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The first thing Renjun notices upon regaining consciousness is the stringent vegetal scent of crushed leaves and sap. The second thing he notices, breath hissing out of him all at once, is that moving his left arm while attempting to extricate himself from the bushes he’s flattened during his involuntary express passage from the sky to the ground is a really bad idea. Excruciatingly bad. This is on account of the third thing he notices, which is the bleeding hole punched right through the meat of his shoulder. Immediately he tries to unnotice this. The—it’s not bleeding actively, per se, more of a sludgy febrile wetness he can feel seeping through the mangled fabric of his tac gear, almost just as disturbing a sensation.
He squeezes his eyes shut and silently counts to ten. Then he swings his legs out of his impromptu leafy cradle and stumbles upright. The world wobbles, vertiginous, but steadies itself after a few moments. There’s a maroon smear across the flattened foliage. He should do something about that. His shoulder feels, distantly, boiled. Glazed over. But it doesn’t hurt if he doesn’t move it, and he hopes whatever chemical cocktail his brain is pumping out as anaesthetic doesn’t wear off too soon.
Unsure of what else to do, he starts walking. At least it’s late enough that there’s nobody out on the streets; his mask must have come off at some point during the fall. He’s crashlanded in some civilian neighbourhood, presumably one of the half-absorbed districts littering the outer fringes of the city, jigsaw puzzle of high-rise flats and greenery patches. His head aches, half possible blunt force trauma, half the increasingly insistent feeling that he’s been here before. But there’s no reason he would ever have visited this particular suburb and the definitive identification eludes him. More pressingly, he needs to orient himself so he can make his way to an extraction point and transmit an SOS back to base, since the hole in his shoulder is a little too conspicuous for public transport.
Renjun loves fieldwork, usually. In concept. The occupational hazards, maybe not so much, but it’s part of the experience and his agency rarely sends them out on solo missions anyway. Again, in concept. The memory hauls itself together: Jaemin’d gotten shot out of the sky while they were over the harbour, a glint of silver in the corner of Renjun’s eye plummeting towards the water. They hadn’t been expecting a sniper. Since when did the Public Order Management Bureau have a sniper hero in reserve? Now the R&D team will have to incorporate bulletproof materials into Jaemin’s mobile exoskeleton, because Jaemin insists on having aerial capabilities even though he hates fieldwork, or at least the parts of fieldwork that don’t involve waving at news cameras.
One more step and Renjun freezes. With a nauseous abruptness, the vague sense of deja vu resolves itself as recognition. Renjun does know this neighbourhood. He’s read the field reports from other agents—done the recon work himself, even, tacked up the blown-up photographs and satellite imaging printouts onto the main meeting room’s serial killer corkboard, which had accrued the moniker thanks to Donghyuck staunchly refusing to call it anything else despite Renjun’s best efforts at arguing that being a serial killer was really a specific status separate from killing serially, and Renjun was willing to concede the latter but not the former. Jaemin, who never met a debate he didn’t find hysterically funny to play both sides, professed the stance that even if that were true, they all possessed both attributes anyway, so the distinction had no practical effect.
See, even Nana agrees with me, Donghyuck said smugly, to which Jaemin turned his most breathtakingly charming Top 10 Supervillains Too Sexy To Be Terrorists! photo op smile on Donghyuck and said, Don’t ever call me that again, and Renjun frowned and said, But we really aren’t serial killers, though. And we’re not going to kill Protagonist. Serially or otherwise.
This set off a firecracker chain of protests. Why do we have photos of his house on the serial killer corkboard if we're not going to kill him? Donghyuck complained.
I said it’s not a serial killer corkboard!
It’s not not a serial killer corkboard, Jaemin said, piously diplomatic again, but only because it made the situation worse.
Crises of relative morality aside, Renjun has spent a lot of time staring at this particular pavement, this crumbly fissure in the concrete, this set of wide double doors prefacing the apartment on the corner of the block. Mark Lee lives on the third floor, which is a height achievable on Renjun’s current energy levels, but if he flies up there and can’t get in there’s no guarantee he’ll have enough juice left to fly back down and not end up stranded on the window ledge like a concussed pigeon. He probably does have a concussion. Concussion is probably the least of his medical concerns right now.
