Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The fluorescents droned, a thin insect note threading the concrete chamber. Vent fans worried the air with a steady breath, and over it the cash made its own weather. The crisp notes whispering as stacks were counted. Overhead, neon bubblegum pink and arcade blue bled from the ceiling tubes, skinning the room in bruise-light, color pooling in the seams of the floor. Smoke kept its own timetable, the vents too tired to claim it; it braided itself above the money in deliberate curls, as if learning the room by touch. Rubber bands snapped softly. The paper smelled of starch and ink, a clean chemical sweetness that couldn’t quite drown the metal tang of the ducts. Everything was hard: the slab underfoot, block walls beaded with cold, a tabletop scored by box cutters and burn marks. In that wash of color the portraits on the bills went flat, almost gray, but the paper kept its bite. The weight that settled into the palm and said, without drama: count again.

"Ten million dollars, baby," Mingi whispered, lips brushing the top of the final stack as if sealing a lover’s kiss. He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, took a long drag, and exhaled like he was breathing out the weight of a thousand sins. "This—" he said, spinning in the creaking swivel chair, arms wide like a king on his throne, "—is fucking life."

The wall-mounted TV stuttered through a snowstorm of static before cutting to the breaking news. A suited anchorwoman with too much makeup and too little truth was talking about the Siren Heist: a job so clean it turned the country’s finest into amateurs on live television. Cutaways rolled past.Officials blotched and blinking, detectives talking in circles, a mayor too proud to admit he’d been outplayed as he rattled off hollow vows to haul 'The Twin Towers' into court. The chyron said "developing." The room knew it was done.

Mingi scoffed. "Fucking idiot cops."

"Fucking dumbass government, you mean," Yunho muttered as he knelt to seal the last stash of cash into a reinforced titanium safe. The hiss of hydraulic locks sounded like music to their ears. "Can’t even catch their own shadows."

The Twin Towers.

That’s what the media called them. Not because they were brothers by blood, but because they moved like mirrors: same thoughts, same instincts, same deadly precision. Two minds split across two bodies. Mirror images in mayhem. A duo carved from the underbelly of society. Shadow and flame; calculation welded to chaos. Ghosts in the underworld. They clawed up from the city’s bruise and learned its grammar the hard way. In the alleys they went from rumor to parable to law. They weren’t born to crime. Fate orphaned them; hunger hardened them. The rest they chose. 

Yunho, the Mastermind. A straight-A student turned ghost. Plucked into money, then thrown out of it on a lie about a missing watch—an irony that now feels quaint. Once polished, once promising; now the quiet crown of the underworld. Calm. Clever. Calculated. His mind cut cleaner than any blade. He didn’t crash systems; he redrafted their rules and made them sign.

Mingi, the Executioner. Born into welts and apologies that never came. A father’s belt taught him to stop crying; hunger taught him to start taking. When taking wasn’t enough, he learned the grammar of endings. Reckless, mule-stubborn, a weather front with fists. If Yunho drew the blueprint, Mingi was the impact crater. He was the last silhouette before the lights went out.

Together they close the circuit. Mercury and granite. A nail and a hammer. They’ve emptied vaults that swore at birth to stay shut. They’ve made currencies stutter and ministers rehearse lies in the mirror. Ten years and the ledger shows no red. They move like choreography taught to a storm. One draws the map, the other becomes the road. You don’t see them arrive; you notice you’ve already complied. The city carries their signature as a faint ache in its bones, a lesson learned once and remembered always. Not invincible. Worse. Exact. Perfect enough to feel inevitable.

"I still can’t believe we pulled that shit, man." Mingi practically vibrated with excitement, bouncing his heel against the floor. "You’re a fucking genius!"

Yunho smiled, not modestly as in never that. But like a man who already knew. "You know I couldn’t have handled it without you."

"Oh, fuck yeah!"

The room vibrated with the buzz of energy, it was the kind that came after doing the impossible and living to talk about it. The heist had gone off perfectly, just like the others. And tonight, they were kings in a world they’d built from ash.

"This calls for a celebration," Yunho said, brushing dust from his tailored sleeves. "We drink tonight."

"Same place?"

"Same place."

Beneath the glittering lights of the surface world, lived a city called Sector One. Built on broken laws and blood debts, it was the sanctuary for the criminal, the damned, and the forgotten. No cops came down here. No cameras lasted long. No laws. No mercy. Snitches didn’t live to see daylight. This was a society of predators, and at the top of the food chain stood the Twin Towers.

When Yunho and Mingi slipped into the core, the ground had a heartbeat. Stalls welded from shipping crates sold calibers by the handful and chemicals by the gram; secrets were weighed with the same scale. Corners worked like checkpoints, gang colors standing in for flags. Neon bruised the damp walls and marked the iron doors, each a choice between danger, pleasure, or both. The crowd didn’t part from fear; it adjusted out of habit. Yunho read exits without looking up. Mingi measured threats by how quickly they remembered to look away. Sector One was awake and watching, and its kings had come home.

