[oneshot] The stars remind me of you. (4/4)

[yakiseop]

Kai comes to his senses a good deal of salty water to his face later. Taemin does his best to reanimate him, talks him through it, as if Kai was about to die instead of just too shocked to function. He doesn’t properly pass out, either; his brain is actually racing as his body malfunctions, thinking and rethinking and processing and remembering and it barely makes sense to himself anymore.

“Be strong, Kai, stay with me. Stay with me, okay?” Taemin calls as he probably thinks that Kai is walking towards the light, when he’s actually thinking, what the fuck? I’ve been dreaming to meet you since I was a snotty teen and you’ve been actually living with me for the past several months?!, or something along these lines.

Kai had been very attached to the idea of seizing the Eve of the Future since the very beginning of his career as a hunter. Ravi, a snotty teen himself but with much more experience, schooled him on all things bounty-hunting, and, out of all things, Kai was the most fascinated by the ranking.

What happens if I catch the number one?, Kai had asked then. Ravi, in response, had shrugged.

You’ll get your money, he had said simply. And you get your ego check, he added a bit disdainfully when Kai’s fascination failed to wane. Aiming for the top has always been almost a hobby for Kai.

Imagine you his shock to discover that the number one bounty head in the universe, the one he has been pretty much lusting after for literal years, is the same person as the cute amnesiac he had fallen in love with over the course of many spacial road trips and bland-tasting bowls of onion soup.

This is not real, Kai concludes at last when Taemin is, once again, applying cold salt water to his face. None of this is real. He isn’t real either.

“Kai, please,” Taemin pleads in a small, desperate voice. Kai starts coming back from his confused reverie. “Please don’t die. If you die, I’ll never forgive myself. Never. Please-”

“I,” Kai croaks suddenly, startling the hell out of Taemin. Kai moves. Hm, he doesn’t feel as bad as before. Perhaps he can sit up? He tries. “I’m alive. I’m good. I’m here. Hello.”

“Oh god,” Taemin lets out a huge breath of relief, and helps Kai in his endeavor of sitting up, a gentle hand on his back. Right now, Taemin is like a nurse. It’s hard to believe that this individual could be classified as ‘very dangerous’ by anyone. “You weren’t responding to anything. You barely even moved your eyes. I thought I was going to lose you.”

Affection chokes Kai up. This is Taemin. Definitely Taemin. “I’m good. I guess I was just, you know...” Kai gestures Taemin’s bullet wounds vaguely. Almost all of them are healed by then. “... thinking. About what you told me.”

Taemin’s face falls, morphing from relief to grief in a second. It’s hard to watch. He looks miserable beyond repair, to the point that Kai wishes he hadn’t said anything.

“I guess I did hit you too hard with that,” Taemin smiles feebly. “Sorry. I didn’t know how else to tell you. I couldn’t hide it either, not after what you told me that time.”

Kai nods. He understands. But there’s more that he needs to know. “How did you recover your memory?” He questions.

“The adrenaline helped me to access my system back up,” Taemin explains fluently, to Kai’s surprise. “It’s supposed to help me to enter battle-mode. I guess whatever issue I had with the memory stuff was fixed by that.”

Kai blinks. This is fascinating. “And-and the healing stuff,” he goes onto the next question. “How does it work? I mean, you bleed and all...”

“I’m not entirely mechanic,” Taemin explains patiently, equal parts didactic and depressed. “I have organic parts. Actually, I suspect I’m made more of organic parts than mechanic, since my skin, my circulation system, and my organs are pretty much identical to a human’s.” It’s strange for Kai to hear Taemin refers to humans as a group he’s not included in. “The difference is that my DNA is tweaked to produce new cells faster. Hence my abnormal healing ability.”

Kai makes an ‘oooh’ sound, feeling nothing but amazed and curious. How can any of that be real? “So you’re pretty much immortal, then?”

“I suppose I do age,” Taemin replies, a bit unsure. “But it’s hard to destroy my body. And heavens knows they tried,” he adds bitterly, and Kai’s attention is redirected.

“They?” Kai follows the cue immediately, head bubbling with new questions. “Who’s ‘they’?”

