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Not many people come to Mycian. Most governments call it a public correctional facility to justify the avoidance, but the truth is that it’s just some backwater prison planet at the fringes of the outer rim, its underground cells saved for prisoners with life sentences: treason, mass murder, terrorists.
“What’s he doing here?” one of the guards hisses behind the patrol booth, watching Hoseok’s ship land on the other side of the glass.
“Heard he came to see 0912,” patrol answers.
The guard blanches. “0912? Are you kidding me?” He turns back to the window, watching the landing ramp open up, Hoseok’s security detail come through first. The captain of his guard’s holding a spear half a head taller than he is. “He wants to see the only guy we’ve got in max security?”
Patrol shrugs. “Just a rumor,” she says, fixing her sunglasses, settling back into parade rest. “I don’t question royals anymore, Shin. They do what they do,” she watches Hoseok emerge from his ship next, dressed in whites and gold and ceremonial robes of Gaechun tradition. Even from this far away, there’s no doubting his beauty; he reaches up to brush curled hair from eyes with long, gloved fingers. His eyes are steel.
“I didn’t know Jung spoke Solar,” someone asks, after his squadron passes them by. “I thought royals were all Standard freaks.”
“Dunno,” one of the others replies. “That captain didn’t look keen on translating for him though.”
They watch as the squadron boards a planetside chopper, scattering dust as it takes off, a little rough with it. Hoseok’s sits between Taehyung and Jeongguk, inside, his robes folded stiff over his knees.
“We’ll be there in a few minutes,” their pilot says through the headset. “The ground team’s bringing the prisoner up for you.”
Hoseok, where he’s arranged carefully, gives no indication if he understands what’s being said. He turns his head turned to the window instead of responding, gray light washing over the aquiline twist of his nose, his sharp jaw. He’s got hands folded up over crossed legs as the chopper come to a halting stop; they're in the middle of nowhere. It’s just mountains in the distance, and mining equipment scattered over the fields like dead trees.
Out the window, a group of dingy looking prisoners gathers to one side, and a stupendous amount of guards circling the mining shaft as the elevator comes up. A couple of them have guns, but they’re long-range, not much use at close quarters. Some have slung bayonets over their shoulders, tapping their feet nervously. Dust comes up in clouds as their ship touches down.
“Your Highness,” Jeongguk says. He’s one foot out the door. “My men first, please.”
Hoseok stops him with a hand to the chest. “He won’t hurt me,” he says, and— no wonder he’s king. The way he speaks is like liquid in the spine, sweet and delicate and groomed high. His accent in Standard is flawless. “You can go first if you like, but I want to see him.”
Jeongguk frowns, displeased. He can’t disobey direct orders from his king though. Not when Hoseok’s trained for battle too.
Then: “Come,” he says quietly, after Jeongguk and Taehyung have left, the rest of his soldiers falling easily into formation. There is much that Jung Hoseok’s given up for love: comfort, kindness. This is nothing to him now.
“Your Highness,” the captain bows, when Hoseok’s within speaking distance. Taehyung and Jeongguk have come to parade rest between them. “As you requested,” he says, fidgeting nervously. “We’ve brought 0912 from his cell.”
The prison guards wait nervously by elevator doors, four of them holding tight to the tail end of a chain.
The captain wavers the longer Hoseok ignores him, sweating uncomfortably. He turns to Jeongguk, who’s expression is no better. He shakes as he says: “Sir, I think he may not understand what I’m saying, can you—”
“Oh, no, I heard you,” Hoseok cuts off quietly. He turns to look at the captain for once, taking a step closer to him. “I’m fluent in Solar.”
The guard blanches. “I— your Highness, I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“I won't take offense this time,” Hoseok dismisses blandly. “But your incompetency,” he sighs, looking away. “Is rather disappointing.”
The captain flushes scarlet, finally turns to his guards and shoos them aside, hissing orders for them to clear a clumsy path for royal military, leaving only three to drag Hoseok’s prisoner forward by the underarms.
“Unchain him,” Hoseok says, quietly, when he’s collapsed by his feet. Nobody moves. Then, harder: “I said,” he snarls, contorting his pretty features. “Unchain him.”
“M-my apologies your Highness,” the captain stutters, and rushes to undo the cuffs around the prisoner’s wrists. There’s still a collar on the him after — thick and bruised tight across the skin of his neck — exaggerating his exhausted shoulders, his arms corded with labor, and fingers are bleeding, crusted with scabs and burnt skin. Fading bruises have started to climb out the thin sleeves of his shirt.
Hoseok loses himself at the sight. “The key, captain,” he says, holding his hand out without looking. One of the guards steps up for him, terrified. Hoseok closes his fingers around the handle, takes a step closer. “Can he see me, do you think?” he looks up at prison security. “How long have you had him underground?”
