one burn, one red, one grin (3/?)
one burn, one red, one grin
day6/got7
pg-15
almost exactly 3 weeks and 5 days to the end of the world as jae knows it. (superhero au)
<<< part 2
You’re not going to believe this.
From where he sat in the room, Jaebum could only make out the words ‘ability’ and ‘wrong’ from the shape of the doctors’ lips. His mother buried her face in her hands as she started to cry, so he turned to look at Jinyoung sitting beside him at the desk. Jinyoung’s eyes lit up as he turned to smile delightedly at him, his fingers already working to sign the words to him.
What? Jaebum signed back.
All this time… your hearing… it was just an accident. It’s your ability.
His heartbeat was echoing through his body. What?
Try this. Jinyoung held his hand in front of him as if he was grasping an invisible knob. He turned it slowly to the right, looking meaningfully at Jaebum. Jaebum, feeling quite sure that this was all an elaborate joke, that there was no way, no way in hell that he had spent the last 6 years of his life living in a self-induced endless silence because what kind of power was stupid enough to turn the user completely deaf? And what kind of idiot would make himself deaf in the first place?
Jinyoung poked him sharply in the arm. Just do it, he signed, I’m not kidding. And of course Jinyoung would know exactly what he was thinking. It was just something he’d been doing since they met for the first time, 7 year old Jaebum the quiet, newly deaf kid sitting by himself in the corner of the classroom and Jinyoung the glossy-haired boy who came up to him and learned basic sign language by the end of the day just so he could talk to him.
So Jaebum raised a hand, held on to a volume dial that wasn’t there, and turned it violently. And, like wild waves crashing violently into a lone rock in the middle of the ocean, all of the world’s sound slammed loudly, deafeningly into earshot. His mother weeping, the doctor talking to her in soft murmurs, the mechanical hum of the computer on his desk, the ringing of the phone in the next room… everything was screaming at him, and it was all too much.
“Jaebum,” said a low foreign voice as he slapped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut to shut out the sudden attack on his senses. Someone grabbed his face. “Just focus on my voice,” said the person, and Jaebum found a strange sort of calming peace in the sound. He opened his eyes reluctantly. Jinyoung was clutching his head so tight it was if he was trying to keep him from falling apart. He let him go to sign the words, You can turn it down if you want.
Jaebum released one shaky hand from his ear and turned the invisible knob slightly to the left. The world muted, and he found he could uncover his other ear without flinching. “Good,” said Jinyoung, nodding encouragingly. He put a hand on Jaebum’s shoulder and smiled, wide and bright and blinding. “Hi Jaebum. I’m Jinyoung. Park Jinyoung. Your best friend.”
Park Jinyoung. Back then the words sounded like the twinkling of stars to Jaebum, cutting through the black void he’d unintentionally placed himself into. Now they sounded like a million shattering lightbulbs. Before his eyes Jinyoung morphed from a glossy-haired 7 year old with a smile like sunshine into the wild young man standing cockily on a table, smiling into a TV camera and pointing a loaded gun at a group of innocent civilians cowering on the floor. The look in his eyes was murderous.
As the gun went off, three thoughts ran through Jaebum’s mind. One, that maybe he deserved this. Maybe Jinyoung was a monster of his own creation, born from his selfish indignance at losing a dream they’d both been working towards since they were kids. Two, that Frankenstein’s monster eventually led him to his own death, and three, that from this point on there was no turning back.
The crowd screamed at the gunshot, and in the stunned silence that followed, Jaebum heard someone laughing. He dragged his gaze across the unharmed group on the floor and finally settled on Jinyoung, whose laugh he barely recognized. Glee pouring from his eyes, Jinyoung deftly stepped off the table and dropped to his feet in front of Jaebum.
“You didn’t think I’d actually do it, did you?” he asked lightly, and pushed the gun into Jaebum’s chest. It was feather light in his hands. Jaebum blinked, dumbfounded. “But let’s start taking this seriously now, yeah?” Jinyoung added, leaning in closer to Jaebum so no one else could hear him. He pulled away and they looked at each other. Jinyoung’s smile was still the same bright one Jaebum had once associated with warmth and sunshine, but his eyes were as cold and dark as the first time Jaebum found himself plunged into a sudden bottomless silence.
Jinyoung patted him on the shoulder and turned away towards Wonpil. Off to one side, Jackson watched Jaebum warily, who himself was watching the confident sway of Jinyoung’s own shoulders. Once, in a classroom full of soundless screaming children, Jaebum thought of Jinyoung as the one person who saved him from despair. Now, as he held the model gun in his hands and felt the enormity of the chaos suddenly rising around him, he wasn’t so sure.
Despite the heater blasting away in the corner and the people grouped in a loose, sorry excuse of a circle around the coffee table, the air was bone chillingly cold. Jae could almost taste the frost in the air as he kept a cool distance from Sungjin. Mark sat quietly beside him. He hadn’t said a word since the initial shock of finding Dowoon gone, and while he’d never been a talkative guy to start with his silence seemed to weigh heavier to Jae than Brian’s or Sungjin’s. Brian himself sat alone on one end of the couch, looking vacant. Yugyeom and Bambam took up the other side, looking uncomfortable. And Sungjin… well Jae couldn’t even bring himself to look at Sungjin.
“I know we’re not all in the mood to talk at the moment,” Sungjin finally broke the silence in a soft, humbled voice. Jae, looking very pointedly at Brian’s finger blankly tapping the arm of the couch, would’ve preferred he used his usual decisive, commanding tone just to keep up the façade that he was actually their pillar of support instead of the one who caused them all to come crashing back to earth. In that moment he’d never hated anyone more. “But we’re in a crisis at the moment.”
Jae snorted. He waited for Brian to glare at him, but it seemed he didn’t even have the heart to lift his head from where he sat staring at his feet. Now that Jae came to think of it, had Brian even taken one look at Sungjin since they sat down? It all felt… wrong.
“Dowoon and Youngjae,” Yugyeom burst out, then shrank back a little and flushed when everyone’s head turned to him. “They’re not bad guys. I know that much. They’d never sell us out. There must be another reason why they left.” Beside him, Bambam sank further down in his seat, his mouth set defiantly. Jae could only attempt to guess why.
“Did either of them say anything to you last night?” Sungjin asked testily.
Yugyeom shook his head. “Youngjae was out of the room for a while, but he came back and went straight to sleep. He seemed a little down,” (Jae glanced at Mark) “but nothing unusual. Maybe he was tired. Dowoon fell asleep before any of us. Bam and I stayed up til 1, and they were both still there the entire time.”
“It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t leave together,” Jae finally spoke up. He fixated his gaze on the coffee table. “Unless Dowoon left much earlier and you guys forgot he even existed until now.”
Bambam scoffed. “You don’t really get Dowoon’s power do you?” he asked contemptuously. “It isn’t that just anyone forgets him as soon as you take your eyes off him. He could do that, sure, but he has to keep his power activated constantly for that to happen. It wears him out. Haven’t you wondered why we never forget who he is? If you forget him, it’s because he wants you to.” He looked oddly triumphant.
“Well,” Brian said listlessly. He still didn’t bother raising his head, arms folded in front of him. “I guess that means he’s the real traitor then, doesn’t it? Seeing as he seemed very keen on having us forget him. Let’s just get rid of him.”
Yugyeom and Bambam looked stricken. “That’s jumping to conclusions,” Jae retorted. “And it’s too easy to just blame him based on something like that. We need proof.”
“Good, bad, whatever,” Brian said apathetically. “I don’t really care anymore. If someone makes a decision, they should just pay for the consequences.” Off to one side, Sungjin shifted slightly in his seat.
Jae stared. In front of him, Brian had regressed back into the uneasy, awkward kid he first met on the first day of high school, fresh off the plane from Toronto and too shy to talk to anyone except the tall gangly bespectacled kid standing in front of him in the line. And that was after Jae accidentally elbowed him in the chest. “Don’t fucking fall apart on me now, Kang Younghyun,” he said, without any real malice. Brian opened his mouth in surprise and closed it, finding nothing. For one wild second, Jae almost wanted Brian to snap back at him - something, anything - just to feel like everything wasn’t totally out of whack.
“Shut up, both of you,” Mark stood up. He looked directly at Sungjin, the first person to do so since they found out the truth. “If I’m honest, I don’t really give a shit about Dowoon. If he left on his own to do God knows what, that’s on him. But I know Youngjae, and he’s not the type of guy who’d sell us out. I’m gonna go look for him. You can all decide what to do with Dowoon on your own.”
“Wait just a minute,” Sungjin started, when his phone buzzed. He glanced impatiently at the screen. Jae watched his expression change into something more apprehensive as he immediately reached for the TV remote. The second he turned it on, Jinyoung’s smiling face filled the screen.
“What -?” Mark couldn’t have looked more confused if he tried.
“Is this an old ad?” Jae got to his feet.
The camera zoomed out as Jinyoung announced “Seoul!” in a gleeful voice, throwing his arms wide. In one hand he held what looked like a balaclava. In the other, a rifle. Jae’s blood froze in his veins, fingers already reaching for his throat. “Fuck no,” Mark breathed beside him.
“We need to get this off air now,” Brian said, sounding more alert, as Jinyoung made his speech. He turned to Sungjin, who seemed completely dumbfounded. Obviously he hadn’t anticipated this, but really who could have ever anticipated golden child Park Jinyoung to show up on their TV screens one day, brandishing a gun at a group of defenceless people and declaring war on society? “Sungjin!”
“No!” Mark bellowed as the broadcast cut off exactly as the gun went off. He made a move as if to jump right through the screen and held on to the back of the couch to steady himself. Jae watched all the colour drain from his face.
“We need to get back to Seoul now,” Brian muttered.
“Wait,” Bambam said into the stunned silence. “Is that… were we supposed to be fighting that?” He pointed a finger at the blank TV screen. “That guy? The guy who just shot into a defenceless crowd?”
“Bam,” Yugyeom said, but he just shook him off and stood up shakily.