Taemin sighs. He might be tired of the questions, or he might be feeling whatever negative feelings he associates with whoever ‘they’ are. Regardless of any of those, Taemin tells a long, long story.

A quick summary of Taemin’s Long, Long Story™.

Titan’s government is a little trigger-happy, as most of the Saturnian system nations seem to be, and launched a secret project to engineer the perfect android, intelligent, invincible, and self-sufficient. The ultimate objective was, of course, war, mostly cold war, but war nonetheless. As a result of that ambition, Taemin - or MR10V, the first prototype of such androids - was born.

Taemin spent his days in a lab being assembled, disassembled, and then reassembled multiple times. Sometimes, he was aware of his surroundings, and could feel the people screwing his arms onto his torso; sometimes, he was ‘asleep’, as if dead on the cold table.

“At first, my thoughts were all jumbled up,” Taemin confesses to Kai, a bit troubled by the unpleasant memories. “My thought system wasn’t polished yet, so it was like I was hallucinating constantly. I thought of random words and made phrases out of them.”

“Like ‘squirrel watermelon doesn’t fly above the sentience’?” Kai chirps in, and the example is so absurd and yet so accurate that Taemin doesn’t even laugh.

“... something along those lines, yes.” he admits, and then finally cracks up, pausing to laugh for a while before carrying on.

When his ‘brain’ - the compact, extremely powerful computer that controls the entirety of Taemin’s body - was finally programmed correctly, Taemin started to act human at last. Scientists would go into his chamber to have conversations with him, all while other scientists observed everything through the large glass window that served as one of the chamber’s walls. Taemin was a newborn, but had the information bank of an adult. The scientists were constantly impressed at him.

Hard to tell why. They had created Taemin to be exceptional, and yet were awed at every little thing he did. Narcissism is a tricky thing to understand.

Taemin watched TV daily, on command, in order to learn by himself things that the programmers couldn’t be bothered to embed onto his system. He learned about the universal diaspora, about each one of the colonies, about major and minor diplomatic conflicts between them. He learned about agriculture, fungiculture, about trade and economy and the everyday lives of almost every kind of human. But one thing particularly fascinated him.

Earth.

Upon hearing about Earth the first time, through a TV show documentary called ‘Biomes of a Lost Past’, Taemin was immediately fascinated. None of his ‘parents’ ever found out why. No matter how much they researched, calculated, and theorized, Taemin’s particular admiration towards Earth remained unexplained.

“I was obsessed,” Taemin confesses, toying with his necklace distractedly. “I didn’t want to learn about anything else. I loved to hear how the people lived here, how nature behaved... I guess it was then that my dream to see a flower field was born.”

“Oh,” Kai sighs sadly.

Taemin also sighs. “Anyway...”

Anyway, in the last part of Taemin’s Long, Long Story™, he began to grow more and more restless at the lab. He wanted to go out and see life with his own eyes; see the sky, see the green and yellow and pink and white of real life, not just the ice-gray, ice-cold, washed-out laboratory. Scientists sense his restlessness, talk to him about it, but they do nothing about it but write down in reports. Taemin is free to walk around the lab now, and often steals parts of study samples of Earth.

“They’d bring... you know, this kind of junk,” he points at a nearby pile of debris, one that Kai can’t see properly, but has seen enough similar ones to know what he’s talking about. “Old objects, trinkets, pieces of nothing. I’d raid the samples in a regular basis. That’s where I got this,” he adds, holding his necklace up. “This is a nameplate from about four thousand years ago. I decided it’d be my name from then on.” A brief pause. Taemin laughs to himself. “I was so silly.”

Kai says nothing.

Meanwhile, politics happened. It’s too complicated to explain in a concise way, so let’s just leave it at that: politics happened. Politics happened, and the existence of the project was exposed to public, which caused an enormous uproar due to its semi-organic, semi-genetic, semi-illegal nature. The people rioted. The government did a lot of press conferences, all in vain. The people rioted even more. Eventually, the government decided to do the only thing they could think of to appease the opposition - terminate the project.

After all, despite the billions poured into it, the human beings that had slaved on over genetic engineering and computer programs, and the completely sentient form of life created by it, it wasn’t that important of a project, right?

