[VIXXO] the heart is just a bloody motor (never meant to drive) [1/5]
Title: the heart is just a bloody motor (never meant to drive)
Fandom: VIXXO
Rating: PG-13
Genre: action/adventure
Word Count: 43k
Pairing: Minseok/Taekwoon (with minor side Hyukbin)
Summary: [sort of mafia!AU] Minseok has long since stopped trying to make sense of the contradictions in his own life, so he's not sure why he's so invested in reconciling the various sides of one Jung Taekwoon. Still, he thinks that it might plague him until he figures out until exactly what he's supposed to think about this person he was trying to kill just the other day.
Warnings: bodyswapping
Notes: Originally posted here for chansoos in the minseokful 2014 round.
THANK YOU SO MUCH as always to exeuntpbabear and elpis_chan for letting me scream at them and lie on the floor crying. Thanks to kimikko for several of the gags and to Rina (xiyings) for being my illegal beta and supplier of plot.
THANK YOU, AYUMI, FOR THE PROMPTS THAT I ENDED UP COMBINING TO MAKE THIS PLOT and for word warring me and unwittingly helping me finish your fic.
This fic would not be possible without copious amounts of Block B, FEMM, and Sucker Punch soundtrack.
Minseok hits the pavement. It's not particularly elegant as far as falls go; more of a sprawl than a tight roll, his shoulder making impact with more force than he would like. A split second later a bullet hits the wall right where his head had been, but by then Minseok is already scrambling forward towards the metal storage crates stacked in even rows a few yards ahead. Lu Han reaches the crate at the same time and his hand immediately shoots out to drag Minseok further into cover. More bullets sing overhead now and ping off of the crates, ricocheting in odd directions. Even though they can't see exactly how many shooters there are, from the sheer rate of fire Minseok estimates that there are at least four, maybe five of them. If that's true, then Minseok's team easily outnumbers them, but they still have the established cover and vantage points. They have the advantage.
"Fuckers!" Lu Han spits, his shoulder and arm pressed tightly against Minseok's as they crowd away from the edges. "They knew we were coming!"
"Sure looks like it," says Minseok shortly. He reloads his own gun as quickly as he can, even though he's unlikely to get a good shot in from here. Still better to be prepared. It's only when he's finished that he finally has a moment to catch his breath, shaking out his shoulder a little bit as he moves to peer around the corner. "I was only set to take care of the heavy lifting tonight, you know. If you'd told me we were likely to have company, I would have brought something a little more impressive than this."
"If I'd known," Lu Han retorts, "I would have insisted that we leave more than a skeleton lookout."
"Your intelligence-gathering is shit. And I mean, I know Jongdae's lost some weight recently, but a skeleton..."
"Ha ha ha," Lu Han deadpans. Anger and fear have robbed him of his usual appreciation for Minseok's jokes. "You're a regular comedian aren't y- shit!"
He breaks off in mid-sentence and Minseok cranes around to see what has caught his attention. The suppressing fire has slackened somewhat, which is potentially worrying on its own, but when Minseok follows Lu Han's sharp gaze, the sight that greets him sucks the air back out of his lungs faster than the earlier impact with the concrete floor had. He sees Yifan crouching behind another line of crates closer to the center of the warehouse, more exposed than their own current hiding place, and he sees one of the gunmen coming down the stairway from the walkway above, making a wide circle around the perimeter. Minseok sees Yifan's exposed back, left open to the figure approaching, gun aimed right at his head.
Stop. Rewind.
That morning the word had come in from their paid informant that the cargo was waiting stacked and stored in the warehouse on the furthest edge of the shipyard, carefully and conveniently placed there after another series of bribes had caused the storage records and instructions to be subtly shuffled around. Yifan had complained about the amount of money they had to lay out up front, but they all knew that the payoff when they found a buyer would more than cover the necessary bribes, leaving a hefty share for each of them, so Minseok could tell he only complained for the look of the thing. Their intelligence told them that the greater part of the shipyard's workers would be out and away for machinery training, and Junmyeon's generous wallet, over Yifan's halfhearted protestations, had ensured a vacant gate and a door lock that a toddler could pick. A shipment like this, full of apparently quite valuable biomedical research material, would normally be under much heavier security, but such were the benefits of paying off the right people in the right positions. The entire operation, Minseok had thought as he slid his gun into its holster alongside spare cartridges, would be like taking candy from a baby.
Stop. Rewind.
When Minseok had first met Junmyeon and Yifan, they had only recently entered into their joint leadership of the city's only real organized crime racket. They were still being constantly trampled and cut out on every "business opportunity" by the amorphous gangs that ebbed and flowed through the city, splintering and merging together and splintering again on a monthly basis. Neither Junmyeon nor Yifan had scratched out much of a place for themselves on their own, but together they had a plan that would make them the power to be reckoned with in the area. Even with their two groups combined, they were massively outnumbered by the competition; even the addition of Minseok, and later Zitao, Jongin, and Sehun, did very little to change that. But the secret to EXO's later success was not the amount of manpower they possessed, but rather Junmyeon and Yifan's almost uncanny ability to pick the most overlooked targets and wring more profit from them than any onlooker would have believed possible. Aided by Lu Han's frankly overwhelming network of information and Junmyeon's apparently inexhaustible access to bribe money, their unbelievable luck, if that was what you wanted to call it, was what boosted EXO up the gang hierarchy to their current spot on the top of the heap.
Now.
Now it looks for a moment like that incredible luck is running thin, leaving them floundering like fish on a beach after the tide goes out, right when they needed it the most. Then Lu Han launches himself forward, out from behind the crates, sprinting forward with both guns blazing. Yifan looks back in surprise just as the gunman beats a hasty retreat, target forgotten for the time being.
"Watch your fucking back!" Lu Han snarls, not even looking at Yifan.
"Watch your fucking mouth!" Yifan shoots back, but Minseok can tell that he's rattled by the close call.
Minseok can also tell that Lu Han is going to be in a shitton of trouble in a second when the others up on the balconies get him in their sights, so he rolls up onto the balls of his feet to dart into a better firing position. The others, scattered around the warehouse, seem to have largely the same idea because Minseok hasn't even lifted his gun when a volley hits the metal wall above, interrupting most of the remaining fire coming down. Minseok glances around and finds Kyungsoo, Junmyeon, and Yixing already firmly entrenched next to a forklift and locked into a rotating fire-reload pattern. No one seems to be hitting anything -- their rival gang's cover is too good for that -- but it means that the balance has shifted enough to let them regroup down below on the warehouse floor.
Chanyeol slides in next to Minseok, shooting him a toothy grin that's mirrored by Baekhyun at his elbow.
"Where are the kids?" he asks cheerfully.
"Beats me," Minseok shrugs. "Last I saw Jongin, he was standing closest to the edge. He was prepping the first carton to be loaded."
"Well," says Baekhyun, "Sehun was with him when I heard him sound the alarm, and Zitao won't have been far behind. Most of the first shots went in that direction after Sehun yelled like that." He grins again, more teeth and less humor this time. "If anything happens to them, I'll skin Jongdae alive."
"If anything happens to anyone, you'll have to get in line behind the leaders," Minseok rolls his eyes. "This was supposed to be an easy job, so you know they'll be pissed."
"What, you mean this isn't an easy job?" Chanyeol's eyes are wide. "I've been lied to."
"Why yes, I understand how it would be difficult to tell right away," says Baekhyun, tapping a finger to his lower lip. "Scurrying from barricade to barricade, cowering from bullets, hostile hitmen holding the high ground... this has all the appearances of a walk in the park."
Minseok shakes his head. "I don't want to know what kind of walks you take or what kind of parks you're taking them in."
"Forbidden dog parks mostly," Baekhyun says absently. "Hey, did you hear that alliteration I got just then? 'Hostile hitmen holding the high ground'... d'you think Kyungsoo would appreciate that? He reads books, right? I'm gonna go ask him." He stands up and walks out into the open floor, shooting off a few bullets as he goes. "Hey, Kyungsoo! I have something to tell you!"
There are several answering shots, followed by Baekhyun's indignant squawking.
"Sorry," Minseok hears Kyungsoo's sugar-sweet apology above the noise. "You startled me. I thought you were an enemy."
The cover fire gives them enough time to start converging in the middle of the warehouse floor, the last few to arrive being Jongin, Sehun, and Zitao, once they finally peel out from behind one of the staircases where they've been hiding out of sight since the first shots were fired.
"Nice of you to join us," Lu Han rolls his eyes. One hand is tight on Minseok's arm and the other, still wrapped around a gun, jerks back and forth along the line of the walkway above as he scans for movement.
"You all looked like you could handle it," says Sehun, calm in a way that he definitely had not been when he raised the alarm.
They have instinctively pulled together into a tight knot now, a back to back circle looking out at the surrounding walls. Most of the crates stacked around the warehouse are huge metal things, but here, in the center of the floor, there sits a stack of wooden boxes, each one small enough for a single person to pick up, but surprisingly heavy and stacked up just higher than the top of Yifan's head. This is what they've come here for and this is where they all gather now, standing guard around a pile of splinter-filled wooden planks that hide their next windfall. The gunfire has died away, leaving only a tense, ringing silence in Minseok's ears. When their rivals finally emerge they appear just as wary, the two sides at a stalemate, staring across at each other from behind gunbarrels. Neither wants to be the first to speak, but Minseok can tell that neither side will easily give way. They're both here for the same thing and to back down now would mean losing more than just the shipment and the price it will garner; it will mean ground lost in the ongoing turf war that is life in this city. It will mean loss of reputation and loss of potential business contacts in the future, the heist too high-profile to go unnoticed by the rest of the city's underground. They knew going in that this could make or break their criminal careers. The thought lurks at the back of Minseok's mind even now. When the other gang starts to edge their way down the stairs, Minseok can see that they know it too.
"What's a nice mob lord like you doing in a place like this?" asks their leader, half-smirking at Junmyeon, and Minseok could just roll his eyes at the line.