Renjun squints up at the window belonging to Mark’s apartment. In his current state, he could manage normal glass but not bulletproof. So either he tries his best to commit a light spot of breaking and entering while hoping that Mark doesn’t have some kind of deadly anti-intruder ward set up, or he lies down on the street and prays that Donghyuck’s superpower roulette miraculously spins back around to tracking before Renjun exsanguinates. Renjun’s not typically one for cost-benefit analyses, but it doesn’t take Jaemin to realise that the outlook is rather grim either way. There’s really only one choice.
When he steels himself and pushes himself off the pavement in a wobbly arc aimed at the general direction of Mark’s window, his original concern turns out to be immaterial, because the window is actually already wide open. Because Mark Lee has some kind of death wish. Renjun gives himself a few seconds of brainspace to marvel over this as he lands clumsily on the sill, swings his legs over, and slides into the studio, too exhausted to do much more than try to avoid jostling his shoulder too much and keep his mouth clamped shut when he inevitably does. It feels overly rude to get blood all over someone else’s bed uninvited, so, wincing with effort, Renjun drags himself across the floor to the couch before collapsing onto the cushions.
Almost simultaneously, the front door rattles and before Renjun can even catch his breath the room floods with light. From the threshold, the superhero known to the public as Protagonist, and to his friends and also enemies as Mark Lee, blinks at Renjun, the door groaning shut behind him under the force of its own weight. What’s another insane stroke of coincidence for the night? But of course probability always warps around Mark anyway; it’s practically a foregone conclusion. Renjun considers lifting a hand to wave hello, but his limbs simply refuse to accept instruction, so all he can do is blink back politely. Mentally he upgrades the blunt force trauma from possible to probable.
Mark blinks again. His mouth opens and closes and opens. Then he seems to decide that the most appropriate greeting upon seeing a public enemy bleeding out all over your upholstery is an uncertain, “Yo…”
“You should lock your window,” Renjun says. If he concentrates on keeping his voice even, he’s less likely to pass out. That seems like it makes sense. Why did he deliver himself directly into the hands of a person whose literal job involves causing him harm? That seems less like it makes sense. “At least make it a little harder for any random person to break in.”
Mark makes a strangled sort of noise. “Kestrel,” he says. “Dude. Are you, like… okay?”
Renjun stares very pointedly at the gory crater that is currently his shoulder, then back at Mark, whose hand is still frozen on the light switch.
“Don’t you—you don’t heal?”
“Please don’t look so freaked out,” Renjun says tiredly. “I’m the one with the hole in my shoulder. I do heal, just, um… slowly. Very slowly.”
It’s not that Renjun doesn’t have a healing factor. He’d have died three days into this line of work if he didn’t. It’s just that his one works a little more slowly than the average superhuman. Still perfectly serviceable though; just because Jaemin’s healing factor could probably regenerate limbs and Donghyuck’s healing factor could probably regenerate himself from a limb doesn’t mean that is the industry standard. Even if it’s looking increasingly likely that this specific injury might be a little above the threshold of his capabilities at the moment.
“What about your,” Mark visibly struggles to think of an appropriate descriptor, “... henchman?”
Renjun frowns. “Henchman? I have a henchman?”
Mark laughs nervously. “Someone said it during a briefing. About the guy who sometimes comes out with you but isn’t Fullsun, doesn’t he usually do the healing…?”
“Oh, you mean Viper.” Jaemin is not going to be happy to find out that Mark doesn’t know his name. “We… lost contact.”
“Uh, but your shoulder is…” Mark’s tone firms, latching onto a purpose. It’s the exact same way he gets in a fight. Surprising how perfectly clockable it is, the translation into audible effect of that unwavering pursuit of a goal so resolute even fate gave way before it. “You need to go to a hospital. That really doesn’t look good.”
"Protagonist," Renjun says impatiently. "I am a supervillain. I can’t go to a hospital, I’ll be shot dead at the door, or arrested and shot dead later.”
“Right. Okay, um—can I do anything?” Mark lurches towards the kitchen. “Wait, I have a first aid kit—shit, but I don’t know first aid—”
Well, first aid is better than nothing. “I’ll talk you through it,” Renjun says. “And your powers will make it work out anyway, remember?
“Is that why you came here?” Mark says. He’s crouched down by the sink, rifling through the drawers.
“I didn’t plan to,” Renjun says, letting his head tip back against the arm of the couch, but careful not to exclude Mark from his line of sight. Objectively speaking, Mark is the biggest threat to him in this room right now, even if Renjun is finding it really hard to make himself care. “It was a coincidence, if you can believe that.”