“Yo, this isn’t what I signed up for!” he shook his head, eyes wide with fear. “You know, when you guys said they were in a crime ring I thought this was like… drug lords or something! Did you see the look in that guy’s eyes? He’s fucking crazy! And he used to be a hero? Hell if I’m going to jump into something like that!”
“Did you think any of us signed up for any of this?” Mark snapped despite his own shaking hands. “Pull yourself together, man. Aren’t you always the one crowing about how you were supposed to be the next gen’s big hero?”
“Fuck no,” Bambam backed off, hands held up in front of him. “I’ve changed my mind. Who am I to take on maniacs like that? I’m just a back alley street fighter; the biggest guy I’ve taken down was a jewellery thief for fucks’ sakes!”
“You took me down,” said Jae quietly. “And I used to be a Super.”
“You’re out of practice, it doesn’t count,” Bambam replied. Before Jae had time to even feel offended (although it was true) he added, “You’re not batshit insane either. I wouldn’t touch crazy like that even if you paid me triple, Sungjin. I’m outta here.” And he turned and ran for the door.
“Like hell you are,” Brian snarled, instantly on his feet. He stretched his hands in front of him before yanking them back. Bambam, already halfway out of the room, flew backwards towards him and flipped over the couch, landing on the floor with a groan. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s a damn coward,” Brian spat at him. “I’ll fucking kill you, you piece of shit.” And he put his hand over Bambam’s chest, eyes glowering.
Jae remembered a joke he’d made once in school, an offhand spur of the moment comment that immediately got sealed in the back of his memory with all the other stupid, senseless things that came out of his mouth. “Hey Brian, wouldn’t it be cool - if you were a villain at least - if you could kill someone by pulling out their heart?”
Mark immediately hauled Brian off Bambam and slammed him into the couch, wrenching his arms up behind his back. In the midst of it all, Jae started sniggering. It was all just so absurd to him - his friends’ defections, his being dragged into this against his will, watching the unravelling of everyone who, up until last night, he had seen as being so much better than him… it was surreal, to say the least. As the sniggers turned to full blown laughs, he was aware it sounded very much like sobs.
Sungjin sat down heavily and put his head in his hands. “Maybe,” he said in a low voice that cut through the chaos that had erupted around the room, “it would be better if we just called all this off.”
Brian stopped struggling. An “I told you so” welled up in Jae’s throat, and he had to bite his tongue so hard to keep it from coming out he was sure he drew blood.
If Wonpil tried hard - but not that hard, because all it took was the smell of plum blossoms to trigger the memory - he could remember exactly how it was on his first day of Super school. It had been a beautifully crisp day, he remembered. There was only the faint hint of budding spring in the air like a promise of what was to come, and as Wonpil passed through the gate to what should have been his rosy future, he remembered he had been absolutely terrified.
He often wondered what he would’ve done if he had been one of those dispatched to Bucheon the day Junhyuk went rogue. Could he have been the one who calmed Junhyuk down? Could he have been the one to stop Junhyuk instead? The details of how he’d actually died were murky, but Wonpil was sure if he knew anything about Im Junhyuk - and he was so, so sure that he was one of the few people who really knew Im Junhyuk - that Junhyuk’s pride would have never allowed someone else to take his life.
Or maybe somebody did, and Wonpil had never known him at all.
Either way, Junhyuk had ruined everything. After the fact, Wonpil returned to Incheon with a hero career he never even got to get off the ground. He ended up helping his father out on the bee farm, just like what his parents had intended before he piped up the courage in middle school to say that he had applied to the best hero school in Seoul and had been accepted in on a half-scholarship and there was nothing they could do to stop him. They’d stopped hounding him about it when they found out just how much more money heroes made compared to beekeepers.
And so life went on, agonizingly slowly for someone who had honed his skills enough to the point that he detected a bomb in a building the second the timer went off. Or at least it did for a couple of years, until the day Wonpil returned home from a delivery and found Jaebum, Jinyoung and Jackson waiting outside his house, grinning those disarmingly friendly grins they had the first day Wonpil met them in a shared training session and had never really been able to get out of his life ever since.
“Been a busy bee?” Jinyoung had joked over drinks, to which Wonpil laughed.
“What Junhyuk did was wrong, I’m not denying that,” Jaebum had said out of nowhere, slamming down his beer. “But why did we have to be the ones to pay for his mistake? It’s totally unfair, if you think about it.”
“JB’s still hung up about losing his fame and fortune,” Jackson had whispered loudly, waggling his eyebrows at Wonpil, but Jinyoung looked thoughtful. Wonpil remembered the little wrinkle that appeared in the corner of his mouth, something that only came up when he was thinking about upcoming exams, or the best way to negotiate a hostage situation.
“It’s not just unfair, it’s totally dumb,” Jaebum declared. He had shoved a slice of pancake in his mouth after saying this, Wonpil remembered, and it took some time for him to swallow it down before he continued. “What if a supervillain league attacks tomorrow? The army would never be able to handle it. The public are idiots for trying to pretend that we don’t exist anymore.”
“Well there’s nothing that can be done about it,” Wonpil had tried to reason, but he should have known that there was nothing he could say. Because there was a reason Jinyoung, Jaebum and Jackson were poised to become the top rookies the year of their debut: they had the sort of confidence and relentless determination that Wonpil, who had never imagined himself as anything more than a sidekick or part of a team, could never summon up for himself.
“You know what we should do?” Jinyoung had suddenly slammed down his chopsticks, cheeks flushed and eyes shining. “We should remind them that we exist.”
“What, become vigilantes?” Wonpil had asked dubiously.
“Hell no,” Jinyoung shook his head wildly. Wonpil could smell the alcohol hanging around his head. “What’s the point in helping people who don’t want to be helped? If the people want us to be villains so bad, well shouldn’t we just become those villains?”
Silence all round. Wonpil remembered feeling the static hovering in the air like an omen, raising the hair on the back of his neck. He couldn’t deny that Jinyoung’s words felt wrong, but wasn’t there some truth in them as well? It was true that Junhyuk had ruined everything, but it wasn’t Junhyuk who destroyed all their hopes and dreams. It had been society. Society and its stupid, baseless fear.
“You know,” Jaebum had said quietly, “that could actually work.”
“What? That’s crazy talk; you guys are drunk as hell,” Jackson looked between them, frowning. “I’m going to get the bill.”
“Wait, listen,” Jaebum caught his arm to keep him from leaving. “Maybe becoming villains is a bit much,” he had fixed Jinyoung with a meaningful stare, “but what if we just cause a little chaos? You know, fuck it up enough that people realize they actually need us? Nobody even needs to know it’s us, you know. Think about it. We could be the ones to reinstate Supers. And if it doesn’t work… well maybe it’ll make people remember that they used to have heroes, at the very least.”
Wonpil had felt the static in the air growing stronger, but he’d ignored it. The thought of spending the rest of his life tending to the bees, listening to their senseless chatter, was enough to make him think that maybe, just maybe, Jaebum’s idea wasn’t so crazy after all. Wasn’t it alright to pretend to be a villain if it meant being able to return to being a hero? Surely, as long as no one actually got hurt, they could pull this off. And life really could go back to normal.
“We’ll take it one step at a time,” he had said at the time, and now, three years later, he was beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they had taken it a step too far.
“Park Jinyoung, explain what the fuck that was,” Jackson snarled now, slamming the door behind him. If it wasn’t broken before there was definitely no saving it now, but Wonpil wasn’t stupid enough to say anything about that, seeing as they had just robbed a bank and now had enough money to replace any number of doors Jackson broke.
Jinyoung only looked up from where he had been sorting the money into neat wads and stacking them in equally meticulous piles to the side of the table. Beside him, Wonpil was tallying the figures on his laptop. Jaebum sat opposite them with his chin resting on his interlocked fingers. He had only been watching silently, but now he got up.
“Yeah, let’s talk,” he leaned against the table, Jackson bristling with fury beside him. Wonpil felt the clear divide lying between them, but if Jinyoung saw it too, he gave nothing away. “Explain yourself, Jinyoung.”
“Come on guys,” Jinyoung spread his arms out wide. His eyes sparkled like he was grinning, although his expression remained completely innocent. “It was about time we showed ourselves, wasn’t it? Wasn’t this the aim of the plan anyway? To plant some terror into people’s hearts?”
“Yes, but not like this,” Jackson hissed before Jaebum could stop him, pounding a fist on to the table. “When you told me you wanted me to film you I thought it was for… archival purposes or something! Not to broadcast you committing mass murder to the entire nation!”
“Did I kill someone?” Jinyoung demanded, looking dangerous. “Tell me, Jackson. Did anyone die?”
Maybe not today, Wonpil thought. Whether Jaebum and Jackson knew he wasn’t sure, but Section 3’s boss was not the first person Jinyoung had shot over the past three years. Wonpil had felt each and every bullet reverberate through the air, and he had turned away every time. They’re criminals anyway, Jinyoung always said. What we’re doing isn’t any different from when we were Supers, if you think about it. Wonpil could see the truth behind that, but he never mentioned that the first rule that was drummed into their heads in school was that unless in dire circumstanced, Supers should never kill.
“No…” Jackson said reluctantly.
“Then what are you so mad about?”
“Jinyoung,” Jaebum finally said in a low voice. Both Jackson and Jinyoung backed off a little to look at him. Wonpil had never seen such a pained look on Jaebum’s face. “What are you doing?”
For a second, just a tiny fraction of a second, Jinyoung looked exactly how he used to when he was called on out of nowhere in the middle of training. It was an expression that said he knew the call meant he’d messed up somewhere but he had no idea just where. Wonpil had happened upon him more than enough times in the locker rooms going over every single excruciating detail of the session afterwards to know that the only person demanding perfection of Jinyoung was himself. Wonpil had only known one other person who had pressured himself in the same way, and that person went and brought down a whole industry with him when he died.
Then Jinyoung straightened, and he had that fiery look of determination Wonpil had always admired about him. “We’ve slogged away for years trying to get society to notice their mistake, to get them to remember us,” he said quietly. “But we haven’t made any real impact, have we? We aren’t going to make any statements if we keep staying in the shadows. People need to know that threats are out there! I did this for us, you guys.”
Jaebum looked exasperated. “But I said we weren’t ready.”
