#c: jeon taesik (alexei kim)

[riveires]

the chain

@twentysixdegrees��

GAHYE

The advice goes: if you're tossing and turning, get up and do some physical activity to chase the restlessness out of your limbs. Unfortunately, that's not an option. It would look incredibly strange for a young, married, professional to be strolling on the sidewalk of their quiet, quaint, neighborhood at 2:47am in the morning--without her charming, handsome, husband by her side at the very least.

Thinking about him makes her want to roll over and curl in on herself. Would she feel safer in that position?

Earlier--that'd been a trap. A set-up if she's ever been trained to spot one. They were lucky, she supposes, but she wonders why them. They weren't fresh faced by any means, but she always thought they seemed too young still. Was it their youth and by extension--their adaptability? Or maybe it was the fact that they were young enough to still be disposable?

Her eyes were burning; it'd been a while since she blinked. The darkness made the action seem less important. Gahye thinks that maybe, she forgot to, mistaking the absence of light at this time of night for the dark behind her eyelids.

Would she feel safer if he were here next to her?

The doorknob is cold against her palm, the air is too on her bare legs. She opens the door soundlessly, and she can tell that he's not asleep, either. It's hesitation that keeps her feet rooted where they are, but it dissolves when his shoulders seem to relax.

For the longest of times, she'd always thought that missions were hard, and that the decompressing after was easy. Tonight, it's a bit of an inversion (but not completely).

She slips under the covers, shivering at the cold sheets against her warm skin. Strangers, but not quite. Right now he's the closest thing she's got to home. He's the only one she comes close to trusting, right now.

Gahye curls up on herself on the opposite end of the bed. 

TAESIK

It’s hard to pinpoint what had done him in—the seconds ticking down to then, or the aftermath. Whatever it is, whatever it had been, it followed. From the scene of the crime to trailing right at their heels. To the back of their four-seater, as they drove into the night. And now, it pads through the silence, the confines of their home. Inertia creeping. 

Motionless, Taesik has nothing more but the company of shadows and the thoughts that slip through the expanse of the room, oil-slick. He’d be foolish to think sleep would wash over him by now: two hours and counting with his eyes wide open, fixed to the slow spin of the ceiling fan. 

A close call. The closest they’ve ever been to being slit over a knife’s edge. Fear is a notion that’s long drained out of him—that, or it’s morphed into a different shape entirely. It’s hard to tell if it’s this numbing sensation he wants off his chest, or the weight of the memory itself. Dichotomies of choice that come around in full circle. 

The sudden creak of the door startles him. Immediately, Taesik turns on his side, held tense, bated breath. Waiting. It’s the sound that follows that has him recoil slow. Exhale, then relief.  He carefully sinks back against the pillows. 

For all the time they’ve spent together, what he knows about her is little to none. Perhaps this is inconsequential. After all, it seems, they have heavier things to share in its place. The grievances. The small diamonds in the rough to counter each one: this isn’t home, this is close enough, I don’t need this, I need you as you need me. Necessity is both the mother of invention and the noose that pulls tighter, all without mercy in equal measure. 

Tonight he has no stories to spin. 

Tonight there’s a knot that neither of them can untie. 

His eyes take in the space between them, her face. The thick tangle of hair spilling over the pillow. He only dares to move an inch closer, barely breaking this distance. His voice is barely above a thin murmur, echoing faintly. 

“Gahye?” 

GAHYE

The answer? Yes. Every step closer to this very spot had made her feel safer. As soon as she'd walked through that door, there was no turning back. It's a silly phenomenon, and she doesn't want to examine it too closely. There might be some realizations that she's not quite ready to reckon with--mainly, that she needs him more than she wants to admit. It's a primordial truth: there's comfort in company, there's strength in numbers.

"I didn't mean to intrude," he's already awake. Her eyes have adjusted to the relative darkness, and she slowly shifts onto her back, as if moving too fast might startle him. "I'm sorry, I thought you might want some company tonight." Because I need it.

With her back completely pressed against the mattress, she allows herself to turn her head to look at him. The moonlight filtering through the gauzy curtains outlines his figure like a halo, and Gahye almost wants to laugh at the irony. "I'll leave if you want me to, though." I know we're not close like this. She's not good at...this. And she feels foolish, backtracking on all those months of being an ice cold bitch, but there are too many sentences jammed into her head to be able to properly convey that. She's also got a little too much pride.