He recognizes him by sight -- Hakyeon -- the way he recognizes them all by sight. It's not the first time they've run into each other, after all. This new gang, VIXX, has been slowly pushing into their territory in a way that they can't really ignore. Cha Hakyeon, Jung Taekwoon, Lee Jaehwan, Kim Wonshik, Lee Hongbin, and Han Sanghyuk. Minseok knows all their faces by now, knows them well enough to match names to those faces, but not much more beyond that.
"I suppose now that we're all here, it's too much to expect that you'll give up quietly and go home?" Junmyeon sounds almost exasperated.
Hakyeon shrugs one shoulder with a grin. "What kind of rivals would we be if we let you have all the fun? You're not the only one who understands spending money to make money. When we got a tip that you were planning to hit this warehouse tonight, I knew there must be something really special here and really, how could we stay away? Everyone knows you never pick a bad target, and we've been studying your methods quite closely. EXO sunbaenim, please take care of us~"
It doesn't escape Minseok's notice that they've used Hakyeon's speech to spread out across the floor, inching step by step towards the contested crates. The fact doesn't escape Yifan's notice either.
"That's far enough," he says sharply, and they all freeze in place, Jaehwan with one foot left floating comically in the air. Now that he has the floor, Yifan continues. "I'm only going to tell you this once, so listen carefully. The door is right behind you. Turn around and leave now, or so help me god, when the dust settles I cannot guarantee that all of you will leave this building."
Minseok can feel the air get more tense. Yifan's eyes are fixed on one person in particular. He looks right at Sanghyuk and oh, then Minseok understands. Hit them where it hurts. Their youngest. He knows how his team would react if anything happened to one of "the kids," so presumably Yifan is hoping that a similar protective streak runs through the other gang. Sanghyuk himself looks uncomfortable and more than a little annoyed at being singled out as the weak link, but with the way the smirk has dropped right off of Hakyeon's face it looks like Yifan's threat has hit home.
A tiny flicker of movement catches Minseok's eye a moment later. Hongbin twitches slightly, his head jerking to the side just enough to meet Taekwoon's eyes. Taekwoon nods almost imperceptibly and then in an instant they both burst into motion. Minseok barely has time to see one of Taekwoon's arms swing out and knock Sanghyuk to the ground, but then Hongbin is sprinting towards the nearest crate, hand outstretched, just a second before shots ring out from somewhere behind Minseok and that's when everything goes to hell.
The first thing that happens, just as Minseok slides his finger back onto the trigger, is that several of the bullets miss Hongbin and punch through the wooden crate at the end of the stack instead. Hongbin hits the floor and rolls behind the line of boxes just in time to miss several more rounds. The next thing that happens is that the two groups break rank, running at each other or for cover, looking around for a target or a friend. Minseok fires off a few shots that send Wonshik stumbling back to avoid them, derailing his charge towards Jongin, and then Chanyeol is there to push him back further with a more determined look than Minseok has seen on his face in a long time. The next thing that happens is that the silvery smoke oozing its way out of the gunshots in the wooden crates finally seems to catch the attention of both groups. It was faint, almost invisible, when it first left the cartons and whatever it was, it was heavy enough that it sank to the floor, looking more like dust swirling around their feet than anything else. It's now up to Minseok's neck and there's enough of it in the air that it forms swirling clouds of almost opaque fog. The last thing that Minseok sees before it covers his eyes is Sehun and Yifan standing back to back, then a wave of it crashes over his head and everything goes gray.
The fog is even thicker than it had looked a second ago; now that he's engulfed in it, Minseok can't see more than a foot in front of his face. Even more disconcerting is the way it feels. It brushes up against his skin like solid cloth, feeling far more substantial than it has any right to be, and everywhere it touches starts to tingle, the same cool, bright feeling that he gets after brushing his teeth except it's all over his body instead of inside his mouth. It hits him so fast that he hasn't had enough time to draw a breath anyway, but the sensation is still enough to make him freeze up. He gropes forward towards what he hopes is the edge of the cloud, but it continues to expand out in all directions. He stumbles, tripping blindly over something that turns out to be a leg. The fog is too thick for him to even see the person's face. It could be one of their opponents or it could be... it could be one of his friends, caught in the crossfire. It could be Sehun or Jongin, or Zitao. The thought distracts him enough that he doesn't quite regain his balance in time, toppling dangerously and sucking in a hissing breath between his teeth as he flings out a hand to catch himself.
He realizes his mistake almost instantly because the moment the fog gets into his lungs, it starts to radiate out a numbness that takes hold of his entire body. The cold (minty supplies Minseok's brain helpfully) tingling feeling is running under his skin now, spreading out from his chest into every corner of his body, each individual finger and toe, cheerfully shutting down every nerve as it goes. He hits the floor when his legs give out, but the impact feels almost cushioned to his dulled senses. At least this means whoever he tripped over earlier probably just got a lungful of this stuff rather than having been shot. Of course, whatever gas had been in those containers might very well turn out to be just as deadly as bullets, Minseok reminds himself. While he tries in vain to move a hand, he notices that the room has once again gone quiet, meaning that the gas has almost certainly gotten to them all by now. If it does turn out to be deadly, Jongdae is likely to be the only man left standing out of both gangs. Minseok wonders if the reporters will try to get a statement out of Jongdae, but then again, he's always been one of the better ones at dodging attention, so no doubt he'll long since have skipped town by then. Probably take what's left intact of the night's haul along with him, the lucky bastard.
The paralyzing fog has completely taken hold of Minseok's body now. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't move so much as a pinky. Minseok wonders if it's seeping into his brain now too, though, because his thoughts are starting to get sluggish along with the rest of him. It feels almost like falling asleep, his mind falling into the same kind of fuzzy, nonsensical patterns. He thinks he can feel the edges of his body start to melt away. The fog is not so much eroding his outline as it is smearing it, like a hand across charcoal lines, breaking them up so that the rest of Minseok can escape, which is exactly what's happening. He feels like a blob of ink dropped into a pool and left to dissipate. It's not a particularly unpleasant sensation. It would be worrying, he's sure, only he can't muster the energy to be worried. For a moment he hangs there, suspended insubstantially in midair, a darker spot of spreading pigment in a sea of silver gray, with flickering images of recent memories fluttering around and through him. Breakfast stolen off of Lu Han's plate as payback for waking him up by flopping right on top of him, lifting Yifan's wallet without him noticing and then using the contents to fill up "the getaway van" or "the mystery machine" as Chanyeol variously calls it, sitting in the back of said van and checking his ammunition one last time as Junmyeon runs through the plan one last time, Sehun standing with his back to Yifan's as silver mist billows up around them.
Then suddenly he's falling downwards as if into a drainpipe, being poured through a funnel and condensed back into a solid shape. The ink blot of his consciousness spreads out again, this time easing into the shape of its container, held securely in a human body once again. The numbness starts to fade away again. His limbs are tingling back to life with every breath he takes. There's a sort of dull roar almost buzzing in his ears. Minseok lies there for a moment, just taking mental inventory to make sure everything is where it should be. Two arms and two legs, in roughly the right places. His feet feel a long way off, but so does most of him right now, so Minseok can chalk that one up to general disorientation. He hears various groans from the others around him, each one apparently surfacing from the same sort of muddled out-of-body experience that Minseok had gone through. He risks opening his eyes a crack and finds that most of the strange fog is gone. The sound he hears is the sound of the ventilation fans whirring in the ceiling. The noises of movement nearby are getting louder, so he stretches out a leg, surprised when it makes contact with a hard edge. He had been in the middle of the floor, on the far edge of the group away from the stacks, and he didn't think he had wandered that far in the fog. When he hauls himself up into a seated position, the room wobbles slightly and he sways as if he were on a rocking boat. The faintly seasick feeling doesn't help much, to be honest. Shaking his head, Minseok leans against the nearby crates while he fumbles around for his weapons. He doesn't see his pistol nearby, but then again, he doesn't know when he dropped it. Some time after the fog started to affect him. All around the others are doing the same, patting themselves down for their weapons and belongings. Minseok frowns. He still feels unbalanced, and none of his things are where they should be. His clothes feel strange. He looks down at his legs. The ground is still a long way off, but more importantly, Minseok is fairly sure he had been wearing different pants today. He doesn't think he owns pants like this at all actually, but everything is still so groggy...
"You-"
The strangled cry comes from right behind his head, and Minseok whirls around to see Yifan staring at him in complete horror. There's something wrong with the sight though, something nagging at him that's more unsettling than the expression on their leader's face. An instant later the thought flashes through his head that he looks smaller, but then something else in the corner of his eye distracts him and no, this is much worse. Minseok is frozen in place, staring at a spot a few yards out into the middle of the floor, where he sees himself staggering to his feet.
If I'm overthere, then who-
Minseok digs through his pockets until he finds a phone (not his phone, he notices), swiping frantically at the screen until he pulls up the camera. Sure enough, instead of his own face, he sees Sehun staring back at him, looking stunned.
"Oh my god," he says faintly.
Yifan reaches around him (no wonder he looks smaller) to grab the phone out of his hands. "Give me that," he demands, holding up the camera to get a good look at himself. If possible, he looks even more distraught than before at the sight that greets him. "Why?" he wails. "How could this happen to me? At least before I was good looking! It was all I had going for me!"
"Hey!" Hakyeon, halfway across the room, looks deeply offended. Or... whoever's in Hakyeon's body now? Minseok rubs his-- or rather, Sehun's-- face. This is so fucked up.
Holy shit, I'm tall!" Taekwoon's face is definitely not meant to hold such an expression of unholy glee. Kyungsoo's eyes are wide, and not with sugarcoated fury the way Minseok is used to seeing them. Hongbin, helping Sanghyuk to his feet, shudders slightly. Sanghyuk pats his hand comfortingly, but he seems equally perturbed by the sight.
"What's going on in here?" Jongdae flings open the door to the warehouse, hand clamped over his mouth and nose. "I came in to see what all the fuss was, and there was smoke everywhere! You're lucky I could reach the switch for the fans and didn't just leave you here to asphyxiate. What did you do?" He looks over at Junmyeon but all he gets in response is a blank stare.