Jackson had been looking between them in disbelief during the whole exchange, but now he raised his arms and brought them down on the table, cracking it in half. Wonpil snatched up his laptop before it had a chance to fall to the ground.
“Jinyoung,” Jackson breathed into the shocked silence. His fury seemed to be burning white hot that it almost seemed cold, and Wonpil felt that with the usual amiable, laidback Jackson it just seemed so much worse. “You,” he pointed at Jinyoung, “have lost your god damn mind. And Jaebum,” his eyes flashed, “I thought better of you. I thought better of you all.”
“Jackson, wait,” Jaebum put out a hand to catch him, but Jackson swatted him away.
“You’re just as bad as them,” he snarled. “You were considering doing something like this too? Not now, but eventually? You know, if I didn’t know you guys before I would’ve thought that I was standing in a room full of villains right now!”
The situation was spiralling out of control. “That’s enough,” Wonpil got to his feet. All eyes flew to him. “Remember when we were in high school? We made a pact that we were all going to become heroes and open an agency together. Remember that?”
“Yeah, but that didn’t happen,” Jaebum muttered. Wonpil ignored him.
“Three years ago we made a decision to try and keep that dream alive,” he continued. “No matter what.” He fixed all of them with a meaningful look. “Are you all really going to fight over something that was inevitable? We all agreed behaving like villains was the best way to get people to remember we existed. Is what happened just now really that far from what we wanted to accomplish? And no one got hurt, just like what you wanted,” he pointed out to Jackson.
“Fuck, Pil, I know no one got hurt but did it really need to be that extreme?” Jackson asked, sounding kinder but still looking furious.
“Revealing yourself was stupid, too,” Jaebum added to Jinyoung. “Who’s going to reinstate a hero who basically identified himself as a villain on national TV?”
The question struck a chord in Wonpil. It was stupid oversight on his part, but Jaebum was right. Jinyoung would never be accepted back into society. Even if he confessed it was all part of a plan, there was no way any council or committee would allow him to work as a Super again, noble cause be damned. He glanced at Jinyoung to gauge his reaction, and came away with nothing.
“When the time comes, it’ll all sort itself out,” Jinyoung said calmly. Something about his expression said that there was nothing else they would be getting out of him about the matter. “Let’s just keep riding the momentum. We can’t go back now.”
Jackson fixed him with a withering look, and left the room without another word.
“Maybe you should talk to him,” Mark nudged Jae and tilted his head towards the front of the train. Jae could just make out the top of Brian’s head as he sat beside the window, alone. Sungjin sat by himself one row away, and Bambam and Yugyeom seemed to have fallen asleep on each other. One more hour until they reached Seoul, and Jae would be free from all this. He was already counting down the minutes to falling into his own bed, closing the blinds and never having anything to do with the hero world ever again.
“No point talking to someone who’s already given up,” Jae said a little louder than intended, but Brian didn’t even stir.
Mark shook his head. “I know you and Brian haven’t exactly been the best of friends in a long time but aren’t you being a little harsh?”
“Harsh? Me?” Jae asked, baffled. “I don’t know where you’ve been for the last four hours but I think I’m probably the only sane one left in this place,” he huffed, slumping down in his seat.
“I’m just saying,” Mark looked out the window, “don’t do - or not do - anything you’ll regret later.”
Jae wished, not for the first or last time that day, that he had shut the door in Sungjin’s face the day he turned up at his office. What would he be doing now? Probably shadowing someone around town. With a coffee in hand, just to seem less suspicious. An iced latte sounded pretty good right about now. He sighed. His dreams were always just out of reach. “You know, what happened with Jinyoung… it’s not your fault,” he said aloud instead.
“You don’t know that,” Mark said to the windowpane. Past the outline of his ears the countryside flew past in a muddled blur of fiery reds and deep greens, the occasional golden smudge appearing for a second before disappearing into the past. Jae hadn’t realized how deep into autumn they had gotten. What would happen when winter came? Would Jinyoung have burned the city to the ground?
“But I do,” he said, as they flew over a river. The surface of the water sparkled in the sunlight, mesmerising Jae. “You’re a goddamn hero, whether you like it or not.”
“No,” Mark looked towards the front of the train, where the silent TV screen was replaying the bank incident from that morning. Jae couldn’t watch it happen again, but Mark kept his gaze fixed on the screen. “I’m not. I’m not Brian or Sungjin or even you. I don’t have any lofty ambitions to save the world or anything like that, I never did. What kind of hero saves people just because it pays well? What kind of hero turns the people who look up to him into villains and cowards just because he didn’t want them to get too close? Aren’t heroes supposed to inspire others? I’ve had this feeling ever since Youngjae left, and what Brian said this morning confirmed it. I never was a hero, and I don’t have any right to call myself that.” He shook his head wearily.
Jae thought about Junhyuk; proud, arrogant Junhyuk with his fiery temper and thinly disguised contempt for the people he was supposed to be saving and suddenly felt tired. Who was it that decided who heroes should and shouldn’t be? Junhyuk, in the end, had done for him what none of them were honestly prepared to do themselves, despite all their self-righteous outrage and constant affirmations of self-sacrifice. But Mark was still talking.
“Honestly the only reason I joined Sungjin on this mission wasn’t because of the money, or the fact that he was going to throw my ass in jail for vigilantism. It was so I could tell Jinyoung I was sorry. I already knew that day when I crushed his dreams - like I did to Youngjae - that I had done something terrible to him, and I was right.” Jinyoung was silently laughing. Mark’s eyes followed the gun as it swung across the screen. “I used to think words were just words, but I’m starting to think they’re more powerful than any superpower. Maybe this is just my punishment for not realizing that earlier.”
“That’s bullshit,” Jae said vehemently, surprising himself. Mark blinked, startled. “Jinyoung’s world didn’t revolve around you, and neither did Youngjae’s,” he continued. “Sure, it was a shit move on your part and they were definitely disappointed, but did you ask Jinyoung to become a murderer? Did you ask Youngjae to run away? You can’t really influence what’s already inside someone, you know. I mean, I know you were the top rookie and everything but even you aren’t that special, you know?”
Mark stared at him, dumbfounded, then broke into an uneasy smile. “It’d be nice if that was true,” he said, looking out the window again.
“You know, I’m not used to hearing you talk about your feelings,” Jae said to his shoulder.
“Neither am I,” Mark sighed.
15 minutes before they pulled into the station, Sungjin came clambering unsteadily down the aisle, taking a seat across the aisle from Jae. “What’s up?” Mark asked, leaning over when Jae stubbornly ignored him.
“Not so loud,” Sungjin said, sounding closer to the old him than he did before. He cast a glance over the other passengers in the train. “Meet up at my place when we get back to Seoul. This mission isn’t over, no matter how much we want it to be.” Jae glanced at him and looked away immediately. Sungjin had the same determined glint in his eye he had the day he crashed Jae’s office. “Jae…” his voice lowered slightly. “I know it’s asking a lot from you, but can I count on you to be there?”
“He’ll be there,” Mark said. Sungjin nodded at him gratefully and made his way back to his seat.
“Stop dragging me into things without asking first,” Jae whispered furiously to Mark.
“You always said you were a shit hero,” Mark whispered back. “Now’s the chance to prove yourself wrong.”
“Ugggghhhhhh,” Jae moaned, sliding down in his seat and pulling his hood over his head.
Meanwhile, two rows away, Bambam and Yugyeom exchanged glances. “Remember when Dowoon asked if I was going to sell out Sungjin?” Bambam whispered furtively.
“You wouldn’t,” Yugyeom frowned. “Not after what he and Youngjae did. Do you want us to get thrown into jail too? Sungjin and the others won’t let just let it slide, you know. Plus, Brian almost killed you just now!” he hissed.
“Yeah, but he didn’t,” Bambam pointed out. He glanced at Sungjin’s retreating back and pulled his scarf further over his mouth. “We always knew when to back out when we were out of our depth, didn’t we? That’s how we survived this long. And we are way out of our depth right now.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Bam.” Leaning back in his seat, Yugyeom closed his eyes. “You’re a better person than that,” he added. Bambam didn’t reply, looking out the window until the train pulled into the station.
Jaebum turned up his collar against the sudden rain that began falling in sheets over Seoul. People hurried past him in all directions, barely casting a glance at the dark, solid figure that cut across the street and slipped into an alleyway unnoticed. Not too long ago he could barely step out of his apartment without getting asked for an autograph or a photo, and now he was just another invisible civilian. How quickly life changed. He stepped over a drunk sleeping at the backdoor of a shop, then paused. He sighed.
“Jaebum,” Jackson greeted as he emerged from the adjoining lane. Jaebum, stooped over the drunkard, got to his feet. He nodded.
“What did you want to talk about?” he asked, glancing around to make sure nobody was possibly hiding around the corner eavesdropping. He heard nothing so he turned his attention back to Jackson, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his raincoat to keep them warm.
“I think you know exactly what we need to talk about.” Jackson leaned against the wall and gave a meaningful look that Jaebum didn’t want to return. Of course he knew what Jackson was about to say. He knew the second Jackson cut that broadcast off without warning. Jinyoung had been careful not to show his displeasure, but the way he completely neglected to bring it up told Jaebum that Jackson had committed a serious error. Jinyoung never pointed out anyone else’s mistakes. He just brought it upon himself to fix them himself. “He needs to be stopped.”
That got Jaebum’s attention. “Stopped?” he repeated. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“You know as well as I do that we can’t keep going like this,” Jackson hissed. “Did you hear what he said just now? That he did that all for the good of the team? To further the agenda? It’s all bullshit. Look at what’s happening, man. He’s just using you - using us - for whatever plans he has. Did you hear his speech? I’m not gonna lie to you; it scared the shit out of me. That wasn’t Jinyoung talking. That was a tyrannical psychopath.” He shook Jaebum’s shoulder slightly, looking determined.
Jaebum couldn’t look him in the eye. Jackson was pulling every single thought out of his head so accurately that if he didn’t know him better he’d think he was telepathic, but somehow he just couldn’t bring himself to voice them out loud. If he did, the one thing he was still stubbornly refusing to consider might actually become reality: that Jinyoung, somewhere along the line, had become someone else entirely. “… I can’t just leave him, Jackson,” he said. “He’s still our friend.”