Gahye's body is completely still, save for her hands. Muscles slowly relaxing, there's a few beats of complete silence as they both try to figure this out. Her thumbs are nervously tracing over the shape of her nail, a nervous tick that betrays her so completely. Usually she's good at keeping it under wraps, but right now it's just--idle hands are the devil's playthings.

"Taesik, can I…?" Can I what?

So are idle lips, apparently. 

TAESIK

She must think of him to be transparent, what with the way she can unlace him entirely with the single sweep of her gaze. Exposed before he can so much as pull the strings loose himself. Though their target had nearly beat them to the chase. Taesik can still see it now, clear as a picture. The barreling down of bullets. The shattering. Broken glass and metal and a deep, deep red.

"You're not intruding." Watching her watching him. There's no animal instinct involved in the act besides the draw of curiosity. Fear too, a quiet kind, that brims beneath the skin. Espionage teaches you the art of stealth, of slipping without tipping over the edge, but it's never ever brushed upon what it means to be vulnerable. 

In the dark, she's a figure that cuts in sharp-soft. Pale moonglow and the thinned hardness of her hands. He remembers the first time they'd interlocked fingers, not because of some magnetic pull of want but the push of a reminder. You have to sell yourselves. His grip had tightened on the spot. Back then, perhaps that was the least passive pretense he'd donned at all in those months. It's different now.

There's not any form of tense to describe their positions, the questions that pool beneath their bodies. His eyes flit between her thumb and the curve of her bare collarbone. Time only exists between the faint pound of their pulses. 

"I don't want you to go." His arm lifts from his side to rest over her waist. Different. Different. A novelty he's not sure what to make of, but is willing to revel in out of none other but sheer, careful need. 

Please. 

GAHYE

She stills completely, mid-motion, pausing with the tip of her nail still pressing into her fingertip. This feels real. The sensation, it grounds her until suddenly it's insignificant compared to the feeling of his arm around her. He feels primordially close, and her instincts tell her to shift closer-- "I'm not going anywhere," it almost feels like a promise. Her eyes drift closed and Gahye breathes out slowly, body moving with every inhale, exhale, curving closer towards Taesik. "Don't want to be anywhere but here."

Sometimes she's afraid that this is it. That her experiences up to this point are everything she's going to do, everything she's ever going to feel.

It was a silent sort of terror watching their cover slip away, like the sand beneath your feet when the tide sweeps back out. It's a certain brand of relief whenever they come back, together, alive (bruised, bloodied, but not too too broken). It's the particular stillness of them lying together, pressed closer than they'd been before. 

Gahye imagines how deeply she might have fallen in love if the circumstances were different. If they weren't brought up in these worlds where everything except for their orders are off-limits. "I was a little afraid of losing you tonight." It might even feel somewhat like this.

"I really don't know what I would have done if I did." Her arm slips out from under the covers to mimic the positioning of Taesik's, settling over until her fingers trace over his own. 

But she does know. If either of them never came back, the other person would be ordered to pretend to grieve appropriately, then uproot and disappear. They'd be re-assigned. Rinse and repeat until they've wrung every bit of life out of you.

The thought of it gives rise to something unpleasant.

She turns her upper body, eyes searching for him in the dim light. It's been like this for a while. A call and response. This time, she wants to initiate. "Things feel different tonight, don't they?" As much as she wants to live in this role, she doesn't know if she can continue to do so, strategically keeping each touch hollow, empty.

When she lays completely flat on her back, hand reaching up to brush against his cheek, Gahye muses out loud. "I'm going to stay."

TAESIK

There’s that telltale second where he wonders if he had crossed a line. Intimacy of this kind has always been foreign by design, between them, with her. Obligation in place of emotion. He thinks to move his hand.

Until she moves first. Closer to become close, close enough that if he reached out to trace a finger slow over her eyelids, the bridge of her nose, down, down, to the dip of her Cupid’s bow, it’d be the closest he’d ever be in that moment, for that moment.

The inevitability of it all looms, like a distant cloud, a shadow ten steps behind their heels. You’re as young as you feel, so they say. Only the feeling has long been drained. Looking at the mirror these days reflects an exhaustion that is starting to sink in, and after tonight, it’s sunk bone-deep. Looking at Gahye’s face and months flash to decades to the bare, few milliseconds that had divided them between another breath and their very last.

He exhales carefully and is immediately conscious of the sensation, the deliberate attention to it at all unnerving in its newness. 

“You’d know.” He revels quietly in her touch, love-like but not love in the way it should be, and there’s a faint ache in his chest knowing this to be as so. “If not right away, then eventually.” 