“I always believe in coincidences,” Mark says. Triumphantly he fishes out a box from the bottom drawer and pops the latches on the lid to scan the contents. “Alright! I have, like, antiseptic and bandages, is that enough? Bandaids as well, but that’s probably not gonna be too useful…”
“I think… if you can just… ” Apropos of nothing, Renjun’s mouth goes dry. He swallows. “Help me wrap it up. Then my healing powers should be able to do the rest, it’s just—a little bit too much for me. Maybe. Right now.”
With the kit in hand, Mark approaches Renjun. A sheen of exaggerated slowness and carefulness to each step, like he thinks Renjun might startle like a wild animal and bolt away. Unfortunately Renjun had bolted towards instead and has successfully trapped himself in a matchbox with no more than two exit points that he probably couldn’t get to anyway without blacking out, but he appreciates it nonetheless. The gesture, the concern behind it.
Still at half-speed, Mark kneels down in front of the couch and holds up a small spray canister. “D’you want?” Renjun winces, imagining the vivid abrasive sting of antiseptic on raw flesh, and shakes his head. “You sure?
“I’ll be fine with just the bandages.” If he can’t find Jaemin before developing a fatal blood infection or gangrene or something, there may not be much hope for him anyway.
Obligingly, Mark picks up a package of sterile gauze, tears open the packaging, and lifts out the square of white fabric. He’s shockingly near. The faint clean scent of laundry powder unfurls from his skin. They’re rarely this proximate even during battles; Renjun’s fight style focuses on all-dimensional agility, only the momentary contact of a blow itself before he’s wheeling away again in preparation for the next strike. Sustained closeness is reserved for the periods of masklessness, Donghyuck and Jaemin back at base. He has no analogue for this.
Renjun has to close his eyes. He lays his free hand across them, too, for good measure. Gradations of lightlessness. His shoulder simmers.
A plasticky rustle. “I think I need to cut off the shirt fabric around the… yeah. To get the bandage on."
"Okay," Renjun says. “Do it.”
Mark’s touch, when it comes, is almost solicitously gentle. Renjun focuses on regulating the rhythm of his breathing. Everything amplifies itself in the darkness, anticipatory. The quiet snick of scissors, momentary brush of coolness when the blades skim across skin.
“Tell me if it hurts too much,” Mark says, and lays the bandage onto the wound.
Renjun bites off a sharp hiss at the first press of the gauze against the shredded meat of his shoulder, overwhelming. All of him tenses up. He has to stop himself from flattening himself against the couch, pulling away from Mark. This is what he asked Mark for, after all.
Mark’s fingers against Renjun’s skin halt. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Renjun grits out. Shaky inhale, exhale. “Keep going.”
He can hear the tiny tearing sounds as Mark detaches sections of medical tape and smooths them with painstaking care into place; Renjun doesn’t feel each piece of tape so much as Mark’s fingers kissing the superheated skin of his shoulder around the wound as he works. Curiosity gets the better of Renjun. He lets the hand over his eyes drop. He turns his head an increment, catches a glimpse of bright arterial red bleeding through white in the periphery of his vision, and instantly squeezes his eyes shut again, stomach churning. How is it worse to see it through a layer of gauze? The damage hidden from view; it hadn’t even felt so sickening only looking at the open wound but the visual signifier of something having gone wrong along with the attempt to fix it somehow makes it less unreal, less distant.
This must be the longest he’s ever gone with an unhealed injury. Bodies are so breakable. Not for the first time he thinks that civilians must be very brave, facing the prospect of having their flesh irreversibly macerated every day and still going out into the world.
Mark continues taping for what feels like an interminably long time. Finally, he huffs out an exhale. “All done,” he says. “I think? I'm not kidding, I really don’t know how this works, but, uh… yeah. Also I think you’re, like, supposed to put pressure on it. So it slows the bleeding?”
Renjun chances another glance down. Mark has been very conscientious in making sure that the bandage will stay on. In fact, there’s so much tape that the gauze is barely even visible underneath it. His shoulder is basically mummified. This is a weirdly endearing sight. “Well, you’re the one who did it, so it should be okay.”
