#maybe i rlly will finish one!! i still need to draw the throne

[crisp-art]

Whats this another wip!!???! 🦅🦅

[honeybammie]

every day & always › jeon jungkook

↳ part two, part three  ↳ when the time comes for jungkook to take over his father’s role in the min gang, he has second thoughts about the man he wants to be, but you’ll do everything in your power to make him stay.  ↳ mafia!au jungkook, angst  ↳ wc: 5,506 ↳ note: this is what i’ve been working on while i’ve been so absent from tumblr there are 6 parts so far and ~30,000ish words. is it good? not rlly, but i’ve enjoyed myself regardless ↳ note note: my minimal as hell research for this includes one (1) saturday looking up italian and japanese gangs so,,,you’ve been warned 

I did not cry at my father’s funeral, not under the electric eyes of cameras broadcasting my family’s every reaction. He would’ve been proud, my father, sitting me down in front of his leather throne all those times to tell me never to allow the enemy a glimpse under my skin. I’d watched his arrests on a television we rarely used, stood next to him by his own father’s grave, his facade never anything but stone cold. He reserved laughter and remorse for the familiarity of my childhood home, showered me and Yoongi in praises, taught us everything we knew. By the time he died, we had all the knowledge we needed to run the Min Clan. With Yoongi as one of our youngest bosses ever, and I as his second-in-command, our legacy was going nowhere.

The same could not be said for Jeon Jungkook, who wept at his father’s funeral without a drop of shame. Only a petty thief, one would think he hardly had anyone to worry about putting a bullet through him, but his father’s enemies would become his. I had to turn a cheek at his impotence, enraged by the fact that all his youthful promise was being wasted on tears. We hadn’t spoken a full conversation since my own rise in rankings six months prior, and what I saw in him over his father’s casket was a horrible disappointment.

“He’s an embarrassment,” I muttered to Yoongi as we watched from the back of the pack so as not to draw attention to ourselves, all the while Jungkook was subject to throes on throes of woe.

“His father wasn’t born into the mafia, but he ended up as one of our best soldiers of the last few decades,” Yoongi reasoned. “This is the only life he knows, the one he’s been raised for. Maybe the Jeons just take longer to realize the potential they have with us.”

In my opinion, Yoongi put too much faith in him, but when we were children, Jungkook and I watched mob movies for hours on end and envisioned plans for our own heists, counting out thousands of dollars in bills and indulging on life’s finest offerings. I hoped there was still a glimmer of that drive in him. I hoped my brother was right.

Two weeks came and went with hardly a word from Jungkook. He was given a few days off and afterward tasked with a minor drug smuggling job, hardly worth our time, but he was used to the line of work and did it well. No one ever suspected such a disarming face to play a part in organized crime, so he excelled at getting away from a scene scot-free. He could work his way up to be every bit the soldier his father was.

In my office, I crunched numbers, making sure every subordinate was paying their dues and that every investment was boding well. Any suspicion of police on our trail was treated with a red herring to throw them off, and I wrote out instructions for caporegimes to hand down to their soldiers, ranging from assassination to casino operation. On a whim, stemmed from a personal desire, I called in Kim Taehyung myself — one of our greatest thieves, never leaving a trace of fingerprints in his wake. He shared my proclivity for art, too.

I hardly glanced at the shadow in my office threshold a few moments later, uttering a basic “come in” to who I assumed was Taehyung.

“I need to speak to you,” came a different voice, although one painfully familiar. Jungkook stood in front of my desk, expression unreadable for a rare change.

“Taehyung is coming in soon to receive an assignment,” I told him. We were long departed from pleasantries. “Proper code says you should tell your superior when you want to speak to the boss so the boss can find a place in their schedule and meet you on their terms. You know this.”

“Last I checked, my superior was dead,” he said, still straight-faced. “And last I checked, you aren’t the boss.”

He was too bold for his own good. I clicked my pen, anger rising fast inside me, and had half a mind to cut off one of his fingers right there. Better men had been punished as such for smaller crimes. “Yoongi isn’t in town, which makes me acting boss,” I said slowly, hoping he would quickly find some sense. “And your superior now is Kim Seokjin. Go ahead, Jeon, test me again.” I played this game much better than he did.

