowing Jeongguk. They’re all deniers at first. It takes a very rare criminal to so freely admit anything upfront, and their admittance comes less in wordplay and more in silence.
“You’re a killer,” Seokjin says to him, boot stepped into the man’s crotch and lower stomach to keep him pinned down. “It’s easy to tell. You know what always separates those from who have killed and who haven’t?”
He grinds down.
“It isn’t a lack of remorse, although I suppose it could easily be misread as such. No, it’s always that you just look so fucking bored.” Seokjin deftly removes his tweezers from the inside of his jacket and weasels his way in under the incision he made in the guy’s neck earlier in the evening. He can’t touch real vocal cords like this, but he can get close enough. He can pluck at muscles inside the man’s neck and play them with ease to mime speaking when the asshole says nothing.
“Nothing will ever excite you or move you the same way again, so everything else becomes dull, doesn’t it?” Seokjin yanks hard enough that the man can’t scream the way he has been, a guttural gasp and eyelids fluttering like he’s in shock already.
This man is a killer, but he isn’t a serial killer.
Seokjin suspects whoever killed Jeongguk might be.
Time to wrap this up. “Now you tell me,” he says, leaning down into the guy’s face, all of his defenses stripped away, even his teeth. He has no teeth to even lash out at him with. “How bored do I look right now?”
Seokjin makes a bigger mess with this guy, but he’ll live. Seokjin delivers him to an ER with enough of the confidential files from his agency for local law to be able to convict on a case they currently sit on, although Seokjin isn’t sure how well this guy will fare back in the system with so few natural defenses left to his body.
Yoongi comes to see him before Seokjin leaves for Chungmu where he needs to start for the third lead. “You look better than I thought you would,” he remarks, peering through Seokjin’s home and belongings like he would know any better.
“Still standing?”
“More like still alive.”
Yoongi understands that the men Seokjin hunts won’t kill him. Wouldn’t be able to. No, that’s not why or how he’d be dead.
He cheers Yoongi dryly with a click between their glasses of whiskey - something Yoongi brought with him that churns his stomach.
“What will you do after?” Yoongi asks.
“If I find the guy.”
“You will.” Yoongi laughs. “I can see no universe in which you wouldn’t. You’ll find him, even if it takes the rest of your days, but honestly -” He looks over everything collected on Seokjin’s walls. “I don’t think it will be long.”
Later in the evening, Yoongi lifts some of the papers covering what originally hung on the wall. Photos. Paintings. Silly things Jeongguk tacked up like keychains. “You never knew him,” Seokjin says, glassy eyed for once not solely from sorrow.
“You never let me know him.” Yoongi looks at a photo of Jeongguk, tongue out, freshly pierced, on his nineteenth birthday, arm wrapped around Jimin and of a time before Seokjin knew him. That photo wasn’t there previously. Seokjin moved it out of a keepsake box full of old print photos after. There are other photos, a messy collage, of Jeongguk riding a fake alligator from their vacation a few years ago, big sunglasses holding back his messy hair, a cheesy selfie he took while attempting to bleach Seokjin’s hair at home. All the photos contain Jeongguk, only a few include Seokjin as well.
The only framed photo, the largest of the bunch, is the two of them dressed in their suits, clasped hands and matching smiles. There was a series of photos taken at the same time - this one, the official photo, but there was one with Jeongguk biting Seokjin’s cheek or the one with his leg hiked up around his hip, ready to be dipped like a maiden.
“You knew I was married though,” Seokjin mumbles. He’s sloppy right now. Could still handle almost anyone in this state, anyone except maybe Min Yoongi, and now is his time to show out as a homophobe if he is one.
Yoongi just shrugs. “I mean. Sure. Plausible deniability aside, it was obvious. Secretive phone calls notwithstanding, you have tan lines around your ring finger.”
Seokjin never wore a ring while working. Couldn’t, even if he wanted to. He’d seen a man’s finger entirely degloved more than once from a wedding ring getting caught on something. Hell, Seokjin had used the tactic himself once on an advisory.
“I’m glad, you know.” Yoongi lets go the stacked and pinned papers, lets them flutter through his fingers like thumbing through a book. “As hard as it is now, it’s always better this way.”
“What? Solo revenge plans?” Seokjin stumbles a bit as he slams his glass into his sink. It explodes into pretty, pretty, pretty shards. Yoongi doesn’t flinch or even look in his direction. He isn’t worried about Seokjin harming himself.
“No.” Yoongi picks up the bottle of half drunk whiskey. “I meant that you had him at all. Better to have loved and lost, all of that.”
