Work Text:
January
Q opens the door before Tae even raises her hand to ring the doorbell.
"Number Five," she says, lips pressed together in an unimpressed line. "How did you find my apartment?"
"Can I come in?" Tae asks. The hole in her shoulder is starting to tip over from annoyingly painful to actively distressing. She knows she has a limited amount of time before it becomes a much bigger issue.
Q stares at her for a long moment, and then throws her hands up and turns around, gesturing Tae inside. Tae follows, kicking off her shoes near the door. Q closes the door behind her. The locks that shut sound far more complex than they'd appeared on sight, a series of whirs and clicks that take a full few seconds to finish their routine.
"I thought you were in the field tonight," Q says, gesturing Tae into her small living room. "Wasn't Four with you?"
"He went home," she says, absently, hand pressed to her shoulder to keep it from bleeding too badly. It's a cute living room — she half-expected every quartermaster to live in a nest of monitors and microphones the way their rooms are set up back home, but Q's living room is almost completely devoid of visible technology, down to the pen-and-paper crossword puzzle sitting on her coffee table.
"Then, why are you— oh my god, did you get shot?"
"Kinda," Tae says, then shrugs with her good shoulder. "Bullet just clipped me."
Q gathers her by the good arm, hustles her into the bathroom to sit on the edge of the tub. Her touch is firm but gentle as she pries Tae's hand away from her shoulder and peels off her dress shirt. She's still got her standard issue undershirt on, clinging tightly with some of the blood starting to dry. It hurts when Q pulls gently at it, a little splash of pain through the numbness that's beginning to spread.
"I'm going to have to cut this off you," Q mutters, her hands fluttering over Tae's body. Tae gives her a weak thumbs up.
"Whatever you have to do," she manages.
Q opens up a closet and pulls out a full field medic's kit. She starts rifling through it, setting aside sutures and gauze and antiseptics on the lid of the toilet. Finally, she pulls out the flat-bladed shears and begins to cut the fabric away from Tae's shoulder.
"Ah, fuck." Every time the fabric shifts and pulls, it sets her entire arm throbbing. Tae powers through the pain by staring intently at Q's skincare bottles sitting on the sink, which seem to consist of a 2-in-1 face wash, a mostly-untouched moisturizer, and a little tube of sunscreen. Huh. She guesses that less-not-more is kinda working for Q. Her face is really close to Tae right now and her skin looks soft.
"Five. Five." Q's brows furrow.
"What?" Tae mumbles. Maybe if she asks, Q will let her sleep on her couch. It looked soft, too.
"I said, I have to clean this out, okay?" She has a bottle of antiseptic in her hand. Tae groans. She hates this part. It fucking hurts, no matter how gentle Q is.
She grays out a little, comes back to the uncanny feeling of her skin being stitched up. Q's hands are steady but her breath shakes on the exhale. Tae feels a little loopy, a little distant from her body, only brought back when the needle enters and exits her skin.
"How did you find my apartment, Five?" Q asks, eyes intent on the sutures behind her thick glasses. Tae huffs out a laugh.
"It wouldn't be fun if I gave it away," she says. "I'm really good at my job."
"Yeah?" Q tugs meaningfully at the last stitch a little too hard and Tae winces, sucks a breath in through her teeth.
"Tonight was a fluke." Tae looks down at her shoulder, at the neat, even row of stitches. "Huh, these are really good."
"Thank you." Q sighs, sitting down on the lid of the toilet across from Tae. She scrubs her face in her hands, glasses shoved up onto her head; Tae doesn't tell her that she's smeared blood onto her cheek. "So, are you going to tell me why you're here instead of at home? With our team of really, really good doctors?"
"It seems like you're a pretty decent doctor," Tae says.
"I'm not a doctor." Q looks up at her. "Five—"
Tae doesn't know why she does it. It's one of the stupider things she's done tonight, and it's been a night filled with stupid things. She wishes she knew what possessed her to break one of the most closely-held rules across the entire org.
"It's Tae," she says. "Taeyeon. But, just Tae."
Q stares at her in disbelief. "What?"
Tae manages to meet her gaze for three seconds before she has to look away. She's only ever heard Q's disappointed voice, she's never been confronted with Q's disappointed face. It's a little bit devastating, but she can't take it back now.
"Sorry. Just forget about it."
"I can't just un-hear it." Q blows a breath out through her teeth and then, like sunrise, a tiny smile quirks the edge of her full lips. "Besides, it suits you. You look like a Tae."
