Work Text:
mission 0148
“Why do you get to be the bartender?”
“Because no one’s going to believe you’re even old enough to drink, let alone serve alcohol.”
Jisung gasps, eyes wide as he brings both hands up to cup over his mouth.
“Wow, I’ve never heard that one before! You know, if you end up having to retire early because of a stray bullet in your ass or something, there’s always standup.”
Minho rolls his eyes at him, adjusts the tie around his neck before straightening out his waistcoat. He’s not wearing anything special; the standard uniform for the casino they’ve been on recon duty for over the last three days, and yet Minho still manages to pull off the ensemble in a way that makes him look just as good, if not better, than the wealthy casino patrons in their Armani and Canali and Gucci and other 'i suits.
“You wanna try being a croupier tonight then?” Minho asks with a tilt of his head. A single strand of dark hair has managed to escape from where the rest is brushed back, and Jisung’s hand twitches with the urge to reach forward and twirl it around one of his fingers.
He wrinkles his nose before replying. “Ew, no. I’m not doing all of that math for someone else, and I’m sure as hell not gonna do it standing the whole time either.”
Jisung easily fulfills his task of mingling with the casino visitors, and eavesdropping on others, until he reaches the point where he needs to take a break. It’s not his favorite, but he’s good at both playing up the boyish charm enough to coax older women (and sometimes men) into mentioning a few things that they wouldn’t usually drop in casual conversation, and at being unremarkable enough that he can slip away from them without raising any suspicion at the loss of his presence.
He spots the bar against the far wall, illuminated only by the same warm, dim lights found throughout the rest of the floor, and a soft blue glow emanating from the underside of the bar; cyan fluorescence beaming softly over the space around and behind the counter. Jisung makes his way over with quick steps; when he’s close enough to see Minho, head tipped down as he carefully pours liquor down a spoon while he prepares a layered drink, he slows his pace almost abruptly, and lingers back to watch him.
Jisung doesn’t observe his (unsurprisingly) impeccable bartending skills so much as he observes the tight pull of Minho’s crisp white shirt across his shoulders, waistcoat snug where it sits over his chest, his sleeves rolled up against his forearms—the subtle flex of the muscle there as he squeezes a lime over the drink.
The soft lighting casts a low halo over the crown of his head, makes it look like he's glowing around the edges, and the stray strand of hair from before floats in front of his face, the end just barely brushing the bridge of his nose before Minho blows it away with a small puff of air through his lips.
Jisung’s interrupted from his staring when a customer steps up to the bar, blocking his view. He frowns and heads closer to the bar himself as well. The man that’s stood there is leaning both elbows on the counter as he asks Minho something, probably a drink recommendation, and Minho presses a knuckle to the bottom of his mouth as he thinks it over before answering with an easy smile that turns into a soft laugh after the man speaks again.
Jisung doesn't think to question why the sight sets off a flare of annoyance in his gut.
Then Minho’s gaze flicks over to him. It’s for less than a second, the briefest look over, but Jisung knows his presence has been noted. He waits politely to the side for Minho to slide the man a glass of something amber and for him to walk away before dropping himself onto a bar stool. Then his eyes fall on the napkin left on the dark wood of the bartop, unmistakable ten digit number scrawled across it. Jisung holds it up and raises a brow.
“Are your coworkers not mad that the new guy’s already pulling?” he teases, letting the napkin flutter from his fingers back onto the counter.
Minho scoffs, and Jisung watches, pleased, as he pulls down a bottle of Bacardi and begins putting together a rum and coke.
“Does my coworker even plan on going near the poker tables tonight, which, need I remind him, are the entire reason we’re here?” He takes a sip from the glass, and Jisung tries not to smile at the pointed way Minho sets it down on the napkin in lieu of an actual coaster. He reaches for the glass himself and Minho slaps his hand away.
“You can have a drink after you get us something new tonight. Go check out that table on the left. It’s already the fourth round, and no one sitting there’s looked even a little bit upset about losing so far.”
Jisung shifts in his seat, angles his body to the side so he can get a better look at said table. There’s six men seated around it, stacks of black and orange chips all pushed towards the center. One man lays down his cards face up, and though Jisung can’t read them from here, he watches the croupier line them up as the man pulls the winnings towards himself. Judging by the number of orange stacks, it’s easily half a million’s worth.