They turned into a corridor marked by blue flame symbols, the sign of their favorite bar.

Halazia.

A place of refuge for the ruthless. Hidden behind a rusted vault door that opened like a secret and exhaled a wool-thick haze. The music stayed low enough to plot over, the pours came heavy and honest, and the clientele was curated for danger.

As they stepped inside, the room recalibrated. Heads tipped. Sentences lost their endings. The heavy scent of alcohol, sweat, and smoke settled over everything like a weighted blanket. Not out of fear, though some felt it. Not out of respect, though they earned it. It was pressure, the barometric shift that happens when weather walks in. Famous criminals in a room full of infamous ones, and every eye made the same quiet math: if Yunho was the angle, Mingi was the force. The blue flames on the wall seemed to burn a shade brighter, as if recognizing their own.

"Ah, there’s my favorite chaos duo," said a voice from behind the bar.

Wooyoung, the owner of Halazia, flashed his signature grin. Sleek, dangerous, charismatic. Same age as them, but smarter than most. He knew how to run a bar where murderers drank side-by-side. And he knew when to shut up and pour. If Sector One was hell, Wooyoung was its cheeky devil. "The usual?" he asked, already reaching for the good stuff.

"Yeah, the usual," Mingi replied, tossing a smirk as they dropped onto the barstools like they owned the place.

"You got it, my lords," Wooyoung teased, sliding two glasses of obsidian-dark liquor across the marble counter.

They clicked their glasses. A silent cheers to chaos. The burn down their throats was familiar, comforting. It tasted like loyalty. But of course, envy doesn't hide long in Sector One. From a shadowed corner came the inevitable venom.

"Tch, it’s those cocky punks again."

"They’re so full of themselves. They really think they run this place."

Mingi didn't bother turning but rather he sneered. "Fucking pricks."

"What'd you say, asshole?" came a drunken voice from behind them. A twitchy broad man, probably a gang grunt, stood behind Mingi.

Mingi didn’t flinch. He turned slowly, eyes glinting like broken glass, and stood. Shoulders squared, chin high.

The man laughed. "Yeah, that’s right. Stand up. Let’s see what you got. Or are you just your master’s little bitch?"

He was about to let loose the fire when—

"Mingi," Yunho’s voice cut through like a blade. It was calm yet sharp. Like a safety clicked off.

Mingi froze, jaw tight. He let out a shaky breath and sat back down, his glare never wavering. 

The thug grinned wide, triumphant. "Yeah bitch, that’s what I thought. Listen to your—"

CRACK.

A glass shattered.

Not from impact, but from Yunho’s hand. His knuckles tightening so hard around the whiskey glass it exploded in his grip.

Everything tipped.

By the time the room understood the sound, Yunho was no longer on his stool. He was standing over the thug, motion so fast it looked like a skipped frame. His fist kissed the man’s nose once.

Crunch.

Then again. And again. A rhythm of ruin.

The thug hit the floor, but Yunho didn’t stop. He followed him down, straddled his chest like a predator on its kill. His fists became pistons, rising and falling, bone meeting bone with mechanical brutality. Each punch landed with sickening sound. 

"You don’t speak to him like that," he said calmly yet his tone said otherwise. "You don’t look at him like that."

"Don’t." Crack.

"Ever." Crunch.

"Call." Snap.

"Him." Whack.

"Bitch." Bam.

The man screamed. Or tried to. But his jaw was already broken. Teeth spilled from his mouth like loose coins. Blood painted the floor in wide arcs, splashing Yunho’s sleeves, staining his jaw. But his expression never changed.

Blank. Cold. Empty. It was like a porcelain mask hiding hellfire. His eyes were locked on the man’s face, what was left of it. As if he wasn’t even hitting someone anymore. As if he was erasing him.

The bar had gone deathly still. Even the music had stopped. The only sound in the room was Yunho’s fists pounding flesh like a drum of war. 

No one dared move. No one dared breathe.

Yunho’s final punch made a sound that wasn’t human. Something cracked deep. A rib? A cheekbone? It didn’t matter.

He stood slowly, calmly. Blood dripped from his knuckles like rain from a blade. He turned to the thug’s crew and they were frozen in fear, white-faced and stunned.

"Take him," Yunho said, voice level, almost gentle. That was the terrifying part. "And if I see any of you again… I’ll put you in the ground beside him."

The minions scrambled, dragging the barely breathing body toward the door, leaving a crimson smear in their wake that told the whole story without a single word.

Mingi let out a whistle, impressed, then laughed wide as he slung an arm over Yunho’s shoulder. "Holy shit, man. You’re a freak."

Yunho didn’t respond. He was already wiping the blood from his hands with a napkin like it was nothing more than spilled wine. Because to him, it was nothing.

If anyone so much as breathed wrong toward Mingi, Yunho wouldn’t raise his voice.

