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Seven fighters streak across a pitch black sky, wings cutting like knives through the darkness.
“ Remember what I said ,” Mark reminds them for what feels like the thousandth time, “be careful . These guys like to fight down low, close to the atmosphere. Too close, and you’ll end up crashing, you hear me? ” His voice crackles over the comm system built into Renjun’s helmet, pitched high like how it does whenever he’s worried.
“ Careful is my middle name. ” Donghyuck’s voice replies. Renjun can hear his smirk.
“ I’m just saying, ” Mark repeats, far too used to this to listen to anything Donghyuck says, “ the Presidency’s bullshit— they don’t fight fair .”
“ Have we ever fought fair? ” Jaemin interjects. “ We’re outlaws, Mark. Space pirates, if you will. Fighting fair is boring . ”
Renjun can’t help but grin, half from listening to Jaemin and half from the adrenaline coursing through him as the green expanse of the planet Togyria appears before him. Backed against a tapestry of faraway stars, it looks something close to beautiful. He can feel the rumble of his jet’s engine beneath him, hear the whir of it, and he knows everyone else can feel it too.
“ He has a point, Jaem .” Jeno’s gentle voice, coaxing even as it crackles with static, sounds in Renjun’s ears. “ Don’t be reckless, please .”
“ Me? Reckless? Never . ”
Renjun snorts. “Yeah, right.”
“ Everyone shut up, ” Mark cuts in, “ final check, is everyone ready? ”
Six variations of yes , ranging from Jisung’s soft “Yeah” to Donghyuck’s loud and slightly sardonic “ AYE AYE ” echo through Renjun’s earpiece.
“ Good. Remember, this is an easy mission. Get in, get the weapons, get out. We’re not here to fight, in theory ,” he reminds them, “ we’re here to steal as many guns as we can, and to stop the shipment from reaching the troops on the surface, got it? Any of the shit we blow up as a consequence is a demonstration to the Presidency that we mean business. ”
“ So, permission to blow as much shit up as I want? ” Chenle asks excitedly.
Renjun can hear the eye roll in Mark’s voice. “ Sure .”
The mission goes something like this: The Galactic Presidency is waging a useless war on the peaceful forest planet of Togyria, under the guise of wanting a share of its resources. In reality it’s a power grab, a show of arms, and an excuse to expand the power of the government.
This is where they come in.
They’re not exactly a resistance group. Their morals are foggy at best, but the bottom line is that the Presidency gets in their way, and so naturally, they have to resist, to a certain degree. And as Chenle so eloquently said, blowing shit up is a personal favorite way of theirs to get that done.
If that means raiding a supply carrier full of weapons being sent to Togyria, then that’s what it means.
As the carrier comes into sight, flanked by at least ten Presidential fighters, Mark speaks over the line again.
“ We’ll hit both sides at once, ” Mark says, “ I’ll take Jisung, Chenle, and Jaemin on the right, and Jeno can lead Renjun and Donghyuck around the left. As soon as we’ve cleared out their escorts, board, get the weapons, get out. Open fire when I say. ”
Renjun double checks the restraints holding him tight to his seat, readjusts his hands on the steering, and focuses ahead of him. Flying in tight formation, he’s just behind Jeno now, and gets ready to split off to follow him as soon as Mark says the word.
The seconds just before a conflict are always nerve-wracking, no matter how many times Renjun flies into battle, no matter if the thrum of his ship’s engine and the rapid racing of his heart are one and the same. There’s always that jarring realization that this isn’t just blowing shit up— this is life or death.
There’s always the possibility that one of them might fly in, but never fly back out.
Renjun shakes his head, tenses up, shivers coursing down his spine in anticipation. He said his I love you ’s before he climbed into the cockpit, as always. Jeno and Jaemin can take care of themselves, he knows that.
It’s always a rush, when it all starts.
“ NOW! ” Mark orders, and on a dime, Renjun twitches the control stick just enough that he veers off from their main formation, tailing Jeno closely. He can see Donghyuck pull up beside him, can even see the concentration set in his expression through the tinted windshield.
Oftentimes, things happen so fast that Renjun barely thinks about them. Muscle memory, his fingers on the trigger, reacting to sound and light more than actual thought.
The ships escorting the carrier rocket outwards to meet them immediately, and Renjun doesn’t even wait for Jeno to growl out the order to fire before he’s shooting at them, one hand dancing over the controls as he twists sideways to avoid a blast of cannonfire, the other focused on directing his attacks.