"What about you?" the body formerly known as Hakyeon demands. "You were on lookout so we wouldn't get ambushed. What, did you decide to catch up on your beauty sleep or something?"
Jongdae blinks at him before turning to the rest of the room, now thoroughly confused. Minseok knows the feeling far better than he would like right now. "Okay, now I really need an explanation," says Jongdae.
"This is going to sound strange, but don't say anything until I finish," whoever is in Baekhyun's body holds up a finger. "As far as I can tell, the smoke you blew away somehow shuffled our minds around into each other's bodies when we inhaled it." He blinks at the sound of his voice and pulls the phone out of his pocket to check his reflection the way Minseok had a minute ago. He closes his eyes in mute horror. "On second thought, it might have actually been kinder to let us asphyxiate."
"So wait," says the person in Minseok's body and Minseok hadn't thought it could get weirder than watching himself stand up from across the room, but hearing his own voice is actually infinitely stranger. "Who are you then?"
It's unsettling to see Baekhyun's usually open face close off that quickly. "Who are you?" he counters.
"I'm-"
The dumbfounded look on his face is so familiar that Minseok almost laughs. It's a very Lu Han expression, which is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. While probably not the worst of options, the prospect of having Lu Han in his body fills Minseok with a sort of dread. Unfortunately any humor in the situation is dampened somewhat when the importance of this exchange dawns on him. None of them know who anyone else is, save for Jongdae, and even if they were to announce their identities now, none of them have any reason to trust each other. Minseok could claim to be Chanyeol right now and no one except the real Chanyeol would have any good way of verifying that. Minseok already has his suspicions about several of them, just from his limited observation, but none of them have a reason to come out and tell the truth just yet when the potential for trickery is still out there.
However, at the moment all this means is that they're left staring at each other across the warehouse in the back corner of the shipyard with no clue as to what to do next.
"Anyone have any ideas?" asks "Chanyeol" dryly. No one answers him for a long moment.
"You mean other than 'get back into the right bodies'?" the person in Yifan's body says with a sneer. Almost certainly Sehun, thinks Minseok to himself.
"Well, I, for one, would also like to get paid," says Jongdae. "Just putting that out there. So maybe we could take this somewhere that doesn't have guards patrolling everywhere? Even ones we've paid off?"
"Good idea," says whoever is in Yixing's body, taking a step forward. "We'll just take these and-"
Several people have their guns out and pointed at him before he can even lay a hand on the crate. Those remaining have their guns out a second later, pointing them at anyone else pointing guns. Minseok finds himself with his pistol trained on Junmyeon, who has a gun pointed at Jongin. No matter who is in Junmyeon or Jongin's body at the moment, Minseok is not keen on watching one of their young proteges bleed out on the floor because of a hastily-pulled trigger. Junmyeon's eyes meet his. Whoever is in there blinks steadily, and the hand holding the gun doesn't waver even as he holds Minseok's gaze.
"Okay," says "Yixing" quickly and takes a step back again. "I think everyone needs to calm down. We're all overreacting and-"
"'Overreacting'?" Baekhyun's lip curls slightly. "We've swapped bodies, in case you haven't noticed. I'm not sure it's possible to overreact to this."
"I could be on your side, for all you know," argues "Yixing," somewhat lamely.
"You could just as easily not," says "Baekhyun." "I have no way of knowing. None of us do. Why should any of us let anyone else leave with the cargo?"
"What are we supposed to do then?" demands "Wonshik." He gets a half shrug in response.
"I don't have an answer to the situation," says "Baekhyun" simply. "I was just pointing out that it is hardly in our best interests to let anyone else leave with anything."
"So if no one is going to leave the stuff behind, then we need to stick together," Minseok finally says. "Which means we need somewhere big enough to store both it and us."
Their own headquarters are more than big enough for the task, but even if they can get through all the security that the leaders insist on, Minseok doesn't think anyone will be keen on bringing unknown rivals into their base of operations. Though he has no idea as to the size of their location, the same concerns would naturally hold true for the VIXX headquarters. Which leaves them in the position of finding a third, more neutral location.
Jongdae looks around. "I might know a place," he says slowly. Everyone turns to look at him. "It's a house a little way outside the city. Junmyeon knows what I mean, right?" He turns to look at "Junmyeon", who just stares back at him. "Uh. Right," Jongdae says. "Well, wherever he is, Junmyeon knows about it. It's that place he gave me the key for a while back."
"Wait," says the person in Taekwoon's body. "Is this that lake house you were bragging about like three months ago? The one that's a safe house but you were rubbing in our face like it was a vacation luxury spa?"
"Yeah, that's it," Jongdae agrees. "The one his family used to own, I think. Never actually seen it, but it sounds great and you know them. Really old, filthy rich crime family? It's gotta be a mansion."
Minseok notices "Yixing" carefully examining his nails as Jongdae talks. Junmyeon has a good poker face when he actually thinks about it, but something about his friends seems to set him enough at ease that he never thinks to turn it on, so he tends to be painfully easy for anyone who knows him to read. Most of them are still focused on Jongdae, but Minseok catches... well, his own eye. He doesn't think that it's his imagination that spots Lu Han's glimmer of humor when he realizes that they've both come to the same conclusion about "Yixing's" identity.
"That sounds fine to me," says what Minseok thinks is Lu Han, once they break eye contact. "Chanyeol" and "Sanghyuk" look especially displeased, but they do not protest.
"That house is owned by an EXO leader," points out "Junmyeon". It's the first time he's spoken, Minseok realizes, and is much more restrained than Junmyeon is usually wont to be.
"Right," says "Kyungsoo", "So we- I mean, if we decide to use this place -- and I wish I had a better idea, but I don't -- then we have to load up all this stuff and take it with us into one gang's private territory. How do we know we won't get screwed over?"
"We never agreed to give you anything in the first place," "Yifan" snaps. "Literally the only reason no one's shooting anyone else right now is because we don't know who to shoot. Our people were here first and we don't owe anyone anything, especially not the people who attacked us first."
For a moment it looks like the fight is about break out anew. The guns that had drifted down to their sides now snapping up again as their owners bristle at "Yifan's" words. Minseok groans to himself. Sehun is a sweet kid most of the time, but he has this knack for saying exactly the thing that will piss off everyone the most right when it's the least convenient. Standing on the tipping point of a gang shootout is definitely not the time to ruffle feathers, but that's exactly what is happening and they are two seconds away from someone getting a bullet in the head and losing all the night's profits.
"Let's just... think about this, okay?" "Hongbin" holds up his hands as placatingly as possible. "We've all got the same problem right now, don't we? We can't figure out who gets anything-" he looks at "Yifan" here "-until we know who everyone is, so before we can actually do anything else we need to do is get back into the right bodies. Right?"
"Yixing" nods. "Can we all just agree to put this stuff in storage until we figure out how to get back to normal?"
"Then we can shoot them and be done with it," sighs "Yifan".
"Or we can come to a solution that will benefit everyone," "Yixing" glares.
No one seems overly pleased with the plan, but no one else argues further so they fumble around in various pockets until they find car keys and can maneuver their vans into the warehouse side-by-side and load them up with as many of the wooden crates as they can fit. If the members of VIXX manage to get a few more into their own van, Minseok can't quite blame them. If he were the one driving into a rival's safe house, he would want as much material security as he could get his hands on too. Once the vans are packed with as many crates as they can possibly hold, Jongdae looks around.
"We all have to get to the house, so I either have to give someone the address or you have to follow me," he says. "And I'm not planning to make it easy to catch me. We've hung around here too long already and I'm not keen on getting busted."
"Jaehwan" holds up a hand and jangles the keys loudly. "I guess I'm driving?" he asks.
"Give me your phone and I'll program it into the GPS." Jongdae holds out a hand and then stops, realizing. "Wait. Does it have a passcode?"
They both look at the phone. They turn it over a couple times and Jongdae wrinkles his nose. Around the room, everyone else is pulling out the phones in their possession and poking at them. Minseok doesn't think any of them would leave their phone unlocked, but at that moment "Zitao" lets out a choked laugh.
"Apple phone is best phone," he whispers in glee. "Fingerprint locks are yes."
"Jongin" makes an incoherent noise and snatches the phone out of his hand. "Stay out of there!" he demands. "It's not yours!"
"Is very mine! I'm Zitao!"
"No, you're not! And that's not even- the real Zitao speaks better Korean than that!"
"I am Zitao so I know! I speak good!"
Minseok rolls his eyes. At least now everyone knows where Zitao has ended up. That makes... He tallies it up in his head. Four of his teammates whose locations he's at least ninety percent sure of. Sehun is in Yifan's body, Junmyeon is in Yixing's body, Zitao is in Jongin's body, and Lu Han is in Minseok's own body. That last one is definitely something he's going to have to deal with before too much time passes. Minseok also has some suspicion of where Yifan himself ended up, but he'll have to observe further before he can be sure. To make things more complicated, he knows that at least Kyungsoo is someone from VIXX, even if he doesn't know exactly who, and there are bound to be more cross-gang switches. The entire thing is giving him a headache. If they could just agree to tell the truth about their identities, everything would be so much easier. One step at a time though.
"Let's take all the phones and give them to Jongdae then," he suggests, ignoring the outraged shouts that follow. "None of us want anyone else getting into our things and it's not like we can get them back to their owners right now."
"You're not giving my stuff to your buddy to break into," says "Chanyeol" grumpily. "No way."
"What, do you keep classified information on your cell phone?" Lu Han counters from where he's settled against the back doors of EXO's van like a guard dog. "If you do, then you deserve everything that happens to you. Your bosses should've taught you better than that."
"Jongdae's the only one that we know is who he says he is," Minseok persisted. "You can all watch him put them in a safe or something and no one will touch them until we sort this out."
"The building is old," says Junmyeon, his pleased expression looking weird on Yixing's calm face, "but I had a couple new features installed. There's an electric safe where we can set as long a password as we want. Everyone can enter two or three digits and that way we'll all have to be working together to get our things back out again. We can agree that nothing leaves that safe until we either get our right bodies back or until we come to some other agreement."