And Minho’s right; none of the men look more than a little put out after the loss. Jisung figures they’re either so disgustingly rich that it’s little more than losing pocket change to them, or it’s a part of the laundering ring they’ve been investigating.
He turns back in his seat, reaches for his drink so he can down it before joining the next game; Minho catches his wrist before he can curl his fingers around the glass. He fits his palm over Jisung’s, and he feels the weight and shape of the chips in his hand without having to look down to see what they are. Minho moves back, but doesn’t let go completely, letting his hand rest over the inside of Jisung’s wrist. He hopes Minho can’t feel the rapidfire flutter of his pulse beneath his fingers.
When Jisung looks down at what Minho’s given him, he nearly chokes. In his hand are ten pink poker chips. He whips his head back up to look at Minho, who’s easily finishing off his drink as if he hasn’t just handed Jisung fifty grand’s worth in chips.
“How did you get these, hyung?”
Minh sets down the now empty glass, pokes his tongue out over his bottom lip to catch a stray drop of rum, and says, “Tips.”
Jisung gawks at him.
“Ha fucking ha. Did you swipe them?”
“Yes, I swiped chips off the tables without moving an inch from behind the bar the entire night. It’s a new skill I’ve been working on. Now, go use that to get started.” He pinches Jisung’s wrist softly before finally letting go, straightening up as a woman approaches the bar.
Jisung curls his fingers over the chips before dropping them into his pocket. He’s not sure what to think about Minho easily making fifty fucking thousand dollars worth in under four hours simply by smiling. He’s torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to cry.
Jisung is better at poker than he remembers ever being. He’d made small talk with the men at the table at the start of the round, and they’d seemed more amused by him than anything. Their smiles drop once the round ends with Jisung’s straight flush and he’s pulling his winnings from the pot toward himself.
Minho cuts in over his earpiece with a low crackle. “Jisung, what the hell was that?” he asks sharply. “Are you cheating?”
Jisung’s gaze snaps up to the bar, behind the man across from him silently seething in his seat. Minho’s drying a glass with a small towel, but he’s watching the poker game like a hawk. Jisung catches his eye and moves his head the slightest bit; a near imperceptible shake of his head that has Minho’s voice in his ear again.
“Fuck, alright. Play the next round, they’ll get suspicious if you leave now. Just don’t actually try for it. We’re only here for intel tonight, and I think this already makes things clear enough.”
Jisung hums an affirmative, which he plays off as being contemplative as he eyes the cards he’s dealt.
Half an hour in and he thinks he’s doing alright; he’s not playing too well, but he’s not so bad that anyone at the table should think he’s doing it on purpose. Jisung barely remembers the game, and he’s pretty sure his initial win had been a fluke. With that in mind, he lays his cards out when it’s his turn, confident that they’re nowhere near the highest of the bunch. Four of a kind isn’t a flush, and he’s pretty sure that’s when the good hands truly begin.
He’s proven wrong when one of the men swears, the others glare, and the dealer congratulates him.
“Jisung,” Minho hisses. “Stop being a show-off."
“I’m not,” he murmurs, because he really isn’t.
One of the men looks towards him. “What was that?”
Jisung clears his throat. “I was going to say I’m not cheating or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. Beginner's luck I guess?”
He ignores Minho’s pained oh my god, in his ear, then pats down his pockets and makes a show of shaking his sleeves out, and, when no cards turn up, he smiles. “See?”
That earns him a solid fist to the side of his face.
Within a second, he's slammed down face first onto the poker table, pinned down with a rough hand on the back of his neck. The suddenness of the action is nearly as disorienting as the pain, and the coarse baize of the tabletop chafes harshly over the skin of his cheek when his face is pressed down further into the surface, but he bites his lip to keep from groaning. He’s tugged back up roughly by a heavy hand yanking at his hair.
“What was that?”
“Jisung, shit—don’t say anything, hold on.”
Jisung ignores him.
“I said I’m not che—”
He’s slapped hard against the side of his head before he can finish the sentence. His vision blurs immediately, and this time a pained whimper does manage to escape him. But Jisung’s faced worse, needs both hands to count the number of times he’s been left bloodied and battered within an inch of his life. Getting slapped around a little isn’t ideal, but it’s not going to stop him.
