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(one – four years before canon)
Sean jumps off the ladder and pauses.
“Are you sick?”
“What?” asks Yok, sounding confused as he adds, “No, do I look bad?”
He tilts his head and says, “It’s July. You’re wearing a scarf.”
There’s more he could say – I’ve never seen you wearing a scarf, perhaps, or even your shirt has sleeves, or also you didn’t walk in as much as like, you’re skulking around the walls, and what’s up with that, huh? – but Sean doesn’t care that much. He just doesn’t want to catch whatever Yok has.
So when Yok jumps and looks at him nervously Sean grits his teeth.
“Man,” he tells him, “Hia’s cool, he won’t replace you if you take a day, don’t give me your-“
“-I’m not sick and I can’t take a day,” Yok protests.
Sean believes him on the second one but rolls his eyes and finishes, “Don’t give me whatever you have – stay away.”
It’s kind of mean, probably, and that sucks – Yok’s only been working here a couple of weeks but Sean thinks he’s pretty cool, he didn’t raise an eyebrow or ask any questions when he realised Sean lives here, he only peered at the dented door to Sean’s room and offered to add some decorations, so Sean doesn’t want to be a dick to him, but Sean can’t take a day either.
There are costs involved in burying your parents, it turns out, and they didn’t have enough savings to not turn those into debts.
But whatever, he knows Yok’s in his own financial situation too, so he’s not about to call Gumpa over from where he’s talking to a client and insist he send Yok back or some shit – he just needs Yok to-
“Oi,” he warns as Yok grabs his elbow – Sean shakes him off aggressively.
“Sorry,” Yok whispers again. “I just- I’m really not sick, I’ve just been hiding- You know.”
Sean doesn’t know.
He doesn’t think much about the kind of things people hide, so he stupidly exposes a raw spot and says, “Are you on drugs?”
“Around heavy machinery? After hia’s talk?”
That makes Sean snort – yeah, you’d have to be fucking brave to pull anything like that after the talk, complete with the pictures, and Yok’s face looks as haunted as Sean feels.
Shaking his head, Yok starts to unwind the scarf while saying, “No, man, I just didn’t want to show these,” and Sean watches as some impressive fucking hickeys are revealed.
He stares – they cover a full side of his neck and they’re deep, deep purple.
“Was she a vampire?”
Yok laughs, pauses, and gives him a look, kind of searching and nervous, before he says, “Maybe he was, I don’t know, I didn’t get his name or anything.”
“Huh,” Sean huffs. “Were you wearing that to hide from your parents or someone?”
He doesn’t know if Yok even has those, but maybe getting to know his new coworker won’t suck – he can’t be as bad as Sean’s classmates, anyway.
(two – two and a half years before canon)
Yok wakes up in the forbidden chamber – “stop calling it that, dickhead, I just don’t want people messing with my shit” – the forbidden chamber, where he’s finally been allowed entry after like two whole years of knowing Sean, and he rolls his head sideways to look at Sean.
It’s maybe not the smartest idea in the world, but they both just found out they got into university, and they got into the same university, and that’s cool! It’s good news! And Gumpa had put up a banner and been bragging to his clients, which Sean found super embarrassing but Yok’s cool with and Yok’s mae was very approving of, so when she had to leave in the daylight with a piece of cake in a little bag so she could get to her latest cleaning job she’d been all approving of him staying after hours, and Yok had maybe taken that approval and run with it, right to the beer, and maybe he’d taken the beer and run-
Well, right to Sean’s room, clearly.
He knows some people – real adults – get headaches when they drink as much as he did, but he feels fine – perky, even!
Part of that is getting into university and another part is-
Yok smirks.
Sean didn’t remember to put a shirt back on before he went back to sleep, clearly, and he’s on his side facing away from Yok, all curled up, like he wants to preserve his space but all that means is Yok can see all the scratches down his back, which is a hazard of sleeping with Yok.
“Are you laughing at me?”
He hadn’t even noticed he was laughing – but he was, giggling, oops, so he defends himself, “No, I just saw the marks-“
Which has Sean trying to suffocate him with a pillow, and Yok will acknowledge – fair response.