It seems that this, like all of their decisions tonight, is reached only with the reluctant realization that, while no one likes it, they simply have no other options. With no way to actually prove ownership, no one can come up with a better solution for getting their hands back on their own phones and belongings, so Jongdae goes around with a toolbox that he's emptied out into the corner and makes sure that they have all eighteen phones stacked inside. After some debate, wallets and the other contents of their pockets follow a moment later. When everything they want to keep safe has been safely stored, Jongdae shoves the box between two stacks of crates in the back of VIXX's van, brushing his hands as he stands back.
"Are we all okay now?" he asks with a sarcastic quirk. "No one's worried that anyone's going to be reading their top secret emails or anything? Can we finally get out of here?"
The driving setup is decided quickly since the two people already in possession of the keys agree to drive and no one cares enough to argue that at least, leaving them only to divide themselves up into two vans. They manage this with a minimum of arguing and confusion as well, which is stunning, Minseok thinks, considering most of the people they have to deal with right now. The reality of their predicament seems to finally be sinking in for the group at large, and however they may grudge having to work together, for the time being they don't have much of a choice. Minseok winds up in the middle row of EXO's own van, his newly acquired long legs bunched up awkwardly behind Jongdae's seat. The back gate is still left unattended, as per the agreement they'd struck with the shipyard supervisors, so there's no one to see them leave.
True to his word, Jongdae does not travel at an easy pace, but they never quite lose the van behind them. Minseok has seen Jongdae when he wants to lose cars tailing him, so he can tell that he's carefully calculating the distance he needs to stay within to keep from leaving the others behind in the dark. They leave the city limits and Jongdae pulls off the main highway almost right away, winding along smaller and smaller roads that disappear into the surrounding forest. Before long their headlights on the road ahead and the bobbing lights of the van behind are the only things Minseok can see. Jongdae's phone, propped up in a stand on the dashboard, says that their destination is about an hour's drive away from the city, but Jongdae manages to get them there in forty minutes, even when halfway there the roads turn into gravel and dirt paths. The house itself looms up like a massive black mountain against the night sky. The headlights shine onto a broken slate walkway leading up to a sprawling porch. The building, or what Minseok can see of it, looks beautiful but abandoned. It's certainly big enough to hold them all, but it's not the sort of place Minseok would pick to stay in for any length of time. The windows are boarded up and the grass is so overgrown that it nearly reaches the window ledges on the first floor. Minseok has seen haunted houses look more inviting than this place does. Jongdae shuts off the engine and grabs a flashlight off of the floor of the car before climbing out to stand alongside the rest of them.
"Okay, he said it was old, but this is just ridiculous," Jongdae frowns.
Behind them, the other van rumbles up the driveway. Minseok hears Kyungsoo's voice screech out from inside when the other driver jolts to a stop with an audible bump against a thick tree. The parking brake is barely on when they all tumble out in a far less orderly fashion that the occupants of the previous car had, with "Kyungsoo" right in the lead. He rushes over to the front of the car, letting out a sort of pained gurgle at the sight of the dent the tree has left in the van's hood.
"Oh my god!" he screeches. "I would never have let you drive if I'd known you were blind! What, were you parking by braille? The tree was right fucking there! Would it have killed you to, I don't know, just tap the brakes a little instead of waiting for a solid object to break your momentum?"
"Give me a break," "Jaehwan" shrugs. He looks completely unaffected. "It's my first time driving. I think I did pretty okay." He walks past the line of stunned faces, each showing various degrees of horror, and up onto the porch to try the front door. "Hey, who has the key to this place?"
"Get the car keys away from him," says "Kyungsoo" faintly. "Someone. Please."
"Oh my god, we could have
By the time Jongdae fishes the key out of some back compartment of his wallet, everyone has crowded around the door behind him, each craning forward to be the first to get a glimpse into their new lodgings. It's not as bad as it could be, Minseok thinks when the door finally swings open. It's dark at first, but when someone finds the light switch the warm glow from the lamps makes the place look far less haunted. There's dust everywhere, over the floors and tables and the chairs covered with sheets. There are more than a few spiderwebs as well, which they discover when "Jongin" walks through a doorway without checking it first. The screams that follow are very Zitao-like and Minseok didn't know Jongin's throat was even capable of the same noises that he's used to hearing from Zitao, but the pitch and volume is exactly the same as he remembers, which is comforting in a way. Anything vaguely familiar right now is bound to be comforting, he thinks.
He catches "Junmyeon" watching the scene with an unreadable expression for a long while before, as if he can feel the eyes on him, he turns to look back at Minseok. It's the same slow blink he'd given Minseok before with Minseok's gun pointed at his head. It's a far steadier look than Junmyeon ever has, steadier than Minseok is used to seeing from just about anyone except Kyungsoo or Yixing. It's not that Junmyeon doesn't focus, because he does, but in those cases he gets an almost compressed look to his face, like he's building physical barriers between himself and any distractions. This is the same distance that Kyungsoo's eyes sometimes get when he consciously detaches himself from a situation and it's the same nearly unflappable calm that Yixing is so good at. This is someone used to observing from the edges of a crowd, venturing in only when required, so different from Junmyeon's need to stick himself in the middle of every conflict as if he hopes to unravel it from the inside. All of a sudden Minseok feels very tired. Life was hard enough just trying to scratch out a place for themselves in the city's criminal underbelly without at the same time having to try to guess who's looking at him and wearing his friends' faces. He wants to go to sleep and wake up to find that this has all been an absurd dream.
Before he can fall into a bed, however, there are crates to unload into the house's basement. Minseok isn't surprised to find that half of the massive concrete room is taken up with a safe that looks like it was taken straight from a bank's vaults. In the interests of fairness and calm tempers, everyone watches Jongdae lock the safe once all the wooden crates are stacked up inside so that they can memorize the combination. The physical bar and padlock seem almost like an afterthought, but it leaves them with a key to lock inside the smaller electric safe upstairs along with all the cell phones and wallets. It might be more symbolic than anything (Minseok is fairly sure any one of them could either pick the basement safe's lock or break it in one way or another), but they're grateful for every little bit of security they can get. But even once this is all done, the others can't agree on a sleeping arrangement that will satisfy them all. Since the bedrooms are scattered across the house's multiple floors, there is a considerable amount of debate over who gets the rooms closest to the basement and who gets rooms connected to other rooms and with every single minute that passes Minseok thinks he's going just a little bit more insane.
"You know what," he says after fifteen straight minutes of listening to them go at it, "I'm too tired to stand here and listen to you all. You can stand here until sunrise, but I'm going up those stairs and I'm taking the very first bed I see and if you don't like it you can tell me about it in the morning."
He ignores the surprised looks from everyone else in favor of flinging open the door back into the entrance hall (what kind of lake house has an entrance hall anyway) as loudly as he can, taking the stairs two at a time with Sehun's long legs. His plan develops a hitch when the first room he storms into turns out to have an occupant already. For the third time this night, he finds himself stared at with Junmyeon's face bearing a distinctly un-Junmyeon expression. This time underneath the fixed stare he thinks he can see the faintest suggestion of surprise, but even that is infuriatingly brief considering that he just burst into the room loudly and without warning. No one should be allowed to look so unperturbed in the middle of this clusterfuck. Minseok hadn't even seen him sneak away. He's already got the boards off the windows and the bedclothes pulled out of the chest at the foot of the bed, so it must have been early in the discussion. He doesn't say anything. He just stands there in the middle of the floor, halfway through the process of pulling his shirt off, staring at Minseok expectantly. When Minseok clenches his fists even that sensation feels different enough from what he's used to that he thinks he might scream.
"I'm sorry," Minseok says, utterly unapologetically. "I didn't know you were up here, or I would have knocked. I'll just go find somewhere else to wait until I wake up from this godawful nightmare."
He doesn't even wait for a response, but turns on his heel and makes for the very next door down the hall. The room looks like it hasn't been touched in a year at least, judging from the levels of dust everywhere, but Minseok only drags out an armful of blankets and dumps them into a sort of nest on the middle of the mattress before climbing in himself and flopping down. He's facing the wall now and it's only then that he notices the second door in the wall, connecting it back to the room next to him.
Well, just let him try to murder me in my sleep, Minseok thinks grumpily. I'd like to see him try.
Minseok doesn't think that any of them would try to attack any of the others, just out of fear of accidentally hurting a teammate by mistake, but it probably can't hurt to be careful. He untangles himself just long enough to find a chair and wedge it under the doorknob before he's back in bed with a huge yawn. He hadn't been lying when he said that he was too tired to listen to everyone argue. Whether due to the excitement, or the actual process of swapping bodies with someone else, or even because he was now stuck in the body of a sleepy teenager, Minseok was asleep almost before his head hit the mattress. In that brief moment between closing his eyes and unconsciousness, he thought he could hear the vague sounds of the others filtering up the stairs into the other rooms, but they melted right away into murky dream sounds so that he couldn't be sure he had heard anything at all. He sleeps for what was probably hours because when a loud noise jolts him awake, he has that lurking sense that the recently-awoken get sometimes that there had been complete silence until just a second ago. A moment later the door to his room swings open and a figure bolts across the floor, landing half on the bed and half on Minseok in a pile of limbs. Obviously he'd forgotten to barricade the door out into the hall like he'd done to the other connecting door.
"Wha-?" Minseok croaks.
"I don't care if you're a horrible, murdering psycho or not, I'm staying here," a voice hiccups. "A massive death bird with ten-foot claws just flew in through my window. I'm not going back in there even if you kill me."
Minseok sighs. He recognizes both the voice and the tone of the words, though they don't usually go together. "Go to sleep, Lu Han," he says, kicking the other man a little bit off of him. "I'm not going to kill you unless you snore. And even then I might just kick you onto the floor, depending on how loud you are."
