#moc: yunho

[hongism]

mists of celeste ➻ 51

➻ pairing: ??? x fem reader

➻ genre: space au, pirate au, space pirate!ateez, angst, smut

➻ word count: 21.1k

➻ rating: M

➻ warnings: language (additional warnings under the cut, pls heed them!)

➻ summary: Months into your stay aboard The Horizon, it becomes apparent that things are not as cut and dry as you thought, and that you might have bitten off more than you could chew with this crew.

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act seven ➻ part three

additional chapter warnings: cannibalism (dream), discussion of suicidal ideation, hallucinations

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When you come to, you almost don’t realize that you have woken up at all because you open your eyes to complete darkness. The first thing you notice is the weight at your back, something digging into your shoulder blades and making you wildly uncomfortable, but that sensation is pushed to the back of your mind as your brain starts catching up with the reality you’re in. Your right arm does not feel wholly attached to your body in any way, and even when you attempt to use it to help move around in the cramped space you’re in, it refuses to budge at all.

Above you, there is a firm plank of wood that slots into your faux coffin so perfectly you imagine it’s aiming to act as your grave.

In your left ear, you hear a quiet yet unsettling whispering coming from outside the box.

“I know you’re there,” comes the distorted yet familiar tone, “I’ll pull every splinter of wood off this box to reach you. You can’t hide forever.”

You swing your left arm up as hard as you can manage given the limited space you have to deal with, ramming your elbow into the block of wood over your body. The huffs of your breathing make the enclosure feel that much smaller, and in turn, it causes your moves to lean more frantic than an organized attempt to escape.

“Keep struggling just like that. I like a fight~”

The voice belongs to San — there’s no doubt about that — and yet it sounds nothing like your San.

Twisting onto your side, you slam your left shoulder sideways into the wooden box, and that finally loosens whatever seal is keeping it shut. You tumble out onto the cold, metal ground followed by spools of what looks to be fabric and threads. Your right arm aches suddenly with a sharp pang in your upper bicep that makes you hiss and clutch at it desperately.

It’s dark all around save for one singular light in the distance, but it flickers into nothingness every so often.

“I’ll give you a head start if you’d like,” comes San’s cruel whispers from just beside you. A chill of terror passes down your spine, but when you turn to look over your shoulder, there’s nothing — and no one — there.

You hoist yourself up while still gripping your aching right arm. A bit of feeling has returned to it, just enough to let you twitch your fingers and make a weak fist with them. The light in the distance illuminates enough of the room you’re in to show you a somewhat clear path to the only exit, though the shadows around you have an almost sinister feel to them. You open your mouth to speak into the darkness, a witless hope that you can reason with the San that’s out there, but your voice bubbles up and dies on your tongue. With those hopes dashed, you resolve to simply make a run for it.

Breaking into a sprint, you launch yourself towards the archway leading to the exit as the shadows rise up to meet your every step like they’re chasing you. The boxes scattered throughout the room are like a maze keeping you from a safe and easy exit. When the light flickers out, you stall and count the seconds until it flickers back into its wobbly pattern again — thirteen plus a half. Each time the darkness swallows you, the exit seems to get further and further away no matter how much you run towards it while the light is on. A cry of frustration rests on your lips but the sound refuses to come out.

“Won’t you look at me, star?” San’s voice rises behind you once again. Darkness envelops the room.

Thirteen and a half.

“Do you fear me?”

Yes, you think. Your fingers squeeze around your bicep until your palm is wet and hot with some sort of liquid that makes your skin slippery.

Five and a half.

You tense. The shadows at your back feel so close that it’s almost like there’s a breath of cold air running down the back of your neck.

“Does my presence frighten you?” he whispers.

One.

You reel around just as the light comes back to life, intent to catch San where he’s lurking once the shadows are dispersed under the fluorescent haze. The world spins terribly even though you hardly moved much, and you topple over like a wobbly top onto your knees. The light has morphed into a solitary spotlight coming down from above onto you, blinding you so much that you try to block your vision to an extent. You look forward to the floor only to be met with a horrifying sight.

“…San?” you say under your breath in a slight panic.

There’s a body on the floor before you, and with the excess light that’s suddenly spilled into the room, you can clearly see that you’re inside the cargo bay aboard The Horizon. The place where you started your journey with this crew. And now the place where San’s slumped and crumpled body lies before you like a corpse. You reach out towards the back that’s facing you with a tremor in your hands that won’t go away. Your fingers close around a cold arm and twist the body so that you can see the face even though the build looks so starkly like San that you’re dreading it.

The moment you do, however, the face morphs and twists before your eyes until it resembles Minho. Gasping, you scramble backwards on your hands, tweaking your injured arm as you do. His lips are blue, as though he’s been dead for some time, skin pale and eyes wide open — bloodshot. Saliva runs down from both corners of his mouth, dried and flaking against his ghostly white face.

A strange whistling echoes throughout the cargo bay.

Minho’s corpse speaks to you.

“Why did you bring me here to die?”

You twist over onto your hands and knees, ignoring the flare of pain that shoots down your arm as you launch yourself forward in a vain attempt to escape. The whistling continues to ring in your ears, like a macabre song fueling your sprint out of the cargo bay and into the attached corridor. You move through the hallways frantically, passing room after room with open doors and faceless bodies inside each one. By the time you reach the mess hall, you’re out of breath, and your sanity is fraying at the edges because of the damn whistling that refuses to stop following you.

The lights here are flickering too, and the usual hum of machinery that radiates throughout the ship is absent completely. The tables in the hall are shoved to the side haphazardly and coated in a thick layer of dust. Beside one of the toppled tables sits Jongho’s guitar, broken on the ground with its strings snapped.

“There you are.”

You don’t have time to process who the owner of the voice is — you barely have time to brace yourself for the impact that strikes you from behind. It does nothing to save you from the impending fall, though the floor dissipates as you approach it face-first, and you swing into darkness instead. Next thing you know, you’re sitting in a chair with no way of seeing what’s around you and warmth blossoming across your face.

The hands that cover your eyes are not your own yet they are just as calloused and rough on your skin, but the voice against your ears is so soft by comparison.

“Are you ready, mon amour?” It’s Seonghwa who speaks with a foreign warmth to his tone you haven’t heard in some time. You bring a hand up to cover his, eager to pull him away and restore your vision. “Not yet, you haven’t answered the question.”

“I’m ready,” you breathe out in nothing more than a whisper.

“Good.”

Light creeps into your vision, pulling back the curtains of darkness, and what you see before you is both astonishingly beautiful and horrifying at once. You’re at a dinner table small enough to seat two, and across from you sits none other than your captain. Except unlike you, who possesses the freedom to move from the chair as you please, Hongjoong has ropes bound around his torso and keeping his arms stuck to his sides. He stares ahead at you, face oddly blank and expressionless. Seonghwa creeps into your peripherals draped in white robes that make him look like a saint sent from the heavens.

“Seonghwa.”

“Shh, mon amour. Let us prepare this feast for you to enjoy.”

A deep haze settles over your mind, whether from the odd sweet aroma in the air or from Seonghwa’s lilting voice. You do not feel fully present as you watch what unfolds next. As Seonghwa takes his captain by the hair and drags his head so far back that it seems as though his neck is the feast in question. Something glints in Seonghwa’s hand, but you realize it far too late, as the next second leads this dinner into something far more horrifying.

He splits Hongjoong’s neck open on the blade. Little crimson rivulets spill over the silver. Your brain is calling for you to take action, to stop this gruesome scene before it becomes worse, but still your body does not move. Seonghwa continues to wrench the knife along skin without relent, as though it is nothing to him, like Hongjoong is merely a slain animal for him to butcher as he sees fit, and you are terrified.

“Is this not what we are owed, Y/n?” Seonghwa says, angling his head down to the blade. He pulls his tongue along the flat where a minute amount of blood has pooled. “Our devotion deserves just rewards.” The edges of his sleeves are staining more and more by the second, though it is nothing but an afterthought in the moments that follow. Seonghwa turns his head further in to lay his lips along the seam he has created in his captain’s flesh. He sinks teeth in deep, and when he draws back, there is blood up to his nose and dripping down his chin.

“We’ve earned this, Y/n.” If your body could function according to your mind, you would certainly jump in your seat from the sudden intrusion of a new voice joining the fray. Yunho comes in from the left, out of a strange pit of darkness that seemingly has no beginning or end. He balances a knife of his own in one hand, fingers barely clutched around the hilt, but his grip shifts once he steps over to the table. It’s with a firm hand that he drives it directly into Hongjoong’s sternum. Or, what you believe to still be Hongjoong. His face is more obscured than anything, and his form does not seem recognizable in the slightest to you, but it was him before Seonghwa slit his throat. It must still be him now, no?

Then this man beside Seonghwa cannot be Yunho. You have never known him to be violent.

“We have all given him parts of ourselves, my star.” Warmth surrounds you. Before you realize it, you are standing, and San is there behind you like a mere extension of yourself. His arms wrap around your body, hand resting steady on the base of your throat. Hot breath pours from his lips and down the side of your neck. It causes a tingle to rush up and down your spine; though despite that, your body still does not feel like it is your own. “Does it not make sense for us to take in return?” San’s hands retract to rest on your lower back. He pushes you down like he wants to bend you over the table, but rather than letting your chest collide with the empty plates laid out there, he nudges your leg up with his knee. Like a puppet, you crawl across the table, sending utensils and glassware both to the ground. San caresses your head and squeezes the back of your neck in silent reassurance. That this is okay, this is fair, this is what you are owed.

When you reach the other side, Hongjoong is upright once more. It is still him, though you aren’t sure if there is relief in you upon seeing his face. Knife still in his chest, throat still slit and bleeding — now even with a chunk of flesh ripped out to add to the carnage — he stares right at you with strangely lively eyes. All this and yet the monster is still not defeated. What a fool you would be to believe that it would be an easy feat.

“If there is something you desire—” blood coats his teeth, making his crazed grin all the more insane “—you must tear it from my flesh.”

His fingers are cold on your wrist. You did not notice how close you came to the edge of the table, now teetering between the wood and falling into his lap, nor did you realize that you had brought a hand to his chest in the process. That’s where he holds you now, keeping your hand flat over his heart with an ice cold grip.

A phantom heartbeat makes itself known on your fingertips. A steady and calm ba-dum, ba-dum that gets stronger and stronger the more your fingers sink into flesh and bone.

Something shifts.

You don’t understand how, but you are no longer on the table. Hongjoong does not sit across from you any longer, nor are there even the slightest traces that he ever was there to begin with. The table is clean once again and set for one — you and you alone. You are already holding a fork and knife in your hands.

Seonghwa comes forward from the spot where your captain just was, dressed again in white but this time he is clean and free of blood. He sets a plate down before you, one you do not immediately look at because you are too busy examining his face for any trace of Hongjoong’s flesh and blood. He smiles without showing his teeth and nods towards the dish.

“Please eat, mon amour. You’ve worked so terribly hard for your meal.” He finishes his words with a full-blown smile. His teeth are stained red.

Before you, on a pristine plate, lies a still-beating heart.

It’s not the morning hour or your lover shifting in the sheets that finally pulls you out of your sleep, but rather a muted horror lingering in your body from a rather violent and gruesome nightmare that came upon you once you fell asleep last night. Despite your wishes to forget such a thing, it persists in your memory, even as you climb out of bed and make your way to the bathroom where San is already up and prepping for the day ahead.

“Good morning,” you mumble while rubbing the sleep from your eyes. He returns the greeting just as incoherently, lips wrapped around a toothbrush, but he still makes way for you to press a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“Water’s still warm,” he pulls his toothbrush out a bit to get the words out, eyes on you through the mirror as you strip down to nothing. “I didn’t wanna wake you up.” He doesn’t need to explain a thing, though you’re certain he already knows as much so you don’t voice those sentiments out loud. You stand up straight to look at him through the reflection too. A small smile plays at your lips, one that’s meant to be reassuring. You hope the smile doesn’t drop too soon when you turn, but if it does then San plays the part of being clueless exceptionally well. He was correct about the water though, as it feels blissfully warm on your skin.

Your hopes to forget the dream that plagued you last night are dashed almost immediately, however, when you close your eyes to keep the barrage of water from spilling into them. It returns to you in a flash, like you are reliving it just the same, and the dream floods your senses fully. The metallic taste on your tongue horrifies you to the point of eliciting a small gasp from you that leads to water rushing into your throat and making you choke. You only realize that you’ve bit your cheek once you’re recovering from the sudden choking fit.

“Are you alright?” San sounds two seconds away from a serious panic.

“I-I’m fine, fine, just had an awful dream.” That isn’t what he was asking, but the realization dawns on you only after you’ve spoken.

The curtain pulls back a bit to show San’s concern in full. The soft pout on his lips makes you want to kiss him.

“I bit my cheek and choked on water because of it. And I was thinking about my dream. Wasn’t… I don’t know, it was just surreal and horrible.” You don’t imagine there to be any normal way to explain what you dreamt about in the slightest. Leaning forward out of the shower a bit, you plant a quick kiss against his frown to reassure him. “I’m fine, I just need to fully wake up and shake it off.”

“If you wanna talk about it…” he trails off, eyes still full of concern and trailing over your face even as he tastes your touch on his lips with his tongue. “I’m gonna head down and get some breakfast. Take your time.” He seems to note that you’d like space to mull over your nightmares, even if your reassurance hasn’t diminished his worry much at all. The curtain falls back into place, leaving you enclosed in the shower in peace, and you let out a small breath when you hear San leave the room.

You douse yourself with water and hang your head under the showerhead to let it pelt you from above in a vain attempt to clear your mind. The metallic scent of blood was so real and prevalent that you can almost taste it on the back of your tongue now, as the memory of the dream sinks back over you like a dark shadow.

Your limbs seem to move on their own as your right hand brings the fork forward to sink into the beating flesh of the heart. Blood spills out of the tiny pinprick holes your fork leaves in its wake. The scarlet pools at the base of the plate. The knife slips through the organ after some struggle, as though the thumping flesh is wrought with steel.

Seonghwa still stands across from you on the other side of the table with his hands folded in front of him like a steeple. He smiles, lips closed and tightly wound into a grin that’s almost painful to look upon because of how strained his expression is. He watches you cut away at the heart and take a small cube neatly onto your fork.

“To think he would let you of all people feast upon his heart,” he says, eyes wide and unblinking. You pause with the bite halfway to your mouth. The knife in your left hand clatters against the plate when you drop it unceremoniously. Seonghwa unfurls his hands and lays them against the pristine white tablecloth. “Tell me, mon amour, would you…” he swallows hard around nothing. You remain frozen in place, and it’s your turn to watch him now as he slides around the edge of the table and comes over onto your side. Seconds tick by at an agonizingly slow pace, and Seonghwa lowers himself to his knees. A trembling hand clasps around your thigh tightly. It takes you a moment to recognize the expression painting his features to be excitement. “Would you grant me a bite?”

Your hand moves the fork over to him without conscious thought. You coax his chin up with your free hand, fingers lingering on the underside of his jaw as his pretty lips part in an almost feral want.

“Ask nicely and perhaps I might.” Your voice comes out in a sultry tone that does not feel like your own despite it sounding like you. Seonghwa exhales a shaky sigh, his pupils blown out and sweat beading his brow.

“Please…” Seonghwa shudders and shifts his chin down, catching your thumb between his lips and nipping at the pad gently. “Just a bite.”

You split the seam of Seonghwa’s lips further open upon your thumb and wedge it between his teeth, finally bringing the fork down to his waiting mouth. His breath lies hot against your thumb. The soft pants he exhales are frantic, and his gaze upon your face is so unsettlingly steady that you cannot force yourself to be the first to look away. As the fork descends upon his mouth and pushes the small bite onto his tongue, you retreat and pull your thumb out of his mouth. Seonghwa moans around the morsel, a little rivulet of blood trickling down from the corner of his mouth as he shudders around the taste of Hongjoong’s heart.

Seonghwa’s chest is heaving when he pushes up on his knees and reaches for your face with both hands. You let him cup your cheeks, neatly manicured nails digging into your flesh as he tugs you down to meet his lips with your own. What follows is a mess — a kiss full of blood, saliva, teeth, and the lingering heartbeat resting atop Seonghwa’s tongue as he thrusts the wet muscle into you to coat the whole interior of your mouth with the taste of iron. The fork in your right hand hits the ground with a sharp clang that rings too loudly in your ears. You search the table blindly with your other hand until you find the plate with the rest of the heart on it, and when you close your hand around what’s remaining, the heartbeat thumps like it’s part of you.

Saliva connects your mouths when you push Seonghwa back and separate your lips. He’s dazed, still looking up at you like you’re some benevolent god offering him saintly blessings, and you do. As you swipe your thumb over your bloodied lip, you push the heart firmly against Seonghwa’s parted lips. He groans, eyelashes fluttering around the taste, and there’s a sick squelch resounding in the air once he works his teeth into the flesh.

“This,” he says through soft pants, twisting his chin down into his shoulder to catch his breath even as you force the organ further against him. It stains his pretty tanned skin with red streaks that drip down the front of his white garb. “This shall be our final feast.”

You come to again on the floor of the shower, hunched over with your head leaned into the corner of the tiles. The water beating down on you is icy now; any lingering warmth you had upon entering has dissipated while you were unconscious. Beneath your head where the water can’t quite reach is a streak of crimson. You lift a hand to your head first in search of the source of the blood but stop immediately when a fresh drop falls. Tapping your nostril with your middle finger first to confirm, you rub roughly at your nose with the back of your hand to sweep away any other droplets that threaten to come out.

The shower handle doesn’t budge right away when you reach for it blindly above your head, fingers slipping off the knob upon the first few tries. By the time you finally do get it to shut off as intended, you’re huffing your frustrations out in small bouts of profanities.

Your head hurts by the time you are able to finally pull yourself out of the shower and get dried off, but the nosebleed has stopped so you take it as a small victory. San set out a fresh set of clothes for you on his way out it seems, something you had forgotten to do entirely, and you smile as you see them laid out on the bed through the bathroom doorway. Even though you’ve thoroughly dried off, it’s still somewhat a struggle to tug your pants on, and your turtleneck is even more a pain in the ass. You slip into your boots by the door as you’re lacing up the corseted vest San set out for you overtop your shirt. You tie it tighter than is necessary, mostly on account of your thoughts drifting off to other things as you go about your routine.

Of all things to dream about, the cannibalism of your captain is a new — and quite startling — one. No part of you wants to revisit the visceral images that haunted you, and you aren’t sure you want to understand the subliminal messaging your brain is trying to communicate with you either. It’s best, you imagine, to push everything about it far to the back of your mind to be forgotten in the waking hours and only recalled when night falls again.

The corridor outside your shared room with San is void of life, though you can hear voices rising from the first floor of the hostel. Upon descending the stairs halfway, you catch sight of San standing near the foyer, one arm folded over his broad chest as he uses the other to accentuate whatever he’s talking about with minute gestures. Nightingale stands across from him, with the bright glow of his eyes tracking your every move as you descend the staircase.

“Pardon me then,” he utters through a nod in San’s direction.

“Oh.” San glances back over his shoulder, gaze softening upon landing on you. “There you are.”

“Sorry it took me so long.” You aren’t wholly certain how long you spent passed out on the shower floor, though given that San seems to have already eaten, you imagine it was enough time to cause a bit of worry.

“No worries, star, I spoke with Nightingale to pass the time. He’s found a charter for Soojin and Luca to take, one that’ll get them to one of the larger ports a few cities over. Setheno here is more of a trading hub than one meant for more widespread travel. Apparently, Nightingale intends to leave with them, though it doesn’t depart until the beginning of next week so you… you still have time with Soojin. Not sure if or when we’ll cross paths again.” San shrugs, extending his hand out to you as you step up to him. “He also mentioned that the two of you had spoken recently.”

“Ah that… I, uh, I’m sorry for not bringing it up sooner. We were preoccupied with other things and it slipped my mind. Since we had already discussed similar things so much, I didn’t want to bring it up again and again or seem vengeful by any means.”

San shakes his head quickly even before you’re finished speaking. His hand shifts around your hip to rest against your lower back. “I’m not upset, don’t misunderstand. Simply wanted to be transparent and let you know that we had spoken about it as well — just the time you went to speak with him in the training room, that is. I had already given him a heads-up after I told you that story making sure he knew you were wholly aware of it. Even though I told you the circumstances of our relationship and what Captain had me do to him, I am very glad that you heard it directly from Nightingale too. Not just my side of the story.”

“Did you by chance tell him I knew of your history before I did that?”

“It’s possible.” San purses his lips and looks off at the wall as he seems to rack his brain trying to complete the timeline of matters in his head. “I stopped by the training room first thing in the morning after I told you, to speak with Yeon — Nightingale — and let him know the extent of your knowledge about our history. To be frank, I also told him that he need not be the one to share that history with you as I had already done so because I didn’t wish for him to feel it was his responsibility in any way. It seems he wished to disclose it regardless though.” He shifts his chin down and looks back at you with a small smile decorating his lips. “It’s a miracle we even have a working relationship, given said history.”

“He… didn’t mention any of that when I spoke with him.” Though you sigh, it comes out more as a breath of relief than anything else.

“You were still in bed when I got up, so I imagine I was the first to accost him. I’m sure he thought it was an organized attack on his psyche when we both came to corner him separate times to dig up ghosts of the past.”

“Which would explain why he acted like a raging asshole who purposefully tried to drive a wedge between the two of us?”

San’s hand withdraws from your back, and he lowers his head. “Please do not — just.” A breath before he deigns to lift his head again. “If you say anything further, I will not be able to resist hurting Nightingale. Should he hurt you, then I will hurt him tenfold in return. So please, if you do not wish to see that then bite your tongue.” You take his face into your hands.

“Quiet those thoughts, San,” you murmur. His gaze chases your lips then flutters shut.

“You’re right, it’s not helping anything to think like that.” When he brings up a hand to cover one of yours, your chest tightens. You wonder, albeit briefly, if you’re of any help or solace to him as he is to you. “I’m supposed to go help Yunho stock some supplies for the ship in a few minutes. You wanna come along?”

“It’s not as though I have any other plans,” you shrug, letting your hands fall down by your sides in unison.

The morning air is far more welcoming than the ambience you experienced last night on your walk with Mingi. With bright beams of sunlight cascading down across the gorge and the dense fog lifted from the streets, it’s almost as though that place you walked the night prior was nothing more than a figment of your imagination. Just as your cruel nightmare had been. Minho is going to have the time of his life when he hears about it, you know that much for certain.

“Ah, there you are!” Yunho comes into your line of sight in a flurry of white as he balances a stack of boxes on the ground before you and San. “San, these small crates are ready to go on over to the docks, I’ll take care of the medications!”

“This is more than expected, no?” San says, brows knitting together as he releases your hand to take up the crates. Yunho stares for a moment with his mouth open and his jaw wholly slack before he winces and shakes his head.

“Yeah, I guess I messed up inventory because I had to shift some numbers around and alter some entries.”

“It’s not like you to do that,” you add, and the earring dangling from your right ear chimes with the movements of your head.

“Hongjoong said the same thing but…” he hesitates. His tongue darts out to wet his slightly chapped lips. “Something must’ve slipped through. It happens! I’m sure it’s not the first time I’ve done so.”

You take two of the crates atop San’s stack without a word, and it earns you a sharp pinch in the side from the man himself.

“Can’t let me show off my big manly muscles for you, huh?”

“What? You don’t wanna see mine?” you tease in return, nudging him with your hip.

“Oh I’ve seen you show them off quite well,” he hums as his gaze seems to trace your body beneath your clothes.

“Ew! Ew, stop being gross in front of me, I’m still here!” Yunho covers his eyes with his free hand, balancing the crate he’s holding on his hip and cradling it under his arm. “Let’s run these over quickly; Mingi and Jongho are already at the dock running a post to help load and transport supplies. Say, do you know if we’re offloading today too?”

“Mhm, Seonghwa and I are meeting with a number of buyers this evening,” San replies, sidestepping you slightly when Yunho nearly knocks into him. “As are Captain and Yeosang, I believe.”

“Ah… sweet freedom,” Yunho hums, but his tone isn’t as light and airy as it usually is. You dare to glance over at him, to try to catch his expression or the gleam in his eyes, but he masks his emotions masterfully.

“He’s been a bit incessant since we landed, yeah?” San talks as though he understands what Yunho means nonetheless, and although it excludes you to an extent, you are certainly good at making your own assumptions. And frankly — it wouldn’t take a genius to guess.

“You know him as well as I do. Can’t stand change even a little bit.” Yunho clenches his jaw. “Speak of the devil.”

Ahead, Hongjoong stands with Seonghwa’s tall and lithe form at his back like a menacing shadow. If possible the circles under his eyes are even darker than last you saw him, though you aren’t graced with the sight of face for long before he’s turning away in a clear attempt to avoid eye contact.

“Here’s the rest!” Yunho says as you approach the dock, and any remnants of his emotions are tossed behind the metaphorical mask he slips on when Hongjoong acknowledges your presence. “Also, Mingi, those pain meds are at the top of this crate. I kept a bottle with me back at the hostel in case you need more while we’re here.” He passes off the box under his arm to the Berserker, patting the side of it as Mingi nods.

“Is something the matter?” you inquire when Mingi turns to you next. He motions for you to add your crates to his growing pile, waiting to respond until you’ve securely set them atop the one he’s carrying.

“I’ve been having a killer headache since last night. Have you?”

You lock eyes with him just before he straightens and the crates block his face completely.

“No, I’ve been just fine—” it’s unwise at best to lie to Mingi, but to do so with Jongho just mere steps away as well is simply asking for trouble “—no headaches. Has anyone else been having them?”

“Lieutenant,” Mingi says under his breath. He shifts his body to the side just enough to block Hongjoong and Seonghwa from seeing his lips as he continues to whisper to you, “though that may be due to another reason altogether.” The Berserker turns away, and you straighten up, clearing your throat in the process as the weight of your captain’s stare bears down hard on you.

“That’s the last of things, Captain.” Yunho passes his load onto Jongho as San departs from your side to help organize the cargo in the transport.

“Seonghwa will follow along to help finalize the deal on that side of the gorge.” Hongjoong beams like a proud cat, but the man at his shoulder does not share the same sentiments on his solemn expression. “Do be good and behave. I am quite eager to be rid of all the excess goods we’ve been lugging around for so long.” You avert your eyes so that you do not have to see the way his sharp gaze tries to sear holes into your skin. His index finger drums against the band of one of his rings on his opposite hand like a metronome. Steady and unwavering, tick tock, a slow and deliberate rhythm.

