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“Fuck you, Seungcheol, I’m not getting on a jaeger again,” Mingyu spits at the receiver of his phone.
Answering his phone at two in the morning after his ringtone drones for a solid five minutes is something that his body refuses to do nowadays. His eyes sting against the brightness of his phone screen, and his arm still aches in the journey from grabbing his phone and leaning it against his ear. Maybe if he was at least three years younger, this call wouldn’t be so much of a burden on his body.
Even with the phone away from his ear and his thumb hovering over the red button, Seungcheol is a frenzy of “Wait, wait, Mingyu.” He huffs, scowls into his phone, and surrenders another listen into what Seungcheol has to say after being cursed out. After all, Seungcheol pulled Mingyu out of the routine of risking his life on the top of a concrete wall of political outcries and crumbling promises. But then again, Seungcheol threw him into risking his life on top of machined steel of political outcries and crumbling promises. “Pohang still has Emerald Endeavor on standby. I’m not putting you into a jaeger you don’t know.”
“But you’ll put me with any copilot?” An uneasy breath rustles through, and it’s enough evidence for Mingyu to shoot down this bargain. “Goodbye, Seungcheol.”
“Mingyu” shoves into his ear in a plea. “It’s a category four, and we only have one jaeger in commission. A mark three, no more, and the jaeger they're offering from Nagasaki will take too long to get here to keep the kaiju back.” Seungcheol’s voice wanes down.
At some point, Mingyu can’t help himself from feeling sorry for the marshal. He hasn’t been up-to-speed with the prediction calculations since his months after leaving Pohang for good but with predictions on the news every day in print and digital–in weekly emails from his boss and bulletin boards around the office–he has no excuse to not be vaguely aware of when the next kaiju is expected to come through the Breach. At the same time, Seungcheol could have called up anyone else, someone with an unsevered connection to their copilot or someone who has retired only months or even weeks prior to now. Mingyu hasn't touched a drive suit in five years, so why him?
“Just this once, Mingyu, and you’ll never hear from me again.”
A curdle of guilt settles in the pit of his guts.
Why is he so selfish about getting back into a jaeger when it can possibly save thousands of others right now? Seungcheol may have thrown him into the perilous life of piloting and saving lives around the Pacific, but he’s the same person who made sure that Mingyu never left Pohang with less than what he deserved. Mingyu can put a reasonable price tag to his worth, but his words mean nothing without "marshal" before his name. A nice apartment in the bustling center of the country, where kaiju is less of an everyday worry and closer to a world away. An accountant job for a consulting firm that pays him well than enough to have his apartment and his car and with a boss who genuinely likes him. Kilometers and kilometers from Pohang, the Shatterdome still has some connections to his workplace.
A rub at his eyes, he flips over on his back. “Alright, fine. Fuck, do I still need my card to get in?”
“Kim Mingyu?” balks at him the second he scans his cracked, peeling ID card and gets granted entrance into Pohang. He was much thinner in his card back then, eyes beady and shiny in fear and destitute of confidence. After a supposed one-hour car ride that Mingyu heavy-footed to forty minutes, he should have known that his presence in the Shatterdome would cause some surprise, some absolute confusion. He just didn’t think it would happen the second he stepped in.
Yoon Jeonghan hasn’t changed in the years, except for dying his hair blond and letting his hair grow down to his shoulders. Features as soft as ever, no sharpness besides the rock-solid stare in his eyes, perhaps ensuring that yes, it is Kim Mingyu, Kim Mingyu is the one he is looking at. “Seungcheol called you?”
A shrug of a shoulder. An exhausted drag of his hand over his own face. If he had more than three hours of sleep, he would be surprised, too, but the world runs on a thunder of footsteps and beelines of commands, and he would rather be tucked under his blanket and repaid for the gas to get here and back. Emerald Endeavor this, Emerald Endeavor that, Emerald Endeavor up there.
“He sounded desperate on the phone.”
“Desperate?” Jeonghan rolls his eyes at his words, offended in a way that Mingyu doesn’t understand, nor does he want to care to. “I gave Seungcheol a list of pilots who checked yes on the form, and you weren’t on that list.”