Jisung uses his current state to his advantage, curling in on himself to exaggerate the effects of the blow while he sneaks a hand towards his side holster. He waits for the man to lean in again before he wiggles his pistol out, thumbing the safety off from muscle memory alone.
“You’re not what? You’re not cheating?” the man sneers. He steps closer, and once his leather Oxfords are in Jisung’s line of sight from where his head is pressed down, he fires.
He’s let go of instantly. The man curses out a howl at the bullet lodged in his foot, and Jisung drops himself to the ground immediately. He can hear yelling coming from the other patrons, ignores it as he grabs the table legs and turns the whole thing onto its side. Then: the unmistakable sound of poker chips scattering and clacking against each other as they’re sent flying, gunshots fired into the table as Jisung ducks behind it, and a stampede of clueless casino visitors scrambling to leave as quickly as they can.
Jisung juts an arm around the table, shoots blindly, and pulls back when he hears two different voices cry out in pain. He looks around and swears. He’d been sitting closest to the wall during the game, which now leaves him cornered with the wall to his back and the table in front of him, the only thing that stands between him and six angry men with firearms. His earpiece crackles to life again.
“Jisung?”
“Yeah?”
He doesn’t get a response, and risks peering around the side of the table to check the bar; the men from the game are on his ass, but that doesn’t mean they were alone on the floor. There could easily be more of them. He sighs hard with relief once he spots Minho, still behind the bar but reassuring a panic stricken guest, pointing out the way towards one of the exits.
Then Jisung notices the halt in gunfire, and the familiar click of magazines dropping loose. He takes his chance while he can as they reload, and, bracing his forearms against the wall to his back, kicks the table forward as hard as he can.
He doesn’t wait to see how far the table goes, or if anyone goes under it. He dashes out from the side and makes for the bar, shoes slipping across the floor and nearly tripping him. He turns around only once, when he’s far enough to shoot, which he does without aiming. Three behind him, one of whom is the man he shot, and three others pushing the table back up, but not making any immediate moves to pursue him.
Minho’s not behind the bar; Jisung realizes only when he’s actually there, and the adrenaline trades itself out for worry, running cold in his veins. He’s about to call for him, ask just where the fuck he’s disappeared to, but he doesn’t get the chance.
It happens both before Jisung can even blink, and almost as if he’s a spectator watching the events play out in slow motion before him. The first man’s caught up, and Jisung can barely form the thought of how, he was shot, before he grabs a tumbler off the bartop. Jisung only just manages to tip his chin down so the glass comes shattering down over the top of his head rather than his face. Blood immediately streams down his forehead, into his eyes, and he braces a forearm against the bar to keep from toppling over blindly while he drags a sleeve across his face.
He’s pulling himself back up as quickly as he’d been struck. His head is still reeling, verging on floating, and there’s a ringing that’s more like a prolonged beeping in his ears; but Jisung’s long ago trained himself to ignore his own body, to keep himself grounded, to force himself to focus beyond the fog his brain is swimming through.
Another glass broken over his head sends Jisung back down just as fast as he’d gotten up, with a choked-off groan pulled from his throat. He can feel himself fade out a little, spots dancing in front of his eyes, but it’s less than a second before he comes back to himself, refusing to pass out from sheer stubbornness and anger alone.
A rustle of movement behind him then, and Jisung ducks back down once again before Minho’s knee can break his nose as he appears from behind the bar only to swiftly clear it in the next second; one hand bracing himself against the countertop while he pulls himself up, the other gripping a cocktail shaker, which he then proceeds to crack across the man’s face before his feet can even touch the floor.
Jisung’s vision’s blurring around the edges—from the force of the hits or the blood stinging his eyes, he can’t tell; it may as well be both—but he can make out Minho clearly, pinning the man who’d both suckerpunched and glassed him against the casino floor with a knee to the chest, just as he crushes the tin of the cocktail shaker into his face again. And again, and again, until Jisung stops keeping count.
When he finally lets go and drops the shaker, the steel is coated so brightly red that Jisung might have thought it were fake if he hadn’t seen the equally bloody mess of the man below Minho. He can’t tell if what he’s looking at is his open mouth or a brand new crater opened up in his face, glistening with exposed flesh. Jisung watches the discarded cocktail shaker roll a few inches across the floor before it’s stopped by the dent in its side breaking its momentum.