Even after being startled awake, Minseok finds it easier than usual to fall back asleep. The house settles back into silence except for the sound of the person breathing in bed next to him, and just lying there with his eyes shut makes it easier to believe that nothing has changed at all from the way it was that morning.
part 2 -->
Fandom: VIXXO
Rating: PG-13
Genre: action/adventure
Word Count: 43k
Pairing: Minseok/Taekwoon (with minor side Hyukbin)
Summary: [sort of mafia!AU] Minseok has long since stopped trying to make sense of the contradictions in his own life, so he's not sure why he's so invested in reconciling the various sides of one Jung Taekwoon. Still, he thinks that it might plague him until he figures out until exactly what he's supposed to think about this person he was trying to kill just the other day.
Warnings: bodyswapping
Notes: Originally posted here for chansoos in the minseokful 2014 round.
THANK YOU SO MUCH as always to exeuntpbabear and elpis_chan for letting me scream at them and lie on the floor crying. Thanks to kimikko for several of the gags and to Rina (xiyings) for being my illegal beta and supplier of plot.
THANK YOU, AYUMI, FOR THE PROMPTS THAT I ENDED UP COMBINING TO MAKE THIS PLOT and for word warring me and unwittingly helping me finish your fic.
This fic would not be possible without copious amounts of Block B, FEMM, and Sucker Punch soundtrack.
Minseok hits the pavement. It's not particularly elegant as far as falls go; more of a sprawl than a tight roll, his shoulder making impact with more force than he would like. A split second later a bullet hits the wall right where his head had been, but by then Minseok is already scrambling forward towards the metal storage crates stacked in even rows a few yards ahead. Lu Han reaches the crate at the same time and his hand immediately shoots out to drag Minseok further into cover. More bullets sing overhead now and ping off of the crates, ricocheting in odd directions. Even though they can't see exactly how many shooters there are, from the sheer rate of fire Minseok estimates that there are at least four, maybe five of them. If that's true, then Minseok's team easily outnumbers them, but they still have the established cover and vantage points. They have the advantage.
"Fuckers!" Lu Han spits, his shoulder and arm pressed tightly against Minseok's as they crowd away from the edges. "They knew we were coming!"
"Sure looks like it," says Minseok shortly. He reloads his own gun as quickly as he can, even though he's unlikely to get a good shot in from here. Still better to be prepared. It's only when he's finished that he finally has a moment to catch his breath, shaking out his shoulder a little bit as he moves to peer around the corner. "I was only set to take care of the heavy lifting tonight, you know. If you'd told me we were likely to have company, I would have brought something a little more impressive than this."
"If I'd known," Lu Han retorts, "I would have insisted that we leave more than a skeleton lookout."
"Your intelligence-gathering is shit. And I mean, I know Jongdae's lost some weight recently, but a skeleton..."
"Ha ha ha," Lu Han deadpans. Anger and fear have robbed him of his usual appreciation for Minseok's jokes. "You're a regular comedian aren't y- shit!"
He breaks off in mid-sentence and Minseok cranes around to see what has caught his attention. The suppressing fire has slackened somewhat, which is potentially worrying on its own, but when Minseok follows Lu Han's sharp gaze, the sight that greets him sucks the air back out of his lungs faster than the earlier impact with the concrete floor had. He sees Yifan crouching behind another line of crates closer to the center of the warehouse, more exposed than their own current hiding place, and he sees one of the gunmen coming down the stairway from the walkway above, making a wide circle around the perimeter. Minseok sees Yifan's exposed back, left open to the figure approaching, gun aimed right at his head.
Stop. Rewind.
That morning the word had come in from their paid informant that the cargo was waiting stacked and stored in the warehouse on the furthest edge of the shipyard, carefully and conveniently placed there after another series of bribes had caused the storage records and instructions to be subtly shuffled around. Yifan had complained about the amount of money they had to lay out up front, but they all knew that the payoff when they found a buyer would more than cover the necessary bribes, leaving a hefty share for each of them, so Minseok could tell he only complained for the look of the thing. Their intelligence told them that the greater part of the shipyard's workers would be out and away for machinery training, and Junmyeon's generous wallet, over Yifan's halfhearted protestations, had ensured a vacant gate and a door lock that a toddler could pick. A shipment like this, full of apparently quite valuable biomedical research material, would normally be under much heavier security, but such were the benefits of paying off the right people in the right positions. The entire operation, Minseok had thought as he slid his gun into its holster alongside spare cartridges, would be like taking candy from a baby.
Stop. Rewind.
When Minseok had first met Junmyeon and Yifan, they had only recently entered into their joint leadership of the city's only real organized crime racket. They were still being constantly trampled and cut out on every "business opportunity" by the amorphous gangs that ebbed and flowed through the city, splintering and merging together and splintering again on a monthly basis. Neither Junmyeon nor Yifan had scratched out much of a place for themselves on their own, but together they had a plan that would make them the power to be reckoned with in the area. Even with their two groups combined, they were massively outnumbered by the competition; even the addition of Minseok, and later Zitao, Jongin, and Sehun, did very little to change that. But the secret to EXO's later success was not the amount of manpower they possessed, but rather Junmyeon and Yifan's almost uncanny ability to pick the most overlooked targets and wring more profit from them than any onlooker would have believed possible. Aided by Lu Han's frankly overwhelming network of information and Junmyeon's apparently inexhaustible access to bribe money, their unbelievable luck, if that was what you wanted to call it, was what boosted EXO up the gang hierarchy to their current spot on the top of the heap.
Now.
Now it looks for a moment like that incredible luck is running thin, leaving them floundering like fish on a beach after the tide goes out, right when they needed it the most. Then Lu Han launches himself forward, out from behind the crates, sprinting forward with both guns blazing. Yifan looks back in surprise just as the gunman beats a hasty retreat, target forgotten for the time being.
"Watch your fucking back!" Lu Han snarls, not even looking at Yifan.
"Watch your fucking mouth!" Yifan shoots back, but Minseok can tell that he's rattled by the close call.
Minseok can also tell that Lu Han is going to be in a shitton of trouble in a second when the others up on the balconies get him in their sights, so he rolls up onto the balls of his feet to dart into a better firing position. The others, scattered around the warehouse, seem to have largely the same idea because Minseok hasn't even lifted his gun when a volley hits the metal wall above, interrupting most of the remaining fire coming down. Minseok glances around and finds Kyungsoo, Junmyeon, and Yixing already firmly entrenched next to a forklift and locked into a rotating fire-reload pattern. No one seems to be hitting anything -- their rival gang's cover is too good for that -- but it means that the balance has shifted enough to let them regroup down below on the warehouse floor.
Chanyeol slides in next to Minseok, shooting him a toothy grin that's mirrored by Baekhyun at his elbow.
"Where are the kids?" he asks cheerfully.
"Beats me," Minseok shrugs. "Last I saw Jongin, he was standing closest to the edge. He was prepping the first carton to be loaded."
"Well," says Baekhyun, "Sehun was with him when I heard him sound the alarm, and Zitao won't have been far behind. Most of the first shots went in that direction after Sehun yelled like that." He grins again, more teeth and less humor this time. "If anything happens to them, I'll skin Jongdae alive."
"If anything happens to anyone, you'll have to get in line behind the leaders," Minseok rolls his eyes. "This was supposed to be an easy job, so you know they'll be pissed."
"What, you mean this isn't an easy job?" Chanyeol's eyes are wide. "I've been lied to."
"Why yes, I understand how it would be difficult to tell right away," says Baekhyun, tapping a finger to his lower lip. "Scurrying from barricade to barricade, cowering from bullets, hostile hitmen holding the high ground... this has all the appearances of a walk in the park."
Minseok shakes his head. "I don't want to know what kind of walks you take or what kind of parks you're taking them in."
"Forbidden dog parks mostly," Baekhyun says absently. "Hey, did you hear that alliteration I got just then? 'Hostile hitmen holding the high ground'... d'you think Kyungsoo would appreciate that? He reads books, right? I'm gonna go ask him." He stands up and walks out into the open floor, shooting off a few bullets as he goes. "Hey, Kyungsoo! I have something to tell you!"
There are several answering shots, followed by Baekhyun's indignant squawking.
"Sorry," Minseok hears Kyungsoo's sugar-sweet apology above the noise. "You startled me. I thought you were an enemy."
The cover fire gives them enough time to start converging in the middle of the warehouse floor, the last few to arrive being Jongin, Sehun, and Zitao, once they finally peel out from behind one of the staircases where they've been hiding out of sight since the first shots were fired.
"Nice of you to join us," Lu Han rolls his eyes. One hand is tight on Minseok's arm and the other, still wrapped around a gun, jerks back and forth along the line of the walkway above as he scans for movement.
"You all looked like you could handle it," says Sehun, calm in a way that he definitely had not been when he raised the alarm.
They have instinctively pulled together into a tight knot now, a back to back circle looking out at the surrounding walls. Most of the crates stacked around the warehouse are huge metal things, but here, in the center of the floor, there sits a stack of wooden boxes, each one small enough for a single person to pick up, but surprisingly heavy and stacked up just higher than the top of Yifan's head. This is what they've come here for and this is where they all gather now, standing guard around a pile of splinter-filled wooden planks that hide their next windfall. The gunfire has died away, leaving only a tense, ringing silence in Minseok's ears. When their rivals finally emerge they appear just as wary, the two sides at a stalemate, staring across at each other from behind gunbarrels. Neither wants to be the first to speak, but Minseok can tell that neither side will easily give way. They're both here for the same thing and to back down now would mean losing more than just the shipment and the price it will garner; it will mean ground lost in the ongoing turf war that is life in this city. It will mean loss of reputation and loss of potential business contacts in the future, the heist too high-profile to go unnoticed by the rest of the city's underground. They knew going in that this could make or break their criminal careers. The thought lurks at the back of Minseok's mind even now. When the other gang starts to edge their way down the stairs, Minseok can see that they know it too.
"What's a nice mob lord like you doing in a place like this?" asks their leader, half-smirking at Junmyeon, and Minseok could just roll his eyes at the line.
