for maudlinsky
Title: There Goes My Hero
For: maudlinsky
Pairing: Jiho/Taeil; Minhyuk/Jihoon/Kyung
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~7,600
Summary: Jiho is a paragon of heroic justice and Kyung is his archnemesis, and their sidekicks are helpful, sometimes, when they aren’t being incredibly useless or secretly dating each other.
The toaster is broken again.
Jiho inspects the malfunctioning kitchen appliance with the delicacy of a soldier checking an open field for land mines. After poking and prodding the metal appliance without losing any fingers in the process, he comes to the conclusion that the toaster is, indeed, merely broken and not booby trapped or otherwise tampered with by the likes of any criminal organizations. On one hand, Jiho is very glad that his toaster is not a bomb and it is just a toaster, but he is also very hungry and his toast is not going to make itself.
Just as Jiho is mourning the fact that his group isn’t affiliated with anyone capable of producing flames, not since they had to cut ties with Dragon Boy after an unfortunate incident involving Yukwon’s hair, his least helpful team member wanders into the kitchen with a Pop Tart in hand.
“It’s broken,” Jiho explains, gesturing to the toaster and shoving a corner of his bread slice in his mouth. He begins chewing with a perplexed look on his face, unsure whether the taste in his mouth is just the bland flavor of normal, untoasted bread or if he should have properly inspected the loaf for any molding or a long-past-due expiration date.
“Again?” Jaehyo whines. He sets the stiff Pop Tart on the counter and groans to himself.
None of them really know how to make breakfast without at least a toaster to aid them. They’re super heroes, not breakfast magicians, and unfortunately, none of them have been blessed with any power relating to food which cooks itself.
“We need Minhyuk hyung,” Jiho decides with a definitive nod.
He looks at Jaehyo expectantly until the other turns his head a few degrees to the side to bellow at the top of his lungs, “MINHYUK!”
Jiho rolls his eyes. Jaehyo’s power has nothing to do with his voice, but Jiho still thinks Jaehyo’s shriek is a few decibels too high to be quite normal.
“Maybe he’s not in,” Jaehyo suggests, after a few moments pass without a response from their resident technopath.
“How can he not be in? He has no life outside of his computers.”
Jaehyo shrugs and starts in on his cold Pop Tart, spilling crumbs all over the floor which Jiho stares at with a resigned look. For all of the extra high-tech adjustments Minhyuk has made to their base of operations, he hasn’t yet installed a self-cleaning floor. Jiho makes a mental note to inquire with Minhyuk later about the possibility of constructing some kind of a robotic maid.
“Okay, this is ridiculous,” Jaehyo says, pouting. “Here we are, eating cold bread and Pop Tarts, with a broken toaster, and we’re the best team of heroes in the City and we can’t even eat our breakfast right.”
“The best team in the City, huh,” Jiho huffs. “You practically don’t even have a power anymore.”
Jaehyo’s mouth drops open like it often does when their leader jumps straight into the insults first thing in the morning. Jiho watches him gawk for a moment as he tries to decide what to do about his ruined breakfast and finally tosses the half-eaten bread in the trash.
“I do so still have my power,” Jaehyo argues vehemently, nostrils flaring in his righteous early morning outrage. He fumbles in his pockets and pulls out his deck of cards in one hand, fanning the individual cards out between his fingers like a seasoned magician. Jiho can see where the corners are bent and many of them are heavily creased from the last fight, and his gut instinct is telling him to order Jaehyo to put the cards away before he winds up hurting himself, but his lack of a proper breakfast is making him feel rather grumpy and vindictive.
“You don’t have a toaster-fixing card in there, do you?” Jiho asks snidely.
Before Jaehyo can come up with some kind of a clever retort from his sneering mouth, a crashing noise from the hallway steals their attention away from the ridiculous argument and to the ball of black fur dashing through the opening into the kitchen. Jiho jumps out of the way as the creature makes a flying leap from the floor to the counter next to the toaster and nearly knocks the whole thing off the counter and onto the tile.
“Yukwon!” Jiho yells. “I thought I told you not to run around inside! And don’t sit on the counter like that. We eat off of there, you know.”
The spider monkey responds by sticking his tongue out while his tail reaches out to turn the coffee maker on.
“Have you seen Minhyuk?” Jaehyo asks from across the kitchen. He’s shuffling the card deck now, pressing them all together in a sorry attempt to flatten each card into its original, undamaged shape.
The monkey shakes his head and in the next instant, Yukwon jumps back to the floor in a crouch and rises again to his full human height, fixing his bed hair.
“Haven’t seen him all day,” Yukwon responds, leaning against the counter. “Why? What’s up?”
“Toaster’s broken,” Jiho and Jaehyo reply simultaneously, glaring at each other.
Yukwon raises his eyebrows. “Can’t Minhyuk hyung fix it?”
“He can,” Jiho sighs, “if we can find him.”
“I’ll go look for him,” Yukwon offers, and just as soon as he finishes talking to them, he’s running out of the kitchen on four thin, furry limbs, leaving behind the familiar stench of monkey fur that Jiho has long grown used to ignoring.
“Would you put those away?” Jiho asks testily as soon as Yukwon leaves the room. “I would really like for my kitchen to not blow up.”
“They still work,” Jaehyo snaps. “They just need a little tape or something.”
As if to prove a point, Jaehyo pulls a card out of the deck and Jiho braces himself just in case.
“Seven of clubs,” Jaehyo says, and Jiho expects the usual green-tinted ball of energy that Jaehyo usually summons with that card to appear in his outstretched palm. When nothing happens for several seconds, Jaehyo frowns and Jiho sighs in relief that at least nothing went horribly wrong.
“I don’t think it’s working,” Jiho points out, just because he feels like being an ass, and Jaehyo makes a frustrated face.
“Seven of clubs,” Jaehyo tries again, enunciating each word carefully, and then he brings his hand close to his face and stares with furrowed eyebrows. “Oh. Well. That’s something, I guess.”
“What?”
Jaehyo frowns as if he isn’t sure whether he should let Jiho in on his discovery, hesitantly holding his hand out. Jiho takes note of the green nail polish on each finger, which certainly hadn’t been there a moment before, and immediately bursts out laughing.
“It’s not funny!” Jaehyo protests.
“Don’t worry,” Jiho snorts, “if you can’t be a hero anymore, maybe you could at least open a salon or something.”
“I’ll fix them,” Jaehyo assures him, flattening each card in turn against the kitchen counter as best as he can.
Yukwon walks back into the kitchen in human form, looking entirely unamused.
“Minhyuk hyung says the toaster isn’t even plugged in,” he informs them, crossing his arms. “Thanks for wasting my time. Is the coffee ready yet?”
“What? How can it not be-”
Jiho tugs the toaster away from the wall plug and peers behind it. He turns towards his teammates slowly, a wide grin plastered across his face, and Jaehyo growls at him.
“Are you fucking serious?”
“I totally thought I had plugged it back in. Honest.”
“Coffee,” Yukwon repeats, walking past them and looking for his mug in the cupboards.
“Who the hell unplugs a toaster and doesn’t plug it back in?!” Jaehyo demands.
“Who the hell doesn’t think of checking that first?” Yukwon mutters under his breath.
Jiho ignores his teammates and grabs another bread slice to make his morning toast as Jaehyo starts going through his cards again.
“They’re not broken,” he mutters to himself, making Yukwon give him a look over his mug of hot coffee. “Okay. Let’s try this one. Jack of diamonds!”
Once again, nothing happens, and Yukwon snorts into his coffee as Jiho smirks towards Jaehyo and prepares to insult his useless power, but then a loud roar rips through the base, making the dishes piled up in the kitchen sink vibrate and clatter against each other, and Yukwon barely has the time to drop his mug onto the floor and shift before the tiger comes bounding into the room. The monkey escapes from the tiger’s swipe by a hair and barely manages to keep his furry head on his shoulders and Jiho springs into action, using his superior speed and strength to pin the snarling beast to the floor.
“See?” Jaehyo yelps from where he’s climbed up onto the counter, clutching at the top of the cabinets. “That one worked just fine!”
The electric blue glow of a multitude of computer screens reflecting off of his pale face and the accompanying hum of machinery are all that keep Minhyuk company in his “fortress of solitude”, as Jiho likes to call it. Although he and Jiho constructed the base themselves from the skeleton of an abandoned underground parking garage, it isn’t often that Minhyuk allows himself to enjoy the rest of the complex outside of the four walls he thinks of as “his” room. Even as he moves things around in each monitor, opening and closing browser windows with a thought, he can hear the commotion coming from the kitchen. The sudden, loud roar of a tiger suggests to him that Jaehyo has been playing with his faulty cards, but he doesn’t move beyond the twitch of a pinky finger, engrossed in his work and sure that he wouldn’t be able to help them much anyway. His power is ill-suited for combat and Minhyuk prefers to fight with intelligence and deception, working behind the scenes for his more physical-oriented teammates.
As Minhyuk is checking the security cameras for various local businesses, a new screen blips onto his main monitor and the text for an incoming call flashes bright green against the black background. Minhyuk concentrates on the screen to intercept the audio as he takes the call and transfers the audio feed to his head, establishing a telepathic link to the monitor.
“Jihoon?” he asks, feeling silly for having to make sure when he knows there isn’t anyone else who would need to communicate with him through the machine. He hasn’t spoken to Jihoon since the brawl at the drive-in, the night Kyung dropped an SUV on Yukwon and tried to skewer Jiho with the parking lot’s metal guard rails.
“Yeah,” Jihoon responds, quiet, and Minhyuk feels the irrational urge to get up and lock his door, even though he knows no one can hear the conversation happening in his mind.
“How is everything?” Minhyuk asks as he usually does. By “everything”, he always means Kyung, but Jihoon humors him anyway.
“It’s been quiet,” Jihoon replies. “We haven’t done much in the past few days. I think he’s still depressed that we lost the cat we were training to be his evil pet.”
“Oh. My condolences, I guess. How did it die?”