The lab opposed. The government took no shit from them, and temporarily shut the entire lab, only agreeing to open it up again once the android project people agreed to go. People from other areas of the lab were pitched against the project, and the pressure was too much. Eventually, they all gave in.

The records were destroyed. The experiments were archived. Taemin was sent to immediate termination.

The end.

Kai blinks at the sudden silence. “And then?”

Taemin tilts his head to the side, not understand the demand. “And then nothing. I escaped. They chased me. They’d find me, and try to kill me, and I wouldn’t die and escape again. Eventually, they put a price on my head.”

“Ooh,” Kai nods, satisfied by that epilogue. So that’s the birth of Taemin’s story as a fifty-seven trillion woolong head. Fascinating. “And-okay, last question, I swear,” Taemin laughs, clearly not believing that promise. “Why did they call you Eve of the Future?”

“Easy one,” Taemin temporarily assumes the role of a professor at a school, as if trying to break through the gloom. “Because they synthesized me from stem cells of someone else. You could say I was born from someone’s bones. Just like Eve, from the bible, who was born from Adam’s rib.” He catches sight of Kai’s slightly confused face, and asks, “you do know that legend, don’t you?”

“Not the rib part,” Kai admits. “But this is pretty cool. So you’re like a superhuman.”

Taemin sighs. Oh no. He’s starting to get sad again. “I’m not a superhuman. I'm not human at all.”

“What about you is not human?” Kai assaults him immediately with yet another question.

“... you said that the previous question was the last one,” Taemin confronts him.

“You know what I mean!” Kai retorts. “Like, you have memories. You have feelings. You even make mistakes sometimes. Remember when you snorted mushroom cream through your nose that time?”

“Why do you even remember this,” Taemin whines, slightly humiliated.

“Because-look, I get you not thinking yourself as human,” Kai concedes to him. “But Eve was human, right? Wasn’t she?”

Taemin stares at him silently. Kai feels that his words aren’t having the impact he expected them to have - he wanted to wipe that sad ‘oh no I’m not human I’m not worthy’ feeling out of Taemin’s body. Maybe he’s not taking the right approach. Change tactics.

“And look, even if you’re not human,” it’s Kai’s new tactic. “What’s the problem? As a matter of fact,” oho, fancy words, “you’re much better than a human. You’re still alive after taking a shower of bullets. You run super fast, like, remember Charon?, and you have such good balance too. And you do calculus stuff. Even if you do snort food through your nose sometimes,” Kai adds, and Taemin almost laughs again. “What’s the problem, you know?”

“It’s not... it’s just...” Taemin tries to reply. Perhaps the hesitation could be a sign that Kai is getting to the point? “All of that... the way I think is just a result of a computer working. My heart is just a really complicated clock. My bones are all metal. When it comes down to it, I’m just a robot.”

“And when it comes down to it, I’m just dog poop,” Kai retorts immediately. “It’s all the same, right? All organic-”

“That’s not what I meant,” Taemin interrupts. “But hey, nice comparison.”

“Shut up! Listen to me,” Kai shouts in outrage. “Listen, just listen. It doesn't matter that you have some metal stuff in you. My neighbor back home had a metal arm and a metal leg. It made a hellish noise when she moved, but guess what? Nicest person in the block.” Kai puts both of his hands on Taemin’s shoulders, pulling him closer. The wound hurts like fuck, but it doesn’t matter. “You’re still Taemin, and everyone loves you. Robot or not.”

Kai knows he’s hitting home. Taemin’s eyes are downcast, gleaming, and he looks... vulnerable. Moved, perhaps? Kai’s own heart flutters with several emotions.

“I could malfunction at any moment...”

“So could I,” Kai throws back. “It’s called ‘getting sick’.”

“I...” Taemin trails off, out of things to say. His lips flutter, as if he was choosing words to say, and Kai gets this sudden, but not foreign, urge to kiss him.

Oh, hey, wait.

This is probably a good chance.

“Look, Taemin. Seriously, look,” Kai pleads, one hand on Taemin’s cheek to gently raise his head for their eyes to meet. Kai’s heart is threatening to burst through his chest, but it doesn’t matter. This is more important. “I-please take what I say completely seriously, okay?” He’s once again holding Taemin’s shoulders with both his hands, and those hands are shaking. “I. I really, really like you, Taemin.” Shit, he said it. “Like, really. I really like you.”

