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Because god himself hates him, Taeho somehow ends up sandwiched between Kim and Woo on an abandoned rooftop, grinding the pebbles to dust beneath his shoe and counting the seconds as they tick by, one torturously slow beat a time.
“So,” Kim says, clapping his hands together like they’re on some sort of fucking field trip instead of a stakeout of one of the country’s most infamous criminal organizations. Woo looks unperturbed as per fucking usual because nothing short of impalement–and scraping the tiniest bit of skin off Kim’s face–can crack an expression out of him. “We never finished that conversation from before.”
Taeho racks his brain–they’re not exactly on friendly-enough terms to have conversations in passing. In fact, the only time Taeho had run into them in the lunchroom, he’d made Woo get on his hands and knees in the world’s worst fucking apology. It had been a lot less satisfying than the ten times he imagined it in his head.
“What conversation?” Taeho grits out from between his teeth. Kim flashes him that same hopelessly naive puppy-dog look in return.
“The one about our first kisses! You were going to say something about yours, Taeho, before uh, before everything happened.”
Taeho chokes. The conversation had been so inane he had completely erased it from his memory. His fucking mistake apparently.
“My first kiss, right,” Taeho balks, coming up completely empty. “That I definitely had. Yep. You know, there just gets to be so many that they all kind of blur together. Yeah.”
His palms are sweating by the end of the sentence and he prays to the god that he doesn’t believe in that they buy it. Woo’s deadpan stare and Kim’s stupid grin give him absolutely zero indications either way.
“I didn’t like my first kiss,” Woo says unprompted instead. Taeho’s torn between relief from not having to cough up more bullshit and horror at the prospect of listening to the romance ballad of the teenage version of the Terminator. Who apparently still has more experience than him somehow. Cell 4: 1, Cell 3: 0.
“Going back to the mission–”
“I didn’t want it.” Min’s staring straight into the sky while he says all this and Taeho realizes he’s never seen him blink before, which what the fuck. His skin prickles in the cold.
“Want it? Want what?” Taeho snaps, not sure if he’s more disappointed or angry with himself for biting.
“I didn’t want to kiss her.”
“Then why didn’t you just cut her fucking hand off?”
“I couldn’t.”
Taeho blinks. He’s seen Min go for the kill shot without hesitation, he doesn’t think some two-bit pushover would be able to stop him.
“What the fuck do you mean you couldn’t?”
Min doesn’t even bat an eye at him.
“I thought you should know, Iseul.”
“I’m right fucking here.”
“You offered to help,” Min barrels on.
“I did…” Iseul replies slowly. “Yeah, I promised that.”
“So,” Min says and follows it up with absolutely nothing. Taeho and Iseul both stare at him.
“Like right now?” Iseul sputters, shooting an obvious sideways glance at Taeho. Like he’s the fucking intruder here when they’re literally all on a mission sanctioned by the Corps. Taeho grinds his teeth together and gives a long sigh.
“What, like you offered to give him a better kiss to forget?”
Kim does a fucking stellar impression of a tea kettle.
“W-What? No! No! Of course not, why would you say something like that?” It’s the first time Kim’s puppy-dog facade has ever slipped and Taeho would be more surprised if he wasn’t so appalled. “I meant like, if he needed anyone to talk about it or something. Obviously.”
Taeho trips face-forward towards the concrete and nearly buckles from a sudden crushing wave of pressure. And then it’s gone in an instant, like nothing ever happened in the first place. But Taeho has lived among Aberrants for his whole life, learned the unmistakable touch of another person’s aura before he learned to fucking walk and for all his dumbass expressions, Kim’s no fool. They turn slowly, as one, to face Woo on the rooftop. Taeho would say he’s doing a stunning impression of a stone column but that’s just his default look.
“Min, is that what you thought I meant?”
“No,” Woo replies instantly and the flare in his essence is so blatant even Taeho can sense it.
“I can tell you’re lying.”
“Forget it,” Woo says. The air around them turns heavy in an instant again and Taeho struggles to keep his head up. Woo’s a fucking monster on the battlefield–Taeho’s witnessed it firsthand–but that doesn’t hold a candle to what he’s like when he’s pissed.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Kim, the fucking idiot, fighting his way to get up in Woo’s face. There’s sweat beading down his forehead and his feet are dragging against the concrete but he manages somehow to wrestle his way in front of him.