Another shrug of his shoulder, Mingyu remembers that form clearly. Before retiring away his life of piloting, the PPDC required prospective retirees to fill out a form asking for permission to call them back to the Shatterdome in a “time of need.” A flick of the pen, a click of the mouse for No and the contact information portion, which made up much of the form anyway, left as empty lines, Mingyu was one of the very few to check off that box, to submit a blank form. One electronic copy, one physical copy, he wonders how Seungcheol got a hold of his information in the first place.
“He made it sound like he had no choice.”
Mingyu and Jeonghan finally meet in the middle, a firm handshake dissolving any remaining professionalism into one embrace that Mingyu knows he will never forget. A deep press of Jeonghan’s cheek on his shoulder, arms tight around his sides and palms flattened across his back. Jeonghan has always been the warmest inside and out.
“Do you still remember how to get bay six?” once they let go and step back.
“Shit, I wish I didn’t,” Mingyu jokes.
Jeonghan howls out a laugh before patting his arm, bidding him a safe return and a clean fight, an invitation to eat afterwards if Mingyu will still be around the area.
The commotion upon climbing onto bay six should have ruptured his eardrums. So many claps on the backs of his shoulders, he thinks he needs to balm the sore spot when he gets home. Too many hugs that he ponders the idea of feigning a cough or hacking a lungful away. He just wants to get this fight over with safely, cleanly, quickly and never have to step onto another jaeger again, just hopes that maybe Seungcheol will finally take a lesson and call up someone from Jeonghan’s list next time.
But when he changes into his drive suit, the rush of standing in front of the screens, in front of infinite pads of buttons that hold the power to end or continue the world, slips back to him like air. He used to feel invincible inside Emerald because in the back of his mind, there was the reminder that not many people could hop on a jaeger and make it out alive, let alone deal with kaiju in the flesh and face. In the back of his mind, there was always the reminder that thousands of lives depend on him. In the back of his mind, he knew that the news would dedicate an extra minute or two recapping the kaiju fight and debriefing LOCCENT with his own face taking up a quarter of the screen. In the back of his mind, the urn of Minseo haunted his footsteps from applying for the jaeger program to his return back to shore until his parents understood him, until they accepted that everyone had their own interpretation of grief. Mingyu’s just happened to be sacrificing himself in the name of honoring his younger and only sister.
Fluttering pulse in his chest, he pretends he’s twenty-two again and just starting to understand the weight of the world in his palms. The currents of the ocean uncontrollable and slipping away between his fingers. That being on one of the tallest jaegers around meant facing his fear of heights every time the siren summons him.
“Marshal Choi on deck” glides in his ears, and Jisoo’s voice is still as clear as ever. Nothing heavy and nothing slurring, everything Jisoo as if he never knew that a letter of resignation could exist in Pohang.
“Mingyu,” Seungcheol’s voice booms through the comms. “We’ll make adjustments to your drive suit while we wait for your copilot.” Just then, a new stream of a crew files in a single, orderly line. Toolboxes, soldering kits, plastic tubs on hands.
“Who’s my copilot?”
Perhaps it’s a newly-trained pilot that Seungcheol dragged over by the collar at the last minute. If that's the best that Seungcheol can give him, he would rather risk his life and pilot solo. Without the comms buzzing back to silence, Mingyu looks ahead to the technician tightening his chest plate. Not having to train for piloting anymore has made Mingyu go soft on vital muscles of his physique, his daily exercise now nowhere as intense and strict as his pilot training and workouts.
“Do you know who’ll be my pilot?” Mingyu tries his luck to coax the name out, even with a playful smirk.
“Can’t,” the technician says, a chuckle at the edge of his voice and under the rim of the technician’s white cap, there’s a smile on his face. “It’s good to see you again, Mingyu.”
Mingyu studies past the white puffy technician suit and the cap, the nearing-tattered silver PPDC patch barely shining through anymore in the lights inside of Emerald. “Chan?”
Chan turns off his power drill for a second to tilt his head up at him. “It took you so long to recognize me.”