If there was a danger of it being awkward, the scuffle after fixes it – if there was a danger of it happening again, the amount of bitching Sean does about the scratches fixes that. They’re cool.
(three – during canon)
“Dude, foul move,” Yok complains when he catches his breath.
Sean laughs openly – it’s mat-sparring under Gumpa’s eye, the only foul moves are ones that end with actual injuries – and offers Yok a hand up, saying, “Stop making yourself new weak spots if you don’t want me to use the openings.”
It’s an old argument between the two of them.
Whenever they spar, Yok’s going to have some marks on him, sometimes from fights or work or say, parkour, but mostly from sex. He’s kind of a massive slut, which Sean’s always known and isn’t… not… himself, but Sean doesn’t like getting marks. If Yok doesn’t either he’s very bad at letting his guys know, that’s for fucking sure, because the amount of them-
Anyway, there are always marks on Yok, and today there were marks on one wrist that Sean’s familiar with himself and also, he clearly has some pretty deep bruising on his thighs – Sean only saw because Yok kind of had to replace his jeans after they ended up pretty much covered in grease, which, okay yeah that was Sean’s fault – and it was the thigh thing that helped Sean take him down in sparring this time, making the opening that had left him with a knee to the solar plexus and then, swiftly, his arm in a painful hold until he tapped out.
What happens every time is Yok complains about the move and Sean reminds him he could stop making new ones and Yok says, It wasn’t me who made them, and then gives some random tiny detail about his latest hookup while smirking and wiggling his eyes as stupidly as possible, and Sean waits for the standard response so he can hit Yok on the head.
It doesn’t come.
He looks at Yok, who is… avoiding eye contact.
Weird.
Sean’s about to ask, but then he wonders what’s going to happen if Yok turns the question around on him, asks him about his own love life – Black’s face (but is it?) flashes across his mind, and the noncommittal response Yok had given when Sean had been about to mention his growing suspicions, and the other stuff that’s been happening…
He lets it go.
(four – late in canon)
It’s the longest they’ve gone without talking since they were teenagers who barely knew each other, and even then they’d ask each other for tools or to help with a tricky bit of an engine but now they aren’t even working, can’t go back to the garage in case they’re caught or shot again, and Yok doesn’t know which gunshot that makes him hear when he thinks of it – the one that hit Sean, out in the open, or the one that P’Dan took for him, or the one that didn’t ring out only because Yok managed to run over there and grab the gun before-
Or maybe it’s the other one that echoes in his mind, the only one he could never have heard because it happened before he met any of them, even though it’s apparently a gunshot that defines his existence because he’s heard its story two ways now – the gap left behind in Sean’s life, told more in silences than in words but told to Yok in the old days before they even met Black and Gram, and then also in P’Dan’s words but with that one detail missing that none of them knew yet – from two of the people who matter the most to him in the world, so Yok never heard it but it’s all he hears and-
The point is they aren’t exactly talking.
They can be friendly to each other in front of the group – they’re both pretending better than Yok would have thought either of them could. Sean introduces Black’s secret fucking twin brother who’s been spying on them, apparently, and that betrayal isn’t worth words because he’s so sorry about it but Sean can’t even look at P’Dan without seething and-
No, that’s not fair, White didn’t kill anyone.
But Sean nearly did, and-
Well, he introduces his new boyfriend and it goes better than Yok introducing his because he knows it’s all not about him and P’Dan and so Yok laughs and jokes and looks Sean in the eyes and silently tries to forgive him.
(Silently in a metaphorical sense – silence in the literal sense isn’t really Yok’s thing.)
The closest it comes to slipping is when Yok’s washing himself off in the evening, looking across the water at the reflections in it and trying to think how he could recreate those colours one day, with oil, maybe – maybe even something he painted with P’Dan, they could make their styles work together, and he’s smiling to himself thinking of it when Sean approaches alone, head down, to clean up as well.
His smile fades even though Sean isn’t looking.
The air feels tense, but maybe it’s just the humidity, because they’ve been so good at pretending.