He’d raise hell.

And Mingi would burn the map for Yunho without a second thought.

Ten years of death, chaos, and loyalty forged in hellfire. They weren’t just partners. They were each other’s trigger and safety. The charge and the ground. The line you don’t cross and what happens when you do.

The air in Halazia slowly returned to its usual buzz. Voices rose again, cautiously, as if afraid to shatter the silence left behind by Yunho’s fists. Music resumed, soft and haunting. Mops appeared from nowhere; no one asked whose. Conversations resumed in fragments, pronouns doing the heavy lifting. The bar remembered how to be a bar, but the room kept a bruise. Blue flames jittered on steel and in the puddle’s reflection, as if the walls themselves were trying not to look. Wooyoung poured another round, his eyes flicking to the blood still staining the floor.

"You’re both freaks," Wooyoung said, shaking his head as he wiped a blood smear off the bar. "And I say that lovingly." 

They laughed. Freaks? Yeah. Maybe. But in Sector One? Freaks rule the world.

"Shit, Yunho," Wooyoung muttered, sliding the drink toward him. "You ever think about therapy?"

Yunho scoffed as he sipped silently, unfazed. Mingi was still grinning, the fire in his chest not yet cooled. "Don’t act like that wasn’t the best entertainment your bar’s had all week."

"No doubt," Wooyoung smirked. Then he leaned in on the bar, elbows planted. "You two know you’re the talk of the whole world again, right?"

"Let ‘em talk," Mingi shrugged, lighting another cigarette.

"Nah, I mean it. Everyone won't shut up about the Siren Heist. Ten million clean. No blood. No trail. No alarms." He gave a low whistle. "Even The 0X1 is watching now."

Yunho’s eyes lifted slightly. Mingi arched a brow. The 0X1 was an older gang, notorious and hard to kill. If they're paying attention… the water is about to get red. "They’re still alive?"

"Barely. But they’re watching now. And more importantly…" Wooyoung’s smirk faded. He tapped the counter once. "The Captain wants to see you both."

The air thickened. Even in a place like Halazia, that name meant something.

For he is the leader of the Black Pirates.

It's a ghost syndicate. Built from orphans, strays, and outlaws. Sector One’s quiet kings. Their work was so clean the surface called it rumor and filed it under acts of God.

Yunho and Mingi were the headline, sure, but only a line in a longer text: the Black Pirates. Not a gang. A lineage. Heists that left no bruise you could photograph, only budgets that woke up limping.

At the heart of it all is their leader: The Captain—Hongjoong.

He hadn’t saved them; he selected them. Pulled kids from train yards and back rooms, from storm drains and precinct benches, then tempered them—discipline first, silence second, family as binding law. He taught the etiquette of vanishing and the craft of arrival. Hunger became edge. Grief learned geometry. He turned scrap into instrument, names into signatures, rumor into record. His word is law, and they follow.

They finished their drinks without another word, the burn of alcohol now secondary to the weight of the summons.

Wooyoung led them past the regulars, through a rust-stained hallway, to the reinforced steel door at the back of the bar. Only five keys existed for it. Wooyoung carried one of them.

The hinges groaned open, and the secret room of the Black Pirates swallowed them whole.

The room spoke in whispers. An operations core smothered in shadow, where black glass exhaled data—camera mosaics, wireframe blueprints, ledger anomalies, satellite pings chasing themselves across the dark. Holographic maps hung like slow planets, arterial routes pulsing as they turned.

At the center stood The Captain.

Hongjoong looked misplaced in the constellation of it. He wore an oversized cream cardigan over a soft black tee; thin silver rings laddered his fingers; platinum hair parted clean down the middle, curled just enough to look accidental. His eyes were large and almost doe-like, framed by long lashes. He looked like someone who belonged in an art gallery, not at the helm of a crime empire.

But Mingi and Yunho stood straighter the moment they entered. 

Sector One had learned the saying the hard way: "don’t judge by a book by its cover." The softness was only scabbard. Behind it lived a tactician with tolerances you could measure in microns. They're precise, unsentimental, lethal without raising the temperature. He folded cities the way others fold maps. He didn’t bark orders; he subtracted options until obedience was the only arithmetic left. Networks feared his math. Even the holograms seemed to cant toward his gaze, as if the room itself had learned where authority lived. 

He isn’t the Black Pirates’ Captain by accident.

Hongjoong turned slowly and spread his arms widely. "My towers. Sector One's finest."

"Sit," he said softly, gesturing to the leather chairs across from him. 

Yunho gave a curt nod. Mingi collapsed into his seat with that same smug grin, but even he kept his tone in check.

"You did good," Hongjoong said. "Clean work. No casualties. No trace. Ten million. That’s another history for you both." He circled them slowly, assessing like a general before war. Then he stopped and looked them in the eyes. "But this was just the start."

A wall screen blinked to life, displaying a moving schematic of what looked like a corporate fortress. Armed patrols on every tier. Rooftop pads waiting for blades. Vaults sunk like anchors below street level.