Taemin’s eyes are filled to tears - have been, since Kai’s emotional pep talk from earlier - and now, one tear trickles down, slowly, as he smiles. “I like you a lot too,” he admits, and Kai feels like he doesn’t understand.

“No, like,” Kai has to say it again. Even though his face is already roasting in the flames of hell, he can’t leave it at this. “I like you enough to marry you. Like, for real. I... love you. You know? Yeah.”

The most awkward confession Kai has ever known off, doubtlessly. He wishes he could’ve confessed as smoothly as a soap-opera hero, gently stroking his love interest’s cheeks, a hand laced around their waist... well, it’s a bit too late now...

“Oh,” Taemin understands, at last, and Kai would be relieved if he wasn’t so !!! from the thrill of confessing. “I see. Maybe I love you too?”

Kai groans. “What do you mean by ‘maybe’?! Do you love me or not??”

“I’m sorry! The exact concept of love isn’t embedded to my system,” Taemin complains, his own cheeks a bit red as well, and Kai feels like ‘not embedded to my system’ will be regularly used by Taemin as an excuse from then on. “But I do like you, and marrying you isn’t a bad idea. Also, I ripped off a piece of my body to reconstruct yours.”

At that, Kai halts still. It’s all gone. The embarrassment is gone. “You’re kidding.”

“I wanted you to heal faster,” Taemin shrugs, and Kai takes a look at his own wound. It’s closed. It’s already scarring. When he looks at Taemin’s torso, there’s a giant scab right at the same spot Kai’s wound is. “I had to tear a piece of my liver off too, because yours was damaged by the bullet. I guess this could be called love.”

Kai doesn’t have good reasons to disagree with that.

As promised by Taemin’s overly precise info, all of their wounds are completely healed by the time the sun starts to rise. Upon seeing the dawn break right before his eyes, Kai becomes anxious with the time they’ve must spent down there, and with the possibility that Ravi might’ve deemed them dead and departed from Earth.

“Night on this particular area of Earth where we are lasts only twelve hours,” Taemin informs helpfully when Kai voices his worries in an almost incomprehensible rant. “If we get going now, we might reach the ship before Ravi decides to go.”

Kai feels a little relieved. Then, he notices something. “How do we get to the ship from here?” He asks, looking around for anything he might recognize. “I have no idea of where we are...”

Taemin’s silent grimace says everything.

So, despite being completely and absolutely lost, Kai decides to go with his gut instinct and drive in the direction he thinks might be the right one. Taemin, who has been up since the battle, has started to look bone-crushingly tired since his long, long story, so he sleeps, lying across the back of the cockpit, legs dangling from the side of the ship.

It’s a strange feeling, to have confessed to the one you like, Kai concludes as he drives. Most would think confessing would bring some kind of relief to the constant feeling of giddiness that loving someone causes, but, if it usually does bring relief, Kai did something wrong. He only feels giddier, more on edge than ever, as if he’d explode at any moment; the only difference is that he’s almost sickeningly happy most of the time.

“Loooove, this distant staaaar, my only solaaaaaace,” he sings to himself as he drives, and god, that song truly is awful, but he feels like singing and he can’t help it. “Looooove, this foreign feeliiiing, this vice of miiiiiiine.” He can’t sing for shit either.

Everything is beautiful to him. Earth’s sunrise, all blue and purple and pink and yellow, is beautiful. Earth’s ruins, comprised of things from broken computers to pipes, from broken bricks to whole dining tables, are beautiful. Earth’s murky soil is beautiful. He himself is beautiful. Taemin is beautiful.

And eventually, he finds something even more beautiful than all that.

“!!!!!!!!!” he screams silently as the thing he finds reveals itself before his eyes. He can’t believe it. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. “Holy shit! Taemin! Taemin, wake up!”

Taemin sleeps like dead. He barely breathes. Sometime in the future, that will really bother Kai, and he’ll grow used to watch Taemin sleep with dread, only to sigh in relief when the android breathes. That’s for the future, though; right now, Kai is too excited to notice it.