“Well, I didn’t sleep much before coming here” earns a grin from the younger. Eyes still so bright and hopeful, Chan continues tightening the screws of his chest plate with a lingering smile. A ghost of a habit comes and goes, hands about to grip the younger's shoulders and talk as if they're fooling around in the Kwoon Room but disappears when he remembers that Chan needs to work on his drive suit. “How have you been, Chan?” barely comes through when Chan warns him that he’ll start working on adjusting the docking of his spinal clamp.
“Kind of the same, except I’ve been dating someone for a year now.”
“A whole year?”
The past and present overlay each other. Back in the days when Chan stood much smaller that he was barely heard across the table, Mingyu would tell Chan that he’d beat anyone up who would dare to hurt him. He'd risk all the useless retraining modules and codes of conduct reviews to protect Chan from something as long-lasting as a broken heart.
“I know.” The smile carries onto his words. “He’s moving in with me next month. We’re waiting for his lease to end first.”
Mingyu smiles in return against the contagious beam in Chan’s voice, the smile reaching to his eyes. “I’m happy for you, Chan.”
“We should have a drink sometime, Mingyu.” His voice lowers, “I miss seeing you around Pohang.”
“Yeah, just tell me a day and-”
Before he finishes his thought, Jisoo’s voice cuts him off. “Mingyu, your copilot is here.”
Chan sighs through gritted teeth and flattened lips, his smile and a taste of reminiscence gone in a second. “I gotta finish your spinal clamp, Mingyu. But when you come back, we have to catch up.”
“With some barbeque, too.”
Their sudden planning rekindles the smile, childish giggles between them. One smirk from Chan over his shoulder is all he needs to stop talking, to hang onto loose promises about how to get a hold of Chan after he returns from this fight.
I shouldn’t be so cocky, he chides himself. He swallows hard, lets the words spin around and around in his head because even the finest mathematicians, analysts, engineers in all of PPDC dread the inevitable possibility of the unpredictable. Chan comes back to give one firm push of his palm on his chest plate, right over his heart.
“Too tight, Mingyu?”
A stretch of his arms up and his legs around, the drive suit is less slack on his body. Enough to let him move around but not so that the drive suit hovers too far above his skin. He shakes his head. “Just right, Chan.”
“Okay, you’re all done, then. Someone else will suit you with the spinal clamp circuitry.” Mingyu offers one solid nod. Chan bends down on one knee to fix his toolbox. Before he goes, though, his eyes lock on Mingyu, sincerity and worries at the corners, that reminds him of the times when Chan would pour out his apprehensions, his anxieties about being accepted into and entering Kodiak. “I don’t know if anyone’s said this yet but thank you for saying yes this time.”
Mingyu’s lips knock open, a little hollow in his chest and no words spilling out because Chan is already halfway through the comm pod, halfway down to the door. It hits him, then, that no one has said anything like that to him.
The doors of the comm pod evaporate the peace of mind and patience that Chan somehow engulfs him in. And usually, it lingers in him, clips over his heart like a locket until night falls and he places the chain on his bedside. Through the doors, another figure in a drive suit comes through, once shiny emerald plates now battered to a murky, hopeless moss. He scowls at his copilot, and he wants to slap Seungcheol for this.
“What the hell?” Mingyu’s lips crumple those words out, about to stay stuck behind his teeth if it weren’t for the sudden anger pulsing in him. The whirring of the drills, commotion of footsteps in and out of the comm pod diminish with his three words alone.
Jeon Wonwoo falls back in half a step, an invisible nudge to his chest, as if he’s disgusted by his presence, at having the need to say his name. “Mingyu?”
“You said you didn’t want to pilot with just anyone,” Seungcheol reminds him through the comms. He hates to admit that Seungcheol is right about that, but it also pricks his mind that out of anyone he has to control a jaeger with, of all people on this earth and whoever has graced this Shatterdome in particular, he hates that Seungcheol’s called back Jeon Wonwoo.
Wonwoo’s first steps back in Emerald tap tentative, as if testing the metal from disintegrating under his feet.
“I thought you said no in the form,” Wonwoo murmurs as he takes stand on his right side, a crew already beginning to swarm around him, following the same procedures that Chan has finished. One technician from the group steps to the side and stands behind Mingyu, the buzzing of another power drill to his lower back drowning the conversation.