Jackson looked pained. “Friends don’t lie and use each other and go behind each other’s backs,” he declared, and let Jaebum go. “You know, I used to believe in you. In what we were doing. It wasn’t the best thing to do, yeah, but I believed in it because it was for the good of everyone else. But I get the feeling that this isn’t about other people anymore. I’ve watched you become more bitter over the years, and I can’t let you or Jinyoung keep going like this. Because,” he slapped a hand to his chest, “deep inside, I’m still a hero. I’m still that kid that wanted to save people, and I still know what’s right and what’s wrong. And what Jinyoung is doing is wrong. I know you know that, Jaebum. And I know, deep down, you’re still a hero too.”
“I left that life in the hands of the people who took it away from me,” Jaebum said bitterly.
“Then why did you look so scared when you thought Jinyoung killed a civilian?” Jackson asked softly. “And why is that drunk guy,” he waved a hand at the alley they had left behind, “going to wake up with enough money in his pocket to buy himself a meal? Stop lying to yourself. I know who you are, even if you pretend he’s not here anymore.”
The rain seemed to grow heavier with each passing silent moment. If Jaebum felt like it, he could gather that intense drumming roaring around him and release it in a shockwave that could level the city. And then it’ll all be over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No heroes, no villains, no friends or enemies. Just a sweet, silent nothing. Instead, he looked at Jackson.
“I’m sorry, Jackson.” It sounded pathetic to his ears. “I… lost sight of what we were trying to do. I’ve known for a while now that he hasn’t been himself but… but somewhere in there is the Jinyoung we know and believe in, and I… I have to try and bring him back. I owe him that much.”
“So you don’t believe in his plan?”
He paused. “I don’t. It’s crazy. I just need him to keep trusting me.”
Jackson closed his eyes for a second, then nodded. “Okay, but we can’t do this alone. I’m still going to see Sungjin.”
Jaebum’s blood seemed to freeze in his veins. His skin prickled, although he couldn’t tell if it was from the rain seeping down the back of his neck or from something else entirely. “Are you crazy?” he hissed. “They’ll kill you.”
“They won’t,” Jackson said adamantly. “They’re trying to save us, man! I don’t care if you hate Sungjin for joining the other side or whatever, but you’re not so stupid that you can’t see that he’s been trying to help us out the whole time. Come on, you’re better than that.”
“It’s suicide. Mark will kill you on the spot.”
Jackon’s expression softened. “If there’s anything I know as truth,” he said, “is that Mark Tuan will be the last person to murder me. Anyway, who else do you think can and will help us?”
Jaebum had no reply to that. He gritted his teeth. Everything he had built up for the past three years was slipping out of his fingers. Jinyoung, his team, his hatred for Sungjin… it was as if none of it had really mattered after all. In the end he was just going to lose everything, same as always. “Do whatever you want,” he muttered. “Go. See what they say. I’ll stay and try to work on Jinyoung.”
“Wonpil…”
“Wonpil will help me, I know. I’m sure he can see what’s going on, even if he isn’t brave enough to stand up to Jinyoung.”
Jackson frowned at that, but said nothing. “Keep safe,” he reached out and clapped a hand to the back of Jaebum’s neck, a determined look in his eyes. “And if I never see you again, just know that you’re one of the best bros I could’ve asked for, and the only thing I regret is that we never got to open our hero agency together.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jaebum tried to smile, but found that he couldn’t. He closed his eyes and knocked his forehead against Jackson’s briefly. “Promise me one thing,” he said, pulling away.
“What?”
“Don’t die.”
Jackson laughed and turned to go. “And you promise me this,” he added as an afterthought, turning back around.
“What?”
Jackson’s smile was the saddest Jaebum had ever seen. “Promise me you’ll get Jinyoung back.”
He swallowed. Was it a lie if you had no idea if you could keep a promise in the first place? He’d let Jackson down once; he couldn’t let it happen again. As the rain hammered around him, he nodded. “I promise.”
High above them, hidden by crooked awnings and low-strung wiring, Wonpil straightened from where he had been crouched on the edge of a rooftop. Already the vibration of Jaebum’s footsteps was growing faint as he left the alley. Wonpil raised his head to the sky and closed his eyes, feeling the static gathering in the air. A storm was coming.
Jinyoung was sprawled on the couch when Jaebum unlocked the door to the flat. A bowl of popcorn tilted precariously to one side beside his legs and an open bag of potato chips lay on the floor, just within reach. For all his meticulousness, there were times when Jinyoung really was nothing but a 20-something without a real job. “Where’s Jackson?” he asked casually when Jaebum threw himself on the other side of the couch. He moved his legs out of the way and settled them comfortably on Jaebum’s lap.
“I couldn’t find him,” Jaebum lied through his teeth, massaging his forehead as if he had a headache. The weight of Jinyoung’s legs over his felt so comfortably familiar that he had to swallow hard to keep his throat from constricting. “I have no idea where he is,” he added, since it was partly true. “But I’m sure he’ll be back soon. You know Jackson. He just needs to blow off steam.”
“Hmm,” Jinyoung said thoughtfully. Jaebum kept his eyes closed so he didn’t have to see the expression on his face. It was easier to keep the lie going like this; Jinyoung always could read him like a book. “Hey,” Jinyoung suddenly chuckled. “We haven’t had a day off like this in a long time, huh?”
Jaebum opened his eyes in time to catch the chip bag that Jinyoung lobbed at him. Jinyoung was grinning from ear to ear, carefree and gleeful, and it was all so natural, so completely innocent that Jaebum couldn’t help grinning right back.
“Well that’s your fault, you workaholic,” he jabbed Jinyoung with his toe.
Jinyoung chuckled lightly, flicking through TV channels. “Kinda reminds you of when we were in middle school, huh?” he said almost distractedly. “You used to come over to my place and we’d lock ourselves in my room playing video games…”
“… and your mum would almost bust the door down trying to get us to come out for dinner.”
“Remember in high school when we went shopping for her and bought all the wrong things? I don’t think I was ever so scared facing villains than seeing my mum’s reaction when she started taking things out of the bag.”
“Or that time Jackson got mad when he kept losing and threw his controller through the wall,” Jaebum reminisced. “Even I was terrified of your mum then, and I wasn’t even the one who did it.”
Jinyoung’s eyes shone. “Remember the day we found out you weren’t actually deaf? Didn’t you spend the next six months pretending you still were so you didn’t have to answer questions in class?”
“It was because everything was too loud and you very well know that,” Jaebum scoffed and kicked him. “And I didn’t like the sound of my voice,” he added.
Jinyoung laughed, bright and blinding. “I really miss being kids,” he said, like it was an afterthought and not particularly important. “Just, you know, going to classes and training and never really thinking about what the real world was like… life used to be so much easier back then, wasn’t it?”
Jaebum looked over at him. Jinyoung was staring at the screen - a bland looking engineering documentary was playing - and stuffing his mouth with popcorn, but despite the gleam shining in his eyes his expression was almost wistful. At that second they really did seem to have morphed back into teenagers, just normal friends hanging out on a normal weekend doing nothing in particular. Did Jinyoung think about these things too? Did he sometimes wish they had never taken this path the way Jaebum sometimes did? A hundred questions were hanging on the tip of his tongue, but only one seemed to fight its way out of his mouth:
“Do you ever think about what we’d be doing if we were still heroes?”
Jinyoung’s expression seemed to blank out for a second. “You tell me first,” he finally said after a long pause.
“I asked you first,” Jaebum insisted.
Jinyoung shook his head. For the first time since they’d starting talking he looked Jaebum in the eye - really looked him in the eye - and Jaebum knew that whatever Jinyoung was about to say would be nothing but truth. It was something he’d picked up from years of watching Jinyoung’s expressions without being able to hear a word he said, of knowing that even the smallest twitch of his eyebrow meant something disproportionately important to him. Lately none of Jinyoung’s expressions had lined up with his actions, and that had shaken Jaebum more than losing his entire life’s dream overnight.
“Honestly?” Jinyoung finally said, with a sardonic tilt to his mouth. “I don’t really remember what it felt like being a hero anymore.” He cleared his throat slightly. “What about you?” What would you be doing if we were still a hero?”
It occurred to Jaebum that he hadn’t given much thought to what he’d be doing right now if he was still a hero. They would have continued working at the same hero agency, certainly, patrolling side by side like before. They would have had after work drinks with Jackson and Wonpil. They’d have started their own team by now, probably. Their faces would be plastered everywhere, maybe. Everyone would know that their names meant peace and safety. And Jinyoung would always be smiling like this, with a twinkle in his eyes, bright and blinding.
If they were still a heroes, Jaebum thought, he’d probably still be sitting here in the exact same way with Jinyoung. They would be laughing and joking, just like this, and he wouldn’t have to pretend that he couldn’t see the hollow emptiness snarling and grimacing behind Jinyoung’s smile.
But before he could say any of this, Jinyoung laughed as if he was suddenly embarrassed. “Wait, I take that back. It isn’t that I don’t remember what it felt like to be a hero. I guess what stayed with me more was how it felt being with you guys. We’ve been a team since high school and honestly… Recently I’ve been thinking that maybe it doesn’t really matter which side I’m on, as long as I get to do it with you. Lame, isn’t it?” He chuckled and looked at the TV again.
In that moment Jaebum knew that no matter how far Jinyoung fell, no matter how deep and dark the abyss that Jinyoung sank into, even if all he could reach were the tips of his fingertips he would try his damned hardest to pull him back out.
Both their heads turned to the door when they heard the key suddenly turning in the lock. Jinyoung turned off the TV and got up cautiously. Wonpil appeared on the other side of the door with a vaguely familiar, bleary -eyed young man. He grinned roguishly at Jaebum and Jinyoung when he saw them.
For a second all Jaebum could draw was a blank, when the name formed so easily on his tongue he was surprised he’d ever forgotten it. “Yoon Dowoon,” he said incredulously. Dowoon’s grin grew even wider.
“Long time no see,” he said in a deep voice.