There was fire perched on his lips, words to start a war, but it would end just as quickly as it had begun, and he would be the one left to ash. Instead, he shifted on one foot, the first sign of his unease at being there, and mumbled an apology. “If you have the time, I’d like to talk about something.”

I wanted to dismiss him with a wave, tell him to come back when he learned conduct. Anyone else in my family would’ve, but making him leave would only mean postponing whatever was in store, and I had already been waiting for weeks to see what he would drag up to me. “Fine,” I resigned, “but wait until after Taehyung leaves. He’ll only take a few minutes.”

“Alright,” he said, looked at one of the empty velvet chairs across from my desk. “Mind if I sit?”

At twelve, I never would’ve imagined Jungkook asking to sit in my office. All these years later, I found myself replying with a stiff nod. “Go ahead.”

Taehyung entered as if on cue, only a second after Jungkook sat down, coming in like a spring breeze and carrying himself so easily I sometimes forgot he was part of what we did. He was too beautiful for the dirty work we found ourselves in, but he was bound for life.

When he noticed Jungkook, the breeze came to a suffocating stop. The two stared, wreaking silent havoc on one another until I coughed and Taehyung’s eyes snapped right back to me. We had all been close, once, but Taehyung’s commitment to perfection and my inevitable future at the top left Jungkook where he so chose to remain. They had started with the same jobs, at the same time, and at his age Taehyung had already pulled off million dollar heists. International ones, too. Jungkook could’ve done the same, worked side-by-side with an old friend, if only he applied himself.

“You called for me?” Taehyung prompted, ever eager for his next job.

“I haven’t had any new art in weeks.” I gesture to the walls on either side of us, decorated mostly in stolen art from the last couple decades—one of the guilty pleasures of the Min family, especially my mother and I. Of course, it was a well-kept secret. The worth of the room was unparalleled, and our collection was ever-growing. “I was wondering if you could get a hold of a Manet for me.”

“I could get a hold of Mona Lisa herself if you wanted,” he said, and I beamed. Jungkook was probably rolling his eyes, but I didn’t look in his direction. Unyielding obedience was, after all, a hallmark of our organization, and Taehyung apparently knew it better than Jungkook

“I’ll make arrangements for you in Italy. Maybe Germany—I’ll figure out more details later, and I’ll let Hoseok know you’re going to be abroad for a couple of days. While you’re there, feel free to grab something for yourself.”

“That’s what I love to hear,” he smiled, the proud owner of a growing collection. Most of what we knew of art, we learned together, and it was one of the only pleasures I got to enjoy outside of the mafia. “Anything else?”

I shook my head, knowing I had to get back to Jungkook, although I would’ve liked to invite him to stay a moment longer. “That’s all for now, but I’m sure I’ll call you back here tomorrow.”

“Of course. I’ll see you then.” He offered a polite, customary nod to me and turned to leave, not deigned to give Jungkook another glance.

“You’d benefit from spending some time with him,” I started to Jungkook, who was clearly not ready for a lecture. And not interested, either. “He’s already on his way to having his own subordinates someday, and you’re still doing the work of sixteen year olds.”

He chuckled, but there was no lilt in the sound, all dry bitterness. “Just because you’re sleeping with him doesn’t mean you have to put him on a pedestal.”

My lip twitched, but indulging him with a reaction would fuel him further. He wanted to make me crack, wanted to prove that he still could. “We should start talking about your initiation. You’re plenty old enough to take the oath, and you’ll need time to catch up to the other soldiers your age, but you’d be a great replacement for your father someday. Seokjin would sponsor you, and I’ve already considered some ideas for your first assignment.”

He waited until I finished to shake his head, black hair falling into his eyes. “No.”

“No?” I echoed. “What do you mean no?”

“I mean no, I won’t take over my father’s position. No, I won’t go through initiation. No, I’m not going to kill for you.”

I clicked my pen, trying to find the best angle to reason with him. My father’s mantra: anyone can be won over when you choose your words well enough. “Your father raised you for this. You are his legacy, and you have far more potential as a soldier than as an associate. You’d make more money, work your way—”

This time, he didn’t wait for me to finish. “I don’t want to be an associate either,” he said, and I was too perplexed at his implications to care that he interrupted. “I want out. Period.”

