Chapter Text
Part of Lee Minho always knew of the existence of houses like these, the sprawling, multi-level bungalows built on real earth, not the endless steel and neon towers of matchbox apartments in New Seoul. He just never fathomed that there were people rich enough to actually, you know, own them, or anything.
He wipes the trickle of sweat on his brow on the rough fabric of his gloves, hefting the bucket into his other hand as he stares at the portrait framed up on the living room wall. The guest of honour for tonight, 64-year-old Moon Sihyuk, smiles condescendingly down at him, an arm around his surgically perfect wife, both standing behind their three children. Minho would go out on a limb and say at least one of them don’t belong to him. What a typical picture of any chaebol family in the Republic of South Korea, 2077.
And yet…his eyes settle on the way the youngest child, a jubilant arts-prodigy type high school girl, is hugging her older brother, genuine mirth on her face. The house, and its traces of life all over, the video games under the television and pictures on the wall, the recipes tacked onto the fridge with stars drawn on in highlighter, have him thinking…it’d be nice, he supposes. A family, that is.
But oh well. Back to work.
Minho hums as he treads out into the backyard, dark except for the yellow house lights from the garage, lugging the bucket with him. On the way, he grabs a trowel off the grass, testing the contents of the bucket without much thought. The mix is perfect. He knows it is.
He lands soundlessly in the empty pool, making his way to the centre, until he’s standing at the jagged edges overlooking the hole he’d axed into the floor just half an hour ago.
Face down in the makeshift grave lies tonight’s guest of honour, as Jungkook likes to laugh on a job, minutes before he puts a bullet in their skull. Tonight’s assignment had been an easy one, so much so that Jungkook even risked his stellar success rate to let Soobin, tagging along, take his kill.
Minho’s biceps strain against the sleeves of his gardener’s uniform as he carefully tips the bucket of cement in to join the rest. This batch should be the last one, he thinks, watching the body disappear under the thick, grainy goop.
By the end of the night, the dry cement is painted over, the pool refilled, and kitchen floor bleached. Minho re-locks the garage door (one of Soobin’s consistent, classic rookie mistakes), before heading back into the wet kitchen, lifting the calendar hanging on the corkboard and hanging the keyring on the pin. He stands in that big, beautiful house, probably entirely funded by illegal cybernetic implant shipments, to make sure everything’s back where it was before.
Back where it was before he was here. Before Jungkook walked in through the back door while the target was retrieving a bottle of sparkling water and short-circuited his visual implants, then had Soobin ram a knife between the target’s ribs before he could hit the panic button on his biomonitor.
A family would be nice, he thinks, turning the lights off, and leaving the house.
*
As much as he thinks about it, though, Minho isn’t the type of person to sprint when he chases. He likes to let things happen as they do, keeping his head down and eyes open, watching the world around him.
And if he’s being honest, things aren’t too bad as they already are.
“Clean job,” Seokjin tells him warmly when he walks in, turning around on his comfy swivel chair. It isn’t often Minho comes back to HQ – he’s not part of the core team, anyway, and BTS is comfortable to have him based at the offsite trainee apartments until they need his services.
On the surface, Kim Seokjin seems pristine, skin clear of cyberware and implants. It’s rare, in an underground society that correlates the number of implants grafted into your body with how strong you are. Minho’s never seen anyone try to kill him, though. People’d already stopped trying by the time he joined.
“Thanks,” he smiles, still a little awkward. “I’ve got the report for tonight’s job here.”
“Just leave it where you usually do, I know you always get everything,” Seokjin waves a hand. Behind him, multiple screens wink in and out, an overview of their operations in Korea and worldwide. They have a whole command centre supporting their ops, so Seokjin technically doesn’t have to lift a finger, but Minho knows the second-in-command just likes being able to see everything. “How are your cats?”
“Doing well. I think one of them likes the cat tower you sent,” Minho says, tucking the chip in a little paper pocket. It’s a lie – the tower still lies, unassembled and boxed, under his bed. He’d told himself that his cats don’t need another one, anyway.
“Ah, that’s great.”
