Work Text:
He can’t say he’s surprised to see Park Seongha sitting on his couch, leaning so far off the seat to peer at the Union documents he’s brought that he’s about to fall onto his face at any moment. He’s donning his usual look of disconcerted gloom, fatigue-green trench coat tossed haphazardly somewhere in his house. The scene is so familiar he’d almost be more surprised if the agent wasn’t in his house, using his things with no intent of paying him back ever.
Changing one’s environment can be key to getting a fresh outlook on a problem, he lies to the awakened students at their academy.
Alright, maybe it’s not a lie, but it’s definitely him pushing his agenda. It’s him playing the long game to get him to maybe accept that he’s always going to be breaking into his house.
Well, sorry to say, it’s never going to happen. Having just changed out of his formal clothes, he does a quick turn back into his kitchen and grabs another drink. It’s absolutely sweltering today, but he doesn’t bother with ice. He never needs to.
Plopping himself down by the Union agent’s right after setting down the drinks and throwing his right arm over his face, flushed pink with the heat, feels almost second nature to him, he thinks as he stretches out his left arm as far as it’ll reach on the couch’s backing, slouched way down, seeking a kind of primal comfort in the dark that shields his eyes-
There’s the oh-so-familiar noise of ice cracking and popping as it’s chilled into existence, a few wayward drops of the liquid splashing against his knees when the ice is too excited to stay contained in the glass.
-And the sweet cool aftershock that lingers in the air after ice is formed isn’t so bad either.
He drops his right arm to his side to stare holes into the back of Park Seongha’s head as he continues to glare, uninterrupted, at the work that’s been haranguing him the whole livelong day.
Inhyuk begins to count.
One.
Two.
Three-
Park Seongha subtly slides the drink closer to him, bringing it up to his lips.
He snorts.
There’s no getting around the swift knock of the Awakened’s right knee against his own, but it so sorely lacks any threat at all, he’s looking at his own smile reflected back at him by the ice swirling around in his drink.
The movement sends a few leafs of paper fluttering off of the edge of the table, but a stray gust of wind knocks them back onto the table, resulting in a real mess of papers from the random re-orientation. Park Seongha shrewdly continues to stare at the paper that is most probably covered by some completely unrelated file as he pushes his drink back onto the table.
It wasn’t his plan to doze off, but it wasn’t exactly like he could be blamed for it in the stifling heat and silence of his home.
Several hours later, by incidence or purposeful malicious intent, he stirs, forcefully pulling apart crusty eyes and swallowing hard against a parched throat reeking of ketones, to survey the ghost-town of an apartment he calls home. The sun had sunk completely below the horizon since he’d last seen it, the violent gold and red tones soaking his apartment replaced with the cold silver of moonlight and the tapestry of city lights. His blunder of not turning on a dehumidifier was a dreadful one, as his skin is now pebbled with sweat, limbs sticking together wherever they came into contact with anything else, which is to say- everywhere. The sticky feeling, while completely unpleasant, draws his attention to a Park Seongha doing a frankly awful job at feigning sleep.
Waiting games are ones he always wins, staring down people with his glossy eyes reflecting light in their eerie way right as they-
Where he’s slumped over the Union Agent’s right side, mouth buried in the fabric of the sleeve of his shoulder, left arm arcing around his neck to rest over a bicep, Park Seongha flexes to brush against his fingers. There’s a deep crackly sound from the creases of his throat of someone attempting to speak after a long while before he clearly thinks better of it.