The air inside the head of Emerald Endeavor sinks down on everyone to mere wordlessness. An occasional “How is this, Mingyu?” or “Give me one size up” or “Wonwoo, does it feel tight around your chest?” Nothing more than the crew working to make do with their abandoned drive suits to the best of their ability and he and Wonwoo relaying their answers, preferences, comfort accordingly.
“Didn’t you say no, too?” Mingyu slaps back. He stares ahead, trying to jog his memory of which button does what, which hologram shows up on which part of the screen.
The reflection of Wonwoo on the dark glass of Emerald Endeavor moves like a long-lost memory, speaks like an apparition. Almost present, but not quite. Proximity just an arm’s reach away but Mingyu refuses to believe that he can get anywhere closer. He can pretend to toss out a joke for old time's sake, but the stiffness in Wonwoo's words, in Wonwoo's neck tells him that Wonwoo won't reciprocate the habit, this once trusted routine.
“Seungcheol wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“I guess he really wanted us fighting today.” Mingyu notes the curling of Wonwoo’s hands open and closed, open and closed. Open. Closed. “Are you ready to get into my head again?”
Wonwoo’s shoulders spring up for a second, causing the buzzing to veer for a second and for the technician to tsk at him before starting over. “No-no. But I have to be, don’t I?” Mingyu shrugs a shoulder. “I’m sorry for the things you’re going to see.”
A faint, futile shake of his head, Mingyu tries to shove away the gamble of what it can be that Wonwoo is so sorry to have him see, but it’s the only thing that stops his own hands from trembling at his sides. Some money-laundering scheme Wonwoo’s been building since he left Pohang. Perhaps a murder he didn’t want to be a part of. Or maybe a murder he orchestrated himself.
“That’s just how it goes.”
In the Drift, their memories would begin with Mingyu’s angry maroon overtaking Wonwoo’s sky blue before the maroon dims down to a blushing pink and pink floats into a jarring white and somehow, the Drift shimmers through them in a breathtaking, merciful lavender. Whatever ticked Mingyu off by the seconds that very day, Wonwoo would counter it with a memory from his own life, thrown into the Drift for both of them to share, as if Mingyu was there in the memory and just needed a reminder of better, forgiving times. It was this balance—Mingyu’s anger, drive, desire to do the best in-hand with Wonwoo’s quietude, realistic and pragmatic approach into getting out of a battle alive and as close to one piece as possible—that allowed their names to roll throughout Pohang whenever kaiju emerged through the Breach.
But that was the Drift before they left Pohang.
To Mingyu’s surprise, the Drift drops him into drapes of the sky, clouds forming and gliding around them.
Mingyu thinks the first memory is of Pohang. Familiarity in the metallic drab of walls and exposed piping, the cacophony of metal being machined then bent above the debates of calculations and predictions above the stern voices of authority meticulously planning which pilots to send off tonight. But he looks up, and the doming windows on the roof showcase shards of monochrome and a swirl of thick wind. Mingyu has only stepped between the walls of Kodiak by name and pictures and now, secondhand memories.
The memory smears into bright lights above and a masked face hovering over from the side. On the reflection of the masked face’s glasses, a transparent reflection of Wonwoo’s face. Oxygen tubes up his nose, lips parted like his conscience ran away, and two white sticky tabs plastered on his forehead.
“You’re done with this week’s tests, Wonwoo. We’ll see you again on Tuesday.”
A pinprick across his forehead, he winces at the sight of Wonwoo’s face twitching inwards, the arch of his back up and off the surface through the glasses.
An ink drop of red, Mingyu recognizes himself in a company meeting. Ironed and fitted suits tossed together haphazardly in the name of celebration and flames of alcohol down throats. Metal tinkling into glass, thin smoke slithering through the air, and Mingyu manning the tongs and scissors with one too many buttons of his dress shirt undone. A slender fingertip on his shoulder, and his head turns to Hayi locked on him with a one-sided smile, languid blinking behind her lashes that teeter between the border of coworkers and acquaintances, a work after-party and an after-party taxi to her apartment.
Pale blue washes him lavender, and he's grateful to remain ignorant to the happenings of that night and why Hayi later migrated her belongings over one cubicle closer to him.