Minho nods, choosing to focus on opening one of the metal cabinets lining the room, flipping through the different paper pockets to find an empty spot, past the reports for all the other men and women they’ve made disappear. This cabinet’s almost full, he thinks absently. Time to get another one again.
“Hoseok was going to speak to you about an offer, or so I’ve heard.”
Minho’s stomach clenches. He doubts there’s anything in this organisation that Seokjin hasn’t heard, any secret he hasn’t laid his wide-eyed, bambi gaze on.
“Yep.”
“How’d that go?”
Minho takes a deep breath, stilling the tremble in his chest, and closes the metal cabinet. “I told him no.”
Seokjin raises a brow, as if he didn’t already know. “And why not? Seems like a shame, all those years of training he spent on you.”
“I’m comfortable where I am now,” Minho smiles tightly. “This is the lifestyle I’ve chosen.”
The older man sighs, taking his time to tidy up whatever he’s working on. Minho stands across the holo-table behind him, hands folded in front of him, waiting for a cue to show he’s allowed to leave.
“I know you’re not like the other kids here, Minho-ah. You’re too experienced, for one,” Seokjin waggles a finger at him, like it’s something he should apologise for. “And the boys Namjoon takes in these days…Jungkook just has to dangle the sub-team openings in front of them, and they’re knifing each other in the back to get at it,” he says, incredulously. “So dramatic. Don’t you think?”
Minho doesn’t say anything. The body he’d cleaned up in their trainee apartment just last month had belonged to one of the boys, as Seokjin so affectionately calls them. Something about cyanide planted in a box of kimchi supposedly sent by his mother.
“But I can see you’re not like that, Minho. You think before you act, and you’re good at reading between the lines, and most importantly, you put the team before yourself,” Seokjin says kindly. “That’s what makes you the best clean-up agent in our ancillary team, Minho.”
Minho doesn’t say anything. He’s waiting for the but.
“But,” Seokjin rests an elbow on the table between them. His eyes are so piercing, Minho wonders if the goosebumps prickling on his arms are the result of a cybernetic implant, or if it’s just Seokjin, as he is. “I can’t lie. You’d make a great killer, Minho.”
The younger man dips his head, only so that he’s not looking Seokjin in the eye anymore. “You guys can take centre stage,” he nods, smiling. “I’d rather just be in the background.”
He can feel Seokjin’s obsidian eyes boring in between his shoulder blades when he turns to leave, like magnets and molten steel, willing him to repent. For once, he doesn’t.
*
The digital lock beeps and blinks in the darkness, before light floods the tiny, shadowed apartment from the main door.
“Hi, kids,” Minho yawns, turning to latch and bolt the door thrice after the electronic lock beeps behind him, gaze spinning across the shoebox apartment, its single bedroom and bathroom attached to the living area. Soonie and Dori are the first to run over, eager to begin their mission of getting as much lint as possible on Minho’s trousers from the calf down.
He turns on the lights, unlocks his bedroom door, and washes up in his bathroom. Then he starts his nightly routine of cleaning out the automated cat food dispensers, changing the water, and letting out the old vacuum bot from its cubby to pick up the cat hairs from the cool floor.
In retrospect, it’s an apartment furnished for cats, that’d been modified, on a need basis, to also accommodate one (1) human. Tonight, that one (1) human drops onto a floor cushion and absent-mindedly nudges Dori’s inquisitive whiskers away from his bowl of stir-fry and microwaved rice propped on a foldable table.
“You guys would care if I died, right?” he says, watching Doongie chase a toy across the living room. Beside him, Minho sees Dori look around the tiny room, the multitude of carefully arranged cat towers and rope bridges across the ceiling, before he glances back up with his big, watchful eyes.
You’re just a crazy old cat man, is what he seems to say primly, before heading off, tail in the air.
Minho sighs, leaning back on both hands, eyes sliding close.
At times like these, that same longing like back at the bungalow last night resurfaces. Except this time, it’s deepened and dulled, into something like a slow, wistful ache.
*
His next case comes a little differently than the rest do.
Usually it’s in the form of a secured text, blinking in a corner of his HUD thanks to the custom implant hardwired into his brain. But Yoongi calls him down this time too, in person, to his offsite safehouse.
