Chapter Text
“That day, when you had to miss our anniversary because someone was attacking the city, why can’t I remember everything that happened?”
“Mingi we’ve been over this.” Yunho laughed. “Okay, I missed our anniversary. I apologized a million times and I want to make it up to you. So I called you. On the phone, let you know what was going on, told you the plan on how we were going to defeat him. It was the Jester, he was up to his usual antics. The fight was quick and easy. Like it always is with him. I tried to get home as fast as I could but I had to debrief with the agency and then I had to make sure Jester actually got to the prison this time. By the time I came home you were passed out on the couch so I carried you to bed. Remember now, sweetheart?”
“No.”
“Mingi,”
“No, that’s not…that’s not what happened.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. That’s what I remember happening.” Yunho chuckled, a sweet nostalgic sound that sent a pang through Mingi’s chest the moment he heard it. He knew that sound. He’s missed that sound. It’s what made his eyes blur with tears the moment Yunho stopped making that noise.
“I…I remember you being called out and I remember talking on the phone, but after the fight, it’s all hazy.” Mingi placed a hand against his temple as he tried to pull the memory to the forefront of his mind. A stinging sensation came to his eyes the clearer it all became. “It’s not…it’s not clear.”
“Mingi, I called. Remember? I called you once I got to the base. I told you that we got him, that I’d be home once I took him to the prison.”
“I know. I know you called. I remember that.” And yet, he couldn’t stop the tears from falling the more he began to remember.
“See? And once he was in prison I came home and carried you to bed. Don’t you remember, baby?”
“No, no I don’t remember that. Because it didn’t happen!” Once the truth came out, silence rang in the house. The only noise to be heard was the sound of their breathing. “It didn’t happen.” He whispers in the quiet.
“Yes it did. You woke up while I was carrying you.”
“No, no I didn’t. I didn’t.” Mingi dropped his head into his hands. The weight of his sobs shook his entire body. Like the moon pulling the tides. He felt as if he were underwater, as if he’d been pulled under the waves of a stormy sea, fighting to break his way up to the surface and just breathe.
“Mingi,”
“You didn’t come home. You didn’t carry me to bed and I didn’t wake up next to you in your arms. That’s what I wanted to happen. But that’s not what happened. It’s not real. This isn’t real.” It was like a rock had lodged itself in his throat the more he forced himself to talk. The words felt toxic as they spilled from his lips and the tears burned their way down his face as they formed a puddle in his hands. “You’re not real.”
“What are you talking about?” Yunho kneeled on the floor in front of Mingi, gently grabbing his hands away from his face. “I’m right in front of you.” He locks eyes with Mingi, watching the tears fall from his eyes at the sight of his face. Slowly, he places one of Mingi’s hands on his chest, directly above his heart for the younger man to feel his heartbeat. “Do you feel that? My heart is beating. I’m here, I’m alive.”
“No you’re not!” Mingi pulled his hands away from Yunho’s grasp, cradling them close to his chest. “I want you to be here, with me, I want you to be real. But you’re not. You’re not here…because you’re dead.”
“Mingi, you literally just felt my heartbeat. I don’t think a dead guy has one of those.” Yunho joked, but Mingi didn’t laugh. Instead, it seemed as if he began to cry harder. Because it was such a Yunho thing to do. To make a joke when things got too serious, to laugh and lighten the mood, it had his name written all over it. It was Yunho’s thing, but this wasn’t Yunho. No matter how much Mingi wished it was.
“You didn’t come home.” Mingi pulled his legs up onto the couch, resting his head on his knees. Again, he felt as if he were being pulled under the water. The waves were becoming violent the more he spoke, angrily trying to pull him under, beckoning him to silence his cries, to forget this conversation and lull himself into a false calm. Every time he grasped onto the true memory, something kept begging for him to forget it all and just be here, to listen to whatever reality Yunho was spinning. “I waited for you to come home, but you didn’t. I didn’t wake up to you carrying me up the stairs, I woke up to my phone ringing on the coffee table. Delilah called me, she told me…she said that there had been an accident during transport. She said that you had been involved in it.” The storm raged on, Mingi was completely submerged under water by now, his lungs burning as they begged him to breathe, let the water into his body, stop talking. The storm, this storm, clashed inside his head. One side wanted him to remember, but the other, more powerful side, wanted him to forget anything ever happened. He was drowning inside a storm of his own making. It begged him to forget, to let it go. But the floodgates had already been broken open, and if he stopped now he would never start again, because he would forget again. Something was making him forget, it didn’t want him to remember.