Seonghwa’s chin dips to his chest as he nods, and the man turns on his heel to follow after the Berserkers without waiting for further instruction. You almost wish to go with him when you see what unfolds before your eyes next — your proud captain sidling up to Yunho and looping his arm around the healer’s lithe waist. The look in his eyes reminds you much of an apex predator. As Seonghwa had once mentioned sending Yunho into the lion’s den, that analogy is not lost on you nor is it an inaccurate one to say the least.

“What are we doing today, dearest?” he purrs against Yunho’s shoulder despite the rigidity he’s met with. Yunho only has the gumption to stop the man when Hongjoong reaches down and tries to lace his fingers through Yunho’s, only to grasp at air as Yunho instead clears his throat and dodges the wandering touches.

Hongjoong’s soft gaze shifts in an instant, and his lips draw into a firm little line as he once again attempts to grab Yunho's hand.

“What exactly is it you’re trying to do, Captain?” Yunho hisses through his teeth with so much venom that he spits a little.

In that moment, your oh-so-proud captain has the audacity to look like a kicked puppy, lips folding out into a minute pout, and the tension in Yunho’s shoulders melts into nothing half a second after. Tick tock. Like clockwork.

Yunho lets out a sigh, one akin to defeat. He waves Hongjoong off and pries himself out of the man’s grasp, leaving him to glower and stare at the side of Yunho’s head with barely concealed fury. “I’m going back to the hostel. It’s too humid today to walk around. Come with, Y/n? San will probably go along with the Berserkers.”

You glance back at the transport, seeing San still inside next to Jongho, and give a slow nod. When you fall into step with the healer, it takes everything in you to not pass a lot over your shoulder at Hongjoong, just to see his expression one last time before you go.

“Sorry, I thought he would follow if I didn’t ask you to come with me. The last thing I want right now is to be cornered again.” Yunho’s lips quirk into a crude smile as he speaks.

“I can’t blame you,” comes your quick response. “It’s hard to say what’s worse: being alone with him in silence or when he decides to open his mouth.”

“Both are…” Yunho laughs out of the blue. “Truly stressful.”

At the door to the hostel, Yunho pauses his stride and turns to look at you. The image of him driving a knife into Hongjoong’s chest flashes before your eyes. If he were an angrier man, one not afraid of violence, perhaps that would be a potential reality on the horizon. Either Hongjoong’s hold is truly so deeply rooted that those under his thumb cannot move, or he is merely lucky that those closest to him are incapable of harming him.

But this Jeong Yunho before you is more akin to a white lamb left on an altar, much like Seonghwa and all others Hongjoong delights in toying with.

He grins a tad awkwardly.

“How do you feel about going to a bar with me tonight?”

────────────

Your excess of free time leads you into the courtyard, though you cannot claim to be outside for the scenery and nothing else. Rather, it’s the man seated at the small table he was at last time you spoke with him.

“I didn’t even have to hound you to meet me this time,” he chirps as you sit in the chair adjacent to his in lieu of announcing your presence. “What a delightful change.”

Minho turns the book in his lap over so that the pages splay over his thigh, and when he folds his fingers over the back, the spine gives a slight crunch.

“May I ask you an odd question?”

This makes him perk up a hair, eyes flashing interest as he angles his torso more towards you. “That is what my job is for, in a sense.”

“Does your job also include the interpretation of dreams?”

Minho offers a shrug, eyes flitting up to glance at the sky before coming back down to reconnect that unsettlingly firm eye contact he seems so obsessed with.

“I’m no fortune teller or witch, but there is some science to it.”

“What does it mean to dream about eating someone?”

A laugh rips from Minho’s lips, and it quickly devolves into a cackle that has him doubling over on himself. He slides his book off his thigh, snapping it shut without bothering to mark the place he left off on. He gives it the same amount of care when he tosses it onto the table like it’s nothing.

“There are simpler ways to occupy my attention, Ghosty, I must say,” he says, still chuckling as he jerks his chair across the cobbles to face you head on. “But you always pick the most exciting options. Eating someone?”

“My dreams since coming here have been odd and surreal, much like intrusive thoughts but dialed up to eleven.”

“Well, you aren’t alone in that. I’ve been having strange dreams too though… I fear none quite like cannibalism.” He draws a hand up to his face, thumbing over his chin before continuing. “In any case, dreaming of consuming someone can mean a myriad of things. It can be sexual in nature, it can mean you feel so close with someone that your subconsciousness interprets that connection as a need to take that person into yourself. Or there could be a level of intimacy to such actions, the act of one giving themselves unto you so wholly that they give you their flesh. Dreaming of such things is not always cannibalistic in terms of literally wanting to eat someone in the waking world. I would not be concerned that you will suddenly have the desire to change your diet anytime soon. Sometimes those dreams steam from desiring someone heavily — either sexually or otherwise. If those you’re consuming in your dreams are faceless beings, then it could be as simple as your mind begging for a deeper connection or a level of intimacy that is neither sexual nor romantic necessarily.” Minho pauses to smile at you, eyes falling shut and creasing briefly before he snaps them back open. “But I could sit here and psychoanalyze you for days if not weeks and still not be able to give you a definitive answer as to what it means for you specifically to be having cannibalistic dreams.”

His tone leaves more to be desired, as though there’s another thought hanging at the end of his tongue waiting for its cue.

“And yet…?” you prompt, almost immediately regretting your curiosity. The chime dangling from your right ear lets out its melody when you tilt your chin and further seek his gaze. Minho leans forward at the waist and into your personal space.

“And yet I can piece together who it is you are consuming in those dreams of yours, hm?”

Though you smile, your eye is twitching.

“You fear the conclusions you come to on your own might be true, so you go to others seeking other answers but when they tell you that you’re correct, you become incensed.” Minho hums and folds his arms loosely over his chest. “Hardly a unique dichotomy. It is in our nature to become so defensive, after all.” The doctor moves one hand and flicks an invisible fleck of dust off the pad of his thumb. When he speaks again, it’s with a flourish of his wrist. “There is nothing to be ashamed of really. Desires are natural. Lust is powerful. A denouement is on the horizon. And frankly, it’s hardly your fault given how every piece has been moved with such care to bring you to such a mental state. You cannot be expected to have done anything else with the odds so stacked against you—”

Minho catches himself a beat too late, eyes flicking open and darting over to your face in an instant as his typically manicured expression slips into one of slight panic. He exhales a breathy laugh.

“Ah… I see now,” he mutters. You hold his gaze. “How easy it is for one to let their guard down…”

Your tongue feels like cotton, and the thoughts in your head have slowed to as near a halt as is possible. Though your lips move around unformed words and phantom questions, you can’t seem to bring yourself to ask. As the doctor said, you dread vocalizing your thoughts only to have them confirmed to be true. Even if you already know.

If he were to ask right now: what is it you are feeling?, then you aren’t wholly sure how you would be able to answer that. Neither dread nor disappointment stirs in your chest, though there is a deep ache. In truth, it’s nothing you did not already know even if you had hoped Seonghwa spoke the words purely out of contempt in the heat of the moment.

When your hatred turns to infatuation, I’ll be sure to tell you all the ways in which Hongjoong has orchestrated the destruction of your psyche since your arrival here.

Minho makes no effort to correct himself or cover his words; in fact, he deigns to say nothing at all.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” you say, unsure of your volume thanks to how loudly your heart is seeming to beat in your ears. The man opens his mouth, closes it, then squeezes his eyes shut.

“What is it you’re expecting me to say?”

“That you misspoke,” you answer almost before he finishes his question. “That you spoke out of line, based on assumptions, that — that…”

“What point is there in appeasing you with half-hearted words that you know to be lies?”

“You tell me, you’re the psychologist!” When you jut your hand out to him, Minho’s face returns to its usual candor. He folds his fingers around your outstretched ones, clutching the back of your hand tightly as he moves quickly and efficiently to kneel in front of you with his knees on either side of your feet.

“Ghost — Y/n, breathe.” His other hand moves to your knee. “You have to breathe. Deep breath in, hold it, hold it, now let it go. Again, again. Come on, again for me.” Your hand is trembling against his despite how tightly he’s gripping it. “It is not your fault. You did not know. You cannot blame yourself for this.”

You sink into yourself. “I should have followed Jisung off that fucking cliff.”

“No, no, Y/n, that’s what we’re not gonna do or say. You’re spiraling.”

“I’ve lost my fucking mind.”

“You’re having a perfectly reasonable reaction to uncomfortable truths.”

“I must be fucking crazy,” you say through a shaky laugh as you lean back in your chair and let your head dangle off the back of it. “I must still be sleeping, that’s it. I’m not awake yet.” Minho grips you hard enough to make certain that his nails bite at your skin, as though to prove you wrong. “I need to—” Fuck, you need to feel anything other than this crippling anxiety pulsing in your veins. You bend in half again in a blur of movement, rushing forward and into Minho’s space in search of something that is surely a detrimental mistake, but he’s quicker than you are even in this panicked state because he flicks his hand up from your knee to place it firmly over your mouth before you get too close to planting your lips on his. Something akin to disappointment burns in his stare, though it’s replaced so swiftly that you want to believe you imagined it. Cheeks flame with an inherent shame as a wash of realization rushes over you.

“Enough of that,” he states firmly, as though chastising a small child. “You are not sleeping. You are not dying. You are not insane or crazy or whatever other colorful word you can think of that is synonymous with those two things. You are having a panic attack, Y/n, and you will be okay.”

Your body stops fighting him so heavily then. The logic in his words, combined with how certain his tone is, blocks out every spiraling thought for just a moment. The tension in your shoulders slacks as you slump in the chair.

“Thank you,” he says under his breath, slowly bringing his palm off your mouth. “Now, I need you to breathe with me. Steady and slow, just following my movements. Breathe in as I clench my fist, exhale as I release it, okay?”

You wet your lips as you nod in the hopes that it will dispel some of your trembling.

“Do not look at my face,” he murmurs, hand raised by his head. And when, slow and steady like a pulse, he draws his fingers in until they’re a tightly wound fist, you let his motions guide your breathing. Though your chest burns, the tightness in your throat is far more pressing and weighty. While not impossible, it is difficult to a degree to gulp down breaths until the searing panic dilutes. The black coating the edges of your vision diminishes. It comes with regret though because looking upon Minho’s face in your peripherals shows you an expression of such deep pity that you glance away in an instant.

Is this the oh so glorious fall from grace that Seonghwa had been waiting for?

“Ghost of Eros, who have you become?” It’s Jisung’s voice that echoes in your ears. You haven’t allowed yourself much time to fall into these thoughts since his death, mostly to keep yourself sane and away from more hellish thoughts. You crave the allowance to cradle your head in your hands and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until all thoughts pop out of you, but Minho keeps your right one firmly occupied still.

“You used to be the most renowned sniper in certain parts of the galaxy.” Ah, not Jisung’s voice. Minho is the one speaking to you. Yet his tone is tinged with that same venomous pity as before. “Say, do you even remember how to fire a sniper rifle, Ghosty?”

“Of course I do,” you say as you come back to yourself bit by bit. “You just… it’s not something that can be described so easily without demonstration.” You glance down at where Minho kneels before you. From this angle you can see down past the high collar of his white coat, and a blossom of redness sits across his smooth skin near his collarbone and across the line of his shoulder. He shifts under your stare, and the shrug makes his collar cover the welts across his skin.

“Are you blind to how reckless you are?” he asks suddenly. “In all departments, to be fair, but very much so in terms of situations that would put you in danger.” His chin drops to his chest as the doctor lets out a sigh. At last, he releases your hand, pushing up on his knees to help him stand upright for only a second before he’s dropping back into his own chair. “You live like a person who does not wish to. Thus, I am going to ask you this outright, and you will answer me outright in return. Fair, no? Do you wish to die?”

“No,” comes your answer, as though it is the most obvious thing in the universe. Minho levels you with a stare once more, and it prods at your already soft and sensitive outer shell. “No, it’s not that I wish to die. If I were to die then… perhaps I would not mind as much as others might in such a position.”

The man across from you leans forward enough to set his elbows atop his knees.

“Do you think of Jisung often?”

You wonder if this man is truly so good at his work that he can see through to your brain at any given second, or if you wear your thoughts and emotions on your face to be read like a book. On the other hand, the question feels more of one being asked by Minho-the-human-being as opposed to Minho-the-snarky-psychologist.

“I try not to.” Then — “I do not want to.”

“Does that come from a place of guilt?” Silence is often the most telling response. “Allow me to frame things in a more digestible way for you. Let’s say I die trying to protect a person I love. Then that person blames themselves for my death… in that instance, I would see a need to claw my way out of hell to tell her that I am fine. The choice made was not one made lightly. That she has nothing to feel guilty about. Because it was not her fault. That she deserves to be happy more than anyone else, and more than anything, she deserves to live on. If nothing else then for the mere reason of honoring the life given to save hers. The cost of sacrifice is not her guilt.

“I understand that Jisung did much to harm and betray you in the days leading up to his death. Even before then, too. But know that on that cliffside, what your captain witnessed and informed me of in the aftermath of that hell was a desperate man throwing himself at the remaining threat to your life after Hyunwoo fell. He had a goal to push Hyunjin off that cliff as well, and though he failed, he did so in an effort to save your life. Were he a man intent to die from the start, then he would have let himself be killed before even leaving that barn. His final gift to you was his sacrifice, and in that, his remorse.”

“Ha… oddly, that makes me feel more guilty than before,” you mutter through a crude laugh. Minho shakes his head.

“I would not tell you this unless I was certain you were ready to hear it. We are not the amalgamation of others’ hopes and dreams, nor are we destined to carry the memories of those we’ve lost as burdens. Do not carry his death as a burden of guilt upon your shoulders.”

“And what of you, doctor? Do you think of him often?” you inquire in return, finding his gaze drifting upwards to the sky. He chuckles as a hand seems to move to the back of his neck with a mind of its own.

“I did not join him willingly, yet I did not leave him willingly either. I am coping with far worse things than the aftereffects of Stockholm syndrome.” You wish to hear the words he won’t say. I try not to. I do not want to. “What I told you of caged birds carving their way out of their prisons with their beaks… such things come from lived experiences. I fear I cannot share in your mourning or your guilt, and I can never be a person who will sit alongside you to exchange fond memories of a man who left me with no such memories. Unlike you, I have no choice but to carry his memory on the back of my neck for the rest of my life. What he did for you in his last moments was freedom to me. I am free because of his decision to save your life. That shall always be my fondest memory of him.” Morbid, yet you share an understanding in that.

“Perhaps it shall be for me as well,” you mutter, a little wistful, a little longing. “May I request something of you, Minho?”

“Again, I am no witch so I cannot promise to grant any wishes, but I shall certainly do my best,” he jokes, one leg crossing over the other. You think of the man always standing at Hongjoong’s shoulder, tired eyes bearing down on the ground more and more often these days as his cheeks grow gaunt.

“Please help Seonghwa,” you implore. The expression that crosses the doctor’s face is vaguely close to the one of pity he spared you not long ago, though you find it to be less demeaning and more sympathetic now.

“I cannot.” His lips barely move, like he’s sorry to share the words with you. “I cannot help him unless he is willing to come to me. Forcing my care on anyone always has an adverse effect, and it limits what I can do if I am lucky enough to not be shunned immediately. As much as I desire to help him… there is nothing I can do. Not unless Seonghwa finds me first.”

You glance down at your lap in an attempt to hide your disappointment as you nod. The crumbling remains of your relationship with the lieutenant are ground too fine for you to handle on your own. Even if you did have the ability to do so, you wouldn’t know where the hell to begin trying to mend things. Regret bites at your skin like a rabid dog latching onto your ankle and slowing your path forward.

“I suppose that’s all I wished to discuss,” you say, clearing your throat. Granted, you got far more than you bargained for when coming here to ask one simple question. Minho’s gaze maintains its emotion as you stand up. Something rattles beyond the gate, and you cast a sweeping look over the streets on the other side in search of the source.

“I’ve poked and prodded you enough—” Minho twists his head to look towards the fence along the front of the courtyard. Though slightly delayed, he picks up on that same rattling noise you heard moments earlier. “I’ve bothered you plenty for one day,” he continues. The rattling continues behind him, and if you did not afford him your attention then you would have missed the way his blinks come in rapid succession, how he inches himself towards the edge of his chair like he’s eager to bolt out of it. “I do not wish to overstimulate you by speaking further about these matters, but do please be gentle with yourself. Not only tonight, but in the coming days as well.”

“I’ll try.”

“I am always available,” he continues, swallowing roughly after speaking those four words. “Be well.”

“Same to you,” you murmur. You take one last glance over the edge of the spiked fence before you depart the courtyard the way you came and head back into the sanctity of the hostel.

Minho stands abruptly the moment you disappear behind the door, and when he does, a hand holding a none-too-inconspicuous orange bottle juts out from behind the wall the fence connects to.

“Enough of that,” he hisses. His eyes flit across the streets on the other side of the fence; his concerns, however, are baseless as the citizens milling about continue on their paths without sparing the scene a glance. A head of mussed black hair and dingy highlights pokes out from the same place as the bottle, then sharp red eyes come into view next. Minho is graced with the full extent of the Brute of Kebos’ face a second later. His steps carry him to the edge of the fence, close to the wall where he’s met with Mingi fully revealing himself.

“She was on her way out,” he argues. Minho wonders if the Berserker poked and prodded at your emotions the way he had.

“There was no need to draw attention to yourself in such a manner.”

Mingi huffs out a breath of air that sounds oddly akin to a laugh. He dangles the pill bottle over the spikes of the fence. It’s barely kept from tumbling down between his index finger and thumb.

“Captain’s orders.”

Minho feels a twitch beginning to make itself known in his right nostril. Foolishly, he stretches a hand out in a feeble attempt to snatch the bottle from the man’s grip, but Mingi yanks it back. He doesn’t even get to lay a single finger on it.

“And what does your captain desire from me this time?” The Scourge of the Black Sea and his crude bargaining chips, and even cruder methods of exercising them. Mingi glances past the man to the door you just passed through.

“He asks for the same thing she does.” Ah, so Mingi was listening to an extent.

Minho can’t contain the laugh that tears from his lips. “Then I’m afraid my answer remains the same: I cannot help someone unwilling to see me.”

“You’re incapable of knocking on a door of all things?”

One less knowledgeable might mistake Mingi’s words to be an attempt at humor. Minho leans forward and rests his forearms between the spikes lining the barrier between him and the pills.

“Have you ever heard of those old folklore stories and fantasy fictions about vampires? How they cannot enter a home without being allowed in first? My line of work is very much similar to that — I cannot force myself upon anyone, nor can I convince anyone to let me in.” He fixes his eyes on Mingi’s despite how much terror the sight of those red irises brings him. “Simple. As. That. I might as well not exist at all in your lieutenant’s eyes, and until he is willing to see me, then your captain’s orders are an impossible feat.”

Silence stretches between the pair. Mingi stares back at him, but there are no cues or indicators of emotion for Minho to glean from at all.

Then — Mingi twists the cap of the pill bottle off, and before the doctor can even suck in a panicked breath, half of the pills are dumped onto the ground on that side of the fence. At his feet. Some drum against his shoes and scatter across the cobbles. The twitch moves up to Minho’s eye, but he’s blinking so furiously that it’s hard to tell the difference between the annoyance and panic.

“I know you’re feeling antsy, doctor. Did someone take the stash you smuggled into that little pack of yours?” Mingi quirks a brow at him. The faint upturn of his lips tells Minho that the Berserker is enjoying this quite a lot, paying that sadistic voice in his head its dues in things other than blood. “Or did the real doctor finally figure out where his meds have been disappearing off to?”

“Tell…” Minho has to let his mouth form around the words on his tongue in silence for several seconds. He cannot tear his attention away from the bottle in Mingi’s palm. “Tell San to approach him and implore him to meet with me. Or you can do it. Either one of you should be perfectly capable of such a thing.”

“Good on you, doctor.” Mingi caps the bottle, and it’s like all the oxygen in Minho’s lungs comes alive as he starts breathing steadily again. The Berserker cups the back of one of his hands and sets the closed bottle in his palm, delicate and gentle, then with his other hand, he curls Minho’s fingers around the cylinder. Warm. “I apologize for my crude tactics. I was not the one who stole the medicine.” Mingi’s touch is like hot coals against his skin.

“I am aware,” Minho sighs through his teeth as he straightens up. His grip on the pill bottle is iron tight.

“I shall leave you to it then, doctor.” Mingi turns and disappears behind the wall once more, leaving Minho where he is. Once he’s certain that the Berserker’s steps have withdrawn, he shifts his jaw until it pops. A sear of pain ripples through his cheek.

Minho glances at the half-full bottle in his hand, then drops to his knees to pick up the fallen pills off the dirty cobbles through the wrought iron bars.

────────────

When you find Yunho again, it’s already late enough into the evening that you need to have your mask up even though the majority of the people milling about have neglected to do so. Yunho is not one participating in that majority, leaned up against the wall close to the hostel door with his arms crossed over his chest. Though you cannot see his face in its entirety, you imagine he gives you some sort of faint little smile when you pivot and make eye contact with him.

“Didn’t change your mind?” he asks with a tilt of his head.

“Dare I say I need a drink as badly as you do?” you jest in return, though the level of truth in that statement is far greater than you’d like to admit aloud. “Come on, there’s a bar just down the street.” He keeps pace with you despite his long legged advantage. Quiet lingers in the air between you, but it’s far from a peaceful one in your opinion; you both seem to have plenty occupying your minds, and those things are the exact reason why you’re seeking alcohol in the first place.

The bar, quaint as it may be, emanates a nice warmth that’s a welcome relief from the humidity of the evening. The purple-tinted glow of the streetlamps filters through the windows and casts colorful shadows across the tables and floors. People line the booths and the tables, leaving small pockets of unoccupied space near the corners of the bar, but it’s the actual bar itself that Yunho drifts toward with you following in tow.

“Whiskey on the rocks for me—” you’re barely seated when a bartender flits over to the two of you and Yunho puts in his order, leaving you to stutter out a quick “gin and tonic please” as he tries to make a speedy departure. To his credit, Yunho wastes no time in getting into the thick of things right off the bat. “I’m being made a proper fool of, aren’t I?”

Your thoughts drift back to the morning, to the ostentatious show Hongjoong put on, to the day prior when the captain did something similar with more success. Your heart aches for Yunho again, as it has so often these days.

“It’s hard to watch, isn’t it?” comes his second question, and this one is far easier to answer honestly.

“It is, a bit,” you mutter as the bartender returns with two drinks and slides them across the counter. You stare at the budding condensation on the outside of the glass. “But we’re all fools when it comes to love, aren’t we? I’ve ignored things that are very deeply… not right with San, choosing to ignore it time and time again because I want the love I have for him to be easy and simple.”

Yunho huffs out a rather exasperated sigh against the rim of his glass.

“I don’t even deserve this. I don’t deserve to be treated like this. What went wrong wasn’t my fault — it was fucking Hongjoong and fucking Seonghwa playing a dumb game of jealousy with me as one of the pieces. Seonghwa manipulated Hongjoong into getting what he wanted — just like he always fucking does — and then Hongjoong manipulated me into going along with it because he knows I would follow him blindly into anything.” Yunho tangles his fingers through his hair so roughly that your scalp aches just watching him tug at the strands. “Seonghwa just wanted to fuck Hongjoong, so why’d he have to drag me into it?”

“Yunho…”

Conversation slows to a halt between the two of you. The rumbling beats of music hanging about the bar seem so much louder in the absence of Yunho’s voice. Your fingers trace over the dangling chime attached to your right ear as your other hand flexes around the base of your drink. The conversation lulls to a halt long enough for both of you to finish your drinks and receive replenished ones.

“I know my place compared to him,” he says like the words are pure venom on his tongue, “and no one can take that place. I’ve long since come to terms with that.” When he laughs, the sound comes out wet and choked but his eyes only glisten with some form of loathing. “I thought I could get around it since the two of us are so damn different but that doesn’t change the facts. I’ll never be a killer or Siren or anything else of use to Hongjoong so what’s the fucking point? I failed at the one job I had — couldn’t do shit to help Mingi and got replaced by a shiny new doctor because I’m too involved in the personal lives of the crew but we fucking live together so how can I not be involved? Does he expect me to not make friends or have feelings or wants? God forbid I have wants!”

“Yunho,” you say again, louder and with a hand firmly pressed to his shoulder when his voice turns strained. He jerks his chin in your direction as though realizing for the first time since he sat down that you’re beside him. “Just let everything go.”

“I don’t want to be stuck in one place forever, chasing my tail and running in circles because I keep caving to a man who won’t ever…” Either his mind goes elsewhere, or he cannot bring himself to finish the thought. “I’ve been good at pretending I don’t know Hongjoong’s game all this time. Good enough to where he doesn’t seem to realize that I’m fully aware. But despite that, I let myself give in over and over again. I’ll never be able to get out if I keep doing that.”

“What is it you want then?”

“To make a decision for myself and not be judged for it, not have him looking down on me for it. I want… to have someone who isn’t Hongjoong.” Yunho dips his chin to his chest then looks up at you. His tongue runs along his lower lip before he catches it between his teeth and blinks several times in quick succession. The look would be undoubtedly flirtation if not for the deep nervous furrow of Yunho’s brows. “We’ve teased and toyed with the idea, haven’t we? Would it be so bad if we had each other just because we wanted to and not for any other reason?”

For once, you’re assuredly quick to reject the proposal.

“Even if I was fool enough to believe that’s what you truly wanted, I’ve never done that and had it be truly no strings attached.” Unless you were to count that time with Yeosang, though that feels like a different beast in retrospect. “To be strangers would be one matter, but with how messy and interwoven the threads are — that would be an unavoidable mess.”

“You’re right,” the healer mutters through a sad grin. His fourth drink arrives at the same time your third one does, but his pace hasn’t slowed one bit. “Part of me knows that I’m never going to love someone the way I loved Cassie, and there’s so much of me that would rather not try to fall for someone the way I did for her. In the beginning, things with Hongjoong were okay because my feelings for her were lingering and fresh, yet even after it stopped being about coping with the losses we shared, we kept going back to each other. I used to be tied to this idea of making things work because I fell for some part of Hongjoong that I don’t even know exists anymore. I want to be careless and free again without having to worry about how much collateral damage it may cause.”

“Look around: there are plenty of fish in the sea here.” You shrug your shoulders up close to your ears. “Plenty of people would love to have a nice tall man in their beds for a night, I’m sure.” In an attempt to bring some sort of levity to the conversation, you crack a smile and nudge Yunho with your elbow. He ducks his head once again, though this time, the tips of his ears are flushed bright red and he hides the rest of his blush from you by taking a drink. You laugh into your own glass.

“You’re quite intimidating, you know that right?”

“Hm?”

“Like, Cassie had a sort of soft beauty to her, even when she’d come to me with cuts and scrapes I needed to patch up, she still held an almost ethereal aura about her. You’re attractive in a really intimidating way. And that’s not me coming onto you, just to be honest, I don’t have any explicit reason in saying that. I find you objectively attractive, always have. Maybe it was actually really fucking hot to see you stand up to Hongjoong day one the way you did!” He’s laughing as your expression twists into one of shock. “You and San look really good together, yeah?”