A knot forms in Tae's chest, tight and difficult. Her calculus was off on this one. She should've gone home after all, to the sterile medical wing and the impartial doctors there who would have simply sedated her right away. Now, her shoulder throbs and her face prickles with the scintilla of an emotion she can't name.
Her tongue is heavy in her mouth when she asks, "do you have any ibuprofen?"
Q snorts. "Yeah, I have ibuprofen."
February
"We can't keep doing this," Q says, even as she throws an old towel onto her nice couch and gestures for Tae to lay herself out on it. She darts into the bathroom for her medic kit.
"Why not?" Tae asks, stripping off her tank top and leaving it on the floor. It stings when she stretches her arms above her head but it's worth it to have the fabric off her body.
Q nearly trips when she walks back into the room. She sets her kit down on the coffee table with a thunk and perches on the edge.
"Okay, shirt is off," she mutters, rifling through the kit, and Tae almost laughs.
"Sorry, did you want to cut it off again?" she asks, slipping into flirtation without thinking twice about it. Q glances up at her, ears red but eyes sharp on Tae's face.
"Tae," she says, unimpressed, and that bitter taste rises up in Tae throat again to hear it. "Why did you come here?"
"Last time was so fun," Tae effuses, "I wanted to see you again."
"Come on." Q pulls out the same bottle of antiseptic and a clean cloth. "If you're going to break into my house like this, at least be honest with me."
Tae hisses past the familiar sting as Q cleans out the jagged wound down her side where she got caught on something sharp while falling out of a building earlier that evening. It's not deep at all, not much more than a bad scrape — that could be an easy excuse, that she didn't want to bother the medical team back home with something like this.
There's a little more honesty in what she actually says, which is,
"I really did want to see you." Tae watches Q's focused expression flicker momentarily into confusion.
"We talk all the time," Q says. "You could see me back at home, if you really wanted."
What Tae doesn't say is that when they're at home — ensconced in the warren of impersonal offices and hallways and monitoring rooms and training gyms — it doesn't count. That after a decade of time spent there, of growing up there and watching people come and go, that it's stopped feeling like a real place that she inhabits with her corporeal form. That she's floating around like a ghost these days. That she has friends, kind of, but she doesn't know their names.
Tae can't say any of that. So she falls back on what she knows.
"Maybe I wanted you to touch me again, too," she says, letting a smile melt onto her lips, letting her body relax in the ways she's been taught.
Q stares at her. Her full cheeks are touched with red, but her expression is nonplussed. The knot in Tae's chest makes a return, a counterpoint to the dull pain radiating from her side.
"Sure, Tae," she says, and turns to rummage through her kit again. "This isn't deep enough to stitch, so I'm just going to wrap it up. You'll have to be good about changing the dressing tomorrow."
Quiet settles over them as Q works, her careful fingers firm and warm on Tae's skin.
"You said you're not a doctor," Tae says, as Q cuts the end of the bandage and smooths it down. "Why are you so good at this?"
Q laughs, but it's humorless. "It was a necessary skill, so I picked it up. I liked it better than shooting."
"You were in the field?"
Q rests her cheek on her hand, regarding Tae from behind her glasses. "A long time ago."
She says it with the tone of someone who would rather it had never happened at all. Tae wonders, for a moment, what Q might have been if she hadn't somehow ended up in their business. Lives where she might have been an opera singer, or an aerospace engineer, or a dentist, instead of a woman who sits behind a hundred screens and guides another woman to lie and kill over the distance of a city or country or hemisphere.
"Will you tell me your name?" Tae blurts out. It's an ill-considered move. Q's face sours.
"Why would I do that?" Q asks, regarding Tae with a kind of weary consternation.
"Because you know mine." Tae sits up, bare chest suddenly making her feel very, very exposed. "And because I know that no one's watching us here."
She doesn't know that for sure, but Q's reaction confirms it for her. She guesses that that's the privilege of being the eyes themselves, rather than the constantly-surveilled. She watches the conflict play out on Q's face over long moments of silence.
"Eunsook," she says, finally. "I'm Eunsook."
Tae mouths the name, feels it rest heavy on her tongue. It feels good to possess, makes the knot in her chest loosen just a little bit.
"Hi, Eunsook," Tae says. Eunsook's inscrutable expression melts into something close to fondness.
"Hi, Tae."
March
"How did you manage to break two fingers?"
Tae shrugs, perched on the edge of Eunsook's kitchen table. "Car door."
Eunsook's face twists up, but her hands are gentle as she guides Tae's fingers into a splint and wraps them with tape.
"Did it even happen during your mission or was this just bad luck?"
"During! Technically."
Eunsook narrows her eyes at Tae. "Technically?"