“Hey,” he says. He’s shorter than Woo but he cuts an impressive figure against the moonlight, his hands defiantly balled up into fists. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
Kim takes a deep breath. In, then out.
“But I wish it was.”
Woo blinks at him once. Twice.
“Oh,” he says and the tension in the air dissipates in an instant, leaving nothing but a light sense behind. Woo’s actually cracked a smile–well it’s more like his regular line of a mouth is tilted exactly one degree upwards but still it’s far beyond what Taeho thought he was capable of–and Kim’s grinning like he’s won the fucking lottery.
Taeho wants to fucking die. He was warned of many things by his father before joining the Aberrant corps–weak teammates, reckless criminals, heartless instructors. Getting trapped in a shoddy knockoff of a shojo manga was not one of them.
“I’m going to patrol the building,” Woo says, despite the fact that they were given clear, explicit instructions to watch the apartment complex across the street. Which can definitely not be seen from the back of the building.
He stands up and Kim wastes absolutely no time in chasing after him.
“Me too! We’ll be back soon, Taeho!” he says and he has the audacity to do a cheeky two-finger salute like this is all some game and not their fucking jobs that they’re supposed to at least pretend to take seriously. Taeho just barely restrains himself from detonating a bomb in their faces and putting all three of them out of their fucking misery. Just barely.
And then Woo and Kim traipse into the fucking moonlight like the end of some shitty B-rated romcom and don’t come back for another twenty minutes, yes he counted. Kim’s lips are bitten red–which Taeho could have gone his whole fucking life without ever seeing–and Woo’s aura is so sweet he thinks he could fucking choke on it.
And that’s how Taeho inadvertently gets two of his most-hated coworkers together and it all goes downhill from there.
Taeho doesn’t smoke but a month of this shitshow is really starting to test his patience. He’s not like the other trainees, though, who are a dime a dozen, smoking the shit out of their lungs because they know they’ll never last long enough for any of it to matter. His grandfather lived long enough to turn half the fucking world against their family–Taeho’s built for things that last, he can’t afford to make it to the end only for his own body to collapse in on itself. He kicks open the door to the back of the Third Headquarters for a bit of fresh air in lieu of a smoke break.
What he gets instead is the sight of two silhouettes pressed against the brick, one pinning the other against the wall. They’re close together–far closer than any two people need to be to have a normal fucking conversation–and Taeho gets a glimpse of a baseball cap and the glint of someone’s glasses and this awful disgusting sound and all he can think of is no, hell fucking no. He’s already dealt with one pair of disaster gays this week, two is pushing his quota. And no wonder Cell 4 is constantly on the brink of fucking collapse, what with all the relationship melodrama they have going on on top of their missions. Not that he’s, like, jealous or anything, that would be ridiculous. He’s Taeho fucking Gyeon, the most gifted out of this year’s crop of trainees, with crazy good looks and a fucking stellar lineage to boot. He’s a 10 out of 10 and he could pull anyone if he wanted to. (He can’t believe though that Lee is getting more action than him. Lee, out of all fucking people? He didn’t even think she found anything besides bottomless reports intriguing!)
Taeho doesn’t even bother catching the door, letting it bang loudly against the brick wall. Who gives a fuck if Lee and Kang heard him, they should pick a more discrete place to make out than if they don’t want to be disturbed.
In the distance, he watches their silhouettes split apart and there’s a flash of light and then–
Okay so maybe, just maybe, Taeho can admit that Kim has a tiny–like a smidge–more game than him. It is, admittedly, harder than it looks.
“Hi Dahee,” Taeho says, scrabbling for literally anything to say and coming up empty. “Your hair looks, uh, very… pink?”
“Thanks?” Dahee looks perplexed, which is a far cry from charmed. God damn it, his father’s curriculum was seriously lacking in multiple departments.
“How’d you get it so… pink?”
Dahee stares at him like he’s grown a second head.
“Genetics?”
“Cool, that’s cool,” Taeho says and wishes his mouth would shut the fuck up for two seconds and give him a goddamn break. Of course, because his life is one nonstop joke, it’s not that fucking easy. “Do you want to eat lunch together?”
“We always eat lunch together. We’ve eaten lunch together as a cell since our first day.”