Despite biting back a smile, you roll your eyes and push his hand, and subsequently his drink, down to the counter. “Had too much to drink already?”

“Well my eyes still work! What a mean sandwich the two of you would make.” Yunho’s sigh is half joking and half wistful. The corner of your lips quirks up even as you hold your index fingers up in the sign of an ‘x’ over your face.

“You aren’t the only one who suffered a bad experience sharing the dear lieutenant as a third,” you say from behind your fingers.

“Ah, what a good homewrecker the man makes.” You agree with the sentiment internally, because it feels too cruel to voice it. “I hope it doesn’t come between you and San, truly. San has… he’s finally found something to protect and hold onto desperately, and you’ve given him a stronger voice to stand on his own. Without heeding Hongjoong’s every whim, that is. So I hope that the two of you last for a long time.” Yunho shakes his head ever so slightly, lips curling around the rim of his drink. “Such serious talk for a night out! Have you found the freckles on his ass cheek yet?”

“Yunho! I’m not telling you whether I have or not?!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! But really, you gotta give me more credit — that little pleasure piece down there was my doing.” The wink he sends you, coupled with the insufferable, shit-eating grin painting his lips as he speaks drives you to slap the back of your hand to his bicep.

“Where exactly did you learn to do all of that anyway? I doubt it’s something you picked up from your mother in the clinic.”

“I taught myself, for the most part. With lots and lots of videos. And of course, practice, back when the crew was larger and I had many more people readily eager and willing to be test subjects. We made frequent pit stops, sure, but I had to make do myself at a certain point.”

“Yet you don’t have any yourself?”

Yunho laughs. “I wouldn’t dare try to. I’m quite the pussy when it comes to pain. Stub my toe too hard and I’ll scream like a banshee.”

“It’s that bad?” you say through a laugh of your own.

“Jongho and San used to play this evil prank on me where they’d leave little things on the ground for me to trip over or step on, just to see who could make me cuss the loudest. They finally had to quit because the last time, I face planted into a wall so hard when I tripped that I broke my nose and busted my cheekbone. My poor, pretty cheekbone.” He cradles his cheek, eyes squeezed shut to add to the theatrics of it all. “Cruel bastards, the both of them!”

“My team in the military wasn’t big on pranks, from what I recall.” It’s not the liquor that makes you take a trepid walk down memory lane, but Yunho’s reminiscence has you thinking back as well. “One time I fell off the top bunk in our dorms, but that was because I yanked on the bed sheet too hard, all pissed over something stupid, then my hand slipped, I punched myself in the face, and fell off the bed in the process. I tried catching myself on the way down but landed so hard on my arm that I snapped my clavicle.”

“Holy shit? Holy shit, I bet that hurt like a bitch!”

“To say the least, but I think actually my pride was what was the most damaged at the end of the day. I mean what a loser way to break a bone.” You nurse your drink as Yunho laughs again, and a sharp pang of clarity hits you after the fourth sip. Laying your hand on his forearm, you naturally pull his focus to you, a curious and equally puzzled gleam to his eyes. “You deserve to feel happy, Yunho.”

His lips part like he wants to counter immediately — perhaps to tell you that he is happy — then a smile covers the momentary crack in his facade. It’s strained and pulls at the corners of his lips too hard.

“Having someone to fuck isn’t always the solution to that,” you continue before he gets the chance to make excuses or play the fool. “And I know I’m the last person who ought to be saying that, but it’s something I’m trying to teach myself too. If I can do it though, I know you can.”

Yunho’s expression does not give away much, though his brows are pinched together just enough to indicate that some thought in that head of his is causing some level of distress. Rather than offering up a response, he downs the rest of his drink like a pro and fetches enough credits from his pocket to cover both of you and then some.

“At least I don’t feel inadequate doing that,” he mutters, just barely audible, before pulling his gas mask up over his face. A sigh leaves your lips, but you follow him nonetheless, mimicking the same motion as you get up from your stool and follow him to the door. He doesn’t speak again until the two of you are out in the night air outside the bar. “Do you think there’s any happiness to be had where we are? Doing what we do?”

“If you wanted to wash your hands of it all, you could,” you say after a breath of hesitation. Yunho looks forward, shoving his hands deep in his pockets.

“Because I’ve not killed anyone?” he scoffs. The scrape of his heel over the cobbled streets echoes along with the sound. “How many wounds have I stitched up for criminals? To either keep them alive or make sure they can keep on doing as they please? My finger may not be on the trigger, but I am just as guilty of putting the gun in killers’ hands.”

You shrug your shoulders up, walking ahead of the man a few steps and turning to look at him face to face as he steps forward with you.

“The guilt is yours to bear as you see fit, but you are no more guilty than the mothers who birthed those criminals. You told me once that your job is to save lives. Do you measure the lives of those you save by their deeds, good or otherwise?” You spin on the ball of your foot to walk alongside Yunho again. “Then—” your index finger points to the sky, then angles down to the man beside you “—who are you to be the judge, jury, and executioner?” Yunho’s breath hitches. Perhaps your stare is a bit too harsh, a tad too uncaring. “San has killed innumerable amounts of people. He did unspeakable things in his past. Does he then not deserve to be saved by you, doctor?”

“That’s different, the circumstances were—”

“Ah, so there are circumstances to your judgment?”

Yunho hisses through his teeth, a sharp spike to his frustration that hurts your arm when he grips you hard enough to bruise. Though you could easily detach yourself from his grip and plant Yunho on his ass right here in the streets, you refrain from doing so sheerly out of curiosity. A longing for an explanation to his madness. The straps of your mask dig into the back of your head. Yunho has shoved you into a cramped alleyway that’s hardly big enough for two people, but he manages it well enough by pinning you to the wall of one of the buildings. You shift your jaw in an attempt to alleviate the strain caused by the mask biting at your skin.

“You do not understand. There are things I cannot wash my hands of,” Yunho spits out. His mask clanks against yours so hard that you worry it might break.

“Yunho,” comes your breath of warning.

His hand trembles where his fingers are latched around your wrist. When he speaks next, it’s without the same vehemence.

“I have a confession. I can’t blindly continue onwards while holding onto it. I… wanted you when you first joined the crew. I wanted you so badly.” His eyes flicker back to something more recognizable: familiar, warm, an inviting chocolate brown, searching for answers in your gaze. He finds nothing in the firmly set flat expression you’ve schooled yourself into mastering. “I wanted to do to you what Hongjoong does to me,” he continues. The bait bobs along the surface of his eyes, and you can see yourself taking a bite if you’re not careful. “Just to see… if it would be as easy as he makes it seem…”

“But you couldn’t.” A pesky strand of hair has gotten caught in the strap cradling your skull, and its nagging pain distracts you. “Because you’re not that kind of person.”

Yunho lifts a hand to your throat. It’s large and encompasses your skin with ease.

“Hongjoong has a way off killing you without letting you die. Like he’s reaching into your chest and ripping your heart out.”

Yunho’s fingers pulse around your neck, and they surely feel the way your pulse jumps and scatters into a frantic rate that betrays your panic before your expression cracks and the panic seeps through to the surface there. His grip loosens a hair, and his hand trails down a little too far for comfort. You recover from the lapse and snatch him by the wrist to stop his movements. When you dare to look up at his face, you find him staring upwards at the slivers of night sky between the tall buildings on either side of you.

“I know. I pretend to be dumb around Hongjoong but I know. I know Hongjoong is taking the damn painkillers, know he’s trying to make me believe that I’m taking stock wrong even though I’ve been doing it for years without issue — for fuck’s sake — just like I know that when I’m selected for missions it’s not because Hongjoong thinks I have any value being there. All he wants to do is spite Seonghwa. I know I’m only allowed to fuck Hongjoong because he won’t put his dick in anyone that isn’t Seonghwa. It’s always Seonghwa, Seonghwa, Seonghwa.”

“I know, Yunho, you told me already. It’s okay.”

“Ah, I’m sorry, I must be — I’m feeling the liquor a bit, that’s all. Don’t take anything I say to heart.” Yunho’s smile looks more like a sneer though. “Is it… could it be because I refuse to kill? I can’t — reason out why it is that I’m not enough?” His head collides with the wall above your head, and you have to jerk your head to the side to avoid bruising his throat with the hard edges of your mask. “If I should kill someone then—” you hear his inhale even through the filter of the gas mask, then his hand is up around your throat once more. Tighter this time, squeezing at the base of your neck in a way that is wholly ineffective if he were truly trying to murder you here and now. With his ramblings, however, you aren’t sure you can take those chances.

“Yunho,” you offer a final warning in the hopes of reaching the part of his brain that controls his reason. The fingers at your throat dig in like he’s aiming to take chunks of your skin out with his nails.

“If I am tainted, perhaps he will desire me more.”

“Please forgive me for this in the morning,” you mutter under your breath. His head tilts much like a dog’s would when faced with confusion. Unbeknownst to him, it only allows you better access to the pressure point you’re after, and your fingers jam up against it faster than he has time to react. His muscles are rendered all but useless, and you twist his body in your grip hard enough to make his knees give out. The second his knees thud against the ground, you slide your arm around his neck, bending your elbow just hard enough to restrict his air flow without doing too much harm. “This is for both our sakes,” you add just before his gaze goes a bit hazy and unfocused. He passes out in your grip seconds later.

There’s a moment of guilt that takes over you, one born of the panic in his eyes when you grabbed him, but given the circumstances, you’d much rather live with that than have him live to make a decision you know he would regret terribly. You loop your arms under Yunho’s and do your best to hoist him up enough for you to support a majority of his weight.

“You shouldn’t have to kill someone just for another to love you back,” you mutter to Yunho though he cannot hear you. “…I hope that you never have to break that rule you made for yourself.”

You can only be thankful that Yunho didn’t pick a bar at the other end of the city, and your struggle in walking back to the hostel with the much larger man draped around your shoulders like a sack of flour. When you flatten your hand to the door leading inside, Yunho’s head lolls to the side. You nearly slam his temple into the doorframe as you thrust the door open with your foot.

The lobby and attached lounge are both void of life; a far cry from the night prior where you came into such a warm and lively atmosphere. Now, you cross the threshold silently, passing empty chairs and empty couches in a sort of greyish lighting adding to the already dismal ambience. The staircase looms before you, dim and shadowy at the top like it's trying to mock you. The air rushes out of your lungs then back in quickly in an attempt to brace yourself for the upcoming struggle.

“Allow me.”

“I’m beginning to think you lurk around every corner just waiting for me to pop up,” you joke, half-serious as you look up at the man who has just stepped into view at the top of the staircase. He shoves his hands into his pockets, and with each step down the stairs, his sandals slap against the wood.

Five steps from where you stand at the bottom, Mingi tilts his head to the side, gaze drifting over Yunho’s limp form quick enough for you to almost miss it.

“You would be incorrect.”

He descends the rest of the way.

“I know, I know — it’s just a—”

“Every corner would be improbable as there are places where corners do not exist.” Mingi smiles first with his lips, then with his eyes when he squeezes them shut. You’re stunned into silence just long enough for him to relieve you of Yunho’s weight without argument. “But if I give away my hiding spots then you’ll know where to look for me.”

“…places where corners do not exist?” you murmur.

“You’re overthinking it, Ghost. It’s just a joke.”

“I didn’t kill him,” you say, nodding towards Yunho’s limp form that’s now supported by Mingi. The damn Berserker makes it look so easy that it hurts your pride, for no reason.

“Well, he’s still breathing, so if you had claimed to then I would be questioning both your sanity and how good you are at killing people.” Mingi’s words actually stir a laugh out of you — one of disbelief, but still a laugh nonetheless, and you shake your head. Loosening the mask around your face, you let it hang about your neck and suck in a breath of air unfiltered now that you’re in the safety of the indoors.

“He was rambling nonsense and on the verge of making… a terrible decision.” Your gaze lingers on the side of his face as Mingi hoists him up a bit higher. “It’s thanks to my intelligent decision to knock him out that I did not kill him.”

Mingi’s gaze sharpens on you.

“He made an attempt on your life?” What comes out as a simple statement at first morphs into a question by the end of it. Your subconsciousness drives you to rub at the base of your neck where the skin itches some still.

“No,” you say after several seconds of silence. “No, he was seeking guilt. I told him that there was still a way out of this for him, that of all of us, he could escape freely. He despised that answer quite a lot, and then—” a lazy wave of your hand finishes the thought for you.

“It is understandable. His greatest fear is inadequacy. Yet, he is a Normie. He is not capable of anything great. He has no place on this crew by comparison.” Mingi’s flat tone coupled with the brutally harsh words take you aback. Climbing the stairs slowly, you keep pace with the Berserker while eyeing the man draped over his back. Still unconscious, or a very good actor perhaps. “He is useless, and yet he remains. Because he is needed when others make mistakes.”

“Mistakes?” you hum. “Our captain seems to make a lot of those.” You ascend a few more steps only to realize that Mingi is not following you. Turning, you see him three steps below you, red eyes watching you with blank curiosity. You squeeze the railing tight in your left hand.

“Yunho should leave the crew, then.” Said as a statement, you almost don’t realize that Mingi is asking you if that is your true opinion until many seconds pass in silence.

“Yunho should… do what is best for him. What is best for his heart and mind both. If he is truly so miserable here, then why should any of us demand that he stay? If we — if we truly care for him then allowing him the freedom to choose is the best thing we can do for him. Even if we do not like the choice he makes. You know much about that, do you not?”

“I could have chosen to take the serum, yes,” Mingi says, shaking his head as he speaks. “You fought for my ability to choose back then, but that is different than now. Yunho has zero desire to leave. Given how you are speaking, you know that very well. He has made his choice. If you truly care for him, then is it not best to allow him to live with that choice no matter the consequences?”

Your tongue weighs heavier in your mouth, and an acrid taste is rising in the back of your throat. You try to clear your throat to dispel it.

“You have not yet given up on your hopeless ploy to save people who do not wish to be saved, Ghost.” Mingi’s gaze turns narrow, and he looks up at you through half-lidded eyes. “Or perhaps is that an excuse to cover up your subconscious intentions? Dispel those closest to the man you find so evil so that you may drive the knife into his chest without suffering deeper guilt.”

“Are you accusing me of something, Mingi?” It’s nothing short of a miracle that your voice remains steady and contained. He steps up one, two, three. Now he looms over you, bending at the waist just enough to be eye to eye with you, and there are mere centimeters between your faces.

“It is in your nature, Ghost, to kill those with authority over you,” he says, his breath huffing out over your cheeks. “I keep warning you time and time again. You will not succeed this time if you make an attempt. Do you truly wish to die at the hands of someone you cherish so deeply? Or have you deluded yourself into thinking that he will not be the one to execute you at his captain’s command?”

“And how do I know you are not doing your captain’s bidding right here and now?” You tilt your chin up and look Mingi in the eye without faltering. “How many instruments has he engaged to orchestrate my failure and destruction?”

“Oh, how interesting.” Mingi chuckles. “You finally caught on.”

“So again I ask if you are accusing me of something? Because if you were truly doing that, then I would not be alive and breathing right now, would I?”

“Between the two of us, you are not the only one guilty of regicide, Ghost. It is in our nature,” he repeats through a whisper that makes you shiver. “The question is… how willing are you to repel that part of your nature?”

“Are you?” Your gaze narrows on him as you hiss out your counterargument, but Mingi hardly reacts at all. You may as well have not said anything at all based on the way he blinks slowly back at you. “Let’s simply get Yunho upstairs,” you murmur, turning your chin away from the man and looking towards the top of the stairs. Mingi leans back enough to let you breathe easy again, and you steal a glance his way when he straightens up. “Where’s his room?”

“Hongjoong is in it.”

“What?”

“He had Seonghwa book one room for him and Yunho to share.”

“That’s—” utterly psychotic. You bite the words back though; you’ve frayed the ends of Mingi’s nerves enough for one day and it would be unwise to continue to do so further. And though your rage towards how Seonghwa has been treating you of late is not quelled one bit, you do feel some outstretch of sympathy solely on account of how downright cruel such a request from Hongjoong is.

“Yeosang and Wooyoung are sharing, as are Jongho and myself. You and San have a room, the doctor and Nightingale, then your friend and her small charge.”

You hesitate at the top of the stairs. The hand you have wrapped about the railing is so tightly wound that your knuckles are stained white.

“…Our captain had the lieutenant book a room just for himself?”

Mingi mumbles something, uncharacteristically quiet and under his breath. You do not press him to echo the words to you.

“Then let’s bring Yunho to San and I’s room. We’ve got a perfectly suitable couch he can sleep on.” The door to your room is blessedly right across from the stairs, and you give a series of light knocks to announce your arrival that’s met with no argument. San awaits inside, propped up in bed with a book set before him and the lamp casting light over the pages. His features mold into a smile that’s soft around the edges just before his gaze flits past you and finds Mingi lugging in an unconscious Yunho about his shoulders. The book snaps shut with a pop! and he slings his legs over the edge of the bed.

“Did something happen?”

“The two of us went for drinks, and he had a bit much,” you explain. “I, um, had to knock him out to get him back here.” As far as you’re concerned, San doesn’t need to know anything beyond that right at this moment. Mingi allows you such privacy and leads Yunho’s limp body to the couch across from the bed.

“Ah… Hongjoong and him are sharing a room too. We got back not long ago but — disturbing his beauty sleep is asking for death, pretty much,” San mumbles, bringing his hand up to his mouth. “We can leave him here no problem, right? Are you comfortable with that, star?” When he comes over to where you’re standing, his hand drifts to cup your hip, thumb tracing over the flesh through your clothes. You don’t think twice before leaning forward and pressing a kiss against the line of his jaw.

“Mhm, that’s fine. I actually suggested that too.”

“He’ll be fine on the couch for one night surely.” San cracks a smile that’s a little lopsided and very endearing. “Though, if he complains, I’ll just remind him of how much worse it could’ve been!”

Mingi clears his throat as he rights himself. His gaze slips from you to San then down to the man now sprawled over the couch cushions.

“And if he asks where his bedmate has gone?”

San’s lips fold into a more devious smile. “I’ll simply say I’ve borrowed him for a bit of fun!”

Mingi does not betray much with his expression, but you know that he does not find the excuse to be so believable that it will deceive Hongjoong.

“Then, if that is all…”

“Hm? Oh, yes, goodnight Mingi.” San offers a small wave but Mingi does not budge even as the Spectre turns to the bed.

“Thank you for your help. I appreciate it,” you say to the man.

“Of course.” He looks like he wishes to say more, but refrains on account of San, who’s begun to hum behind you as he crawls back into bed. “Goodnight.”

You exhale a breath that was lodged firmly in your lungs when the door snaps shut behind Mingi. It doesn’t take much work to rid yourself of your clothes and get into something far more comfortable, though glancing at Yunho on the couch leaves you with an inkling of guilt again. His attempt on your life was still very much that — you hardly regret stopping him the way you did (in fact, you left him practically unscathed) — but the place it was coming from was neither genuine or one born of reason.

“He came onto me,” you mutter over your shoulder. Once again, you hear the flutter of pages and a snap as San forgoes his book and redirects his attention to you.

“You are welcome to do whatever you please.” His tone holds no animosity; San can be perhaps a bit too forward with his emotions when he speaks. Tonight, you are grateful for it though. “Yunho is a very good partner, quite doting and accommodating to whatever needs and desires his partner might have.”

“Not…” you clear your throat. Abandoning the dresser, you move to the bed and slip underneath the covers. “Not in that manner. Though it was a topic of discussion briefly. As was the idea of a threesome, but I rejected both offers rather quickly.” You fold your hands over the sheets. It’s a struggle somewhat to look at San’s expression as he’s still sitting upright further up on the mattress than you, but his comfort comes in the form of fingertips tracing your hairline. An encouragement to continue, or a sign that he’s listening intently to what you have to say. “I suggested that he find others to sleep with instead. Can’t take him anywhere: people were ogling him from all sides while he was… lamenting his relationship struggles.”

“Far from surprising. He’s always garnered that sort of attention wherever we go.” San laughs as he runs his fingertips over your scalp. “It’s a shame…” He stops himself from finishing the thought, but you’re not given a chance to press him to continue. “You’ve not stopped trembling since you came in,” he murmurs. With his free hand, San moves his book off to the side table and sinks lower under the covers until he is eye level with your shoulder. “What…” San seems to weigh his words very carefully before daring to speak again. He settles on the most barebones question of all. “I’m always here if you need to talk, yeah?”

And you yourself cannot fathom why you’re trembling at all or when it began. Mingi failed to mention it to you, though you understand that it could have been mere courtesy. To confirm, you lift a hand from the sheets and watch your fingers shake like grass under unruly wind in the low light.

“Ah,” you let out a noise of realization. “I didn’t eat anything before or while we went drinking. Maybe that’s why my head’s bothering me too.”

“Do you need anything to help you sleep?”

“Mm, no, I just need to sleep it off.” You let your hand fall back to its place atop the sheets. “You said once that Yunho is the best drinker on the crew, right?”

“Best at handling alcohol by far, yeah.” San laughs a little as he angles his head down to rest against your bicep. “I’ve seen him down eight shots in a night and not even be tipsy afterwards.”

It stands to reason then that Yunho’s excuses of blaming the alcohol for his behavior are shoddy at best.

You do not fear Yunho, nor were you in any sort of genuine fear for your life back in that alleyway. Your brain barely perceived him as a threat — certainly not one to leave a lasting impression on you. And though it is odd, questionable even, and calls into question your sanity, you do not feel unsafe in San’s presence. There is a lingering unrest brought about by the severe lack of knowledge surrounding what Hongjoong may or may not have had him do to you since your first meeting, but the safety that comes with being beside San has not been called into question. When he tucks himself back under the sheets and rests his head in the juncture between your neck and shoulder, you are all too aware of the steady breaths coming from the couch.

Perhaps it is not that you are afraid, but rather that this unending discomfort comes from some deeper realization. Tonight, whether sober or not, Yunho seemed prepared to abandon that cardinal rule he set for himself: to never bring harm to someone. Solely because he believed it would grant him Hongjoong’s favor.

────────────

A familiar landscape greets you when sleep finally descends, though it doesn’t come with the mild comfort of white sands and black waters. Grey dust pools around your feet, bare and sinking into the flaky terrain as you take a few tentative steps into the ruins ahead. Even in its dilapidated state, you can see that you stand in the remains of a church. Something acrid reaches the inside of your nostrils, making your lip twist in disgust. The stench of something long dead.

One pew remains intact. Upon it sits a figure with contrasting black and white hair split horizontally across the back of his head. His form is so perfectly still that it makes you wonder if he’s even truly there. When you push further into the ruins, the ground gives way with each step, making the grey ash climb up to your ankles. Something sharp digs into the soles of your feet. From what you remember of being in a place similar to this before, you do not want to look down.

“Wooyoung?” you call out. You grip the end of the pew to step carefully around it and look at your friend. He deigns not to return your stare; instead, his gaze is trained firmly on the shattered remains of what once was a stained glass window behind the pulpit.

“Do you know what used to be there?”

His question catches you off-guard, and as you shift to look between the window and his face, you shake your head. Then, right before your eyes, the glass trembles and morphs, broken pieces climbing up from the heaps of ash around the church. As though drawn by some magnetic pull, they move to fill in the frame. The picture fills itself out piece by piece, stained red by the moonlight filtering in from behind, and it makes the imagery all the more horrible to look at.

Long, bony fingers that stretch into sharp points spiderweb over a small face with closed eyes with even smaller hands clasped as though in prayer. The arms attached to the hands descend from above but there is no body to be seen, nor is there a face to put to the monstrous figure. The figure below — the child — kneels on a stone that juts out over a deep black abyss. In the empty space between the arms of the unknown beast, a red moon gleams. Below the abyss, separated by a thin bronze strip, there is a raven with its wings spread wide, and the head is turned sideways, its maw open and pointed towards the sky. The one eye that’s visible is the same red as the moon above it and the one currently hanging above your heads. Its talons curl around a bleeding heart.

“Daichi says that the murders… the sacrifices were always for the greater good of our people. What justification can there be for killing your children and grandchildren under the guise of being blessed by some unseen gods? I don’t get it,” Wooyoung mutters. He leans forward and places his hands on either side of his knees, clenching his fingers around the wooden bench. “If they had known what would happen to them, would they have still done so? Or would they have murdered more in vain attempts to beg for protection from their gods? Repeated the ritual in smaller and smaller increments of time until there were more adults than children? Or even… sought younger candidates for their plight?”

You deign not to answer any of his questions outright; they do not seem to be directed at you in the hopes of response anyway, but you doubt he’ll receive a response from either the ones responsible for the atrocities or those beings such sacrifices were for.

“Our ritual failed. Why?” Vague memories filter their way through your head but they aren’t tangible enough for you to grab hold of.

“I won’t die because of their fate. I won’t let them choose how my life ends or when it ends.”

“Our fates have been sealed, Tsukio. Isn’t it simpler to accept that?”

“Don’t call me that. That’s not my name. And yours isn’t — it isn’t Umiko!”

“They did not have the opportunity to conduct it.”

“Why?” you press again, harder and with more force to your tone. Wooyoung is selecting little truths out of the bigger picture.

“They…” Wooyoung stands suddenly, pursing his lips as he looks down at the floor where ash resides. You wonder if he too feels the slight crunch beneath his toes, if he knows what remains there. “…did not have enough children to do so.”

“They did not have five children to sacrifice?” you retort the second he finishes speaking, and a flush rises up his neck to stain his cheeks. In one blink, Wooyoung looks utterly ashamed, but in the next, a flash of anger takes over his face. You wish to inquire further, wish to know what sowed those seeds of shame, crave to understand that which you cannot remember yet Wooyoung can. None of your questions leave your lips, however.

“They did not deserve to bear even a single child if they were going to just raise their young for slaughter.” Wooyoung turns his palm to the sky, narrowed gaze glaring down at the ash painting his skin. He thumbs over it with his other hand. “I don’t like it here. I don’t want to be here.”

Before you can react, the world around you swirls like it’s in the center of a vortex, and the church dissipates into a haze of nothingness. In its place, black water stretches out before you. Your toes sink into soft sand and smooth stones now instead of ash and bones. The violent and sudden shift makes your stomach lurch, sending you forward to propel your hands forward to brace on your knees in a barely successful attempt to catch yourself as a dry heave ripples through your body. Wooyoung looks none too bothered in stark comparison.

“How do you do that?” Wooyoung watches you carefully out of the corner of his eye as you approach the spot where he crouches by the water. “I can’t seem to control any bit of the Dreamscape while I’m here.”