“I don’t know what to tell you, I’m right here. Are you sure this wasn’t a nightmare?”
“It wasn’t.” Down, down, down. Mingi was drowning, the water kept pulling him deeper as the storm raged on. His heart became heavy, as if tied up in chains as the tears fell faster and faster. His stomach churned, hot…cold…hot…cold, it made him sick. “Seulgi came over to pick me up and drove me to base. Chief wanted me to identify the body, your body.” Down, down, down. He was drowning. “I came back to an empty house, and I sank to my knees with my back against the door and I screamed and I cried but nothing I did brought you back. I couldn’t move for a week, I didn’t leave the house for a month, and I could barely deliver the eulogy at your funeral. You’re not the real Yunho, because you’re dead. I know that now.” Mingi was floating now, not sinking or swimming, just stagnant. He didn’t really feel as if he were in his body. As if everything that happened now wasn’t happening to him, not really. He didn’t know if that was better or worse. Sitting here, on this couch, in the apartment he’d bought with Yunho. As if he were watching a movie, like this wasn’t really his life now, just some badly reproduced version of it, an alternate reality of it. Because even though this man in front of him wore Yunho’s face, even though he talked like Yunho and had his mannerisms, he wasn’t Yunho. Mingi knew that now.
“I…I don’t know what to tell you.” Yunho sighed.
“How are you here?” Mingi questioned. “I mean, this isn’t possible, not when I identified your body in the morgue. How can you be here and not be here?”
“I’m,”
“Please don’t lie to me. Not again.” Mingi could tell when Yunho didn’t want to tell him the truth. His nose would scrunch as his forehead creased. He’d clear his throat before he began to speak as he tried to think of what to say. But Mingi was too tired to listen to lies. All he wanted was the truth, no matter how painful it may be.
“Okay.” Yunho lifted himself up into the couch, he adjusted them both so that Mingi’s head fell into his lap as he gently carded his fingers through the dark curls of the younger man’s hair. “I’m not here, not really. You’re sleeping Mingi, you have been for a bit of time now. When you found out I was dead you couldn’t handle the stress of it all. You tried to, tried to be strong at the funeral, tried to pull yourself together when the bureau called you out for missions, but you’d stopped sleeping and you’d stopped eating, and eventually your body got too weak to keep going on autopilot. You collapsed during a meeting, once you’d found out Seulgi had passed on, and your mind brought you here, to your dreams. It made this place, brought you to this memory. But you never remembered all of it. That’s why you went to Wooyoung.”
“That tells me how I got here, but you’re not telling me how you got here.” Mingi could tell Yunho didn’t want to tell him something. He saw it in the way he paused after each sentence, he’d always done that when he was debating with himself on what he should and shouldn’t say.
“I’m here because you needed me. I could see that.”
“But you’re dead! How can you see anything when you’re dead?”
“I felt it. I watched over you because I didn’t want to pass on without knowing you would be okay, without seeing you be taken care of and then you collapsed like that and it scared me because it’s too soon for you to meet me here. So I came over to your dream, I wasn’t going to stay for as long as I did, I never meant to but,” Yunho stopped himself. He took a breath, regained his composure as a single tear fell from his eye, “but you didn’t remember I was gone. And though it was selfish I… for a moment it was like I wasn’t dead and I had you here with me, safe and sound like you always should have been, living the life we should have had. One where the government and supervillains and powers didn’t get in the way. One where we weren’t responsible for other people’s decisions, where the weight of the word didn’t fall on our shoulders, and it felt nice. It felt nice to be able to sleep in and wake up at noon, next to you. It felt nice to be able to sit down and have dinner that led to late night talks, ones where we’d stay up for hours talking about everything and nothing all at once. To not have to rush everything because we didn’t know if we’d get to see each other again. It was the life I always wanted for us. For once in our life we were normal, and as selfish as it was I liked it. Then you started remembering things, and I didn’t know what to do, so each time I kept trying to make you forget.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me this?” Down, down, down. The more Yunho talked the further and further Mingi’s mind was dragging him under. He didn’t think he’d ever breach the surface.
“Because you were happy here and I didn’t want you to lose that. Because if you knew then you’d want to go back. ”
“But I’m trapping you here. I’m stopping you from moving on, from seeing your family again on the other side.”
“The only person I need is you.” Yunho pulled his hands from Mingi’s hair and gently caressed the side of his face, pulling his gaze to meet his own. “You and me against the world. But I’m not being fair to you. I should have let you go back, should have let you wake up.”