He recognizes him by sight -- Hakyeon -- the way he recognizes them all by sight. It's not the first time they've run into each other, after all. This new gang, VIXX, has been slowly pushing into their territory in a way that they can't really ignore. Cha Hakyeon, Jung Taekwoon, Lee Jaehwan, Kim Wonshik, Lee Hongbin, and Han Sanghyuk. Minseok knows all their faces by now, knows them well enough to match names to those faces, but not much more beyond that.
"I suppose now that we're all here, it's too much to expect that you'll give up quietly and go home?" Junmyeon sounds almost exasperated.
Hakyeon shrugs one shoulder with a grin. "What kind of rivals would we be if we let you have all the fun? You're not the only one who understands spending money to make money. When we got a tip that you were planning to hit this warehouse tonight, I knew there must be something really special here and really, how could we stay away? Everyone knows you never pick a bad target, and we've been studying your methods quite closely. EXO sunbaenim, please take care of us~"
It doesn't escape Minseok's notice that they've used Hakyeon's speech to spread out across the floor, inching step by step towards the contested crates. The fact doesn't escape Yifan's notice either.
"That's far enough," he says sharply, and they all freeze in place, Jaehwan with one foot left floating comically in the air. Now that he has the floor, Yifan continues. "I'm only going to tell you this once, so listen carefully. The door is right behind you. Turn around and leave now, or so help me god, when the dust settles I cannot guarantee that all of you will leave this building."
Minseok can feel the air get more tense. Yifan's eyes are fixed on one person in particular. He looks right at Sanghyuk and oh, then Minseok understands. Hit them where it hurts. Their youngest. He knows how his team would react if anything happened to one of "the kids," so presumably Yifan is hoping that a similar protective streak runs through the other gang. Sanghyuk himself looks uncomfortable and more than a little annoyed at being singled out as the weak link, but with the way the smirk has dropped right off of Hakyeon's face it looks like Yifan's threat has hit home.
A tiny flicker of movement catches Minseok's eye a moment later. Hongbin twitches slightly, his head jerking to the side just enough to meet Taekwoon's eyes. Taekwoon nods almost imperceptibly and then in an instant they both burst into motion. Minseok barely has time to see one of Taekwoon's arms swing out and knock Sanghyuk to the ground, but then Hongbin is sprinting towards the nearest crate, hand outstretched, just a second before shots ring out from somewhere behind Minseok and that's when everything goes to hell.
The first thing that happens, just as Minseok slides his finger back onto the trigger, is that several of the bullets miss Hongbin and punch through the wooden crate at the end of the stack instead. Hongbin hits the floor and rolls behind the line of boxes just in time to miss several more rounds. The next thing that happens is that the two groups break rank, running at each other or for cover, looking around for a target or a friend. Minseok fires off a few shots that send Wonshik stumbling back to avoid them, derailing his charge towards Jongin, and then Chanyeol is there to push him back further with a more determined look than Minseok has seen on his face in a long time. The next thing that happens is that the silvery smoke oozing its way out of the gunshots in the wooden crates finally seems to catch the attention of both groups. It was faint, almost invisible, when it first left the cartons and whatever it was, it was heavy enough that it sank to the floor, looking more like dust swirling around their feet than anything else. It's now up to Minseok's neck and there's enough of it in the air that it forms swirling clouds of almost opaque fog. The last thing that Minseok sees before it covers his eyes is Sehun and Yifan standing back to back, then a wave of it crashes over his head and everything goes gray.
The fog is even thicker than it had looked a second ago; now that he's engulfed in it, Minseok can't see more than a foot in front of his face. Even more disconcerting is the way it feels. It brushes up against his skin like solid cloth, feeling far more substantial than it has any right to be, and everywhere it touches starts to tingle, the same cool, bright feeling that he gets after brushing his teeth except it's all over his body instead of inside his mouth. It hits him so fast that he hasn't had enough time to draw a breath anyway, but the sensation is still enough to make him freeze up. He gropes forward towards what he hopes is the edge of the cloud, but it continues to expand out in all directions. He stumbles, tripping blindly over something that turns out to be a leg. The fog is too thick for him to even see the person's face. It could be one of their opponents or it could be... it could be one of his friends, caught in the crossfire. It could be Sehun or Jongin, or Zitao. The thought distracts him enough that he doesn't quite regain his balance in time, toppling dangerously and sucking in a hissing breath between his teeth as he flings out a hand to catch himself.
He realizes his mistake almost instantly because the moment the fog gets into his lungs, it starts to radiate out a numbness that takes hold of his entire body. The cold (minty supplies Minseok's brain helpfully) tingling feeling is running under his skin now, spreading out from his chest into every corner of his body, each individual finger and toe, cheerfully shutting down every nerve as it goes. He hits the floor when his legs give out, but the impact feels almost cushioned to his dulled senses. At least this means whoever he tripped over earlier probably just got a lungful of this stuff rather than having been shot. Of course, whatever gas had been in those containers might very well turn out to be just as deadly as bullets, Minseok reminds himself. While he tries in vain to move a hand, he notices that the room has once again gone quiet, meaning that the gas has almost certainly gotten to them all by now. If it does turn out to be deadly, Jongdae is likely to be the only man left standing out of both gangs. Minseok wonders if the reporters will try to get a statement out of Jongdae, but then again, he's always been one of the better ones at dodging attention, so no doubt he'll long since have skipped town by then. Probably take what's left intact of the night's haul along with him, the lucky bastard.
The paralyzing fog has completely taken hold of Minseok's body now. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't move so much as a pinky. Minseok wonders if it's seeping into his brain now too, though, because his thoughts are starting to get sluggish along with the rest of him. It feels almost like falling asleep, his mind falling into the same kind of fuzzy, nonsensical patterns. He thinks he can feel the edges of his body start to melt away. The fog is not so much eroding his outline as it is smearing it, like a hand across charcoal lines, breaking them up so that the rest of Minseok can escape, which is exactly what's happening. He feels like a blob of ink dropped into a pool and left to dissipate. It's not a particularly unpleasant sensation. It would be worrying, he's sure, only he can't muster the energy to be worried. For a moment he hangs there, suspended insubstantially in midair, a darker spot of spreading pigment in a sea of silver gray, with flickering images of recent memories fluttering around and through him. Breakfast stolen off of Lu Han's plate as payback for waking him up by flopping right on top of him, lifting Yifan's wallet without him noticing and then using the contents to fill up "the getaway van" or "the mystery machine" as Chanyeol variously calls it, sitting in the back of said van and checking his ammunition one last time as Junmyeon runs through the plan one last time, Sehun standing with his back to Yifan's as silver mist billows up around them.
Then suddenly he's falling downwards as if into a drainpipe, being poured through a funnel and condensed back into a solid shape. The ink blot of his consciousness spreads out again, this time easing into the shape of its container, held securely in a human body once again. The numbness starts to fade away again. His limbs are tingling back to life with every breath he takes. There's a sort of dull roar almost buzzing in his ears. Minseok lies there for a moment, just taking mental inventory to make sure everything is where it should be. Two arms and two legs, in roughly the right places. His feet feel a long way off, but so does most of him right now, so Minseok can chalk that one up to general disorientation. He hears various groans from the others around him, each one apparently surfacing from the same sort of muddled out-of-body experience that Minseok had gone through. He risks opening his eyes a crack and finds that most of the strange fog is gone. The sound he hears is the sound of the ventilation fans whirring in the ceiling. The noises of movement nearby are getting louder, so he stretches out a leg, surprised when it makes contact with a hard edge. He had been in the middle of the floor, on the far edge of the group away from the stacks, and he didn't think he had wandered that far in the fog. When he hauls himself up into a seated position, the room wobbles slightly and he sways as if he were on a rocking boat. The faintly seasick feeling doesn't help much, to be honest. Shaking his head, Minseok leans against the nearby crates while he fumbles around for his weapons. He doesn't see his pistol nearby, but then again, he doesn't know when he dropped it. Some time after the fog started to affect him. All around the others are doing the same, patting themselves down for their weapons and belongings. Minseok frowns. He still feels unbalanced, and none of his things are where they should be. His clothes feel strange. He looks down at his legs. The ground is still a long way off, but more importantly, Minseok is fairly sure he had been wearing different pants today. He doesn't think he owns pants like this at all actually, but everything is still so groggy...
"You-"
The strangled cry comes from right behind his head, and Minseok whirls around to see Yifan staring at him in complete horror. There's something wrong with the sight though, something nagging at him that's more unsettling than the expression on their leader's face. An instant later the thought flashes through his head that he looks smaller, but then something else in the corner of his eye distracts him and no, this is much worse. Minseok is frozen in place, staring at a spot a few yards out into the middle of the floor, where he sees himself staggering to his feet.
If I'm overthere, then who-
Minseok digs through his pockets until he finds a phone (not his phone, he notices), swiping frantically at the screen until he pulls up the camera. Sure enough, instead of his own face, he sees Sehun staring back at him, looking stunned.
"Oh my god," he says faintly.
Yifan reaches around him (no wonder he looks smaller) to grab the phone out of his hands. "Give me that," he demands, holding up the camera to get a good look at himself. If possible, he looks even more distraught than before at the sight that greets him. "Why?" he wails. "How could this happen to me? At least before I was good looking! It was all I had going for me!"
"Hey!" Hakyeon, halfway across the room, looks deeply offended. Or... whoever's in Hakyeon's body now? Minseok rubs his-- or rather, Sehun's-- face. This is so fucked up.
Holy shit, I'm tall!" Taekwoon's face is definitely not meant to hold such an expression of unholy glee. Kyungsoo's eyes are wide, and not with sugarcoated fury the way Minseok is used to seeing them. Hongbin, helping Sanghyuk to his feet, shudders slightly. Sanghyuk pats his hand comfortingly, but he seems equally perturbed by the sight.
"What's going on in here?" Jongdae flings open the door to the warehouse, hand clamped over his mouth and nose. "I came in to see what all the fuss was, and there was smoke everywhere! You're lucky I could reach the switch for the fans and didn't just leave you here to asphyxiate. What did you do?" He looks over at Junmyeon but all he gets in response is a blank stare.