Jisung thinks that’s it, until he sees the corkscrew in Minho’s hand.
He doesn’t get the chance to see what he does with it, however; the rest of the men chasing him have managed to make their way past the horde of panicking patrons, and Jisung’s drawing himself back up before he can think. There’s no firearms drawn as far as Jisung can tell, and he’s throwing the next punch before that changes—and before anyone can take the pleasure of doing so away from him.
A swift uppercut under the jaw and one man goes down with the feeling of bone moving where it shouldn’t beneath Jisung’s hand. Pain instantly shoots up through his first two fingers and into his palm, sharp and stabbing, and Jisung swears before shaking his fist out. The feeling of a hand roughly grabbing him by the back of his suit jacket makes him tense back up immediately.
He twists around as far as the hold allows, and he’s just about to slip out of the jacket when a muddler’s brought down hard against the man’s elbow, splintering on impact; the grip on Jisung drops with a garbled yell. He steps back as soon as he can move again, until his back is met with the familiar, solid feel of Minho’s frame against his own; watches as Minho brings the heel of his polished black dress shoe against the man’s knees and, once he’s down, down onto his temple.
With two of the men down, the third comes from the side and Jisung throws an arm out to clothesline him around the throat. Minho hauls him back up by his hair, grabs him by the front of his shirt, and throws him into another behind him. Jisung takes the distraction to grab his pistol from where he’d dropped it at the bar, nearly tripping as he rushes back to where Minho’s finally remembered he has a gun of his own and pulls it free from its concealed holster.
As soon as Jisung’s back, they're side to side, with Minho to his left. Jisung tilts forward so he meets Minho’s eye, silently asking if he’s prepared for a brawl, and the tight line of his mouth shifts into a smile; crooked curve of his lips that leaves Jisung both smug and delighted.
An angry yell has Jisung turning back around in an instant, the rest of the men from the table finally making their way across. And if they hadn’t realized that Minho was with him before, the shots he fires at them leave no question about it.
After, when the casino floor is littered with half a dozen unconscious bodies, Jisung slides his pistol back into its holster and flops down backward across the nearest poker table, breathless and thrumming with adrenaline. He figures they’ll have ten minutes tops before either security or the cops get there. He can feel the warmth of the blood that’s soaked into his shirt—he’s not sure how much of it is his own—now cooling on his skin, and he plucks at where it’s beginning to dry against him.
“Hey.”
Jisung lifts his head up, and Minho drops a bundle of zip ties on his chest. The sweat from the fight’s brought his hair loose and messy over his eyes, which he goes to brush back, stops when he sees the blood on his hands, and instead tips his head backwards to shake away.
“Get up, princess. You can sleep at the hotel.” His words leave no room for argument, but he holds out a hand to help pull him up. Jisung groans, takes Minho’s hand nonetheless, and pretends his heart doesn’t stutter at the feeling of Minho’s palm, soft skin slippery with warm blood, pressed to his own.
“Am I gonna get that drink at the hotel too?” Jisung asks. Minho rolls his eyes and pulls on his hand until he’s forced to stand before he lands ass first on the floor.
It’s when Jisung’s rolling the men over onto their fronts to bind their hands behind their backs that he learns where the corkscrew went.
The man lolls his head, unconscious but alive, blood pooled beneath his ear where the corkscrew’s wedged in halfway.
Jisung’s learned by now that in order to do this job, and do it properly, he’ll have to acknowledge that there are lives that he’s both already taken, and will have to take in the future. The sight and smell of death hardly even make him flinch anymore. He also knows that Minho had taken his fair share of lives long before Jisung even met him, and long before he’d even joined the agency.
But this isn’t a kill. It isn’t the clean, efficient method of disposal they’ve both been trained—and expected—to carry out. Jisung isn’t exactly sure just what it is, but he can’t help feeling that no matter what it may be, it’s somehow personal.
He’s broken from this train of thought when gentle fingers curl over his shoulder.
“Done?”
Jisung nods.
“Come on then, I think I can hear the sirens.”
Jisung’s pulled to his feet, stumbling a little; Minho’s there within a second to wrap an arm across his shoulders and brace him against his right side as they make their way towards the back exit. When Jisung glances over, he sees a bottle of Bacardi in Minho’s other hand.