“That’s not true,” he sighs before patting the sand beside him. You take the invitation to sit down there, folding your legs underneath you. “You can, we share the same abilities in that way. You simply can’t remember how to do so.”

“Would you show me, if I asked?”

Wooyoung’s lips quirk a little, and he shifts to kneel in front of you. Taking your left hand into both of his, he flips your palm up to the sky.

“Close your eyes.” Two fingers dig into your palm. “Imagine a butterfly sitting on your hand; the type doesn’t matter, just picture it in your mind. Think about how it would feel, the shape and size of it, what it would look like.” You do as told without complaint or question, letting his instructions flow over you as he continues to speak. “It gets easier over time, and takes less time and effort. Like me now, I can change a whole landscape with just a thought. Or revisit old memories in the same manner. It starts small, though. Thinking something into existence out of nothing. Keep focusing on that image of a butterfly in your hand… and eventually you open your eyes—”

Your eyes flit open when you feel the slightest phantom touch against your palm.

“—to something amazing,” Wooyoung whispers through a smile, looking down at the same spot on your palm.

There in place of his fingers sits a small butterfly with wings painted blue and black. The wonder that bubbles up in your chest is palpable, like the wings of that very butterfly are beating frantically against your ribcage. It folds its wings in and out on your palm, small spindly legs testing their strength against your flesh, then in the blink of an eye, it brings itself into the air and flutters up and away into the starry sky. You lift your hand closer to your face, and your fingers trace over the spot where the creature just was as though another might pop up in its place.

“So, yes, you are capable of altering the Dreamscape as you see fit. You likely have already done so here and there; perhaps, not consciously, as Seonghwa mentioned to me you only feel able to use your abilities if your life is under duress. That makes sense — to an extent, it’s true. Your Siren genetics act as a barrier of sorts to defend you in times of need, but you are equally capable of using them in other circumstances.” Wooyoung reaches both his hands out, motioning for you to let him take hold of yours. This time he cups both your hands together. His palms are warm against your knuckles, and his fingertips skate over your wrists. “Now try again, with something bigger. The same way as before.”

An image blooms behind your eyelids when you shut your eyes, and as you focus on bringing the creature to life with your mind, Wooyoung’s honey tone seeps into your ears.

“While you won’t be able to do this in real life, it helps to start trying to hone these abilities in the Dreamscape. Learning to focus your energy into something, to pull from an invisible pool within you — these are both key in being able to draw upon your Siren abilities in the real world. It’s easier when your body is asleep because there aren’t any external stressors happening at the same time — so long as you aren’t ripped out of sleep early.” Wooyoung’s hands withdraw from yours, but you can still feel the heat emanating from them so he must remain close. “As a Siren, you can do all sorts of things that others might find odd and unnatural. But that’s how the universe works, no? San has his endless stamina, can blend in with shadows to conceal himself, has that Spectre constitution that lets him run faster and jump higher. Yeosang has his intelligence, the elevated mental capacity that comes with being an Elitist. A natural tendency to lean towards logic over emotionality, and everything comes easier to him even if it’s something he’s never tried before. Mingi and Jongho have their unmatched strength, but also the unfortunate side effect of absorbing the emotional auras of those around them which makes Berserkers more prone to aggression and violence due to an overstimulation of the limbic system.

“And people like you and me, Seonghwa — what we have is a legacy. It differs from person to person. No two Sirens will have the same extent of ‘powers’, however, I despise calling our abilities that because it sounds childish. We’re all born with our intuition. You’ve felt it before with both Seonghwa and myself, and I know I’ve mentioned it to you. We can sense another Siren’s distress and push out energy to soothe or provide comfort. Similar to Berserkers, a bit, in that we can feel what other Sirens feel. Some history books even claim that the first settlers on Celeste were Berserkers and the gods of Celeste blessed them to create Sirens, though I find it hard to believe. The key difference is that rather than absorbing emotions from fellow Sirens, we possess something of a heightened empathy.”

Wooyoung withdraws his hands completely, quicker than you expect him to, and the haste in his movements bring you to open your eyes and look over at him. His gaze lingers on your hands. Whatever words he was going to share with you are lost as his lips part to let a sigh slip out. Something soft writhes between your palms, fluttering and beating a few times before quiet warbles emit from the space. You part your thumbs, gingerly and ever so carefully, to reveal a round budgerigar so young that its adult feathers have yet to fully come in. It twists its head around, surveying the surroundings with beady black eyes, before stretching its small wings and unveiling the black striped pattern across them.

“You… made a bird.” Wooyoung reaches out to it with his index finger crooked like a perch, and the bird climbs up without hesitation. It remains unphased when Wooyoung brings his face close to it, merely letting out a little warble and tilting its head at him. “Incredible.”

Without another word, Wooyoung lifts his hand up above your heads, and the bird immediately takes flight. You watch it disappear into the trees across the lake with a similar feeling of wonder as before when you created the butterfly. Wooyoung’s gaze lingers longer than yours, seemingly consumed by thoughts you aren’t privy to, and when he turns back to you at last, his expression is more troubled than anything.

“As I was saying — Sirens, we can shift the density of our bodies to go through objects like a wall or a door, though it is more difficult to master as you risk getting stuck inside whatever object you’re trying to phase through. But, well, it’s different for you. Most Sirens cannot go through living things, or rip a man’s heart clean out of his chest.” Wooyoung gives you a sympathetic smile.

“Nothing we don’t already know,” you reply with a shrug.

“Seonghwa mentioned a certain incident that occurred on Dorado.” Wooyoung winces a bit and looks down at the sand. “He was asking me questions, at least. I put two and two together based on what we had talked about that one time and asked the right questions to get the information out of him. Not maliciously! I just needed to be certain about why he was asking, in case — so that I could understand better. I ended up doing some research on a few of the databases Hongjoong has access to, and there are records of Sirens being able to do similar things. Most, unfortunately, were captured by the military or slavers to be used as weapons. Some were test subjects as well, and there are a few detailed studies about being able to phase through living beings. Other records showed that militaries use Sirens as batteries to power other soldiers with their blood, which is horrific. I couldn’t stomach to look into that for long, it was just too gruesome.”

“Then it’s possible that both you and Seonghwa could do so?”

Wooyoung hums, nodding a few times, “Yeah, in theory. I’ve never made any attempt to do so. And Seonghwa never mentioned it before he learned of you doing so. Had you ever done anything similar before then?”

“With a living creature, no. Early on when I first joined the crew, I recall being able to pass through bullets without taking harm on my first mission. Then when I was captured with San, I was able to free myself by phasing through ropes.”

“Both of those instances were likely your natural instincts jumping out as a form of self defense.”

“What of your ability? Daichi mentioned it some time ago, that we were found to be most apt for sacrifice because we were Sirens not meant to exist. He implied that I shouldn’t be able to rip a man’s heart out with my bare hands, just as you should not be able to kill Sirens within the confines of the Dreamscape.”

“If I am able to kill Sirens here in the Dreamscape, then it’s a tad terrifying to think of what forsaken ability you were given. And to be fair, ripping hearts out is a mighty horrifying ability to have, so it might very well be what sets you apart. Though Daichi is limited by the constraints of our knowledge here, as far as I know. Unless there is an unknown entity that resides in the Dreamscape alongside him, then he only shares information which we already know. Hence why he can be so damn dodgy when answering questions. I’d assume that at the time when you told you that, he was gleaning knowledge from the two of us, or potentially Seonghwa. Seonghwa believes that you should not be able to do what you did to that man; that was why he approached me asking for information, because he has some inkling that you and I are not the same as him.”

“He’s inconsistent at best,” you say, drawing a confused glance from Wooyoung before clarifying, “Daichi is. Sometimes it truly does seem like he only knows what we know, but other times, he speaks in riddles and circles as though he knows more than he lets on.”

“Something of an unreliable old man, hm?” Wooyoung jokes through a soft laugh. “I know he dislikes me because he fears me. I have tried and failed to kill him before. But because so much of his identity is an oddity to me, I’m not sure if I can hurt him at all. Regardless though, he loves to remind me that I was supposed to die alongside you and three other children a long time ago. I don’t believe him when he says that we were only meant to die because we were special. We were marked to die as babies. Our abilities did not come until later, until after the cult had conducted all sorts of experiments on us. That cult was the same one who made us a dyad, with the hope that in the future we would have been able to further a stronger bloodline. Why would they have gone through so much effort for children marked to die?”

You recall this somewhat from what Wooyoung has told you in the past.

“We were part of a group of children used by a defunct sect of the main church… an old, defective sector that had broken off a long time in the past and taken their teachings with them…There were thirty children to start, all chosen from birth and offered by their families for the tests, yet each year, more and more children died. By the time the Ritual Year came along, there were only seven children left, and among them, both of us remained…It wasn’t something given at birth, not a gift from the gods — it was a harsh result of cruel and repeated testing and experimentation that kills dozens of children. Except, despite us successfully making it through that ordeal, we were still meant to die in the ritual, as a sacrifice to the gods.”

“Perhaps they wanted to find a way to halt the sacrifices,” you mutter, toying with a bit of loose skin around your pinky nail. “Instead of sacrificing children to be blessed with Siren abilities, maybe their intent was to make it so that Sirens could be self-sufficient without gods. I imagine… any parent doubtful of the church’s teachings would have been eager to find a way out for their child.”

“I suppose that much could be true. I remember next to nothing of my parents, even less of my grandparents, so whatever beliefs they held true to are a mystery to me.” Wooyoung inhales so sharply that he winces a little. “Regardless of any of that, it’s a good sign that you're still able to tap into your abilities. It means more might come back to you as time continues to pass.”

“Sometimes it feels more like I’m regressing rather than moving forward,” you complain, dropping your hand and leaving your cuticle be for now. Wooyoung hums.

“It makes sense, given what you’ve been forced to go through lately,” with his words comes a tone so full of reassurance that it makes your chest ache. “An overload of new information on top of relearning yourself — learning that much of what you thought you knew to be real was a carefully constructed lie. No one would blame you for having those feelings. It could very well be that your own mind is getting in the way of you remembering what it means to be a Siren in an attempt to protect you from further harm. Since your mind may be uncertain what’s real and what isn’t, you could be unintentionally blocking yourself from honing your abilities and can only tap into them in life or death situations.” Wooyoung reaches out across the space between your bodies and sets his hand down on your knee. “I promise I’ll do my best to help you distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t. I can only do so much if your mind subconsciously thinks that whatever memories are still locked behind the wall the serum put up are dangerous. But I do like a challenge. Hell, I made an Elitist fall in love with me, so what’s some pesky military medicine compared to that?”

You purse your lips, letting one of your hands cover Wooyoung’s and give it a small squeeze.

“You’ll have to forgive me if I rely on your optimism too much. It’s hard for me to be as confident as you.”

“That’s okay. I’ll be positive for both of us!” Wooyoung twists his hand in your grasp and pushes it upwards with his own. Your fingers splay out against each other, his extending past yours by several centimeters. “When we were little, my hands were smaller than yours. I thought I’d never hear the end of it with the way you so mercilessly teased me.” His eyes turn glassy as he looks at your palms pressed together. “Before I moved into Yeosang’s room at the castle, when we shared a cot in the broom closet next to the kitchen… we would compare hand sizes every night, and I always insisted that my hands would be bigger than yours one day. After we were separated and you were forced to leave, I would hold my hand up to the ceiling and ask you if it had finally outgrown yours.”

It sends a pang through you knowing that Wooyoung has to relive these memories alone, that you cannot share in the nostalgia the same way he does. You hardly know what to say now, so you intertwine your fingers and cling to him as tightly as you can without causing pain. His hand trembles in your grasp, the same way his smile wobbles.

“How lucky I am to finally see the day where I can say I was right to your face.”

────────────

You’re stirred awake by a gentle nudging against your shoulder, and it isn’t until your consciousness starts processing what’s going on that you hear San’s voice filtering through the haze of sleepiness.

“Hey, star, we gotta go downstairs.”

“Mmhmph?” you grumble, hand grabbing at air a few times before it finds purchase on San’s warm and solid bicep.

“Yunho wants to introduce us to the owner of this hostel. He claims — he says it’s his father.”

genuinely am seriously so thankful and grateful and touched by everyone who has been sending love and messages lately, even if just to say they've been thinking of me/moc or rereading in the long wait it truly truly motivated me to keep pushing onwards and keep going despite everything :')

────────────

a/n: good god where do i even begin TT if not for an apology for the obscene and absurd and stupid amount of time it has taken for me to get this out 😭 genuinely was wanting this to be posted in january but holy heck look at the time it's.... may... kms...

nothing will make up for the long wait but i do hope you enjoyed this chapter nonetheless!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

[downbadreading]

Ateez fic recs

some of this is mature themed so MDNI!

first of all, there's a lot more and i will edit it time by time! thanks for the authors for writing such a great fic that make me enjoy reading so muchh

my main fic recs is here!

THE LEGENDARY FIC IS MIST OF CELESTE BY @hongism (m)

-i've been dying to do this i always think whenever i do my own fic recs this fic MUST be on the very top because it's insane i'm telling you who never heard of moc???

OT8 / ateez x reader

SUBTLE VARIATIONS OF HEARTBREAK by @nonclassyparty (m)

please read this. I am begging. the heartbreak i feel for each chapter??? INSANE. MUST READ AND REREAD.

the answer by @berryunho (m)

A CULT. A HOT CULT LEADER YET I AM ONE THE VERGE TO CRY BECAUSE HOW GOOD IT IS.

into the aurora by @honeyhotteoks (m)

this is so cute. super cute. i'm having emotional attach. btw part 2 is coming soon so if you're done with the first part, stay tuned! it's a poly ateez fics!

like the moon by @sunmoonjune

poly ateez x female oc. i love this. i love bug. i want to protect her so badly i will kill for her. what i really like about this fic is it's so wholesome. read this and you will understand, I SWEAR.

Seonghwa

love is gone by @ateezmakemeweep (m)

i have no words. it's not yet done, but i really love this story. there's another must read story SO PLEASE CHECK THE MASTERLIST

read for me by @pirateprincessblog (m)

(fem reader x best friend's father) this one heheheh it's so fucking hot like you don't get it it's just another tier i'm kicking the ceiling jaw on the floor while reading it.

Wallflower by @tenelkadjowrites

This is not just a sexual thing between an officemate okay it's more than that because i'm so invested on this story. mc and nerdy hwa is so cute and sexy when it come to the time there's four part of this fic!

Accidental Destiny by @hoonieversed (crying throwing up because this blog has been deactivated)

based on how to train your dragon and YEAH IT'S TOOTHLESS HWA (shifter) with healer reader i love the concept

Hongjoong

paradise lost by @setsugekka (m)

i will cry. this fic is so special to me because it changes my reading style and that's how good it is. i remember all the reread session i did before this because I AM OBSESSED.

bla bla bla by @yoongiseesawmp3 (m)

Stylist reader x idol hongjoong their relationship make me wanna cry it's sooooooo good

game of thrones au by @wordstro (m) eventually i think

I'm a sucker for got. even for hod. a fic starring my favourite group with my favourite series? i'm super duper in. there's one part leave from this fic, it contains four part! (and i'm not ready for the ending yet actually)

yunho

the meaning of 'jeong' by @hwaightme

ANYONE JUST KICK ME THIS IS SO URHHHHHH HOW DO I SAY THIS YOU MUST READ IT FIRST AND THEN WELCOME TO A ROLLERCOASTE RIDE OF EMOTIONS

yeosang

laces by @ttalgiwooyu (M)

This makes me blush for soooo long i wanna die. and read it again.

san

ginger and cinnamon tea by @cheollipop (m)

THIS ONE IS SUPER CUTE. AND HOT sick san and caring partner (along with woo's nonsense idea) this is a must read!

2 a.m. || Choi San by @mingigoo (m)

where do i start? idol san with make up artis reader is so hot.

in this place, full of lies: series masterlist by @wordstro (m)

i'm on my knees. the impact this series have on me. the fact i read it on one sitting and it takes hours. YET SO WORTH IT. I LOVE IT. SO MUCH. TO THE CORE. this one is post-apocalyptic world, and i love it.

Say what you want,be my people pleaser by @chokchokk

Still ongoing but the writer can have my kidney for this story I'm so invested you don't understand this is the falling with your fwb when he doesn't (yet idk it's my wild guess) and conflict here and there my I love this way tooooo much

mingi

series 2: sector one of itpfol by @wordstro

-this one is still ongoing and not yet started but it's on a same masterlist as the s1 with different y/n BUT IT'S ON ITPFOL UNIVERSE SO FIGHT ME

wooyoung

i wish you would by @multiland (M)

THIS? so good. so fucking cute and wholesome and hot and bother me so much. reader here is like frustrated with woo because he keep flirting that lead to a situation (NOT GONNA SPOIL IT BUT HOLY SHIT)

° good lil boy by @sorryimananti-romantic

I read this fic at 3 in the morning. By the time I'm finished with it, it's nearly 4 (or past already) and I can't sleep because this fic is so super duper good. Prince wooyoung and princess y/n (different continent they're not related!!!) And I love their banter so much

jongho

PLEASE SUGGEST ME SOME

multi member

starring roles by @nonclassyparty (san and mingi) (m)

BIG CLAP FOR THIS ONE. you know this is more y/n centered like i couldn't care less with who she ended up with i want her to be happy and be her. i root for her and i will kick anyone who mess with her on their ass. (i do care ofc but you know what i mean y/n is everything for me!)

not all that glitter is gold by @the7thcrow (seonghwa, san, wooyoung and reader) (m)

a great storyline. a super duper great one. i can go on days about this fic and the backstory of each of them. IT'S INSANE! eventually poly!

[potatomountain]

PROCESSING IS NOT THE SAME FOR EVERYONE

This is just fcked up you can have the same mental disorder as someone else and guess what ITS NOT GOING TO EFFECT YOU BOTH THE EXACT SAME WAY that's not how that sht works hyper fixation isn't even the same for people I've got a few mental health issues, I'm on the spectrum AND have my own trauma and can guarantee what works for you won't work for me and vise versa.

Also is everyone literally just gonna forget the fact that a World Wide famous song was PLAGIARISED by writing HC?????

As someone whose read both HC and ID and has actually had ideas for ID run past them and helped a lil as someone that's seen the "similarities list" yes Hongjoong likes clothes Joong irl loves customising his and his members clothes, Jongho and libraries go hand in hand have you SEEN how peaceful that man is???, Yunho drawing has been used in soooo many different fcking fics it's ridiculous, Yeosang being mcs "first" would have been an argument point even if it wasn't Yeosang, MC is closest and the moment to Mingi and Yeosang NOT Jongho and ya know what annoyed me the most the comparison that the demons have Black eyes.... like my loves please search up what colour are demon eyes = black, the mind connection is literally more of a wolfpack thing than a demon thing so huh

Anyways I'm just done with the fcking fact that a FAMOUS song was plagiarised to write Hotel California and yet NO ONE gives a sht about that and are just layin in on the ID fic these are both fanfictions that a storyline that has been used time and time again with both being similar to ALOT of other fanfics of EVERY fandom people write for

So enough Doom has apologised (for something that honestly doesn't need one) they've explained how something might’ve made it easier to overlook similarities so how about people just grow up and look at both sides

I-

Thank you anon.

Im so distraught over this I bawled at work and they let me go home.

I can honestly say I feel so guilty and ashamed- mostly over the MoC/LT thing but I wanted to stand by ID.

I still plan to rework it cuz I don't want any trouble. They are both big in the ateez fanfic community here, they were both authors I respected and looked up to- but I'm like beyond hurt about this?

I did everything they asked, I claimed blame for MoC and spoke my side. HC and ID is another matter I'm just not even going to argue over.

I only asked for some understanding and forgiveness on my part as I am only human, and not one that functions by societies standards. I did my best to be an adult about it. I owned up to the mistakes pointed out and I apologized like you said.

But at this point it feels like they want me to be a bad guy about this?

Neither author has said anything past the initial call out to me. Neither have acknowledged my attempts to remedy the situation. The author of HC has me blocked so I can't see on their end and frankly I don't want to. I was an adult about the situation, their turn.

I'll admit my reaction at first to the ID-HC situation wasn't the best but I was extremely hurt by the claims. And I think I have a right to be.

[thehorizoncrew]

Yunho, how much u wanna fuck yn? gimme a percent if u will babe. 😘

Yunho: “A whole percentage, huh? 89% absolute certainty that I’d like to fuck her, and 11% just pure desire to get under our dear lieutenant’s skin, since he’s the only one who would truly mind my sleeping with her.”

[ncrdbk-blog]

Meloholic - drama

zawiera nikłe spoilery

To może być dość ryzykowne - zacząć od dramy, która spotkała się z tak pozytywnym odbiorem wśród widzów (7.3 na IMDb oraz 97% poleceń wg Google), szczególnie, że nie zamierzam wypowiadać się na temat tej dramki zbyt pobłażliwie, bo była, krótko mówiąc, bardzo rozczarowująca.

FABUŁA

Akcja rozgrywa się w środowisku Eunha University, gdzie poznajemy głównego bohatera i dowiadujemy się, w jaki sposób zyskał swoją nadzwyczajną moc czytania w kobiecych myślach. Eun Ho (U-Know Yunho) wykorzystuje tę umiejętność do uwodzenia kobiet, ale wie, że żadna z nich nie mówi nigdy tego, co naprawdę myśli. Następnie Eun Ho poznaje główną bohaterkę, Han Ye Ri (Kyung Soo-Jin), która jest pierwszą kobietą spełniającą wymagania Eun Ho. Okazuje się jednak, że ich życie nie może być takie proste - Ye Ri ma dwie osobowości, a druga, Han Ju Ri, robi wszystko, żeby skłócić Ye Ri z Eun Ho.

AKTORZY

Przyznam szczerze, że gra aktorska Kyung Soo-Jin jest powalająca - na pewno nie jest łatwym zagrać dwie postaci naraz, szczególnie tak skrajnie od siebie różne. Soo-Jin świetnie sobie z tym poradziła; obie jej bohaterki były żywe i wyraźne, przyciągały spojrzenie i zaskakiwały ekspresją. Gorzej niestety wypadła gra aktorska U-Know Yunho, który właściwie na całą produkcję przybrał trzy, może cztery wyrazy twarzy. Postać, którą dostał do zagrania, była dość łatwa i można było się nią pobawić, żeby była bardziej realistyczna i poruszająca - wyszło trochę mdło. Bohaterowie drugoplanowi poradzili sobie przeciętnie, za wyjątkiem Han Joo-Wana, który dość dobrze wczuł się w swoją postać w drugiej połowie dramy.

SCENOGRAFIA, KOSTIUMY, MUZYKA

Ujęcia w Meloholic były ładne. Nic więcej, nic mniej - kamera i scenografia w porządku. Muzyka przeciętna, dość irytująca po pewnym czasie, jednak można się przyzwyczaić (albo nauczyć ją ignorować). W tej sferze nic nowego i nic szczególnego.

UWAGI

To, co szczególnie zniechęciło mnie do Meloholic i do pozytywnej opinii na temat tej dramy, było zakończenie. Nie będę zdradzała szczegółów, ale drama, która dotyczy choroby psychicznej, jaką jest rozdwojenie jaźni, powinna przedstawiać ją w każdym świetle, tylko nie w dobrym. Przez całą dramę moment zmiany Ye Ri w Ju Ri był przerysowany - bohaterka nagle miała pełen makijaż na twarzy, w tym czerwone usta i dorysowany pieprzyk, wydaje mi się, że nawet rósł jej biust (?), ale w porządku. Rozumiem cel - reżyser chciał, żeby nie było wątpliwości, którą z bohaterek oglądamy właśnie na ekranie. Gorzej jednak, że przedstawione zostało nam tylko jedno jedyne wyjście z sytuacji, w której znajdowali się bohaterowie - choroba musi się skończyć, żeby postaci mogły być ze sobą szczęśliwe. Oznacza to, że Eun Ho i Ye Ri nie mogą być szczęśliwi ze sobą tak długo, jak Ju Ri istnieje. Niezbyt trafiona wizja rzeczywistości, w dodatku przedstawiona w bardzo pretensjonalny sposób, jakby innego wyjścia rzeczywiście nie było.

OGÓLNA OCENA

6/10

[dumbbears]

07

Yunho se na něho podíval, tohle bylo trochu jiné než jak si to představoval, ale by zase s ním."Jae, královna chce mír, alespoň myslím." pronesl tiše a sledoval ho."Jo? Víš to jistě?" zeptal se ho a podíval se na Changmina, který stál v pozor jako by se Yunho chystal Jaeho každou sekundou zabít, ale to nebyla jeho parketa."Myslí, že by se mně měl přestat bát, já jsem nikdy žádnému dítěti neublížil, vždycky jsem byl ten kdo se rval za to, aby tohle přestalo, a sám krev radši nepiji." pronesl tiše a Jaejoong se překvapeně podíval na Yunha a nechápal to. Jak mohl takhle dlouho přežít aniž by vyschl. Yunho se jeho zmateným myšlenkám jen zasmál a v Changminovi začala růst zvědavost, protože jednou ze schopností, kterou měla upíří šlechta bylo čtení myšlenek."Královna ona vždycky mi dala napít." usmál se na něho."Nikdy mě nenechala tak moc žíznit." ujasnil."Tak mě napadá..." začal Jaejoong a Changmin ser tiše a opatrně jako kočka plížil k Yunhovi, který si ho k sobě stáhl za ruku a pevně ho objal."Přeci by ses mě nebál." zasmál se a pocuchal mu vlasy. Changmin se na něho jen uraženě podíval a Jaejoong pokrčil ranemy. "Tohle mi dělal vždycky, když jsme byli malý.""Zpět k tomu míru." pronesl Jae."No nejsem si tím jistý, ale unavená vidím to na ní a navíc koho by pořád bavilo se hnát po něčem jako je válka, pověz mi ty sám Jae, kdybych k tobě, přišel a slušně se tě zeptal, jestli se smím napít, co by jsi mi odpověděl?" zeptal se ho Yunho a Jaejoong jen naklonil hlavu na stranu."Mou odpověď znáš už teď, pořád jsi moje rodina a to se nezmění, ani když jsi upír." usmál se na něho."Tak jinak Changmine." usmál se na chlapce, kterého měl na klíně, aby mu dokázal, že nekouše, tedy zatím."Kdybych se tě zeptal jestli se mohu napít, jak by jsi zareagoval?" zeptal se ho, nemohl se ptát Jaejoonga, ten by pro něho skočil i z okna, takže musel někoho, kdo k němu nemá žádný vztah."Myslím, že bych vás nechal." pronesl zdvořile."Vidíš, to je ono, kdyby se vytvořila nová pravidla mezi lidmi a upíry, tak by jsme tu mohli mezi sebou žít a nikdo by nebyl nucen krást děti a lovci by nebyli nuceni upíry zabíjet, tedy pokud by se nenašel někdo, někdo kdo by je porušoval, chápeš jak to myslím?" zeptal se ho.Jaejoong přikývl. "Takže co teď?" zeptal se ho.Changmin to chápal. "Myslím, že Yunho teď musí za královnou a my za velitelem.""Předně tak Jae." zvedl ze země a sebral svůj meč a zasunul jej do pouzdra."Je zase čas se na nějakou dobu se rozloučit Jaejoongu." Yunho se sklonil k Jaejoongovi aniž by si uvědomil, proč to dělá se sklonil k jeho rtům a políbil ho."Láska k tobě mi zachovala lidskost." pošeptal mu do rtů a pak zmizel ve tmě a nechal tam Jaejoonga jen tak sedět na trávě s pohledem zaklesnutým někde do dálky."Ehm, asi by jsme měli jít za velitelem." pronesl Changmin a tím tak vytrhl Jaeho ze zamyšlení."Myslím, že máš pravdu, jdeme." rychle se vyhrabal na nohy a vzal si svůj meč a protáhl se."To byl ten Yunho, kvůli kterému máš ty noční můry?" zeptal se ho."Není to kvůli Yunhovi, ale kvůli mojí blbosti a nezodpovědnosti, kdybych tehdy nechtěl, tak moc utéct, tak by nebyl Yunho upír." pronesl Jae a podíval se na Changmina."Ale na druhou stranu žije ne?" zeptal se ho Changmim"Myslím, že jo." pokýval hlavou a Changmin se zaculil, tak to v tom případě mohl být Jaejoong jedině rád, že se Yunho nepomátl a neprokousl mu krk, hned jak měl možnost, ale co do Yunhovi hlavy neviděl a nemohl tudíž vědět, co si o tom všem myslí.

