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“Hongjoong…”
Hongjoong looks up from where he crouches down lacing his boots tight. His eyes find Wooyoung standing in the kitchen of their one-room apartment pod chewing on his lower lip and wringing his hands together. Apprehension twists in Wooyoung’s stomach when Hongjoong takes a moment to survey him before meeting his eyes with a guarded expression, shoulders tense.
Swallowing reflexively, Wooyoung darts his tongue out to wet his chapped lips and takes a steadying breath. “I don’t like this.”
Hongjoong blinks slowly, tipping his head to the side. He doesn’t ask what this is. The corners of his mouth turn down in a subtle frown that bleeds disapproval. “It’s just like any other job,” he says flatly, dismissive, lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug. “I’ll be in, out, and back before you know it.”
“But it’s not like any other job, is it?” Wooyoung asks, voice low and threaded with urgency, hands falling to his sides.
It’s not a real question; he anticipates the silence that meets it and the way Hongjoong averts his gaze, stares off vacantly at Wooyoung’s mouth like he’s resigned himself to tuning out whatever ends up coming out of it. They both know that this isn’t just another routine job and Wooyoung isn’t going to pretend that it is. Hongjoong is just trying to pacify him, shutting down his concern like he’s unreasonable for being uneasy about this at all. Indirectly asking him to back down—as if he expects Wooyoung to obey.
He should know better than that.
They’ve been partners for years, more than long enough for Hongjoong to know Wooyoung isn’t the type to calmly submit to his demands. He’s going to make himself impossible to ignore, voice all of his concerns—make Hongjoong hear him, and even if the stubborn bastard won’t listen to reason and it turns into a fight then at least he’s said everything he needs to.
Almost everything.
Never everything. Always one thing left unsaid, unacknowledged, forced to sit at the back of his throat—and no matter how many times he swallows he can’t choke it down.
Wooyoung paces the length of their cramped and messy—lived-in—flat, agitated hands coming up to rake back through dark strands of hair. “Something doesn’t feel right, Joong-ah,” Wooyoung says quietly, tacking on the nickname in sly supplication—pulling half of his hair into a ponytail just to give his hands something to do. When Hongjoong flicks his eyes up to find Wooyoung’s, he stops dead in his tracks and stares hard at Hongjoong. “Why can’t I go with you?”
Not a question; a demand, greeted with even more infuriating silence. Hongjoong’s expression goes tight, eyes dropping to watch his fingers finish tying off his boots with a deliberate slowness. He releases a sharp exhale through his nose that loosens his shoulders once the laces are knotted and rises to his feet.
Wooyoung’s eyes track Hongjoong moving around their flat, inspecting his weaponry and equipment before sliding guns and knives into the holsters strapped to his body, packing away anything he deems essential into the pockets of his clothes and the rest into the bag the slings over his back. Slips his arms into a nondescript black jacket, fastens buttons with quick fingers. Fiddles with his ammo bag, snakes its cord through a belt loop to fasten it at his hip. Picks at his cuticles until the skin around his nails is bloody from his restlessness.
Wearing at Wooyoung’s patience with his visible lack of desire to have this conversation despite knowing that it’s inevitable. Wooyoung won’t let Hongjoong leave their flat if he doesn’t at least entertain Wooyoung’s reservations.
Eventually, when there’s nothing left for him to use to avoid Wooyoung, he turns on his heel to face him. Hongjoong won’t meet his eyes when he shrugs and says, “They asked me to go solo.”
A humorless laugh barks out of Wooyoung and cuts off just as abruptly as his expression goes flat from the severity of the fury flooding his chest. “We don’t do solo missions, Kim Hongjoong,” grits out between clenched teeth, raw and hostile. Wooyoung prowls towards Hongjoong like a stalking predator, hands curling into fists at his sides itching with the need to hit something. He’s crowding into Hongjoong’s space, aggressively backing him up into the wall and cornering him so that he has no choice but to face him. “We’ve never done solo missions—we’re partners and they fucking know that. Doesn’t this seem strange to you?”
“I know what I’m doing,” Hongjoong spits venomously—quiet and lethal, sharp as the snap of a whip that Wooyoung refuses to shy away from. His head tips back, gaze jerked up to meet Wooyoung’s eyes with an unflinching intensity. “You’re the one that always goes in guns blazing, shoot first ask questions later. Don’t you think I’ve thought this through?”
Hongjoong punctuates his words with a hard jab to the center of Wooyoung’s chest, forceful enough to make him stagger back and create a little space between them. White-hot anger burns through Wooyoung like wildfire, uncontrolled and all-consuming. His hands tremble with it, the pins and needles sensation in the pit of his gut turning his stomach. Wooyoung roughly shoves Hongjoong back against the wall and keeps him pinned there with the weight of his body, chasing away the space between them just as quickly as it had come.