A child is the last thing Mingyu would have guessed in that gamble of what Wonwoo wants to hide from him. If the boy is Wonwoo’s, he’s not sure about that. He’s never heard anything from Wonwoo about having a child of his own but then again, Mingyu hasn’t heard from Wonwoo until approximately fifteen minutes ago. A son and a lullaby wrapped warm in Wonwoo’s voice in the same way the baby boy is protected and snug under a blanket that waterfalls down to Wonwoo’s waist. Long eyelashes closed but the smallest of smiles on his face, sun-kissed skin so golden and pure on this baby and a shell of dark hair over his forehead. The baby boy must have stirred in his sleep moments before this memory.
The next memory isn’t a memory at all.
His guts lift, suspend midair in a trip tiptoeing towards nausea, and the reflection of Wonwoo is of him in the drive suit, flashing streaks of light and moving catwalks and vibrating pipes and scurrying crew members zipping across his chest in a ghastly blur.
I’m sorry, Mingyu, Wonwoo’s voice reaches him.
What, you couldn’t pick what you wanted to show me this time?
“Jeon. Kim.” Seungcheol’s voice bears low on them, a haunting kind of worry. “I need you two to focus. Your neural handshake is starting to fall.”
He tries to focus. Not on the fact that after their fourth drop with Emerald, Wonwoo mastered controlling which of his memories to manifest into the Drift, while Mingyu laid his entire past, present, and uncertain future out to be probed and questioned and judged in every direction, in every shade of vulnerability. Not because Wonwoo confessed that after three years of piloting together. Mingyu reasons to himself that the little boy in the Drift needs his father home, and it’s not until Mingyu forces himself to secure that thought in a mantra does Seungcheol speak to them again.
“Looking better now. Keep this up.”
Seungcheol has yet to tell Mingyu the name of the kaiju they’re set to kill. The water sends the balls of his feet lulling, his head floating when the question of where the kaiju is waiting clings onto the tip of his tongue.
Call it something cool, Wonwoo’s voice finds him again, but something that can be broadcasted.
The first steps through the water, the muscles on his thighs are already screaming. A curse at the resistance, they cross another hundred meters when Mingyu finally responds, The morning news will just be bleeping our words.
A chuckle as Wonwoo presses a button, and a hologram shows, sweeping the area within a one-kilometer radius. Not a single dot anywhere. Seungcheol’s gonna have a hard time in the debriefing after this.
Good, he deserves a hard time for putting us together again.
Mingyu, please.
Shut up, Mingyu wades through the water and the tinge of defeat in Wonwoo when they haven’t even located the kaiju yet, I just want to get this over with.
“Wait for Haicheng Beacon to catch up before moving forward," Jisoo saves him from sparing Wonwoo another syllable, from a crevice of a conversation they don't need to have right now. "You’re three kilometers away from the signature.”
The serenity of Wonwoo’s unconfirmed son restrains Mingyu from leaping farther out into the water and demanding Jisoo to tell them which direction the kaiju is approaching from. To abandon Junhui and Minghao before they even reach them so that they can start fighting, so that Mingyu doesn’t have to be linked with Wonwoo like this any longer and ever again after this fight. But he reminds himself that Wonwoo has someone who depends on him now, someone helpless, someone who crawls around the world with eyes and ears closed to malevolence, who needs the kind of shield that only his father carries.
He begins dimming the holograms inside, wriggling his fingers and inhaling his lungs’ capacity to prepare himself for what’s to come. The world shakes around him and through the comms, the colliding excitement of Junhui and Minghao calling them unweaves the tension between his eyebrows, his jaws, his fists, his chest.
“Let’s finish this fast, yeah?” brims hopeful from Minghao.
“I’m glad it’s Emerald with us today,” Junhui pipes. Next to them, Haicheng Beacon raises her fists in the air, perhaps in a signal of a victory secured before the battle.
For nine minutes, Junhui orders them to stand their guard in the jet black confusion between ocean and sky. By the second minute, Jisoo alerts them of a signature again. At the fourth minute, Mingyu's ears are blessed with the first curse word out of Jisoo's lips and the curse that the signature has disappeared out of nowhere. Even the scope on Emerald isn't picking anything up. In nine minutes' time, the water tens of meters ahead of them ripples in zigzags.