>>>> part 4
day6/got7
pg-15
almost exactly 3 weeks and 5 days to the end of the world as jae knows it. (superhero au)
<<< part 2
You’re not going to believe this.
From where he sat in the room, Jaebum could only make out the words ‘ability’ and ‘wrong’ from the shape of the doctors’ lips. His mother buried her face in her hands as she started to cry, so he turned to look at Jinyoung sitting beside him at the desk. Jinyoung’s eyes lit up as he turned to smile delightedly at him, his fingers already working to sign the words to him.
What? Jaebum signed back.
All this time… your hearing… it was just an accident. It’s your ability.
His heartbeat was echoing through his body. What?
Try this. Jinyoung held his hand in front of him as if he was grasping an invisible knob. He turned it slowly to the right, looking meaningfully at Jaebum. Jaebum, feeling quite sure that this was all an elaborate joke, that there was no way, no way in hell that he had spent the last 6 years of his life living in a self-induced endless silence because what kind of power was stupid enough to turn the user completely deaf? And what kind of idiot would make himself deaf in the first place?
Jinyoung poked him sharply in the arm. Just do it, he signed, I’m not kidding. And of course Jinyoung would know exactly what he was thinking. It was just something he’d been doing since they met for the first time, 7 year old Jaebum the quiet, newly deaf kid sitting by himself in the corner of the classroom and Jinyoung the glossy-haired boy who came up to him and learned basic sign language by the end of the day just so he could talk to him.
So Jaebum raised a hand, held on to a volume dial that wasn’t there, and turned it violently. And, like wild waves crashing violently into a lone rock in the middle of the ocean, all of the world’s sound slammed loudly, deafeningly into earshot. His mother weeping, the doctor talking to her in soft murmurs, the mechanical hum of the computer on his desk, the ringing of the phone in the next room… everything was screaming at him, and it was all too much.
“Jaebum,” said a low foreign voice as he slapped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut to shut out the sudden attack on his senses. Someone grabbed his face. “Just focus on my voice,” said the person, and Jaebum found a strange sort of calming peace in the sound. He opened his eyes reluctantly. Jinyoung was clutching his head so tight it was if he was trying to keep him from falling apart. He let him go to sign the words, You can turn it down if you want.
Jaebum released one shaky hand from his ear and turned the invisible knob slightly to the left. The world muted, and he found he could uncover his other ear without flinching. “Good,” said Jinyoung, nodding encouragingly. He put a hand on Jaebum’s shoulder and smiled, wide and bright and blinding. “Hi Jaebum. I’m Jinyoung. Park Jinyoung. Your best friend.”
Park Jinyoung. Back then the words sounded like the twinkling of stars to Jaebum, cutting through the black void he’d unintentionally placed himself into. Now they sounded like a million shattering lightbulbs. Before his eyes Jinyoung morphed from a glossy-haired 7 year old with a smile like sunshine into the wild young man standing cockily on a table, smiling into a TV camera and pointing a loaded gun at a group of innocent civilians cowering on the floor. The look in his eyes was murderous.
As the gun went off, three thoughts ran through Jaebum’s mind. One, that maybe he deserved this. Maybe Jinyoung was a monster of his own creation, born from his selfish indignance at losing a dream they’d both been working towards since they were kids. Two, that Frankenstein’s monster eventually led him to his own death, and three, that from this point on there was no turning back.
The crowd screamed at the gunshot, and in the stunned silence that followed, Jaebum heard someone laughing. He dragged his gaze across the unharmed group on the floor and finally settled on Jinyoung, whose laugh he barely recognized. Glee pouring from his eyes, Jinyoung deftly stepped off the table and dropped to his feet in front of Jaebum.
“You didn’t think I’d actually do it, did you?” he asked lightly, and pushed the gun into Jaebum’s chest. It was feather light in his hands. Jaebum blinked, dumbfounded. “But let’s start taking this seriously now, yeah?” Jinyoung added, leaning in closer to Jaebum so no one else could hear him. He pulled away and they looked at each other. Jinyoung’s smile was still the same bright one Jaebum had once associated with warmth and sunshine, but his eyes were as cold and dark as the first time Jaebum found himself plunged into a sudden bottomless silence.
Jinyoung patted him on the shoulder and turned away towards Wonpil. Off to one side, Jackson watched Jaebum warily, who himself was watching the confident sway of Jinyoung’s own shoulders. Once, in a classroom full of soundless screaming children, Jaebum thought of Jinyoung as the one person who saved him from despair. Now, as he held the model gun in his hands and felt the enormity of the chaos suddenly rising around him, he wasn’t so sure.
Despite the heater blasting away in the corner and the people grouped in a loose, sorry excuse of a circle around the coffee table, the air was bone chillingly cold. Jae could almost taste the frost in the air as he kept a cool distance from Sungjin. Mark sat quietly beside him. He hadn’t said a word since the initial shock of finding Dowoon gone, and while he’d never been a talkative guy to start with his silence seemed to weigh heavier to Jae than Brian’s or Sungjin’s. Brian himself sat alone on one end of the couch, looking vacant. Yugyeom and Bambam took up the other side, looking uncomfortable. And Sungjin… well Jae couldn’t even bring himself to look at Sungjin.
“I know we’re not all in the mood to talk at the moment,” Sungjin finally broke the silence in a soft, humbled voice. Jae, looking very pointedly at Brian’s finger blankly tapping the arm of the couch, would’ve preferred he used his usual decisive, commanding tone just to keep up the façade that he was actually their pillar of support instead of the one who caused them all to come crashing back to earth. In that moment he’d never hated anyone more. “But we’re in a crisis at the moment.”
Jae snorted. He waited for Brian to glare at him, but it seemed he didn’t even have the heart to lift his head from where he sat staring at his feet. Now that Jae came to think of it, had Brian even taken one look at Sungjin since they sat down? It all felt… wrong.
“Dowoon and Youngjae,” Yugyeom burst out, then shrank back a little and flushed when everyone’s head turned to him. “They’re not bad guys. I know that much. They’d never sell us out. There must be another reason why they left.” Beside him, Bambam sank further down in his seat, his mouth set defiantly. Jae could only attempt to guess why.
“Did either of them say anything to you last night?” Sungjin asked testily.
Yugyeom shook his head. “Youngjae was out of the room for a while, but he came back and went straight to sleep. He seemed a little down,” (Jae glanced at Mark) “but nothing unusual. Maybe he was tired. Dowoon fell asleep before any of us. Bam and I stayed up til 1, and they were both still there the entire time.”
“It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t leave together,” Jae finally spoke up. He fixated his gaze on the coffee table. “Unless Dowoon left much earlier and you guys forgot he even existed until now.”
Bambam scoffed. “You don’t really get Dowoon’s power do you?” he asked contemptuously. “It isn’t that just anyone forgets him as soon as you take your eyes off him. He could do that, sure, but he has to keep his power activated constantly for that to happen. It wears him out. Haven’t you wondered why we never forget who he is? If you forget him, it’s because he wants you to.” He looked oddly triumphant.
“Well,” Brian said listlessly. He still didn’t bother raising his head, arms folded in front of him. “I guess that means he’s the real traitor then, doesn’t it? Seeing as he seemed very keen on having us forget him. Let’s just get rid of him.”
Yugyeom and Bambam looked stricken. “That’s jumping to conclusions,” Jae retorted. “And it’s too easy to just blame him based on something like that. We need proof.”
“Good, bad, whatever,” Brian said apathetically. “I don’t really care anymore. If someone makes a decision, they should just pay for the consequences.” Off to one side, Sungjin shifted slightly in his seat.
Jae stared. In front of him, Brian had regressed back into the uneasy, awkward kid he first met on the first day of high school, fresh off the plane from Toronto and too shy to talk to anyone except the tall gangly bespectacled kid standing in front of him in the line. And that was after Jae accidentally elbowed him in the chest. “Don’t fucking fall apart on me now, Kang Younghyun,” he said, without any real malice. Brian opened his mouth in surprise and closed it, finding nothing. For one wild second, Jae almost wanted Brian to snap back at him - something, anything - just to feel like everything wasn’t totally out of whack.
“Shut up, both of you,” Mark stood up. He looked directly at Sungjin, the first person to do so since they found out the truth. “If I’m honest, I don’t really give a shit about Dowoon. If he left on his own to do God knows what, that’s on him. But I know Youngjae, and he’s not the type of guy who’d sell us out. I’m gonna go look for him. You can all decide what to do with Dowoon on your own.”
“Wait just a minute,” Sungjin started, when his phone buzzed. He glanced impatiently at the screen. Jae watched his expression change into something more apprehensive as he immediately reached for the TV remote. The second he turned it on, Jinyoung’s smiling face filled the screen.
“What -?” Mark couldn’t have looked more confused if he tried.
“Is this an old ad?” Jae got to his feet.
The camera zoomed out as Jinyoung announced “Seoul!” in a gleeful voice, throwing his arms wide. In one hand he held what looked like a balaclava. In the other, a rifle. Jae’s blood froze in his veins, fingers already reaching for his throat. “Fuck no,” Mark breathed beside him.
“We need to get this off air now,” Brian said, sounding more alert, as Jinyoung made his speech. He turned to Sungjin, who seemed completely dumbfounded. Obviously he hadn’t anticipated this, but really who could have ever anticipated golden child Park Jinyoung to show up on their TV screens one day, brandishing a gun at a group of defenceless people and declaring war on society? “Sungjin!”
“No!” Mark bellowed as the broadcast cut off exactly as the gun went off. He made a move as if to jump right through the screen and held on to the back of the couch to steady himself. Jae watched all the colour drain from his face.
“We need to get back to Seoul now,” Brian muttered.
“Wait,” Bambam said into the stunned silence. “Is that… were we supposed to be fighting that?” He pointed a finger at the blank TV screen. “That guy? The guy who just shot into a defenceless crowd?”
“Bam,” Yugyeom said, but he just shook him off and stood up shakily.
“Yo, this isn’t what I signed up for!” he shook his head, eyes wide with fear. “You know, when you guys said they were in a crime ring I thought this was like… drug lords or something! Did you see the look in that guy’s eyes? He’s fucking crazy! And he used to be a hero? Hell if I’m going to jump into something like that!”