“What if I don’t want that?”
“What?” Yunho was caught off guard with the question, his eyes widening as Mingi laid himself bare.
“What if I don’t want to go back?” Mingi repeated. “What if I want to stay here, with you?”
“Mingi, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Don’t say that. I do know. When you died, I lost everything, the only reason I wanted to keep going, the only reason I stayed breathing. Losing you made me lose me. You died and took me with you.” He reached his hands up and cradled Yunho’s face in between them. “But now you’re here, with me, and I have a chance to make up for all the lost time.” Mingi wanted this, wanted to stay here so bad he could taste it on his lips. Yunho was right, this is how things should have been. They should have been allowed to retire, should’ve been allowed to have a normal life worried about the mundane things. Not out saving the world for people who didn’t care for it.
“Baby, you can’t stay here.” He couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand why Yunho was seemingly so against it. Didn’t want this to happen when he just said he did. They both wanted it, wanted this, so why was Yunho going back on his word?
“Why? Didn’t you just say that we were happy here? That the reason you didn’t tell me sooner was because you didn’t want me to leave? Well I don’t want to leave. Not if it means I have to keep living without you. Why can’t we have this?”
“Mingi, baby, no. You have to wake up. You have to keep going. If you stay here any longer you’ll die.”
“Then so be it!” Mingi yelled. “If it means I get to be with you then I don’t care. I have nothing to live for out there. As soon as I wake up I’ll be bombarded with more and more missions, surrounded by people who take and take but don’t ever give. I don’t want to live that life anymore. All I want is you, all I need is you. You were right, I wasn’t happy back then, but I am now. Here, with you, I’m happy. I don’t want to lose that again. I don’t want to trade this paradise for hell.”
“People need you.” Yunho tried to convince him once again. But if there was one thing Yunho knew about Mingi, it was that he was stubborn. Once he wanted something he wouldn’t back down from it.
“Screw the people. All they want me for is a sacrificial lamb. Someone to give up in their times of need. Never letting me rest. Well I’m resting now. I’m done. Call it whatever you want. But I don't want to leave. I want to be with you. I want to pass on with you. I want to be selfish. Just this once, I want this one thing for me, for us. Can’t we just do that? Please? Can’t we just be selfish?” And Yunho couldn’t say no, because Mingi sounded so exhausted and Yunho wanted to shield him from the cruelty of the world but he couldn’t do that because he was dead. And he was dead because of the people he’d sworn to protect. He died protecting people who couldn’t care less.
Mingi had been right in that regard. They wouldn’t let him rest if he woke up. The second his eyes opened they would give him case file after case file, mission after mission, most he wasn’t even qualified to do. Yunho knew that because they’d done it before. To both of them. When they’d gotten injured so bad they’d been forced into a coma, the first thing they awoke to wouldn’t be each other, it would be papers and criminals and everything in between. They could never just rest. Could never have a day for themselves.
So how could he look Mingi in the eyes and deny his request? How could he look at him in those sweet dark brown eyes, wide and earnest with hope, and tell him he had to go back to the place that brought him so many tears, so many hard times? How could he force him back to a place that bore no happy memories for either of them? He couldn’t, not really. He couldn’t tell him to go back, couldn’t force him to go back. The only thing he could do was respect Mingi’s wishes, respect the fact that he wanted to stay with him. He reaches up and grabs Mingi’s hands off his face in order to hold them in his own, intertwining them together, a promise in its own right.
“Are you sure you want this?” Leaning down, he presses a gentle kiss to the middle of his forehead before sitting back up and leaning back onto the couch.
“More than anything.” They stayed there like that, in this apartment. Even as the walls began to crumble and a bright light shined through the cracks. Even as the world fell apart around them and they were forced to stand with their hands held tight between them. Even as they were forced to walk to the door that showed itself in front of them. It was time for them to go. To leave this plane and head to the next one.
Together. Because they would never have to be alone again, would never be separated again. At least, they thought they would. They were so close, right there, and then Mingi’s hand started fading out.
“Yunho,” the man in question whipped his head back around, taking in the hints of fear in Mingi’s face, “Yunho what’s happening?” It takes him a minute to find what was wrong, takes him an even longer minute to rush over to him and grab him close in his arms whispering no over and over again. “Yunho, what’s wrong?” He couldn’t answer Mingi, couldn’t tell him the truth as the world began to rebuild itself around them, the door disappearing as more and more of Mingi’s body faded away. “Yunho, please.” It took a strength he didn’t have to pull back and look Mingi in the eyes as he told him these words, a strength he forced himself to fake as his tears fell freely.