"What about you?" the body formerly known as Hakyeon demands. "You were on lookout so we wouldn't get ambushed. What, did you decide to catch up on your beauty sleep or something?"
Jongdae blinks at him before turning to the rest of the room, now thoroughly confused. Minseok knows the feeling far better than he would like right now. "Okay, now I really need an explanation," says Jongdae.
"This is going to sound strange, but don't say anything until I finish," whoever is in Baekhyun's body holds up a finger. "As far as I can tell, the smoke you blew away somehow shuffled our minds around into each other's bodies when we inhaled it." He blinks at the sound of his voice and pulls the phone out of his pocket to check his reflection the way Minseok had a minute ago. He closes his eyes in mute horror. "On second thought, it might have actually been kinder to let us asphyxiate."
"So wait," says the person in Minseok's body and Minseok hadn't thought it could get weirder than watching himself stand up from across the room, but hearing his own voice is actually infinitely stranger. "Who are you then?"
It's unsettling to see Baekhyun's usually open face close off that quickly. "Who are you?" he counters.
"I'm-"
The dumbfounded look on his face is so familiar that Minseok almost laughs. It's a very Lu Han expression, which is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. While probably not the worst of options, the prospect of having Lu Han in his body fills Minseok with a sort of dread. Unfortunately any humor in the situation is dampened somewhat when the importance of this exchange dawns on him. None of them know who anyone else is, save for Jongdae, and even if they were to announce their identities now, none of them have any reason to trust each other. Minseok could claim to be Chanyeol right now and no one except the real Chanyeol would have any good way of verifying that. Minseok already has his suspicions about several of them, just from his limited observation, but none of them have a reason to come out and tell the truth just yet when the potential for trickery is still out there.
However, at the moment all this means is that they're left staring at each other across the warehouse in the back corner of the shipyard with no clue as to what to do next.
"Anyone have any ideas?" asks "Chanyeol" dryly. No one answers him for a long moment.
"You mean other than 'get back into the right bodies'?" the person in Yifan's body says with a sneer. Almost certainly Sehun, thinks Minseok to himself.
"Well, I, for one, would also like to get paid," says Jongdae. "Just putting that out there. So maybe we could take this somewhere that doesn't have guards patrolling everywhere? Even ones we've paid off?"
"Good idea," says whoever is in Yixing's body, taking a step forward. "We'll just take these and-"
Several people have their guns out and pointed at him before he can even lay a hand on the crate. Those remaining have their guns out a second later, pointing them at anyone else pointing guns. Minseok finds himself with his pistol trained on Junmyeon, who has a gun pointed at Jongin. No matter who is in Junmyeon or Jongin's body at the moment, Minseok is not keen on watching one of their young proteges bleed out on the floor because of a hastily-pulled trigger. Junmyeon's eyes meet his. Whoever is in there blinks steadily, and the hand holding the gun doesn't waver even as he holds Minseok's gaze.
"Okay," says "Yixing" quickly and takes a step back again. "I think everyone needs to calm down. We're all overreacting and-"
"'Overreacting'?" Baekhyun's lip curls slightly. "We've swapped bodies, in case you haven't noticed. I'm not sure it's possible to overreact to this."
"I could be on your side, for all you know," argues "Yixing," somewhat lamely.
"You could just as easily not," says "Baekhyun." "I have no way of knowing. None of us do. Why should any of us let anyone else leave with the cargo?"
"What are we supposed to do then?" demands "Wonshik." He gets a half shrug in response.
"I don't have an answer to the situation," says "Baekhyun" simply. "I was just pointing out that it is hardly in our best interests to let anyone else leave with anything."
"So if no one is going to leave the stuff behind, then we need to stick together," Minseok finally says. "Which means we need somewhere big enough to store both it and us."
Their own headquarters are more than big enough for the task, but even if they can get through all the security that the leaders insist on, Minseok doesn't think anyone will be keen on bringing unknown rivals into their base of operations. Though he has no idea as to the size of their location, the same concerns would naturally hold true for the VIXX headquarters. Which leaves them in the position of finding a third, more neutral location.
Jongdae looks around. "I might know a place," he says slowly. Everyone turns to look at him. "It's a house a little way outside the city. Junmyeon knows what I mean, right?" He turns to look at "Junmyeon", who just stares back at him. "Uh. Right," Jongdae says. "Well, wherever he is, Junmyeon knows about it. It's that place he gave me the key for a while back."
"Wait," says the person in Taekwoon's body. "Is this that lake house you were bragging about like three months ago? The one that's a safe house but you were rubbing in our face like it was a vacation luxury spa?"
"Yeah, that's it," Jongdae agrees. "The one his family used to own, I think. Never actually seen it, but it sounds great and you know them. Really old, filthy rich crime family? It's gotta be a mansion."
Minseok notices "Yixing" carefully examining his nails as Jongdae talks. Junmyeon has a good poker face when he actually thinks about it, but something about his friends seems to set him enough at ease that he never thinks to turn it on, so he tends to be painfully easy for anyone who knows him to read. Most of them are still focused on Jongdae, but Minseok catches... well, his own eye. He doesn't think that it's his imagination that spots Lu Han's glimmer of humor when he realizes that they've both come to the same conclusion about "Yixing's" identity.
"That sounds fine to me," says what Minseok thinks is Lu Han, once they break eye contact. "Chanyeol" and "Sanghyuk" look especially displeased, but they do not protest.
"That house is owned by an EXO leader," points out "Junmyeon". It's the first time he's spoken, Minseok realizes, and is much more restrained than Junmyeon is usually wont to be.
"Right," says "Kyungsoo", "So we- I mean, if we decide to use this place -- and I wish I had a better idea, but I don't -- then we have to load up all this stuff and take it with us into one gang's private territory. How do we know we won't get screwed over?"
"We never agreed to give you anything in the first place," "Yifan" snaps. "Literally the only reason no one's shooting anyone else right now is because we don't know who to shoot. Our people were here first and we don't owe anyone anything, especially not the people who attacked us first."
For a moment it looks like the fight is about break out anew. The guns that had drifted down to their sides now snapping up again as their owners bristle at "Yifan's" words. Minseok groans to himself. Sehun is a sweet kid most of the time, but he has this knack for saying exactly the thing that will piss off everyone the most right when it's the least convenient. Standing on the tipping point of a gang shootout is definitely not the time to ruffle feathers, but that's exactly what is happening and they are two seconds away from someone getting a bullet in the head and losing all the night's profits.
"Let's just... think about this, okay?" "Hongbin" holds up his hands as placatingly as possible. "We've all got the same problem right now, don't we? We can't figure out who gets anything-" he looks at "Yifan" here "-until we know who everyone is, so before we can actually do anything else we need to do is get back into the right bodies. Right?"
"Yixing" nods. "Can we all just agree to put this stuff in storage until we figure out how to get back to normal?"
"Then we can shoot them and be done with it," sighs "Yifan".
"Or we can come to a solution that will benefit everyone," "Yixing" glares.
No one seems overly pleased with the plan, but no one else argues further so they fumble around in various pockets until they find car keys and can maneuver their vans into the warehouse side-by-side and load them up with as many of the wooden crates as they can fit. If the members of VIXX manage to get a few more into their own van, Minseok can't quite blame them. If he were the one driving into a rival's safe house, he would want as much material security as he could get his hands on too. Once the vans are packed with as many crates as they can possibly hold, Jongdae looks around.
"We all have to get to the house, so I either have to give someone the address or you have to follow me," he says. "And I'm not planning to make it easy to catch me. We've hung around here too long already and I'm not keen on getting busted."
"Jaehwan" holds up a hand and jangles the keys loudly. "I guess I'm driving?" he asks.
"Give me your phone and I'll program it into the GPS." Jongdae holds out a hand and then stops, realizing. "Wait. Does it have a passcode?"
They both look at the phone. They turn it over a couple times and Jongdae wrinkles his nose. Around the room, everyone else is pulling out the phones in their possession and poking at them. Minseok doesn't think any of them would leave their phone unlocked, but at that moment "Zitao" lets out a choked laugh.
"Apple phone is best phone," he whispers in glee. "Fingerprint locks are yes."
"Jongin" makes an incoherent noise and snatches the phone out of his hand. "Stay out of there!" he demands. "It's not yours!"
"Is very mine! I'm Zitao!"
"No, you're not! And that's not even- the real Zitao speaks better Korean than that!"
"I am Zitao so I know! I speak good!"
Minseok rolls his eyes. At least now everyone knows where Zitao has ended up. That makes... He tallies it up in his head. Four of his teammates whose locations he's at least ninety percent sure of. Sehun is in Yifan's body, Junmyeon is in Yixing's body, Zitao is in Jongin's body, and Lu Han is in Minseok's own body. That last one is definitely something he's going to have to deal with before too much time passes. Minseok also has some suspicion of where Yifan himself ended up, but he'll have to observe further before he can be sure. To make things more complicated, he knows that at least Kyungsoo is someone from VIXX, even if he doesn't know exactly who, and there are bound to be more cross-gang switches. The entire thing is giving him a headache. If they could just agree to tell the truth about their identities, everything would be so much easier. One step at a time though.
"Let's take all the phones and give them to Jongdae then," he suggests, ignoring the outraged shouts that follow. "None of us want anyone else getting into our things and it's not like we can get them back to their owners right now."
"You're not giving my stuff to your buddy to break into," says "Chanyeol" grumpily. "No way."
"What, do you keep classified information on your cell phone?" Lu Han counters from where he's settled against the back doors of EXO's van like a guard dog. "If you do, then you deserve everything that happens to you. Your bosses should've taught you better than that."
"Jongdae's the only one that we know is who he says he is," Minseok persisted. "You can all watch him put them in a safe or something and no one will touch them until we sort this out."
"The building is old," says Junmyeon, his pleased expression looking weird on Yixing's calm face, "but I had a couple new features installed. There's an electric safe where we can set as long a password as we want. Everyone can enter two or three digits and that way we'll all have to be working together to get our things back out again. We can agree that nothing leaves that safe until we either get our right bodies back or until we come to some other agreement."