“Taemin, wake up!!” He insists, nudging Taemin on the arm rather violent, and Taemin wakes up in a startle, flailing his arms as if he was falling. “Look at this Taemin, seriously!!”

Taemin sits up, completely awake and a bit alarmed. And he sees. And both of them are frozen looking at it, Kai with a smile, Taemin with his jaw slack.

It’s a flower field. A huge one, extending past Kai’s sight, of yellow nameless flowers growing in tall, thin stem; dense, like a carpet, and Kai has never been so excited, because the rest of Earth looked so... infertile. So devoid of life, that this is almost a miracle to his eyes.

And to Taemin’s... well, it’s literally a dream come true.

“Oh my god,” Taemin says faintly, face still showing nothing but surprise. “Oh my GOD! KAI!” It’s all the warning Kai receives before Taemin literally jumps off the ship and runs towards the field. Kai almost has a heart attack.

“Jesus fuck Taemin the soil-”

“Who cares!” Taemin shouts back at him, laughing and laughing and laughing. “This is just-amazing! I could die right now!”

“Please don’t,” Kai mutters as he safely parks his mono.

“Come on!” Taemin beckons him as he blindly runs into the flower field, which could easily be a poisonous swamp of some sort, but Kai chooses to just follow him, because he won’t have a chance like this so soon - or ever.

To Kai’s surprise, the soil of the field is relatively firm, not as murky as he thought it’d be; this could possibly mean they’re going in the wrong direction, away from the ocean rather than towards it, but, honestly, who cares! Flowers! Taemin is already spinning around wildly, touching as many flowers as he can with his spread arms.

“This is amazing,” he chants as he runs around.

“For god’s sake, wait for me!” Kai feels like he’ll be chasing Taemin for centuries. Taemin runs and skips and twirls and Kai is getting a bit tired of running already, so, when Taemin stops moving away for one split second, Kai seizes his chance and sprints towards the android, tackling him to the floor.

“HA!” he yells savagely.

“Aaaaah you caught me!” Taemin feigns a lament, actually smiling from ear to ear, breathless and gleaming. “I’m so happy. You have no idea.”

Kai wants to kiss him. He really wants to kiss him. So he kisses him, without a warning, chastely and quickly; it’s not a particularly grand kiss, nor do fireworks explode in the sky while cathartic music plays, like in the soap operas, but it’s been so long due for Kai that he’ll probably never forget that one kiss.

“I’m happy too,” he says afterwards, leaning his forehead against Taemin’s, and his chest and throat feel tight with sheer, pure happiness. “I’m so happy I could die right now. Seriously.”

“Don’t die,” Taemin whispers at him, raising his head slightly, as if subtly chasing Kai’s lips. “Let’s live. Let’s have that pet shelter together someday.”

Just as Kai is about to reply, both of them hear a bark in the distance. It surprises them enough for their smiles to fall.

Awkward pause. “Do you think these flowers are hallucinogenic?” Taemin theorizes.

“I’m not sure anymore,” Kai confesses as he starts hearing the sound of an engine.

Despite the initial disbelief, the sounds are so clear and feel so real that they don’t resist looking around for a source. Kai rolls to the side, to allow Taemin to get up, and both of them get to their feet really, really slowly, glancing around with something akin to fear.

It seems like the day is out to surprise them the most it can. In the distance - about seventy meters away from where they are - there comes Ravi’s mono.

“Yes!!” Kai shouts victoriously. Ravi has come to save them! They’re not risking being stranded anymore! “Ravi!! Here!”

“So he was looking for us!” Taemin comments, jumping and waving to the car. “We’re so lucky!”

“We really are!” Kai comments, and, as the mono gets closer enough for him to see who’s piloting, he adds, in a completely different voice: “Wait, what the fuck?”

It’s not Ravi who’s driving. It’s... at the steering wheel, it’s Jjanggu, who’s stepping on Monggu for leverage. Kai and Taemin stop waving. The car gets close enough for them to climb up and stops, and Jjangah pops up from the pedal area.

“Woof!” She says.

Kai and Taemin exchange a look.