Jungkook had not come from the generations of family ties that I had, or that most of this syndicate had. His father had made the paramount mistake, decades ago, of crossing the brutal Park Clan. With a bounty on his head, he had gone to my father seeking refuge for himself and his family. The Park Clan wouldn’t have stopped at killing him but would’ve taken his wife, his parents, and done God knows what with them. Jungkook’s father had run a couple odd jobs in his younger years, and my father found great promise in him, liked him—which was a rare thing of my father — and made him a soldier on the spot, promising protection to his entire family. The only conditions: unwavering loyalty for the rest of his life, and his youngest child. Jungkook’s older brother was spared from the mafia life, while Jungkook had been raised in it and taught its ways from the time he was old enough to understand. My father had only wanted to establish the Jeon line, one he had seen great potential in, and I was not about to let that slip away.

“No,” I told him, flat. “That’s not an option. Your father—”

“Enough about my father.” He gritted his teeth, as did I. “That’s all I’ve heard the past couple weeks. Hell, even the past couple years. That I should be more like him, or that it’s time for me to rise to the occasion and keep building a Jeon legacy, but my father was a pathetic excuse of a man.”

“He was as noble as anybody,” I snapped back. “He gave up his freedom to protect his family. If he hadn’t sworn himself to us all those years ago, you wouldn’t even have been born.”

“I’m not angry at his reasons for joining the mafia. I’m angry that he became one of you. When I was young, he’d send as much money as possible to my mom and my brother and to my grandparents, but you know how he got. From the time I was fifteen, he’s spent all his money and time on alcohol and prostitutes. Most kids get an inheritance when their parents die. I got half a bottle of whiskey.”

“You cried like a child at his funeral,” I reminded him. “Made a mockery of the rest of us.”

“He was still the only family I had. Ever since he started drinking and sleeping with other women, neither of us have heard from my mom or brother. She says I’ll end up just like him. I don’t even know if they still live where we did when I was a kid.”

My thumb continued pressing on the end of the pen. Click, click, click, while I thought of what to tell him. Since Yoongi and I were in charge of his family’s protection, we knew where they were located. Jungkook’s mother, about six years ago, had asked my father to move her and her oldest son to a new home, one where Jungkook and his father wouldn’t be able to contact them. I decided to withhold what I knew. For now.

“We are your family. The Min Clan. What do you think’s going to happen if you leave? No one on the other side is going to give a shit about you. Your own blood doesn’t speak to you, and based on what? You haven’t done anything your father has, and they still don’t want you. We want what’s best for you.”

“Then let me go. That’s what’s best for me. I’ll find the rest of my family, prove that I’m not the same person as my father, and make an honest living for myself,” he said, too optimistic for his own good.

“An honest living?” I rolled my eyes. “It’s not all it’s chalked up to be, kid.”

“I’m older than you,” he spat.

“I’m the second-in-command of a fucking crime syndicate. You do child’s work. If reminding me that you’re older is the best argument you’ve got, get out of my office.” I was tired of being patient with him, tired of him trodding over my position like we were friends, like we were still in our childhood days on the playground.

He collected himself, reminded of how small he was. He needed me if he wanted to get anywhere, and the ice he strode so confidently over was beginning to crack under his feet.

“What do you think you’re going to do as an honest living?” I asked, keen on a glimpse into his fantasies.

“I…” he paused, realizing how foolish he was going to sound. I thought he might drop the idea entirely, but he pressed on. “I’ve thought of moving away and going to college. Getting a business degree, starting up an office of my own. I’d try to be a good husband someday, and a better father than mine was.”

All his fire simmered down to coals, reducing him to nothing more than a boy with a dream.

An idiot with a dream.

“You want to run a business? We have casinos. We have strip clubs. There’s your business, and you don’t have to go to school for years taking brain-numbing classes to get there. You can start as an employee and work your way up. And get this: you can have a wife and kids, too, and they’re all protected under the clan for as long as you work for us.” I stood up, trailed a half circle around my desk until I stood before him. “The strip clubs always love a fresh face, and you’d bring in good money.”

