Archive of Our Own ^beta

Over time, Wooyoung had come to understand.

Beomseok wasn't going to let him get any closer. He pushed him away violently every time Wooyoung crossed the line.

The first time, he wasn't aware of it.

The words simply rolled off his tongue and escaped his lips. A comment. A comment that promised to be mocking and lighthearted, but ended up being awkward and tense.

Wooyoung remembers the first time he met Beomseok. A broken dog, that was the best way to describe him. Small eyes, with dark circles under his eyelids, a fragile body, promising to be too thin under the dark sweatshirt he was wearing at the time, intense and deep pain buried under the flesh of his skin.

Wooyoung had a certain weakness for stray dogs.

However, that dog started out as a bank. Yeongbin had told him how rich Beomseok was, the son of an assemblyman, too suffocated by fitting in that he wasted whatever money was necessary to belong somewhere.

At first, he didn't believe him. However, once he locked eyes with him and saw him, everything just clicked. Something in his gaze screamed desperation, so loud and noisy that Wooyoung should have looked away.

He didn't.

Five seconds. He analyzed it, saw his grimaces, his discomfort, his submission, he saw it so much that it seemed like his eyes were going to fall out. Other thoughts echoed in his consciousness, but he let them pass.

They shook hands, a casual agreement. They were thin, long fingers, prone to breaking if Wooyoung pressed harder.

Then came the jobs. Beomseok wrote, called, quoted, gave names, ages, and weaknesses, and let Wooyoung do whatever he wanted with them and paid. Beat them up and get paid, that's how it was.

Until it wasn't.

One day, Wooyoung arrived feeling simply too bored, and Beomseok's serious, expressionless face didn't help matters. He spoke, a little more than usual, mockingly, as always. But just as he was about to shut up because talking to a statue wasn't stimulating at all, something in Beomseok's expression changed.

Too slight to describe as a serious grimace. Too small to be considered an amused or tired snort. It was just something. More than Wooyoung had ever gotten before.

And that something had motivated him enough for more.

He had discovered that the stray dog was not just a disguise for coldness. He could get irritated, annoyed, tired, confused, and who knows, maybe even cry and be happy.

Wooyoung's favorite stories were always tragic ones. They told the perspective of a broken protagonist, shattered and destroyed by others. Beomseok was the perfect protagonist for one of those stories.

Over time, the meetings became more casual. He was always summoned for the same reason: to destroy someone, but now he did something else before destroying someone. Wooyoung would talk, telling dry, simple jokes that came to him on the spot, which Beomseok would scoff at when they were too lame or raise an eyebrow at when they were... decent.

On rare occasions, Beomseok would contribute to the conversation. Nothing too long or rehearsed, just monosyllables that slipped unintentionally from his lips.

Wooyoung's image of Beomseok as a stray dog didn't change much. He was broken, in such a strange and disconcerting way that it stirred something inside Wooyoung.

But Beomseok was like a lost star orbiting in the middle of the galaxy. From afar, Wooyoung could believe he knew him, believe that the distance between them was steps he could easily cross, but once the distance narrowed, Wooyoung could go no further.

No matter how close Wooyoung thought he was, Beomseok always reminded him that he couldn't cross that line.

And, of course, it wasn't supposed to matter. It was a silent agreement that Wooyoung accepted from the moment he received his first payment: not get involved in their personal lives.  

They weren't friends. Beomseok was a broken man with enough money to pay Wooyoung to do his dirty work. And Wooyoung didn't care what Beomseok did.

Correction.

He wasn't supposed to care. 

So he didn't have to try to reach for the fallen star. 

He had to admire it from afar, silently, with the echoes of his thoughts orbiting around it. Wooyoung didn't want or need anything else.

He couldn't just stand there staring at Beomseok as if he were the most beautiful star in the galaxy. He didn't have to appreciate how strangely cute he looked when he tried to appear more intimidating by taking off his glasses and covering his bony body under a shirt twice too big for him. He had to stop looking at his hair, the line of his jaw, and his thin eyebrows.

He's getting off topic again.

Now, he was in a park. It was nighttime, past 9 o'clock, and he was a little bored. Beomseok hadn't texted him all week, nor had he called him. There was no name, no school, no age, nothing in the chat. 

He could excuse himself by saying he wanted his weekly allowance. They had been doing this for months, so much so that it had become routine. It wouldn't be strange if he started the conversation that way, right?

Wooyoung: No beating this week?

He spent several minutes checking his cell phone until the message notification appeared. A reply. An address. Nothing else. 

He got up from the bench and stretched his body. The place where Beomseok had asked him to meet was a few minutes' walk away, so he could warm up his body by the time he got there. 

Walking alone gave him more time to think. And, honestly, he didn't want to keep thinking about Oh Beomseok and his strange star metaphor. But the brain is treacherous.