On the ride there, he’s filled with dread. Getting called down means a special request, and the only one who’s called him down so far is Seokjin.
He gets into the fortified warehouse without so much as a glance from the guards, and Yoongi pushes a pack of steaming tteokbokki across the rickety wooden table once he’s seated across him.
“You got a new case cleaning a body for Yeonjun this morning,” the older man says, digging into his own serving of rice cakes. “You read up already?”
Where Kim Seokjin is pristine, hands clean up in the brain of the organisation, Minho doesn’t think Min Yoongi’s ever left the ground. He’s one of the few core team members who still takes on jobs himself, and there isn’t a limb left on him that hasn’t been chromed up, one eye replaced by a glass and steel one that glows a soft blood red.
“I did, hyung,” Minho says, taking a bite of tteokbokki, because it would be rude not to. His mind is racing through the multitude of reasons why Yoongi could possibly want to speak to him personally. “Someone pissed off our client enough for them to want to put a hit out on him.”
“Yeah, you read the target’s profile? It’s just some street rat. Description makes it sound like he could be roadkill tomorrow and no one would give a shit,” Yoongi says, looking straight at Minho. “Yet someone wanted him dead enough to come to us.”
Minho doesn’t say anything for a moment. He opts for the safe route. “I mean, if you’ve got the money, you could do whatever you want?”
“So either the client’s rich, mad and stupid, or, the target’s not just some street rat. He’s hiding something, some affiliation or connection. I know you know it too,” Yoongi verbalises what was on Minho’s mind, each word cutting. “And if you and I know, Seokjin definitely does too, which is why he put Yeonjun on the case.”
“But isn’t Namjoon the one who assigns all the-…”
“You really believe that shit, Minho? Hoseok told me you were smart,” Yoongi stabs his chopsticks into a rice cake. Minho stops talking. “And you’ve been here long enough to know what goes on up there.”
Yoongi’s right. Minho’s one of the few still here and alive who remembers what the BTS core team used to be like, back when they operated out of a single base and had their sights set on just Daegu, rather than the world. There was a time each of them would take a bullet for each other.
And as their power skyrocketed, Minho’d watched the team unravel before his eyes – they were still effective colleagues, of course, Namjoon had made sure of that. But Minho doesn’t know if any of them would call each other friends. Not after what they’d lost.
Minho used to believe in a family. Until he didn’t, not anymore.
“Namjoon’s assembling the first sub-team under us. Got a name and everything for them already – TXT. Cute, right?” Yoongi pushes his empty plate of tteokbokki away, tearing a napkin from the roll on the table. Some distance away, a group of guys are sorting through a crate of implants – men loyal to Yoongi, not BTS. “Seokjin’s even got a favourite already. Which means he’s doing everything he can to make him Namjoon’s favourite too. You know his name?”
Silent, Minho feels the press of Yoongi’s expectant stare, like he should know. And he does, despite everything he’s done to keep his distance, because that’s what family means.
“Choi Soobin.”
“Exactly. Incompetent little fuck you cleaned up after with Kookie just last week, wasn’t he?” Yoongi’s lip curls. “And you know the name, rightfully, at the top of the Hoseok’s overall rookie leaderboards for the past five months?”
Regrettably, Minho sees where this is going. Your student. “Choi Yeonjun.”
“Exactly,” the other man snarls. “Seokjin knows something’s up with this job, which is exactly why he’s put Yeonjun on it instead of his golden boy. If he succeeds, it’s just another shitty rookie assignment, and if he fails, it’ll be the embarrassment of the year.”
The younger man stays silent. He feels like he’s sinking, quicksand clamping around his ribs the longer he sits here. “Hyung. Why am I here?”
“Seokjin put one of the junior cleaners with Yeonjun at first. I was the one who pulled you in,” Yoongi says, unabashed. “I’m not asking you to go out of your way, Minho. You’re the most senior of the disposal agents, and you’ve seen through hundreds of cases. I’m just asking you to keep an eye on Yeonjun while he’s on the field, in case this job isn’t all it seems.”