“No, we literally lost it. We can’t find it anywhere.”
Minhyuk rolls his eyes and hopes Jihoon can sense it through the link.
“You two are the worst villains I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.”
“Well, hyung’s tried to kill you all enough, but I’d agree that I’m not the best fit for the job.”
Minhyuk grins in spite of himself, feeling almost like he used to, back when they were all together. The mood doesn’t last very long.
“Which is why I need to tell you,” Jihoon continues, “I think you should check on the bakery when you get a chance.”
Minhyuk sits up quickly, already watching the monitor as the video feed comes onto the display.
“Shit.”
“Now, don’t say I never do you any favors,” Jihoon says, just before his voice disappears from Minhyuk’s head.
Minhyuk shoots out of his seat and prepares to go out as he reaches out to the radio in the kitchen to alert his team. Jiho yells at him for using appliances as speakerphones, mostly when he starts talking to them abruptly through their alarm clocks in the morning or tries to scare Jaehyo by talking to him through his ear buds while he listens to music, but he doesn’t have the time to run over to the kitchen.
“There’s an armed robbery happening at King’s Bakery,” he says, hearing the faint echo of his voice from far off. “We need to move out.”
“Good evening, citizens of New Daegu City. This is Foresight, bringing you the latest in future news,” a woman dressed in purple says, clutching her microphone to her chest as an unidentifiable figure dashes out of a small business in the background of the screen. “I’m standing in front of King’s Bakery on Second Street, where a theft is currently taking place inside the business. In just a few moments, the City’s resident ‘bad boy’ hero team, the Buster Crew, will be arriving to apprehend the criminal.”
A round of shouting coming from the inside of the bakery interrupts the reporter. Without missing a beat, the seasoned, capable reporter shifts a few degrees to the side to afford the camera crew a clear view of the front door, through which a great deal of commotion can be heard and seen.
“Wow, sounds like it’s getting pretty rowdy in there! Now then, the Buster Crew is a four man team of heroes who have largely been embraced by the City as a crowd favorite because of their unconventional methods and interesting powers. The members currently active in the Buster Crew are the indomitable leader Zico, the handsome Card Shark, the mysterious Technobomb, and everyone’s favorite furry friend, the Monkey King. As we all know, the Buster Crew initially was a team of six members, also consisting of the two former members, Mental Breaker and Fullmetal, before the team disbanded and the new Buster Crew was formed. Mental Breaker and Fullmetal went on to become one of the City’s most reviled supervillain duos, and the relationship between the Buster Crew and Mental Breaker is still strained at best, with Mental Breaker and Zico widely regarded as each other’s ‘archnemesis’.”
The female reporter leans towards the camera with a gleam in her eye, squeezing her microphone, just as the sound of shouting voices grows louder and louder in the video.
“And here they are! The Buster Crew has just arrived to save the day, and they are just on time! There goes the thief, running out the door with what looks like a bag of doughnuts and quite a bit of cash, and there’s Zico, racing after him with his super speed - and he’s got him! Let’s try to get a closer look.”
The camera view shifts to the side of the building and then the ground, jostling around as running footsteps distort the audio. A few seconds later, the view swings back up from the ground to capture the female reporter catching up to the lagging Technobomb, who is leisurely following his teammates at a distance.
“Technobomb! Technobomb, can you spare a few words? Do you recognize the thief? Where are Mental Breaker and Fullmetal now?”
The silent man peers into the camera, ignoring the reporter for the moment as he gazes quizzically into the lens and brushes his bangs to the side. Catching the reporter’s eye at last, the hero simply smiles, lifting a hand towards her microphone. With a single touch, the audio feed from the reporter’s microphone cuts out abruptly, leaving the video feed completely silent. The reporter can be seen gesturing angrily and pointing at the camera and at Technobomb as the young man says something to her and then waves at the camera with a small smirk, shifting away and breaking into a run after the distant image of his teammates escaping into an alleyway.
Right after stepping into the alley, Minhyuk gets a monkey thrown at his chest and he barely manages to catch Yukwon with his normal, human reflexes. He realizes that this is no ordinary “catch-the-criminal” escapade as Jiho gets flung from where he’s pinned the thief to the grimy floor into the brick wall of the alley, smacking into the hard surface with a sickening thud.
A familiar laugh preludes the entrance of an equally familiar duo stepping into the alleyway.
“Well, if it isn’t the League of Extraordinary Assholes! The Buster Crew must be pretty hard up if you’re going after common thieves nowadays,” a man in a deep blue outfit begins, his cape billowing behind him and a mask obscuring his face from view. Minhyuk recognizes him immediately, anyway; he would know that voice even in his sleep. “Zico, fancy meeting you here.”
“Mental Breaker,” Jiho shoots back, gritting his teeth as he pulls away from the wall. “What do you want?”
“Well, I noticed you were giving my friend here a hard time,” Kyung responds, resting a hand on the thief’s shoulder as his body jerks upright into a rigid, frozen standing position. The thief backs up several steps as soon as the hold of the telekinesis drops, clutching his bag of money and doughnuts close. Kyung inclines his head towards the bewildered crook. “You might want to take the money and run.”
“You set this whole thing up,” Jiho growls heatedly. “You made this guy do it.”
“What is the point of having the power of mind control if one never uses it?” Kyung asks brightly, watching as the confused thief turns and sprints out of the alley.
Minhyuk unconsciously touches the device hanging from his neck. He had designed it himself soon after Kyung had left them, to protect themselves from Kyung’s mental influence and thought-reading. Kyung catches his eye and glances down at the device, eyes crinkling behind his mask.
“Leave us alone,” Jiho demands, moving away from the wall. “Go back to whatever shithole you’ve cooped yourselves up in and stay out of our business.”
“Now, see, this is exactly why I left,” Kyung says with a frown. “All you ever do is give orders. It’s all you’re good for.” He glances towards Jaehyo, who has been inching closer to Jihoon. “Did you know everyone calls you ‘Zico and his Buster Crew’ now? I wouldn’t be surprised if the City starts to forget the rest of you have names.”
“We aren’t looking for recognition,” Yukwon interrupts him. “We’re just doing what we’ve always done - helping people.”
“Or have you already forgotten what we’re about?” Jaehyo asks testily.
Jihoon takes a step back and reaches for a section of pipe laying on the floor as Jaehyo takes another step towards him, twisting the metal into a more suitable weapon. Jaehyo backs up, looking torn, and Kyung takes the distraction as an opportunity to send the shards of glass littering the alleyway from broken bottles flying at Jaehyo.
The next several moments are chaotic and Minhyuk puts as much distance between himself and the fight as he can, searching for anything he could use as a weapon if need be. Kyung leaves him alone and focuses mostly on Jiho, deflecting superfast attacks with his mind and letting the alleyway take the beating as Jiho’s fists crumble brick and stone. Across the way, Yukwon and Jaehyo team up against the metalbending Jihoon, leaping out of the way as Jihoon takes a whole fire escape down. Yukwon jumps onto Jihoon’s back and tries to claw at his face as Jaehyo shakily shuffles through his faulty deck of cards and manages to turn Jihoon’s steel pipe into a stuffed koala instead of summoning his own weapon.
Overall, the fight is going nowhere fast, and Minhyuk settles on standing at the end of the alley to ward off pedestrians, holding a broken beer bottle just in case. A sudden shout of pain from Kyung draws his attention back to the fight, where Jiho has managed to land a hit to Kyung’s ribs, doubling the supervillain over, and Minhyuk jerks forward in surprise, heading towards them, just as a deep, loud rumbling noise fills the alleyway behind him.
Kyung seems to grab Jiho and lift him into the air with the power of his mind, catching him off guard, and the engine noises zip past Minhyuk as a motorcycle drives straight past him towards the fight. Minhyuk can only watch as the motorcycle suddenly veers, trying to get around them, and in the next second, Jiho is flung through the air, sailing straight into the owner of the motorcycle and toppling it over with the force of the blow. The grinding of the metal frame dragging across the alley, engine still gunning, hurts his ears as Minhyuk rushes forward to help the fallen boy where he’s laying on his side under the motorcycle and Jiho.
Jaehyo and Yukwon rush over right afterward, calling for Jiho, and Minhyuk reaches them last as Jiho stands up and immediately checks on the citizen he hit. When Minhyuk finally glances up to look around the alley again, Kyung and Jihoon are both long gone.
“Are you alright?”
The boy jerks in the direction of where Jiho is leaning against the outside of the bakery, giving him the most suspicious look, and Jiho supposes he deserves it for having spent the past couple hours hovering around and waiting for him to leave what is apparently the boy’s workplace. After helping him back up in the alleyway after the crash, he had run off into the bakery with a few boxes stacked up in his arms, presumably returning from making a delivery for the bakery, and Jiho had lost sight of him before he could even ask any questions.
He only wants to make sure the guy’s okay, Jiho tells himself. He did sort of accidentally knock him off of his motorcycle earlier - there could be serious injuries to tend to and Jiho would be neglecting his job as a hero not to take responsibility for it. Or something.
“What are you still doing here?” he asks, taking his bike off of its kickstand.
“Uh,” Jiho responds, waving his hand around slightly, “just checking in. You got pretty banged up back there.”
He looks down at where the boy’s hands have been hastily bandaged, the skin cut and scraped from landing on the floor of the alley.
The other shakes his head, fiddling with the ignition. “It’s all on my hands. I didn’t get hurt anywhere else, thanks to my gear.”
Jiho nods gratefully. The boy is wearing a leather jacket and jeans, and he clearly remembers him wearing the black helmet sitting on the back of the bike. He shudders to think of how much worse the injuries could have been had the boy not been riding safely.
“Listen, I’m sorry - um, what’s your name?”
“Taeil.”
“I’m sorry for what happened, Taeil. I didn’t mean to hit you.”
“You broke my bike.”
“I...what?”
Taeil gestures to where he’s turning the ignition switch and nothing is happening, repeating the action several times to help the information sink in for Jiho.
“My bike. It won’t turn on.”
“Shit. I’m sorry?”