“No, I meant, like… just the two of us?” Taeho asks, fully aware of how he sounds like a goddamn elementary schooler.
Something clicks behind Dahee’s eyes and she sighs.
“Listen, Taeho,” she says, scratching at the side of her face. She looks uneasy but it can’t even hold a candle to how fucking uncomfortable Taeho feels right now. He almost wishes Woo were here to fucking slice him in half again. “I respect you as a cell leader–and as a friend–and this is all very, uh, flattering but I’m a lesbian.”
“Oh,” Taeho says. Next to him, Tsubaki walks straight into the wall.
Taeho needs to get Lee’s copy of the day’s fucking notes but he also needs whatever screaming match is going on inside to die down before he can get them. From the voices, it sounds like Kang and Lee. That and the fact that he’s never seen the two of them go more than 30 seconds without one of them trying to take a swing.
“If you had just followed my lead–”
“Your lead nearly got us all fucking killed!”
“Do you remember the deal that we made?”
“Pretty sure that deal doesn’t apply if I’m fucking dead!”
“What–Ryujin, you were never in serious danger! I had everything under control–”
“Control, my ass–”
The screaming abruptly stops and Taeho presses his ear to the door to confirm it. The room has gone strangely silent and Taeho waits another ten seconds before deciding that the coast is clear (enough). He kicks open the door and comes face-to-face with Sayeon sitting on the table, back pressed up against the wall and Ryujin leaning forward on both palms, kissing her senseless.
Taeho scrambles for the door but the damage has already been done. Kang and Lee break apart from each other like they’re on fucking fire, Kang wiping saliva (?????) from her mouth and looking like she’s going to kill him where he stands. No wonder Cell 4 is constantly on the brink of fucking collapse, what with all the relationship melodrama they have going on on top of their missions. He opens his mouth to say, well, to say something but for some reason, Lee’s hand is rising all of a sudden and—
“Trainee Gyeon!” Taeho grinds to a halt, waving to the rest of his cell to continue without him as he turns to face the open door. Officer Ahn’s half-leaning out of the infirmary, shaking a paper at him and beaming like the fucking sun. Taeho has to squint in the sudden light. “Just who I wanted to see.”
Taeho knew that his last name would do little for him in here, that he’d be starting at the absolute bottom of the ladder in the Corps but still, he hadn’t expected to be summoned at someone’s beck and call like… well, like a dog.
“Is there something I can do for you, Officer?” he grinds out because if there’s one thing his father trained into him, it’s the chain of command.
“Yes, there is!” She hands him a cream-colored envelope with “Miyeon” written in cursive across the back. In glitter pen. Taeho’s pretty sure the seal is made of real wax and if he squints, he thinks the squiggles in the corners might resemble hearts. Whatever it is, it’s above his pay grade. Just smile and nod. “Could you deliver this for me? I’m a bit tied up at the moment.”
Taeho peers through the open doorway to see a Level 2 splayed out on a gurney, literally bleeding out from their gut. Officer Ahn blinks at him, completely unperturbed.
“Sure,” Taeho says, if only to get away from the situation as fast as fucking possible. “Who is this for?”
“Oh, silly me! Instructor Sang, of course,” she says and Taeho blinks. Instructor Sang, like slapped-Woo-across-the-room-for-being-two-seconds-late-and-incredibly-renowned-Judge-Hand-Instructor-Sang? “I better be getting back to work now. Thanks again, Trainee Gyeon!”
And then she slams the door in his face and Taeho’s left standing in the middle of the hallway, wondering who the fuck he pissed off in a past life to deserve this.
Taeho knocks once on the doorframe and tries not to lose his entire fucking nerve. He’s spoken to Instructor Sang on his own once before to deliver the report of his cell’s mission and that was enough times for a lifetime. Still, who knows what would happen to him if he disobeyed the direct order of a superior–and a Level 8, at that.
“Come in,” Instructor Sang calls and Taeho makes the slow torturous trek to the front of her desk like he’s being sent to the gallows.
He bows and holds the letter out to her with both hands.
“This is for you.”
Instructor Sang finally looks up from the mountain of paperwork in front of her at that. She drags her gaze from the offensively glittery envelope to him and then back to the envelope. She regards him like an ant stuck on the underside of her boot and he struggles not to scream.
“Trainee Gyeon, this type of relationship is highly unprofessional between a subordinate and their superior.”