It takes Jisung two tries to get the keycard to work on the door to their hotel room, hand trembling from his split knuckles and his head throbbing hard enough that he all he can hear is the vein in his temple pulsating. He’s grateful that Minho doesn’t say anything about it, just guides him into the room with a hand on his back and, after shutting the door behind them, gently nudges him towards the bathroom. Jisung sheds his suit jacket, slips off his holster, and undoes his tie as he makes his way over, dropping everything on the bed nearest to him as he passes by.
Minho doesn’t join him immediately, and Jisung takes the time to wash his hands—a string of fuck fuck shit fuck shit shit fuck at the sting and a grimace at the way the water runs almost russet—and scrub the blood and sweat off his face. With his face clean, he can clearly see the swelling and discoloration on his cheek, a bruise both the size and color of a small plum beneath the harsh red abrasions across his skin.
He’s cleaning his teeth, careful to avoid irritating a cut on his lip, when Minho finally steps in. He’s in his shirtsleeves, left with more brown visible than white, which he pushes up past his elbows as he grabs his own toothbrush. They both brush in silence, eyeing each other through the mirror, until Jisung leans over to rinse his mouth out.
He freezes, immediately blindsided by the smell of Minho’s cologne, the heat radiating off his body. His own body electric, Jisung stops dead where he is with his hand over the faucet, snapping back only when Minho nudges him, and he remembers to actually turn the faucet on.
Then Minho’s pulling him over to sit on the edge of the tub while he pulls out a medical kit from one of the cabinets.
“Turn around,” he instructs, and Jisung does, left sitting with his legs over the edge and in the tub and with his back to Minho.
Minho’s touch is gentle as he slowly brushes Jisung’s hair aside and feels across the top of his head. It’s not a surprise; his touch is always gentle with him, and Jisung, punch drunk and half asleep, can’t help but mention it.
“This is weird.”
“What is?” Minho presses his fingers lightly against where a small bump is forming and Jisung winces.
“It’s weird that I just saw you literally rearrange a guy’s face, and now you’re touching my head like it’ll break if you breathe on it wrong.”
Minho hums, runs the pad of his index finger across a tender cut on his hairline, and says, “Well, I guess I don’t have to. You got lucky, only a bump and a few cuts. Though, I’m not surprised considering your thick skull.”
“Hey!” Jisung jerks around to glare at him but Minho nudges his face back around.
“Don’t move.” Jisung feels something wet on the top of his head and grimaces at the feeling. He feels Minho work the salve across the top of his head with his fingertips when a thought comes to mind, and he barks out a laugh.
“What is it?” Minho asks.
“You ever been to the zoo?”
“Yes? I mean once, yeah, as a kid. Why?”
“Did you go to the monkey house?”
“You missing home, Sung?”
“Shut up, no. I just mean—have you ever seen those little monkeys grooming each other? Eating bugs off each other’s heads and shit? I feel like we look just like those little monkeys right now.”
There’s a pause, and then he hears a snort before Minho groans behind him.
“It’s weird that I’m making sure you don’t have a concussion after you got your head slapped around, but it’s not weird that your first thought about it is that we look like the little monkeys at the zoo?”
Jisung opens his mouth to reply, “no, it’s not, because we do,” when Minho drops an ice pack on top of his head and turns him back around; Jisung pulls his knees up so they don’t knock into the side of the tub. Minho crouches down in front of him and taps the back of his hand.
“Can you do these yourself?” he asks.
Jisung can bandage his own knuckles in his sleep, but he shakes his head and holds his hands out anyway.
They sit in silence while Minho cleans the dirt out from the cuts, his hands warm where Jisung’s fingers feel too cold, broken only by a loud, "fuck," when he pours rubbing alcohol across the tops of Jisung’s split knuckles. He has them wrapped neat and tight within a minute, and Jisung flexes his fingers to test their mobility.
Minho stands back up with a loud pop of his bones, and he gives Jisung a look of warning before he can make any retirement jokes. Then he heads back into their room, and through the open door Jisung can see him promptly and ungracefully throw himself face first onto his bed.
“Hey, at least wash your face!” Jisung calls. He quickly follows him, one hand reaching up to stop the ice pack from sliding off his head before he throws it onto one of the side tables.