The sound of his footsteps on the concrete stood out in the silence of the night. Wooyoung didn't understand the situation with Beomseok at all. He liked what he was offering: free training and easy money.

But that was leading him to the same bonfire. He thought about him too much. He thought about what he was doing and why he was doing it. Wooyoung already knew that Beomseok had been bullied at his old school. Yeongbin had told him about it as if it were gossip on the day he first met Beomseok. At the time, he didn't think it was important. Wooyoung beat people up for money and recorded it to upload it to the internet. But now...

He already knew that Yeongbin had introduced him, but even so, he had many options. Why did he specifically need Wooyoung, an idiot who beat others up for money, to take revenge? It didn't matter. Wooyoung had to stop dwelling on an issue that had the answers written down on a damn piece of paper from the beginning.

He watched as the shadow of a building grew larger as it approached. Beomseok's thin, tall, and fragile silhouette came into his field of vision as he turned the corner. However, there was something strange about the way his back was hunched forward, as if his body couldn't support its own weight and was sliding forward.

“Hey, Beomseok.” He waved his hand as he approached.

When the man turned around, Wooyoung had to force himself not to lower his hand and clench his fist. Beomseok's eyes had always been small, but now they were bloodshot, red, and swollen, the eyes of someone who had been crying for the last few hours. The sweatshirt he was wearing that night was dark, about three sizes larger than the one Beomseok had worn last time, giving him a more fragile and disheveled appearance.

Something had happened. Beomseok didn't usually look so devastated.

“Wow, you look like shit.”

Beomseok looked away. He reached into his sweatshirt pocket and pulled out a check for Wooyoung's weekly pay.

Wooyoung looked at the check in disbelief, raising an eyebrow.

"What? Are you going to pay me without me having done my part?"

“Here. There's no work this week.”

Wooyoung frowned. “If there's no one to beat up, don't pay me.”

Beomseok was Wooyoung's personal bank, but an uncomfortable tug formed in his chest at the possibility of simply taking the money without having earned it.

“Don't you want the money?”

“I want it.”

Beomseok was already getting irritated. So much so that he looked at him again.

“Then take it and don't bother me”

“No.”

“Why are you being so damn annoying today?”

Wooyoung growled, moving closer until he was face to face with Beomseok. He was right, his eyes were empty, swollen, his eyebrows drooping and his lips pressed tightly together. The sweatshirt was turtlenecked, loose-fitting at the bottom, dark and sober, as if he were trying to hide something.

“Why do you look so pathetically shitty? Are you sure there's no one I need to beat up, huh, Beomseok?”

The thinner one clenched his fists, throwing the piece of paper at Wooyoung's chest with irritation blossoming on the edge of his skin, wrinkling part of his sweatshirt. He would later have time to think that it was the first time he had seen Beomseok so angry, irritated, and upset.

“Wooyoung, take the damn check and get out. I'm not going to talk to you about anything.”

“Why?” he growled hoarsely and angrily.

By this point, Beomseok was fed up. Small curses spilled from his pursed lips, and his grip on his chest began to wrinkle.

At one point, Wooyoung grabbed Beomseok's wrist. Shaking his arm with controlled force.

“Tell me what's going on, and maybe I'll take the damn check.”

“It's none of your business. We're not even friends. Is your brain so tiny that you can't understand that?”

Like fog after a rainy day, the growing anger began to cloud his mind. The grip on Beomseok's wrist tightened so much that Wooyoung heard a small, pitiful moan escape from his lips. That stopped him.

He loosened his grip enough to prevent his fingers from leaving marks on the other's more sensitive skin, but he didn't let go. The fabric of the sweatshirt had wrinkled under his hand, revealing a small purple bruise peeking through.

Wooyoung hadn't done that. He could see his fingers marked a little higher up, not even the skin was red enough to give him away.

“Oh Beomseok, who the hell did that to you?”

Beomseok's frantic movements stopped, his breathing became so ragged that Wooyoung feared he was having a damn panic attack.

“Beomseok, what―?” Wooyoung had already noticed how heavy his body was for the other to hold on his own, but it became clear when Beomseok collapsed forward. On top of him.

In his hands, Beomseok's bones felt thin. His head ended up resting near his collarbone, his slow breathing bumping against his chest. Wooyoung placed one hand on Beomseok's lower back, the other still clinging to his wrist. Beomseok didn't move, his body had simply collapsed and he seemed to have no control over it.

“Wooyoung, let me go” There was no anger or rage, only a funeral-like exhaustion that spread through his pores.

The man let out a hoarse laugh. “So your face crashes into the floor? I'm not that asshole”

Wooyoung dragged Beomseok's body to the hidden corner of the building. It was difficult work maneuvering Beomseok's long, dead limbs. Wooyoung leaned his back against the wall, while Beomseok's entire weight rested on him. It was uncomfortable, feeling too intimate for what they were supposed to be.