The fact of contact between Renjun’s palm and the gauze dressing doesn’t hurt. Cautiously Renjun pushes down, then decides he might as well commit, the inverse of ripping a bandaid off. A brief flare of pain, then probably the neural receptors responsible for the feeling of pain clock out from overwork altogether.
“I’m not really sure how this works either,” Renjun admits, clutching his shoulder. “Viper usually takes care of everything.”
Mark rocks back on his heels into a crouch and huffs a laugh. “Yeah, like I said, we did think he was your team healer,” he says, “but he, uh, seems a bit aggressive for a healer. And, like… crazy overpowered? Maybe just crazy in general? All respect though, he seems cool. Except for the being evil thing, that’s not cool.”
“I’ll tell him you said that,” Renjun says. “He’s actually a Protag fanboy, it’ll make his day.”
“What, really?”
“No,” Renjun says. "He has a—corkboard, you know. Like a serial killer corkboard. Pictures of you and your house."
“Like, for work, though? That’s pretty normal. We have corkboards too, for you guys.”
“No, it’s his hobby,” Renjun says. A vague guilt over besmirching Jaemin’s good name starts to set in, but his shoulder has a hole in it and Jaemin’s does not, so it should balance out. Besides, it isn’t necessarily an unrealistic vision; Jaemin might very well have a secret corkboard on top of their communal corkboard. Jaemin might have anything. His taste in hobbies can best be described as eclectic and worst as calculated to maximise inconvenience for everyone else. Renjun should investigate Jaemin's room once he gets back, just in case Jaemin actually does have a private corkboard with intel he's been keeping to himself.
“Huh.” Mark is consideringly quiet for a moment. “Guess I’m flattered? Kinda.”
“Protagonist, I don’t really know if it’s a compliment to have a supervillain stalking you.”
“Mark,” says Mark. “My real name’s Mark.”
“I know,” says Renjun. “Viper’s corkboard, remember? We already know everything about you.”
“Haha, yeah,” says Mark, sounding altogether not concerned enough about the fact that his civilian identity and place of residence is common knowledge amongst supervillains. Though Renjun supposes that if he had the ability to have everything literally magically turn out in his favour he wouldn’t be that worried either. “Do you mind if I call you Renjun?”
“That’s fair,” Renjun concedes. Too easy to be lulled into a sense of casual camaraderie. Mark is too easy to be around. Time to change track. “Can you talk about something?”
“Huh?”
“I need to stay awake,” Renjun says. “Just talk about something, it doesn’t matter what. What you had for breakfast. The street you lived on when you were five. Your mother’s maiden name.”
Mark laughs. “You trying to hack into my bank account? Um, I had cereal for breakfast, pretty normal… to be honest, I lived nearby when I was five, I didn’t move really far.” He falls silent for a moment. The ghost of his fingertips on Renjun’s shoulder is still very warm. “This is seriously surreal,” he says. “I never thought you’d, like, be in my house for real. You look… you look really different without the mask.”
“I think that’s the idea behind wearing a mask,” Renjun says. “Also… I honestly didn’t think you knew who I was.”
“Of course I know who you are!” Mark protests. “I actually even still remember our first battle.”
“Really?” Renjun had aimed for disbelief but it ends up landing more in the vicinity of breathless teenage girl.
Luckily Mark doesn’t seem to notice. “Yeah, it was at this, like, garden with a big stone fountain? And there were sunflowers everywhere.” Mark pauses. “You had petals in your hair,” he says. “After I, uh, threw you off the roof…”
“It’s fine, I didn’t break anything. Much.” Renjun pulls a face. “And Viper was around anyway. But that doesn’t mean—don’t start going easy on me, okay?”
“I won’t,” Mark promises. “You’re my rival.”
Renjun smiles. “I thought Fullsun was your rival.”
“Yeah, that's true, I guess he is,” Mark says thoughtfully. “You definitely are too, though.”
This lances him through with an effervescent happiness. It is an exceedingly stupid and exceedingly exhausting feeling. “But not Viper?”
“Viper is Canine’s rival. I think. I’m not really sure what’s up with Viper, to be honest.”
Obviously I’m not rivals with Protagonist, Renjun imagines Jaemin saying, with the slyly hopeful sideways glance that indicated he was not not expecting someone to jump in and reassure him that he was in fact Protagonist’s most beloved arch-rival of all, even though Mark apparently hadn’t known his name.