"This," Hongjoong said, "is our next step. The Siren Heist was so impressive. But, this will be unforgettable." He tipped his fingers toward the projection. "Codename: Utopia."

They leaned in as he sketched the bones: triple-tier security, offshore routing webs, stacked encryption. Air-gapped segments. Dead-man switches. Every line of it spelled don’t bother.

"There’s a new element this time," he added. "You’ll meet additions soon. They’ll run at your shoulder."

"New blood?" Mingi’s brow creased. 

"Yes."

"I work better with knives than strangers," he muttered.

"I know," Hongjoong replied without blinking. "But the next target is bigger. Riskier. The payout justifies the bruise. You’ll need depth on the bench. This isn’t another hit. Rather, it’s a declaration."

Mingi didn’t bother to hide the sour set of his mouth. Yunho’s hand settled on his shoulder. "If the Captain says so," he said, eyes on the rotating fortress, "we trust you."

"That," Hongjoong replied, the faintest smile touching one corner, "is why you’re still alive. Go. Rest. I’ll brief you when it's time."

They'd barely turned when the captain’s voice called out behind them. He looked at them both. Not just as a leader, but like a man who had watched them bleed and rise and become. Scars he recognized. Fire he’d helped stoke.

"I’m proud of you," Hongjoong said, simply. "You remind this city who we are. You’re not just the frontliners anymore. You’re the edge we strike with. The fear they feel before they even see us."

A beat of silence passed before Yunho nodded once. Mingi’s smirk curled back into place. It was wolfish, wicked, ready for war.

They exited the backroom without another word. Two ghosts stepping into neon rain, boots whispering over tile, the hallway narrowing like the barrel of a gun. The city sensed them before it saw them. The air pulled taut, vents holding their breath, doors remembering how to be afraid.

They weren’t just legend now. Legend is something told after. They were rumor turning rigid, rumor hardening into rule. Their names moved mouth-to-mouth in the underlevels, ferried by people who never looked up and never forgot. Yunho counted exits by habit. Mingi smiled at the cameras because he wanted them to remember his face.

And tonight they wouldn’t whisper. They’d set the city to their frequency.

They would etch their names into the skeleton of this place—rebar, grout, river silt. They’d leave fingerprints in ash, stamp every vault with a motive no file could domesticate. Corridors would keep the heat like a secret. Sirens would have to learn a new note.

They never asked for power. Asking is what you do when you plan to accept no.

So, they took it.

Because freaks don’t beg for the world.

Freaks rule it.

And the first empire they’d burn? The one that built the cage and called it order.

Steel will crease. Locks will talk. The city will carry their mark, not as a brand but as a scar that knows its makers.

This is their story. Everything after this is consequence.

Chapter Text

A week after the Siren Heist, Sector One still thrummed like a struck cable. The sound wasn’t in the air so much as under it. It was down in the concrete, inside the plumbing of the city. It was an electric note that made stalls falter mid-bark and doors hush themselves shut when certain names were spoken. Rival crews pretended not to listen while they listened to everything. The cops wore their questions like crucifixes and prayed to a god who never answered the radio.

In that underworld where respect wasn’t granted so much as extracted. Well, The Twin Towers stopped being a nickname and turned into a landmark. People pointed to them without raising a finger. You measured distance by how close you were to their shadow.

Power did what power does: it grew eyes. It learned your weight from the way you climbed the stairs. It kept a ledger of your habits and kinked the page at the places you thought were private.

Then came the orders.

The summons arrived the way all real messages do—without flourish, inside a thing that looked like something else. A dead account blinked back to life, spat a string of clean numbers, and collapsed. Yunho caught the shape of it mid-fall, decrypted it in two breaths. The payload was coarse as gravel:

'Report to HQ. Immediate briefing. All hands.'

It carried Hongjoong’s fingerprint without needing his name. The Captain didn’t ask. He didn’t issue orders so much as alter the pull.

Yunho had known it would come. He’d been dividing the future into columns since the moment their boots hit the floor at their headquarters. In the motel’s thin light, he sat up slowly, eyes already awake, the kind of awake that doesn’t blink.

Mingi, by contrast, rose like a city after curfew, resisting on principle. Shirtless, hair matted into a crown of static, he peeled himself from the bed with a groan that could have been a joke if it had any breath in it.

"Tell me it’s not another mission," he said, voice sanded down to the grain.

Yunho let the corner of his mouth tilt. "It’s us," he said. "It’s always another mission."

Mingi scrubbed a hand over his face, found last night’s bruise with his knuckles, and hissed. Outside, rain worried the neon into long, tired streaks. The room carried the stale bite of cut cordite and cheap coffee; the city’s perfume. He toed for his boots under the bed, found one, then the other, and laced them like he meant it.

"Black Pirates’ HQ?" he asked, already knowing.

Yunho nodded. "The Captain called all hands."