The breathing beside him was low, cutting through the silence of the night. Wooyoung had already entered Beomseok's orbit, closer than he could have been before. 

“Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?” 

Beomseok snorted, letting out a heavy sigh into the air.

“What do you want to know?”

Wooyoung bit his tongue. He wanted to know so many things, but he didn't know how many steps he could take before being pushed back to the beginning.

“Why did you collapse?” It was probably the simplest question. 

Beomseok closed his eyes for a moment, but his body did not tense up. Good, one step.

“I have anemia. Sometimes I lose the strength to hold up my body and faint.”

“You haven't fainted until now.”

Beomseok grimaced. “You held me up. I guess you kept me awake.”

Wooyoung's stomach twisted.

“Why did you insist on paying me if there was no work?”

No tension, two steps, good.

“It's routine. I didn't feel like planning anything, but I had to pay you anyway because―”

“No.” Beomseok narrowed his eyes, annoyed by the interruption, but he didn't walk away. “From now on, if there's no work, don't pay me. Don't do charity with me, okay?”

“Whatever you want.”

The silence lingered. Wooyoung had already gotten close enough; he could keep asking questions, he wanted to, but he didn't know Beomseok's new limits.

“You've been crying.” It wasn't a question, but a confirmation.

Beomseok looked away to the other corner.

“Why?” Beomseok's body tensed. Shit. Wooyoung had to fix this quickly. “...If I may ask.”

Beomseok took longer than usual to respond. He let out two long sighs before speaking.

“Because a shitty old man”

Wooyoung nodded.

“Can I beat him up?”

Beomseok let out a bitter laugh.

“Unfortunately, no.”

Wooyoung felt anxious; he had one question left that could ruin everything.

“The bruises...” Beomseok tensed up, his whole body slumped over his shoulder, his lips pressed tightly together and his eyes closed. “Are they from that shitty old man?”

Beomseok tensed up. “I don't want to talk about it.”

Yes, that was a yes. Wooyoung gathered all his self-control so as not to explode at that moment. The old bastard had to be Assemblyman Oh, his damn father, the only man who could do that to Beomseok and not get beaten up by Wooyoung. A powerful public figure, with connections and the unpleasant authority to hurt someone and cover it up. Wooyoung felt strange; he had never before thought about the consequences of the blows, the screams, and the wounds. He didn't care, in fact. But seeing Beomseok so destroyed, kicked and beaten by someone else made his blood boil like he never thought it could.

All this time, Wooyoung thought that, with his jobs, Beomseok was getting away with the physical consequences. It was he who beat, it was he who spilled the blood, it was he who inflicted the wounds, and it was his face that was etched into the nightmares of those asshole.

Beomseok hired people, Beomseok investigated and planned, but at the end of the day, he wasn't the one who struck the first blow. In all his jobs, Wooyoung always made sure that idiots didn't lay a finger on Beomseok. But now it turned out that none of that mattered once Beomseok got home, his fucking father laid all his dirty, wrinkled fingers on him.

The grip on his wrist shook him out of his thoughts. He glanced down at the long fingers holding his left wrist. Beomseok was staring at him, his eyes fixed on his face and the way he tensed up.

“Let it go, it's not worth it” The words were hoarse, with a sense of resignation hidden between the letters. Beomseok had given up, probably long before any of this happened, and for some reason, that pissed Wooyoung off even more.

He clung to the touch on his wrist so as not to lose his way. Beomseok was in a very vulnerable moment, and Wooyoung couldn't screw it up. He was practically orbiting in the same orbit as his star.

“That fuckin' bastard is doing this to you. You don't know how much I want to smash his face in and destroy him completely.”

Beomseok hummed slowly. A little doubt, a little longing.

“Why do you care so much?”

Unlike the first time, this time the words were filled with genuine doubt, not annoyance.

And, just like the first time, he didn't have a clear answer.

Why did he care so much? Why did his blood boil and anger consume him at the mere thought of someone hurting Beomseok? He had no damn idea.

“I have no fucking idea” He replied brusquely.

Beomseok let out a low snort, a somewhat contented snort compared to the snorts Wooyoung used to receive.

“You're so weird”

“And you're too stupid”

Wooyoung laughed. The whole situation was so bizarre if he looked at it through the eyes of his version from three months ago.

Beomseok was leaning on his shoulder, his fingers wrapped around his wrist. Talking about shit he never thought he'd talk about with him in the middle of the night in an abandoned building. Wooyoung was in the same orbit as his star, and he didn't even care.

He still hadn't sorted anything out, his doubts—and concerns—about Beomseok had only grown, but now their relationship had been distorted—transformed was a better word—into something else. Beomseok no longer pushed him away, at least not now. He had let Wooyoung in enough to see a more vulnerable side of the stray dog, and Wooyoung didn't mind seeing it.

Now that he had entered the orbit, he didn't think he could leave.