One of the enemy ships breaks away from the pack, and Renjun quickly follows it, the thrill of the chase setting him aflame.
“ Careful, ” Jeno growls over the comms, over the roar of the shooting, “ remember what Mark said. ”
“I know,” Renjun replies, grinning as he picks up speed, “I’ll be fine, Jen, trust me.”
Renjun aims a few shots at the ship, but misses, the pilot deftly avoiding his attempts.
He’s so focused that he doesn’t notice how they’re dipping lower, and lower, until suddenly there’s red-hot fire engulfing the edges of his windshield and the Presidential ship is pulling up and away as he feels the awful drag of his ship cutting through layers of atmosphere, and he thinks the intelligent thought of shit.
He thinks he hears someone’s, maybe Donghyuck’s, voice shout something, but the signal is destroyed, and the words come out garbled.
Renjun fights to keep his hands steady as he tries to right his entry angle, aware that he’s gone in far too shallowly and now he can feel his ship quivering from the resistance.
It’s all he can do to stare at the canopies of Togyria’s forests as he plummets towards them, as he hears the ear-shattering noise of metal tearing from metal and one of his wings shears off from the force of his crash.
The pointed nose of his ship slices through the forest canopy like a hot knife through butter. He squeezes his eyes shut as he begins to hit branches, the ship ricocheting off of the wood, throwing him against his restraints.
He tumbles down for what feels like hours, flipping upside down at one point for a single, heart-wrenching moment, before the ship rights itself and makes its final descent, landing on the forest floor with a sickening crunch.
Renjun exhales a shuddering breath. Everything has gone deathly still.
He presses the button on the side of his helmet. Static. Nothing. Damn it.
Togyria is hot, so humid that Renjun can already feel the air thickening, catching in his throat and settling at the bottoms of his lungs, so he tears the helmet off and tosses it to the ground with a clatter. His hair’s overlong at this point, falling into his eyes and curling beneath his ears, the underside of it bleached white. His reflection stares back at him in the shattered windshield.
Enough of this. His seatbelts are digging into his ribs, enough that he knows they’ll leave ugly bruises later on. He reaches to unbuckle them, but finds a small problem with that.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Renjun grumbles, yanking on his restraints and finding, much to his annoyance, that the crash jammed the buckles’ release system, which means he’s effectively trapped in, a fly in a spider web. Which wouldn’t be terrible, except for he can smell sour smoke billowing from the engine, and he’s hanging almost completely sideways.
This is fine, he decides. He has a knife stuffed into the compartment right by the controls, and if he could just reach the latch. . .
He stretches his arm as far as he can, struggling against the tight restraints, and figures out that his arms are too short to reach the compartment from this angle.
If Donghyuck were here, he’d be laughing his ass off.
Fuck Donghyuck, he thinks, and with a mighty swing, lifts his leg up just enough that he can kick the latch instead, snapping it clean off and sending the contents of the compartment tumbling out. He catches sight of his knife as it flips through the air, blade gleaming in the fractals of sunlight that filter in through the shattered windshield.
Renjun snatches the knife with a triumphant ha! and, with a flash of pain, discovers he’s caught it by the blade. Thin streams of blood trickle down his palm, catching in the creases of his hand and staining the sleeve of his jacket.
The Donghyuck in his mind cackles.
Wincing, he turns the knife over, ignoring how the blood’s already starting to dry and stick to his hand, and slashes himself out of his restraints. He drops to the ground immediately, his body sighing in relief when the pressure is released, and, rather ungracefully, slides out of the gaping hole that had been torn off the side of his ship when he tore through the forest.
Rolling onto the forest floor and recovering his balance enough to pull himself into a sitting position, he crosses his legs beneath him and sits in the dirt, staring at his wrecked ship while his hand bleeds onto his pants, the knife sitting bloodied on the ground next to his knee.
A shame, really. He’d liked this ship. It was one of those fancy racing models, all sleek and expensive, though he sure hadn’t paid for it himself. No, he’d stolen it off of some smuggler at a bar on Moliria, who’d been stupid enough to turn her back on him for longer than a second. Jeno had even let him help with the paint job when he brought it back to base, had let him pick out the colors and everything. So it is a little sad that this one had to go, but it’s not the first, so he watches the engine smoke twist up and up and up into the sky, and presses his hand against his thigh and tries to stop the bleeding.
Eventually, he stands up. No use in just sitting here, he supposes. So he wanders back into his ship, smoking as it is, and wrestles with the emergency compartment until it opens. He grabs bandages and a bottle of that disinfectant stuff that hurts like hell, silently thanking Taeil for forcing them to keep a kit in their ships just in case, and returns to his spot on the ground.