"That many ears in one room," Mingi muttered, "we’ll rattle the chandeliers."

"Then don’t breathe too loud."

They moved without ceremony. Holsters rethreaded. The anonymous jacket that was more warning than clothing. Phones wiped, then killed. Yunho slid the tiny drive back into its cavity behind the mirror; Mingi palmed the mirror shut. The door sighed open, and the hallway met them with the hush of bad news.

Sector One kept humming. Somewhere, a market seller cleared their throat and decided not to say a name. The city made room as the Towers walked, and the rain walked with them. Power had called. They were already on their way.

Their boots kept saying the same hard word to the stone, down corridors lined with red pupils and gates that stole a breath and measured it before giving it back. At the base’s center sat the war room: a bank vault turned brainstem, hinges swallowed, walls that remembered every order ever spoken inside them. The table threw cold light up into their faces: relief maps rising like bones, strings of encrypted feed crawling across the glass like frost.

Two familiar silhouettes waited.

Wooyoung, the shadow-charmer.

He had that crooked grin loaded and a butterfly knife skittering across his knuckles as if it had been born there. He dealt in quiet entries and louder exits; in leverage braided with sugar. Locks didn’t resist him so much as lean in to listen.

Jongho, the brawler.

All ballast and still water, a short-range disaster built out of muscle and intention. He let silence do the talking and let his hands handle grammar. Weapons were a dialect; close-quarters, a mother tongue. His loyalty was notarized in scar tissue.

"Look who decided clocks are optional," Wooyoung said, not bothering to stand.

Mingi snorted, found the chair’s back with one hand. "Bold from a man still wearing yesterday’s eyeliner."

Before the bickering found teeth, the door hissed again and the new blood entered the room.

San came first—angles and untamed current. His rig hung open to the sternum, black hair shaken into a storm he had no intention of taming, knuckles scabbed like signatures. The grin he wore was made for impact. He threw Wooyoung a wink as if they’d already survived something together. Wooyoung let it pass without catching.

Yeosang followed like smoke under a door. Pale, proportioned, immaculate. Black turtleneck, gloves, a neat ladder of implants along his right temple that pulsed once and then forgot you. The holographic table breathed light up at him and he watched it the way a surgeon watches an uncooperative heart. Somewhere, a network felt noticed.

Last to arrive was Seonghwa.

He entered on a delay, the room adjusting around his pace. All-black tailoring that fit like an argument, long fingers ringed in silver. Beauty that unsettled because it didn’t ask permission. You could sense the etiquette before the threat. Chairs corrected by a few centimeters when he passed, voices found their lower register. Rumor said he kept a rosary and a razor in the same pocket. Rumor rarely lied.

When he finally spoke, his voice carried like a quiet instrument.

"So… these are the famous Twin Towers."

He let his eyes find Yunho and stay there. "You must be Yunho," he said, smiling too gently to trust. "Taller in person. Steadier, too."

Yunho took a beat. "Thanks," he said, trying for neutral and landing there.

"No wonder the name holds." Seonghwa didn’t look away.

Mingi snorted. "He means me and Yunho."

"Of course," Seonghwa said mildly, turning just enough for it to count. "You’re the other peak."

Yunho’s glance hit Mingi like a hand to the chest—stand down. Too late. A tendon jumped in Mingi’s jaw; the table’s cold light ironed his knuckles white.

Hongjoong entered before the tension could crest.

As always, his presence was quiet and absolute. The soft knit, the careful bone structure, the measured cadence; he wore gentleness like a mask. The room knew the steel beneath it.

"Good. You’ve met the new blood," he said, not raising his tone. "Introductions later."

He touched the table and the map woke like an animal. Water lifted out of darkness. A cliff unfurled, ribbed with concrete and glass, a vein-bright grid threading its bowels. Corridors bloomed like capillaries; security nodes pulsed like small, watchful hearts.

"The Utopia," Hongjoong said. "Our next target."

Not an island so much as a thesis about control. It was bitten into basalt, surf gnawing at its lower teeth. The facade read wellness retreat and research park: wind-scoured helipad, mirrored suites, a desal tower breathing white vapor. Beneath the face, the true architecture: biometric choke-points that decided who counted as human, contractors with parade-ground posture and war-left habits, cameras that didn’t blink so much as brood. The sea around it wore a fence of quiet things. The buoys that listened, drones that drifted like plankton, currents mapped and patented.

"'The paradise' is what the government calls it," he continued. "It launders reputations and money with the same soap."

He tapped again. The model shed its pretty floors until only a red core remained under the server decks, beating like an underwater beacon.

"The Golden vault," Hongjoong said. "A chamber that pretends not to exist. Four rotating keys, each held by a different custodian, none of them aware of the other three. The keys must agree within a narrow window, or the vault reverts to silence and eats its own trail. Inside: uncounted wealth, stolen surveillance, off-ledger identities. A library of the city’s sins."