“Do you really believe that?” Seokjin laughs. It starts as a laugh. It ends as something entirely different and he’s ready for Yoongi to leave.
“Yeah, hyung.” Yoongi would only ever call him so familiarly outside of work. “I do.”
He leaves.
Then Seokjin leaves.
Out in Chungmu, Seokjin meets the mother and abandoned son of his next suspect. More than that, every fiber of Seokjin’s being coils the more he listens to them speak of Shin Kyong. They don’t know where to find Shin Kyong, but by the end of the day, Seokjin does.
He’s out on the outskirts of a small farm when night falls and Seokjin easily breaks into a small building attached to a greenhouse. There’s vinyl and rope and things to dig up the earth that can just as easily dig up loose flesh, all strewn about in ways that a farmer would never. Silently, Seokjin slips through the rooms, alone as of now. Seokjin can’t tell that anyone works here other than Shin.
There’s a large enclosed room with a table that stops Seokjin. It’s just a table. A long, lean table, but even if it isn’t made of metal, all Seokjin can see is a morgue. He approaches slowly. It looks clean.
It smells like blood.
Seokjin stands and works his way into the small attached office. It looks innocent enough. Ancient desktop computer, filing cabinets, a dusty bookshelf filled with everything from almanacs to porn.
There are locks on the file cabinets. Why? It only serves to ward off the mildly curious. Anyone who wants to break these locks can and will, and Seokjin does so with ease. Inside, mostly women’s handbags.
Seokjin removes one, opens it, but he already knows. This is it. This is him.
He found Jeongguk’s killer.
Manically, he riffles through items inside this cabinet and the next. Jeongguk had a bag, it was a heavy duty black backpack and it would have taken up an entire drawer on its own. It was never recovered from the scene - so many parts of Jeongguk were, but never his bag.
Seokjin never finds it. It isn’t there.
He finds tokki instead.
A soft, once white and fluffy rabbit keychain Jeongguk clipped to his backpack.
It’s here. In Seokjin’s hand.
It’s matted red.
All the training in the world can’t kill the sob in his throat. It dies, aborted halfway through, but the ghastly note of it audibly creeps into the room.
It isn’t the only noise.
The door to the greenhouse creaks.
Seokjin hears it now.
He pockets tokki.
Time to go to work.
Adrenaline makes it easy to focus and step aside from anguish. Everything inside the office and outside it and everything in between - it’s all dark, and that makes Seokjin think the man might be aware someone is there, or at the very least, has been there, if he isn’t turning on a light.
He’s going to let this guy think he has a chance. After all, this man, Shin Kyong, is a killer. A literal serial killer. If Seokjin had to guess based on the number of trophies stuffed away, his victims number at least a dozen. This man might face a moment of fearful apprehension that someone knows, found out, but he’ll think he can best Seokjin.
Seokjin wants him to think that.
When Shin finally flips on a shitty overhead light, Seokjin is there, standing on the other side of the greenhouse, hands in pockets, perfectly squared to meet his gaze. Shin doesn’t react, hardly blinks, ready to stare him down, size him up. Seokjin sees the faint shift of his eyes, where they roam, what weapons are handy and accessible to him. There’s a trowel close to his hand.
He just makes it so easy for Seokjin.
With a roar, Shin decides to make his move, running straight for Seokjin, snatching the trowel as he goes. It’s easy to side step, divert and redirect his energy so he lands on his face. Seokjin gets a kick into the softest part of his stomach before stomping down on the back of his head so he hears the nose break into the dirt.
Howling in pain, Shin is still quick to get back up. Now, he realizes that Seokjin won’t go down easily, and he proceeds with more caution as they circle each other. “Who the fuck are you?” he gurgles through the blood gushing into and out of his mouth.
Seokjin will give him no answers. Part of him hopes, of course, that Shin might understand, might think of his last victim and know that he killed someone who had a husband, someone who loved him dearly even if it wasn’t enough in the end. When he takes the trowel out of the grunting, screaming, spitting man’s hand like he’s a child only to dig it into his stomach, right below his navel, he hopes that Shin recalls all his victims. Did he dig through them for sport like Seokjin does now?
The autopsy was inconclusive on so many things. That’s what happens when a body is no longer whole.
And soon - eventually - this man will know just as well.
Well, he’ll know some of it. Seokjin will not give his death the same dignity. Shin’s mother and son haven’t seen him in years already. This man, when he’s dead, will not be missed. In fact, he may very well never be thought of again after his death.
By anyone other than Seokjin.
Seokjin will never forget.
But, all good things come to those who wait.
Seokjin steps back from his handiwork.