He’s not very worried. He’s crashed before, most of them have, and if he knows Taeyong, he’ll have the guys out looking for him in the next hour. Togyria’s jungles are dense, but they have a vague idea of where he went down, and Renjun’s fairly sure he has some flares somewhere in the back.
Once his hand’s wrapped up and disinfected, he doesn’t entirely know what to do with himself. He turns around, turns his back on his destroyed fighter, and stares into Togyria’s dense, dark forests.
The trees are tall, and not just tall, but gargantuan, looming so high that their canopies dip into the clouds, their trunks so thick that you could hollow them out and live comfortably inside. Roots as thick as Renjun’s torso snake out all around him, twisting and looping around each other in patterns that nearly pass for grotesque, bathed in mottled shadow and pale sunlight.
He’s heard the stories. Though the fighting is well contained, and the Presidency is secretive about their operations, the Togyrian wars are whispered about in every dark corner of the galaxy. Stories always find a way out, Renjun’s found, no matter how hard you try to contain them. Mostly from Togyrian natives who’d fled from the fighting, taking along with them tales of genocide, villages burning, senseless warfare that they can’t understand the reasoning for.
Renjun knows the reasoning. It’s really very simple, but he’s been in this game— and the wrong side of it— for a long time. The Presidency isn’t a presidency at all. It’s a coverup for an imperialistic group of bastards who want nothing more than to take the entire Galaxy for themselves, one planet at a time. Togyria happens to be the next planet on their list.
Nonetheless, the stories from the Presidential side of the fighting are just as interesting. Renjun’s heard of trees that walk, vines that choke unsuspecting soldiers to death, rivers of insects the size of fighter jets and with fangs dripping venom, panthers with three sets of teeth and more eyes than you could count before they tear your throat out. He doesn’t know what’s true and what’s not, but nonetheless, he has his knife, his belt, his dual blasters holstered at his belt. But it won’t come to that, hopefully.
He stares out into the forest for a long time, peering into the darkness that swallows up the trunks of the massive trees. He doesn’t know how long he looks.
They’ll come back for him eventually.
Right?
He blinks, shakes his head. Staring into that forest for long enough, all those images and stories spinning around in his head, is enough to make anyone go insane.
A crack, from somewhere in the trees.
He springs to his feet in an instant, yanking both of his guns from his belt and aiming them at the source of the noise. His left hand, the one he’d caught the knife with, throbs, but he ignores it.
He quickly runs through his chances of surviving an attack by a many-eyed panther. With three sets of teeth. Maybe if he shoots it in the eyes? No, but there’s too many eyes, that wouldn’t do anything. Shit, he thinks. It seems an appropriate reaction to being mauled by a panther with too many eyes to be considered natural.
“ Lower your weapons .”
He doesn’t think that the stories mentioned that the panthers could talk.
A man steps out of the forest, holding a long, rather imposing rifle stiffly in his hands, dressed from head to toe in the unmistakable camouflage of a soldier. Renjun almost laughs with relief, spotting the badge the soldier is wearing, the interlocked rings of the Presidency sewn into his coat, and an emerald green ribbon— the planet Faunus, if Renjun remembers correctly— pinned to his chest. This, he can handle.
He slips his blasters back into his belt, but keeps his hand resting on the hilt of one.
“Okay,” Renjun concedes, “but why?”
The soldier barely budges, staring him down with hard eyes. “You’re trespassing in a military personnel-only zone,” he explains, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“I. . . would love to,” Renjun replies, honestly enough, “but in case you haven’t noticed, my ship’s out of commission at the moment.”
The soldier frowns, and then fixes Renjun with an analytical stare. He stalks forwards, the rifle never shifting in his grip, inspecting him for a moment, before he moves on to his ship.
“Expensive model,” the soldier muses, “how’d you come by it?”
“A friend lent it out to me.” The lie slips from his lips easily, from years of practice.
The soldier doesn’t buy it.
“A big weapon shipment was just raided, what, an hour ago?” He starts, circling back around to face Renjun again. “Crew says one of the ships looked just like this. You wouldn’t be involved in any of that, now, would you?” He steps closer, finally changing his grip on his weapon, so that Renjun can see his finger come to rest on the trigger.
Renjun holds his ground. “Not at all,” he says as smoothly as he can, “I was just passing through, must be a coincidence. One of my engines gave out.”