“Woof!!” Jjanggu agrees, climbing off the steering wheel to jump over the seat. “Woof woof!”

The other two soon join Jjanggu behind the seat, waiting obediently for Kai and Taemin to climb onto the car. Monggu has some hardship jumping over the seat, as he’s bigger than the other two and not much of an exercise dog, but he manages. The two humans are still too dumbfounded to move.

At last, Kai turns to Taemin and says: “I guess it makes sense to deal this kind of dog.”

Taemin nods. “I guess it does.”

They get a lift by the dogs back to the Kiev; Kai drives Ravi’s mono, while Taemin drives Kai’s. It’s the first time Taemin tries his hand at driving, but, since he was built to learn and has seen Kai pilot that thing often enough, he does it pretty well.

It takes him the day to arrive. By the time they’re entering the garage, the sun is setting. Kai couldn’t, and wouldn’t, ever get used to those short ass days-

“FUCK YOU!” Ravi screams as he tackles Kai, laughing while Kai screams, getting him into a surprise chokehold. “Man, I thought you had really cashed in your chips this time. I had no idea what to do.”

“Aww,” Kai coos sardonically, still being choked. “How sweet! Now let me go.”

Ravi does let go, and goes off to hug Taemin. “So good to see you two, seriously. I thought I’d have to stay alone in this ship for life. And without a car,” he shoots the dogs a nasty glare. “Can you believe the fucking dogs stole my fucking car?”

“We can’t, actually,” Taemin admits. “But they seem to have done that indeed.”

“And they did. Well, you come in for a meal. You were away for quite a while,” Ravi pushes them out of the garage, into the main deck, and the dogs follow, barking and running in their usual silly manner. Kai can’t believe he’s home again.

And the day pulls out his last shock card before turning into night;

“You!!” Kai yells when he spots Timoteo lying on the couch. “You’re alive!!”

“You can bet on it,” Timo snickers maliciously, barely turning his head to look at them. “Alive as always. And hello there, Taeminnie! You got a rash?”

“It’s... hard to explain.” Taemin’s multiple bullet wounds are now faint scars, and they do look like a rash to anyone who doesn’t know better. “And you? You look...”

“Almost dead,” Ravi fills in for him, walking past everyone to get to the kitchen. “This one got shot. Was white as a corpse when I found him.”

Timoteo starts laughing almost convulsively. “Oh guys, you have to hear this. I was down there, bleeding like hell and presumed dead, when that guy over there,” he tries to signalize Ravi with his head, but it’s such a feeble nod that it’s nothing, “came in a flying saucer-looking shit to save me. I laughed so hard I think I burst my main veins open. You guys should’ve seen him.”

“I saved your ass!!” Ravi objects, genuinely outraged. “I patched you up! I see now that should’ve left you down there!!”

“What did you do to the security module though?” Kai asks, being familiarized with the ‘flying saucer-looking shit’ a.k.a. security module of the ship. “Ditched it?”

“Left it there,” Ravi admits. “I didn’t have time to bring it up again. That guy over there,” he signalizes Timoteo with a vague gesture of his hand, “was bleeding his guts out. So we came back up in my car.” He pauses, making a face. “Then, the fucking dogs stole it. My car have been getting stolen a lot these days, doesn’t it.”

“You got shot on the chest?” Taemin asks, attracting Kai’s attention. When he takes a closer look to Timo, he notices that the swindler has a patch over his chest. A considerably big one. It must’ve been bad.

“Yeah. Shot through the heart,” Timo jokes. “And then, my prince charming came to my rescue. Romantic, right?”

“Yeah,” Taemin laughs, stealing a glance at Kai, and their eyes accidentally meet. It’s enough to make Kai’s heart skip a beat, and he wonders if Timoteo hears it, because his gaze turns sharper, and he shifts his position to face them fully.

“How about you, though?” he asks, eyes going back and forth from Taemin to Kai. “I heard you went to the battlefield as well. What happened then? I want to hear.”

Ah. It’s Time, then. Kai and Taemin exchange a glance; they’ll have to talk about That much sooner than expected. Regardless of how reluctant both of them are to touch the subject so soon, Timo got shot trying to protect them, and Ravi is their captain. They deserve some explanations.