He let that sit, gaze moving across them like the second hand of a patient clock.

"We’re not cracking a safe. We’re seizing the mechanism that launders everything filthy into something spendable."

Yunho leaned into the light, eyes tracing angles, pressure lines, lies. "Three breach vectors," he said. "Sea. Sky. Interior."

"Correct." A single nod. "That’s why we’ve widened the circle."

He indicated the newcomers with a surgeon’s economy.

"San will lead the insertion since he knows how to move where rooms forget to look. Yeosang keeps the grid. He'll fog the pulse and teach every camera to blink. Seonghwa wears the face: manners minted into keys, charm pressed into clearance. The rest of you?" Hongjoong's gaze settled on the old blood, "I don’t need to explain work you’ve already bled for."

They nodded in unison, the room drawing tight around the vow.

"You’ll operate as two mixed units: one to hold the light, one to move the shadow."

The map rolled, slow as a planet learning its own weather. Details rose and settled without hardening into orders: shift changes that overlapped just enough to make men sloppy; a supply ferry kissing the dock before dawn and pushing off with its empty crates and full lies; a gala weekend that lacquered the lobby while the back halls thinned; a maintenance lull at midnight when the compound exhaled and forgot itself. Deep below, the vault’s keys turned on a clock that didn’t care about storms; above it, the custodians turned on appetites that did.

"You’ll learn this place until it lives under your skin," Hongjoong said. "Where the light pools and where it thins. Which doors open to air and which open into walls. Who smiles because they mean it, and who smiles because they’re paid."

He drew three small arcs across the projection, gestures more like intentions than routes. "Sea takes you to the service spine. Sky buys you a breath and a blind spot. The interior—" his gaze touched Seonghwa, "—opens for those who belong and closes for everyone else. We’ll stage our truth to fit the lock."

"You’ll drill until your feet know the steps without your head," Hongjoong finished. "Minimal noise before the heart opens. One clean window. We leave with more than money."

He dimmed the projection until the table became a black sea and their faces floated on it. “We take the city’s center,” he said, gentle as a gavel, “and from it, we decide how the world will turn.”

The map died. In the hush that followed, boots settled, jaws set, and the room’s air thinned into purpose. Outside, the water kept its secrets. Inside, the fuse was lit, and the city was already standing on the edge of a fire it could not see.

The lights were dim in Yunho and Mingi’s shared quarter. A single bulb swung overhead, its chain creaking faintly with every lazy arc, scattering shadows across concrete walls stained with age and damp. The room bore the weight of their lives. Two bunks shoved against opposite sides, a couch slumped with use, a table littered with maps, gear, and crumpled notes. It smelled of gun oil, damp stone, and the faint musk of bodies long accustomed to sharing air. Clutter lay where it fell; nothing here was polished, yet everything bore the imprint of two men who had grown into the space and into each other.

Mingi sprawled across the couch, limbs thrown wide in mock despair, like a cat demanding attention through sheer posture.

"I don’t like that guy," he mumbled, words echoing faintly off the concrete.

"Which one?" Yunho asked, stripping off his gloves with practiced efficiency, as though the leather demanded more attention than Mingi’s moods.

Mingi scoffed. "You know which one. The smooth-talking, soft-smiling, Yunho-staring one."

Yunho turned, one brow arched. "Seonghwa?"

"Ugh. Even his name pisses me off."

"He was just being friendly."

"He was flirting," Mingi snapped. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, shadows carving harsh lines across his face. "And with you. Right in front of me."

Yunho’s laugh came quick, too quick, like a shield raised. "So?"

"So… I don’t like him."

"You don’t like anyone," Yunho teased, forcing lightness into his voice.

"Yeah. I only like you," Mingi said, plain as truth.

The words landed heavy, breaking the room’s rhythm. For a moment, Yunho forgot to breathe. His heart stuttered once, twice, before he forced it steady. He bent his head quickly, fingers busying themselves with the zipper on his gear bag, as if the metal teeth could drown out what had just been said.

Mingi didn’t take it back. Didn’t laugh it off. He only leaned back, expression unreadable, like he hadn’t just shifted the ground beneath them. Maybe he knew. Maybe he didn’t care.

Yunho swallowed hard, the fire in his chest pressed down until it burned clean. His voice came out even as he forced a scoff. "That’s not very reassuring."

"Too bad." Mingi yawned, sprawling back into the couch, but softer now, his edges blurred by the weight of honesty. "You’re stuck with me."

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was thick, alive, circling both of them like a secret neither was ready to name. Yunho kept his eyes fixed on the floor, afraid of what Mingi might see in them. Afraid of what he might not.

At length, Yunho asked, quieter than before, "What do you think of the heist?"

Mingi looked at him then, the room’s shadows softening the sharpness of his features. His voice was even, stripped of all bravado. "It’s big. Dangerous."

"You nervous?"

"Yeah." Mingi’s eyes didn’t leave his. His answer was simple, unguarded. "But you’re here, so it’s less scary."

