Chapter Text
The first thing Lee Sejin did to Agent Park Moondae was piss him off.
In his defense, though it’s not much of one, he honestly thought Moondae was a rookie. He didn’t exactly give off the vibe of a senior agent, with his vague expression and skinny build. Within the Agency, even the desk agents usually looked like they could take the field at a moment’s notice. Park Moondae looked like he could fall asleep at a moment’s notice. And he wasn’t wearing his Agency-mandated mask.
So when he introduced himself to Sejin with a nod and a quiet “I’m Park Moondae,” Sejin didn’t second guess his first impression.
He laughed and said, “Hey hey hey, no real names! Always use your codename when you’re on the clock. Like, I’m StarOne. Try again!”
It was like a scene from a nature documentary, when they show you a forest scene with no animals in it, but then the perfectly camouflaged animal moves and you realize there was, in fact, something lurking there that had simply tricked your eyes into missing it. It was that exact feeling when Park Moondae’s sleepy gaze went from “bored” to “boring into Sejin’s head like a drill.”
Not a rookie. Definitely not a rookie.
“I’m Park Moondae,” he repeated.
Sejin’s eyes fell to the desk Moondae was sitting behind, and the nameplate on it, which would of course say his codename.
PARK MOONDAE, read the plaque.
“Got it,” Sejin said, mouth dry. “My bad. I’m StarOne. Looking forward to working with you.”
“Likewise.”
Neither of them meant it at the time.
“Dodge. Whatever you do, don’t hit her.”
“Fucking excuse me?” Sejin yelled back, dropping to the ground to avoid the punch he had been about to knock away. Gravel that had once been smooth pavement crunched beneath the knees of his suit.
“She’ll absorb all force that hits her and turn it back on you. Run west.”
Cursing in one long stream under his breath, Sejin dodged a kick, slid around the villain, and sprinted west.
Heavy footsteps pounded behind him. “And what if she hadn’t followed me?” Sejin huffed around his gasping breath.
“You’re wasting energy. Five blocks to go. Left!”
Sejin threw himself to the left. A beam of pure, hot, concentrated fuckyouuppery blew past him.
“And that would be the energy from when you hit her before,” Moondae said.
Sejin was busy regaining his speed, but he held up a middle finger in the direction of the drone flying overhead.
“You’re welcome. You’re coming up on a wall across the middle of the street. Don’t lose speed, phase through it.”
Fuck, he hated phasing. It was the power he had the worst grip on. He’d only learned that he had it since he started working with Moondae and half the time he couldn’t make it work.
“You’re trying to pancake me!”
“I’m trying to pancake her. Don’t second guess. You’re going through that wall.”
He could see it now, a brand new wall of steel turning this street into a dead end, looming larger and larger as he sprinted toward it. Moondae must have been on the other line with Steeler to get it up within the last few minutes, because it was still shining unrealistically bright. It was going to hurt like hell if he bounced off that thing.
“I can’t—“
“You can.”
“If I die—“
“I’ll send flowers to your funeral.”
He screamed, part frustration, part fear, part anger that Moondae would ask this of him when he knew Sejin was bad at it and hated doing it and hated how his whole body went shaky and unreal as every atom that made up Lee Sejin drifted apart and stretched to the point of pain until they snapped back together and he was whole and alive on the other side of the wall.
Behind him, the entire structure shuddered as the full force of a dumb, angry robo villain crashed into it. Then there was silence.
“She’s out cold. You can go shell her.”
Sejin looked shakily over his shoulder. The wall was starting to rust, but it would be a while before it started to really decay. Steeler had become much more powerful recently — he couldn’t have made something this big last this long before Moondae took over as their agent. And Sejin was definitely not phasing a second time within one minute. “I’ll go around the block.”
“There’s a door for you. Look down.”
“What am I, a pet?” Sejin asked, seeing the doggy door-like cut out at his feet. But he was grateful, because he realized as soon as he saw it that Moondae wouldn’t have wasted Steeler’s time adding this to the wall just to make Sejin’s job slightly easier. He’d installed it as a fail safe in case Sejin couldn’t phase, so he wouldn’t be stuck in a dead end, trapped with a villain he couldn’t even fight properly.
When he’d first been told that Park Moondae had never lost a hero, he hadn’t been impressed. Moondae was probably as young as Sejin, he sure fucking hoped no handler managed to get their hero killed that early in their career. But that was before he realized the Agency exclusively gave Moondae the most difficult heroes they had. Now he knew why Agent Hamster (excuse him, he meant Agent ReActor, of course) bothered to tell him Moondae never lost a hero. Considering Moondae’s roster, that was both an achievement and a testament to how good he was at his job.
Arguments and middle fingers aside, Sejin felt safe with Moondae.
He crawled through the door, very dignified, and emerged practically on top of the collapsed robo-suited villain. Moondae’s drone was already there, and it drifted to hover over his shoulder as he pulled the tool heroes tended to call a nutcracker from his belt and used it to pry off the face of the robo armor. After the rash of robo villains they’d had this year, he was adept at shelling them open.