It seems that this, like all of their decisions tonight, is reached only with the reluctant realization that, while no one likes it, they simply have no other options. With no way to actually prove ownership, no one can come up with a better solution for getting their hands back on their own phones and belongings, so Jongdae goes around with a toolbox that he's emptied out into the corner and makes sure that they have all eighteen phones stacked inside. After some debate, wallets and the other contents of their pockets follow a moment later. When everything they want to keep safe has been safely stored, Jongdae shoves the box between two stacks of crates in the back of VIXX's van, brushing his hands as he stands back.
"Are we all okay now?" he asks with a sarcastic quirk. "No one's worried that anyone's going to be reading their top secret emails or anything? Can we finally get out of here?"
The driving setup is decided quickly since the two people already in possession of the keys agree to drive and no one cares enough to argue that at least, leaving them only to divide themselves up into two vans. They manage this with a minimum of arguing and confusion as well, which is stunning, Minseok thinks, considering most of the people they have to deal with right now. The reality of their predicament seems to finally be sinking in for the group at large, and however they may grudge having to work together, for the time being they don't have much of a choice. Minseok winds up in the middle row of EXO's own van, his newly acquired long legs bunched up awkwardly behind Jongdae's seat. The back gate is still left unattended, as per the agreement they'd struck with the shipyard supervisors, so there's no one to see them leave.
True to his word, Jongdae does not travel at an easy pace, but they never quite lose the van behind them. Minseok has seen Jongdae when he wants to lose cars tailing him, so he can tell that he's carefully calculating the distance he needs to stay within to keep from leaving the others behind in the dark. They leave the city limits and Jongdae pulls off the main highway almost right away, winding along smaller and smaller roads that disappear into the surrounding forest. Before long their headlights on the road ahead and the bobbing lights of the van behind are the only things Minseok can see. Jongdae's phone, propped up in a stand on the dashboard, says that their destination is about an hour's drive away from the city, but Jongdae manages to get them there in forty minutes, even when halfway there the roads turn into gravel and dirt paths. The house itself looms up like a massive black mountain against the night sky. The headlights shine onto a broken slate walkway leading up to a sprawling porch. The building, or what Minseok can see of it, looks beautiful but abandoned. It's certainly big enough to hold them all, but it's not the sort of place Minseok would pick to stay in for any length of time. The windows are boarded up and the grass is so overgrown that it nearly reaches the window ledges on the first floor. Minseok has seen haunted houses look more inviting than this place does. Jongdae shuts off the engine and grabs a flashlight off of the floor of the car before climbing out to stand alongside the rest of them.
"Okay, he said it was old, but this is just ridiculous," Jongdae frowns.
Behind them, the other van rumbles up the driveway. Minseok hears Kyungsoo's voice screech out from inside when the other driver jolts to a stop with an audible bump against a thick tree. The parking brake is barely on when they all tumble out in a far less orderly fashion that the occupants of the previous car had, with "Kyungsoo" right in the lead. He rushes over to the front of the car, letting out a sort of pained gurgle at the sight of the dent the tree has left in the van's hood.
"Oh my god!" he screeches. "I would never have let you drive if I'd known you were blind! What, were you parking by braille? The tree was right fucking there! Would it have killed you to, I don't know, just tap the brakes a little instead of waiting for a solid object to break your momentum?"
"Give me a break," "Jaehwan" shrugs. He looks completely unaffected. "It's my first time driving. I think I did pretty okay." He walks past the line of stunned faces, each showing various degrees of horror, and up onto the porch to try the front door. "Hey, who has the key to this place?"
"Get the car keys away from him," says "Kyungsoo" faintly. "Someone. Please."
"Oh my god, we could have
By the time Jongdae fishes the key out of some back compartment of his wallet, everyone has crowded around the door behind him, each craning forward to be the first to get a glimpse into their new lodgings. It's not as bad as it could be, Minseok thinks when the door finally swings open. It's dark at first, but when someone finds the light switch the warm glow from the lamps makes the place look far less haunted. There's dust everywhere, over the floors and tables and the chairs covered with sheets. There are more than a few spiderwebs as well, which they discover when "Jongin" walks through a doorway without checking it first. The screams that follow are very Zitao-like and Minseok didn't know Jongin's throat was even capable of the same noises that he's used to hearing from Zitao, but the pitch and volume is exactly the same as he remembers, which is comforting in a way. Anything vaguely familiar right now is bound to be comforting, he thinks.
He catches "Junmyeon" watching the scene with an unreadable expression for a long while before, as if he can feel the eyes on him, he turns to look back at Minseok. It's the same slow blink he'd given Minseok before with Minseok's gun pointed at his head. It's a far steadier look than Junmyeon ever has, steadier than Minseok is used to seeing from just about anyone except Kyungsoo or Yixing. It's not that Junmyeon doesn't focus, because he does, but in those cases he gets an almost compressed look to his face, like he's building physical barriers between himself and any distractions. This is the same distance that Kyungsoo's eyes sometimes get when he consciously detaches himself from a situation and it's the same nearly unflappable calm that Yixing is so good at. This is someone used to observing from the edges of a crowd, venturing in only when required, so different from Junmyeon's need to stick himself in the middle of every conflict as if he hopes to unravel it from the inside. All of a sudden Minseok feels very tired. Life was hard enough just trying to scratch out a place for themselves in the city's criminal underbelly without at the same time having to try to guess who's looking at him and wearing his friends' faces. He wants to go to sleep and wake up to find that this has all been an absurd dream.
Before he can fall into a bed, however, there are crates to unload into the house's basement. Minseok isn't surprised to find that half of the massive concrete room is taken up with a safe that looks like it was taken straight from a bank's vaults. In the interests of fairness and calm tempers, everyone watches Jongdae lock the safe once all the wooden crates are stacked up inside so that they can memorize the combination. The physical bar and padlock seem almost like an afterthought, but it leaves them with a key to lock inside the smaller electric safe upstairs along with all the cell phones and wallets. It might be more symbolic than anything (Minseok is fairly sure any one of them could either pick the basement safe's lock or break it in one way or another), but they're grateful for every little bit of security they can get. But even once this is all done, the others can't agree on a sleeping arrangement that will satisfy them all. Since the bedrooms are scattered across the house's multiple floors, there is a considerable amount of debate over who gets the rooms closest to the basement and who gets rooms connected to other rooms and with every single minute that passes Minseok thinks he's going just a little bit more insane.
"You know what," he says after fifteen straight minutes of listening to them go at it, "I'm too tired to stand here and listen to you all. You can stand here until sunrise, but I'm going up those stairs and I'm taking the very first bed I see and if you don't like it you can tell me about it in the morning."
He ignores the surprised looks from everyone else in favor of flinging open the door back into the entrance hall (what kind of lake house has an entrance hall anyway) as loudly as he can, taking the stairs two at a time with Sehun's long legs. His plan develops a hitch when the first room he storms into turns out to have an occupant already. For the third time this night, he finds himself stared at with Junmyeon's face bearing a distinctly un-Junmyeon expression. This time underneath the fixed stare he thinks he can see the faintest suggestion of surprise, but even that is infuriatingly brief considering that he just burst into the room loudly and without warning. No one should be allowed to look so unperturbed in the middle of this clusterfuck. Minseok hadn't even seen him sneak away. He's already got the boards off the windows and the bedclothes pulled out of the chest at the foot of the bed, so it must have been early in the discussion. He doesn't say anything. He just stands there in the middle of the floor, halfway through the process of pulling his shirt off, staring at Minseok expectantly. When Minseok clenches his fists even that sensation feels different enough from what he's used to that he thinks he might scream.
"I'm sorry," Minseok says, utterly unapologetically. "I didn't know you were up here, or I would have knocked. I'll just go find somewhere else to wait until I wake up from this godawful nightmare."
He doesn't even wait for a response, but turns on his heel and makes for the very next door down the hall. The room looks like it hasn't been touched in a year at least, judging from the levels of dust everywhere, but Minseok only drags out an armful of blankets and dumps them into a sort of nest on the middle of the mattress before climbing in himself and flopping down. He's facing the wall now and it's only then that he notices the second door in the wall, connecting it back to the room next to him.
Well, just let him try to murder me in my sleep, Minseok thinks grumpily. I'd like to see him try.
Minseok doesn't think that any of them would try to attack any of the others, just out of fear of accidentally hurting a teammate by mistake, but it probably can't hurt to be careful. He untangles himself just long enough to find a chair and wedge it under the doorknob before he's back in bed with a huge yawn. He hadn't been lying when he said that he was too tired to listen to everyone argue. Whether due to the excitement, or the actual process of swapping bodies with someone else, or even because he was now stuck in the body of a sleepy teenager, Minseok was asleep almost before his head hit the mattress. In that brief moment between closing his eyes and unconsciousness, he thought he could hear the vague sounds of the others filtering up the stairs into the other rooms, but they melted right away into murky dream sounds so that he couldn't be sure he had heard anything at all. He sleeps for what was probably hours because when a loud noise jolts him awake, he has that lurking sense that the recently-awoken get sometimes that there had been complete silence until just a second ago. A moment later the door to his room swings open and a figure bolts across the floor, landing half on the bed and half on Minseok in a pile of limbs. Obviously he'd forgotten to barricade the door out into the hall like he'd done to the other connecting door.
"Wha-?" Minseok croaks.
"I don't care if you're a horrible, murdering psycho or not, I'm staying here," a voice hiccups. "A massive death bird with ten-foot claws just flew in through my window. I'm not going back in there even if you kill me."
Minseok sighs. He recognizes both the voice and the tone of the words, though they don't usually go together. "Go to sleep, Lu Han," he says, kicking the other man a little bit off of him. "I'm not going to kill you unless you snore. And even then I might just kick you onto the floor, depending on how loud you are."
Even after being startled awake, Minseok finds it easier than usual to fall back asleep. The house settles back into silence except for the sound of the person breathing in bed next to him, and just lying there with his eyes shut makes it easier to believe that nothing has changed at all from the way it was that morning.
part 2 -->