Taeil levels a flat look at him and Jiho swears he can feel a chilly gust of air coming right out of Taeil’s eyes at him. He ignores the shiver in his spine and tries to give Taeil a wide, placating grin, holding his hands up.
“Do you want me to help you fix it? I’ll find somewhere you can take it.”
“No thanks. No one’s better than my mechanic.”
Taeil pulls the bike out and backs it up to move it up the ramp onto the sidewalk, walking alongside it.
“Hey, wait, are you walking home?” Jiho hops up onto the sidewalk and starts following Taeil, faltering only slightly when Taeil looks back over his shoulder with a frown.
“I don’t have much of a choice,” Taeil points out. “I’m only a few blocks away, anyway.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jiho offers. “I wouldn’t want anything else to happen. You have to be careful around here.”
Taeil stops walking, making Jiho bump into the back of the motorcycle in surprise.
“Do you think I can’t protect myself?” Taeil asks. “Just because I’m not superhuman, it doesn’t mean I’m helpless.”
“That’s not what I-”
“You heroes are all the same. You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” Taeil says, shaking his head and continuing to move forward.
Jiho stays rooted to the spot for a moment, taken aback by Taeil’s attitude, and then he hurries to catch up, feeling incensed by the generalization.
“Hey, if it weren’t for heroes, the citizens would have no one to help fight off all of the villains! You might be able to defend yourself from other people, but you can’t do much against someone using their powers for evil. You need help from us.”
“What, like that other guy from the alley? I don’t remember him doing anything evil to me. I remember you flying into me and breaking my bike.”
“Which was his fault!” Jiho argues. “He’s the one who made me fly into you!”
“That’s not what I saw.”
Jiho barely refrains from snapping back at Taeil and doing something ridiculously childish like stomping his feet. He crosses his arms over his chest and walks along in moody silence for a moment. When the urge to open his mouth proves too strong for his willpower, Jiho takes a long stride to walk beside Taeil and grabs a hold of the other handlebar of the bike. Taeil looks at him sharply, as if he’s about to demand Jiho let him walk the bike himself, but then he relents and leans up to let him share the weight of the bike with a resigned sigh.
“You really don’t like people doing things for you, do you?”
“I can take care of myself. People seem to think I can’t, and it bothers me.”
Jiho considers this. “I’ll tell you what. If we get ambushed, I’ll let you take half of the bad guys and I’ll take the other half.”
Taeil glances his way. He still looks guarded, but his shoulders look a little more relaxed. It’s a start, Jiho figures.
“How far do you live, anyway?” Jiho asks, looking around at the unfamiliar roads.
“Just a couple more blocks.”
Jiho nods, and he tries not to let his disappointment show on his face. He isn’t sure why, but he’s reluctant to let Taeil go. It must be that he’s concerned about his safety. After all, he wouldn’t put it past Kyung to try to ambush them the moment they go their separate ways at Taeil’s house. It would be his duty to rush back in and save Taeil from the clutches of evil, and then perhaps Taeil would be so grateful that he would invite Jiho in for drinks. Sneaking a look at the other boy, Jiho moves his hand a little more towards Taeil’s hand on the handlebar, falters, and then moves it back. He suspects Taeil wouldn’t be too keen on this whole idea of Jiho being his “savior”. He would probably much sooner yell at Jiho for treating him like a useless damsel in distress than offer him any drinks.
Taeil shoots a look at Jiho then, as if he can sense Jiho fantasizing about him, and Jiho looks away, pretending to read a sign on a storefront.
“Well, this is home,” Taeil speaks up after another two blocks, stopping in his tracks.
Jiho frowns down at the bike. He looks up at Taeil with what he hopes is only a minimum of hopeful optimism.
“Maybe we’ll run into each other again?”
“Maybe,” Taeil shrugs simply, steering his bike towards the door. “Bye.”
“Oh, bye,” Jiho replies, voice soft with disappointment. Taeil hardly even notices him waving goodbye as he heads inside the building and leaves Jiho standing on the sidewalk.
This day was truly not his lucky day.
When Minhyuk can’t find the door after several minutes of searching, feeling along the outer walls of the large, concrete structure for the hidden mechanism lying beneath the surface that would usually pop the lever holding the entrance closed, he realizes that something has been changed. He can usually find the entrance with a single brush of his fingers over the wall, locating the source of the electrical pulse and manipulating it through the concrete to coax the lock to engage, but his manipulation doesn’t seem to be working and he can’t feel the familiar spike of energy beneath his fingertips at all, nothing but cold, hard concrete greeting his flesh.
He settles on finding his own way in, the old-fashioned way, by announcing his presence. All he needs to do is remove the chain hanging from his neck, opening up his mind, for the door to slide open with a mechanical whir and Kyung’s annoyed face to appear in its place.
“Yeah, I couldn’t find your doorbell,” Minhyuk jokes flatly, staring back at Kyung.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Kyung asks, but he isn’t blocking the doorway with his body and Minhyuk thinks that’s as good a reason as any to waltz inside past his gawking ex-teammate.
“You changed your locks. I didn’t realize you knew how to technopath-proof your base.”
“Well, it became necessary after the last time you broke in on us,” Kyung grumbles to himself, closing the door behind him with a wave of his hand. “Only I can open and close the doors now.”
“Keeping Jihoon locked inside like a princess in a tower?”
“All he needs to do to leave is ask.”
“I don’t know,” Minhyuk says, walking down the hallway without waiting for Kyung to escort him. “It sounds an awful lot like a hostage situation to me.”
Suddenly, he isn’t moving anymore, and Kyung catches up to him with slow, measured steps, turning to stand in front of him with a look so bitter Minhyuk is reminded of that last day, Kyung leaving in the dead of night, disappearing with Jihoon and ignoring Minhyuk’s devastated expression as he held Minhyuk in place with his mind to prevent him from following them out into the night.
“I told you never to do that again,” Minhyuk says, and it’s a little surprising to him how gravelly he sounds, as if his voice was dragged through broken glass and put back in his throat bloodied and torn.
The hold over his body disappears and his heart unclenches in his throat, Kyung dropping his gaze and leading him through the base without another word. Minhyuk puts the necklace back on immediately to prevent any further power abuse and walks after Kyung.
“So,” Kyung repeats himself once he’s made his way into the large kitchen, “what is it that you want?”
Minhyuk looks around. Kyung’s base of operations is much more austere, compared to the flashy gadgets littering the base he and Jiho constructed, and Minhyuk appreciates the streamlined structure of the base, the simple decorations and the silver furniture. There is an assortment of other metals throughout the base, most of it in Jihoon’s room and his section of the base, which Minhyuk can tell Jihoon designed himself.
“I just wanted to check in,” Minhyuk says, slipping his hands into his pockets as he watches Kyung fiddle with the microwave. “You injured a civilian today, remember? You don’t hurt regular people if you can help it.”
“He got in the way,” Kyung shrugs, moving a pizza onto the counter and sprinkling extra cheese over it. “It’s not that big a deal.”
Minhyuk moves closer to get a whiff of the pizza, stomach gurgling. “What if you had killed him?”
“I didn’t.”
“But what if you had? Would it still be no big deal?”
Kyung looks up at him and narrows his eyes at Minhyuk’s proximity. “You aren’t getting any pizza.”
Minhyuk grins, leaning his elbows on the kitchen counter, and Kyung moves the pizza further away from him, cutting it into slices.
“I’m a villain now,” Kyung reminds him. “Should I be concerned if people get killed anymore?”
“You’re still the same person,” Minhyuk says, rubbing his thumb over his mouth boredly as he watches Kyung get a plate for himself.
“Am I?” Kyung asks offhandedly, moving sideways to grab a fork out of a drawer.
Minhyuk realizes Kyung is trying to keep from turning his back to him and he finds this ridiculous and almost brings it up to Kyung. He doesn’t have anything to hurt Kyung with and his powers would be absolutely no match for Kyung’s, especially in his own base.
“What if you killed one of us?” Minhyuk asks instead.
He notices that Kyung hesitates as he moves a slice of pizza onto his plate, hovering for a millisecond before he goes back to the task at hand.
“Isn’t that just the risk that we take?” Kyung asks, his voice a little too bright for the topic. “I’ve been fighting you all for a while now. Eventually, someone’s going to get hurt.”
“And it won’t be you or Jihoon.”
“No,” Kyung replies firmly.
“What about me? Are you going to hurt me?”
“You aren’t my main target.”
“But I am part of the fight. They’re going to notice eventually, if you keep avoiding me. You need to at least pretend like you want to fight me.”
Kyung stops with his droopy pizza in front of his mouth, slanting his eyebrows.
“Do you think I’m sparing you?” he asks incredulously.
“You didn’t even look at me today, and I was wide open. I could have done something to you.”
“You have no way of hurting me. Why should I even be concerned about you?”
“Don’t underestimate me, Kyung,” Minhyuk warns him. “You don’t know what I’ll do.”
Kyung bursts into laughter, setting his pizza down. “There’s nothing you could do to hurt me.”
“There is something.”
Minhyuk casts his gaze towards the hall, in the direction of Jihoon’s room. He looks back at Kyung and Kyung is glaring at him with wide eyes. He’s glad that he has the necklace on, or else Minhyuk fears his head might have been exploding at that moment.
“Did you think bringing him here would keep him from me?” Minhyuk asks, resting his arms on the table.
“I know he still talks to you,” Kyung admits, voice tight. “He asked me not to read his thoughts, but I still do from time to time. I know you communicate.”
“Are you angry?”
“No.” Kyung takes a bite of pizza and drops the slice on his plate, chewing thoughtfully. “I knew it would be difficult for him, turning against you.”
Minhyuk watches him in silence, looking him over in an appraising manner.
“You know why he decided to come with you, right?”
Kyung glares at him again and Minhyuk wonders whether Kyung is going to have a stomach ache from eating such an upsetting dinner.
“He didn’t want you to be alone.”
Kyung rolls his eyes, leaning back in his chair and avoiding his eyes.