On the dirt in front of him lies a man unconscious, rendered useless by pain and shock, the kind he subjected so many others to and yet he could barely tolerate any himself. Seokjin hopes that before he passed out he felt the same as Jeongguk - the fear and realization that he never had a chance.
Seokjin sobs.
Bloodied hand over his mouth, he staggers backwards.
It’s done.
For now.
Step one: complete.
Seokjin walks away and waits for Shin Kyong to wake up and hope anew.
Seokjin will be waiting.
Will he think that Seokjin made a mistake? Left him for dead or truly thought him to be dead already? Either way, Seokjin knows when he wakes up, he’ll require medical attention. What lies will Shin give the doctor? There are two close physicians Seokjin finds the address for from the local newspaper. Not advertised online, these are the places Shin would visit. Small practices with people who are easier to intimidate and quicker to look the other way.
Seokjin hedges his bets on which one it will be.
Doesn’t matter.
Seokjin lowers the back of his seat in the car to examine the gash on his ribcage. Deep enough it would normally require stitches, he applies some of the adhesive gifted to him in his kit from Hoseok to bind the skin back together for now. On his phone, a notification lights up.
When he opens it, he sees he was right. Shin Kyong picked exactly who Seokjin assumed he’d go to immediately for medical treatment. He sits there and watches the pulsing red dot on his phone as it slowly moves south.
Seokjin starts his car.
The hard part is over, he thinks, breathing deeply.
Once Shin Kyong stumbles out of the back of a country doctor’s office, a frightened and weeping nurse on the floor behind him, Seokjin rests easy, assured by the fact that if the killer had x-rays done, they did not detect the tiny tracker he sewed into the lining of his abdominal wall. More likely than not, Shin only demanded to be stitched up and given pain killers.
Seokjin gives the guy the week. He stays close by, intercepting before he can creep too closely on a school girl on her way home, makes sure that the bartender Shin harasses at another time, high off his meds and fueled by alcohol, is momentarily replaced when Seokjin gives him his own special cocktail then hauls his unconscious ass out of the bar and throws him in the icy river.
Seokjin wouldn’t let him drown, but as is, he need not worry. Shin comes to, gasping and clutching at his week old wounds that won’t ever heal. He didn’t see Seokjin so he can’t be sure of anything - can’t remember how he ended up by the bridge.
Seokjin toys with him.
It isn’t fun, but it is something Seokjin can give back. Even if the autopsy was inconclusive, this is a man who toys with his victims, and Seokjin will give him everything he gave Jeongguk tenfold. If it’s the last thing he does.
His vows.
When Shin wakes up and finds everything in his shithole of a home slightly askew, it isn’t enough to make him immediately suspicious. When he goes out to dig a hole in the back of some farmland, he returns with a tarp and saw to a freshly covered mound of dirt.
Then he starts watching his back, and Seokjin knows that Shin realizes something is up. He can’t guess that there is a tracker directly in his body, but since he’s acting so jumpy Seokjin can circle in a little more aggressively. He cuts the tires on the killer’s truck when he goes into a store, he opens up every door, window, and cabinet in the man’s home while he tries to sleep at night.
Seokjin lines the bottom of his rice cooker with a special blend of arsenic that is slow-acting. It won’t have enough time to kill him anyway, just add to his misery.
Before, Seokjin would have found all of this distasteful. Of course he would have. His job required of him to pick and choose his preferred torture methods, but he was never one to toy. Others were. Others swore it was the best way to yield the truest results.
Seokjin isn’t looking for a result. Not really. This man is dead, his fate sealed. That isn’t a result. There just isn’t anything else from him Seokjin wants. He doesn’t want this man to utter a single thing about Jeongguk. He is so undeserving of even a moment of his time, and he took all of Jeongguk’s last moments. This man doesn’t have anything for Seokjin, other than his death.
Some suffering in the meantime is just for Jeongguk.
Jeongguk suffered.
Of that, Seokjin is sure.
Namjoon keeps calling. He picks up while sitting on a backcountry road not far from Shin. “You’re still alive,” Namjoon says, as if that’s what he should be worried about.
Seokjin hums.
“Hyung, come home,” Namjoon pleads. “You know you’re welcome here anytime. Hell, go see my parents. My mom’s been asking when she can make you her new and improved braised beef. It’ll make her year.”
Seokjin hums some more.
“Hyung. Hyung,” Namjoon insists.
He says it like it means anything, a benediction, a request, a love, all in one.
“I’ll try to visit soon, Namjoon-ah,” he finally replies. On the screen of his other phone, the pulsing red dot slowly moves. “I need to go now.”
The last hyung gets cut off.
Seokjin powers off that particular phone. He doesn’t need it for the moment.