“Forever,” he swallowed as tears built themselves up in his eyes, “is gonna have to wait a little longer, Mingi.” He can’t force himself to smile, force himself to hide the pure exhaustion and grief in his eyes as he looks at him. He wished so badly to trade places with him. To make it so he wouldn’t have to go through this again, but there was nothing he could do. Because he was dead and buried and Mingi was still alive.
“No, no,” he shakes his head at the realization that the organization was waking him up, “no, I don’t wanna go back.” He cries. “I wanna stay here, with you. I want to go to paradise.” Mingi didn’t know what was worse now. In the beginning he’d been drowning inside his own mind, had been fighting with himself to figure out the truth, now he couldn’t feel a thing as he was pulled away from his only source of happiness. “I want forever, I don’t wanna wait anymore.”
“I’m sorry.” Because what else could Yunho say in the face of such mourning? What else could he do, but hold him in his arms as he panicked and begged to stay here? There was nothing he could do or say that would make any of this right or fair.
“We were supposed to be selfish. We were supposed to stay together. I want to stay here.” His tears soaked through Yunho’s shirt as he talked. He wants, so badly, to grip his fingers on Yunho’s shirt, to hold it tightly as it twists beneath his fingers, but sobs harder as he realizes he doesn’t even have arms to move as he was being forced to wake from his coma.
“I’m sorry.” Yunho repeats. “I’m so, so sorry.” Mingi screams then, a loud, raw, and ugly one. One that ripped his heart straight out of his chest as it was the last sound he heard from him before he faded completely and Mingi’s eyes were forced open back into the real world.
“Dreamer,” a young voice calls out his hero alias as he looks around the dingy medical room the organization had placed him inside, “Dreamer, can you hear me?” Weak, he forces himself to sit up as he pulls the wires out of his arms and the string of oxygen from his nose. “Dreamer?” The voice calls again, couldn’t be older than seventeen, too bright and cheery to have been in this service for too long. It means that she’d just started here.
“Dreamer?” Another, softer voice calls out. A boy this time from the sounds of it. Young, too. Another child that had been recruited, probably a pair knowing how this place liked to work. “Are you okay?”
“What have you done?” He finally addresses both of them. Voice scratchy from being unused for quite some time, or perhaps from the tears building in his throat at the thought of being back here. He hated it, hated this feeling of resentment that bubbled in his stomach as he thought of possible reasons he would be brought back when he was so close to finally getting what he wanted. “Why are you here?”
“The organization said you’d been asleep for months, they sent us to wake you up!” The girl had such a bright smile on her face, as if she had done him a service by helping him open his eyes. “Good thing we got here when we did, you almost coded in the bed. That was a close one.” His eyes narrowed, a deep hate pooling in his guts. He knew it was wrong to feel that way toward someone so young, but knowing it was her to wake him, even if it was their company who’d sent them, it made it so easy for the feeling to seep in and fester. “We need your help.” She tells him, a somber tone overriding the smile on her face. “Something is coming, something we can’t stop by ourselves. You’re the senior hero here, you’ll know what to do. Once we get you in your suit and brief you on the details-”
“Find someone else.” He cuts her off, his voice cold as he turns away from the two children, because that’s what they were. Children. That’s always been how the organization works. Recruit them young and throw them to the side once they're too old to function. It happened to him and Yunho, it happened to Seulgi and Irene, now it was happening to these two, and they were too naive to realize it.
“What do you mean?” The boy laughs, as if Mingi had told a joke and not shut them down without a second thought. “We need you. You know these people better than we do, you have the experience.”
“Find someone else.” Mingi put his foot down, he swung his legs over the dude of the bed and stood, holding on to the rails at the end to steady himself until his legs stopped shaking. “I refuse this mission.”
“There is no one else.” The girl tells him. “Anyone who could have helped has been killed. You’re the only person we have left.” She charges forward and grabs his arm in her hand, forcing him to look at her and those wide young eyes. “Please, you’ve gotta help us. Help us save the world. Be the hero you were hired to be.”
“My world,” he snatches his arm out of her grasp, turning away once more as he shakily walks to the door, “is already dead.” He opens it, pausing in the doorway to say one final thing. “You just took him away from me again. I’d rather watch this world burn than save it again.”