[hongism]

mists of celeste ➻ 49

➻ pairing: ??? x fem reader ➻ genre: space au, pirate au, space pirate!ateez, angst ➻ word count: 19.7k ➻ rating: M ➻ warnings: language, talks of abuse & violence, minor violence, smut ➻ summary: Sneaking aboard the ship of a renowned space pirate may not have been the best idea, but you’ll have to make do with what fate has handed to you

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act seven ➻ part one

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What rots away at your insides in the days that follow is nothing pretty — a deep profound obsession that drives your hatred towards a particular man into the skin until it sits engraved there, with wounds oozing blood all the while.

“Have you seen Nightingale around?”

Soojin jerks her chin up at the sudden interruption of your voice cutting through whatever pretty silence she constructed for herself. You feel bad, though only mildly, for disturbing her without warning. It’s become somewhat common to find her in the mess hall these days, with Luca off to the side with the two resident Berserkers. Your stare lingers on Mingi for a few more seconds than necessary. The last conversation you shared with the man rings in your ears like it was mere minutes ago and not several days.

“Um, training room I think? That’s where he’s been hanging around at least.” Soojin passes you a little half-hearted smile. You don’t doubt that your discomfort and likely unabashed anger is on full display to her; however, she opts not to ask further about your reasons for asking, so you deign not to say anything other than a quiet ‘thank you’ and nod your head.

Mingi shifts where he’s kneeling close to the child. His gaze finds yours the second you turn to head out, stopping you in your tracks and forcing you to return the fierce eye contact for several seconds. You let it stagnate for too long, apparently, because the Berserker stands without warning and moves in your direction. You don’t consider your next move to be one of avoidance, though it must look like that to anyone else aside from you with how you retreat the way you came and head for the arched doorway leading out. Mingi persists still.

“Ghost.”

“Yes?” You only stop to turn when the two of you are far enough away from both Soojin and Jongho.

“I hope what I said to you the other night hasn’t been on your mind too much.”

“…Hardly.” Something else has been in its place — a messy conglomeration of anger, frustration, and other emotions you haven’t paused to address internally yet. You got to see the full picture Mingi had been painting for you that night days later in any case.

“That’s—” he inhales sharply and goes rigid for a moment, so still that you almost think someone has crept up behind you to interrupt the conversation but it’s still just the two of you near the edge of the room. A noise of realization slips from your lips. How hard is it to lie to a man who can feel every bit of the emotions radiating off you in waves?

“I understand what you meant now. I do.”

“I had wished to apologize and to… to let you know that what I said was untrue. I apologize for misleading you.” Mingi’s expression is surprisingly genuine in comparison to his words, though you know you won’t find whatever sincerity you seek in his tone regardless.

“I don’t believe that,” you start in a whisper, “and I doubt you do either.”

Mingi’s full lips twitch into what seems to be a fight against a smile.

“Ever so perceptive.”

“Were you ordered to apologize?”

“No.” Mingi smiles truly now. Without showing his teeth in any fashion, the gesture comes across as more terrifying than reassuring. “What I said to you was my personal opinion. I cannot be crucified for an opinion. I’m telling you that I was wrong because my opinion has changed. Although, perhaps there is nothing and no one more dangerous than a woman scorned.” You duck your chin as you laugh, trying to hide the noise behind your hand, though when you look back up at Mingi, he is chuckling too. “Yunho told me that once, you can blame him.”

“Noted. I’ll be sure to file a complaint. In the meantime—” Mingi raises his eyebrows at you as though echoing a silent question “—thank you for looking out for me. All is well between San and myself now.”

“But not you and the captain.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You get this certain look about you when you’re pissed at him in particular.” When Mingi grins at you next, you can’t keep your laughter in any longer. “I don’t know if it’s of any consolation to you, but if you do wish to speak with the captain, he has not been inviting any guests to the bridge these days aside from myself. So while there wouldn’t be total privacy, there would be some level of it at least with the lieutenant’s absence.”

“If I didn’t know better, Mingi, I might say you are trying to start a fight.” You keep your tone above the belt so to speak — kind enough to imply simple jokes if Mingi chooses to read it as such. The Berserker glances over his shoulder then over at you briefly.

“It might amuse me thoroughly to see you swing a few punches at him before having to intervene,” he says under his breath, and as surprise starts to hit and drag through your body, the man turns his back to you to walk back the way he came. Mingi at least seems to understand you on a fundamental level; in a regard to how you expunge your feelings with some form of confrontation, and perhaps you and the Berserker share overlap in such areas. He has been no stranger to confrontation himself in the past. The arena itself is the perfect example of such a thing, where he was driven by a simple desire to do something. Feel something, do something in return. Eye for an eye in a strange sense — you made me feel this way so I am doing this to you as a response to those feelings. He’s far from unintelligent by any means; if anything, Mingi is a lot smarter than all of the people you share the ship with.

Rather than complicating matters with seedy lies and interweaving half-truths to make things seem more honest than they are, Mingi allows for the perspective of “one plus one equals two, so why complicate it beyond that?”, and he pushes a compelling argument into your hands. The temptation of whacking your captain across the face is a delightful one. Even if there wasn’t an abundance of anger stirring in your gut because of his actions, you think he has fully warranted several punches just on account of his existence.

Simplifying things in such ways, however, is far from your forte.

And there is still the desire to address the sea of lies and half-truths Nightingale presented to you when you asked rather straightforward questions upon first meeting him. You could gain absolutely nothing from this confrontation or you could garner more ammunition to fire into Hongjoong when you inevitably seek out that fight.

Finding the man you’re after is indeed as simple as going to the training room, though the sight that awaits you beyond the door is not at all what you were anticipating. You’ve been in the room several times by now, becoming quite familiar with the layout of everything inside, and even though you have been slacking since you got back from Rathmos, you cannot imagine the room to have changed so much in such little time. Nightingale finds you, instead, frozen by the door with what can only be rampant confusion on your expression.

“Don’t give me that look, it’s only temporary. Need a firing range somewhere to keep sharp.” He motions behind him with his prosthetic arm, tilting his chin in a way that makes the choppy pink strands of hair atop his head flop around. “You’re welcome to use it as you see fit while it’s up though.”

With the explanation, the sight before your eyes makes much more sense. Haphazard targets that look to be crude metal cut-outs of vaguely human form now occupy the far end of the training room, where the (albeit very minimal) row of training dummies used to sit against the wall. Those have been moved as well, brought forward some to spread throughout what Nightingale has added.

“Is anyone aware of your interior decorating skills?” you ask as you push further into the room.

“Ha ha, no one mentioned that you’re the funny one around here. And yes, I was given permission to do as I please while I’m here. Thus—” the man waves a hand through the air in a rather dismissive fashion, tacking on a forced smile at the end of his response. Pressing your lips into a thin line, you return the gesture. “If you’re gonna just stand there, get over here and join me. Clearly you have some reason for being here.”

The bounty hunter extends a hand in your direction, fingers clasped around the barrel of a pistol, and he presents the grip to you without waiting for your agreement one way or another.

“I do want to ask you a few questions, yes.” He doesn’t let go of the weapon immediately, even after you try to take it from him. You still find it wildly unsettling to look at that fake eye so you dip your chin and clear your throat. He lets go seconds later without pushing the topic further, passing the metaphorical ball back into your side of the court for the next play to come. “Starting with an explanation of what your relationship towards Hongjoong truly is.” Part of you is nervous to ask such a thing because the man is full of so many unknowns, and in your mind’s eye, you could be traversing into very dangerous territory. Without knowing for certain that your safety is guaranteed in his hands, you’re left to eye the pistol that he takes into his hands and weighs carefully.

As though offering up a warning of your own, you take aim at one of the mangled metal targets and press your finger over the trigger, letting the gun fire its bullet forward. It hits as intended, and if the head had features attached to it, your bullet would have landed between its eyes. Nightingale huffs out a laugh through his nose.

“Now you know, huh?”

Again, you fire; this time at a different target though with the same intention. When your bullet lands again, you lower the pistol to your side and look over at the bounty hunter.

“Why did you lie?”

“Why are you believing every word out of San’s mouth?” he counters just as quickly, but it doesn’t catch you off-guard the way he clearly intends for it to. “He’s the one who talked to you, no? I doubt it was Seonghwa given how much he wants to avoid what Hongjoong and San both did back then, and it certainly wasn’t the man of the hour himself. So why are you hanging onto every word, taking every little thing San is telling you at face value?” Nightingale’s fake eye is oddly expressive for all the tech and hardware glowing through the sclera. “Did he not tell you how he manipulated me? What game did he play to do so, I truly wonder, Ghost? How did he tell you? Were you in bed? Were his hands on you, telling you foul and hideous words with his lips but touching you so gently with his fingertips?”

He succeeds now in pushing discomfort far into your veins. You lift the gun in your hand a second time if only to distract yourself from his words but he’s already accomplished his goal.

“He explained very gruesome details about it all,” you say through gritted teeth, “but it would be odd to lie about that.”

“But not impossible, no?”

You draw your lips together until your teeth start to ache from the pressure you’re putting against them.

“My eye was taken by your captain, Ghost, but my arm — my arm was taken by your captain’s dog.”

Your finger fumbles on the trigger at the shock revelation, and you don’t have the mind to correct your angle before the gun is firing off a shot into the wall adjacent to one of the targets. Nightingale lurches forward, artificial fingers pressing down hard on the barrel of the gun to lower it once more.

“Try not to go blowing holes in your captain’s ship unless you want the same done to you,” he offers. His hand stays attached to your gun, and now you can’t rip your gaze off the prosthetic. When your gaze flits up to his face, you take in the sight of his wry smile and that glowing eye. “Though I suspect San would sooner die than harm you. Suppose that’s where we differ.”

“Why do you still willingly work with Hongjoong? He takes your eye and your arm, but you still do favors for him?” If it were you, you would either swear to kill the man with your bare hands or put as much distance between you and him as possible.

“There’s more I need out of him yet, and he’s willing to make deals according to his needs. No one aboard this ship can compete with the services I offer.”

“What if he asks San to kill next time? Then what?” It seems bizarre that Hongjoong would allow a person whom he clearly considered an enemy at one point to lie so comfortably amongst his crew. That is, if Hongjoong’s claims about how desperately he wishes to protect his crew are true, and you think you can at least find credibility in that. If nothing else.

Nightingale flicks his bangs to the side as he jerks his chin upwards and grins in full at you.

“That’ll be the fun part.”

“Fun. You have a sick definition of fun!”

What you get in return is a half-hearted shrug that tells you the man does not truly care in the slightest.

“San pretends to be torn up about the things that happened between us,” he continues, and this at least doesn’t come as a surprise. “I think there is some sliver of the man that does feel guilty about it but maybe that’s hopeful thinking on my part. I’m not sure he’s capable of guilt at all.”

“He is. He is, he’s not—”

When your words falter, Nightingale looks towards you with raised brows and wide eyes, but the smile on his lips persists still. It makes your skin itch and burn with discomfort.

“He’s no monster. He’s capable of feeling things, and guilt is among those things.”

“He knows that the order to kill could come any day,” Nightingale speaks as though you didn’t interrupt in the slightest. “So he doesn’t let himself feel that bad. Pretending is easier anyway, no?”

In a stroke of what might be pure foolishness, you allow yourself to be vulnerable before this man here and now.

“How much of a hand does Hongjoong have in the things San does?”

“What do you think?” he asks in turn, and that grin finally drops.

“He’s admitted to me that he wishes to be Hongjoong’s weapon and nothing else,” you whisper.

“Do you feel safe with San?”

“I do. Doubtlessly.”

The corner of the hunter’s mouth twitches a bit at that. “I did too, at one point. Until San asked to take me to the brig one day. Even when I was fully in the mouth of a monster, I did not feel it. Not until he clamped his jaw down around me.”

“I run the risk of sounding delusional, but that’s different from the position I’m in now. I’m part of the crew. You said you aren’t and never were, so you were someone on the outside, someone with a rival crew, someone who posed a threat to this crew.” You gleaned that much from San’s distorted story and can only hope that it’s the truth. “I’m not like that nor am I in that position. My loyalty is already set in stone.”

“You’ve been taught well already,” Nightingale all but sneers back at you, but it devolves into a laugh seconds later. He doesn’t allow you the chance to ask what that means either. “Your loyalty is to San, but you have to realize by now that by dedicating yourself to him, you are dedicating yourself to Hongjoong too.”

“Truth, respect, and loyalty,” you throw out. “That’s what Hongjoong demands, but that doesn’t mean he should be allowed to get away with heinous things.” Nightingale hums.

“It’s easy to mistake leadership for coercion if you do not believe in the man leading you. Do not forget the company you’re keeping here, Ghost, or what marks have stained your ledger red with blood.”

“I would be first to admit that my morals aren’t all there.” Taking a deep breath, you do your best to put to words what it is that has been irking you so much about the man in command. “But doing these things to people he claims to care about — that’s not an issue of morality. He keeps telling me that every little thing he does is for our sake, that all his misdemeanors against me have been to protect his crew, so it seems like a contradiction to let him harm them just as much.”

For all your passion in saying that, Nightingale just shrugs.

“Could you at least tell me your real name?” Your ploy to fish for more information ends in disappointment.

“No. I won’t give it to you.”

“Why not?” The unfortunate side effect of pushing more feeling into your tone is that you end up sounding like little more than a petulant child who isn’t getting her way.

“I’m certain you can figure out why I’m not quick to trust others, especially those close to Hongjoong.”

“Hongjoong already knows these things about you though, I’m sure! What’s the harm in telling me now?”

“It’s about the concept of trust, and you don’t have mine.” As you scowl, Nightingale pulls the pistol fully from your hands. “I don’t have a crew now because of what your captain did to mine in the past. Every last one of them became fragments of debris in space. My trust is hard to come by and even harder to earn.” He waves his free hand towards the exit. “Now shoo so I can focus alone.”

There’s the distinct feeling sticking to your gut as you leave that you have upset the man in some way, whether on account of your questions or your answers to his own questions, but it’s also paired with the sick churn as you feel his eyes on you as you go. You wonder with which hand Hongjoong had taken his eye, and in what manner he went about doing so. Further, imagination takes over to wonder how San took his arm — what they talked about, what they did beforehand, how it all went down — and fills you with sick curiosity. You wish to know the ins and outs of how things turned out the way they did if only to know how to avoid the same fate for yourself later down the line.

That is not a privilege you get to have, however. Aware of that fact, you move on to other, much less pleasant business by your standards. It takes you to Minho’s door, and you barely get the chance to knock even once before it’s sliding open before your eyes to reveal the doctor on the other side.

“I was about to come get you myself. Here I thought you were being difficult again.”

“Justifiably, I’d say,” you mutter, stepping past him to get in the room. You certainly have no desire to do this presently, but Minho cornered you last night after dinner and all but demanded that you see him for another session.

“Hm, how has your day been so far?”

You hum as your head tilts from side to side in a nonverbal response to his question. He moves for that cursed table with the chessboard atop it immediately, but you choose to hang back and glance around the room as though anything will have changed since you were last here. And truly, nothing is inherently different about the décor of the room. What does catch your eye is a thing much more insignificant by all means — the bottle of pills sitting atop his bedside table. You have seen him with it before, seen him take pills from the very same bottle, and that alone should not be cause for concern.

“Ghost.”

Your gaze lingers in place even as your body twists to face the doctor. It’s the exact same bottle, and the pills must surely be the same inside as well, except when you saw him days ago, it was barely used. There had to be only a few taken out at that point. Now the bottle sits close to empty, with another identical container filled to the brim with more capsules right beside it on the table. Feasibly, there’s no way that he could have taken all those pills in such a short amount of time.

“Y/n, the sooner we talk, the sooner you can take your leave.” When you finally rip your gaze off the bottles and turn to Minho, it’s just to find that he’s looking back at you with such an intensely heated glare that you almost feel like a child being caught doing something wrong. “Come sit. We will not play today.”

“Um, have you been well too?” you inquire through the sudden tension hanging in the air. Minho offers nothing but a sigh, leaning back in his chair as you sit down across from him. “Or… I mean, your day, has your day been okay too?”

“It’s been fine, thank you.” The man smiles at last, and that gesture provides some relief for you. Not enough, it seems, because your gaze flicks back over to that nightstand and what sits atop it within seconds. “Are you distracted today, Ghost?”

“A bit.” It’s said through a whisper, and Minho’s stare makes you want to challenge him further but you decide against it. “What is it you wanted to talk about today?”

“You seem to suffer from PTSD,” he states almost out of nowhere. Something about both the suddenness and the bluntness in his tone makes you scoff. It’s akin to one of the very first things he said to you though, and the sense of familiarity with what he’s said makes you recall that now.

“Of course I do.”

“What do you mean by that?” He has that pad out once again, opened over his knee where he crosses his legs, and you see his pen move down to the tablet before you can even offer up a response.

“Looking at my history, wouldn’t it be a bit obvious for me to have PTSD?” Something about how methodical the man is in writing down words unbeknownst to you makes you violently insecure all of the sudden. You feel seen in an uncomfortable way, in a way you do not want to be seen, though he perpetuates the discomfort by shifting to look you in the eye.

“Only depending on who you are. There are those who wouldn’t, though they would fall under a different umbrella.”

“Something worse…?” you trail off without being able to finish the thought, mostly because you fear falling into that category yourself.

“Nothing worse. Nothing worse. We don’t use terms like that. While symptoms can have levels, the disorders themselves differ in severity. It is better to address them in tentative terms. Nothing is worse in this room. We are talking about you and you alone. No comparisons, no parallels, no odd faux psychology test meant to tell you whether you have the same mental disorder as some planetary celebrity.” Minho looks down at the screen below him, eyes scanning over the contents of whatever sits there, and you find yourself grossly curious about what he’s writing about you. “Yunho made heavy note of your trauma response and the symptoms you struggle with on a day-to-day basis. I’d like to hear it from your lips. Can you look back and pinpoint a particularly traumatic event in your life?”

In retrospect, there are plenty of moments you could bring to light now. Starting all the way from childhood and moving up until recently, for that matter, you find it difficult to count the memories of your childhood that you do not have. Even so, in the military, you have clear and distinct memories that jump out to you; however, the fog of not being able to distinguish the minute details of what’s accurate and what was fabricated by two men who suffered the same fate.

“I was a slave before joining the military. I imagine that would be a rather traumatic experience.”

“You imagine? That time has not been recovered in your memory yet, is that correct?”

“I have yet to remember it, yeah, but I’m sure that caused some extent of damage to my brain along the way.”

“If I may be so bold,” Minho starts, leaning forward in his seat and over his knees in a way that forces you to make eye contact with him, “I am of the belief that the most prominent event was the night you killed the King of Eros. Would it be alright if I asked you to recount what happened then?”

Your fingers clench and unclench against your thighs and releasing that grip feels close to an impossible feat. Minho notices the sudden increase in your breathing patterns, along with your frantic blinking as you entertain the mere idea of telling him such horrors.

“There are many ways in which I can offer you support, should you need it. Encouraging words, eye contact, I can even put a hand on your knee or hold your hand if need be — and you can allow yourself to be emotional here. This is a safe space.”

“Can you not speak down to me in such a way?” It’s an inaccurate judgment of his actions, and you are well aware of that fact. The words push their way out of you before you can stop them, even though you don’t believe them either — at least not fully. He is simply a man doing his job: the offer to assist you is part of the work asked of him.

“Why do you feel as though I am speaking down to you?”

You gnaw at the inside of your lip.

“Is it because of our last session?” Minho unfolds his legs and lays his tablet down atop the table between you two. “I will not bring that into conversation today, you need not worry about that.”

“It makes me nervous,” you admit through your teeth.

“Yes, I gathered as much. To put it bluntly and risk your ire further, you tend towards lashing out when you start to feel anxious. A completely normal, human reaction! Don’t get me wrong; nearly every person in the universe does so as well. I am genuinely trying to help you here, Ghost, but I can only do so if you let me in to some extent.” The doctor extends a hand across the gap between the two of you, palm up to the ceiling, and you blink between him and his hand several times before finding your voice again.

“That night, I waited until my team was asleep, pretending to be so myself, and when I thought the coast was clear, I got up and left our cabin. Jisung followed me out. I told him I would finish the job he started so that no one else would… fall victim to whatever it was he wanted. I asked him to take responsibility, to do it himself and stop me, but he didn’t. Instead, he told me that I could do it myself if I wanted to save Hyu—our team so badly. I went to the king’s quarters myself, alone, killing any and every guard I saw along the way. When I reached the king’s chambers, I slit his queen’s throat in her bed right beside him and then I waited. And waited.” Minho’s hand doesn’t waver where it remains above the chessboard. You hone your gaze in on his fingers rather than his face, solely because of the overwhelming sense of dread swarming your gut as you pour yourself out to this man. “And I waited until her blood soaked the sheets enough to wake him. Then when he finally woke, I climbed over her dead body and I reached into that man’s chest to break it open and squeeze the life of his heart. Once I had done that, I gathered what documents I could and what I thought was important at the time before going back to the cabin I shared with my team. Soojin took me to the bath and tried to get the blood off my skin and out of my clothes. Jisung stood above me and lied to them, claiming he told me not to do anything, that he had nothing to do with it, and that I ruined his plans. He put his hands around my throat and pushed me under the water with the intent to kill me.”

“Do you remember how you felt the exact moment you killed that man and his wife?”

“I felt powerful.” Perhaps such an admission makes you sick and deranged in the head but it does come from a place of honesty. “I felt afraid at the same time. I think I’ve only ever felt that once before, and it came long after that night.” You have a clearer memory of that instance — a day when everything that could go wrong happened to shatter around you all at once. San getting shot, Hongjoong pushing your hand through a door, saving Soojin and Luca, San almost dying, your hand going through a man’s chest and squeezing around his still beating heart.

“Power and fear have more in common than you might imagine,” Minho whispers as he finally pulls his hand back into his lap.

“All my time in the military, I was heralded as some sort of prodigy thanks to my skill with guns. Be it pistols or rifles or snipers, I understand them on a fundamental and mechanical level, to the point where I could tell you how far a bullet will travel before it begins to drop. I could tell you in numbers how much force is behind the recoil on a sniper or how a silencer affects the handling of a gun. I never felt powerful with that knowledge though. Not enough to feel fear in the same breath at least. But for the life of me…” your breath stutters momentarily, just enough to let you think over what you’re trying to get at, “I cannot explain how I can do such a horrific thing with apparent ease.”

“Does that make you afraid of hurting those closest to you? Those you care about, those who trust you, who put their faith in you and hope their survival is guaranteed in their hands?”

“No, I know I wouldn’t hurt them in any way.” You push force into your tone intentionally, with the hope to squash what it was he was implying you would do the last time you sat in this chair across from him. He does not give the reaction you hoped for, however — an acknowledgment of your forced honesty — and rather, you get a cat-like grin that pulls the corners of his lips upwards until it’s unsettling to look at.

“Do you fear yourself, Y/n?”

“Not in the sense that — I don’t fear that I will physically hurt the people close to me because I have a power I don’t fully understand. But sometimes I can’t shake the feeling of a heartbeat that is not mine on my fingertips, or I can’t unhear the sound of a thumping heart beating in my eardrums.”

“You fear becoming a slave to your own capabilities,” Minho concludes for you. Part of you is wildly grateful he took it upon himself to finish the thought because admitting it would only add to the weight bearing down on your shoulders now. “You fear becoming a monster.”

Pressing your lips into the thinnest line you can manage, all you can do is offer a series of meager little nods to confirm his suspicions.

“Y/n, tell me, when something you consider to be bad happens, do you hear and feel that heartbeat?”

“I imagine I do, but I’m certain I mistake it for my own from time to time.” Your fingers draw the fabric of your pants into your palms again, squeezing tight until you can feel your nails biting skin through the material. “Is there a word for that? Some diagnosis out of one of your long books and manuals?” You did not intend for so much sarcasm to push through your tone but it slips in nonetheless. Minho doesn’t so much as bat an eye at the attitude you send his way and instead pauses as though he is truly mulling over your senseless question.

“We in psychiatry ought to aim to help patients adjust to their current mental states. If the bad outweighs the good, then we determine treatments accordingly. If there are goods that cannot be had outside of that mental state, then we ask the patient to determine what’s best. Within reason, of course, we ought not to let anyone harm themselves with their own decisions, intentionally or otherwise. However, more often than not, the patient is the one best suited to figure out the right dosage of medications or treatments or therapies needed in order to maintain a good and healthy life. In my seat, from where I stand on this side of the dilemma, it is easy to preach to you, the patient, about how you should choose. How you lead your life, what medication you should take, to slap labels on you and tell you that definitively this — whatever the diagnosis we find is, I mean — is what is wrong in your head. Manual after manual, book after book, the list of articles grows day by day with new names for things that perhaps do not even need a name. Y/n, I will not place a name to whatever it is you are suffering with on any given day. Each individual case, patient, person should be treated separately, without a manual or an article or some doctor halfway across the universe telling me that there’s some title to slap on you. What you are is a human being who deserves the respect of being treated as such, not just another tick mark against the name of a disorder that may encompass your symptoms at a given point in time. Is that agreeable to you?”