“Did you think any of us signed up for any of this?” Mark snapped despite his own shaking hands. “Pull yourself together, man. Aren’t you always the one crowing about how you were supposed to be the next gen’s big hero?”
“Fuck no,” Bambam backed off, hands held up in front of him. “I’ve changed my mind. Who am I to take on maniacs like that? I’m just a back alley street fighter; the biggest guy I’ve taken down was a jewellery thief for fucks’ sakes!”
“You took me down,” said Jae quietly. “And I used to be a Super.”
“You’re out of practice, it doesn’t count,” Bambam replied. Before Jae had time to even feel offended (although it was true) he added, “You’re not batshit insane either. I wouldn’t touch crazy like that even if you paid me triple, Sungjin. I’m outta here.” And he turned and ran for the door.
“Like hell you are,” Brian snarled, instantly on his feet. He stretched his hands in front of him before yanking them back. Bambam, already halfway out of the room, flew backwards towards him and flipped over the couch, landing on the floor with a groan. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s a damn coward,” Brian spat at him. “I’ll fucking kill you, you piece of shit.” And he put his hand over Bambam’s chest, eyes glowering.
Jae remembered a joke he’d made once in school, an offhand spur of the moment comment that immediately got sealed in the back of his memory with all the other stupid, senseless things that came out of his mouth. “Hey Brian, wouldn’t it be cool - if you were a villain at least - if you could kill someone by pulling out their heart?”
Mark immediately hauled Brian off Bambam and slammed him into the couch, wrenching his arms up behind his back. In the midst of it all, Jae started sniggering. It was all just so absurd to him - his friends’ defections, his being dragged into this against his will, watching the unravelling of everyone who, up until last night, he had seen as being so much better than him… it was surreal, to say the least. As the sniggers turned to full blown laughs, he was aware it sounded very much like sobs.
Sungjin sat down heavily and put his head in his hands. “Maybe,” he said in a low voice that cut through the chaos that had erupted around the room, “it would be better if we just called all this off.”
Brian stopped struggling. An “I told you so” welled up in Jae’s throat, and he had to bite his tongue so hard to keep it from coming out he was sure he drew blood.
If Wonpil tried hard - but not that hard, because all it took was the smell of plum blossoms to trigger the memory - he could remember exactly how it was on his first day of Super school. It had been a beautifully crisp day, he remembered. There was only the faint hint of budding spring in the air like a promise of what was to come, and as Wonpil passed through the gate to what should have been his rosy future, he remembered he had been absolutely terrified.
He often wondered what he would’ve done if he had been one of those dispatched to Bucheon the day Junhyuk went rogue. Could he have been the one who calmed Junhyuk down? Could he have been the one to stop Junhyuk instead? The details of how he’d actually died were murky, but Wonpil was sure if he knew anything about Im Junhyuk - and he was so, so sure that he was one of the few people who really knew Im Junhyuk - that Junhyuk’s pride would have never allowed someone else to take his life.
Or maybe somebody did, and Wonpil had never known him at all.
Either way, Junhyuk had ruined everything. After the fact, Wonpil returned to Incheon with a hero career he never even got to get off the ground. He ended up helping his father out on the bee farm, just like what his parents had intended before he piped up the courage in middle school to say that he had applied to the best hero school in Seoul and had been accepted in on a half-scholarship and there was nothing they could do to stop him. They’d stopped hounding him about it when they found out just how much more money heroes made compared to beekeepers.
And so life went on, agonizingly slowly for someone who had honed his skills enough to the point that he detected a bomb in a building the second the timer went off. Or at least it did for a couple of years, until the day Wonpil returned home from a delivery and found Jaebum, Jinyoung and Jackson waiting outside his house, grinning those disarmingly friendly grins they had the first day Wonpil met them in a shared training session and had never really been able to get out of his life ever since.
“Been a busy bee?” Jinyoung had joked over drinks, to which Wonpil laughed.
“What Junhyuk did was wrong, I’m not denying that,” Jaebum had said out of nowhere, slamming down his beer. “But why did we have to be the ones to pay for his mistake? It’s totally unfair, if you think about it.”
“JB’s still hung up about losing his fame and fortune,” Jackson had whispered loudly, waggling his eyebrows at Wonpil, but Jinyoung looked thoughtful. Wonpil remembered the little wrinkle that appeared in the corner of his mouth, something that only came up when he was thinking about upcoming exams, or the best way to negotiate a hostage situation.
“It’s not just unfair, it’s totally dumb,” Jaebum declared. He had shoved a slice of pancake in his mouth after saying this, Wonpil remembered, and it took some time for him to swallow it down before he continued. “What if a supervillain league attacks tomorrow? The army would never be able to handle it. The public are idiots for trying to pretend that we don’t exist anymore.”
“Well there’s nothing that can be done about it,” Wonpil had tried to reason, but he should have known that there was nothing he could say. Because there was a reason Jinyoung, Jaebum and Jackson were poised to become the top rookies the year of their debut: they had the sort of confidence and relentless determination that Wonpil, who had never imagined himself as anything more than a sidekick or part of a team, could never summon up for himself.
“You know what we should do?” Jinyoung had suddenly slammed down his chopsticks, cheeks flushed and eyes shining. “We should remind them that we exist.”
“What, become vigilantes?” Wonpil had asked dubiously.
“Hell no,” Jinyoung shook his head wildly. Wonpil could smell the alcohol hanging around his head. “What’s the point in helping people who don’t want to be helped? If the people want us to be villains so bad, well shouldn’t we just become those villains?”
Silence all round. Wonpil remembered feeling the static hovering in the air like an omen, raising the hair on the back of his neck. He couldn’t deny that Jinyoung’s words felt wrong, but wasn’t there some truth in them as well? It was true that Junhyuk had ruined everything, but it wasn’t Junhyuk who destroyed all their hopes and dreams. It had been society. Society and its stupid, baseless fear.
“You know,” Jaebum had said quietly, “that could actually work.”
“What? That’s crazy talk; you guys are drunk as hell,” Jackson looked between them, frowning. “I’m going to get the bill.”
“Wait, listen,” Jaebum caught his arm to keep him from leaving. “Maybe becoming villains is a bit much,” he had fixed Jinyoung with a meaningful stare, “but what if we just cause a little chaos? You know, fuck it up enough that people realize they actually need us? Nobody even needs to know it’s us, you know. Think about it. We could be the ones to reinstate Supers. And if it doesn’t work… well maybe it’ll make people remember that they used to have heroes, at the very least.”
Wonpil had felt the static in the air growing stronger, but he’d ignored it. The thought of spending the rest of his life tending to the bees, listening to their senseless chatter, was enough to make him think that maybe, just maybe, Jaebum’s idea wasn’t so crazy after all. Wasn’t it alright to pretend to be a villain if it meant being able to return to being a hero? Surely, as long as no one actually got hurt, they could pull this off. And life really could go back to normal.
“We’ll take it one step at a time,” he had said at the time, and now, three years later, he was beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they had taken it a step too far.
“Park Jinyoung, explain what the fuck that was,” Jackson snarled now, slamming the door behind him. If it wasn’t broken before there was definitely no saving it now, but Wonpil wasn’t stupid enough to say anything about that, seeing as they had just robbed a bank and now had enough money to replace any number of doors Jackson broke.
Jinyoung only looked up from where he had been sorting the money into neat wads and stacking them in equally meticulous piles to the side of the table. Beside him, Wonpil was tallying the figures on his laptop. Jaebum sat opposite them with his chin resting on his interlocked fingers. He had only been watching silently, but now he got up.
“Yeah, let’s talk,” he leaned against the table, Jackson bristling with fury beside him. Wonpil felt the clear divide lying between them, but if Jinyoung saw it too, he gave nothing away. “Explain yourself, Jinyoung.”
“Come on guys,” Jinyoung spread his arms out wide. His eyes sparkled like he was grinning, although his expression remained completely innocent. “It was about time we showed ourselves, wasn’t it? Wasn’t this the aim of the plan anyway? To plant some terror into people’s hearts?”
“Yes, but not like this,” Jackson hissed before Jaebum could stop him, pounding a fist on to the table. “When you told me you wanted me to film you I thought it was for… archival purposes or something! Not to broadcast you committing mass murder to the entire nation!”
“Did I kill someone?” Jinyoung demanded, looking dangerous. “Tell me, Jackson. Did anyone die?”
Maybe not today, Wonpil thought. Whether Jaebum and Jackson knew he wasn’t sure, but Section 3’s boss was not the first person Jinyoung had shot over the past three years. Wonpil had felt each and every bullet reverberate through the air, and he had turned away every time. They’re criminals anyway, Jinyoung always said. What we’re doing isn’t any different from when we were Supers, if you think about it. Wonpil could see the truth behind that, but he never mentioned that the first rule that was drummed into their heads in school was that unless in dire circumstanced, Supers should never kill.
“No…” Jackson said reluctantly.
“Then what are you so mad about?”
“Jinyoung,” Jaebum finally said in a low voice. Both Jackson and Jinyoung backed off a little to look at him. Wonpil had never seen such a pained look on Jaebum’s face. “What are you doing?”
For a second, just a tiny fraction of a second, Jinyoung looked exactly how he used to when he was called on out of nowhere in the middle of training. It was an expression that said he knew the call meant he’d messed up somewhere but he had no idea just where. Wonpil had happened upon him more than enough times in the locker rooms going over every single excruciating detail of the session afterwards to know that the only person demanding perfection of Jinyoung was himself. Wonpil had only known one other person who had pressured himself in the same way, and that person went and brought down a whole industry with him when he died.
Then Jinyoung straightened, and he had that fiery look of determination Wonpil had always admired about him. “We’ve slogged away for years trying to get society to notice their mistake, to get them to remember us,” he said quietly. “But we haven’t made any real impact, have we? We aren’t going to make any statements if we keep staying in the shadows. People need to know that threats are out there! I did this for us, you guys.”
Jaebum looked exasperated. “But I said we weren’t ready.”