A promise for a promise. In the end, it’s all they can afford to give, and hold onto, despite the odds. They’re still human, after all. 

(Aren’t they?) 

As if to reaffirm it, his hand lifts up, lays over the one that cups his cheek. It’s only human to need this. To seek comfort wherever it can find you. His eyes lower to the curve of her mouth, then rove back up to lock their gazes once more.

“I’m staying too.” His fingers curl around hers gently, folding them. Carefully, he moves her hand down from his cheek, letting her knuckles brush soft against his lips in place of something unspoken.

For as long as I can.

GAHYE

Nothing comes before their loyalty. Their loyalty to their common goal. To Mother Russia. She knows they’re supposed to fight and die and claw back from the dead, only to do it all over again until they’re actually dead this time around. That’s the only way to earn a comrades’ honorable death. Death in the name of loyalty. Storm clouds gather over this thought, the quiet rumble of thunder the undercurrent to everything she’s about to do.

“Eventually, they’d tell me what to do.”  There’s weakness in allowing your feelings to radiate from within strong enough to interpret without words. “Eventually I’d fall into my next assignment.” So she tries to say them out loud this time, instead. “But I wouldn’t know what to do before those eventualities.” I’d be lost.

They break you. Then, they make you into a weapon. His hands could kill her if he wanted to. Hers could do the exact same to him. But his motions are gentle in the way you soothe something you anticipate will run. They make you into a weapon of war and then tell you to make peace with it. She counts the seconds that he takes to kiss her knuckles.

Gahye watches him carefully, eyes closing when they start to burn from not blinking. She forces her shoulders to relax as she feels his comfort. She’s never closed her eyes during a kill, but instinct has her eyes closing now, in front of him. Vulnerability. Maybe she’s starting to make peace with it.

“You’re very good at making this feel real.”

The world has been unkind to them. So, she decides, they need to be kind to each other. Each step, each offered hand, each moment like this, is a brick laid towards the foundation of something that may just be stronger than blind loyalty.

Her free palm presses to his chest as she shifts closer. Touch starved. “Does this feel real to you, too?”

TAESIK

Truth be told, there’s been a disconnect from the start.

Sworn allegiances are a given. So are the claims to protect the motherland at all costs, even if the price is to be paid in blood. Sacrifice always, always, the means to an end. But he thinks beyond the dogmas instilled in them, to a time before Jeon Taesik was yet another name to assume and he’d been nothing more but a Sakhalin boy. 

This was never our home. 

So the story went, as his grandparents had prepared to return to the Korean peninsula at last. Occupation and war had kept them on that small island until then. What home meant in that moment was irrefutable, almost sacrilegious to question it otherwise. 

They’re long gone now. As is he, continents apart in a strange land, held down with the burgeoning doubt of whether what had been home was ever home at all. 

Would you let them happen? Is what he wants to ask. The list of possibilities are endless, all uncertain, impersonal, meant to make either of them disposable down the line. It makes him take pause. This would be sacrilegious, too.  Instead, he continues to hold her knuckles to his lips, unmoving, for a revelation, any revelation to search him out through the dark. Only Gahye does, as she does every time, with her nearness, the weight of her gaze, the way she lies in wait. Strange, isn’t it? How the silence before a kill sinks the same as it would before lowering one’s defenses all together. 

“I’m not pretending.”

Not here. Not now. 

His breathing is steady beneath the flat of her palm, heartbeat a low thud. “It’s more than just the feeling.” Tenderness of this kind should be frightening, but there’s no stopping the way his body is drawn to it, moth to a quiet flame. 

“…Can it be real?” 

Even if it’s only for tonight.

GAHYE

Why, she wonders, does he say these things? When they met, her first impression had been that there was not a single soul out there more professional, more refined (like the sharpest edge of a blade in her arsenal), more restrained, than Taesik. She hadn't been happy with the pick; in actuality she had the bigger issue with the assignment, but she would sooner off herself than admit that out loud to their handlers. So she suppressed it. She practiced on emanating her newlywed glow, repeated her words over and over to get the American accent to coat her vowels a little smoother, and stared at Taesik until she could describe him in the greatest detail to even a blind man. For a good period of time, she truly believed that she had memorized everything about this man to the point that he would be utterly unable to surprise her.  

But she's at a loss for words. All it took was two sentences from him: I'm not pretending. Can it be real?

