Chapter Text
"Did you read the briefing packet?" Is asked point-blank of Changmin one lovely crisp Second-Moon when he steps into the transporter hovering in the courtyard at Headquarters. It is waiting to ferry them to their meeting, and it is too early.
He nearly doesn't catch the question, because his body hasn't had its daily intake of caffeine yet.
"What briefing packet," Changmin says reflexively, and blinks unfazed at the glare sent this way. "Whoa. Someone woke up on the wrong side of his sleep capsule today."
"Not everything is a joke," his partner is working himself into a snit. "R&D said we are being debriefed by the Commissioner himself, so if you're still hung over from your gathering of irresponsible cads last night-"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Changmin holds up a palm and a hand that's still clutching his cosmos piccolo in self-defence. "Calm down, of course I read it, I was just joking, have you ever known me to not read anything that's sent to my holo-watch-"
His partner sniffs. "You forgot the briefing session the last time you and your bunch of merry men drank together, though."
"Yeah, and you tore me a new asshole for that, Yunho. Why would I dare to do that again?" Changmin snorts, and takes a long pull of his piccolo. He can feel his brain's rusty gears clanking their way to work, and says so.
"More like those gears were drowned in a sea of alcohol," his partner Yunho, better known by his professional designation Uknow, snipes through something that can barely be called a smile. There are too many of his teeth showing. "I don't understand why you people insist on indulging in a historical vice like that."
"Just because you're a lightweight...." Changmin coughs, and raises his hands again in supplication when Yunho steps closer. "I'm joking! You like my jokes, remember? Most of them. You laughed at the one about the baby Flurble and the space maid on our assignment last orbit."
"Hmm," Yunho says.
Changmin breathes a sigh of silent relief when his partner seems appeased for now, because he's belatedly leaning forward at last to let the transporter scan at his iris.
"Good Moon," the A.I. for the transporter greets, her voice all modulated cheeriness. "Captain, Class Humanoid, designation Uknow, of the Interspatial and Temporal Task Force. Impending schedule is t minus nineteen minutes to Commissioner Briefing. Attendance mandatory, for two. A word of caution: temporal buffer is thin."
"Even Bigeast knows you're late," Yunho says. His smile -of a very loose definition of the word- still hasn't waned.
"I'm standing right here," Changmin says, and tugs at the elbow of Yunho's space suit, so Yunho knows to shift his weight to the side. It means Changmin can lean over Yunho's shoulder, to shove his open eye at Bigeast's iris scanner.
"Warrant Officer, Class Humanoid, designation Max, of the Interspatial and Temporal Task Force. Attendance mandatory and noted for the same schedule. Proceed?" Bigeast asks placidly.
"Proceed," Changmin sighs, and sucks in another mouthful of sweet caffeine whilst hooking his chin over Yunho's shoulder.
The transporter hums to life, and shoots upwards. Artificial gravity means they barely feel the movement though, and Changmin's allowed to finish his cosmos piccolo in relative peace, since Yunho's subsided into grumbling beneath his breath.
--
Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, Changmin is sixty-eight and one hundred orbits old, when the Academy first introduces him to a second lieutenant who will take care of his twelve-orbit internship as a trooper cadet.
There are various whistling noises of approvals as everyone crowds around his holo-watch with his announcement noticed beamed up into the air. The onlookers even include the Class Kettloid cadet who does nothing but whistle. “You scored Uknow?”
“Changmin, can we swap?”
“Damn it, just because the nerd’s got high scores on his theory exams doesn’t mean he should be given Uknow!”
“The pairings are randomised, don’t be an idiot.”
“Uknow is us, he is so us, did you hear about how his training period as an officer cadet was cut short because the Task Force basically said they want him on board full-time?”
“I’ll show you an idiot, come here-”
“He keeps cycling through his partners though, I heard they paired him up two orbits ago with three other newly promoted cadets, and it didn’t end well.”
--
The senior is nothing like what he expects.
Changmin had thought, from the stories floating around, and the one glimpse he had gotten across the academy cafeteria during Cadet Career Fair week, that the senior, designation Uknow, might perhaps welcome him with a gentle smile and patient lectures. Changmin’s good at listening, and taking notes.
Perhaps they might get to spar, because Changmin’s getting better at taking fellow cadets out via sonic screams these days. His professors swear there must be some Class Siren in his family history, despite his parents’ collective puzzlement and bemused denials.
Or perhaps he might even get to use Uknow’s infamous gunlance in a shooting tutorial, designated Cassiopeia after his senior once took out five space bandits, under the light of the constellation Cassiopeia as an officer cadet on an abandoned asteroid moon.
He gets none of the above.
Instead his greeting salute is criticised, down to the very angle Changmin tilts his straightened fingers in relation to his cap. Changmin speaks too soft and his sparring moves are too slow to save his life in the field and how can Changmin not understand that sometimes you cannot pause to differentiate friend from foe in the field because they don’t allow you to pause before trying to stab you in the face with a electro-sabre.
Within the first hour of knowing each other, Changmin is already familiar friends with Uknow’s cold gaze and has been treated to a brisk, “just quit the Academy now, if you’re not prepared to take this seriously.”