Minho lets out a bit of a breath. Babysitting. Not the easiest with Yeonjun, but I can do that. “Okay.”
Yoongi must sense this moment of weakness, because he scoffs. “Thought I was gonna ask you to finish the job? I’m not a monster, kid, you’re getting paid nowhere near enough to pull a gun on anyone, and I know you’ve got your stupid no-kill rule, anyway.” He presses a cigarette to his lips, lighting the end with the tips of his fingers.
Minho ducks his head apologetically, quietly. It’s the only thing he’s really been able to hold himself to since he first got here, and something people have been asking of him a lot lately.
Regardless, though, Yoongi flips open the file from a holo-crystal on the table, until the target’s face is staring at Minho in pixelated green.
“Whatever it is, I don’t care where this punk is from, or whatever secret army he’s got behind him. If things go south for Yeonjun, drop me a call straight away. No way I’m fucking letting Seokjin pull a fast one on me again,” he taps his cigarette irritably, the glowing ash drifting down towards the projected screen.
Lit up before him, the target’s youthful eyes are still looking into Minho’s, roguish and handsome. Like he’s holding onto a secret he’ll tell you if you buy him his favourite drink at a bar.
“He’s just looking for an excuse to bump Soobin to top spot,” Yoongi stands, mind already elsewhere, oblivious to the torrent of thoughts in Minho’s mind. “As if he hasn’t already meddled enough.”
Han Jisung, 27, the profile reads. Lower Dongdaemun. Thief and conman.
“Either way, the street rat’s going to die, and Yeonjun’s going to be the one putting the bullet through his brain.”
*
Minho is nineteen, one year into his stay with BTS, when he gets his first real gift from anyone.
“Happy one year,” Jimin says, with his trademark smile, passing over a chrome cube. Minho takes it with a genuine smile, because he can’t see the strings attached to it yet, and because it’s Jimin, one of the most influential in the core team – that’s so cool! “You’re good at what you do, but we figured this would make you better.”
Minho opens the cube, eyes fixed on the delicate cybernetic brain implant sitting in the foam. It isn’t one he’s ever seen before, and he’s got a rather reliable memory for how things look.
“Thank you hyung, but…what does it do?”
“Let’s just say, Seokjin and the others had something custom-made to make you a little more…forgettable,” Jimin twinkles. “Your whole job depends on how well you sneak around places to make bodies disappear – you need to remember everything while making sure no one remembers you,” he pats Minho’s cheek lightly. “And you’re too handsome to go unnoticed, Minho-yah.”
“Oh. Thank you, hyung.”
“You’ve been doing really well. A real asset to the team,” Jimin assures him, closing the box in his hands and pressing it towards him with a half-smile, like he’s sharing a secret.
A secret that echoes in Minho’s head like a mantra when Jimin heads down to the basement alone one night, four years later, and it’s the last anyone ever sees of him.
“Just stay in the background like you’ve always been, Minho, and you’ll do just fine.”
*
And so Minho walks, unnoticed, through the merchants’ complex they’re at, bag over his shoulder, to drop on a seat at a Chinese food booth and order a cup of tea.
He’s got his eyes glued to Yeonjun’s biomonitor and tracker in the corner of his HUD, on his guard just in case. A part of him is chiding himself, convinced that this extra caution is just a waste of time, that it’s actually just a standard case and this Jisung guy’s just somehow managed to piss off someone with a lot of money on their hands.
He definitely doesn’t let his mind linger on the smirking portrait of Han Jisung, still branded in the forefront of his mind, like his photographic memory is mocking him.
Amidst the turmoil, the time window for Yeonjun to contact Minho and tell him the body’s ready for disposal comes, and passes. Each ticking minute weighs a little heavier on Minho’s nerves. Yeonjun returns the pings Minho sends, so what’s wrong? What could possibly be taking him so long?
Two hours later, he gets a message from Yeonjun.
The rookie isn’t dead, Minho realises. He’s just failed.
*
News of Yeonjun’s failure spreads like wildfire amongst the trainees and the core team. It isn’t anything particularly dramatic either, no bloodshed to boast. The target had just managed to slip away.