Yunho felt the words strike deeper than they should, felt the edges of himself bend under them. He smiled faintly, but it was a fragile thing, meant to cover a crack in the surface.

"Same," he said, though the word barely carried, more confession than agreement.

The days that followed snapped the team into mission mode.

Rotations flipped every six hours like a metronome with a knife for a pendulum. Gear cycled, recertified, clicked back into hard readiness. Simulations punished second thoughts until instinct replaced language. Yunho’s heist lived behind every eye, as if it’s burned into lens chips, a tactical HUD that haunted the backs of their lids when they tried to sleep.

Most nights he was alone in ops, washed in the blue of the projection wall. The servers breathed a cold, metallic tide. Coffee went stale. The blueprint threw its ribs of light across his hands.

Until he wasn’t alone.

Seonghwa drifted in and leaned against the board, fingers walking the fine blue lines of the blueprint like he was testing a tripwire.

"You don’t sleep much," he said, almost fond.

"Not when I’m mapping the riskiest job of our lives," Yunho answered, eyes still tracing exits and timing windows.

Seonghwa’s chuckle stuck to the air. "You’re cute when you’re intense."

Yunho blinked. "Excuse me?"

"I mean it." A step closer, the kind that pretends to be casual. "I like smart men. Focused ones."

"I’m not interested."

"In me or in anyone?" Seonghwa’s tone thinned to something probing. "What’s your relationship with Mingi, anyway?"

"He’s my partner."

"Work partner?" Another step.

Yunho stepped back. "Yeah. That’s all."

"No history? No tension? No kisses in the dark?"

"Why are you asking?"

"Because people like you don’t do casual loyalty," Seonghwa said, smiling a smile that forgot to reach his eyes. "There’s something more."

"It's not your business anyway."

"Maybe." Seonghwa tipped closer, blueprint light slicking his cheekbones. "Call it curiosity." His smile curled into something playful, a little cruel. "Have you two ever fucked?"

Yunho’s jaw locked. Heat gathered under his skin. "You’re crossing a line."

"Am I?" He hovered a breath from Yunho’s collar, not touching, letting the nearness do the work. "Then why’s your pulse jumping? Why the color?" A soft laugh, meant to needle. "Is it just 'partners' or the kind that forgets where that word ends?" He tipped his head, voice a purr at the edge of a dare. "Say no and I’ll drop it. Or keep blushing, and I’ll keep guessing."

Yunho didn’t have time to decide whether to answer. A hand caught Seonghwa’s collar and yanked him hard enough that his boots slid, steel caps scuffing against the concrete.

Mingi.

The glare he leveled at Seonghwa could have cauterized a wound. "What the hell do you think you’re doing?"

Seonghwa lifted his palms, all theater. "Relax, I was just asking him something." His gaze flicked between them, and a smirk hooked one corner of his mouth. "Guess this one"—a thumb jerking toward Mingi—"has a different opinion."

"Let him go," Yunho said, fingers wrapping around Mingi’s forearm before the situation could tilt into something they couldn’t take back.

Mingi released him with a shove that rattled the glass. Seonghwa straightened, brushed the ghost of fingers from his shirt, and over Mingi’s shoulder, he mouthed 'see you, pretty boy' to Yunho with a wink before he strolled out whistling off-key. The click of his boots faded down the corridor like a bad thought you can’t shake.

Mingi turned. "What the fuck was that about?"

Yunho huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. "Nothing important."

They didn’t talk about it after that. Saying it out loud would have given the shape a name, and names make targets easier to paint. They preferred alarms they could disarm, not the kind that live under the ribs.

Yunho kept replaying the moment like a faulty sim. Rewind, adjust, rerun. Each pass spitting out a different reading. Jealousy? Fury? Standard-issue protectiveness? He couldn’t tell if the heat in Mingi’s voice had been a flare or a warning light, and the not-knowing worked under his skin like a splinter he couldn’t tweeze out.

Mingi didn’t clarify, not with words. He overtightened straps, rechecked mags that didn’t need checking, called it adrenaline. He looked at Yunho like a problem he could fix if only it would hold still.

Maybe it was attachment. Maybe just habit, burnished by years of moving back-to-back through narrow halls. Maybe nothing at all, and Yunho had misread the weather.

Whatever it was, neither of them showed it again. Not under the mess hall’s blunt fluorescents, not in the diesel backwash at 0300, not in the dead air between drills when the world felt thin enough to tear. In their world, vulnerability gets you killed. They had practiced that lesson until it lived in muscle memory: lock the feeling, wipe the prints, keep moving.

That, more than luck or armor, is why they’re still alive: two men who refuse to bleed where anyone can see. It’s the habit that’s kept both of them breathing.

Mission first. Heart later. If ever.