“You’re asking me to be a stripper?” He leaned forward in his seat, incredulous. “That’s not—no. Aren’t you listening? I want out. Period. I don’t want to marry a woman into this line of work and make her live how my mother did, and how would I be able to come home to my children and tell them that their dad is a criminal?”

“The same way every other father here does, and one day they could be workers, too. Remember when we were young? Remember when we learned what our fathers did, and we couldn’t wait to make them proud? When we first heard about honor, we didn’t care if it meant putting our lives on the line, or if it meant we’d have to kill. Doesn’t that mean anything to you anymore?”

He passed both hands over his face, exhausted. “We were children who didn’t know better. We didn’t know what death meant. Once you learned, you became all the more entranced with this way of life, and I fell away from it.” There was a damning look in his eyes, a question in them that he didn’t want to ask but proceeded anyway. “Do you even know how many murders you and Yoongi have signed off on in the past six months?”

Any answer, unless I said zero, would do nothing to improve his perception of me, but I wouldn’t lie to him. “I don’t know,” I said, remembering that I had just signed off on the assassination of a Park Clan member moments before Jungkook entered my office. The member would be dead within days. “One every few weeks, maybe, but you act like we do it without reason. We kill rats who give information to the feds, or those who break the code, or rivals. We don’t touch the innocent, and we don’t tolerate those who do.”

“Don’t ask me to be like you.” He was pleading now, begging, and I half expected him to fall to his knees.

“You would only have to kill once, and we wouldn’t ask you to again. Not if you’re working one of our casinos or clubs.” We had only a few regular hitmen we called upon, and although Jungkook’s father was one, there were other places he could be useful. But the initiation required two things: a tattoo and a successful hit. The tattoo, a Siberian tiger head with two amethyst gems for eyes, would be given after a prospective soldier succeeded in a hit: one life taken and one life reborn into the clan. The tattoo was our defining mark, the one way to know Min Clan from the rest of the world. Both of my parents, as well as my brother and I, wore ours on our forearm, conspicuous. Jungkook’s father had his on his shoulder blade, the tiger always watching his back.

“I said earlier that I’ve considered targets for your assignment,” I continued. “What about your father’s murderer? Wouldn’t you like to even the playing field? An eye for an eye?”

“No, not even my father’s murderer,” he said without hesitation. “You can’t change my mind.”

Just give me some time, I thought. My father was the stubbornest ox of the lot. In meetings with other clans, and even among our own, he was known for moving the immovable object, persistent even to a fault.

“Everyone has to do things they don’t want to in order to get where they want to be. You could have the perfect life, no more bloodshed if you just do this for us once. Then I’ll be sure we get you on the path you want. Business? Wife? Kids? Done.”

He averted my gaze, eyes fixed on the floor in front of me, filling with agony and agony and agony. “Why won’t you let me go?” he muttered. “You have a thousand other subordinates, a hundred associates who are vying for a chance to make themselves official members. You said yourself that I’m doing child’s work, so I’m clearly not useful to your operation anyway.”

I pulled on an earring, biding my time. He was watching me again. “My father believed in your family, saw things in your father and in you that he swore of until the day he died. Some of our advisers said that he wasn’t worth taking in, and some say the same of you, but Yoongi believes in you.”

“That’s appreciated.” He spoke softly, politely, leading up to something else. “But it’s not what I asked. I don’t care what your father saw, or what your brother sees. Why won’t you let me go?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again just as easy, wordless, still tugging on the jewelry in my ear.

“You used to have so many tells until your father trained you to always wear your best poker face,” he said, and this time I was struggling not to look away. “But you still pull on your earring when you’re nervous. Your left ear. It’s the one thing you’ve never been able to kick.”

I forced my hand back to my side, too little too late. “I want to believe in you the same way Yoongi does. He’s never been wrong about a person before.”

He didn’t believe me, nor should he. Not that I lied, but he knew there was something greater underneath. He was too perceptive not to notice. “You want me to stay because you can’t stand the idea of me not being here with you.”

Jungkook was no longer skimming along cracking ice, but breaking through and swimming down, down, down, even if it meant drowning.

My fingers brushed the cigarette case on my desk, and I picked it up easily, plucking one out and flicking the lighter until it brought the end of the cigarette to orange life. The process took only a few seconds, but they dragged on while the grandfather clock indicated a change in the hour. I hadn’t expected to take so long with Jungkook. This was longer than all of our conversations of the past couple years put together.