This time the sigh you let out is one of pure relief, and the lingering discomfort you felt from being in this position with the doctor dwindles further.

“Refreshingly agreeable, yes.”

Minho dips his ear to his shoulder as he smiles less crudely than before. “Then, shall we dive deeper into that head of yours now?”

•─────⋅☾⭒☽⋅─────•

“I don’t want to go back after this.”

You look up from your bag to face the man who’s just spoken, and when you lay your sight on him, he’s sitting at the edge of one of the beds.

“Sorry?” you echo mostly out of confusion.

He lifts his chin and finds your gaze with wide brown eyes. If you didn’t know any better, you would resort to saying that he looks innocent of all wrongdoings in life.

“I don’t want to go back to Eros. Don’t want to report to some stuffy military official, don’t want Hyunwoo to give us a lecture about how we weren’t the perfect little soldiers, don’t want to keep doing things for people I don’t give a fuck about.”

Setting your bag aside, you move to sit on your own bed and face Jisung only after curling your fingers around the edge of the mattress to ground yourself. What version of Jisung will come out of this conversation is an absolute mystery to you as of yet.

“Aren’t you sick of it, Y/n?”

Despite the urge to shrug and wave off the question, you at least know better than to risk upsetting him this early.

“Defecting would be worse for us.”

“Us? So you feel the same?”

“I’m entertaining the idea for the sake of this conversation, Jisung,” you state in a rather flat tone. The mattress dips a bit further under your grip. “I’m content with the way things are. Who else is there for me to be loyal to? I’m well fed, taken care of, have protection—”

“All of that is only guaranteed if you give your loyalty and freedom in return.”

Your lips draw into a frown.

“Deserting is a good way to make sure freedom is never an option for you, Jisung. We have to stay until we’re twenty-one, those were the rules when we entered this line of work.”

“Letting fourteen-year-olds decide their own fates for the next seven years is bullshit too!”

“But it was a stipulation you knew upfront,” you counter. In a twist of irony, you’re the one losing patience here first. “I’m not saying that it’s ideal or fair, but risking the rest of your life because you’re tired now isn’t ideal either. We could wait, Ji… wait until we’re of age and can leave freely. I don’t want to be in the military forever either but I don’t want to lose the rest of my life because of a lack of judgment as a teenager.”

“You willingly lost the first fourteen years of your life because of the military too, Y/n!” Jisung gets to his feet now, in a flash of anger, and you glare his way with waning amusement. “You’re gonna give them more of those years too? Risk dying for them? Just to possibly guarantee some shred of faux freedom that they dangle in front of your nose?”

“Ji—”

“They make you stay on Eros after you leave, you know that right? You can’t even leave the system, let alone the fucking planet! That’s freedom to you? You don’t have to work for them anymore, sure, but you’re stuck under their noses so they can keep you pressed right under their thumbs for the rest of your life anyway.”

“Hyunwoo would throw you to those so-called rats for even entertaining the thought of treason! Do you think I want to see that happen? You’re one of us too, Ji, you are part of our team. Our team is our family. This is who we have. We agreed to stick together, we decided this for ourselves, and we committed to this together. I’m not doing all this shit because I love the man we have to call king, but I am doing it because it’s for the good of the people I care about. I had imagined you thought the same?”

“Those people would sell you out for a paycheck, Y/n. If I commit treason, then they’re throwing you in my court. We don’t have the golden ticket as they do — I’ve killed too many innocent people, and you’ve been a complicit player in my crimes for too long.”

You move to get up from your seat as well but Jisung crosses the short distance between the two beds before you have a chance to get balanced. It doesn’t keep you from being the one to make the first move, however, and you swing the back of your hand across his face without hesitation. Still, you knock yourself right back to where you were seconds before, pushing a wave of shock through your system in the same breath. Jisung remains frozen in place, no doubt out of disbelief.

“You want me to martyr myself for you so desperately that it’s made you beyond delusional. I’ve been loyal to you partly out of pity, you idiot, because without me, you would have been strung up in the streets by now. I know my place in our team and in our department. You play with your little toys, and I make the kill shots. Part of me believes that you only kill those innocent people in my name because you have somehow deluded yourself into thinking that I need to be protected. I protect you. I protect myself. And I will protect our family when the time comes. You decide now whether you’re included in that group of people or not.”

“And I will do whatever must be done to get us both out. You’re the coward. You’ve let them taint your mind and make you believe that leaving is a crime.” He drags his fingers across your cheek, pulling your chin up to look at him better, but all it does is earn him a glare. “You’ll see it one day, little lady. I promise you that much.”

The man before you has never taken responsibility for a thing in his life, though. Asking him to do so now would be an impossible feat at best. In fact, if you were in the business of making wagers, you would bet that Jisung would only admit fault at death’s doorstep.

•─────⋅☾⭒☽⋅─────•

“I can’t believe we’re losing so badly to a child,” you say under your breath even though said child is staring right at you from across the table. Jongho shakes his head almost imperceptibly as he looks over the cards in his hands before placing them face down on the metal with a shaky sigh.

“This is the fourteenth time in a row, and I’m not even trying to let him win against me.”

“Fourteenth?” You glance down at your own hand but the sight is dismal at best. There is much on the line, however, and it sits in the center of the table between the three of you now. The last handful of gourmet chocolates that Jongho had been stashing in his room all this time without even mentioning their existence to you. You’ll be damned if you lose out on some fucking chocolates to a child, even if he is a master at the art of poker. “My hand is terrible. I can’t even lie about it, it’s so fucking bad.”

“Be glad you can’t see mine because I don’t think either one of us is walking out of here with even a tin foil wrapper.”

Luca raps his knuckles against the metal table and drags your focus back over to him. He lays his own cards down on the table with a growing smile, gesturing to Jongho in a way you still don’t fully understand or know how to read yet.

“He said we can team up against him and split the chocolates if that gives us a better chance,” Jongho translates to you moments later.

“Oh my god, he’s gotta have a flush of some sort in that hand.”

“I’m not splitting the chocolates. They’re my chocolates!”

You sputter over air at the adamant defiance coming from the man and whip your head in his direction to stare him down. He’s insistent on not looking back at you, much like a child acting as though what he cannot see cannot hurt him. You’re of half a mind to whack him upside the head but you also don’t need to be giving Luca any bright ideas either.

“You’re about to lose all of them! Why not just settle for losing half!?”

“I have some pride, Y/n, there’s still pride left in me even after all this!”

“You’ve lost fourteen times in a row to someone who is less than half your age. There is no dignity or pride or anything left! This is about getting even just one chocolate!”

“I won’t do it. You can’t make me.”

“When he pulls out a straight flush—”

Luca grins from ear to ear as he turns his cards over, and one by one you watch your hopes of getting even a bite of the sweet treat sitting in the middle of the table dwindle into nothingness.

“—and look at that, it’s even worse. A royal flush! How’s that pride now, asswipe?” You reach over to pinch Jongho’s earlobe between your fingers, yanking him down a bit as you tug on the skin.

“In one piece because I didn’t split shit with you!” comes his equally immature retort. You’re only interrupted by Luca knocking on the table once again. Except when you both look up from whatever petulant fight it is you’re having, it’s to witness an almost pitiful scene of Luca placing a chocolate between the two of you. He makes a few gestures in sign language that you vaguely recognize but still wait for Jongho’s confirmation to come through. “…he said we can split the chocolate.”

“This is so embarrassing. Where did you learn how to play poker this well?”

Luca offers up a shrug and nothing else. He’s quick to take the bowl of remaining chocolates into his little hands, however, and hops up from the bench seconds later. Before completely turning away from the two of you he bows at the waist, smiling with both rows of teeth on full display.

“Thank you,” he says with one hand before using the same one to wave goodbye. “See you at dinner.”

You aren’t cruel enough to not return the kindness to him, but you do keep Jongho’s ear firmly pinched the whole time.

You release your grip on him at last once Luca is fully out of sight, letting him finally sit back on the bench more comfortably.

“It’s about time for his meeting with the good doctor,” Jongho explains as he rubs at the reddened skin you left behind. “They’ve been meeting every day since Minho got here I think.”

“When you said he steamrolled you in cards, I didn’t think you meant he was good.”

“Yeah, well,” Jongho sweeps the wrapped chocolate over to your side of the table, “I warned you.”

You scoff at nothing in particular as you do your best to delicately open the sweet, pressing down on it with your thumbs until it snaps down the middle.

“You shouldn’t have bet every bit of your good chocolate if you knew we would lose that spectacularly.” With a sigh, you pass over half of it to Jongho before popping the other into your mouth. “We can get more once we land though, right?”

“Yeah, but god knows what they sell down on Gorgon… I’ve never been myself.” The Berserker nudges you in the side with his elbow as he chews. “Have you?”

“Been to Gorgon? Can’t say that I have either. Nothing I’ve heard about the planet is particularly—” you wave a hand through the air to accentuate your point as your expression turns into a grimace “—pleasant, I suppose?”

“No, but Vida in general is nothing pleasant.” Jongho frowns when he looks down at the table with cards strewn across the surface. You press your lips into a thin line. It isn’t all too difficult to realize why he’s saying such a thing — not when Auriga lies within the same system and several thousand kilometers away from where the ship is drifting onward to its target. Even at such a distance, it’s enough for discomfort: a concept you understand wholly because the mere thought of being in Aurum made you ill. Mingi, too, may understand this feeling on a fundamental level the way you do. It’s hard to forget the fallout that came from Wooyoung mentioning Kebos by word of mouth. “It’s uncomfortable but that goes without saying.” Jongho passes you a smile, one that comes as a result of sensing the pang going through your heart right at this moment.

“It brings back memories I’m sure,” you say under your breath. You reach a hand up over the table to lay it atop one of Jongho’s, pressing your fingers into the gaps between his fingers.

“Lots of unpleasant ones. But it’s funny to think that of all the people on this ship, all the criminals living side by side, the one who is probably wanted by the most amount of people there on Auriga is me. Every kind of person in my hometown probably remembers my title and remembers my name in some capacity. Captain has done a damn good job of avoiding Vida for so long. I know he wouldn’t bring us here without good reason, and I suppose that I can only be grateful that whatever he’s after isn’t on Auriga. Still. It’s tough being back here still.”

“How long has it been since you were last there?”

“Ten years. Actually probably eleven at this point.” Jongho exhales through his mouth. “I’ve been running from this for a decade, and it’s still not enough time to feel at peace with what happened. I thought that—”

It’s hard to look at his face, even the side profile that you’ve got an angle of, solely because of how deep his pain is etched into the features there.

“Everything is much louder here. It makes me think… I should’ve been gentler with Mingi when we were on Kebos, or even Seonghwa when we were on Dorado. Was it loud in Aurum?” His voice is barely audible by now. He turns his hand in your grip, shifting just enough for him to curl his fingers further around yours and cling to you in an act of desperation.

“Terribly so. Horrid, wretched, terrific loudness. It’s like deja vu but your body remembers the exact feelings of agony you felt when you were last there.”

“Yeah, I get it a lot more now that we’re so close to Auriga. And I know our reasons for being on Dorado were certainly not good ones — and nothing that happened there could even be considered close to decent — but at least there, I don’t know. Part of me felt happy to be back. I mean, I worked in some random dive bar there for two years after leaving Auriga, and that’s where I first heard of Hongjoong and his crew. That’s where Hongjoong found Seonghwa too. I was there the night Seonghwa approached Hongjoong and asked to join his crew, remember being in the back of the bar and watching it happen like it was yesterday. It felt like returning to the place where things started when I know in reality that place is home. I wonder if Seonghwa views the place solely as something tied to the worst parts of his past or the start of his future.”

“I think that one day… you can see Auriga as the place where your future started too.”

“What place is that for you?”

“In a cramped box in the cargo bay?” you offer, partly as a joke but also because you aren’t sure what else to choose. Jongho snorts.

“We would’ve started the same then.”

“When you joined — or I guess, snuck aboard rather — was it on Dorado?”

“Oh, yes, but probably not when you’re thinking. I didn’t try to follow them that time I saw them meet. And Hongjoong avoids going there unless absolutely necessary. We’ve been back maybe three times max in all my years of being here. It was several months later that they returned briefly for business to get a few more hands on the crew for an operation. Captain and Seonghwa came through the bar I worked at, and I overheard them talking about going to Aegos for a quick warehouse raid, so I smuggled myself into cargo and they brought me aboard. You’ve heard that fun bit though.”

“San was the one who found you too, right?”

You don’t get a response straight away; instead, Jongho inhales and puffs his cheeks full of air as he looks towards the ceiling.

“Yeah,” he says after the silence starts to drag, “yeah, but he was very different back then. I don’t think I mentioned that last time I told you about being a stowaway.”

“How so?”

“He knew I was there for a while, maybe three weeks? Rather than getting me out, he would come through the cargo bay and taunt me. For the first week, he would bring a gun down there and shoot into the boxes around me, threatening to kill me. He knew where I was but he would avoid shooting me because he — wanted to see me come out? I think that’s what it was. He wanted me to come out and beg for my life. He got in trouble for damaging the goods, but what’s even more strange is that when Hongjoong came down and confronted him about it, he had the chance to out me. Instead, he said he was bored and needed target practice. Week two, he would sneak into the cargo bay and at that point, I had gotten out of the box I crammed myself in and made myself a little cubby down there to stay hidden. San would come in silently and scratch at the walls of the boxes around my hiding place. Some days he would sit at the entrance and stare at me through the darkness without saying anything. It was fucking creepy as hell, but when he finally started trying to speak to me in week three, I realized that he just… didn’t know how to communicate well. I remember feeling almost nothing from him at the time like he had no emotional aura whatsoever, and that freaked me out more than anything. It was like dealing with someone who hadn’t had a normal human interaction in his life. He wanted to help me but he wanted to make sure that he could trust me first. So he would threaten me and try to scare me to see if I would snap.”

“He wanted to protect his crew…” you mutter, and Jongho shifts to nod several times.

“San was their first — Hongjoong and Seonghwa’s very first crewmember. As much as Seonghwa is so prominent in the decision-making and plans that Hongjoong makes, San is right there alongside both of them. He’s so much more crucial to so much of what we do as a crew than anyone likes to let on. San will deny it outright if you ask him, and Seonghwa will try to cover for him to keep scrutiny off San, but Hongjoong never fails to remind us that San has the same authority as Seonghwa does in many circumstances.”

“Were you the second then?”

“No, I was the fifth. But something happened one of those nights while I was down in the cargo bay, and the other three crewmates who were there at the time never showed up again. I’ve got no clue what happened to this day, and nine years have gone by without me even daring to ask. I do remember an awful smell wafting down the corridors, and I remember smelling it for a long time even after I officially joined the crew.”

“You never asked about it?” you inquire, but Jongho just throws up a shrug and shakes his head.

“I think the only reason Hongjoong didn’t kill me on the spot for being a fuckin’ stowaway is because something happened to those crewmates. I was never gonna push my luck asking about it.”

You hum, crossing your forearms on the table. Your thoughts are running wild with theories and questions about what could have happened that night Jongho speaks of as you rest your chin atop your arms.

“How did he find out you were there? Was it San?”

“I think he started to notice how often San was going down to the cargo bay, especially after those three disappeared. There was no one else for him to keep track of, and he had already warned San off going down there weeks prior, so it was pretty much inevitable that he would eventually come down at the wrong time. And he did. He saw San talking to what looked like a wall of boxes, and San scrambled to cover for me and say that it was nothing. By then, he’d agreed to help smuggle me off the ship at the next stop on Mensa. It was the day before landing that Hongjoong caught us, but it turns out he knew I was down there the entire time because San had told him I was there. Hongjoong didn’t give him any orders solely because he wanted to see how San would handle things himself. San almost killed me in a panic because he thought he did something wrong in Hongjoong’s eyes by sparing me, but Hongjoong said he never intended to hurt me. Even gave me credit for having the balls to sneak onto his ship, though he wasn’t very well known back then. I got an ultimatum similar to the one you got, I imagine. Carry my own, I could stay.”

“Yeah, that sounds quite familiar.”

“I didn’t want to stay though. Told him outright too.”

“Huh? What?” Jongho laughs as you reel on him. “You really did have balls back then. He throws a hissy fit and a half every time I so much as disagree with him.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to get to Mensa. Since that’s where Hongjoong was headed, I told him I’d be off at the next stop. And you know what he did?”

“Something stupid?”

“Changed course to fly to Yuki hours later and said that because I decided to smuggle myself onto the ship, I wouldn’t get what I wanted right away. I would have to either wait for the next chance to get to Mensa or I would get off at the next stop and find a way there myself. Funnily enough, I ended up sticking around. Only thanks to San! He still holds that over me too.”

“Has Hongjoong ever gone to Mensa since?”

“Not even once,” Jongho answers the question without having to think twice, and it does leave you to wonder how often that eats away at the corners of his thoughts. “As much as I harbored a nasty grudge towards him at first for changing course, it changed as time went on and I became actually rather grateful he did. I wasn’t even close to ready to face what I was after on Mensa, and even now I don’t want to. Maybe after I’ve made peace with what happened on Auriga, I’ll be able and ready to go there.”

“I mean, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to set foot on Eros again. Bounty not included.” Jongho cracks a smile at that, leaning over to nudge you in the side with his elbow. Granted, Ghost of Eros doesn’t hold nearly as much vitriol as Traitor of Auriga, and you aren’t dense enough to ask what he did to earn such a title right now anyway. If anything, you hope he can find some ounce of comfort in the knowledge that he isn’t alone in feeling the way he does, and that not being ready to face such a massive part of his past is nothing to be ashamed of. “It sounds like things were a lot different back then.”

“They were. San has gotten softer over the years, Seonghwa has gotten a lot colder. From the start, his emotional aura was so hectic in ways I’d never experienced with Elitists. As time went on, he gradually mellowed it out and got it under control. I can’t tell if he simply learned how to play the part so well that it’s indistinguishable now or not.”

“Has Hongjoong been this way forever then?”

Jongho purses his lips. He’s quick to busy himself with the cards on the table, pulling them all into a pile to organize nicely, and it implies that you may be toeing an unspoken line here.

“Hongjoong is Hongjoong. That’s all there’s to say about it really. Everyone’s changed in some way over the years. Mingi and Seonghwa the most, I think. Wooyoung and Hongjoong the least.”

You wish you could know who Seonghwa was before Hongjoong in many ways, but that is simply asking for the impossible. With a sigh, you push yourself up and away from the bench to get to your feet.

“I gotta wash dinner dishes, so I’ll see you later?” Jongho hums without looking back at you, and you lean over to pinch the underside of his bicep in retaliation.

“Ow! Hey, would you quit abusing me?!”

“Would you quit ignoring me?!” You pinch harder just to prove your point, earning a firm whack across the thigh as Jongho swings an arm back at you to counter your childish attacks.

“Yes, I’ll see you later, woman! We fuckin’ live together, it’s not like you’re going off to war,” he grumbles. You let out a dramatic gasp, one far from needed but very much so worse egging Jongho on a wee bit further.

“I’ll start one with you if you’re not careful, you little shithead!”

He fully turns to smack you now but you’re almost just out of reach, leaving his hand to glance across your ass instead of your thigh this time, but you severely underestimated the amount of force behind his swing because it stings.

“If you get an earful from San tomorrow because you hit my ass too hard, I’m gonna have no sympathy!” you shout over your shoulder, and Jongho returns your quip with an audible gag.

You aren’t expecting anyone in the kitchen when you walk in, which is partly why you’re still laughing to yourself as you cross the threshold, so finding the silhouette of another person in there already when you arrive is nothing short of shocking. You cut your laughter short with an inhale as you take the figure in, a quiet apology falling from your lips before you can contain it.

“No need to apologize.” Seonghwa’s hair is neat today, parted down the middle and longer strands pushed to sit behind his ears, but those dark purple, almost bruise-like circles still remain under his eyes. “I slipped in earlier, I’m sorry for not making myself known — I didn’t want to interrupt your time with Jongho and the child.”

“Ah…” you exhale, unsure of what else to say to the man.

“I already took care of the dishes, so you’re off the hook for today. I came to prep breakfast for tomorrow.”

“You’re cooking in the morning?”

“Yes, with Wooyoung. He asked to help.”

Even with the easy out, you don’t move from your spot by the sink. Seonghwa doesn’t budge either, clearly waiting for you to make the next move or say anything that might dispel the awkwardness now hanging in the air. It hasn’t changed, you note, that tension lingering between you two. Talking through what happened, discussing his mother, fucking each other in the presence of your own lover — it resulted in a cold shoulder and the same icy air as before. So what good was it all for besides fulfilling some cheap desires of the flesh?

“I spoke with Nightingale a couple days back,” you blurt. Seonghwa pauses with his hand flat against the cutting board.

“What about?”

“He told me that Hongjoong took his eye. That San took his arm.”

Seonghwa’s eyes flash with thinly veiled anger, and through the exhaustion, you’re able to catch the glimpse of frustration on his features.

“Some would say that it was San who did both.”

“Some,” you echo, and that’s when Seonghwa catches himself in the midst of his rage and pulls his focus away from your face. “Hongjoong, then.”

Seonghwa scoffs, “Don’t overanalyze what I’m saying, princess. I’m shocked Yeon—Nightingale was willing to pass any blame onto our captain’s shoulders.”

“Am I knocking on a door I shouldn’t even be in front of, pretty boy?” you ask next. The man waits for the words to seep into his skin and settle there before deigning to respond.

“You’re making a home in a house that does not belong to you, though that is not entirely your fault. San has let you in. Now Nightingale has pulled up a chair for you at the table. I suppose all that’s left is for either Hongjoong or myself to open all the closet doors so that the skeletons can fall out.” He squeezes his eyes shut so tightly that it’s painful to even look at. When they snap open again, there is far more ferocity behind his gaze than before. “But yes, this is one of those things I would not wish for anyone to know. Yet if not for those things, how would he have become the Scourge of the Black Sea? Where would his Lieutenant of Death be?” Disgust on his tongue and in his words, you find yet another version of Seonghwa that you’ve not laid eyes on before.

One that despises the man he loves.

“Seonghwa…” A simple utterance of his name nearly breaks his shaky composure. His next smile is a pained one. “Please talk to me, please tell me what’s going on with you these days. Every day you seem worse than before…? Are you not sleeping well? If you truly can’t speak to Yunho, then at the very least I can. Or Minho can. Someone else can if you are in need of help, Seonghwa, you’re—”

“It’s all catching up to me.” His tone cuts through yours, and you’re almost grateful because you weren’t wholly sure where your train of thought was even headed. “All at once. I thought — that I was already past the limit, that I already broke enough. At no fault of yours, Y/n, there are things I had thought that I came to terms with that are now rushing back in ways I am not ready for. I am uncertain if I will ever be able to mend my relationship with Yunho, Nightingale being among us is bringing back wretched ghosts of the past, and Hongjoong is so sickly engrossed in a game that I can’t stomach watching him play any longer. It used to be that I thought Hongjoong was draining me of my life in a twisted way because he wanted me dead but now I—” when his breath catches in his throat, a tear rolls from the corner of his eye and down the slope of his cheek, “—I must truly be a fool. I must truly have lost my mind after all this time. Whether the man I see in the mirror is a monster of my own creation or the expectations I fought to meet to be my captain’s lieutenant, it does not matter. Because regardless, I can’t distinguish Seonghwa from the Lieutenant of Death anymore. I’ve played this role for so long that it’s consumed me. How am I supposed to come to terms with that?”

“Hwa…”

“Y/n, I do not need anything from you, I promise. I will not try to take more than what I’m given again. And I-I am so deeply sorry for pushing myself to accept San’s offer because it was — it was something I wanted so desperately, please do not take my words for anything else because I did want to be there. I was happy to even be considered for such a thing and yet I could not take my mind away from a past that is long gone.”

When your expression contorts, Seonghwa reaches a hand in your direction. You disrupt his path to your arm by laying a hand down on the counter and squeezing it into a fist.

“Whenever we speak, you say these sorts of things. That I’ve done nothing wrong but we can’t be close again. That you want me and it’s okay for us to want each other, but your want is only a result of chasing something from your past. You want to hold me at arm’s length so desperately but you agreed to fuck me? Knowing what happened the first time around? Did you only fuck me because it reminded you of Hongjoong?”

“Y/n, do—”

“Because you couldn’t keep his name out of your mouth when you were balls deep inside me, then had the audacity afterward to chastise me like I was a child for wanting to understand San better! You treated me no better than a warm hole to fuck, and I’m sorry but the adoration I felt from you that night did not feel directed at me in the slightest. I’m thrilled that I could be a fitting substitute for you, Seonghwa—” sarcasm drips from your tone like venom at that “—and I was never after anything more than pleasure but I cannot be faulted for feeling slighted when it was clear that I was a placeholder for someone else in your head. Perhaps the fool is me for hoping that being intimate again would do anything for us because whenever we try to talk through things, you put up a wall that’s impossible to climb and — and I’m still attached to you, I still care for you, part of me still loves you which is why it’s agonizing to watch you try to give your heart to a man who clearly does not have the same care in return!”

“You were never after anything more than sex but you hoped it would change things?” Seonghwa matches the fire in your tone with an anger of his own as he steps towards you. Brows drawing together quickly, you watch his face turn into a scowl before he continues speaking. “How fucking hypocritical. I could tell you everything but even that wouldn’t make the slightest difference in the long run. You’ve planted yourself so deeply in hating Hongjoong that the moment anyone shows an ounce of care towards him, you consider them to be stupid fucking idiots. I’ve dedicated my life to this man, Y/n! I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like him! He gave each person on this crew a safe space and a home when they had nothing and no one to turn to. Yes, I’ll admit it if you truly wish to hear the words from my lips — the whole time I fucked you with San, I was thinking about Hongjoong. I was thinking of when San and I had Hongjoong in the same position you were in years ago, but you sat there above me and looked down at me with a hatred in your eyes that you reserve for Hongjoong alone. So don’t pretend to be some sort of saint when you were doing the exact same thing as I was. Only one of us had good reason to do so, what’s your fucking excuse?”

You push away from the counter to try to escape the conversation, stumbling over your own feet. All it does for you is corner you further, pressed up against the metal as Seonghwa closes in on you. It’s a sick game of chase that you can’t get away from thanks to both his height advantage and the ease with which he clears the space between you.