The face of the human inside was distorted by the wiring that meshed her into the armor, plugged in at her temples and cheeks and snaking into her nostrils. One side of her jaw had already been replaced with metal plate. “Salvageable?” he asked.
“Maybe. Cleanup’s on their way, just administer the sedative.”
“How’d you know it was a woman inside?” Sejin asked as he injected it in her neck to ensure she’d stay out until the Agency had her restrained in the medical ward. He tried not to think about the likelihood that the wires through her nose had already reached her brain and done damage the Agency couldn’t undo. The robot had been smart enough to put up a fight, which implied it was feeding on brain matter. But, he told himself, dumb enough to ram face first into a wall just because a hero had done it, so it might not have progressed that far yet.
He hated thinking about it. Better to bother Moondae instead.
“The same way I know everything,” Moondae said, as he always did. “You’re shaking. Drink your reco.”
“It’s just adrenaline. I’ll eat something real when I get back to base.”
“Drink the reco or I’ll tell cleanup to take you in for a checkup.”
Sejin swatted at the drone, but Moondae didn’t even bother to maneuver it out of reach. They both knew Sejin wouldn’t risk actually damaging it. Their department’s rate of wrecking the Agency’s drones was already sky high thanks to Moondae’s hands-on approach. Sejin had seen Moondae clobber a villain over the head with a drone multiple times before, and when that happened Moondae wasn’t the only one who had to sit through Agent Archer’s inevitable lecture about how drones were surveillance, not weapons. As if Moondae’s heroes held any responsibility for their handler’s firm belief that anything was a weapon if the situation called for it.
Also, Sejin wouldn’t hurt Moondae’s drone because he always got attached to them. After all, he saw Moondae’s drone more often than he saw his handler’s face. He’d put a sparkly sticker that said “You’re a star!” on this one, and he was probably going to tear up at least a little when Moondae inevitably wrecked it.
Park Moondae never lost a hero, but he also never kept them. Sejin didn’t know that at first. As usual, it was Hamster who informed him.
“I hope you get sent to the other base when Moondae’s done with you,” ReActor had said spitefully when Sejin referred to him as Agent Hamster for the third time in a day.
“When he’s done with me?” Sejin laughed. This was a few weeks into being on Park Moondae’s team, well past their rocky first impression. He was no longer wary of Moondae, and however much Moondae might grumble, he knew his handler liked him too. “What are you talking about?”
“When he passes you on. He always does that, didn’t you know? Moondae’s team is a pitstop for heroes.”
Sejin stopped laughing and went to the records room. Each handler in the Agency had a drawer there with (highly redacted) files on each hero that had ever been on their team. He pulled open some random ones to see what they were like – handlers with the longest careers could have tons of files with the red tabs that meant a hero was no longer with them, though some handlers led basically the same team with few additions or changes for their entire careers. Young handlers had emptier drawers with very few red-tabbed files.
Park Moondae’s drawer was as packed with files as a veteran handler’s, and all but the most recent four files were tabbed. Sejin ran through the dates on them. It wasn’t that Moondae was much older than he’d thought, which was the first way his brain tried to rationalize it. The files only went back three years. But within those three years, Moondae had gone through as many heroes as some handlers went through their entire lives.
All of the heroes in the red-tabbed files had been transferred to another handler’s team after, at most, two years; some after only a few months. Most were about a year. Every transfer was marked “handler requested.” The single exception was the hero ReActor, who transferred from fieldwork to being a handler himself. No other hero had requested the transfer themselves.
Standing in the records room with a cold feeling like ice cubes melting in his stomach was also where Sejin realized Moondae was exclusively given problem heroes to handle. Some had barely passed hero qualifications, like Sejin; others had issues controlling the strength of their powers, like Tiger; others were struggling to get back in the game after an injury or leave of absence, like ReActor.
Moondae worked with them for a while, and then he was done with them.
When cleanup arrived, they found Sejin sitting on the curb, reluctantly drinking his gross Agency-provided recovery fluid while patting the drone, currently in power saving mode, on his lap. He pressed the button on the wrist of his suit to get Moondae’s attention, knowing Moondae had probably tuned into one of his various other channels in the meantime.
“Cleanup’s here and I’m all reco’d. Got anything else for me?”
“Are you all reco’d, or did you dump half of it out?” Moondae asked.
“All reco’d,” Sejin confirmed, as he emptied the rest of the bottle onto the street. A cleanup team member gave him a look.
“Then head to these coordinates. Ham’s team could use backup.”
Only Moondae could get away with calling Agent ReActor that.
Sejin blinked up the map interface on the inner lens of his contacts, and stood up. “Got it.”