He is neither surprised nor unsurprised that Shin Kyong figures out he’s not only being followed but there’s a tracker on him. Seokjin bugged every property he thought Shin might frequent, not just his home and vehicle, but it’s outside a shitty love hotel in the country that he realizes the jig is up. His precise time of death was always in his own hands whether or not Shin realized. Currently, Shin is hunched up over his abdomen as if he might be able to locate the tracker himself and claw it out.
Seokjin should have made more decoy incisions.
“You fuck!” he screams. “What did you do? You fuck!”
No one is eloquent when truly afraid. Seokjin removes his favorite switchblade from his jacket and flips it out. It’s always such a satisfying feeling in his hand. He’d like to think it’s about to feel even more satisfying, but the truth is even now Seokjin just feels numb. The only thing he can accept in the stages of grief is Shin’s death.
The otherwise seemingly calm numbness feels like what he used to be like, before Jeongguk.
Shin’s death doesn’t mean anything. It is just inevitable.
“Who are you?” he screams repeatedly. It is the same as asking why, and that gives Seokjin some satisfaction. He’s sure his victims all wondered the same, and this was only ever about that. Giving Shin back what he gave to others.
That’s the way of life.
Seokjin dodges his feeble lunging; Shin is already weakened from two weeks of poisoned food, lack of sleep, and infected wounds that would never heal. He isn’t the same man physically who killed Jeongguk or his other victims. He stands no chance, and he realizes that, but man is driven to survive. Seokjin will allow him enough room to struggle while he relocates them to an even more remote location.
“Black gloves,” Shin mutters. “People who think they’re professionals wear black gloves.”
Well. He isn’t wrong.
“The difference between you and me,” Shin laughs. “I never see it more than sport. You see it as a job, don’t ya?”
Try - a vow.
“Which one is worse?”
Seokjin is a killer, point blank.
He let Jeongguk marry him without ever disclosing that.
He knows which of them is worse.
“Where are we going?” he asks, tied up in the back of Seokjin’s borrowed van. Earnestly, he’s stopped trying to escape, and not just the feigning kind to placate Seokjin but the kind that is genuinely fatigued, out of breath. He cannot easily see from the back, but eventually they are close enough it’s easy for Shin to recognize.
“You fuck!” He kicks at the back of Seokjin’s seat as much as possible. “Why are we here? Fuck - no! Don’t-”
Seokjin slams on the brakes and puts the car in park. Behind him, Shin groans from the impact of his injuries. “We’re home,” Seokjin finally says. His voice cracks. He has not spoken aloud since his phone call with Namjoon.
He opens his door and stands to stretch.
The home stretch.
Everything is hazy - there is a thick fog that settles less around his ankles and more around his knees as he slides open the van door. Shin comes out spitting and hissing, his teeth wedging into Seokjin’s forearm, and that’s good. Scars are meant to be seen. Acceptance isn’t meant to be easy, but this part is.
Seokjin wishes Shin put up more of a fight, not because it means something about Jeongguk that this pathetic creature killed him, but more so that it would make it easier to recall everything in absolution. It would be both grossly unfair and inaccurate to think of Jeongguk as anything other than capable and strong, but even the weak, the ill prepared, or just plain unintelligible are capable of killing and potentially killing someone who is all those things they are not. Seokjin knows that.
Does Shin know that?
All Shin ever was is lucky, and Seokjin -
Unlucky.
“Fuck you! Why’d you bring me here?” he bellows, and Seokjin reaches forward with his knife to remove the shell of one ear. It always feels like shucking an oyster.
Shin should be recognizable, so Seokjin will leave his overall visage alone.
“You knew better than to think you could die in peace.” Seokjin absentmindedly licks the blood at the corner of his lips; it goes against all training and protocol for obvious blood born reasons, but what does it matter now? “This isn’t about you anymore.”
“Please, don’t!”
Ah, the begging begins.
“The old hag doesn’t even know me anymore! She won’t care!”
What a lie.
A mother will always care, and she is the only person who might, which is why they’re there. It has to be there.
Seokjin knows just the path Shin’s mother walks every day. It’s quite remote, her home that she shares with her husband and grandson far from any neighbor, and Seokjin can only imagine she will be just so curious about the contents of a perfectly wrapped gift in the middle of her path, so far from any store or shop.
“For your head,” Seokjin shows him the bag, “and your body.” He shows him the trunk, and see, if he were truly taunting Shin, he would ask him: which do you prefer she finds?
But this isn’t about him.
It’s about giving back, and Shin’s mother, the person who loves him most in the world even if it is little, whittled away with time, neglect, even abuse, will find him the same way Jeongguk’s body was found by the person who loved him the most in the world.