“You knew Jihoon would follow you if you tried to leave without anyone else knowing, so you told him and no one else. You didn’t think I’d find out.” Minhyuk smirks and leans in towards Kyung. “But he tells me everything, Kyung. I knew before you’d even packed your bags.”
“Jihoon doesn’t keep secrets very well,” Kyung agrees. “It’s one of his only faults.”
“What I want to know,” Minhyuk interrupts him, grabbing the edges of the table and leaning across it even further, “is why the hell you didn’t let me come with you.”
Kyung’s eyes harden the way they do when he’s trying to steel his emotions and Minhyuk wants to laugh at him. Minhyuk has never been able to read anyone’s mind, not like Kyung can, but he’s always been able to read Kyung’s expressions like a book.
“Why would I let my enemy know where I was going?”
“I was never your enemy until the moment you forced me to stay with them.”
Kyung sweeps his plate to the side and the fork goes flying off, clattering onto the floor noisily, and Minhyuk wonders if Jihoon heard it in his room. Kyung leans in towards him to meet him in the middle of the table, mouth set in a hard line.
“You’re loyal to Jiho, not to me,” Kyung snarls into the space between them. “I know you’d still follow him to the ends of the earth. I don’t need or want someone like you around me anymore.”
“Don’t fucking pretend you don’t know what you were doing that night,” Minhyuk returns. “There’s a reason you brought Jihoon along and there’s also a reason you left me behind. Don’t think I don’t know what that reason is.”
“Yeah?” Kyung demands. “Why don’t you tell me what that reason is, since you claim to know more about my own intentions than I do?”
“You left me so you’d always have a reason to come back,” Minhyuk answers easily. “Even if Jiho never apologized to you, even if they never accepted you again, you’d still have something to keep drawing you back to us.”
“And you’re supposed to mean enough to me to be some kind of an anchor?”
“If I didn’t mean anything to you, you would have let me come with you so you could use my powers. Instead, you made me stay, because you know I still want to do good by people.” Minhyuk crosses his arms and gives him a pointed look. “I may not be more loyal to Jiho than to you, but I am a hell of a lot more accustomed to being a hero than a villain.”
“So is Jihoon.”
“So what does that say about how much you care about him compared to how much you care for me?”
Kyung scoffs to himself, a little too exaggerated, and makes a show of rolling his eyes at Minhyuk.
“You think you mean more to me than my sidekick?”
“Your sidekick.” Minhyuk nods, standing up from the table. “Not your partner?”
Kyung’s face falls. “My partner. That’s what I meant.”
“Right.” Minhyuk takes a few steps out of the kitchen. “So, when you read Jihoon’s mind and you see the way he thinks about me, do you get more jealous of me or of him?”
Kyung sputters, pizza falling out of his hand, and Minhyuk shrugs hastily.
“Just wondering.”
With that, Minhyuk escapes down the hall towards Jihoon’s room, and he smirks to himself when Kyung’s furious, expletive-laden text message makes its way from Kyung’s phone in the kitchen to his brain.
The sweet aroma of bear claws, muffins, tartlets and cream pies follows Jiho out the door as he goes to stand and wait for the afternoon to wind down, leaning against the storefront of King’s Bakery with a cupcake. The sun warms the savory treat in his hand and makes him squint as it moves overhead, giving him a scowl that causes the pedestrians passing him by on the sidewalk to give him a wide berth. He thinks about how Kyung always used to tease him and say that his best disguise is his own face, because no one ever thinks he looks heroic when he’s grimacing at the world with his usual calculating stare. Kyung would have been laughing at him right now, surely, if he could only see him, eating his cupcake and lying in wait for a certain delivery boy to wander into his view. Jiho is fairly sure Kyung would have called him desperate and sad, and the thought isn’t exactly comforting to him. He can just hear him now, cackling to himself in that crinkly-eyed way of his, Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
The front door opens with a faint jingle from the interior of the store, and the familiar footsteps of a pair of army boots catches Jiho’s interested ear. Jiho looks over just as Taeil steps out, recognizing him and looking stunned.
“Hey,” Jiho greets him, leaning away from the wall. “I noticed you fixed your bike.”
“Yeah, just yesterday,” Taeil says, sounding a little awed. “Are you stalking me?”
“The cupcakes are really good here,” Jiho replies quickly. “I wanted some dessert.”
“And then you decided to eat it here, in front of the store,” Taeil mutters in disbelief. “Like a stalker.”
Jiho grins and takes a few steps towards Taeil’s bike as Taeil moves to it, unstrapping his helmet. “Fine, you win. I was waiting for you.” He watches as Taeil sets his helmet on his head, easy and familiar, and the way his denim jeans stretch over his legs as Taeil moves the kickstand and gets ready to mount the bike. “Waiting for you to come out, to see you, to talk to you.”
“I don’t get it,” Taeil replies honestly. He looks over at Jiho. “What do you want from me?”
Jiho rocks on his feet, tucking his fingers in his front pockets and grinning up at Taeil like a boy much younger than he actually is.
“I want to get on the back of your bike and go somewhere with you.” He shrugs. “Wherever you want to go.”
“Uh huh.” Taeil straddles his bike and balances it between his legs like a pro, fastening his helmet and running his hands over the handlebars slowly, wrapping each gloved finger tightly over the curves. “And why should I take you?”
“Cause I’m not only a hero,” Jiho assures him. “I’m also just a regular guy trying to go out with another regular guy on his sexy motorcycle.”
“Is that so?”
Taeil gives him a smile, just reckless enough to twist Jiho’s insides like the pretzels on display in the bakery, and enough to make him think he would gladly ride into hell on the back of Taeil’s bike if it meant he could wrap his arms around Taeil’s waist, maybe wrap his legs around Taeil later if the opportunity knocks.
“Hop on,” Taeil says, tilting his head and fixing Jiho with a stare that starts up a chorus of angels in Jiho’s over-imaginative brain. “While I’m still in the mood.”
“Yes,” Jiho responds, already swinging his leg over the bike, fingers slipping into place on Taeil’s waist.
“How do you like theme parks?” Taeil asks loudly as he guns the engine.
“I am pro-theme parks,” Jiho shouts, clutching onto him for dear life, and as they take off at a fast clip, racing around the next street corner, he can’t help but feel that even though he has superhuman powers and is faster and stronger than anyone he’s ever known, he’s still going to have a hard time keeping up with the man in his arms, racing them into paradise.
“How’s it going?”
Minhyuk groans lightly, stretching his arms out behind his chair and popping his stiff shoulders.
“You know how it is,” he sighs, rubbing his arm, “it’s not easy being the watcher of the world.”
“Oh, come on,” Jihoon chuckles over the line. “I know you’re really just watching videos of cats on fifteen different monitors.”
“Hmm,” Minhyuk murmurs, clicking out of said cat videos with a guilty conscience. “How is everything with you?”
“Kyung hyung’s still kind of freaked out about...you know.”
“Well, what was he expecting? Nobody asked him to barge in on us while we were getting to know each other Biblically.”
“I think he’s having a heart attack in the kitchen as we speak. He’s been eating cake pretty much nonstop. I’m going to have to stage an intervention pretty soon.”
“Yeah, we don’t want him to have to put a few extra notches in his villain belt.”
“How’s everyone else?”
“Well, our brave leader ran away with a man who smelled like pastries, so we’ve been holding the fort down.”
“Hmm, I didn’t know hyung had such a sweet tooth.”
“I know. Who’d have thought?”
Minhyuk scratches his chest, glancing at the security cameras boredly. There hasn’t been a whole lot going on in the City that would require their attention. He supposes this is a good thing, with Jiho temporarily out of the picture, since he’s the only member of their outfit who isn’t totally useless now, but a part of him is always itching for a reason to run out the door and save some people.
“Wait,” Jihoon speaks up. “I think he’s outside the door.”
Minhyuk raises an eyebrow as he listens to the rustling sound of Jihoon moving about and opening the door. He laughs to himself as he can hear Kyung startle and Jihoon talk to him in that huffy, husky tone he takes when he gets all riled up.
“Technobomb,” Kyung barks into his head, making Minhyuk wince and rub at his temple. “You are wasting all of my partner’s precious time while he’s supposed to be researching piranha-infested moats.”
“I’m telling you, there were zero hits on eBay,” Jihoon shouts in the background of Kyung’s telepathic line.
“We do have an Amazon account, you know. Did you try there?”
“Kyung,” Minhyuk interrupts their squabbling, mind spinning from having to listen to both of them at the same time, “I wanted to ask you something.”
“What,” Kyung deadpans, already sounding wary of him.
“While you’re ordering things, could you possibly invest in some better bed frames for your base? I think Jihoon and I put quite a dent in his the other night and I’m very concern-”
“ALRIGHT, I’LL JUST LEAVE YOU TO IT, THEN,” Kyung says, quite alarmed, as he seemingly leaves the room.
Jihoon comes back laughing and gasping for breath. “You’re terrible!”
“It was a legitimate question,” Minhyuk defends himself. “Those beds are a safety hazard.”
“Do you think he’ll ever come around?” Jihoon asks, still light-hearted despite the serious note in his question.
“Of course. Despite all appearances, Kyung does still love me.”
Jihoon chuckles to himself. “I know.”
“Do me a favor and go put ranch dressing in his shampoo.”
“I’m on it.”
Minhyuk severs the connection with a soft grin and settles in for another long afternoon of cat videos and gossipy news websites. He isn’t even two minutes into a video of two cats trying to run on a treadmill with limited success when Jaehyo barges into his room, breathing heavily and wild-eyed. Minhyuk shoots to his feet.
“What is it?” he asks, grabbing onto Jaehyo’s arms.
“Hurry,” Jaehyo gasps, clamping his hand down on Minhyuk’s shoulder. “Come quick. We-we need your help.”
“Is someone attacking? Is somebody hurt?”
Jaehyo shakes his head vigorously, catching his breath. He lifts his head and gives Minhyuk the most serious look as he steadies himself.
“It’s Kwon,” he says. “He’s broken the microwave again.”