He pauses for a second, then gives Minho a shake. “Go wash your face, you’re gonna get the pillows all nasty.”
When all he gets is a groan in response, he grabs Minho by the shoulders and rolls him over onto his back.
“Take your contact out,” Jisung orders, then heads back into the bathroom to wet a washcloth. He’s glad to see Minho at least listened to that when he returns, dark brown contact resting on the tip of his finger where his hand lays beside his head.
Jisung climbs up on the bed himself, sits cross-legged beside Minho as he gently wipes the blood and sweat and grime of the day off his face, before he flips the washcloth over to clear away the makeup around his eye. The scar takes a minute to reveal itself—Minho’s always been meticulous about the way he sets the makeup over it—but once it does, Jisung tracks the tip of his index finger down across it, out of habit more than anything.
Jisung traces his finger back up over it before Minho blinks his eyes open at the feeling. The soft light of the lamp on the side table makes the shadows on his face stand out harsh, makes the hollows of his cheeks look deeper than they are, and reflects sharply over the pearly white of his right pupil.
“Quit it,” he mumbles, batting Jisung’s hand away half-heartedly.
“Okay okay, get your beauty sleep.” He crawls off the bed to chuck the washcloth into the sink, then stops by the door. “By the way, you’re doing all the paperwork for this. I don’t even wanna think about the shit we’re gonna have to fill out for having to pass on the case.”
They will have to pass it on, there’s no way they can go back to investigate with their covers blown, but he only brings up the paperwork now because he knows Minho would agree to anything when he’s this tired.
post-mission 0014
Minho lets Jisung have the shower first while he makes the call back to the agency to report their day’s activities. They’ll have to write up a formal report and submit that anyway, so Jisung doesn’t really see the point, but he’s not going to argue with the chance to finally wash the sweat and dirt off his body as soon as he can.
When he’s done, skin flushed from the heat of the water and ends of his hair dripping onto the shoulders of his tee shirt, Minho slips into the bathroom without a word as he brushes by Jisung at the door.
He should probably go to sleep. They’re leaving before dawn, and it’s already half past two. But the thrill of the day’s still humming beneath Jisung’s skin, and his heart has yet to return to its normal pace in his chest. He’d thought the shower would help, but all it’s done is made him hyper aware of everything around him; the smell of the detergent that the hotel uses for their linens, the pristine white ceiling he stares up at, the sound of running water slowly coming to a stop in the bathroom.
A moment later and the bathroom door clicks open, Minho padding across the floor to prepare his equipment for the morning. Which reminds Jisung, he needs to do the same. He sits back up, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and stops short once he catches sight of Minho.
He blinks before looking again. The flat white scar runs vertical through Minho’s right brow and below his colorless eye, stops almost halfway down his cheek, sitting stark over the soft gold of his skin. Jisung’s staring doesn’t go unnoticed, and Minho holds eye contact with him while Jisung wonders how this is the first time he’s seeing Minho’s bare face, when this isn’t even the first time they’ve shared a room.
Minho cocks a brow, arms crossed over his chest, in a way that’s almost challenging Jisung to say something, to ask an intrusive question about how and when and why he’d gotten the injury. He looks almost resigned to it.
Jisung blurts out the first thing that comes to mind.
“You wear makeup?” he asks
Minho blinks, clearly taken aback. He answers almost warily.
“Clearly. You should too.”
Jisung’s mouth drops open. “Are—are you calling me ugly?” he asks incredulously.
Minho blinks again, and he laughs so suddenly that Jisung’s only left more confused, with an uncomfortable warmth settling in his chest at the sound.
“No, Jisung, I’m not calling you ugly,” he says. “I meant for this.” He taps his own cheek as he says this. “It’s cute, but it also helps to cover up anything unique like that on your face that can be used as an identifier when you’re trying to stay inconspicuous.”
“Oh,” Jisung says dumbly, bringing his own hand up to poke at the mole on his cheek. “Okay, I—I’ll do that then.”
The next morning, Jisung eyes the small lineup of makeup along the bathroom counter. Concealer, powder, and a darker, brown powder that he figures Minho uses to fill in where his scar cuts through his eyebrow.
He taps a bit of concealer on his fingertip, blends it across the mole on his cheek, and tries to ignore the small voice in the back of his mind reminding him that Minho had called it cute the night before.