Taeho has never felt so simultaneously horrified and insulted in his life.
“This is NOT from me!” he squeaks, which does absolutely nothing to quell Instructor Sang’s murderous gaze. “It’s from Officer Ahn!”
Something flits across Instructor Sang’s face at that but it’s gone as fast as it came.
“From Hayoon?”
Hayoon? Hayoon? Taeho’s father has worked with dozens of people in the Corps for years and he’s never heard him address any of them by their first name.
Instructor Sang stands and takes the envelope from his hands, cracking the wax seal in an instant. The cream paper is too thick for Taeho to read the words of but he watches as her gaze travels from left to right across the paper, one line at a time. She snorts–yes, snorts–at the end and then proceeds to rip the letter to pieces with one glowing green hand.
Instructor Sang takes her seat back at her desk and picks up another piece of paper like nothing just fucking happened. Taeho’s sanity is hanging by a thin fucking thread at this point.
“Can I–”
“You’re dismissed.”
Taeho doesn’t need to be told twice. He bolts like his life fucking depends on it.
Taeho throws open the door to the storage room without a care in the fucking world. The light that shines through illuminates the two figures curled up in the corner, Kang sucking Lee’s face off like she’s trying to eat her alive. Neither of their ties is anywhere in sight.
“What the fuck,” Taeho stumbles backwards, feeling blindly for the door and missing it by a mile. “What the fuck.” No wonder Cell 4 is constantly on the brink of fucking collapse, what with all the relationship melodrama they have going on on top of their missions.
Kang scrabbles off like a demon possessed but Lee looks eerily calm, fixing him with her creepy-ass stare. It’s uncanny, bordering on inhuman, and Taeho shivers.
“You,” she says, like the singular clip that separates them is miles and miles long. “In every timeline, it’s always you. Why is it always you?”
Taeho blinks at her, convinced that she’s finally fucking lost it.
“Why is it always me wha–”
Taeho recounts this whole shitshow of a situation to an unsympathetic Jungwoo over training.
“And you’re saying,” Jungwoo says, expression flat. “That all of this happened in one week?”
“Yes! Exactly! Do you see how fucking insane this shit is? And I’m not jealous or anything but like… when will it be my turn?” There’s a loud thud as Jungwoo’s spear rips another hole straight through the training dummy. They’re going to burn through the Corps’ shitty savings at this rate, what with how fast he goes through them. “Is it because I’m… you know… not gay?”
Jungwoo snorts and then makes a pitiful attempt to pass it off as a cough.
“It’s not a question of sexuality, it’s a question of personality.”
Taeho bristles at the implication that any part of him is less than fucking stellar.
“I have a great personality.” Jungwoo arches an eyebrow at him. “Most of the time.”
“Right,” he says. “What type of person are you even looking for?”
“Someone to produce a strong line of Aberrants with.”
Jungwoo’s expression, if possible, deflates even further and fine, Taeho can admit that it doesn’t exactly sound flashy on paper but training to be a living weapon from birth hasn’t exactly done wonders for his social life. He hasn’t… met a whole lot of people outside of the trainees at the Corps. One of the downsides to intensive isolated training your whole life.
“Well, what’s your fucking type then?”
Jungwoo recalls his spear back to his hand and examines the shaft closely.
“Rebellious, hates authority figures, bit of an idiot–”
“Kang?” Taeho spits out, incredulous, because what the fuck, he did not see that coming. He thought Jungwoo would prefer someone more… composed. Plus she’s got that whole weird unresolved sexual tension thing going on with Lee.
Jungwoo fixes him with a flat look.
“Male. Although–okay, that actually makes a lot more sense now.”
“Oh. That’s… cool,” Taeho says. “I’m not homophobic or anything.”
“Okay,” Jungwoo says slowly. “Anyways, that’s what it was before.”
“Before?” Taeho echoes. “What’s it like now?”
“Arrogant, bit of a bastard, strong but aggressive, and somewhere deep, deep down there’s a tiny speck of good buried in there.”
Taeho wrinkles his nose.
“Sounds like a dick.”
Jungwoo snorts and doesn’t even bother trying to hide it this time. He hefts the spear in his hand and throws. It hits the target cleanly in the chest, another shot to the heart.
“Yeah,” he says. “He definitely is.”