“Cigarette?” I asked, finally, because it was all I could think of and anything was better than silence.

“Fuck your cigarettes.”

He hated me. He had hated me for years, I remembered. Ever since I killed a man of my own clan convicted of adultery with another member’s wife. Ever since the tiger had been inked into my skin. I showed the orange and the amethyst to him proudly, giddy, and he never looked at me the same way.

We were not friends. I was his boss.“Careful, Jeon,” I said, reminded that he had spoken out of line time and time again over the course of one meeting. I had never called him by his last name. “You’re going to have to realize who you’re talking to.”

“What’re you going to do? Kill me?”

“I could,” I bluffed. I wouldn’t, but I remembered the first time I watched a man die: I was thirteen, sitting in on one of my father’s meetings for the first time, a meeting with a Park Clan member who “seemed more reasonable than most” but would not honor required codes of conduct. My father shot the man, dead, because he had embarrassed my father in front of me. His youngest. His pride and joy. I understood then and there what our family meant.

“You won’t,” Jungkook said, just as easily. “I know too much. Funny, isn’t it? Usually when a man knows too much, his downfall isn’t far off. His higher-ups have to get rid of him before he says something he shouldn’t, but not with me. You could never because I know too much of you, have seen what no one else has. I’m an extension of your memory and if I die, how much of your life dies with me? I am your only weakness, the one you want so desperately to blot out so you can be like your father, and you hate me for it.”

He was a man possessed, lunging out of his chair and coming too close to me for his own safety, breath hot on my face. A man I hated, who hated me, and I wanted him to stay more than anything.

I didn’t yell, didn’t raise my voice or even think about it. I only said, “Sit down, please.”

And he listened. I didn’t deny him the truth, and he didn’t deny my orders, a silent compromise.

An eventual whisper came: “I saved your life once, can’t you give me back mine?”

We were elementary school children. Only recently had we been made aware of our fathers lives, and my father had tried to explain the gravity of the organization. I had to be constantly aware of my surroundings, never too open about my home life. A thousand rules were implemented all at once, but I was still only a child, ten years old, and naivety was my fatal flaw.

Jungkook and I walked home together everyday, or walked to the car of whichever member of the syndicate was picking us up that day. Perpetually hand-in-hand. Attached at the hip, my father used to say. Attached at the heart seemed more accurate.

I had thought we were walking that day. No one had said otherwise, until a man walked up to the two of us and knelt down in front of me, making himself smaller, more personable. “Your father sent me to pick the two of you up today,” he claimed, teeth straighter and whiter than any I had ever seen.

We were used to new faces picking us up from time to time but always told their names beforehand, and what kind of car they drove. “Daddy didn’t say anyone was picking us up today,” I argued. Jungkook’s fingers squeezed around mine.

“Last minute change in plans. Your mother got a concerning phone call, and your parents thought it would be safer if I got you instead of letting you walk,” the stranger explained.

“What’s our address?” I tried him again, thinking myself clever. If he was a kidnapper, surely he wouldn’t have that information.

I didn’t realize at the time how many people knew my home address. Thousands of mafia members knew where my family ate, drank, and slept, so he relayed my street name and house number with ease.

I trusted him immediately after, grinning at him with a breezy, “Okay, let’s go!”

Jungkook held me in place as I tried to follow, wide brown eyes fixed on the man. His perception was unrivaled, even at that age. “Where’s your tattoo?” he asked. “Show us your tattoo.”

“Pardon me?” The man placed his hands on his hips.

“The tiger tattoo with gems for eyes,” Jungkook urged. “If Mr. Min sent you, you have the tattoo.”

“It’d hardly be appropriate for me to show you in a public place. My tattoo is on my back,” said the man, unwavering, as he tried to take my hand. I was who he really wanted.

Jungkook stepped in front of me, the smallest and least intimidating barrier I had ever seen, but he wouldn’t let this man touch me. “We’re not going with you,” he said, and suddenly the man’s teeth were too white, too straight as he maintained a calm facade. He hadn’t stopped smiling.