The drone rose up off him with a buzz, only to pause in mid air over the puddle of reco fluid on the ground. It rotated in place so its “face” faced Sejin, an entirely unnecessary move since there were visual sensors all over the drone’s body and Moondae spoke directly through Sejin’s headset rather than the drone’s emergency speaker. But this side of the drone had the angry eyebrows Tiger had drawn over its “eyes.”
“StarOne.”
“Yes, Agent.”
“You fucking liar.”
“You don’t know how gross that stuff is,” Sejin protested, setting off at a jog for Ham’s team’s location. The drone zipped off to take a more direct route over the buildings of Seoul, but Moondae’s voice stayed as close as always, directly in his ear.
“It’s not that bad. You’re a big baby.”
“You’ve had it?”
“Situation’s deteriorating,” Moondae said instead of answering. “I’m sending Tiger out. He’ll meet you there.”
Hmm. Sounded like Moondae had tasted reco fluid before, despite being a desk agent. It wasn’t the first time this idea crossed his mind. “Have you been in the field as a hero?”
“No. Remember to look sharp, because I can’t pay as close attention when there’s two of you out there. Ham’s team is taking on a modified robo like the one you just had, and there’s three normal ones I told him we’ll handle.”
“Got it, boss.”
It was a long, tiring day of cracking robo heads, and by the end of it he was more than ready to be finished being StarOne and just be plain old Lee Sejin for the night.
He looked around for Moondae when he went back to base to debrief, but the handler had already left for the night. Sejin left him a doodle of Moondae-drone (Moondrone) on a post-it on his desk for him to find in the morning, unsuited in his assigned hero pod, and clocked out. Leaving was a hassle, as the Agency carefully timed the use of the exit tunnels so heroes, agents, and anyone else with civilian identities didn’t run into each other outside of their suits. But eventually it was his turn to exit and he stopped by his favorite restaurant for takeout on his way home.
He passed the wreckage of the earlier fight on his way. Agent Hamster’s team was still hanging around, drinking reco and chatting with the cleanup crew. He had to resist the urge to wave to his friends among them, remembering he wasn’t suited up.
“Hold please,” a voice called out as he entered the elevator in his building, and he put a hand over the door to keep it from closing. “Thanks.”
Sejin nodded as his neighbor who had moved in recently, also carrying a brown bag of takeout, entered the elevator as well. He punched the button for floor seven for them both.
“Long day?” he asked. His neighbor always had eyebags, but they seemed particularly dark today.
“Just as long as usual,” Ryu Gunwoo answered.
“How come you don’t have to wear a mask?” Sejin had asked Moondae, shortly after he was assigned to the handler and noticed that its absence wasn’t a one-time mistake.
“None of your business,” Moondae had answered.
Agent ReActor had been a bit more forthcoming, in his own way, when he overheard Sejin asking about it. “Use your brain. If he’s allowed to show his face, then it’s obviously not his face.”
But if Moondae was a shapeshifter, why was he a desk agent rather than a hero? It was just another mystery about his handler that Sejin hadn’t yet solved.
Gunwoo glanced over at Lee Sejin as the elevator rose, blinking open StarOne’s status window. It was unnecessary, given that he’d checked it constantly over the course of the day as usual, but it was just instinct at this point.
StarOne had been an underwhelming hero when he started at the Agency, but his status window was anything but. His super strength and agility had S rank potential, and he had powers that hadn’t even manifested yet. Since Gunwoo had the Agency put StarOne on his roster, they’d raised his standard stats by at least half and begun working on phasing.
That was some incredibly fast improvement. At this rate, Gunwoo could probably transfer StarOne to another handler in a few months. Maybe to Archer’s team – Cheongwoo knew how to make the best use of his heroes’ talents, and StarOne hadn’t managed to piss him off yet.
It was a good thing, that he’d be letting go of StarOne quickly. The sooner he helped his heroes reach their potential and relocated them, the sooner he could bring in a new hero to help, and the more heroes he would help overall. It was all for the Agency and for the city’s safety.
But for some reason, he didn’t feel the sense of satisfaction he usually did from building a hero up and passing them along. Instead, he felt like he was going to miss this one. Maybe that was why he hadn’t turned around and rejected the lease when he realized StarOne lived down the hall from the apartment he was moving into as a civilian. That was stupidly sentimental, though, so Gunwoo chose not to think about it.
He wasn’t the kind of handler to spend his career with a permanent team, and that was all there was to it.
Sejin ate quickly, happy to have something in his stomach besides recovery fluid. It might be engineered by the Agency specifically to replenish heroes’ strength, but real food just hit different. Also, it tasted good, which was something no bottle of reco ever did.
Moondae would keep nagging him to drink it, though. Because he cared. Sejin, like everyone else, had observed dozens of hero-handler teams during hero training, but he had never seen a handler who so obviously cared the way Moondae did.
So why did he keep passing on his heroes?
Sejin cracked open a beer while he thought. He was going to get to the bottom of this mystery, and every other mystery about Park Moondae. And, while he was at it, he was going to be the first hero Moondae couldn’t give up.
Park Moondae just better watch out.