"Get ready to move," Minghao warns them a beat too late.
His feet crash together, the strike of his ankles through the layers of metal shooting up to his legs, and Mingyu loses his balance, watching the sky instead of the water and his lower back stabbing his nerves from whatever Emerald lands on. The waves lap up behind the holograms but don't surge in.
"Mingyu, can you get up?" The urgency in Wonwoo's voice strikes him. It's not the solid, composed voice in his head.
"Yeah, yeah," he groans.
Just then, the single beam on Haicheng's head appears at the bottom of Emerald's periphery, her hands back up in the air then sinking back down somewhere below them. An ear-scratching screech that echoes even into the waters, Wonwoo winces beside him, and the kaiju releases their ankles. The eel-like kaiju unhinges its jaws, spewing out kaiju blue under the grip of Haicheng's claws in a rainstorm.
Wonwoo reaches out and presses a couple of buttons, assures Jisoo, "We're alright, just winded from the fall." Get up at the count of three?
You count down. When Wonwoo's voice strikes three, Mingyu props himself on his elbows and the ocean comes back to view around Emerald’s shins. Fuck, are you thinking of the sword?
Yeah, but I forgot-
The kaiju wriggles out of Haicheng's grip, screeching once more and heading towards Emerald. Without a thought, Mingyu punches a button to his right, listening to the gears rumble against his left arm. Haicheng begins its heavy sprint across the water, one hand reaching out in front of her and extended claws ready to grasp.
"Minghao, Junhui, we need you to grab the kaiju like the last time," Wonwoo commands.
A second wrap around his ankles, their left hands strike the sword onto the seafloor. Rather than falling backwards again, Emerald keeps herself upright long enough for Haicheng to return and sink her claws into the kaiju. Kaiju blue floats to the surface of the water, fluorescent in this daunting shade of three-in-the-morning Pacific Ocean. A couple buttons on Wonwoo’s end, the gears rumble from the right side of Emerald. They lift their right hands up to strike the ocean floor in front of them once, twice, thrice-
"Kaiju signature is gone," Jisoo rushes out in relief. "Amazing job, guys."
He hears Seungcheol's smile. "Start heading back to Pohang."
Junhui buzzes through the comms, "It felt like that lasted ten minutes?"
He wonders if Minghao has a head-start for these kaiju attacks because despite being one of the first category IV's, Mingyu knows that the four of them set a record on extinguishing the signature off the maps. All it took was Haicheng sinking her metal claws onto the back of the kaiju a second time for the fight to hand in their favor.
"Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds," Jisoo corrects Junhui on their way back to Pohang shores, kaiju corpse being dragged by Emerald's left grip on the sword. “That’s from initial contact to death.”
Mingyu takes sole responsibility on what Seungcheol will curse him out for because of this.
They're in med bay back in Pohang, only him and Wonwoo. Seungcheol yelped out one "Shit, Mingyu, we all can see that it's dead" before complimenting the four of them on a safe return, before sending the two of them off to med bay. Luckily, Junhui and Minghao step down from Haicheng Beacon unscathed, a walk in the park after being shaken awake from a nap.
Seungkwan has given them the royal treatment and sectioned off their two beds to the corner of the floor, curtains blocking them if they prefer to ignore each other. Mingyu’s sprained his back from the fall, and there's a cold pack stuck to his back by the gauze wrapped around his torso. The condensation from the ice pack oozes through the gauze and drips so much into his clothes that Mingyu's abandoned his shirt altogether. On the other hand, Wonwoo only sustains scratches on his lower back, where his side of Emerald apparently landed on coral. Mingyu must have landed on straight-up rocks.
Despite Seungkwan's orders, Mingyu wanders between the corners of their curtains, split open in the middle. Wonwoo remains sitting up on the bed, something about lying down irritating his back from the bandages.
Mingyu's lips part and shut, part and shut, part for an attempt at a conversation but shut back up because the answers to his questions are all found in the Drift. "So…you have a kid now?"
Wonwoo’s neck hesitates for a nod. “Yeah, I do. A son. You have a girlfriend now?