For: maudlinsky
Pairing: Jiho/Taeil; Minhyuk/Jihoon/Kyung
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~7,600
Summary: Jiho is a paragon of heroic justice and Kyung is his archnemesis, and their sidekicks are helpful, sometimes, when they aren’t being incredibly useless or secretly dating each other.
The toaster is broken again.
Jiho inspects the malfunctioning kitchen appliance with the delicacy of a soldier checking an open field for land mines. After poking and prodding the metal appliance without losing any fingers in the process, he comes to the conclusion that the toaster is, indeed, merely broken and not booby trapped or otherwise tampered with by the likes of any criminal organizations. On one hand, Jiho is very glad that his toaster is not a bomb and it is just a toaster, but he is also very hungry and his toast is not going to make itself.
Just as Jiho is mourning the fact that his group isn’t affiliated with anyone capable of producing flames, not since they had to cut ties with Dragon Boy after an unfortunate incident involving Yukwon’s hair, his least helpful team member wanders into the kitchen with a Pop Tart in hand.
“It’s broken,” Jiho explains, gesturing to the toaster and shoving a corner of his bread slice in his mouth. He begins chewing with a perplexed look on his face, unsure whether the taste in his mouth is just the bland flavor of normal, untoasted bread or if he should have properly inspected the loaf for any molding or a long-past-due expiration date.
“Again?” Jaehyo whines. He sets the stiff Pop Tart on the counter and groans to himself.
None of them really know how to make breakfast without at least a toaster to aid them. They’re super heroes, not breakfast magicians, and unfortunately, none of them have been blessed with any power relating to food which cooks itself.
“We need Minhyuk hyung,” Jiho decides with a definitive nod.
He looks at Jaehyo expectantly until the other turns his head a few degrees to the side to bellow at the top of his lungs, “MINHYUK!”
Jiho rolls his eyes. Jaehyo’s power has nothing to do with his voice, but Jiho still thinks Jaehyo’s shriek is a few decibels too high to be quite normal.
“Maybe he’s not in,” Jaehyo suggests, after a few moments pass without a response from their resident technopath.
“How can he not be in? He has no life outside of his computers.”
Jaehyo shrugs and starts in on his cold Pop Tart, spilling crumbs all over the floor which Jiho stares at with a resigned look. For all of the extra high-tech adjustments Minhyuk has made to their base of operations, he hasn’t yet installed a self-cleaning floor. Jiho makes a mental note to inquire with Minhyuk later about the possibility of constructing some kind of a robotic maid.
“Okay, this is ridiculous,” Jaehyo says, pouting. “Here we are, eating cold bread and Pop Tarts, with a broken toaster, and we’re the best team of heroes in the City and we can’t even eat our breakfast right.”
“The best team in the City, huh,” Jiho huffs. “You practically don’t even have a power anymore.”
Jaehyo’s mouth drops open like it often does when their leader jumps straight into the insults first thing in the morning. Jiho watches him gawk for a moment as he tries to decide what to do about his ruined breakfast and finally tosses the half-eaten bread in the trash.
“I do so still have my power,” Jaehyo argues vehemently, nostrils flaring in his righteous early morning outrage. He fumbles in his pockets and pulls out his deck of cards in one hand, fanning the individual cards out between his fingers like a seasoned magician. Jiho can see where the corners are bent and many of them are heavily creased from the last fight, and his gut instinct is telling him to order Jaehyo to put the cards away before he winds up hurting himself, but his lack of a proper breakfast is making him feel rather grumpy and vindictive.
“You don’t have a toaster-fixing card in there, do you?” Jiho asks snidely.
Before Jaehyo can come up with some kind of a clever retort from his sneering mouth, a crashing noise from the hallway steals their attention away from the ridiculous argument and to the ball of black fur dashing through the opening into the kitchen. Jiho jumps out of the way as the creature makes a flying leap from the floor to the counter next to the toaster and nearly knocks the whole thing off the counter and onto the tile.
“Yukwon!” Jiho yells. “I thought I told you not to run around inside! And don’t sit on the counter like that. We eat off of there, you know.”
The spider monkey responds by sticking his tongue out while his tail reaches out to turn the coffee maker on.
“Have you seen Minhyuk?” Jaehyo asks from across the kitchen. He’s shuffling the card deck now, pressing them all together in a sorry attempt to flatten each card into its original, undamaged shape.
The monkey shakes his head and in the next instant, Yukwon jumps back to the floor in a crouch and rises again to his full human height, fixing his bed hair.
“Haven’t seen him all day,” Yukwon responds, leaning against the counter. “Why? What’s up?”
“Toaster’s broken,” Jiho and Jaehyo reply simultaneously, glaring at each other.
Yukwon raises his eyebrows. “Can’t Minhyuk hyung fix it?”
“He can,” Jiho sighs, “if we can find him.”
“I’ll go look for him,” Yukwon offers, and just as soon as he finishes talking to them, he’s running out of the kitchen on four thin, furry limbs, leaving behind the familiar stench of monkey fur that Jiho has long grown used to ignoring.
“Would you put those away?” Jiho asks testily as soon as Yukwon leaves the room. “I would really like for my kitchen to not blow up.”
“They still work,” Jaehyo snaps. “They just need a little tape or something.”
As if to prove a point, Jaehyo pulls a card out of the deck and Jiho braces himself just in case.
“Seven of clubs,” Jaehyo says, and Jiho expects the usual green-tinted ball of energy that Jaehyo usually summons with that card to appear in his outstretched palm. When nothing happens for several seconds, Jaehyo frowns and Jiho sighs in relief that at least nothing went horribly wrong.
“I don’t think it’s working,” Jiho points out, just because he feels like being an ass, and Jaehyo makes a frustrated face.
“Seven of clubs,” Jaehyo tries again, enunciating each word carefully, and then he brings his hand close to his face and stares with furrowed eyebrows. “Oh. Well. That’s something, I guess.”
“What?”
Jaehyo frowns as if he isn’t sure whether he should let Jiho in on his discovery, hesitantly holding his hand out. Jiho takes note of the green nail polish on each finger, which certainly hadn’t been there a moment before, and immediately bursts out laughing.
“It’s not funny!” Jaehyo protests.
“Don’t worry,” Jiho snorts, “if you can’t be a hero anymore, maybe you could at least open a salon or something.”
“I’ll fix them,” Jaehyo assures him, flattening each card in turn against the kitchen counter as best as he can.
Yukwon walks back into the kitchen in human form, looking entirely unamused.
“Minhyuk hyung says the toaster isn’t even plugged in,” he informs them, crossing his arms. “Thanks for wasting my time. Is the coffee ready yet?”
“What? How can it not be-”
Jiho tugs the toaster away from the wall plug and peers behind it. He turns towards his teammates slowly, a wide grin plastered across his face, and Jaehyo growls at him.
“Are you fucking serious?”
“I totally thought I had plugged it back in. Honest.”
“Coffee,” Yukwon repeats, walking past them and looking for his mug in the cupboards.
“Who the hell unplugs a toaster and doesn’t plug it back in?!” Jaehyo demands.
“Who the hell doesn’t think of checking that first?” Yukwon mutters under his breath.
Jiho ignores his teammates and grabs another bread slice to make his morning toast as Jaehyo starts going through his cards again.
“They’re not broken,” he mutters to himself, making Yukwon give him a look over his mug of hot coffee. “Okay. Let’s try this one. Jack of diamonds!”
Once again, nothing happens, and Yukwon snorts into his coffee as Jiho smirks towards Jaehyo and prepares to insult his useless power, but then a loud roar rips through the base, making the dishes piled up in the kitchen sink vibrate and clatter against each other, and Yukwon barely has the time to drop his mug onto the floor and shift before the tiger comes bounding into the room. The monkey escapes from the tiger’s swipe by a hair and barely manages to keep his furry head on his shoulders and Jiho springs into action, using his superior speed and strength to pin the snarling beast to the floor.
“See?” Jaehyo yelps from where he’s climbed up onto the counter, clutching at the top of the cabinets. “That one worked just fine!”
The electric blue glow of a multitude of computer screens reflecting off of his pale face and the accompanying hum of machinery are all that keep Minhyuk company in his “fortress of solitude”, as Jiho likes to call it. Although he and Jiho constructed the base themselves from the skeleton of an abandoned underground parking garage, it isn’t often that Minhyuk allows himself to enjoy the rest of the complex outside of the four walls he thinks of as “his” room. Even as he moves things around in each monitor, opening and closing browser windows with a thought, he can hear the commotion coming from the kitchen. The sudden, loud roar of a tiger suggests to him that Jaehyo has been playing with his faulty cards, but he doesn’t move beyond the twitch of a pinky finger, engrossed in his work and sure that he wouldn’t be able to help them much anyway. His power is ill-suited for combat and Minhyuk prefers to fight with intelligence and deception, working behind the scenes for his more physical-oriented teammates.
As Minhyuk is checking the security cameras for various local businesses, a new screen blips onto his main monitor and the text for an incoming call flashes bright green against the black background. Minhyuk concentrates on the screen to intercept the audio as he takes the call and transfers the audio feed to his head, establishing a telepathic link to the monitor.
“Jihoon?” he asks, feeling silly for having to make sure when he knows there isn’t anyone else who would need to communicate with him through the machine. He hasn’t spoken to Jihoon since the brawl at the drive-in, the night Kyung dropped an SUV on Yukwon and tried to skewer Jiho with the parking lot’s metal guard rails.
“Yeah,” Jihoon responds, quiet, and Minhyuk feels the irrational urge to get up and lock his door, even though he knows no one can hear the conversation happening in his mind.
“How is everything?” Minhyuk asks as he usually does. By “everything”, he always means Kyung, but Jihoon humors him anyway.
“It’s been quiet,” Jihoon replies. “We haven’t done much in the past few days. I think he’s still depressed that we lost the cat we were training to be his evil pet.”
“Oh. My condolences, I guess. How did it die?”
“No, we literally lost it. We can’t find it anywhere.”