Jackson had been looking between them in disbelief during the whole exchange, but now he raised his arms and brought them down on the table, cracking it in half. Wonpil snatched up his laptop before it had a chance to fall to the ground.
“Jinyoung,” Jackson breathed into the shocked silence. His fury seemed to be burning white hot that it almost seemed cold, and Wonpil felt that with the usual amiable, laidback Jackson it just seemed so much worse. “You,” he pointed at Jinyoung, “have lost your god damn mind. And Jaebum,” his eyes flashed, “I thought better of you. I thought better of you all.”
“Jackson, wait,” Jaebum put out a hand to catch him, but Jackson swatted him away.
“You’re just as bad as them,” he snarled. “You were considering doing something like this too? Not now, but eventually? You know, if I didn’t know you guys before I would’ve thought that I was standing in a room full of villains right now!”
The situation was spiralling out of control. “That’s enough,” Wonpil got to his feet. All eyes flew to him. “Remember when we were in high school? We made a pact that we were all going to become heroes and open an agency together. Remember that?”
“Yeah, but that didn’t happen,” Jaebum muttered. Wonpil ignored him.
“Three years ago we made a decision to try and keep that dream alive,” he continued. “No matter what.” He fixed all of them with a meaningful look. “Are you all really going to fight over something that was inevitable? We all agreed behaving like villains was the best way to get people to remember we existed. Is what happened just now really that far from what we wanted to accomplish? And no one got hurt, just like what you wanted,” he pointed out to Jackson.
“Fuck, Pil, I know no one got hurt but did it really need to be that extreme?” Jackson asked, sounding kinder but still looking furious.
“Revealing yourself was stupid, too,” Jaebum added to Jinyoung. “Who’s going to reinstate a hero who basically identified himself as a villain on national TV?”
The question struck a chord in Wonpil. It was stupid oversight on his part, but Jaebum was right. Jinyoung would never be accepted back into society. Even if he confessed it was all part of a plan, there was no way any council or committee would allow him to work as a Super again, noble cause be damned. He glanced at Jinyoung to gauge his reaction, and came away with nothing.
“When the time comes, it’ll all sort itself out,” Jinyoung said calmly. Something about his expression said that there was nothing else they would be getting out of him about the matter. “Let’s just keep riding the momentum. We can’t go back now.”
Jackson fixed him with a withering look, and left the room without another word.
“Maybe you should talk to him,” Mark nudged Jae and tilted his head towards the front of the train. Jae could just make out the top of Brian’s head as he sat beside the window, alone. Sungjin sat by himself one row away, and Bambam and Yugyeom seemed to have fallen asleep on each other. One more hour until they reached Seoul, and Jae would be free from all this. He was already counting down the minutes to falling into his own bed, closing the blinds and never having anything to do with the hero world ever again.
“No point talking to someone who’s already given up,” Jae said a little louder than intended, but Brian didn’t even stir.
Mark shook his head. “I know you and Brian haven’t exactly been the best of friends in a long time but aren’t you being a little harsh?”
“Harsh? Me?” Jae asked, baffled. “I don’t know where you’ve been for the last four hours but I think I’m probably the only sane one left in this place,” he huffed, slumping down in his seat.
“I’m just saying,” Mark looked out the window, “don’t do - or not do - anything you’ll regret later.”
Jae wished, not for the first or last time that day, that he had shut the door in Sungjin’s face the day he turned up at his office. What would he be doing now? Probably shadowing someone around town. With a coffee in hand, just to seem less suspicious. An iced latte sounded pretty good right about now. He sighed. His dreams were always just out of reach. “You know, what happened with Jinyoung… it’s not your fault,” he said aloud instead.
“You don’t know that,” Mark said to the windowpane. Past the outline of his ears the countryside flew past in a muddled blur of fiery reds and deep greens, the occasional golden smudge appearing for a second before disappearing into the past. Jae hadn’t realized how deep into autumn they had gotten. What would happen when winter came? Would Jinyoung have burned the city to the ground?
“But I do,” he said, as they flew over a river. The surface of the water sparkled in the sunlight, mesmerising Jae. “You’re a goddamn hero, whether you like it or not.”
“No,” Mark looked towards the front of the train, where the silent TV screen was replaying the bank incident from that morning. Jae couldn’t watch it happen again, but Mark kept his gaze fixed on the screen. “I’m not. I’m not Brian or Sungjin or even you. I don’t have any lofty ambitions to save the world or anything like that, I never did. What kind of hero saves people just because it pays well? What kind of hero turns the people who look up to him into villains and cowards just because he didn’t want them to get too close? Aren’t heroes supposed to inspire others? I’ve had this feeling ever since Youngjae left, and what Brian said this morning confirmed it. I never was a hero, and I don’t have any right to call myself that.” He shook his head wearily.
Jae thought about Junhyuk; proud, arrogant Junhyuk with his fiery temper and thinly disguised contempt for the people he was supposed to be saving and suddenly felt tired. Who was it that decided who heroes should and shouldn’t be? Junhyuk, in the end, had done for him what none of them were honestly prepared to do themselves, despite all their self-righteous outrage and constant affirmations of self-sacrifice. But Mark was still talking.
“Honestly the only reason I joined Sungjin on this mission wasn’t because of the money, or the fact that he was going to throw my ass in jail for vigilantism. It was so I could tell Jinyoung I was sorry. I already knew that day when I crushed his dreams - like I did to Youngjae - that I had done something terrible to him, and I was right.” Jinyoung was silently laughing. Mark’s eyes followed the gun as it swung across the screen. “I used to think words were just words, but I’m starting to think they’re more powerful than any superpower. Maybe this is just my punishment for not realizing that earlier.”
“That’s bullshit,” Jae said vehemently, surprising himself. Mark blinked, startled. “Jinyoung’s world didn’t revolve around you, and neither did Youngjae’s,” he continued. “Sure, it was a shit move on your part and they were definitely disappointed, but did you ask Jinyoung to become a murderer? Did you ask Youngjae to run away? You can’t really influence what’s already inside someone, you know. I mean, I know you were the top rookie and everything but even you aren’t that special, you know?”
Mark stared at him, dumbfounded, then broke into an uneasy smile. “It’d be nice if that was true,” he said, looking out the window again.
“You know, I’m not used to hearing you talk about your feelings,” Jae said to his shoulder.
“Neither am I,” Mark sighed.
15 minutes before they pulled into the station, Sungjin came clambering unsteadily down the aisle, taking a seat across the aisle from Jae. “What’s up?” Mark asked, leaning over when Jae stubbornly ignored him.
“Not so loud,” Sungjin said, sounding closer to the old him than he did before. He cast a glance over the other passengers in the train. “Meet up at my place when we get back to Seoul. This mission isn’t over, no matter how much we want it to be.” Jae glanced at him and looked away immediately. Sungjin had the same determined glint in his eye he had the day he crashed Jae’s office. “Jae…” his voice lowered slightly. “I know it’s asking a lot from you, but can I count on you to be there?”
“He’ll be there,” Mark said. Sungjin nodded at him gratefully and made his way back to his seat.
“Stop dragging me into things without asking first,” Jae whispered furiously to Mark.
“You always said you were a shit hero,” Mark whispered back. “Now’s the chance to prove yourself wrong.”
“Ugggghhhhhh,” Jae moaned, sliding down in his seat and pulling his hood over his head.
Meanwhile, two rows away, Bambam and Yugyeom exchanged glances. “Remember when Dowoon asked if I was going to sell out Sungjin?” Bambam whispered furtively.
“You wouldn’t,” Yugyeom frowned. “Not after what he and Youngjae did. Do you want us to get thrown into jail too? Sungjin and the others won’t let just let it slide, you know. Plus, Brian almost killed you just now!” he hissed.
“Yeah, but he didn’t,” Bambam pointed out. He glanced at Sungjin’s retreating back and pulled his scarf further over his mouth. “We always knew when to back out when we were out of our depth, didn’t we? That’s how we survived this long. And we are way out of our depth right now.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Bam.” Leaning back in his seat, Yugyeom closed his eyes. “You’re a better person than that,” he added. Bambam didn’t reply, looking out the window until the train pulled into the station.
Jaebum turned up his collar against the sudden rain that began falling in sheets over Seoul. People hurried past him in all directions, barely casting a glance at the dark, solid figure that cut across the street and slipped into an alleyway unnoticed. Not too long ago he could barely step out of his apartment without getting asked for an autograph or a photo, and now he was just another invisible civilian. How quickly life changed. He stepped over a drunk sleeping at the backdoor of a shop, then paused. He sighed.
“Jaebum,” Jackson greeted as he emerged from the adjoining lane. Jaebum, stooped over the drunkard, got to his feet. He nodded.
“What did you want to talk about?” he asked, glancing around to make sure nobody was possibly hiding around the corner eavesdropping. He heard nothing so he turned his attention back to Jackson, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his raincoat to keep them warm.
“I think you know exactly what we need to talk about.” Jackson leaned against the wall and gave a meaningful look that Jaebum didn’t want to return. Of course he knew what Jackson was about to say. He knew the second Jackson cut that broadcast off without warning. Jinyoung had been careful not to show his displeasure, but the way he completely neglected to bring it up told Jaebum that Jackson had committed a serious error. Jinyoung never pointed out anyone else’s mistakes. He just brought it upon himself to fix them himself. “He needs to be stopped.”
That got Jaebum’s attention. “Stopped?” he repeated. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“You know as well as I do that we can’t keep going like this,” Jackson hissed. “Did you hear what he said just now? That he did that all for the good of the team? To further the agenda? It’s all bullshit. Look at what’s happening, man. He’s just using you - using us - for whatever plans he has. Did you hear his speech? I’m not gonna lie to you; it scared the shit out of me. That wasn’t Jinyoung talking. That was a tyrannical psychopath.” He shook Jaebum’s shoulder slightly, looking determined.
Jaebum couldn’t look him in the eye. Jackson was pulling every single thought out of his head so accurately that if he didn’t know him better he’d think he was telepathic, but somehow he just couldn’t bring himself to voice them out loud. If he did, the one thing he was still stubbornly refusing to consider might actually become reality: that Jinyoung, somewhere along the line, had become someone else entirely. “… I can’t just leave him, Jackson,” he said. “He’s still our friend.”