“Please! Don’t! It will kill her!” the man in front of him sobs. Seokjin thought it would take longer than this. “Fuck you! You fucker!”
“You don’t get to beg any longer,” he whispers quietly, plucking Shin’s cheeks and squeezing them between his fingers. His mouth pops open like a fat cherry and his tongue rolls down reflexively before he tries to stuff it back in. Seokjin applies more pressure.
He doesn’t need to cut it out. A slit right down the middle will do the same trick.
It’s daylight out. Still young light, the sun not really risen even though the sky is no longer black, but Seokjin doesn’t hide what he does under the cover of night. Someone could stumble upon the scene, unlikely as it is. Someone might hear Shin’s death rattles. It doesn’t matter now. Seokjin may be a killer and even a monster not unlike the man breathing his last breath beneath him, but he won’t hide it.
That’s the difference between him and Shin.
It’s a mess when it happens. Things come apart like there are seams to the human body. Seokjin takes in a shuddery breath under the warm spray on his face, rope in his hand. He thinks about how it would have felt in his bare hand, no glove, but that’s a little too close. He doubts Shin wore gloves when he -
Seokjin stands, lip quivering, lungs gone. He trembles, rope still in hand, but it stays slack, because there is nothing to resist against it.
Don’t think it, don’t think it, don’t -
Everything on the autopsy pointed to this. He tries not to imagine it, but here he is, living it. It was his choice.
He doesn’t want to think about the last time he saw a part of Jeongguk, only wants to remember the last time he touched him whole. That morning. In bed. Seokjin was getting ready to tag in on a short term but still multi-day job. They’d stayed up all night, wandering through a new night market that popped up the month before, both too cold to stand in the lines they stood in but Jeongguk continually tried to weasel into the same coat with Seokjin while simultaneously hogging all of the food, cheeks puffed out and full in a way that warmed the pit of his stomach.
“Hyung,” he said.
“Tokki.” Seokjin kissed the back of his head.
In the morning, when Jeongguk was uncharacteristically the first one up. “Hyung,” he said, wiggling his way underneath Seokjin’s stomach where he slept.
“Tokki,” Seokjin groaned, all for show, but it worked. Jeongguk giggled.
“I’ll miss you,” he said, kissing the tip of his nose with his own. “Safe travels. Call me when you get land?”
Seokjin wasn’t flying anywhere. He barely had to leave Seoul that time.
“Of course, baby.” Seokjin flipped onto his back. His husband immediately followed, beautiful arms snaking around his waist while Jeongguk planted his face in Seokjin’s neck. There was a bruise on Seokjin’s lower back still healing, a nasty thing that he told Jeongguk was from a surfing accident on a rare day of leisure on his last overnight work trip and not the hood of a car running him down.
“I gotta go, but I’ll talk to you later.” Jeongguk playfully bit at him before scrambling off the bed, laughing as Seokjin sat up to lunge at him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Seokjin asked.
“I told you, I need to leave early for the volunteer gig over at-”
“Without a kiss?” Seokjin puckered up and tapped at his lips, and Jeongguk, endeared, the only person to ever see him like this or see him at all, leaned down to kiss him. “Love you.”
Seokjin always made sure it was the last thing he said to Jeongguk, just in case.
He always knew he might come home in a bodybag.
If he had ever considered the reverse.
“Bye, hyung!” Jeongguk called from their hall. Seokjin couldn’t see him. He was already getting ready for this day.
The last time Seokjin saw him, and he saw him so briefly.
They spoke on the phone.
It was just as brief, an ordinary moment in what otherwise could be an ordinary marriage. Jeongguk didn’t feel the need to hang on every word in case it was the last. He hung up to catch a bus, mistaking those headlights driving down the road towards him.
It wasn’t even someone who knew about Kim Seokjin.
It was just some random man.
It was never preventable at all, and all the care and love in the world that Seokjin poured into every detail of Jeongguk’s life so he could live it freely ultimately amounted to nothing.
Seokjin sobs. Just once, louder than a gunshot. He sucks in a breath, just to breath, but why keep breathing?, but he can’t get it down, another sob rips out of him, shoulders shuddering and heavy, chest tight, it hurts, oh god, Jeongguk died, so he can’t help the next sob after that, or the one after that.
On his knees, Seokjin cries, blubbering, trembling, crawling to nowhere. All he has is a ring, in sight on his left hand, nothing else to show for it.
The job is done.
His job is done.
He thinks about what Namjoon said to him: what justice will it bring you?
And the answer was none then and none now.
But Seokjin never once dealt in justice.