Minho ignores the sigh of relief he lets out, one that quickly dissipates when he finds out from Yoongi that the job’s been extended, not aborted.
Naturally, Yeonjun is furious.
“I had him,” the man seethes, when the two of them have to sit down for the unfortunate failure report. His legs, modified to give him a jump booster, tap a regular metallic rhythm on the floor tiles. “I had that slimy bastard cornered at the junction by the hypertrain at Yangju. Then he managed to weasel into this row of shophouses and straight up vanished. Nothing on my infra-red, on my tracker – it’s like he vaporised.”
“Hmm.”
“Fuckers from ATEEZ were all over the place, too, kept staring me down – or I would’ve turned the place upside down to smoke him out. I didn’t know Yangju was theirs now.”
“Tough,” is all Minho says. You’ll get him next time, is what he should say, but can’t.
Truth is, Minho is curious. Not just anyone can give one of their guys the slip like that, not someone who trained under both Hoseok and Yoongi.
Yeonjun was good at catching people off their guard. But it seemed like this Jisung guy had friends wherever he went, if the way he traipsed in and out of ATEEZ territory said anything.
His mind drifts to the fog hovering behind that static profile photo in his head, filling in a past for this mysterious man. You can’t blame him for being interested – most of his targets are dead by the time he gets to meet them.
Silently, Minho wonders if that’s the only thing that’s intriguing him here.
“I bet Soobin’s just rubbing this in with Namjoon, sucking up to the boss again,” the younger man bites out, half under his breath. The bitterness surprises Minho, and it must show on his face, because the brunt of Yeonjun’s suspicion turns on him. “You’re not part of Seokjin-sunbaenim’s brainwashed zombie army, are you? Yoongi-hyung let you work with me.”
“No, I just-…” Minho falters. “I thought you guys were close. You and Soobin.”
He knew about the bad blood in the core team and the rivalry amongst the trainees, of course. But he’d seen Yeonjun and Soobin with the other top rankers in their cybernetic dojo just a week ago, fist-bumping and talking over a drill. They didn’t look like people who hated each other. They looked like BTS’ shiny new sub-team. The next generation of leaders.
Yeonjun rolls his eyes. “He’s a snake. Hoseok-hyung keeps telling us we need to trust each other – rich, if you ask me, looking at how Seokjin and Jungkook treat him and Yoongi-hyung all the time. He should know better than anyone that holding hands and sharing our feelings isn’t going to get us to the top.”
The younger man’s eyes darken. “I swear, if this assignment makes me drop a rank…over some pathetic,” he swipes shut the report with a titanium hand, snarling. “Nobody of a street rat…”
Minho doesn’t say anything, just signing off his section of the report mutely, wanting strangely to get out of the room as soon as possible.
“I’m going back to the workshop. Taehyun’s waiting for me,” Yeonjun announces suddenly, standing. He turns his gaze on Minho, frowning slightly. “You’re on your own, aren’t you? Hoseok-hyung said you weren’t interested in trying out for the sub-team positions.”
“He’s right. I’m not.”
“Don’t you want a team?” Yeonjun hoists his bag over his shoulder. “Somewhere to belong? I mean, you’ve been with BTS since forever but…you’re just a cleaner, no offence.”
Somewhere to belong…
“Thanks, but, I’m good on my own,” Minho smiles tightly. Yeonjun snorts and turns to head off.
“Honestly, you might be onto something there,” he laughs, a short sound, gripping the metal door frame. “The way things look, I’m going to die anyway, either by the guy I’m pointing a gun at, or the guy covering my six. Just stay alone,” he says, leaving the room. “Whatever you’re missing out on, it’s not worth it.”
*
It’s the first time Yeonjun fails a ground-level assignment, and unfortunately, not the last.
This time, Minho waits in an American-style diner, shifting uncomfortably on the worn red booth seats, arms folded across his chest. Yeonjun had all but flown into a rage the second time he’d failed, stuttering in his anger about how the target had given him the slip in one of the few territories BTS didn’t have any leverage in, casually talking his way into an NCT safehouse before Yeonjun could corner him.