The only thing that hasn’t come under verbal fire is the state of Changmin’s uniform suit, which earned a begrudging “you’re neat, cadet.”
--
The twelve orbits are almost up, before Changmin manages to not fumble during the smaller missions that Uknow allows him to tag along on, and even saves Uknow’s life on one such mission.
“I saw him coming,” Uknow says, unsmiling. “The thief, I mean. I knew what he was going to do with the pulse cannon.”
But when they set his transporter on her course back to Headquarters, Uknow allows Changmin to key in the coordinates instead of performing the task himself, as is his wont.
It’s accompanied by an almost inaudible, “I guess you can call me Yunho. If you want.”
Changmin blinks at him, fierce joy a molten pool at the bottom of his stomach. “What did you say, senior?”
“You heard me,” Uknow- Yunho, it’s Yunho now, says, inscrutable.
“Yes, I did,” Changmin hurries to affirm. His lips hurt from grinning. He'll prove himself yet. “Yunho.”
--
Yunho asks for Changmin to be assigned to him as his full-time Task Force partner barely two moons on, after the cessation of Changmin's internship.
The Academy approves it, together with Changmin’s accelerated graduation into a proper corporal. Changmin graduates with full honours and top scores, and decides to take the mocking nickname that they had for him in the dorms and shorten it down into his new designation Max. Yunho approves.
It’s not always fun and games, but they make a good team, the two of them.
They spend thirty orbits in the General Task Force, racking up an exponentially impressive record of captures and arrests, before transferring as a team to the relatively more elite Interspatial and Temporal Task Force sub-unit.
Specialising in investigating crimes of a temporal nature, Changmin will come to learn, is a very different ball game all together.
--
Two hundred orbits and numerous assignments together later, Yunho looks at him one Moon and sighs, over the body of their latest kill, “I shouldn’t have put in that request.”
“Of course you had to put in that request,” Changmin drawls, ripping his chainmail off in irritation. He switches off the hologram enveloping his gunlance to give the disguise of a more period-appropriate longsword, and stretches.
Fuck but he hates the Dark Ages as a temporal period. All the clothing and protection they have to put on is heavy and people then were evidently still unfamiliar with the concept of a bath. “I saved your life then, didn’t I? You were all impressed and filled with soft lovely feelings of admiration for me. Just like how I just saved your life five minutes ago. Now will be a good time to show your admiration, again.”
“I was going to arrest him,” Yunho laments, when the armour on the newly dead would-be-suspect starts to sizzle.
Their target is -was- Class Hamphibius, who has a tendency to look humanoid enough if swaddled in enough layers. That was, apparently, sufficient reason for their target to flee through time to hunker down at such a dismal age on Old Earth, just to escape being caught for intergalactic trafficking.
“He had a huge-ass motherfucking giant very sharp sword coming down on your back,” Changmin informs him, trying to polish his own gunlance by wiping it on the corpse’s leather jerkins. He grimaces, as that smears the acidic blood and grime and other things around more, and carries on with his retort, “you wouldn’t have been able to dodge, much less arrest him.”
“The orders were to arrest him,” Yunho continues doggedly, iron helm tucked beneath one arm. “You came too close to shoot him. He could have turned around to gut you.”
He carries on with his bitching while Changmin tunes him out to scoop some blood into a sanitised vial, evidence for their after-action report once they’re back at Headquarters in their own time.
“Yunho,” he says, after he’s done and thrown down enough too-heavy armour pieces and cycles through his uniform bracelet, to settle for a less stifling undercover uniform of friar robes now that the danger is passed. “Be honest. Did you want me to just stand back and film you being stabbed and then drag both him and your corpse back to HQ while showcasing you both as Exhibit A and B, sorry for letting my partner expire on a routine assignment but no worries, here I have captured the entire process via hologram? I would save him but he said that is flouting orders, please have my apologies? By the way, I couldn’t stop him from bleeding out since Class Humanoids of Old were not fans of medicine and plain old hygiene?”
That stoppers Yunho’s words.
He ducks his head. They work on the clean up in silence, quicker now that the two of them are properly focused on things.
Yunho doesn’t protest when Changmin reaches over, to cycle his uniform choice to the more lightweight option of robes as well. Instead, he reaches into one of the inconspicuous packs strapped to his side, and goes, “here. We can use this since the assignment is now over.”
Changmin can’t do more than blink at Yunho slapping something really quickly on his wrist. He gets it then, when the feeling of coolness and cleanliness races in an arc over his skin. “So you still have your shower capsule? I would have thought you’ll use it after the bog hunt three Moons ago!”
“Had,” Yunho corrects, but he’s smiling at Changmin now, instead of looking like a kicked baby galactic hound rescued from the outer exo-planets. “I know you already used yours that Moon. I washed up manually in the stream, after that.”
“Oh,” Changmin says, and pats himself down to check he’s got everything (he has) and their gunlances are both strapped to their backs even with the uniform change (they are) and looks around to see if anyone is watching (the battlefield is deserted). “I’m, er, done. Thank you.”
Yunho doesn’t say anything else. He just steps close, a hand around Changmin’s arm in a comfortable grip, as Changmin programmes in the space-time coordinates for Headquarters into his holo-watch.
They bend their heads together, and brace themselves in their usual positions, as the portal activates.
--