They clean up in silence, and Yok steps back first, while Sean’s pouring water over himself, and it’s nearly the end of it but then-
Sean’s eyes meet his.
Yok swallows at the look of betrayal in them, and this time what he hears is the gunshot that Sean fired over the water before telling Yok’s boyfriend to kill himself and now he’s looking at Yok like that but Yok can’t even be angry at him because of that other one and he’s not angry, he’s not, he wants it all to be better again but he doesn’t know how it can.
Then Sean’s eyes shift down and he sees them change, fix on Yok’s chest, and harden, before Sean’s saying so quietly, “I guess you two are compatible.”
They are.
It’s not supposed to sound like an insult; it’s not supposed to burn.
(five – after the van)
He holds Yok’s hand and waits desperately for it to twitch, but it just isn’t, and Sean would have expected tears to come now but instead he just feels fired up, angry and terrified and like he needs to get up and move but how could he get up how can he leave Yok’s side when he looks so pale in this hospital bed-
“Sean,” comes the voice of his salvation. “Breathe – the surgery is over.”
It is. Yok’s going to wake up and remember.
Sean hates that he’s going to wake up and remember.
He’s already had to do that once, back in the first hospital, back before everything else – Black and Techit and the van and the crowd, the amazing unbelievable crowd that proved they weren’t doing this for nothing, that they were speaking and people were hearing, back before all that – and Sean had only been able to feel vindicated in a dead, awful way, wheeling Yok into the elevator and leaving the killer-cop-traitor in the hall, because Yok’s voice sounded like that and his face looked like that and Sean doesn’t know how to deal with Yok being like that.
And after all of it Yok’s stitches had burst and it had turned out that being grabbed and tied up and then kicking the door in the van, all of that had not only undone the shit from the first surgery but actually caused tearing, that’s what the surgeon had said – to Gumpa, who’d been translating because this shithole hospital doesn’t even have any sign language interpreters on staff, and the second they know if they’re going to jail or prison or hey, getting successfully disappeared this time, who knows, the second it’s clear Sean’s going to fucking learn sign language because Yok’s mae has always welcomed all of them even though…
The tears still don’t come – Yok nearly died.
He glares at Yok’s side, looking deceptively clean and bright the way it’s covered in a hospital gown – the shade slightly different from the light blue of his first – but Sean knows that hidden under it is a bullet wound.
It wasn’t actually the traitor that shot Yok.
But Sean keeps thinking of it that way – the last mark that fucking cop can ever leave on Yok, on their lives, on Sean as well because Yok’s his best friend and anything done to him is done to Sean too – because after all, it was the cop who told the other cops where to find them, and it was a cop that shot Yok.
In the back.
While he ran.
Just like that cop.
But that’s the end – this is the last one. It has to be.
(and one – after the bracelets)
Turns out, even if you turn yourselves in all public and under the watchful eye of media both national and international so the authorities can’t quietly dispose of you or even, like, have you seriously beaten (at least until the media gets bored, but White and Nuch and one of Gumpa’s friends have some kind of complex plan to stop that so Yok deliberately isn’t thinking of what might happen then if they haven’t been given probation or bail like they’re hoping for) – even if you do all that, careful as anything, there are some indignities that can’t be avoided.
Like the search.
It makes sense, he guesses, and even turning themselves in like this Black or Sean would probably try to smuggle in a weapon or, maybe, a fucking bomb or something, take out as much of the system as possible in a last hurrah, but it’s still annoying and, even though Yok’s not normally someone who feels exposed when his clothes are off it still does feel kind of-
He’s not sure.
At least, it feels that way until he spots something, and then he remembers that neither Black nor Sean would pull anything that stupid – that suicidal – anymore, not now that a certain someone has entered their lives.
Sean’s shirt is off, and wow- Yok giggles.
It gets a warning sound from the officer watching them and a warning glare from Sean, so Yok – who has also never been accused of having self-preservation skills – leans over and whispers, “I thought you didn’t like marks?”
“White likes to bite,” Sean replies, apparently irritated into honesty.
On the other side of Gram, the twins make identical annoyed noises, and Yok giggles again.
“I can see that.”