The anger is just a cover for his unease, for the feelings he’s never had any intention of addressing—not while they’re still barely scraping by. Not while they’re stuck rotting away in the slums doing whatever they can just to survive. Any means necessary; dirty, shamelessly underhanded, cutthroat; blood-stained hands accepting meagre payouts that won’t absolve them of their sins. Only ever enough for them to make ends meet and nothing more.
Perpetually trapped in the undercity with little hope of ever making it out.
This isn’t living; he can’t let anything get in the way of their survival and that’s all that admitting to the unspoken would do. They’re alive but they aren’t living; they’re just going through the motions and that’s all that they can do until they crawl their way out of the slums. Wooyoung wants to live, desperate like an animal caught in a trap steadily bleeding out. Chewing off his own limbs in the hopes of squeezing himself through the bars of his cage.
He lets the anger consume him so that he doesn’t have to think about anything else.
Wooyoung breaks out of his thoughts when hands ghost up along his chest and cradle his face between them. His gaze finds Hongjoong’s, searching his face for something and coming up empty. Desperate hands seek out Hongjoong’s waist, slip beneath his jacket to twist in the fabric of his shirt. Clinging until his fingers ache like it’ll keep him anchored here. Like he won’t leave, like he’ll feel Wooyoung’s trepidation enough that he’ll refuse the job.
Wishful thinking, he knows. He’s well aware that his desperation falls on deaf ears. Hongjoong will never refuse a job, no matter how high-risk, low-reward it might be. Foolhardy and ruled by his own obsession with getting them out of the slums. Idealistic, driven by the fantasy of a better life for them—for Wooyoung, if that’s what it came down to.
Stupid. As if Wooyoung would ever want to live without him.
“You wanna get out of the undercity, don’t you?” Hongjoong rasps, and there’s a tenderness to his tone that makes Wooyoung’s heart ache, smothering his anger and leaving him feeling hollowed out. Defeated. Thumbs rub up against the corners of his mouth; Hongjoong’s tongue flicks out over his lower lip, gaze dropping to Wooyoung’s mouth before tearing back up to meet his eyes. “The payout’s big, Wooyoungie. Bigger than we’ve ever had before. This could be our ticket out.”
Wooyoung doesn’t know what kind of face he’s making, but he feels it fall, brows knitting together, lips pressing into a thin line. He hates this and he knows that Hongjoong knows it, can see it in the way Hongjoong’s expression softens in apology but remains resolute. There’s no talking him out of this; he’s already made up his mind that this is worth the risk and there isn’t anything Wooyoung can say to convince him otherwise.
“Just trust me.”
Wooyoung closes his eyes tight and swallows around the knot forming in his throat. He tries to keep his breathing even, but the breaths come thin and wobbly, short beneath inflexible ribs that refuse to give enough for his lungs to expand. Hongjoong has the decency not to comment on it, allows Wooyoung his moment of grief while standing there stiffly, half-holding him with unsure hands that linger at the small of his back.
“I trust you,” Wooyoung lies after a long beat of silence, voice barely a whisper. He opens his eyes, flicks them over Hongjoong’s face one more time to commit him to memory. Tells himself that he’s overreacting, that he’s letting anxiety foreign to him get the better of him and that Hongjoong is right. He’s not the reckless one out of the two of them; he knows what he’s doing, and Wooyoung just has to trust that. He has no other choice.
He can’t stop Hongjoong from leaving. Not even if he begged. He’s not allowed to come along—would end up knocked out cold or tied down if he tried. So he doesn’t fight it anymore.
Wooyoung numbly brings his hands up to run cold fingers through Hongjoong’s hair, petting at the nape of his neck in a self-soothing gesture.
“I’ll be back before the night’s over,” Hongjoong promises quietly, hesitating for only a moment before pressing forward and catching Wooyoung’s mouth with his own in a quick but lingering kiss.
His lips tingle when they part. Hongjoong drops his arms from around Wooyoung and Wooyoung shuffles a few steps back—and then Hongjoong is gone, leaving Wooyoung alone in their apartment pod with so much left unspoken.
Wooyoung curls up in their bed and stares out the window for hours, bathed in the colorful neon of blinding city lights. And even though he waits up all night until the sun begins to rise and early morning light bleeds out over the horizon, red staining the sky behind towering buildings, eyes burning with exhaustion and unshed tears—Hongjoong never comes home.
Liar, he thinks bitterly, turning his back on the window and pinching his eyes shut against the first wave of grief spilling over.
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