Minhyuk rolls his eyes and hopes Jihoon can sense it through the link.
“You two are the worst villains I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.”
“Well, hyung’s tried to kill you all enough, but I’d agree that I’m not the best fit for the job.”
Minhyuk grins in spite of himself, feeling almost like he used to, back when they were all together. The mood doesn’t last very long.
“Which is why I need to tell you,” Jihoon continues, “I think you should check on the bakery when you get a chance.”
Minhyuk sits up quickly, already watching the monitor as the video feed comes onto the display.
“Shit.”
“Now, don’t say I never do you any favors,” Jihoon says, just before his voice disappears from Minhyuk’s head.
Minhyuk shoots out of his seat and prepares to go out as he reaches out to the radio in the kitchen to alert his team. Jiho yells at him for using appliances as speakerphones, mostly when he starts talking to them abruptly through their alarm clocks in the morning or tries to scare Jaehyo by talking to him through his ear buds while he listens to music, but he doesn’t have the time to run over to the kitchen.
“There’s an armed robbery happening at King’s Bakery,” he says, hearing the faint echo of his voice from far off. “We need to move out.”
“Good evening, citizens of New Daegu City. This is Foresight, bringing you the latest in future news,” a woman dressed in purple says, clutching her microphone to her chest as an unidentifiable figure dashes out of a small business in the background of the screen. “I’m standing in front of King’s Bakery on Second Street, where a theft is currently taking place inside the business. In just a few moments, the City’s resident ‘bad boy’ hero team, the Buster Crew, will be arriving to apprehend the criminal.”
A round of shouting coming from the inside of the bakery interrupts the reporter. Without missing a beat, the seasoned, capable reporter shifts a few degrees to the side to afford the camera crew a clear view of the front door, through which a great deal of commotion can be heard and seen.
“Wow, sounds like it’s getting pretty rowdy in there! Now then, the Buster Crew is a four man team of heroes who have largely been embraced by the City as a crowd favorite because of their unconventional methods and interesting powers. The members currently active in the Buster Crew are the indomitable leader Zico, the handsome Card Shark, the mysterious Technobomb, and everyone’s favorite furry friend, the Monkey King. As we all know, the Buster Crew initially was a team of six members, also consisting of the two former members, Mental Breaker and Fullmetal, before the team disbanded and the new Buster Crew was formed. Mental Breaker and Fullmetal went on to become one of the City’s most reviled supervillain duos, and the relationship between the Buster Crew and Mental Breaker is still strained at best, with Mental Breaker and Zico widely regarded as each other’s ‘archnemesis’.”
The female reporter leans towards the camera with a gleam in her eye, squeezing her microphone, just as the sound of shouting voices grows louder and louder in the video.
“And here they are! The Buster Crew has just arrived to save the day, and they are just on time! There goes the thief, running out the door with what looks like a bag of doughnuts and quite a bit of cash, and there’s Zico, racing after him with his super speed - and he’s got him! Let’s try to get a closer look.”
The camera view shifts to the side of the building and then the ground, jostling around as running footsteps distort the audio. A few seconds later, the view swings back up from the ground to capture the female reporter catching up to the lagging Technobomb, who is leisurely following his teammates at a distance.
“Technobomb! Technobomb, can you spare a few words? Do you recognize the thief? Where are Mental Breaker and Fullmetal now?”
The silent man peers into the camera, ignoring the reporter for the moment as he gazes quizzically into the lens and brushes his bangs to the side. Catching the reporter’s eye at last, the hero simply smiles, lifting a hand towards her microphone. With a single touch, the audio feed from the reporter’s microphone cuts out abruptly, leaving the video feed completely silent. The reporter can be seen gesturing angrily and pointing at the camera and at Technobomb as the young man says something to her and then waves at the camera with a small smirk, shifting away and breaking into a run after the distant image of his teammates escaping into an alleyway.
Right after stepping into the alley, Minhyuk gets a monkey thrown at his chest and he barely manages to catch Yukwon with his normal, human reflexes. He realizes that this is no ordinary “catch-the-criminal” escapade as Jiho gets flung from where he’s pinned the thief to the grimy floor into the brick wall of the alley, smacking into the hard surface with a sickening thud.
A familiar laugh preludes the entrance of an equally familiar duo stepping into the alleyway.
“Well, if it isn’t the League of Extraordinary Assholes! The Buster Crew must be pretty hard up if you’re going after common thieves nowadays,” a man in a deep blue outfit begins, his cape billowing behind him and a mask obscuring his face from view. Minhyuk recognizes him immediately, anyway; he would know that voice even in his sleep. “Zico, fancy meeting you here.”
“Mental Breaker,” Jiho shoots back, gritting his teeth as he pulls away from the wall. “What do you want?”
“Well, I noticed you were giving my friend here a hard time,” Kyung responds, resting a hand on the thief’s shoulder as his body jerks upright into a rigid, frozen standing position. The thief backs up several steps as soon as the hold of the telekinesis drops, clutching his bag of money and doughnuts close. Kyung inclines his head towards the bewildered crook. “You might want to take the money and run.”
“You set this whole thing up,” Jiho growls heatedly. “You made this guy do it.”
“What is the point of having the power of mind control if one never uses it?” Kyung asks brightly, watching as the confused thief turns and sprints out of the alley.
Minhyuk unconsciously touches the device hanging from his neck. He had designed it himself soon after Kyung had left them, to protect themselves from Kyung’s mental influence and thought-reading. Kyung catches his eye and glances down at the device, eyes crinkling behind his mask.
“Leave us alone,” Jiho demands, moving away from the wall. “Go back to whatever shithole you’ve cooped yourselves up in and stay out of our business.”
“Now, see, this is exactly why I left,” Kyung says with a frown. “All you ever do is give orders. It’s all you’re good for.” He glances towards Jaehyo, who has been inching closer to Jihoon. “Did you know everyone calls you ‘Zico and his Buster Crew’ now? I wouldn’t be surprised if the City starts to forget the rest of you have names.”
“We aren’t looking for recognition,” Yukwon interrupts him. “We’re just doing what we’ve always done - helping people.”
“Or have you already forgotten what we’re about?” Jaehyo asks testily.
Jihoon takes a step back and reaches for a section of pipe laying on the floor as Jaehyo takes another step towards him, twisting the metal into a more suitable weapon. Jaehyo backs up, looking torn, and Kyung takes the distraction as an opportunity to send the shards of glass littering the alleyway from broken bottles flying at Jaehyo.
The next several moments are chaotic and Minhyuk puts as much distance between himself and the fight as he can, searching for anything he could use as a weapon if need be. Kyung leaves him alone and focuses mostly on Jiho, deflecting superfast attacks with his mind and letting the alleyway take the beating as Jiho’s fists crumble brick and stone. Across the way, Yukwon and Jaehyo team up against the metalbending Jihoon, leaping out of the way as Jihoon takes a whole fire escape down. Yukwon jumps onto Jihoon’s back and tries to claw at his face as Jaehyo shakily shuffles through his faulty deck of cards and manages to turn Jihoon’s steel pipe into a stuffed koala instead of summoning his own weapon.
Overall, the fight is going nowhere fast, and Minhyuk settles on standing at the end of the alley to ward off pedestrians, holding a broken beer bottle just in case. A sudden shout of pain from Kyung draws his attention back to the fight, where Jiho has managed to land a hit to Kyung’s ribs, doubling the supervillain over, and Minhyuk jerks forward in surprise, heading towards them, just as a deep, loud rumbling noise fills the alleyway behind him.
Kyung seems to grab Jiho and lift him into the air with the power of his mind, catching him off guard, and the engine noises zip past Minhyuk as a motorcycle drives straight past him towards the fight. Minhyuk can only watch as the motorcycle suddenly veers, trying to get around them, and in the next second, Jiho is flung through the air, sailing straight into the owner of the motorcycle and toppling it over with the force of the blow. The grinding of the metal frame dragging across the alley, engine still gunning, hurts his ears as Minhyuk rushes forward to help the fallen boy where he’s laying on his side under the motorcycle and Jiho.
Jaehyo and Yukwon rush over right afterward, calling for Jiho, and Minhyuk reaches them last as Jiho stands up and immediately checks on the citizen he hit. When Minhyuk finally glances up to look around the alley again, Kyung and Jihoon are both long gone.
“Are you alright?”
The boy jerks in the direction of where Jiho is leaning against the outside of the bakery, giving him the most suspicious look, and Jiho supposes he deserves it for having spent the past couple hours hovering around and waiting for him to leave what is apparently the boy’s workplace. After helping him back up in the alleyway after the crash, he had run off into the bakery with a few boxes stacked up in his arms, presumably returning from making a delivery for the bakery, and Jiho had lost sight of him before he could even ask any questions.
He only wants to make sure the guy’s okay, Jiho tells himself. He did sort of accidentally knock him off of his motorcycle earlier - there could be serious injuries to tend to and Jiho would be neglecting his job as a hero not to take responsibility for it. Or something.
“What are you still doing here?” he asks, taking his bike off of its kickstand.
“Uh,” Jiho responds, waving his hand around slightly, “just checking in. You got pretty banged up back there.”
He looks down at where the boy’s hands have been hastily bandaged, the skin cut and scraped from landing on the floor of the alley.
The other shakes his head, fiddling with the ignition. “It’s all on my hands. I didn’t get hurt anywhere else, thanks to my gear.”
Jiho nods gratefully. The boy is wearing a leather jacket and jeans, and he clearly remembers him wearing the black helmet sitting on the back of the bike. He shudders to think of how much worse the injuries could have been had the boy not been riding safely.
“Listen, I’m sorry - um, what’s your name?”
“Taeil.”
“I’m sorry for what happened, Taeil. I didn’t mean to hit you.”
“You broke my bike.”
“I...what?”
Taeil gestures to where he’s turning the ignition switch and nothing is happening, repeating the action several times to help the information sink in for Jiho.
“My bike. It won’t turn on.”
“Shit. I’m sorry?”