We ran, then, Jungkook taking off towards the school without giving me a warning, but he gripped my hand so hard that I stumbled after him. The man’s heavy footsteps followed us only a couple paces before he must’ve realized there were too many people still around, too many parents and children who would notice if he made a scene.

We stopped running only when we were back in the school’s main office, asking the secretary to call one of our parents. My mother was there twenty minutes later, taking Jungkook and I into her arms and kissing our heads and letting tears fall down her cheeks and into our hair. It was the only time I had ever seen her cry.

Our families ate dinner together that night, eight of us around a table except I sat on my father’s lap, king and his heiress. I told everyone what Jungkook had done, how he had saved me, and in later years I would learn what rival clans did with kidnapped children. Those who were lucky were held for ransom and returned to their families for a sum of money, but there had been plenty who weren’t so lucky.

My father took Jungkook and I each under one arm that night, after we stuffed ourselves full and I drank my first ever sip of champagne. “My one rule, above every other rule, is this—” he whispered, drawing us in close. “You must protect each other. Every day and always.”

Every day and always, I thought. Linking my pinky with Jungkook’s, I knew I would never be able to let him go.

In the middle of the night, I heard my father tiptoe past my room and the distinct click of the kitchen door behind him. Later that morning, I watched a breaking news announcement which displayed the face of the man who had tried to lure Jungkook and I into his car less than twenty four hours prior. He had been shot dead, a bullet through his teeth.

Now, with a couple of feet and a bottomless abyss between Jungkook and I, I realized I was still trying to make every day and always a reality. I had to protect him. Protect a whole clan. I had been his responsibility once while he held my hand and brought me home safe time after time. Now I wanted the same for him.

“We made a promise to my father a decade ago, and it still stands,” I told him.

“You want to protect me by sending me off to kill someone?” He tightened his jaw, making him look older than he usually did. His cheeks still carried some of the roundness as they did back then, but it disappeared more each year. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to protect me by letting me go somewhere else?”

“You think it’s that easy?” I narrowed my eyes at him. He scrambled between yes and no. Idiot. Fool. “You think you can just walk out of this room a free man to a world full of roses? That’s not how it works.”

“Then I’ll plant the roses myself.” He said, still dreaming. I hated to be the one to wake him up.

“And then you’ll have to smell them.” I took a drag from the cigarette, dead ash falling to the hardwood floor. “Word will get out that your family isn’t ours anymore. You won’t have our protection, and the Park Clan will find you and your mother and brother in a heartbeat. Even if they don’t, some of our own clan might suspect you of being a traitor if you defect. If you’re killed—if your family is killed—there’s nothing I can do.”

“My father’s incident with the Park Clan was twenty-five years ago. I hadn’t even been born, and you’re telling me they’d still kill my whole family?”

“Second to family ties, grudges are the strongest thing in the mafia. It’d take a hundred years before they even consider a truce between your families. Your father might as well have promised the next four generations of the Jeon line to us.” I shook my head, recounting the horror stories told to me about the Parks, true monsters among men. “You’d be lucky if they killed you straightaway. They have big business in selling people, though, and still torture their captives like they’re in the Middle Ages. With your mother and brother, who knows what they’d do. They don’t mean anything. You’re the one with information, and they’d do whatever possible to get it out of you. And if you give them what they want, they kill you anyway.”

I stamped on the butt of the cigarette with my shoe, Jungkook eyeing the black cap of my heel and the ash underneath.

“Tell me honestly—” he started, hands shaking, whole body shaking. He never had been able to hold his emotions for long. If his face wouldn’t give him away, his body would betray him. “Is there a future for me that doesn’t involve someone else’s blood on my hands or mine on someone else’s hands?”

I tried, really tried, to think of another way, but we wouldn’t protect him much longer if he didn’t take the oath. Even if he remained an associate, we didn’t have the man-power to give our associates the same protection as soldiers, and his mother and brother would be stripped of the home we provided them in a remote town, thrown back into a city teeming with monsters 

“No.” I started to reach for my earring, caught myself halfway, returned my hand to my side. “I don’t think there is.”

He leaned back in the velvet chair, eyes closed even though he was waking up for the first time, maybe, in his life. A wall of stolen art framed his sinewy and silken body, depicting tragedies spanning the last several hundred years, fictional and real, and Jungkook was the saddest painting of all.