“Most travelers take the main pass through the Midway,” the soldier points out, “any particular reason for a detour?”
“I told you,” Renjun insists, “I had engine trouble, had to make an emergency landing.”
The soldier turns the safety off on his rifle.
Fuck this, Renjun thinks, hand flying to one of his guns, but before he can so, he hears the ominous click of about five more rifles.
Soldiers slink out of the forest all around him, dark looks on their faces, lips curled and mouths twisted into snarls. From behind him, rough hands grab at his arms and twist them behind his back; another snatches the weapons from his belt, rendering him defenseless.
One of the men looks more official than the rest, a few ribbons pinned to his uniform, a cap emblazoned with the Presidential sigil placed carefully on his head. He towers over Renjun, though quite honestly, most people do, and glares down at him with shadowed eyes. “Take him in for interrogation.” His voice sounds like gravel. “We have reason to believe that he’s part of the group that raided the supply carriers from earlier.”
The soldiers salute. “Yes, Commander.”
Renjun is thrown to the ground, his shoulder jolting beneath him, hands tied tightly together. There’s already blood leaking from a cut on his lip, and a dull throb of pain lets him know that his cheek is sure to bruise within the hour; the rope around his hands is hewn roughly and messily, and the fibers slash at his wrists when he struggles, cutting needle-thin lines into his skin that prickle like fire.
He was not taken as an honorable hostage.
Rather, he feels like a pig tied up waiting for slaughter, tossed about like his life is worthless, expendable. He suspects the only thing keeping him alive is the information he holds about the supply raid, but that won’t preserve his usefulness for very long.
In an undignified shuffle, he wrestles himself into a sitting position, leaning back against some kind of crate. He’s sitting in a tent, barely large enough for two people, the canvas torn in places and spattered with something that looks suspiciously like dried blood. It’s a messy holding cell, but the best that the soldiers have got, he assumes. It’s evident that despite their ferocity, the jungles of Togyria aren’t treating them very well either.
He looks to the sky through a tear in the tent, gentle purple, and prays that someone will come look for him soon. Very soon, ideally.
The door to the tent is pulled open, and a grizzled-looking soldier crawls in. His face is gaunt and thin, his uniform too large on him. Renjun can tell that the war is wearing on the Presidential troops.
Good.
Curiously, Renjun scans the badges pinned to the soldier’s chest. Besides decoration, each man, regardless of rank, wears a ribbon bearing the colors of his home planet. A pride thing, Renjun supposes. This one bears a strip of fabric purple and gold, colors halved neatly down the middle. Xiewei.
Renjun’s home.
It was his home, he corrects in his mind. He doesn’t miss the raging winds, the steep cliffs and craggy bluffs, of the planet he was born on. The cliffs of Xiewei are only kind to those rich enough to burrow themselves deep inside of the rocks, where the claws of the wind can’t reach them. Some aren’t so lucky as that, Renjun thinks bitterly.
Still, he decides to try something.
“You will come with me,” the soldier tells him, and indeed, he speaks with Xiewei’s soft accent. That’s about the only soft thing about him, though, because he all but yanks Renjun up from the ground, shoulder screaming in pain from the movement.
“ You wouldn’t hurt a brother, would you? ” Renjun asks, slipping rustily into his native tongue. He hasn’t used it in years.
It earns him a sharp elbow to the side, enough that he has to bite his tongue to keep from crying out. “Shut up.” The soldier growls, and shoves Renjun out of the tent and into the sunlight. He squints in the brightness, left to collapse into the dirt, which draws several laughs from the people passing him by.
A booted foot kicks him in the side, and he coughs. He finds himself staring up into the eyes of the man called the Commander.
“Who are you?” He demands.
Renjun says nothing.
Another kick, this time in the stomach, a wave of nausea nearly knocking him down. He spits, tasting metallic blood in his mouth.
“Who are you?” The Commander repeats.
“Hwang Injun,” Renjun chokes out defiantly. He’d rather not use his realer name, not if he can avoid it.
“Who do you work for?”
Renjun can’t very well say ‘Lee Taeyong, Captain of the Meridian, ’ because that would be like asking for his head to be chopped off and skewered and sold off to the highest bidder, so instead he holds the Commander’s gaze, and says “Nobody.”
He screws his eyes shut, expecting another kick. It doesn’t come.
“Maybe he’s a hired gun,” someone suggests, “maybe it was just a brigand?”
“ Shut it , Zhao.” the Commander barks. Then he turns back to Renjun. “What are you, boy? A rogue?”