But speaking of rivals. "Who's your new guy? The sniper, I mean," Renjun says. "He’s the one who shot down Viper, so Viper's probably going to get really annoying and rivalish about it for a while.”
Mark snaps his fingers. “Oh, yeah! Jis…uhh….”
At that precise moment, a wave of vertigo combs over Renjun. He grits his teeth against it until it subsides. In its wake an unpleasant bedraggled feeling, as if he’d really been standing in the ocean and summarily bodyslammed by the tide. Maybe like Jaemin might be right now, hauling himself onto the shore.
“Jisuhh?” Renjun manages.
“Sorry, he only just picked out a codename, I’m still trying to get used to it. But yo, that's really nice of Viper, can you thank him when you get back? We did have a rival lined up for Jisung’s… uh, I mean… well, anyway. Jisung’s debut, this guy he met on a mission or something when they were kids, but he actually ended up coming over to our side before that could happen, so we were kinda worried about how to establish him as a legit hero… hey, are you still here?” Mark’s hand fumbles at Renjun’s wrist. “Please don’t die on me.”
The world reels in and out of focus. “I’m awake,” Renjun mumbles. “Give me a second.”
Mark’s thumb is a good centimetre too high on his wrist to feel Renjun’s pulse, but the anchor of his hand is warm and solid, comfortingly so. It gives Renjun something to concentrate on while he pulls himself back together.
Once Renjun’s vision is more or less firm around the edges again, he says, “Have you ever gotten hurt in a battle? Can you even get hurt?”
“Not really,” Mark says thoughtfully. “But I’m not, like, invincible or anything. I can get hurt, it’s just, yeah. Less likely.”
“Nearly invincible,” Renjun says. “Rounds up to invincible.”
“Kinda. Yeah. Haha.”
The pressure of Mark’s grasp on his wrist begins relaxing, and before Renjun’s conscious brain can catch up to his mouth the word bursts out of him: “Don’t—"
Mark freezes in place, eyes wide, like he's really taken the negative imperative to heart.
Again, Renjun feels so miserably teenage he could die. “Just, can you keep—I mean, your hand…"
Mark instantly seizes Renjun’s hand again. “Oh, like—”
“It’s nice,” Renjun finishes, exceedingly aware of how weak the explanation is, but at least it seems to be working.
“Okay,” Mark says. He shifts his grip, slides his fingers further down to fit around Renjun’s palm. They both stare down at the joinery of their hands.
"You could turn me in," Renjun blurts out.
Here he is, alone in the lion’s den, practically giftwrapped. If Mark called in the Bureau he’d have no chance of escape or resistance. He knows he isn’t at the top of the public enemy list, on account of Donghyuck monopolising that space, but he’d have a reasonable claim to the top five, definitely. There is no reason Mark should aid him, and yet he has, with an attentiveness that Renjun feels is not warranted by simple compassion.
“I'm not gonna do that,” Mark says.
“Why?"
Mark shrugs. "Same reason you came here in the first place, I guess?"
“You mean coincidence?”
A steady gaze. “You trusted me,” he says. “With your life. Literally. That’s something special—that means something. You know?”
Renjun’s face heats up. Faintly he says, “Um.”
Mark bulldozes on. With zero trace of irony: “Have you ever thought about, like… not being evil?”
Bizarrely touched by this, Renjun says, “No, not really.”
“You could, though,” Mark says. “Like, I could sort everything out with our guys if you wanted to come over to our side. Then I wouldn’t have to turn you in anyway. Really, I mean it, it’d be so awesome to work with you and not, like, against.”
He almost glows with earnestness, so bright Renjun has to focus on Mark’s chin for a moment instead of meeting his eyes. “You must have a thousand fliers already, though,” Renjun says.
“Sure, but they aren’t you, you know?
“What does that mean?”
“I think you’re a good person,” Mark says. “Like. Even though you're a supervillain. There’s something different about you.”
“You’ve never even met me properly until now,” Renjun says.
Mark smiles. “Lucky guess,” he says. “I’m pretty good at those.”
With something stopping the blood from fleeing Renjun’s body en masse, his truant healing factor finally decides to clock in, the familiar corrosive spike of heat almost more painful than the injury itself, without the adrenaline to dull the blade of sensation. By unfair contrast, Jaemin’s healing induces a sparklingly pleasant and almost lethargic warmth, though it’s possible this is intended to have a secondary function as some kind of entrapment tactic to keep prey sedated.