"Getting in the car to go home counts."
"Tae!" Eunsook's reproachful look cracks easily into laughter, and Tae grins. Eunsook tries to school her expression. "Really, you can't get injured off the clock, you get hurt enough as it is."
"Sorry." Tae wiggles her newly-splinted fingers. They still ache dully, but there's no sharp pain now that they can't bend. "I'm sure you got at least a few stupid injuries in the field."
Eunsook freezes where she's setting out mugs on the counter top. She looks caught-out, eyes wide for a long moment before she gets herself back together and keeps moving. Tae recognizes the strategy, the exact thought processes that every one of them has been taught to keep them pushing through stress and pain.
"Yeah," Eunsook says, forced levity in her tone, "lots of stupid stuff. I'm a naturally clumsy person. That's why they had to put me behind the screens instead."
Tae takes the tea that's handed to her and drops the subject.
April
Tae only has snippets of the night before. She remembers the frantic instructions in her ear, the warren of concrete hallways, the adrenaline of a countdown. The sickening, numbing dread of certain failure. The explosion.
She doesn't really recall how she got to Eunsook's apartment with shrapnel lodged in her thigh, and it's probably better that her brain is protecting her from the memory given how painful it is even now as she blinks her eyes open to morning light breaking in through the cracks in the blinds of Eunsook's living room windows.
She stares at the ceiling and takes stock of herself. There's a blanket over her bare legs; she's wearing an unfamiliar t-shirt that feels worn soft with age. Her leg hurts — if she stays completely, utterly still it's almost fine, but any movement at all is agony. Her ears are still ringing faintly. She still smells vaguely of acrid chemical smoke, the scent clinging to her hair.
Done with her assessment, she finally turns her head to see Eunsook in the armchair across from the couch, asleep, her legs curled up underneath her.
Tae's breath catches. Eunsook looks unguarded in a way that makes her chest ache; her hair is disheveled, her lips parted, her sweatpants threadbare and her t-shirt faded. Tae feels almost like she shouldn't be seeing this, that this is a person that wasn't ever meant for her. Her stomach rolls; she doesn't belong here in this mundanity. She stares back up at the ceiling, finds an imperfection to look at. Focuses on her breathing, the way she was taught so long ago.
After an interminable amount of time, she hears rustling from the chair.
"Tae?"
And now, she knows how Eunsook's voice sounds roused from sleep, how it cracks around Tae's name. It sends a pang through her that's almost physical. She doesn't look over, fearing what it might do to her.
"Hi," she manages. Her own voice is barely there, smoke-damaged and hoarse.
Eunsook blows out an audible breath and stands up in Tae's peripheral vision. Tae listens as she goes into the kitchen, the refrigerator opening and closing. She returns with a bottled sports drink and a canned iced coffee. She perches on the edge of the coffee table and cracks the lid off the former, handing it to Tae wordlessly.
Tae drinks. She hates the orange flavor, but she knows how to force herself to consume things that she hates. It feels good on her torn-up throat regardless.
Eunsook watches her for a while before she speaks.
"I already took care of your story," she says, slowly. "I fabricated some logs and reported that I was monitoring your mission, since it was near my location. When you were injured, I came and got you since I was close and it was life-threatening." She pauses. "When you're up to standing, I'll call a car to get you home."
It's so clinical. Tae feels it like a punch to the gut.
"Okay," she says, because what else can she say? "Thank you."
Eunsook's silent for another long moment. She opens her own drink and takes a sip. Looks out the window, even though the blinds are closed.
"Tae," she says, "I can't do this anymore."
It sinks into Tae slowly. "What?"
Eunsook worries her bottom lip between her teeth. Finally, she turns to look back at Tae. The bags under her eyes are dark, her cheeks pale.
"You almost died on my kitchen table last night," she says, quietly. "I barely got your leg closed up in time. You shouldn't be alive."
"So, you saved me." Tae's stomach rolls. "That's a good thing, isn't it?"
"You could have called home. They would have gotten to you in plenty of time. They would've done a better job. You know they would have."
Eunsook's hands are shaking. Part of Tae wishes she'd just get angry. She wants Eunsook to yell at her, or insult her, instead of whatever this is. She just looks sad and afraid.
"I wanted…" Tae doesn't know how to finish the sentence. She wants a safe house to go back to that actually feels safe. For someone to touch her like she matters, not because she's an asset but because she's a person who lives and walks in the world. She wants to bask in Eunsook's attention, unmonitored and unrestricted. But too much honesty will break her into little pieces and she's not sure she'll be able to recover when it's done; so she loses her voice before she can say any of it.