The captain licks his lips. “Since he was sentenced—”
“So two years then,” Hoseok says. “He hasn’t been brought up since he arrived?”
The guy shakes his head, paling another shade as Hoseok’s expression sours further.
“He’s still a boy, you realize,” he says coldly. The light burns, and Hoseok knows he’s probably blinded by the meager sun. “You’ve been beating him regularly too, I suppose,” he points out, raising an eyebrow. “Have you sent him to medics since he’s been here?”
“He’s,” someone stutters. “He wasn’t allowed to leave the mining fields.”
Hoseok presses his lips together.
Security swallows, hard. “I was just doing my job, sir, I don’t know what you want me to say—”
“I want you to start by calling me Your Highness,” Hoseok cuts off, offering a thin smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “It’s the least you military rejects could do.”
The guards wince. Hoseok having brought his squadron with him is just salt in the wound; Jeongguk and Taehyung’s positions are highly favored in the galaxy. To serve a member of the Galactic Federation, and a king from a planet as powerful as Gaechun— it’s. Even those who haven’t been exiled to prison planets consider such promotion enviable.
“So you chained him, beat him, worked him half to death,” Hoseok continues evenly. He’s not sure if 0912 can hear anything; the pressure’s bad that far underground. It’s like living underwater in the mines — both light and air completely artificial. “So let me ask you this: do you imbeciles know if he stand on his own?”
“N-no, your Highness.”
Hoseok’s eyes flick back to the prisoner’s. 0912’s still on the ground, head bowed pitifully; Hoseok takes another step closer, then sinks abruptly to his knees. His skirt comes up stiff around him, the whole crowd sucking in a shocked breath as he reaches out with white gloves to undo the collar himself. It comes off with a heavy clang, Hoseok catching it before it hits the ground, and then— his whole face suddenly, unbelievably gentle as he runs a soft hand over the bruises around the prisoner’s throat. The guards can’t do anything but stare.
“Namjoon-ah,” Hoseok murmurs, sliding a hand through matted hair to cup the base of his head. The words come out pained. “Namjoon-ah, hey, it’s me.”
There’s no reaction.
“Joon,” Hoseok tries again, smoothing his thumb across the scar tissue of his cheek. “Darling, can you look at me?” he asks, Namjoon’s covered in years of sweat and dust but Hoseok still presses their foreheads together, desperate. Kind with it. "Please."
The two of them are a sight: Hoseok’s robes all around him, the broken curve of Namjoon’s back. Hoseok holds him like someone might’ve held sunlight, if stars could be caught.
After what feels like hours, fingers finally reach out to curl, shaking, in the fine material of Hoseok’s skirt. It’s been so long since Namjoon’s touched anything this expensive. Then: “Hope-ah?” he rasps, and doesn’t dare to lift his head.
“Yes,” he chokes out, stroking his hand over Namjoon’s cheek over and over. Oh God. “‘M here.”
“Hope-ah,” his voice cracks. “You’re— you’re going to kill me?”
Hoseok lets out a sob. “No,” he says. How could he think that? “Of course not.”
“You don’t have to lie,” Namjoon says.
“Joon—”
“Please just. You have to go.”
Tears hit the back of Namjoon’s hands, fingers tighten desperately in Hoseok’s skirt — because he knows that this is a dream, that he’s hallucinating, that he’ll wake up in the dark again with the ceiling pressing down on him like a cage.
“I couldn’t,” Hoseok gasps, choking on the words. “Sweetheart, I’m taking you home, I— can’t. I couldn’t.”
“They’re going to murder me.”
“I wouldn’t let them.”
Namjoon is quiet for a long time.
“Then what about your uncle?” he asks. He still doesn’t look up at Hoseok. “He’d kill us on sight.”
“My uncle’s dead.”
Namjoon’s breath hitches in his throat. Hoseok cards through his dirty hair like they’re still young, and alone at night again.
“Hey, come on,” Hoseok murmurs, slotting two fingers under Namjoon’s chin and tilting his head up. He brushes hair back from his forehead when their eyes finally meet, and Hoseok has to bite back anger when he sees the scar that blinds him — the milky white of his left eye. Knotted tissue and residue of infection’s left the skin raw, blackened at the corners; Hoseok traces a finger down the line of it to try and take away the pain. “What did they do to you?” he rasps, voice breaking. He cups one of Namjoon’s thin cheeks, warming his skin with the touch. It’s been so long since Namjoon’s seen sunlight, and the heat of it almost consumes him whole.
“It’s okay,” he laughs weakly. “Hope-ah, I promise.”
“They hurt you.”
“That’s what they tend to do to people around here.”
“I don’t care. I’ll kill them myself.”
Namjoon has to close his eyes, hard, at that. “You were always—” his voice breaks. It still feels like fake: two years underground, dreaming of a day he knew wouldn’t come because he knew, the moment Hoseok’s uncle had caught Namjoon sneaking into the palace and he’d been sentenced him to a lifetime on Mycian, that he’d never see Hoseok again. “You were always so stubborn.”