Mingyu shakes his head, heat creeping up to his neck, then his cheeks, then his ears at the memory. "Just slept with her, but I rejected her after." Behind him, the vacancy of Wonwoo's stare seems farther away. He wonders if Wonwoo is thinking about a person, a place, a memory. “What’s his name?” Picking at his nails, Mingyu lifts his hand to his lips, begins gnawing at the skin around his thumbnail and continues through the seep of warm metallic onto his tongue.
“Hajoon.” Wonwoo drops his head down, almost in prayer. “Jeon Hajoon.”
“Hajoon looks happy.” The nod of Wonwoo’s head comes slow, hollow. “How old is Hajoon?”
Wonwoo slips his digits in a tight thread. “He’s turning one soon.”
“Oh, when’s his birthday?”
“Tomorrow.”
Mingyu’s swallow nearly traps in his throat, and he coughs the roughs out. Guilt punches him numb on his feet, nearly shaking at his knees, but he runs one rough hand through his hair and falters to upright his spine in pure negligence and forgetfulness of the gauze there. “Shit, Wonwoo, I’m so sorry.” Wonwoo’s inhale quivers. “So if we didn’t make it-”
“Yeah” drops like deadweight between them, strained and hard to believe.
“Does Seungcheol know? That you have a son and his birthday's tomorrow?”
One heavy exhale out, “No, he doesn’t. It’s not like it mattered, though. I didn’t think I’d get back on Emerald, so I never thought about telling him or anyone in Pohang, really.”
"They should send you home right away, then." Mingyu crosses his arms over his chest, even if it suffocates him to the pains of his lungs. "Hajoon's mom can look after you and-and-"
He doesn't know which words to pick and place next to grow the space between them. In the drift, the memory only held Wonwoo and Hajoon.
"I found Hajoon in Changwon" kicks him square in the face.
"You moved back to Changwon?"
Wonwoo shakes his head. "I'm not allowed to; no one is, actually. I work in the recovery center there. I went to search for people after the last attack in Changwon, and Hajoon was under so much rubble." A tremble of Wonwoo's lips, the tears in Wonwoo's eyes, the world spins by in freeze-frames in a useless attempt to dry his own tears in his eyes. "The recovery center tried finding his parents, and they identified them two days after I found him…but they died from the attack."
Mingyu restarts his snail's pace around the beds and parted curtains. "So you're like his dad now?"
"In a way."
"Who's with Hajoon now?"
"My parents. They live with me to help look after Hajoon."
Mingyu doesn't notice the languid bobs of his head until then. "I'm pretty sure Seungcheol will let you go after Seungkwan gives you the okay. Some bandages, antibiotics, or whatever, then you can go back to Hajoon. It'd be fucking stupid if you mention Hajoon and they still make you stay."
"O-okay." Wonwoo's lips are knocked quiet, his eyebrows burrowing together in some sort of confusion that Mingyu fumbles to dodge. "What about you? You were eager to finish the fight."
"I wanted to get off the Drift," Mingyu deadpans. "Seungkwan won't let me leave if I keep walking and stretching around like this, but-"
"It calms you down," Wonwoo beats him to the end of his sentence.
Mingyu pretends to be occupied by the one med bay staff folding blankets at the other side of the curtains. Why the hell Wonwoo would finish his thought, let alone remember that bit about him, he doesn’t understand. Creaks of the bed behind him, Wonwoo limps to stand up and over to him, at the parting edge of the curtain.
"I'm going to look for Seungkwan. Maybe he'll really let me go home without needing to tell Seungcheol."
Mingyu nods his head and takes a step to the side to make space for Wonwoo, to get further away from him. The metal rings holding the curtains cling at Mingyu's pathetic tugging and pushing.
"Mingyu?" breaks him from his thoughts, and he's surprised that Wonwoo hasn't moved at all from beside him. "You can hate me, that's okay." The next words lodge in his throat. His eyes dart ahead of him. "Um, it…you're the reason why we're able to go home from this last fight." His hand stills on the curtain, and he doesn't know why his chest hurts, why his heart aches hearing Wonwoo like this. It all sounds like a goodbye reconciling for their last, unsaid one years ago. "Take care of yourself, Mingyu."
A bite of his jaws tight, he nods his head. Wonwoo delves into one begging scan of his face before he steps beyond the curtains and beyond Mingyu's sight.