"I can't take on this responsibility," Eunsook says. She buries her face in her hands. "I don't have it in me, Tae."
And that irks her. Reminds her of the times she's been called a liability, when she's had to bite her tongue, step back, make the wrong call because she needs to be responsible and cautious and discreet.
"Aren't you already responsible for all of us?" Tae snaps. "Or is it different because you're not talking in my ear from behind a screen?" She swallows. "Is it too personal when you can touch me?"
Eunsook stares at her. Pink blooms on her cheeks in patches. Her jaw clenches and relaxes like she's starting a dozen sentences in her head and discarding each one in sequence.
"Do you understand the position you're putting me in?" Eunsook says, eventually. Slow, like every word pains her as it exits her throat. "It's not about what either of us want."
"Why not?" This is selfish, she knows, and she's usually so good at squashing that down in herself, sublimating it until it's nothing but an impulse she can examine clinically from afar. There it is, contained in a box to be packed away and forgotten.
Eunsook stands up, looking down at Tae with an expression that makes her feel stupid and foolish. Her gentle face is set in the hard lines of someone taking care of something unpleasant, and Tae hates knowing that she is the something unpleasant.
"It's time for you to leave," Eunsook says. "I'm sorry I can't give you what you want, Tae."
Tae doesn't answer. She lays there on the couch and drinks the rest of the gross sports drink in her hand. She doesn't watch Eunsook go into the other room. She intentionally allows her hearing to blur so that she doesn't catch what Eunsook says to whoever she's called at home.
She looks, instead, at the pictures on the wall and the books on the shelf and the plants on the windowsill. She imagines a life where Eunsook is a dentist or an opera singer and maybe Tae is a dancer or a delivery driver and they meet by chance at the grocery store, and Tae sits on the couch and Eunsook sits next to her.
November
Tae doesn't even remember how she sliced her hand open. It might have been on the broken glass of the car door window, or on her own utility knife, or some other stupid way. She looks down, after the adrenaline has flushed itself out of her system and she's gone through the whole protocol to ensure she's not being tailed, and realizes her hand is dripping blood.
It's not a deep wound at all. It will need an examination to make sure there isn't any broken glass in it, and maybe stitches, maybe not. In her head, she runs through what will happen when she gets home; sat down on a paper-lined bed under too-bright lights, run through the interminable questions by a nurse in mask and gloves, handled not like she's fragile but like she's endlessly breakable and fixable.
She can’t breathe. She stops on the street. Suddenly, all at once, the thought of that bright, sterile, impersonal touch is impossible to bear. She thinks that if she goes back home right now, and they touch her where it hurts, that she'll do something stupid like tear the entire complex up with her bare hands; or else she'll crawl out of her skin and become something new and worse.
So Tae stands there. Blood drips onto the pavement, slow and steady. She's going to make a bad decision, but it's the only decision available.
She remembers where Eunsook's apartment is, slotted into the map of the city that's been drilled into her head. For a moment, she's terrified that maybe after last time, Eunsook decided to move so Tae couldn't do this anymore. The terror stays with her until she gets up to the door, raises her hand to knock and it swings open before she can.
Eunsook looks like she's just woken up, disheveled in shorts and a sweatshirt. She squints at Tae for a long moment. Doesn't step aside to let her in, yet.
"I'm sorry," Tae starts. "I couldn't go back there."
Eunsook's eyes widen. "Tae, what did you do—"
"No, it's not that! It's all okay. I just…" Tae is suddenly tired in a way she hasn't felt in a very, very long time. "Can I please come in?"
Eunsook bites her lip, stares at her for another long moment before she gestures Tae inside. Her living room looks exactly the same as it did last time, untouched by all the intervening months.
"Come here," Eunsook says, guiding her down the hallway. "Let me look at that."
The light in the bathroom is soft, incandescent yellow and the heater is on high. Tae lets her head thunk back against the wall as Eunsook gently cleans out the cut on her hand and wraps it up in gauze and a bandage. She's efficient in her care, but her hands are so warm.
"Tae," Eunsook murmurs. "What happened?"
What the fuck is she supposed to say? That she panicked so badly at the thought of going home that she couldn't move? That Eunsook is the only person who has stitched her up without it feeling like a transaction? That she wants to hide here in Eunsook's bathroom until the org forgets that either of them ever existed?
"I don't know," Tae says. She stares at the ceiling. "I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't have come here."
"No, you shouldn't have," Eunsook says, but it's not harsh like Tae feared. Tae chances a look at her and she just looks tired. She sighs. "But you're here, now. Do you wanna get takeout?"