“Yeah,” Renjun says, “just a rogue. You have no use for me, so let me—” the Commander kicks Renjun again, landing a painful blow to his gut, one that makes him cough; Renjun can feel blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. He prays it’s only from his cut, and not from somewhere else inside of him.
“That’s right,” the Commander agrees, and when Renjun has quit coughing, smiles a yellow-toothed smile. “If you are a rogue like you say, then we have no further use for you. But letting you go. . . what use would that be? To let you run off into the jungle, only to get picked off by some monstrosity. I think I have a better idea.”
It takes Renjun a moment to figure out what he means.
A circle of soldiers has gathered around him, all of them jeering, all of them wearing pretty ribbons with pretty colors, Xiewei, Faunus, Moliria, Dritov, but to Renjun they seem to blur together, making something far uglier.
“My men haven’t tasted bloodshed in a long while,” the Commander explains. “I think they could use a reminder of what killing is like. Unless, that is, you aren’t a rogue after all, and you do have something to tell me.”
Renjun snarls up at him, weighing his options. He’d rather die than betray his crew, but of he could prolong this somehow, maybe someone would—
An explosion shakes the ground, making Renjun’s teeth chatter.
“What the—” the Commander’s voice is cut off by another explosion, closer this time.
A pair of feet drop to the ground behind Renjun, grabbing his wrist tightly.
“ Can you shoot? ” Jeno asks urgently, whispered against his ear as he slashes the ropes binding Renjun’s hands together. He shoves a pistol into his hands before he can reply, and Renjun’s fingers close gratefully around it, the curve of the handle familiar against his palm.
“How did you—”
“Talk later,” Jeno growls, “Jaemin’s parked just outside, Hyuck and Chenle are up in the air distracting them, let’s move. ”
Renjun doesn’t need to be told twice. He takes off after Jeno, shoving through the ring of distracted soldiers, and follows his lead as he sprints towards the entrance to the military camp Renjun’s been stuck in for the past eternity.
Shots start flying over his head, one brushing past Renjun’s cheek. He turns over his shoulder just long enough to fire back, Jeno mirroring him on his other side, and Renjun almost smiles; adrenaline does things to him that it maybe shouldn’t, but he decides that the feeling of himself and Jeno working in such perfect tandem, even in a moment like this, is a beautiful thing.
It only lasts for so long. Adrenaline can only take his battered body so many steps before his injuries start to catch up to him and he begins to stumble. He hears Jeno grumble a “for fuck’s sake ” before he grabs Renjun’s arm and half drags him along, clumsily supporting his weight while fending off the hordes of soldiers chasing them down from all sides.
Renjun doesn’t really remember much after that.
His memory picks back up again when Jeno pulls him through the open doors of Jaemin’s ship, holding him up, because he can barely walk. Jaemin is there to meet them, and Jeno all but tosses Renjun to him while he flies to the cockpit, the soldiers outside starting to shoot at the ship. Renjun can hear bullets glancing off of the metal sides.
“You’re so stupid !” Jaemin tells him as soon as he gets ahold of him, snatching him up by the collar and dragging him closer. “You didn’t listen, you impulsive, idiotic shithead, we thought you died! If you died I would’ve fucking killed you, Huang Renjun, I swear to all the stars above I would’ve ended you, do you know how worried— do you know ?”
Jaemin is fuming, and Renjun can’t blame him.
“Sorry,” he replies thickly, his cut lip hurting him, and Jaemin softens almost immediately, melts into gentler concern.
“Oh,” Jaemin mutters, touching his shoulder, “oh, baby. How bad did they hurt you?”
“Not as bad as I hurt them.”
“That’s a lie,” Jeno calls out from the pilot’s seat as Jaemin sits him down on the nearest seat he can find, “he hurt none of them.”
“ Hey, I shot a few!”
“Be quiet,” Jaemin tuts, “you look like shit.”
As soon as they’re up in the air and safely cruising away from Togyria, Jaemin sets to work on cleaning Renjun’s wounds as best he can, using what Taeil’s been teaching him. He runs his hands over the bruises on Renjun’s chest and stomach, fingertips gentle, and cleans the cuts on both his lip and his hand, and he marks on his wrists from the ropes, too.
Renjun’s eyes can’t seem to focus quite right. He tries to look at Jaemin, but he can’t keep his chin up for very long.
“Jeno,” Jaemin calls out, “how fast can you get us home?” Concern shines plainly on his face.