“Ravi,” Kai calls, a bit solemn. “Come here.”

Ravi turns around to look at him. “I’m making dinner.”

“Dinner can wait,” Kai declares, and Ravi is visibly puzzled. “Come here. This is important.”

By then, Ravi is already frowning with worry. He leaves the kitchen area and, as if sensing he should sit down to listen, chooses a seat on the couch, where Timo’s legs are lying limply.

“What is it?” he urges, completely serious.

Kai and Taemin exchange another look. Who’s gonna do it?, they ask each other telepathically. Leave it to me, Kai silently says with a nod, and turns to face the other two.

“Uh...” he starts off hesitantly, and goes on to tell a Long, Long Story.

Ravi and Timo take the news surprisingly well. Ravi seems to have low-key thought Taemin was an android all along, and showers him with questions about his composition, which Taemin, egged on by Ravi’s awe, answers professionally. Timo just nods a lot.

“Amazing how much sense it makes,” he repeats to himself. “Truly amazing.”

Kai doesn’t tell any of them about his relationship status change with Taemin. He’s sure they’ll figure it out eventually.

Later on, they eat dinner together, watch some quiz shows and today’s edition of Jack ‘n’ Jill, in which they announce an increase on Taemin’s price, shooting up from fifty-seven to sixty-two trillion woolongs.

“Woohoo!!” They celebrate for no reason.

“I wish my price would inflate,” Timoteo sighs. “I’d turn myself in if it was worth it. I’d pay off my debts with interest and shit.”

Afterwards, Ravi does his daily check up on Timo’s healing condition, which remind them all that, despite being as chirpy and insufferable as always, Timo has a bullet hole where part of his heart should be, and therefore needs to be handled with care. Both Kai and Taemin leave Ravi and Timo to themselves during the medical check up, and find themselves petting the dogs in the sleeping chambers hallway, sitting on the cold metal floor side by side.

“You know,” Taemin says after a while, tone nonchalant. “That was my first kiss.”

Kai widens his eyes, hands slowing down on Monggu’s fur. “Well, obviously...? It’d be really fucked up if someone-”

“No, like, ever,” Taemin interrupts, apparently struggling with words at the moment. “Not just on the lips, you know. I had never been kissed anywhere on my body.”

“Oh,” Kai comprehends, at least. He feels his cheeks heat up from Taemin’s announcement, even though he knows Taemin meant the cheek or something, he knows. “Then. Yay! Super yay?”

“I don’t have any info on intimate touching, at all,” Taemin complains, and it’s getting difficult to not see sexual subtext on what Taemin is saying. “The scientists probably didn’t think I’d need it. Either that, or they expected me to learn it by myself someday.” He glances up to Kai rather... expectantly.

Kai’s heart hammers against his rib, once again, for the millionth time since he has fallen for Taemin. It’s getting real old, and yet, it still distresses him.

“So?” he manages to ask, not sure of what he’s supposed to be understanding.

“So,” Taemin is determined, and his voice says ‘just curious’, but then he grins, and his grins spells, among many other things, ‘mischievous’. “Teach me.”

“Oh,” Taemin exclaims at pretty much everything, not exactly a moan, but an interjection of pleasant surprise. It’s usually followed by a softer, much lewder, “Oh.”

Kai is having the time of his life.

“How’s this?” he asks before giving Taemin’s nipples an experimental lick, the very tip of his tongue teasing the now hardened bud. Taemin’s answer is a choked breath.

“Pretty good,” he comments, thighs twitching slightly against Kai’s own. Taemin is down to his boxers, cotton thin things that allow Kai to feel Taemin’s dick against his navel and drive him into being a tad slutty. “Hm, really good.”

“Good?” Kai repeats, now traveling downwards with his mouth, tasting the slight salty flavor of Taemin’s skin. Taemin’s flesh is firm, and warm, and all Kai wants to do right now is to take it slowly, to appreciate every second till he can’t stand it anymore.

“Hmm,” Taemin hums, and, when Kai grazes his teeth on his navel, “Ooh,” he yelps as he bucks his hips. Taemin’s underwear bulges up against Kai’s chest. Kai is about to go insane.