They order pizza and sit on Eunsook's couch while they wait. It's quiet. Tae picks at the bandage on her hand and looks around the room.
"This is new," Tae says, gesturing to a blanket laying over the arm of the couch. It looks handmade, maybe knitted or crocheted — Tae doesn't know the difference. Eunsook smiles.
"It was a gift from a friend," she says.
"I don't really have friends." Tae doesn't know why she says it. It's the basic truth. She has camaraderie with people, cordial working relationships with others, but she can't think of a single person who would make something with their hands to give to her to keep.
"Oh." Eunsook presses her lips together. "I'm sorry."
Tae shrugs. "Don't be sorry. It's just how it is."
"Still."
Tae jolts at the feeling of Eunsook's hand slipping into her uninjured hand, squeezing lightly, stroking her thumb over Tae's bruised knuckles. Her skin is soft and dry. The contact becomes an epicenter for a gentle warmth that comes to suffuse Tae's entire body. An inexorable motion, she allows her head to drop down onto Eunsook's shoulder. Her sweatshirt smells of laundry detergent and lavender.
Eunsook sucks in an audible breath. A moment later, she strokes her fingers through Tae's hair, over the short-cropped section at the nape of her neck and where it's growing out at the crown of her head. It feels so good that Tae nearly sobs with it. She hides her face in the crook of Eunsook's neck, where it's warm and dark. She feels simultaneously so young and so old.
"I don't know what I'm doing," she whispers into Eunsook's skin.
Eunsook huffs out a breathy laugh. "I can't really help you there."
Gently, she firms her fingers in Tae's hair and draws her back so they can look at each other. Eunsook has dark bags under her eyes that Tae is sure are mirrored on her own face, and her hair is a tangled mess, but it doesn't make her any less beautiful. Eunsook's thumb rests on the corner of Tae's jaw.
"I know I have to go back," Tae says, slowly, feeling out the words as they come, "but I just wanted—" she swallows, "—just once, I wanted to have something for myself. To come back to. Or to take with me. I don't know."
They sit for a long, quiet moment. And then, Eunsook leans in and presses a kiss to Tae's mouth. Tae barely has time to process it before it's over, but her lips buzz where Eunsook's had just been.
"I do know," Eunsook says, something inscrutably sad in her eyes. But her hand is still on Tae's cheek, her thumb at the corner of Tae's lips. She's so warm and so close and Tae doesn't think anyone has ever understood her the way that Eunsook understands her.
Tae jolts forward and presses their mouths together clumsily, desperate for this thing she's denied herself, the simple pleasure of contact without motive. Eunsook sighs, shifting closer so their legs tangle and she can get both hands on Tae's jaw, keeping her where she wants her — not in a way that makes Tae feel confined, but simply held fast and guided. Tae's good hand lands on Eunsook's knee, feeling the fat and muscle under her soft skin.
They kiss until Tae's lips tingle and she needs more air than she can get out of Eunsook's mouth. When she pulls back, she stares at Eunsook's lips that have gone red and swollen and wet. She wants so much, so suddenly, and it's overwhelming. She doesn't remember how to want like this.
Their pizza arrives. Eunsook laughs and wipes her mouth, rising to go answer the door. Tae stares down at the bandage on her hand and listens to Eunsook make small talk with the delivery guy.
She sets the box down on the coffee table in front of them and settles back in next to Tae. She nudges Tae's knee with her own.
"Still hungry?" she asks.
"Yeah, I guess." With every passing moment she feels their intimacy slipping away. She feels desperate when she says, "Eunsook—"
"Hey." Eunsook smiles at her. "It's just pizza."
She hands a slice to Tae, grabs one for herself. She throws her legs over Tae's lap in a way that quiets some of the panic. As they eat, Eunsook tells her about small things — the things she likes to cook, where she got that t-shirt, how she hates getting up early but does it anyways. Tae drinks it up like she's some kind of desert plant. She wishes she had more to offer in return.
It's disgustingly late when they finish, almost early enough for some of their colleagues to be starting their days. Tae bites her lip, glancing at the clock on the TV.
Eunsook anticipates her. "You can stay here," she offers, "if you really don't want to go home." She smiles ruefully. "You'll just have to help me come up with a story."
"I can do that." Tae feels a genuine smile break out over her face for the first time in a long time. "I'm really good at lying."
Eunsook laughs and leads Tae by the hand into her bedroom.
December
Tae sits in Eunsook's bathroom, wrapping up a long scrape on her thigh with the bandages from under the sink. Snow falls outside the window, enveloping the entire world in a deep, dark quietude. She feels safe.