“I would tell you everything of the things Hongjoong has asked his two hands to do in his place over the years, and you would be horrified by every bit of it I’m sure. But I will not give you reasons to justify your disdain for him. You do that well enough yourself.” Seonghwa’s voice drops to a whisper as he traps you between his body and the metal counter. His hands come down on either side of you right as you try to move to the side, and your hopes of escaping now are hopelessly foiled. “I hope you hate him even more now, Y/n, knowing what he had San do to Nightingale. I hope Nightingale lied so nicely about his part in things, about his hand in his own destruction, that you’re blinded by your hatred. I pray that you fall apart at our captain’s feet so gloriously that no one can pick up the pieces because then… then maybe you would understand me. Hate him to the point of obsession as you’ve clearly already pushed yourself to that point. Did it feel good imagining his dick inside you instead of mine? When your hatred turns to infatuation, I’ll be sure to tell you all the ways in which Hongjoong has orchestrated the destruction of your psyche since your arrival here.”

“If your aim is to become a monster, Seonghwa, then you are doing a fine job at it,” you hiss through gritted teeth.

“Isolating yourself in San’s corner of this crew is a foolish and dangerous mistake too.” The words bring a scoff from your lips instantly.

“Why? Because he’s on your level? He has as much power as you do? Or because he’s known of your being a Siren all this time? Because that’s another tally of things you lied to me about! You wonder how things could possibly fall apart between us when so much of what we built ourselves on was a lie, when I poured my heart out to you about how I truly felt about San, you stood there and said nothing of any of this!”

“And I told you that I still loved Hongjoong.”

“After lying to me about it the first time we discussed it!”

“I guess we have that in fucking common then, don’t we? Lying about wanting our captain? Was it between your friends’ deaths that you were first dreaming of wetting the captain’s dick?”

Seonghwa’s body lurches as he’s thrown away from you, and he brings a hand to cradle his jaw almost immediately. Your knuckles burn from the impact you’ve just caused — a firmly planted uppercut to his face in a blind rage that you barely process. His words sit heavy at the forefront of your brain all the while, as your chest heaves with adrenaline that won’t settle. The first angry thought to arise is one that almost makes it past your lips. Something petty and nothing kind in the slightest, a dig at him aiming to accuse him of jealousy, but you withhold it now.

“As much as I am angry with you, trust and believe that I am far more disgusted by myself, Seonghwa.” With a flick of your wrist, you shake out your aching fingers by your side. “To taunt me for it is a new low for you, however.”

“And I hate myself for many things, Y/n, but I would not have you hate me for those same reasons. That is why I do not wish to share those things with you.” He pulls his hand away from his face, brushing over one corner of his lips that now sits split and glistening with blood from your thrashing. “I do love you though, for whatever that’s worth. I’m sorry that’s… I’m sorry.”

Unspoken words, empty promises. You wish he would choose some level of honesty about why he’s feeling this type of way towards you now. Whether it comes from a place of bitterness or jealousy or that disdain for himself that he just mentioned to you. You don’t care which it is; having some fraction of truth from him would be better than what he’s presenting to you now.

You feel violent again. The crawling urge to hit something or ram your head into a wall — whichever will hurt you enough to push the thoughts right out of your brain.

“I’m sorry too,” you say instead, quiet and reserved in comparison to what you just did not too long ago. Seonghwa lets you pass without issue this time as he settles back against the closest solid surface and nurses his lip further. You wonder if he will add this to the list of reasons as to why he loathes himself so wholly and completely.

There’s one thought on your mind as you leave the mess hall, heading in a direction that is opposite to initial instinct. Perhaps a bit predictable in the route you’re now taking to reach the bridge, it doesn’t stop you from continuing on said path. Alongside that, you have the intent to put your lingering anger to use, along with the concern that if you go back to your room and see San there now, you might unintentionally sling your anger in his face without him doing anything to warrant it. You can only hope to find the man you’re after there, and the mere realization that you’re chasing him down with Seonghwa’s accusations burning hot at your heels only serves to deeper your rage to a point of no return.

Hongjoong is both right where you expect him to be and where you want him. Your steps are slow as you approach his makeshift throne at the center of the bridge.

“I know what you did to Nightingale.” There is no use in announcing yourself in any other way; the sooner you address this and hurl your disdain at the man, the sooner you can return to the pleasantness that is your room. But Hongjoong simply turns his head towards you and stares. “Everything Seonghwa said about you was the truth. You aren’t capable of any sort of remorse.”

When the man doesn’t respond, you let your gaze flit to the figure at his side. Tall form, lanky build, kind features, and a gentle expression of confusion on his face, but not an ally right now. This is not Seonghwa (though you aren’t even sure he would be an ally to you at this moment either); this is Mingi, and should you earn the ire of your captain here and now, it might reward you an early grave. If it were San by his side, you wonder how different things might be.

“I believe you are recalling what San did to Nightingale.”

“What you ordered him to do.”

Hongjoong’s lips twitch in amusement. He shifts in his chair and folds one leg over the other while regarding you with the same humiliating expression, one that tells you he finds your outburst more humorous than serious. If not for the Berserker by his side currently, you aren’t sure you would be able to keep yourself from stepping up there to deck the man in the throat.

“I told him to keep Nightingale occupied. How he chose to exercise that order was up to him.”

“You murdered the man’s entire crew before taking his arm and eye. After subjecting him to psychological torture for months!”

Hongjoong stands abruptly, bringing your thoughts to a stutter that reads in the way you step backward once.

“Tell me you were so disillusioned by my hand of kindness, Y/n. Tell me you truly believed I was a gracious man. Tell me you painted an image of me in your mind that was benevolent, so that I may bask in that glorious misconception while I pleasure myself by my own hand at night.” The words revolt you so much that your face contorts and nausea creeps into your gut. You can’t bring yourself to conceal the emotions either, and Hongjoong takes them into his palm instantly with glee. His lips twist into a sadistic grin that showcases a row of white teeth. It twists instantly into something horribly childlike: a pout that pulls the corners of his mouth down and makes his eyes turn doe-like. “You do this to yourself, resisting and playing games like this with me. Submit to me, Y/n, so that this may be easier for everyone involved. San told me he warned you, told me you now know that he has gone to great lengths to defend you from my ire, but what more can I forgive? I have demanded respect from you—” his arm shoots out to point one finger towards your face “—respect that you swore you would give! Yet here comes our righteous savior with her sword of mercy intent on murdering me atop this hill I stand on, for what?”

This is far from the first time Hongjoong has been angry with you. Yet this time his rage takes a different tone: a calm storm that sweeps up everything in its path without cease. His tone carries weight to it too, and a loudness that makes your ears ring. His hand remains stagnant and extended as he continues with his tirade.

“For what? So that you can save these people? Rescue them from me, Y/n, I beg of you, see what good you can do for them. When you return to me in two days' time with blood on your hands, I will share no sympathy.” His hand careens toward his own chest, stabbing hard at his torso, yet even that doesn’t seem to phase him. “You come before me to spurn my name, to excuse the choices your beloved lover made, but that man is my dog! Do you wish to know how I made that of him?”

You shake your head, indignant in your silence. He does not accept your refusal.

“I made him kneel, Y/n! And I will do the same to you if you refuse to treat me as your captain.” Hongjoong turns back towards his seat and flops down on it rather unceremoniously. You only dare to lift your chin and look at him once you see one of his legs fold over the other in your peripherals. “Should I treat you like a dog too, Y/n? You sure do seem to love barking.”

The grin he gives you is borderline maniacal, and even though there usually isn’t much of a difference in your heights, he uses his leverage even while seated over you now to his utmost advantage. Leaning over the empty space between your bodies, Hongjoong reaches a hand towards your face — a sweet illusion that diverts his true intention of dipping that same hand down to clasp around your throat before you can think to act. His smile drops into a scowl in the blink of an eye.

“I do wonder — if I put a collar and leash on you, would you finally behave as intended?”

You can hardly breathe with the grip he’s got on your neck, and he only squeezes tighter as he continues his tirade against you. For every inch of flack you have given this man about his title as the Scourge of the Black Seas, you find yourself wrestling with a deeply seeded terror in your gut now. That he might actually have had enough, that even being a Siren is not valuable enough, that he will kill you where you stand now.

By the grace of whatever outer being is watching over you, Hongjoong decides to spare you and throws himself back in his seat once more.

“If she will not do so willingly, make her kneel, Mingi.”

It seems harsh to think of the man who has extended a hand of comfort and kindness towards you so often doing such a heinous thing. Mingi seems to agree with that sentiment judging by the look of horror that sweeps over his face.

“Insurrection is intolerable amongst this crew — I have warned you time and time again. Do you think I would so easily allow another mutiny to happen right under my nose? I will snuff out whatever flame you are trying to light with this pathetic show, Y/n. Whatever seeds you tried to plant in San’s mind will not take root.”

Mingi takes a step down from his spot on the platform, and your heart plummets to your toes.

“Mingi…” you trail off as you stare at the man’s face, desperate for any sort of reprieve from him.

“Do as asked, Ghost. I do not wish to use force on you.” He shakes his head slightly, as though a warning to stop things where they are now, but you cannot accept that defeat so easily. It is simply not in your nature.

“If Seonghwa were here—”

“Seonghwa would whisper pretty words in your ear as he pushed your face into the ground with his boot, princess!” Hongjoong hisses through his teeth. Fitting how he did something so similar not long ago. “You think these men have more loyalty to you than to me? That giving them your body is enough to martyr yourself for their faith?” Mingi lays a hand against your back and shoves you forward as gently as he can manage. It still manages to send you stumbling solely because of how distracted you are by Hongjoong’s words. “You have humiliated yourself enough before me. Consider this not a punishment but merely an extension of that kindness you believe I have.” Mingi’s presence at your back urges you to take steps forward until you run out of space before those steps leading up to Hongjoong’s seat at the helm. It appears that the Berserker is trying to make this pass as quickly as possible, either for your sake or for his own, because a sharp force hits the back of your knees and effectively sends you to the floor in front of your captain.

It is still humiliating, despite what Hongjoong says, and your retaliation is swift. You lean forward to angle your body over the stairs and hurl the saliva that has gathered in your mouth at his shoes. You consider yourself lucky to not receive the sharp steel toe of that boot on your jaw in the moments that follow. What he does do is almost worse, however.

Sighing, Hongjoong props his elbow up on one of the armrests and lays his chin atop a closed fist. His pose exudes a nonchalance you know is merely a farce. Then he extends the shoe you just spat on towards your face and jerks his chin. The gesture seems not to be meant for you as it is Mingi who shoves you forward once more.

“I tire of playing these games with you, Y/n,” Hongjoong starts, pushing his boot into your cheek. The leather is warm on your skin in a way that disgusts you more than the feeling of having your spit wiped across your face. The wetness of your saliva lingers there and drags over your skin as the man wipes himself clean like that. You have never felt lower on the food chain than you do now, before this cruel and sadistic man who grins down at your agony with no sign of remorse. “How far one can go versus how far one should go… I do not see a difference between the two. Whatever I do, it is done for the sake of my crew. You have been given chance after chance to simply accept that. Was killing Hyunwoo not enough of an example? Or forcing you to let go of Jisung?”

Your hands tremble against your knees. He twists his unoccupied arm in a way that showcases the back of his hand to you. Rings adorn his fingers, but that isn’t anything out of the ordinary in your eyes. The gesture is nearly lost on you. Yet just as a retort is bubbling up inside your mouth, your gaze catches on a glint of one of the metal rings. One you recognize, one with a white gem inlaid at the center. It’s the same one that sat on his hand when he pushed your arm through a door.

“I can have you be treated the way Nightingale was when he refused my offer to join this crew and fall under my command. But for San’s sake, I wish to remind you that there are people other than yourself who will suffer on account of that decision. You are the one who came into the care of criminals and pirates, dear. You should have left your expectations in that seedy box of threads you were rotting away in.”

“You made me drop Jisung!” Your wail comes out strangled as the realization sinks beneath your skin and takes hold.

“I freed you of that leech of a man, and the sooner you see that the sooner you will be free of those unimportant figments of your past.” Hongjoong lunges forward all of a sudden, planting both his feet on the ground with a loud thud. When he bends at the waist, he leans between his legs to angle his face in a way that makes him look more insane. “I will dismantle you from the inside out if that is what it takes to demand your loyalty, but I suggest you not keep me waiting that long.”

“Do you even intend to stop at Kebos or was that another pretty lie meant to make me docile?” you spat out at the captain. He laughs in your face.

“What does it matter what my intentions are?”

“You’re — you’re a sick bastard.”

Hongjoong extends a hand to you, taking your cheek in his palm and dragging his thumb over the wet trail he just wiped onto it. His expression is almost fond for a moment, a sort of sympathy in his eyes as he takes in the fat tears welling up and threatening to spill over.

“Look at me.” Carefully, he twists your chin towards him. His thumb traces along the line of your jaw until it rests on the other side. It’s sick, how you find comfort in that subtle touch that holds nothing more than a faux mercy meant to appease you. He pulls you ever closer until you are forced to lay your hands on his seat, left with no choice but to grip the small fragment that he isn’t occupying between his spread legs. Your gaze flits down to the soft pink of his lips, the gentle curve to them now that they’re resting in a neutral expression, and how the tip of his tongue pokes out to wet them for only a second. “Listen to me.” You have no choice but to do as told. His fingers pinch inwards until they’re no longer resting against your jaw but now dipping into the flesh of your cheeks and gripping hard enough to make your mouth pucker. “Call me whatever pretty names you like. Curse me and spit on my feet if you so wish. Whatever hatred you harbor against me only pleases me further. You may hate me, Y/n, but you can not disrespect me. I have killed my own men for less. Siren or not, San’s lover or not — your timer ticks ever closer to zero so long as you continue with these charades. I will have you obey, and you will respect me all the while. Do I make myself clear?”

You swallow and nod roughly to the best of your ability, but it isn’t answer enough for your captain. He grips your face tighter.

“I will not hesitate to humiliate you further before the whole crew if I must, Y/n. We can make a spectacle out of it. I would quite enjoy it, in fact. Now, do you understand?”

Bile climbs up your throat.

“Yes.”

“Yes what?” The syllables come out enunciated, and his underlying anger makes spit fly through his teeth.

“Yes sir.”

“How quaint,” Hongjoong laughs as he pulls his hand up from your cheeks to your hair, digging hard into the roots and yanking you back from your perch. “I was only looking for you to acknowledge your captain by his title. But sir? Don’t be fucking presumptuous.” He thrusts his hand against you hard enough to throw you back, and you land at Mingi’s feet where he still stands a little ways behind you. A flare of panic arises in your gut as you process his presence and the knowledge that he is hearing every word from Hongjoong’s lips. “Take a long hard look at yourself, Y/n. A woman who was just on her knees before me. Pliant, obedient, with no control to call her own. Isn’t that where you belong, Y/n? My pretty weapon, my pretty Siren, my pretty treasure.” Treasure. It feels wrong to hear him say that of you. It is not a title meant for you, after all, not in the slightest. “Now escort her out and fetch Yunho for me. I wish to have him in my room.”

Mingi answers the call without hesitation. His fingers close around your upper arm, and he hoists you to your feet in the same movement, gripping you with enough force to bruise. Somehow, it feels as though he is saving you in some odd and twisted way. He pulls you from the bridge with a sort of haste that doesn’t leave you any chance to look back over your shoulder at your captain. You are thankful for it. He only slows his steps once the two of you are far away from that room, yet his hand doesn’t leave your arm, grip only lessening slightly.

“Ghost.” His tone remains soft despite how it cuts through the palpable tension. “I apologize for being present for all of that.” A laugh escapes, one that sounds awfully dry.

“What can you do? Say no to your captain?”

“I will not speak a word of it to anyone. Nor will I share any of the contents of what he said to you.”

Ah, yes. The bit about you being a Siren, most likely. Unless Mingi has also been made privy to the ins and outs of who is what here on the ship too.

“He means w—”

“You do not need to defend him to me, Mingi. I understand your bond with him and what he means to you. I only ask that you understand that it is vastly different for me.”

“Why do you stay? If you do not wish to be under his command?”

“I made a promise to someone dear to me that I would not leave.” Wooyoung, Seonghwa, San. But why are you here? Solely to help a man you despise achieve his goals?

“And that is enough to subject yourself to something you do not feel good doing?” For a moment, you believe the man to be mocking you before you catch his tone and find genuine confusion in it. He is merely asking a question — nothing more, nothing less.

“That’s love, Mingi. Love and devotion both.” The Berserker stays quiet for a few more moments.

“…I see. Thank you for telling me.”

You let him guide you the rest of the way through the corridors, pausing as he does when he stops you both in front of a door that is not your own. His hand falls away from your arm as soon as he knocks, however, and the two of you nearly look normal standing outside waiting for Yunho to come greet you. The healer looks tired like you’d just woken him from slumber when you came calling for him. You opt to be the one to break the news to him.

“Captain wants to see you in his quarters.”

“He wishes to — what for?”

“He wishes to have you in his room, Healer,” Mingi clarifies for you, leaving you to roughly swallow around nothing and avert your eyes from the man’s face. “Promptly.”

“Ha… of course he does.” You hear the conflict in Yunho’s voice and glance up quickly to catch the tail end of his grimace. He nudges his way past you without bothering to even collect shoes from his room.

“Don’t listen to him,” you say through your teeth, as though it’ll have any impact. Yunho pauses.

“You of all people should know that that is quite impossible to do, Y/n. Would you deny San?”

Love, as it turns out, is the cruelest master of all.

“As strange as it may seem to you, I have been waiting for him to ask after me desperately,” Yunho continues, though his tone holds more shame than anything positive. “Maybe if only to prove that he still wants me in some capacity. Please do not tell me to leave him alone. Do not judge me or spurn me for going to him. You would do the same if you were in my shoes. If he needs me, then I wish to be there for him. Not because he is my captain but because… well, I’m sure you know why.”

She wields a knife so sharp that one slight cut would have you bleeding out across the floor in mere seconds.

Yunho steps away without another word and leaves you at Mingi’s side in the hallway.

Love and devotion both.

“Today… Ghost, today you made a very patient man angry.”

“That is what you consider a patient man?”

“Ask yourself what your defiance is really for, and why you find it necessary at all.”

“For the sake of the people I do care about, Mingi. I don't have to accept shitty leadership and the hand of a cruel and manipulative man when I know they’re suffering too.”

Mingi draws his lips into a delicate frown. He shakes his head.

“They are all happy under Hongjoong’s leadership, Ghost. What he does beyond being our captain… I cannot account for that, or for what suffering he has put Lieutenant and Healer through behind closed doors that do not involve him acting as Captain. But whenever he wears that mantle, everyone is content. It may seem egregious to you, I understand, but I am sorry to say that of everyone, you are the only one to be suffering.” Mingi buries his hands in his pockets and eyes you without saying anything for several seconds. You shift under his gaze, arms coming up to hug yourself. “What are you trying to save them from, Ghost? The suffering you’re inflicting on yourself? You saw what you did to Spectre that night you were arguing in the hallway — that was you, not Captain.”

“I know that. I know where his loyalties lie, it’s not that—”

“Then why are you trying to fight it?”

“I can’t just — j-just leave?” Your voice turns choked midway through the sentence, leaving you to fight the sudden tightness in your throat and chest.

“You could though. That love and devotion you speak of… I understand that I do not feel it in the same manner that you do, but if you are genuinely so miserable here under Captain’s command, would those people you love and who love you in return truly want you to remain in a place that makes you feel that way? Would they not wish for you to go find your happiness elsewhere? Even if it came at the cost of losing you, does love not beg for sacrifice?”

“I am too selfish for that, Mingi,” you whisper. Mingi pulls a hand free of his pockets and reaches out to lay it on your bicep, over the place where he gripped you so harshly earlier. His touch is gentle now, and he drags his thumb across the abused skin like he hopes to heal the damage he caused.

“I do not wish for you to leave either, Ghost. Our crew has changed in many ways since you arrived, and your fight to allow me my sense of freedom did not go unnoticed by me. I trust our captain with every fiber of my being, as does everyone here on this ship, and perhaps we have grown too complacent in allowing some of his more cruel acts of justice. That does not equate to us being miserable and suffering under his hand though. People make mistakes. Captain does feel guilt, and he does feel remorse over his actions. It’s just that he does not let you see that. Please do not judge him too harshly for the things that he does. Please understand that he is trying to protect the crew, his people, and his family all at once. The more you resist, the more you try to do what you did with Spectre that night, the more agony and strain you are placing on all of us. You do not have to agree with us, but please at least respect that this is our happiness.”

You offer up a series of rather pathetic nods but deep down you do understand every word he is saying. You cannot find the line between truth and a distortion of it for the sake of Hongjoong’s manipulation, but you decide (albeit questionably) to take Mingi’s words at face value. If he is lying to you now, or if it is all just a product of Hongjoong’s convoluted tactics, you will have to deal with those consequences later on down the line. Mingi squeezes your arm gently.

“I hope you are able to find your happiness too, Y/n.” In the back of your mind, you think perhaps Mingi is too kind, and he leaves you at the doorstep to your room without saying anything further.

It catches up to you the moment you lay your hand against the touchpad outside your door. Limiting the series of very unfortunate events to a simple… it is both generous and inaccurate on many levels.

San is where you expect him to be upon opening the door: propped up against the pillows with the lamp on and a tablet in his lap. You can’t see exactly what he’s doing but you do hear some residual noise coming from the speakers. He glances up to pass you a smile. Neither of you says a word. You wonder what emotion paints your features. You wonder what is going through San’s mind as he sees you. You wonder whether there will be a day when you wake up in the same bed as he and his loyalty will outweigh his feelings for you.

You wonder a lot of things it seems, and none of them are pleasant.

You take the fast track to the bathroom without bothering to wait around for San to speak. It’s as you’re splashing your face with freezing water and trying to rub away the lingering residue of both saliva and Hongjoong’s boot that he makes an appearance in the doorway.

“Is everything okay, love?”

Heaving a deep breath, you brace your hands on the counter and look up from the sink to find him in the reflection of the mirror. He’s leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his broad chest and dressed for bed as usual. Your gaze catches on yourself in the glass. Bloodshot eyes and tears rushing to join the water you splashed over yourself. The lie on your lips dies as you see yourself.

“I cannot bear to be humiliated by the captain any longer.”

When your lip wobbles, he shushes you and moves to join you by the sink. You don’t move as he twists the handle until the water stops or when he grabs for a towel. There aren’t any words exchanged while he pulls the towel over your face and sops up the mess you’ve made, but frankly, you aren’t sure what else you could say to drive your point home. San seems to be biting his words though, and it only takes one look at him to know that he has a great deal he wishes to say. He waits until he’s dried everything in sight that’s been touched by water to turn to you, setting the towel aside in favor of taking your face into his hands.

“I warned you so kindly, Y/n. Please do not do something that both of us may regret. Isn’t it easier to just do as asked?” His thumb glides over your cheek where he cradles you so gently.

“It’s pretty clear that I have a bad track record of doing that.”

San lets out the air from his lung and leans back to look to the ceiling.

“Back when you first joined us, back when we were in Echidna, you asked to be treated this way. You asked to be a weapon for Hongjoong. If that is not what you want any longer, then you only have to tell him as much. You have never asked to be anything different, have you?”

“There’s not one position on this crew that would see me getting treated fairly!”

He remains silent as he brings a hand down to clasp over yours and leads you out of the bathroom. You let him do as much without complaint mostly because you’re fighting to keep your breath from spiraling out of control and into hysteria.

“Come on, star, let’s lay down, yeah?”

It almost feels like any other night the way you crawl into bed with his hand resting at the small of your back before he slips in under the covers right behind you. He pulls the covers up over your body as you turn over to face him. The fight you’re trying so desperately to win slips through your fingers the second he pulls you into his chest and wraps a warm hand around the back of your head where your scalp is still stinging from the abuse Hongjoong put on it earlier. The tears come more freely then, and as your body shakes in San’s hold, you cry into the fabric of his shirt without relent. The comfort he offers is enough on its own, and you curse yourself for craving something more, something physical in place of kind and reassuring words.

“Please just try, my darling,” he whispers against your hair.

“I’m terrified of waking up one day to you asking to take me to the brig,” you choke out through sobs. Even though it’s muffled by his shirt, San still hears every bit of your words. You can tell that much by the way his grip tightens on you.

“I promise that won’t happen. I will fight that with all my might if I have to, I will not allow that to happen.” You can’t seem to find reassurance in the words at all though, and a burning pain sears its way through your chest as you choke on your cries.

“Why did you tell me that story? Why would you do that, why would you say that, why, San?”

“I wished for it to be — I didn’t want you to find out through someone else. I needed you to hear it from my lips before anyone else’s.”

“Why did you have to do that? Why, when he’s not even staying with us forever? You could have kept it a secret, you could have not told me, and I would never have known. Why did you have to m-make me—” a sob interrupts the thought, and you feel lips on your forehead, “—why did you have to make me doubt your feelings and intentions?”

“I’m sorry.” His breath is hot. When you try to lift your chin, he refuses to let you see his face. “I’m so sorry.”

His hands glide down from your head to your hips, and it’s with a gentle sort of coaxing that he maneuvers you onto your back. You cling to him desperately, leg pulling up to hook around his body so that he cannot even think to leave you now. The gesture urges him between your legs as you succumb to the desperation you’re feeling for something more. The tears fall more readily like this. You sling an arm up over your face to both shield yourself from view and to sop up the liquid with your sleeve.

“Star…”

“Please tell me you love me, even if it’s a lie.”

“I do love you,” he cries as he pushes hair from your eyes. “Are you sure you want me to…?”

“Please, San, I need you — I want t-to feel you.” Your hands can’t find a place to rest, jumping from his arms to his collar to clasp around the back of his neck like you’ve done so many times before by now. You know how San loves and how that love manifests; at least, you imagined that you knew all this time and now you’re faced with a crushing reality that that might not be the case, yet here he kneels, ever so desperate to prove his adoration to you now in the way he knows best. It makes you feel less torn about wanting him even while your heart is wrecked with emotion.

“I’m sorry, star,” San murmurs into your skin. He leaves a path of wet kisses along your arm, and when his cheek brushes along your skin, you feel a moisture there that is surely not from his lips. It pains your heart tremendously to have him crying above you like this, but deeper than that, there is some sick and twisted part of you that finds joy in the fact that he is feeling the pain you’re experiencing now, that he is tasting the bitter medicine of what he wrought on you. Perhaps you do understand Wooyoung better than you thought, perhaps you can feel the way Seonghwa ripped his own heart out to become a monster for the man he cherishes, why Yunho still chooses to walk into the lion’s den with his head held high — what kind of love hopes for suffering?

San moves down your body with kisses and tears both left in his wake. He whispers words into each bit of skin he can reach, tugging at your neckline to lay his tongue on your heated body before letting it snap back up into place.

I’m sorry.

I love you.

My darling, my star, my divine.

When he slips under the covers and takes your underwear to your ankles with him, his trembling fingers inch your legs apart to make space for himself there. He lays his tongue against you there too, at your most sensitive spot, and moans join the chorus of cries that won’t cease. Your body quivers at the stimulation like a chill passing through your whole system before he settles into a steady rhythm with his lips pressed into your sex and his tongue seeking something deeper. You feel his words again in his movements.