Taeil levels a flat look at him and Jiho swears he can feel a chilly gust of air coming right out of Taeil’s eyes at him. He ignores the shiver in his spine and tries to give Taeil a wide, placating grin, holding his hands up.
“Do you want me to help you fix it? I’ll find somewhere you can take it.”
“No thanks. No one’s better than my mechanic.”
Taeil pulls the bike out and backs it up to move it up the ramp onto the sidewalk, walking alongside it.
“Hey, wait, are you walking home?” Jiho hops up onto the sidewalk and starts following Taeil, faltering only slightly when Taeil looks back over his shoulder with a frown.
“I don’t have much of a choice,” Taeil points out. “I’m only a few blocks away, anyway.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jiho offers. “I wouldn’t want anything else to happen. You have to be careful around here.”
Taeil stops walking, making Jiho bump into the back of the motorcycle in surprise.
“Do you think I can’t protect myself?” Taeil asks. “Just because I’m not superhuman, it doesn’t mean I’m helpless.”
“That’s not what I-”
“You heroes are all the same. You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” Taeil says, shaking his head and continuing to move forward.
Jiho stays rooted to the spot for a moment, taken aback by Taeil’s attitude, and then he hurries to catch up, feeling incensed by the generalization.
“Hey, if it weren’t for heroes, the citizens would have no one to help fight off all of the villains! You might be able to defend yourself from other people, but you can’t do much against someone using their powers for evil. You need help from us.”
“What, like that other guy from the alley? I don’t remember him doing anything evil to me. I remember you flying into me and breaking my bike.”
“Which was his fault!” Jiho argues. “He’s the one who made me fly into you!”
“That’s not what I saw.”
Jiho barely refrains from snapping back at Taeil and doing something ridiculously childish like stomping his feet. He crosses his arms over his chest and walks along in moody silence for a moment. When the urge to open his mouth proves too strong for his willpower, Jiho takes a long stride to walk beside Taeil and grabs a hold of the other handlebar of the bike. Taeil looks at him sharply, as if he’s about to demand Jiho let him walk the bike himself, but then he relents and leans up to let him share the weight of the bike with a resigned sigh.
“You really don’t like people doing things for you, do you?”
“I can take care of myself. People seem to think I can’t, and it bothers me.”
Jiho considers this. “I’ll tell you what. If we get ambushed, I’ll let you take half of the bad guys and I’ll take the other half.”
Taeil glances his way. He still looks guarded, but his shoulders look a little more relaxed. It’s a start, Jiho figures.
“How far do you live, anyway?” Jiho asks, looking around at the unfamiliar roads.
“Just a couple more blocks.”
Jiho nods, and he tries not to let his disappointment show on his face. He isn’t sure why, but he’s reluctant to let Taeil go. It must be that he’s concerned about his safety. After all, he wouldn’t put it past Kyung to try to ambush them the moment they go their separate ways at Taeil’s house. It would be his duty to rush back in and save Taeil from the clutches of evil, and then perhaps Taeil would be so grateful that he would invite Jiho in for drinks. Sneaking a look at the other boy, Jiho moves his hand a little more towards Taeil’s hand on the handlebar, falters, and then moves it back. He suspects Taeil wouldn’t be too keen on this whole idea of Jiho being his “savior”. He would probably much sooner yell at Jiho for treating him like a useless damsel in distress than offer him any drinks.
Taeil shoots a look at Jiho then, as if he can sense Jiho fantasizing about him, and Jiho looks away, pretending to read a sign on a storefront.
“Well, this is home,” Taeil speaks up after another two blocks, stopping in his tracks.
Jiho frowns down at the bike. He looks up at Taeil with what he hopes is only a minimum of hopeful optimism.
“Maybe we’ll run into each other again?”
“Maybe,” Taeil shrugs simply, steering his bike towards the door. “Bye.”
“Oh, bye,” Jiho replies, voice soft with disappointment. Taeil hardly even notices him waving goodbye as he heads inside the building and leaves Jiho standing on the sidewalk.
This day was truly not his lucky day.
When Minhyuk can’t find the door after several minutes of searching, feeling along the outer walls of the large, concrete structure for the hidden mechanism lying beneath the surface that would usually pop the lever holding the entrance closed, he realizes that something has been changed. He can usually find the entrance with a single brush of his fingers over the wall, locating the source of the electrical pulse and manipulating it through the concrete to coax the lock to engage, but his manipulation doesn’t seem to be working and he can’t feel the familiar spike of energy beneath his fingertips at all, nothing but cold, hard concrete greeting his flesh.
He settles on finding his own way in, the old-fashioned way, by announcing his presence. All he needs to do is remove the chain hanging from his neck, opening up his mind, for the door to slide open with a mechanical whir and Kyung’s annoyed face to appear in its place.
“Yeah, I couldn’t find your doorbell,” Minhyuk jokes flatly, staring back at Kyung.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Kyung asks, but he isn’t blocking the doorway with his body and Minhyuk thinks that’s as good a reason as any to waltz inside past his gawking ex-teammate.
“You changed your locks. I didn’t realize you knew how to technopath-proof your base.”
“Well, it became necessary after the last time you broke in on us,” Kyung grumbles to himself, closing the door behind him with a wave of his hand. “Only I can open and close the doors now.”
“Keeping Jihoon locked inside like a princess in a tower?”
“All he needs to do to leave is ask.”
“I don’t know,” Minhyuk says, walking down the hallway without waiting for Kyung to escort him. “It sounds an awful lot like a hostage situation to me.”
Suddenly, he isn’t moving anymore, and Kyung catches up to him with slow, measured steps, turning to stand in front of him with a look so bitter Minhyuk is reminded of that last day, Kyung leaving in the dead of night, disappearing with Jihoon and ignoring Minhyuk’s devastated expression as he held Minhyuk in place with his mind to prevent him from following them out into the night.
“I told you never to do that again,” Minhyuk says, and it’s a little surprising to him how gravelly he sounds, as if his voice was dragged through broken glass and put back in his throat bloodied and torn.
The hold over his body disappears and his heart unclenches in his throat, Kyung dropping his gaze and leading him through the base without another word. Minhyuk puts the necklace back on immediately to prevent any further power abuse and walks after Kyung.
“So,” Kyung repeats himself once he’s made his way into the large kitchen, “what is it that you want?”
Minhyuk looks around. Kyung’s base of operations is much more austere, compared to the flashy gadgets littering the base he and Jiho constructed, and Minhyuk appreciates the streamlined structure of the base, the simple decorations and the silver furniture. There is an assortment of other metals throughout the base, most of it in Jihoon’s room and his section of the base, which Minhyuk can tell Jihoon designed himself.
“I just wanted to check in,” Minhyuk says, slipping his hands into his pockets as he watches Kyung fiddle with the microwave. “You injured a civilian today, remember? You don’t hurt regular people if you can help it.”
“He got in the way,” Kyung shrugs, moving a pizza onto the counter and sprinkling extra cheese over it. “It’s not that big a deal.”
Minhyuk moves closer to get a whiff of the pizza, stomach gurgling. “What if you had killed him?”
“I didn’t.”
“But what if you had? Would it still be no big deal?”
Kyung looks up at him and narrows his eyes at Minhyuk’s proximity. “You aren’t getting any pizza.”
Minhyuk grins, leaning his elbows on the kitchen counter, and Kyung moves the pizza further away from him, cutting it into slices.
“I’m a villain now,” Kyung reminds him. “Should I be concerned if people get killed anymore?”
“You’re still the same person,” Minhyuk says, rubbing his thumb over his mouth boredly as he watches Kyung get a plate for himself.
“Am I?” Kyung asks offhandedly, moving sideways to grab a fork out of a drawer.
Minhyuk realizes Kyung is trying to keep from turning his back to him and he finds this ridiculous and almost brings it up to Kyung. He doesn’t have anything to hurt Kyung with and his powers would be absolutely no match for Kyung’s, especially in his own base.
“What if you killed one of us?” Minhyuk asks instead.
He notices that Kyung hesitates as he moves a slice of pizza onto his plate, hovering for a millisecond before he goes back to the task at hand.
“Isn’t that just the risk that we take?” Kyung asks, his voice a little too bright for the topic. “I’ve been fighting you all for a while now. Eventually, someone’s going to get hurt.”
“And it won’t be you or Jihoon.”
“No,” Kyung replies firmly.
“What about me? Are you going to hurt me?”
“You aren’t my main target.”
“But I am part of the fight. They’re going to notice eventually, if you keep avoiding me. You need to at least pretend like you want to fight me.”
Kyung stops with his droopy pizza in front of his mouth, slanting his eyebrows.
“Do you think I’m sparing you?” he asks incredulously.
“You didn’t even look at me today, and I was wide open. I could have done something to you.”
“You have no way of hurting me. Why should I even be concerned about you?”
“Don’t underestimate me, Kyung,” Minhyuk warns him. “You don’t know what I’ll do.”
Kyung bursts into laughter, setting his pizza down. “There’s nothing you could do to hurt me.”
“There is something.”
Minhyuk casts his gaze towards the hall, in the direction of Jihoon’s room. He looks back at Kyung and Kyung is glaring at him with wide eyes. He’s glad that he has the necklace on, or else Minhyuk fears his head might have been exploding at that moment.
“Did you think bringing him here would keep him from me?” Minhyuk asks, resting his arms on the table.
“I know he still talks to you,” Kyung admits, voice tight. “He asked me not to read his thoughts, but I still do from time to time. I know you communicate.”
“Are you angry?”
“No.” Kyung takes a bite of pizza and drops the slice on his plate, chewing thoughtfully. “I knew it would be difficult for him, turning against you.”
Minhyuk watches him in silence, looking him over in an appraising manner.
“You know why he decided to come with you, right?”
Kyung glares at him again and Minhyuk wonders whether Kyung is going to have a stomach ache from eating such an upsetting dinner.
“He didn’t want you to be alone.”
Kyung rolls his eyes, leaning back in his chair and avoiding his eyes.