“I have to take a detour, make sure they’re not following us,” Jeno replies from the cockpit, “give me a minute.” Renjun can imagine the tight clench of his jaw, the line creased between his eyebrows.
“You didn’t have to, have to do this,” Renjun says. “I had it all. . . perfectly under control.”
“They were going to kill you.”
“Not if I killed them first.”
Jaemin rolls his eyes. “You’re half dead already,” he points out, “you’re lucky we came back when we did.”
“‘Course you were gonna come back,” Renjun mutters, “you love me.”
Jaemin hums, nodding. “We do.”
Renjun doesn’t entirely know when he falls asleep, but he had figured that exhaustion would take over sooner rather than later. All he does know is that he wakes up in bed on the Meridian, home, hair damp like it’s been washed recently, all of the dust and dirt and blood scrubbed clean from his body.
Most of the lights have been turned out, and it’s dark, save for the stars passing by sluggishly outside the window. Artificial moonlight pools silver on the floor, emulating night. There’s a hand carding through his hair, and another slung over his waist, careful not to aggravate any of his injuries.
Jeno and Jaemin are talking quietly, probably so as to not wake him. It’s Jaemin’s arm around his waist, he thinks, he can feel his chest rumble against his back when he speaks, and Jeno’s hand in his hair.
“Why would they do it, though?” Jaemin asks, sounding broken. His fingers trace little circles on Renjun’s stomach. “Why go so far? Thank the stars, Taeil said there was no internal bleeding, but. . .” he trails off.
“It’s ‘cause they’re assholes,” Renjun mumbles.
Jeno laughs. Renjun can’t see his smile in the darkness, but he does feel his hand shift from his hair to cradle his cheek, and he does feel a soft pair of lips kiss his forehead. “Yeah, they are,” he agrees.
Gruff, second-in-command Jeno can bark out all the orders he wants, and Renjun will listen. That’s not quite the same Jeno that grabs Renjun’s hand and runs a reverent thumb across his knuckles, but he’s in there, somewhere.
“Did the raid go well?” Renjun asks, squeezing Jeno’s hand. Whenever he takes in a deep breath his chest and his stomach hurt badly, just enough to knock the air out of his lungs all over again. He doesn’t know how he stayed asleep for so long, when breathing seems to be such a chore. “You know, besides. . .me.”
“It went fine,” Jeno tells him, “we got our point across, we got the weapons. They certainly weren’t happy about it. We were more worried about getting back to you.”
“Sorry.” Renjun can only keep up his bravado for so long. Now, pressed comfortably between Jeno and Jaemin under the blanket of artificial night, there’s no reason for him to pretend that he knew what he was doing, that he didn’t need their help, because he did. It’s easier to admit to the fear he’d felt, tangled safely in Jaemin’s arms, Jeno’s forehead pressed against his.
“Renjun.” Jeno leans down to kiss the corner of his mouth, the side that isn’t cut, and pulls back to lie his head on the pillow. The lights mounted on the walls pulse pale silver, reflecting in Jeno’s eyes, round and wide. “We would cross the galaxy in a heartbeat, if it was for you.”
“And if they'd killed me?” He asks, squeezing Jeno’s hand again.
Jaemin noses at his neck. “We’d have burned them to the ground,” he says sweetly, “fucking destroyed every last one of ‘em.”
Renjun doesn’t doubt this to be true, and not just because Jaemin has an unhealthy thing for arson. Realistically, he knows his death would’ve meant war. At least, he knows that Taeyong would take it as a declaration of as much; the captain of the Meridian is patient, but not impenetrable. Striking from the shadows wouldn’t be enough anymore, if Presidential troops had killed Renjun.
Even now, he’s not sure what might happen next.
“Go back to sleep, love,” Jaemin murmurs, lips brushing against his skin, “we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, Renjun thinks, is an uncertain thing. Tomorrows are relative, as a rule. On a ship like this, they are fabricated, regulated by nothing more than night-and-day cycles programmed into the computer system; in every star system, on every planet, the sunrise and sunset is different, rotating on different timetables, longer and shorter.
Tomorrow, really, only depends on the stars you revolve around.
Jaemin tugs him closer, holding him against his chest, and tucks his head against Renjun’s shoulder. Exhaustion threatens to drag him down again, pushing off memories of gnarled, twisted roots and darkness that creeps up on him and swallows him up.
Jeno snores softly into his hair.
Renjun grins, even though it pulls the wrong way at the stitches running through his upper lip.
Without a doubt, he’d cross the galaxy for them, too.