If he’s truly pretending, then you hope he acts the part for the rest of your life.

San pushes a finger against your walls alongside his tongue, and a second follows so quickly that you don’t have a chance to catch your breath. Desperate, you reach your unoccupied hand down through the sheets to find the top of his head. Your fingers tangle in his dark locks, and he moans into your cunt like a man possessed.

A moment of clarity pushes its way through the haze of arousal. San cannot be faulted for his loyalty, even if it pains you. You do not wish for him to suffer, not even for a second — if you did, then why would you have gone to such great lengths to keep him from doing exactly that time and time again? The man you truly wish to see suffer, the one you want to see in agony with his chest torn open, is none other than Hongjoong. At the end of the day, he is the cause of the cracks between you and San, the rift that grows too large to ignore now, and you wish to see him pay for it in full. A crueler thought enters your mind, but it cannot take a firmer root with San’s tongue pressing your further open to allow his fingers to curl deeper inside you.

Your nails bite at his scalp in ways that must sting and burn, but when you close your eyes, it’s Hongjoong’s face you see behind your lids and between your legs rather than your lover’s — a curling hatred that serves to deepen the pit already formed in your stomach. It disgusts you in many ways, makes you want to crawl out of your skin and scream, because as much as you despise him and everything he stands for, there will always be some part of you longing to satiate the curiosity for good.

Hongjoong was above you earlier, boot pressed into your cheek as you sat on your knees before him with no relief in sight. How much would it take to reverse the roles and have him in such a humiliating and debasing position? Beyond that, if he made good on his promise, what would that look like for you? And how deep are you willing to submerge yourself just to find out?

Isn’t that where you belong, Y/n? My pretty weapon—

He hums against you, and your thighs tremble around his head. Your fingers flex and curl in his hair like a heartbeat. It’s rampant, a speedy ba-dum ba-dum that matches the one beating in your chest right now. You wish to know how his sounds too.

—my pretty Siren—

His tongue leaves you, fingers remaining firm in their place along your walls as he rolls the pads over your sweet spot. You do not need to see his face to know that he is smiling; the curve of his lips is pressed to your clit.

“My treasure,” comes a breathy exhale from the man under you.

—my pretty treasure.

It’s enough to make you come undone, back curling up from the bed as an orgasm rocks you from head to toe. Disgust joins the euphoria just as quick, before you’ve even come down from your high, and the realization it brings with it makes you want to vomit so badly that you gag around nothing. San is quick to move with concern for your well-being no doubt, and it allows you the chance to roll onto your side until the spasms pass and you can breathe easily again. You don’t move from the fetal position you’ve taken, nor does San try to make you. He simply adjusts himself to lay at your back and molds his body around yours with an arm draped over your waist and fingers wrapped loosely around one of your wrists.

It’s as you’re falling asleep that you feel the soft pressure of lips against your head, and the words that follow make the lump in your throat swell to a point where you fear you might choke around it.

“I promise you that my love has never been and will never be a lie, Y/n.”

It leaves more questions unanswered than the opposite.

His love alone isn’t everything, and there is no confirmation that nothing he has done has been done with bad intentions. Or on account of external forces or voices telling him to do things outside of his control. You can only wonder which parts aren’t included under that umbrella and ask yourself if it’s worth ignoring for the sake of what happiness you have.

Mingi’s words ring loud in your ears.

Ask yourself what your defiance is really for, and why you find it necessary at all.

You think, as the room begins to fade into black and sleep settles in, that your will to fight is nothing more than a dull flame about to be snuffed out for good.

•─────⋅☾⭒☽⋅─────•

“Now, we will be here for quite some time regardless of how long the mission takes. This is vacation time, free time, time to rest and relax off the ship before we head back out into the thick of things.” Hongjoong speaks from in front of the airlock, dressed in his more formal captain’s attire down to his steel-toed boots. “We’re offloading cargo as usual, and we’ll be staying in the city across the gorge for our entire stay, but you all are more than welcome to pick up goods as you see fit. It would be quite hard to run us totally dry of funds. As for the mission, I’ll be taking a few of you with me, and it may require us to spread our time dedicated to the mission across several days. We won’t begin until two days from now, however, and you all will still have ample time to relax like everyone else. Mingi, of course, I would like you to join me.”

The Berserker in question passes his captain a nod from where he stands at Hongjoong’s side.

“Jongho, you as well, I wouldn’t dream of doing this without you. And Yunho, you. You’ll be my right hand for this mission.”

Seonghwa is staring at the back of Yunho’s head so intensely that you think Yunho’s head would catch fire if possible.

The airlock rolls to the side, and for the first time in weeks, you see and feel the fresh air. Hongjoong moves to the side and motions to the door, lips still pulled tight into a smile that leaves you thoroughly unsettled. Seonghwa is the first to step out of the ship, with Nightingale close behind him, and everyone else is quick to follow. You remain rooted to the spot not by choice but on account of San’s hold on your hand as he stays put until the other crew members have made their way out onto the planet. You take it as an act of politeness until your gaze shifts to settle on both Mingi and Hongjoong, who have not moved from their spots either.

“And you, Y/n,” Hongjoong calls out through his ever-present smile.

You jerk your head in San’s direction in the hopes that you will see some sort of shock present on his features. Instead, you receive a squeeze around your hand and a nod that seems to be encouraging you.

“You will be my left hand for this mission. Let’s see how tight I need to keep your collar, shall we?”

You do not reward him with a retort today. San guides you out of the airlock and into the new air, both your gazes stuck to the scenery around you the second you step out.

The gorge ahead is beautiful beyond belief, and in the distance, you catch sight of your destination across the chasm. It’s a city built into the side of the cliffs with buildings of reds and gold that stick out starkly against the endless green around it. Green water pours from the sides of the rock in many places, filling the air with the noise of rain, and it cascades down into the lake of green far below where The Horizon is now docked. Your transport is not far from the station though it is surrounded by the hustle and bustle of workers and visitors alike who have docked just like you have.

Hongjoong’s voice rises once again from behind you, loud and clear to address the whole crew.

“And remember… gas masks stay on at night.”

────────────

a/n: i sat and stared at this for like 17 minutes trying to figure out what in the world to say after this doozy of a chapter! first, hi. hello. how are you. welcome to act seven. it’s pretty unreal to be at this point honestly.. i’m so excited though i hope you guys are just as excited!! let me know your thoughts feelings and etcetc the one question i have for you all: was san calling her ‘my treasure’ something fully intentional or just happenstance?

but also just from me to you.. i want to say thank you to everyone who still reads and sticks around and is willing to be patient with me as i write. that means so much to me, i’m so so thankful, and there aren’t words for how thankful i am that people are willing to still read my story!! so thank you!! 

next up on the docket is actually an interim :3 a hongjoong centered one :3 i know i said i was done with them but... brain worms win this time!

also! survey/questionnaire is still open here (of course not a requirement but it would be immensely helpful to me!)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

[hongism]

i miss blood masquerade

[hongism]

i have so many ideas and plots and wips i want to write why can i not be paid simply to write my little stories!

[hongism]

this is gonna be a longer post about it but the basic gist of what all i’m getting at is that inspiration is not an excuse for plagiarism.

the characterizations and the themes in the story are unavoidably similar. the mc character being a “key” to something more, the “amnesia” of the main character that does not allow them to remember much of their past, the bits of the past coming back with triggers and also the dark nature of what is being remembered. 

codenames, healer, healer being yunho, first big confrontation scene with hongjoong happening in you guessed it an infirmary. the back and forth, the banter, the interactions between hongjoong and the mc - and these are all similarities from the second part that was posted. san’s character is noted to be someone very stealthy and who can move around quickly and quietly without being noticed. going straight from the infirmary to get some food and meet other members of the crew. seonghwa calling mc princess. seonghwa taking mc to the bridge to speak to hongjoong and leaving her alone there to have a conversation with him. sparring with a member, it developing into a panic attack having to step outside sitting up against a wall until it subsides it is play by play what happens in my story. wristbands and earpieces. 

other similarities that i am simply too pissed to word out myself:

i do not need to sit here and detail why all this is similar to my story because it is glaringly obvious. mind you i couldn’t even bring myself to read the last six parts that have been posted because i was so frustrated by the similarities from the first ones. some of it is play by play what happens in a scene in mists of celeste.

note - author did not credit me for the hand my story had in inspiring theirs.

on their pinned post, they claim that i am one of their favorite authors. mind you they have talked about wanting to create something inspired by moc before

so why, @senpai-of-doom​, have you suddenly decided that it’s not worth tagging me or crediting me or even putting a disclaimer on the masterlist or the chapters of your fic? you yourself stated that is is greatly inspired by ateez, their lore, and mists of celeste. where is my credit? i have spent years on moc i have poured so much time and effort into my story, i have fought plagiarism accusations too because i know how fucking hard it is when you’re writing a pirate au for ateez! if you love writing as much as you claim to then you know how hard it is to write. so why would you take someone else’s ideas and then not give them their due?

[hongism]

i bear moc spoiley gifts 🙇‍♀️

"I imagine this won't be a stress-free trip as we wish it to be," he whispers, pulling you closer to his body as you start to follow behind Hongjoong and Yunho. You can’t respond right away. The pair ahead of you pulls your focus for a moment, in a stance so similar to you own with San that it causes realization to dawn on you.

“We’re okay, right?” you ask out of the blue. For a moment you think San hasn’t heard you, but he very clearly has based on how stiff his expression becomes. Lie to me. I’m so desperate for your lies.

“Yeah,” he nods, “we are.”

“You know, Y/n, it was actually San who recommended that you have an important role in this mission.” Hongjoong’s voice slices through you at a diagonal, hunting the spot where it will hurt the most like it’s for sport, and his timing is so apt that you believe he’s heard the words exchanged behind him. You don’t give him the pleasure of looking in his direction. San lifts his free hand to lay it over the one you have secured around his elbow like he fears you letting go but your grip is still firm. Nails dig into his exposed skin. You know it will leave a mark.

San’s face is ripped to shreds with a mixture of regret and sympathy. His expression is too genuine for you to find any deception in it.

“I didn’t think he would take it seriously, I… in retrospect I must look fucking stupid because I thought that he would take both of us on the mission.” San’s eyes drop to the ground. “I asked to go. I wasn’t expecting him to choose Yunho over me.”

Again, Hongjoong pushes himself into a conversation not meant for him.

“San isn’t fully healed to the point of mission clearance. Both of our resident doctors said as much, for differing reasons.” The captain reaches down between his body and Yunho’s, and you watch the man lace his fingers through Yunho’s in a way that almost seems natural enough to believe that it’s a regular occurrence. Nothing more than an attempt to keep the man by his side, however, and you turn your chin away from the sight partly because you feel like you’re encroaching.

[hongism]

rb + tell me why in the tags if you wanna too 😗

[hongism]

hi sooo....

O______O wow...

U DID IT AGAINNNNNNN, im so.. im so shocked reading the new moc chapter and must i say i love ur interim chapters i think theyre so !!!!!!!!!! chefs kiss truly

okokok so im speechless.. but im thinking abt it now and ... (maybe this is also bc i recently jus binged like all of moc in like 3 days so its still fresh on my brain but) the very first chapters when mc was alr on the ship and and there was that one bit with san and they spent the night together and were talking and it was when she still was carrying around the pardon papers and they had like a heart to heart to be there for each other and the cheek kiss !!!!!! if im remembering right.. i remember sans reaction being written kinda awkward initially (ill have to eventually go back and find it) so it- it makes me wonder how fast hongjoong tried to come up w a plan to manipulate mc... also... my heartbroke even reading the prev chapter when mc was crying and telling san "why did u have to make me doubt ur feelings?" and then reading this chapter- i have hope for them i really do but i fear.. whats gonna happen once she finds the truth out bc... ik she will </3 and i fear its gonna be hongjoong.. But also..??? WAIT NO BC IM THINKING 80 MILLION THINGS RN.

THE DIALOGUE W MINGI........ MINGI AND MINHO..... minho being shocked that his intelligence is more than he lets on.... ITS MAKING ME WONDER LIKE... theyve all kinda treated mingi like Oh he's helpless or struggling rather, we need to care for him diligently-which is true, bro got demons fr but... then im wondering how much mingi really knows bc...?? i remember mingi saying smth to mc too about like "ask urself why it is that ur even trying to disobey in the first place?" or like idk they had that deep ass talk and.... idk.. im thinking abt it now though... what does mingi know.......

im also wondering... 1) if joong has a conscious LOL 2) no i definitely think he does after this but,,,,,,,,, we still dunno WHY he's become this way- why his demons are like this/why theyre presented this way bc in a way (LOL ME TRYNNA PSYCHOANALYZE HIM)... it seems like he keeps everyone at an arms length... except seonghwa i feel like.. at least for now.. but i saw that because he keeps to himself a lot even amongst the ship- so it seems... but he definitely changes the way he wants to come across people... 3) idk if i wanna hug him and tell him its gonna be alright or if i wanna box him LMFAOOO he is so damn crazy... and then jus the way minho described the way they played chess... everyone else doing his dealing... actually now that im thinking about it.. he's been called out quite easily before... so maybe he isnt as hard to read as he thought... in fact ik mc has been the one to call him out hella on his shit so.. i wonder if thats why he's so adamant on keeping her in shape.... oh joong ... babes what did u go thru 🤣🤣🤣🙁🙁🙁 u lil control freak u~~

anywho.. im also confused.... bc i can see that mc does wanna be approved and accepted (?) by joong yet also cant stand the authority he gives so its quite the paradox.........

rn im jus ranting sm... its like everythings clicking..

but also.. im curious.. hongjoong has only lost chess to yeosang among all the members... yet.. seonghwa is the lit. which ofc im gonna assume its also him being a siren that like he said "the closer he is to me the better".. but then if yeosang thought most like joong... why is yeosang just a pawn in joongs eyes ...? yeosang losing the wooyoung </3 lordddd i dont even wanna start... then minho saying he's excited to see how another crew member plays.. joong immediately thinking seonghwa... but interestingly enough im guessing its either san or yunho.. but my best bet is san given he's like another right hand man kinda guy to joong...

ill conclude on that note since its 3am rn... but wow U DID IT AGAINNNNN i love ur writing so much seriously <33333 thank u thank u thank u and im excited for more x

hi hehe :3 i'm so thrilled that you enjoy the interims that's such a relief and so nice to hear ;-;;

you're in the perfect position bc you remember what happened early on and can pick up on the crumbs i was dropping to make it alllll come full circle! what goes around comes around! not only are hongjoong's plans important to consider (ie when he implemented them, when he put them into action) but also both how san carried out his initial duty and when san started to slip away from that duty into something genuine! both those things will be explored and opened up in san's upcoming interim, that will help pull all the pieces together i hope so!! that scene with mc crying to san,,, i cried writing it and i know it made a lot of people doubt san and his feelings but!! please have hope!! there are SOOO many possibilities!! will hongjoong really leave san to lie in the grave he dug for himself or will he dig it deeper or try to help him out…? all remains to be seen :3

mingi is truly truly such a fun and fascinating character to both write and unveil to you guys ;-; he's exceptionally intelligent beyond the scope of understanding emotions period but he gets treated like he's dumber because he doesn't understand emotions bc in the others' eyes emotions are just simple and easy to understand. mingi def possesses a different kind of intelligence but that kind of intelligence is on the same level of yeosang iw ould say! so it's easiest to think of it as mingi has a different kind of smartness compared to someone like say,,,,jongho or san who both have very good and high emotional intelligence!

1) DOES the man have a conscience? this interim is very telling in that regard and his thought process and the what some would call "intrusive thoughts" really showcase who he is as a person!

2) there are so many layers to him and you really get it bc he does keep everyone at arms length, even seonghwa to some degree bc the whole reason him and seonghwa aren't together is bc hongjoong shut him down the moment seonghwa started expressing his feelings towards hongjoong, he likes to keep to himself and doesn't like to leave his space for many reasons but we now know that one of those reasons is the past feelings of failure and loss coming back to haunt him, and bingo right on the money, he changes the way he wants to come across to people. prime example in yunho at the end of the interim, i think that scene is the absolute best showcase of hongjoong's character and who he is and how he operates.

3) he is DAMN CRAZY!!! i feel like i haven't so much shown that to the degrees that his character really is batshit insane so we're tiptoeing into those waters more now. you do have to think though, with the notion that he changes the way he wants to come across to people, when he's being "called out", is it accurate? or is it what hongjoong is presenting so they think they know what kind of person he is? when mc calls him out on his shit, it's often a two way punch where it as much about her as it is about him so much to think about! he's far far beyond a control freak tehe :3

the fun paradox in mc is that dynamic of wanting to be approved and accepted by him but also having this point blank issue with authority and also how hongjoong excises his authority. and that's been a big point of confusion too i think so im trying to delve more into it and expose more of it so that it makes more sense but there is meant to be a contradiction in her actions for sure

yeosang has been the only one to beat hj at chess, and he is not the lieutenant. we know that hongjoong personally selected seonghwa before yeosang joined the crew and that the position has never swayed, and we also know that yeosang is the master strategist on the crew, which is something a lieutenant would usually take care of so it lends to some questions about how hongjoong views authority in his crew? as far as the chess game goes, his queen was indeed seonghwa, the main bishop he used to both attack and sabotage his own pieces was san, he himself was king, then though not as heavily touched on, the other pieces i had in mind were: mingi and jongho were both knights, yeosang was the other bishop, then mc, wooyoung, and yunho were pawns. who minho was really referring to ;) is quite the twist but a fun one :3

bless you for sending me such a long ask at such a late hour you're so sweet ;-; it made my day i was so happy and excited seeing it thank you for letting me ramble right back at you :3 <3

[hongism]

hello hello its me again been a while, can we get an up to date visual of the crew's hairstyles in moc bc i do not remember how im supposed to be imagining them rn barring seonghwa w the long black hair since mc had to push it out of his face </3 loved the new chapter btw even tho it took me forever to getting to reading it im insane again now <3

yes ofc we have one i just had to go hunt it down but! here we are!

act six:

for act seven! seonghwa's hair is still back but it will be making a shift hehe :3 no real big changes i just envision yunho's roots growing in really and mingi doing a bit of work too!

[hongism]

Can I just say the grip that MOC has on me??? absolutely insane. Like I may rival Hongjoong type of insane, the way you write each character!!!like no character seems to be less complex or pushed in the background they all have such depth about them, same with the planets and side characters too! I absolutely love story telling like this and ugh I could gush about how much I love this story all day.

I wanted to ask questions about MOC but then I realized that all my questions would lead to more questions-

BUT I was thinking about moc hongjoong and it kinda occurred to me that he treats everyone differently and that wouldn’t be a problem if he was normal but now it makes me just side eye him?? Because I do believe that you can see the common denominator of his personality despite who he talks too(like Minho alluded) but it makes me wonder, if mc never actively went against his authority would he had still felt the need to manipulate her from the beginning? Or would he have just done it out of instinct but in a different way?

ALSO I was kinda confused? because everyone in moc likes to speak in riddles about their motives and feelings😭 But Hongjoong is so adamant that he doesn’t need MC even though Seonghwa insists(at the time at least) that he does. Does Hongjoong actually feel like he needs mc?

And I’ve been wondering Mc and Joongs dynamic, it seemed like be “good” at times. Ex: the times they’ve gone to save San together or when he sorta lets her off the hook for things. But it so easily gets flipped at any moment😭is that just because the hate is so strong on both sides that it’s just thin ice? or like revealed does Joon only let the good moments happen when he’s deciding what will make mc the most docile in the moment?

Also is the way Mc feels about Hongjoong(her wanting to be needed, the hatred so intense that anything is ammo, and this hatred going into obsession and in turn obsession making her want him so bad) similar to the way Hongjoong feels about Mc?(I use the term “feel” loosely but the intense hatred, obsession to break and mold her into what he wants)

Basically I think i’m asking does any part of Hongjoong hate Mc so much that it’s turned into “oooo he wants her so bad”like it has for mc(bc this child gives me second hand embarrassment sometimes but same) or is it just the “oooo the captain has a list major issues and mc is challenging a crazy person, therefore he’s just gonna act however makes mc fall in line) kinda like with his scene with Yunho where he was thinking “this simply won’t do.”

This ask is so long I’m so sorry idk what I’m talking about and I never have! No pressure if you can’t answer these yet because I have a billion questions about so many things in MOC that I won’t ask right now BUT I just wanted to tell you how much I admire your work.🥹🤍

hongjoong type of insane pls 😭 but rly thank you so much!! im so glad the characters read well and feel balanced across the crew bc that's one of the harder things to balance with the story haha <3

hongjoong does indeed treat everyone differently hehe part of that has to do with how he runs the crew, where he lets them decide how they want to be treated, but part of that is also just down to him and his personality too! there is indeed a common denominator like you mentioned as well! now, if mc never actively went against his authority, yeah he would have probably been way more normal towards her! which ofc makes it like damn girl you could have had everything you wanted at the cost of what? a slight bit of obedience? but then it wouldn't have been nearly as exciting or fun skksksk there definitely would still have been some manipulation on his part, mostly because that is something deeply rooted in him and something he constantly feels is necessary for 👁️reasons👁️

hongjoong very much puts up a front of not needing y/n, but he very much needs sirens. he knows that she's one, and he hates that that in turn means he needs her but he is adamant that his need for her is solely bc of what she is, not her as a person

hongjoong's mood towards y/n is highly dependent on her own mood towards him. when she acts more hostile, then he responds in kind. hongjoong reacts in extremes, and he does so to everything y/n does. there are times where mc does behave more obediently, and we'll see hongjoong be more lax in those moments, but he also very much likes to let her off the hook on certain things solely bc he wants to see her fail and be able to sort of have this "see, you failed, you need me to make the decisions for you" manipulation tactic

i think it is safe to say that their mutual hatred-obsession-strong lusting is on both ends to an extent but hongjoong wants mc to want him badly enough to make her look stupid bc he's a total psycho LKFJSLD but still we've seen seonghwa call him out point blank for being stupidly obsessed with her too so ! but it leans more on the side of what we saw him do with yunho <3

thank you so much again i love answering asks like this, i'm so sorry it took me such a long time to respond 🥹🥹🥹

[hongism]

yall know what time it is. ITS BREAKING THE ASKBOX TIME SJJSKALALALKAKSKWLWMNSNDDJKDK

honestly i expect nothing short of a masterpiece the moment i saw the notification. YOU! DO! NOT! DISAPPOINT! EVER! MISS CALY!!!

before getting into the crazier bits of this chapter, i wanna acknowledge how much you’ve grown as a writer during this series 🥹 recently i started re-reading some of the older moc chapters, and not to say that your writing wasn’t great before in any way, but the way you write now is so much more refined and beautiful, and i guess some of that is also attributed to how intense the story line and characters have developed. seriously, i’m so grateful to be able to read something and feel just how much effort and love the author has poured into in. now i can go on and on about praising your talent but i digress for the sake of discussing more… pressing issues that goes on here :)

*SPOILER ALERT FROM THIS PART*

now that jisung, hyunwoo and even hyunjin (sadly) has reached their demise, it finally dawns on me that this really is an end of an era. we spent like the past 1 or 2 maybe even 3 acts going through a gazillion emotional roller coaster rides all caused by jisung, but now is it weird that i’m kinda sad that he’s gone? it’s a perfect ending since jisung will probably never get his redemption even if he lives, but idk, i think it’s kinda depressing how love makes you do crazy shit :/ hyunwoo, on the other hand, BYE YOU ASS LMFAO WELL DESERVED. the only thing that dude has is the fucking audacity until the very last minute.

the action scene was beyond immaculate just as the emotional ones and there’s no doubt about that. im writing this with metaphorical tear streaks down my face and a broken heart after reading the whole chapter. you’ve got a way with words that can make me feel like i’m living and breathing in this fictional world. also, can we talk about this:

“Give me what’s mine first”

“Let her go immediately, you dog, or I’ll put a bullet in your head too.”

WELL GOD DAMN SIR. i’m gonna be fr and say i was SO certain we’re finally gonna get the infamous, long-awaited scene that must not be named between captain and ghost, but that’s on for me for not taking the slow burn warning more seriously lol. BUT there is still hope, i mean our mc would not be our mc if she can resist temptations and mind her own business yk.

"All these pit stops, huh? You sure she's the one trying to save you here, Captain? Because it looks an awful lot like that's what you're trying to do to her instead."

"Nightingale"

“I'm going, I'm going!”

and THIS IS ADORABLE OMG?!/?? i swear this whole part and the next part here is a prophecy that they’re gonna get it.

Yet, what you see before you is a trap, one carefully set by a vulnerable yet volatile man who could easily turn the situation into one that is advantageous to him permanently and you briefly. You imagine he has been in this position before — one where he can take as he pleases without thinking of the consequences of his actions — and where you stand, in a vulnerable spot yourself, you feel that tug to be near someone on equal footing. Wonder persists in your mind as you question where that is how Yunho initially fell into bed with him some time ago, or even further back to the first time Seonghwa was with him.

my girl has got some resolve and dignity alright, but we’ll see how long that lasts hahasksjak. we still probably got around 100 more chapters lol but just so you know, you’re gonna have to expect more than a broken askbox when that happens. everyone here will go so insane we might accidentally report you for emotional damage /hj. this is more than enough rambling but PLEASE I CAN NOT WAIT FOR MORE YOU’RE A LITERAL GODSEND THANK YOU LOVE YOU <3 - 🌊

OMGOMG okay i’ve been trying to answer this ask for like 2-3 weeks now but tumblr kept making it disappear from my inbox i was legit losing my mind?? but god bless today... today it worked... so finally i can respond... 

thank you for waiting for me so sorry tumblr was a bitch and didn't let me respond sooner </3 i was legit so sad it kept disappearing bc i wanted to answer SO BAD LSKDFJFLK thank you thank you first off in this past few days i'e received so much lvoe and compliments on my writing, and i've been told many lovely things and i know you sent this ask a while back but man it still means so much to me i'm still so grateful the words hold just as much meaning to me i really truly appreciate them and you!!!

now onto the spoiley bits... you're spot on! this is the end of an arc in its own regard where we've been in this storyline for such a long while by now that it's a bit like wow! that's over! i've been loving seeing the mixed bag of reactions about jisung, truly, the overwhelming majority are upset over his death even if he was a villain in many regards and that is super fascinating to me and frankly that was my goal i was trying to achieve! switching the perspectives of jisung vs hyunwoo, i wanted to play with that concept and i couldn't be happier with the outcome!

hongjoong and mc have such a fun dynamic and push-and-pull to play with too i adore it and i adore seeing everyone react to that as well, especially with recent chapters ofc.. but she's a strong one! she's resisting well! she's still got her resolve and her dignity both buttttt we'll see how much longer that lasts :3