Jackson looked pained. “Friends don’t lie and use each other and go behind each other’s backs,” he declared, and let Jaebum go. “You know, I used to believe in you. In what we were doing. It wasn’t the best thing to do, yeah, but I believed in it because it was for the good of everyone else. But I get the feeling that this isn’t about other people anymore. I’ve watched you become more bitter over the years, and I can’t let you or Jinyoung keep going like this. Because,” he slapped a hand to his chest, “deep inside, I’m still a hero. I’m still that kid that wanted to save people, and I still know what’s right and what’s wrong. And what Jinyoung is doing is wrong. I know you know that, Jaebum. And I know, deep down, you’re still a hero too.”
“I left that life in the hands of the people who took it away from me,” Jaebum said bitterly.
“Then why did you look so scared when you thought Jinyoung killed a civilian?” Jackson asked softly. “And why is that drunk guy,” he waved a hand at the alley they had left behind, “going to wake up with enough money in his pocket to buy himself a meal? Stop lying to yourself. I know who you are, even if you pretend he’s not here anymore.”
The rain seemed to grow heavier with each passing silent moment. If Jaebum felt like it, he could gather that intense drumming roaring around him and release it in a shockwave that could level the city. And then it’ll all be over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No heroes, no villains, no friends or enemies. Just a sweet, silent nothing. Instead, he looked at Jackson.
“I’m sorry, Jackson.” It sounded pathetic to his ears. “I… lost sight of what we were trying to do. I’ve known for a while now that he hasn’t been himself but… but somewhere in there is the Jinyoung we know and believe in, and I… I have to try and bring him back. I owe him that much.”
“So you don’t believe in his plan?”
He paused. “I don’t. It’s crazy. I just need him to keep trusting me.”
Jackson closed his eyes for a second, then nodded. “Okay, but we can’t do this alone. I’m still going to see Sungjin.”
Jaebum’s blood seemed to freeze in his veins. His skin prickled, although he couldn’t tell if it was from the rain seeping down the back of his neck or from something else entirely. “Are you crazy?” he hissed. “They’ll kill you.”
“They won’t,” Jackson said adamantly. “They’re trying to save us, man! I don’t care if you hate Sungjin for joining the other side or whatever, but you’re not so stupid that you can’t see that he’s been trying to help us out the whole time. Come on, you’re better than that.”
“It’s suicide. Mark will kill you on the spot.”
Jackon’s expression softened. “If there’s anything I know as truth,” he said, “is that Mark Tuan will be the last person to murder me. Anyway, who else do you think can and will help us?”
Jaebum had no reply to that. He gritted his teeth. Everything he had built up for the past three years was slipping out of his fingers. Jinyoung, his team, his hatred for Sungjin… it was as if none of it had really mattered after all. In the end he was just going to lose everything, same as always. “Do whatever you want,” he muttered. “Go. See what they say. I’ll stay and try to work on Jinyoung.”
“Wonpil…”
“Wonpil will help me, I know. I’m sure he can see what’s going on, even if he isn’t brave enough to stand up to Jinyoung.”
Jackson frowned at that, but said nothing. “Keep safe,” he reached out and clapped a hand to the back of Jaebum’s neck, a determined look in his eyes. “And if I never see you again, just know that you’re one of the best bros I could’ve asked for, and the only thing I regret is that we never got to open our hero agency together.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jaebum tried to smile, but found that he couldn’t. He closed his eyes and knocked his forehead against Jackson’s briefly. “Promise me one thing,” he said, pulling away.
“What?”
“Don’t die.”
Jackson laughed and turned to go. “And you promise me this,” he added as an afterthought, turning back around.
“What?”
Jackson’s smile was the saddest Jaebum had ever seen. “Promise me you’ll get Jinyoung back.”
He swallowed. Was it a lie if you had no idea if you could keep a promise in the first place? He’d let Jackson down once; he couldn’t let it happen again. As the rain hammered around him, he nodded. “I promise.”
High above them, hidden by crooked awnings and low-strung wiring, Wonpil straightened from where he had been crouched on the edge of a rooftop. Already the vibration of Jaebum’s footsteps was growing faint as he left the alley. Wonpil raised his head to the sky and closed his eyes, feeling the static gathering in the air. A storm was coming.
Jinyoung was sprawled on the couch when Jaebum unlocked the door to the flat. A bowl of popcorn tilted precariously to one side beside his legs and an open bag of potato chips lay on the floor, just within reach. For all his meticulousness, there were times when Jinyoung really was nothing but a 20-something without a real job. “Where’s Jackson?” he asked casually when Jaebum threw himself on the other side of the couch. He moved his legs out of the way and settled them comfortably on Jaebum’s lap.
“I couldn’t find him,” Jaebum lied through his teeth, massaging his forehead as if he had a headache. The weight of Jinyoung’s legs over his felt so comfortably familiar that he had to swallow hard to keep his throat from constricting. “I have no idea where he is,” he added, since it was partly true. “But I’m sure he’ll be back soon. You know Jackson. He just needs to blow off steam.”
“Hmm,” Jinyoung said thoughtfully. Jaebum kept his eyes closed so he didn’t have to see the expression on his face. It was easier to keep the lie going like this; Jinyoung always could read him like a book. “Hey,” Jinyoung suddenly chuckled. “We haven’t had a day off like this in a long time, huh?”
Jaebum opened his eyes in time to catch the chip bag that Jinyoung lobbed at him. Jinyoung was grinning from ear to ear, carefree and gleeful, and it was all so natural, so completely innocent that Jaebum couldn’t help grinning right back.
“Well that’s your fault, you workaholic,” he jabbed Jinyoung with his toe.
Jinyoung chuckled lightly, flicking through TV channels. “Kinda reminds you of when we were in middle school, huh?” he said almost distractedly. “You used to come over to my place and we’d lock ourselves in my room playing video games…”
“… and your mum would almost bust the door down trying to get us to come out for dinner.”
“Remember in high school when we went shopping for her and bought all the wrong things? I don’t think I was ever so scared facing villains than seeing my mum’s reaction when she started taking things out of the bag.”
“Or that time Jackson got mad when he kept losing and threw his controller through the wall,” Jaebum reminisced. “Even I was terrified of your mum then, and I wasn’t even the one who did it.”
Jinyoung’s eyes shone. “Remember the day we found out you weren’t actually deaf? Didn’t you spend the next six months pretending you still were so you didn’t have to answer questions in class?”
“It was because everything was too loud and you very well know that,” Jaebum scoffed and kicked him. “And I didn’t like the sound of my voice,” he added.
Jinyoung laughed, bright and blinding. “I really miss being kids,” he said, like it was an afterthought and not particularly important. “Just, you know, going to classes and training and never really thinking about what the real world was like… life used to be so much easier back then, wasn’t it?”
Jaebum looked over at him. Jinyoung was staring at the screen - a bland looking engineering documentary was playing - and stuffing his mouth with popcorn, but despite the gleam shining in his eyes his expression was almost wistful. At that second they really did seem to have morphed back into teenagers, just normal friends hanging out on a normal weekend doing nothing in particular. Did Jinyoung think about these things too? Did he sometimes wish they had never taken this path the way Jaebum sometimes did? A hundred questions were hanging on the tip of his tongue, but only one seemed to fight its way out of his mouth:
“Do you ever think about what we’d be doing if we were still heroes?”
Jinyoung’s expression seemed to blank out for a second. “You tell me first,” he finally said after a long pause.
“I asked you first,” Jaebum insisted.
Jinyoung shook his head. For the first time since they’d starting talking he looked Jaebum in the eye - really looked him in the eye - and Jaebum knew that whatever Jinyoung was about to say would be nothing but truth. It was something he’d picked up from years of watching Jinyoung’s expressions without being able to hear a word he said, of knowing that even the smallest twitch of his eyebrow meant something disproportionately important to him. Lately none of Jinyoung’s expressions had lined up with his actions, and that had shaken Jaebum more than losing his entire life’s dream overnight.
“Honestly?” Jinyoung finally said, with a sardonic tilt to his mouth. “I don’t really remember what it felt like being a hero anymore.” He cleared his throat slightly. “What about you?” What would you be doing if we were still a hero?”
It occurred to Jaebum that he hadn’t given much thought to what he’d be doing right now if he was still a hero. They would have continued working at the same hero agency, certainly, patrolling side by side like before. They would have had after work drinks with Jackson and Wonpil. They’d have started their own team by now, probably. Their faces would be plastered everywhere, maybe. Everyone would know that their names meant peace and safety. And Jinyoung would always be smiling like this, with a twinkle in his eyes, bright and blinding.
If they were still a heroes, Jaebum thought, he’d probably still be sitting here in the exact same way with Jinyoung. They would be laughing and joking, just like this, and he wouldn’t have to pretend that he couldn’t see the hollow emptiness snarling and grimacing behind Jinyoung’s smile.
But before he could say any of this, Jinyoung laughed as if he was suddenly embarrassed. “Wait, I take that back. It isn’t that I don’t remember what it felt like to be a hero. I guess what stayed with me more was how it felt being with you guys. We’ve been a team since high school and honestly… Recently I’ve been thinking that maybe it doesn’t really matter which side I’m on, as long as I get to do it with you. Lame, isn’t it?” He chuckled and looked at the TV again.
In that moment Jaebum knew that no matter how far Jinyoung fell, no matter how deep and dark the abyss that Jinyoung sank into, even if all he could reach were the tips of his fingertips he would try his damned hardest to pull him back out.
Both their heads turned to the door when they heard the key suddenly turning in the lock. Jinyoung turned off the TV and got up cautiously. Wonpil appeared on the other side of the door with a vaguely familiar, bleary -eyed young man. He grinned roguishly at Jaebum and Jinyoung when he saw them.
For a second all Jaebum could draw was a blank, when the name formed so easily on his tongue he was surprised he’d ever forgotten it. “Yoon Dowoon,” he said incredulously. Dowoon’s grin grew even wider.
“Long time no see,” he said in a deep voice.
>>>> part 4