There's a certain kind of training they put young girls through in the middle years of the program. With the boys - they are beaten and broken until their bones can heal over harder, and they dole out a variation of this training to their girls, too. But there's a divergent path for the girls, as well. They are also broken in a different way and taught a specific skill set. Life has never been very fair to the fairer sex, but to these girls it makes them truly believe that a god doesn't exist; there's only a higher power in their government. So, listen to your handlers, don't you dare think of doing anything other than what's expected.

It's why Gahye pulls back, has barriers. It's why she is intrinsically afraid of this kind of touch. She's never felt it this way before: earnest, gentle, truly loving.

"I can make it feel real." she moves with her words, taking her hand away from his lips, shivering at the loss of his touch. Instead, she draws up on the bed and props herself up with an arm, her bottom half still under the covers with him. She's got the higher ground right now, and she looks at him - his face turning towards her to adjust to her new position, and Gahye's other hand gently nudges at his shoulder, pushing him onto his back. "I know how to make people think it's real." She moves quietly, the only sound the rustle of their covers as she slips a leg onto his other side, effectively straddling him, resting her weight gently near his hips. "But I don't want to do that with you." 

Instead, she keeps her eyes downcast as she pulls her hair back from the front, twisting it between two hands before tossing it behind her shoulder and letting it come undone, tickling her back. She moves with a certain deliberateness as she then seeks out Taesik's hands. Palms pressed together, Gahye coaxes them up near his ears and laces them together, content with the classic picture he makes beneath her. 

Dark eyes drink in the image, and still holding his hands where they are, her index finger traces a quick line against his jaw before -- finally, she leans down, molding her body to his. She rests their foreheads together, the sides of their noses barely brushing with how close they are. "I know that, sometimes...I feel like a ghost to you." Gahye swears that she feels him face tilt up; she feels the butterfly wing brush of his lips, but wonders if that's just her leaning down. "I want to be -- tangible, to you. Right now."

Will they, won't they? Something so full to the seams, that the stiches are starting to strain, to burst. "It's real for me." 

It's always been a push and pull, and for Gahye to feel comfortable enough to be this open, she needs to at least start off with the power, knowing that as soon as he starts kissing back, she'll lose herself completely. And, maybe this one time it's okay. She takes a shaky breath, and presses in to kiss him. There's no eyes around, they're not on an assignment...this is solely for them, and she could almost cry from how right it all feels.  

Here's to hoping he feels even a fraction of the same. 

She dives deep, and wonders if he'll dive in after her.

TAESIK

It'd taken everything and then some: picked apart under the microscopic scrutiny of those above them for them to find, anything, everything that would pose as a liability. Name. History. Bloodline. One by one, an uprooting, a decimation of the self, until they had nothing more but the hollowness of his bones. An imitation body void save for the purpose to carry out their will. Only then did they say, at last. He was ready. 

For what, Taesik hadn't known. Not until the day that door to the General's office had opened up for a woman with a sharp, sharp gaze would walk through it, and he would feel his breath catch in the back of his throat. 

Later, he would look her dead in the eye and find himself thinking, Would it always be like this? To be this empty, this absent in feeling. Ever-present and drained. All deadwater. There hadn't been anything to trace back to—no point of reference, examples, nor a single memory to draw from.

But anywhere he'd look since then, she'd be there. At every turn. Punctuating every end of each thought, even in spaces where not a single word had been exchanged in between. Because he hadn't found anybody else. Because there wasn't anybody else to find. 

What had once been a startling revelation now couldn't be more grounding. 

There's no telling when it began to change. If things were meant to pan out differently. If consequences are imminent because they did.

And yet, Taesik looks her dead in the eye and it's all feeling. That he's ready for this. The thin shiver of thrill that runs down his spine as Gahye shifts, assumes form in a way he's only seen in minute flashes for all the times they've been together, but not ever like this. 

 Heat hums beneath his skin, electric in the way it builds, but he's quiet. He can't say a word, not when there are none to describe the way he feels held at a rapture. That there's something so unbelievably human to all of this, and how long it's been that they've been anything close to being just that.

Everything around them stills. What follows is all motion.

He mirrors her, touch for touch, his fingers tightening in the way they're laced together, lips brushing shy, then fully. Instinct takes over slow as he closes his eyes, indulges in how she overtakes his senses, dream-like. 

Moments pass before he pulls away. Tilts his face ever so slight to regard her. Even shrouded in half-shadow, she's a wonder.

Carefully, he pulls one of his hands free from her grasp, lets his thumb graze up gently to push away the hair that's fallen over her face. The clarity of it all burns, desire undeniable.

A beat, then two, and he pulls her down with him.

Their lips meet. He ignites. 

(This is as real as it gets.)

[FIN]