He extricates his hand from Mark’s with some effort; Mark’s grip has been getting progressively tighter, seemingly unconsciously. Mark blinks, fingers belatedly opening, though Renjun has already vacated the space between them and stood up. A brief moment of lightheadedness, and then he's fine. “Are you leaving?” Mark asks.
“Yeah," Renjun says. "I think my powers can keep things together enough for me to get back.”
Now that he’s aware of his approximate geographical location his priority should be transporting himself to an extraction point and getting out of enemy territory. Already the burn through his shoulder is dulling to a mild stabbing ache, a record swiftness that must be attributable to Mark’s probabilistically-blessed assistance. Jaemin can fix anything that’s still wrong with him.
Mark shifts like he wants to intercept Renjun, but the path between the couch and the window remains unobstructed. “I was gonna offer—you could stay the night, if you wanted?” he says. “And, like, leave in the morning when you're done healing, I swear I won't turn you in or anything. You could take the bed… I don't want you to get hurt any worse. You know?”
Rueful, Renjun shakes his head and moves toward the window. “We have trackers, they’re probably going to find me soon anyway.” This is mostly true. Jaemin’s specialisation in ambiguously-phrased semi-truths is often a source of frustration, but sometimes the secondhand expertise proves itself useful. “If they show up here… I’d rather we didn’t—get caught up in all that. But—thank you. For everything.”
Mark lives in a civilian district, after all. Jaemin and Donghyuck have less compunction about it, but Renjun does try to keep civilian casualties to the absolute minimum. And maybe he also wants to ward off the intrusion of the outside world into this space for a little longer. He hasn’t forgotten where they stand, Protagonist on one side and Kestrel on the other, but surely there are places in between, some littoral zone, where it isn’t impossible to meet. To have that lingering point of contact. The startling relief of Mark’s sure and grounding hand.
No obstacles between him and exit, but Renjun hesitates anyway. He touches the streak of blood on the windowsill. “Sorry about your couch, also,” Renjun says. "Send us the dry cleaning bill, I’ll expense it to Fullsun’s account.”
"I mean," Mark says. "Like… how would I send it to you…? You guys don't exactly have an Evil HQ address or anything, right?”
"I'm literally in your house," Renjun points out. “You can leave it in your mailbox or put it in skywriting over the building or something, we’ll pick it up.”
Mark rubs the back of his neck. “You could always come by again in the daytime and I’ll just give it to you then,” he says. “Like, if you’re free—whenever you’re free. Yeah. Anytime.”
“Okay,” Renjun says. He has to duck his head to hide a smile. “But make sure you lock your window once I go. Like I said. It’s not very safe to just have it open like that.”
“It’s good to get some fresh air, though? Like, it’s fine, it’s not like normal people can really get up here.”
“That’s exactly why you should be worried. The only people who can get up here are the ones who are not normal.”
“I don’t know, last time I left my window open an angel dropped in.”
'“Do you say that to every supervillain who breaks into your house?” Renjun says dryly.
“Nah,” Mark says, grinning boyishly. “Just you.”
Renjun opens his mouth to respond and instead finds himself flushing violently. In horror, his mobiliseable hand moves up on reflex to cover his face, which might be even worse. “It’s… my healing powers, they work by spiking my body temperature,” he says weakly. “Like a fever… kind of thing.”
“Haha,” Mark says. “Cool, that’s cool… or I mean, it’s not cool, it’s literally hot—uhh, not as in hot hot, but like, warm hot… Uhh, anyway!” He jumps to his feet too, like he’s trying to physically redirect this train of speech before the derailing reaches catastrophic levels. It’s fascinating. The awkward sincerity, the magnetic confidence underneath. He looks more handsome than anyone has the right to look under the yellowish apartment lighting. “I mean it though, we should do this again. But without the whole,” Mark gestures at Renjun’s shoulder, “… you know. That part.” He peers at Renjun. Hopefulness without expectation.
This time the answering smile is helpless and irrepressible; Renjun’s eyes slip shut for a moment from the sheer force of it. His heart stutters, an arrhythmia that has nothing to do with near death experiences. Mark’s handiwork scaffolding his shoulder, Mark’s luck radiating outwards to will every best possible outcome into reality. Anything could happen. Renjun believes it.
“Then I’ll see you around,” Renjun says. “Mark Lee.”