“You knew Jihoon would follow you if you tried to leave without anyone else knowing, so you told him and no one else. You didn’t think I’d find out.” Minhyuk smirks and leans in towards Kyung. “But he tells me everything, Kyung. I knew before you’d even packed your bags.”
“Jihoon doesn’t keep secrets very well,” Kyung agrees. “It’s one of his only faults.”
“What I want to know,” Minhyuk interrupts him, grabbing the edges of the table and leaning across it even further, “is why the hell you didn’t let me come with you.”
Kyung’s eyes harden the way they do when he’s trying to steel his emotions and Minhyuk wants to laugh at him. Minhyuk has never been able to read anyone’s mind, not like Kyung can, but he’s always been able to read Kyung’s expressions like a book.
“Why would I let my enemy know where I was going?”
“I was never your enemy until the moment you forced me to stay with them.”
Kyung sweeps his plate to the side and the fork goes flying off, clattering onto the floor noisily, and Minhyuk wonders if Jihoon heard it in his room. Kyung leans in towards him to meet him in the middle of the table, mouth set in a hard line.
“You’re loyal to Jiho, not to me,” Kyung snarls into the space between them. “I know you’d still follow him to the ends of the earth. I don’t need or want someone like you around me anymore.”
“Don’t fucking pretend you don’t know what you were doing that night,” Minhyuk returns. “There’s a reason you brought Jihoon along and there’s also a reason you left me behind. Don’t think I don’t know what that reason is.”
“Yeah?” Kyung demands. “Why don’t you tell me what that reason is, since you claim to know more about my own intentions than I do?”
“You left me so you’d always have a reason to come back,” Minhyuk answers easily. “Even if Jiho never apologized to you, even if they never accepted you again, you’d still have something to keep drawing you back to us.”
“And you’re supposed to mean enough to me to be some kind of an anchor?”
“If I didn’t mean anything to you, you would have let me come with you so you could use my powers. Instead, you made me stay, because you know I still want to do good by people.” Minhyuk crosses his arms and gives him a pointed look. “I may not be more loyal to Jiho than to you, but I am a hell of a lot more accustomed to being a hero than a villain.”
“So is Jihoon.”
“So what does that say about how much you care about him compared to how much you care for me?”
Kyung scoffs to himself, a little too exaggerated, and makes a show of rolling his eyes at Minhyuk.
“You think you mean more to me than my sidekick?”
“Your sidekick.” Minhyuk nods, standing up from the table. “Not your partner?”
Kyung’s face falls. “My partner. That’s what I meant.”
“Right.” Minhyuk takes a few steps out of the kitchen. “So, when you read Jihoon’s mind and you see the way he thinks about me, do you get more jealous of me or of him?”
Kyung sputters, pizza falling out of his hand, and Minhyuk shrugs hastily.
“Just wondering.”
With that, Minhyuk escapes down the hall towards Jihoon’s room, and he smirks to himself when Kyung’s furious, expletive-laden text message makes its way from Kyung’s phone in the kitchen to his brain.
The sweet aroma of bear claws, muffins, tartlets and cream pies follows Jiho out the door as he goes to stand and wait for the afternoon to wind down, leaning against the storefront of King’s Bakery with a cupcake. The sun warms the savory treat in his hand and makes him squint as it moves overhead, giving him a scowl that causes the pedestrians passing him by on the sidewalk to give him a wide berth. He thinks about how Kyung always used to tease him and say that his best disguise is his own face, because no one ever thinks he looks heroic when he’s grimacing at the world with his usual calculating stare. Kyung would have been laughing at him right now, surely, if he could only see him, eating his cupcake and lying in wait for a certain delivery boy to wander into his view. Jiho is fairly sure Kyung would have called him desperate and sad, and the thought isn’t exactly comforting to him. He can just hear him now, cackling to himself in that crinkly-eyed way of his, Oh, how the mighty have fallen!
The front door opens with a faint jingle from the interior of the store, and the familiar footsteps of a pair of army boots catches Jiho’s interested ear. Jiho looks over just as Taeil steps out, recognizing him and looking stunned.
“Hey,” Jiho greets him, leaning away from the wall. “I noticed you fixed your bike.”
“Yeah, just yesterday,” Taeil says, sounding a little awed. “Are you stalking me?”
“The cupcakes are really good here,” Jiho replies quickly. “I wanted some dessert.”
“And then you decided to eat it here, in front of the store,” Taeil mutters in disbelief. “Like a stalker.”
Jiho grins and takes a few steps towards Taeil’s bike as Taeil moves to it, unstrapping his helmet. “Fine, you win. I was waiting for you.” He watches as Taeil sets his helmet on his head, easy and familiar, and the way his denim jeans stretch over his legs as Taeil moves the kickstand and gets ready to mount the bike. “Waiting for you to come out, to see you, to talk to you.”
“I don’t get it,” Taeil replies honestly. He looks over at Jiho. “What do you want from me?”
Jiho rocks on his feet, tucking his fingers in his front pockets and grinning up at Taeil like a boy much younger than he actually is.
“I want to get on the back of your bike and go somewhere with you.” He shrugs. “Wherever you want to go.”
“Uh huh.” Taeil straddles his bike and balances it between his legs like a pro, fastening his helmet and running his hands over the handlebars slowly, wrapping each gloved finger tightly over the curves. “And why should I take you?”
“Cause I’m not only a hero,” Jiho assures him. “I’m also just a regular guy trying to go out with another regular guy on his sexy motorcycle.”
“Is that so?”
Taeil gives him a smile, just reckless enough to twist Jiho’s insides like the pretzels on display in the bakery, and enough to make him think he would gladly ride into hell on the back of Taeil’s bike if it meant he could wrap his arms around Taeil’s waist, maybe wrap his legs around Taeil later if the opportunity knocks.
“Hop on,” Taeil says, tilting his head and fixing Jiho with a stare that starts up a chorus of angels in Jiho’s over-imaginative brain. “While I’m still in the mood.”
“Yes,” Jiho responds, already swinging his leg over the bike, fingers slipping into place on Taeil’s waist.
“How do you like theme parks?” Taeil asks loudly as he guns the engine.
“I am pro-theme parks,” Jiho shouts, clutching onto him for dear life, and as they take off at a fast clip, racing around the next street corner, he can’t help but feel that even though he has superhuman powers and is faster and stronger than anyone he’s ever known, he’s still going to have a hard time keeping up with the man in his arms, racing them into paradise.
“How’s it going?”
Minhyuk groans lightly, stretching his arms out behind his chair and popping his stiff shoulders.
“You know how it is,” he sighs, rubbing his arm, “it’s not easy being the watcher of the world.”
“Oh, come on,” Jihoon chuckles over the line. “I know you’re really just watching videos of cats on fifteen different monitors.”
“Hmm,” Minhyuk murmurs, clicking out of said cat videos with a guilty conscience. “How is everything with you?”
“Kyung hyung’s still kind of freaked out about...you know.”
“Well, what was he expecting? Nobody asked him to barge in on us while we were getting to know each other Biblically.”
“I think he’s having a heart attack in the kitchen as we speak. He’s been eating cake pretty much nonstop. I’m going to have to stage an intervention pretty soon.”
“Yeah, we don’t want him to have to put a few extra notches in his villain belt.”
“How’s everyone else?”
“Well, our brave leader ran away with a man who smelled like pastries, so we’ve been holding the fort down.”
“Hmm, I didn’t know hyung had such a sweet tooth.”
“I know. Who’d have thought?”
Minhyuk scratches his chest, glancing at the security cameras boredly. There hasn’t been a whole lot going on in the City that would require their attention. He supposes this is a good thing, with Jiho temporarily out of the picture, since he’s the only member of their outfit who isn’t totally useless now, but a part of him is always itching for a reason to run out the door and save some people.
“Wait,” Jihoon speaks up. “I think he’s outside the door.”
Minhyuk raises an eyebrow as he listens to the rustling sound of Jihoon moving about and opening the door. He laughs to himself as he can hear Kyung startle and Jihoon talk to him in that huffy, husky tone he takes when he gets all riled up.
“Technobomb,” Kyung barks into his head, making Minhyuk wince and rub at his temple. “You are wasting all of my partner’s precious time while he’s supposed to be researching piranha-infested moats.”
“I’m telling you, there were zero hits on eBay,” Jihoon shouts in the background of Kyung’s telepathic line.
“We do have an Amazon account, you know. Did you try there?”
“Kyung,” Minhyuk interrupts their squabbling, mind spinning from having to listen to both of them at the same time, “I wanted to ask you something.”
“What,” Kyung deadpans, already sounding wary of him.
“While you’re ordering things, could you possibly invest in some better bed frames for your base? I think Jihoon and I put quite a dent in his the other night and I’m very concern-”
“ALRIGHT, I’LL JUST LEAVE YOU TO IT, THEN,” Kyung says, quite alarmed, as he seemingly leaves the room.
Jihoon comes back laughing and gasping for breath. “You’re terrible!”
“It was a legitimate question,” Minhyuk defends himself. “Those beds are a safety hazard.”
“Do you think he’ll ever come around?” Jihoon asks, still light-hearted despite the serious note in his question.
“Of course. Despite all appearances, Kyung does still love me.”
Jihoon chuckles to himself. “I know.”
“Do me a favor and go put ranch dressing in his shampoo.”
“I’m on it.”
Minhyuk severs the connection with a soft grin and settles in for another long afternoon of cat videos and gossipy news websites. He isn’t even two minutes into a video of two cats trying to run on a treadmill with limited success when Jaehyo barges into his room, breathing heavily and wild-eyed. Minhyuk shoots to his feet.
“What is it?” he asks, grabbing onto Jaehyo’s arms.
“Hurry,” Jaehyo gasps, clamping his hand down on Minhyuk’s shoulder. “Come quick. We-we need your help.”
“Is someone attacking? Is somebody hurt?”
Jaehyo shakes his head vigorously, catching his breath. He lifts his head and gives Minhyuk the most serious look as he steadies himself.
“It’s Kwon,” he says. “He’s broken the microwave again.”