“Fuck, Taemin,” he curses as his hands caress the inner part of Taemin’s thighs, not touching, not touching yet, and it’s so hard to hold it back. “I love you. I really love you.”

Taemin chuckles breathlessly, getting leverage on his elbows to look at Kai in the eye. “So this is what love is, then?”

“This, and tearing your liver off for someone,” Kai corrects him, and, as Taemin laughs loudly at that, he adds, “and much more. So much more, you’ll see.”

At that, Taemin hums, both just pleased and sexual-pleased. “I’m looking forward to it,” he whispers, a hand of his caressing Kai’s hair and cheeks. “You’ll teach me, right?”

Kai nods vigorously, hands now circling the bulge of Taemin’s erection quite tightly. Ah, his naughty hands... “Step by step,” he promises, inching his fingers closer to the waistband of that one last piece of clothing. “I’ll teach you everything.”

A short epilogue, set a Terrestrial month after the Earth incident:

Ravi and Kai are sitting side by side on the couch, watching Jack ‘n’ Jill. For some reason, bounty heads have been popping up here and there like they’re the plague, but most of them are either terribly cheap or too hard to capture.

“That one sounds good,” Kai points at a bald scary-looking woman.

“Up in Umbriel. It’d be like chasing one rat in a mouse farm,” Ravi retorts. “Two thousand? Not worthy.”

Kai fumes briefly. “And that one?” he points at the gang Jill is talking about at the moment, a bunch of teenagers with scandalous hair colors and sparkly suits.

“Looks pretty good, but they’re too many. It’d be really hard to catch,” Ravi shrugs. “If you think we can...”

Kai fumes a little more. “I do think we can.”

“Then add them to the list. They were last seen in Rhea.”

“Rhea!” Kai pretty much howls. “Fuck Rhea!”

“Hey, money is money. And you’re the one who suggested them,” Ravi says. Kai fumes even more.

“We should’ve turned that little shit Timoteo in when we had the chance...” Kai curses under his breath.

Ravi sighs. “Can’t do anything about it now, can you?”

Timoteo is gone. As soon as his wound healed, he did what he always does when he stays over at the Kiev; he lingered around for a while, ate some meals, then stole shit and ran away. This time, he had stolen a whole lot of food from the kitchen, Kai’s very own toolbox (the fit Kai threw when he found out it had been stolen was magnificent), fuel for his mono, and some of Ravi’s gadgets. Once again, Timoteo knew how to make people love or hate him at his will.

“Next time we’ll do it,” Kai promises.

“Next time,” Ravi joins into the pledge.

But they never do.

“Guys,” Taemin interrupts their argument a bit carefully. He’s lying on the floor, big headphones on his ears, a laptop right before his hands. “Got one thousand for this match. How much more?”

With his movements outside the ship limited by the possibility of being spotted by the police once again, Taemin had found solace in the ship, and, with it, had also found a way to make money: online professional chess matches. With a brain much more advanced in the calculus part than the usual human being, Taemin is an ace at chess, and most card games as well, even though he’s shit at poker for some reason. He makes the most money he can; it’s not much, but it’s enough.

“Ooh, so you won again,” Kai grins, rolling out of the couch to lie down by Taemin’s side. “Impressive.”

“Well, as expected,” Taemin grins cheekily, bumping his head against Kai’s affectionately, even though he does it a bit harder than necessary. “I do calculus stuff. That’s my thing.” Then, he shatters the moment before Kai can take the chance to kiss him, turning to Ravi to ask, “Should I play another match? I could get one in two hours.”

“You can rest now, Taemin. Sorry for relying on you like this,” Ravi apologizes, shamed as a captain. “You’ve done enough for us. I’ll get some fungi at the market to put in the soup next time.”

“Speaking of soup,” Kai rises a little from the floor to sneak a peek at the kitchen, a bit concerned. “Are you sure dinner will turn out well...?”

Ravi shrugs. “They can fetch a stick. They can play twister, despite being colorblind. They can pilot a fully-armed heavy ass car,” he declares, also taking a look at the kitchen. “I’m pretty sure these dogs can cook a meal just fine.”

Yes, the dogs are cooking dinner. What a time to be alive.

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

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