“I know, I know,” he says. He can’t pull himself away from Namjoon even to get up, just keeps touching parts of him — the sores on his palms, the blisters from where the chains had chafed while he worked in the mines. His feet are bare, and very bruised. Hoseok can’t even imagine the kind of hell Namjoon’s lived in all these years while he sat in the lap of luxury and plotted the seamless murder of his uncle.
“I still feel like I’m dreaming.”
Hoseok shakes his head. “You’re not,” he says, desperate for Namjoon to believe him. “You’re not.”
“I just—”
“I promise,” Hoseok says, fierce. “They can’t take you away from me again.”
Namjoon can’t choke anything else out. Hoseok can see through the torn fabric of his pants that even his thighs have thinned down to almost nothing. “I.”
“You don’t think I’m telling the truth, do you?” Hoseok asks, eyes shining.
Namjoon bites his lip, keeps his eye down, shakes his head reluctantly.
Then: “Look at me,” he says for the third time, voice shaking something fierce. Hoseok cups his face with both hands when he does, and even if he’s crying, his expression is hard. The knotted tissue of Namjoon’s blind eye aches when he sees. “Do you think,” he says, through steel and stone. “That I could come back here and see what they’ve done and walk away from that? Because don’t you dare—” he shakes his head, “Don’t you dare think that even for a second that everything I’ve done hadn’t been to bring you back to me.”
Namjoon’s face crumples at that, like everything he’s been trying to hold has finally shattered between his feet.
“Just, I just,” he rasps; Hoseok’s always been so strong to carry Namjoon too. “Please tell me—”
“It’s not a dream,” he says firmly. Hoseok’s uncle put him in a prison, so then Hoseok put his uncle in a grave. Listen: he really would do anything for his boy. “Come home with me, love,” he says. He doesn’t ask for anyone’s permission before he gets to his feet, Namjoon so weak he can’t stand. Any longer and he truly would’ve wasted away underground, Taehyung helping him carefully back to the ship.
It’s half a day trip back to Gaechun, but Hoseok’s got eyes for nobody else the entire time, biting his lip as the medics take Namjoon from him right at dock and cart him off to the infirmary.
They take better care of Namjoon than Hoseok ever could, but it’s been two years since they’ve last seen each other and the separation is a dull nail in the bed of his chest. Hoseok worries a hole into the floor as the operation drags through to the afternoon, lurching to his feet when the doors to his bedroom slide open and Namjoon appears on the other side. He can’t quite walk on his own, not so soon. Not yet.
Hoseok rushes to help Namjoon sit, kneeling between his legs and smoothing a hand down his side before he checks the bandages the doctors have put in. He’d dreamed about this day the same way Namjoon dreamed about Hoseok while working to the point of collapse in the fields, thinking of him like an angel, and somehow even the years haven’t gotten rid of the sweet curve of his eyelids, his pretty face.
“Does it hurt?” he's asking gently, eyeing the new skin that’s been grafted onto Namjoon’s hands and feet. The callouses are gone — new laser treatment — the blisters scrubbed down so his fingers look the way they used to. The thin scar that circled his neck has disappeared too.
Namjoon blinks dumbly down at Hoseok when he kisses his stomach, very softly. “It— it doesn’t,” he fumbles, tongue thick in his mouth. Hoseok is so good to him. He’s been living half-bruised for so long that he’d forgotten what painless meant. “Hope-ah, I.”
“I know, I know,” he shushes, tipping Namjoon’s head down so that he can kiss along the scar that cuts through his eye too. The doctors couldn’t do anything about the blindness, but they’ve thinned the old tissue down to nothing.
Namjoon reaches out for him hesitantly, then, like he’s still not sure if he's dreaming or not. Hoseok’s smile is sweet when he touches the high points of his cheeks, and very dimpled. He’s so pretty it hurts to look at, Namjoon wilting when Hoseok tucks him in under the covers and reaches out to trace his nose.
“My prince,” Hoseok murmurs, kissing both of his eyelids like he always used to. “I missed you so much.”
Namjoon can’t get words out of his mouth anymore, but wobbles terribly as Hoseok slides under the covers next to him. Everything makes him feel like an infant, relearning the whole world again. He reaches out for Hoseok, and shudders when he rubs his back.
It’s so surreal, all of this, the smell of him everywhere and around. It’s early afternoon, and light slants in through the lace curtains.
“Yours?” Namjoon asks, out of nowhere, fit to burst.
“Of course,” Hoseok reassures him, the words like sugar on the tongue. Namjoon hadn’t realized how heavy the world became until he started carrying part of it again, shuddering when hands slide through his hair, closer, carding. “My prince,” Hoseok murmurs, possessive. “Mine.”