“I could feel him fucking watching me from inside, like he was taunting me!” he’d fumed. Minho had nodded in time, secretly dying from curiosity about this man. His theories about Jisung – the target, he corrects himself, knowing his way around New Seoul well, were more or less there, he supposes.
Despite himself, Minho speaks up. “You should speak to the bosses. Tell them the truth – that this guy’s not just some low-level street rat,” he urges. “It’s out of your pay grade. Give up the job.”
He knows it’s a lost battle when he sees the incredulous look in Yeonjun’s eyes though. At that moment, it doesn’t matter how much they’re getting paid, or who this Jisung guy actually is. To Yeonjun, killing him is a matter of pride.
You’re just a pawn to the ones up there, Minho wants to grab Yeonjun by the shoulders and shout. Whatever you guys are stabbing each other in the back for, it’s not worth it.
But Minho thinks before he acts. He reads between the lines, and most importantly, he puts the team before himself. So he stays silent, and watches the impending crash with a trembling resignation.
This run will be the last one, Yeonjun swears, but Minho’s still waiting in tepid anticipation, ignored as usual by the staff and patrons at the diner thanks to the passive effects of his implant. The iced americano in front of him’s long melted in the heat, a layer of water floating on top of the black liquid.
He’s looking out the window, half-expecting, half-dreading getting a text anytime soon that the mission’s finally succeeded, when footsteps approach the table. Minho doesn’t look, knowing the person’s just passing by.
So when the seat opposite him creaks and whooshes, and there’s a clatter of a plate on his table, Minho freezes, almost as if there’s a gun to his temple.
He turns, slowly, to see none other than the smirking countenance of Han Jisung across him in the booth. There’s a glint of metal in his smile, matching the prismatic cosmetic cyberware zigzagging down his cheekbones, as he digs a fork into the piece of cheesecake in front of him.
“Hi, beautiful. Han Jisung, at your service,” the man says, cheeks full of cake. It’s infuriatingly, deceptively endearing. “Don’t bother calling your friend. I lost him in a piping complex ten minutes ago, it’s going to take him and his ego a while to figure a way out of that one anyway.”
Minho hadn’t even thought about pinging Yeonjun – which should’ve given it away at that point, honestly.
“You’re here to keep an eye on him or something, right? I know you’re not gonna kill me,” Jisung stuffs another forkful of cheesecake into his mouth. “Or you would’ve done it the first time Mr Angry Eyebrows couldn’t.”
A bunch of things are racing through Minho’s mind right now, a part of him snorting at the angry eyebrows, but first and foremost – “You remember me?”
No one’s supposed to remember him. That’s how his implant works. That’s how his job works, how his life works.
“Not gonna forget a face like yours in a long time,” Jisung quips with a crooked smile, oblivious to the turmoil in Minho’s head. Was my implant not working all this time? Or is it just…this way for him?
“Anyway, before anyone realises where I am, I wanted to tell you,” The cheeky countenance drops to a serious one, so fast that Minho feels like he’s getting whiplash. “Stop trying to kill me. I haven’t done anything to piss anyone off enough for it to be worth three failed attempts on my life.”
“Why are you bargaining with me?” Minho says, surprised he’s even able to string the words together. “Shouldn’t you be talking it out with the guy you left in that pipe complex?”
“Don’t know. He seems to have a couple of screws loose, no offence. Also, maybe I just wanted to talk to you,” Jisung shrugs, lackadaisical attitude back, as he shoves the rest of the cheesecake in his mouth. Minho just watches, aghast, as the man across him takes his iced Americano and downs half of it in one go.
“Gah,” he grimaces, setting the cup down. “Americano here fucking sucks.”
“It does,” Minho says, without thinking. His heart is racing in his chest, like he’s at the edge of a roller coaster, looking at the vertical drop down.
Jisung stands, grabbing a napkin to wipe his face. “Once all this murder business is out of the way,” he winks, “what say you and me grab a real coffee together sometime, baby?”
Then, in the blink of an eye, he’s out of the diner, looking both ways to decide where he’s going, then heading off.
Finally, Minho lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding in, deflating minutely against the red leather seat.
Around him, the diner spins on its own little axis, back to the stale familiarity of a world where he doesn’t exist.