And if something ached after lights-out, they learned to hold their ribs shut and breathe through it. Because living isn’t the same as not hurting, and survival has never asked them for anything but everything.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

The past was not a place Mingi visited, not a room he could enter and leave. It was a weather system, a low-pressure zone that lived permanently in his marrow, circulating in his blood. It always smelled of stale beer, buried rage, and the bloody tang of fear.

His first memories were not of a house, but of a cardboard box soaking in misery. It was a two-room hovel that smelled of damp plaster and mildew, where the floorboards gave under his weight. The wallpaper, a jaundiced floral pattern, sweated in the humidity, its edges curling away from the wall as if in disgust. The air was a thick, unbreathable soup of boiled cabbage and the ever-present, simmering miasma of his father’s temper.

He was a small, angular child, a framework of jutting elbows and scapula, upholstered in a thin layer of skin that served as a canvas for his father’s displeasure. The bruises were a rotating constellation, a map of old and new pain painted in shades of septic violet, sickly green, and pale ochre.

Hunger was not an event; it was a companion. It was a hollow, gnawing cold that started in his stomach and spread to his fingertips, making them tremble. It was a constant ache that made the world seem distant and unreal. He learned to subsist on the scraps of his father's volatile charity, the crusts of bread or watery spoonfuls of soup doled out with a grunt or a curse.

The turn of the key in the lock was a gunshot that announced the evening’s main event. It was never a smooth sound; it was a fumbling, angry scraping of metal on metal, followed by a heavy stumble and a curse. His father was not a man, but an affliction. He would enter, sucking the oxygen from the air, his eyes already filmed with the day’s cheap liquor, and the world would shrink to the two-room radius of his displeasure.

The beatings were a liturgy, a predictable and terrible ritual. Mingi learned to unmoor himself, to float. As the first blow landed—a hard, stinging palm that set his ears ringing, the sharp, whistling bite of a belt buckle—he would retreat. He would go to a grey, quiet place behind his eyes, a silent, fog-bound country where he was untouchable. He would count the floorboards. He would watch a spider spin a web in the corner. He would feel the thud of the impacts as distant, muffled things, happening to a body that was not his. He would not cry. Crying was a currency that bought only more violence, a sign of weakness that invited a deeper, more focused rage.

But sometimes, the beating wasn't the end. Sometimes, it was a prelude. When his father’s rage was a colder, more patient thing, or when Mingi’s silence was too defiant, he would be dragged to the door at the back of the room. The cellar door.

He would be thrown down the rotting wooden steps into the pitch blackness. For Mingi, it was a tomb. It smelled of damp earth, rat droppings, and a primal, suffocating rot. The door would be bolted shut, and he would be left alone in the absolute, freezing dark, sometimes for an hour, sometimes all night. He would huddle on the concrete floor, the one that would one day be his father's deathbed, and listen to the sounds of the house above—his father's drunken snores, the creak of his mother's terrified, pacing feet, the skittering of things in the walls. This, more than the beatings, was what broke him. The cold, the isolation, the all-consuming blackness.

His mother, a creature of frayed edges and a perpetually haunted gaze, would find him later, after the storm had passed and his father had collapsed into a snoring heap. She was a ghost in her own kitchen, her comfort a papery-thin shield. She smelled of bleach and fear. She would dab at his split lip with a damp, threadbare rag, her own hands trembling, a fresh bruise blooming on her own cheek. Her whispers were a broken lullaby, a desperate, futile prayer. "It's okay, my Mingi. It's okay."

But, it was never okay.

When he was fourteen, the parasite of his father’s gambling finally consumed the last, crumpled bill. The house fell into a new, terrifying silence. The rages were quieter, more venomous. The cabbage pot sat empty. There was no more stale bread. There was only the gnawing cold, which had now become a living thing with claws, tearing at his insides.

The grocery market was an assault, a paradise of fluorescent light and impossible, dazzling color. It smelled of fruit and fresh bread and soap, an olfactory shock that made him dizzy. He walked in, a wraith in a threadbare jacket, his plan a single, desperate, pounding word: food. A loaf of bread. A package of ham. He could almost taste it. His hands, clumsy with starvation and vibrating with fear, betrayed him. They fumbled, trembled, disobedient. The plastic crinkled, a sound as loud as a scream in the quiet aisle.

"Hey! You!"

A meaty paw clamped on his shoulder, the fingers digging in like talons. The shop owner, a man with a face like a spoiled ham, dragged him to the back by his collar. The beating was impersonal, a chore, a necessary disposal of refuse. The words, however, were worse. They were sharp and stuck.

Filth. Leech. Gutter rat. Worthless thief.

He was thrown into the alley, landing hard on the slick cobblestones. His hip exploded in pain. The bread, now dirty, lay beside him, a monument to his failure. Then the rain began, a cold, stinging penance, plastering his thin hair to his skull. He was staring at the ruined loaf when a shadow fell over him, eclipsing the grey light.

The boy was his age, but he was an aberration, a creature from another, cleaner world. That was the first, insulting detail: he was clean. His clothes were dark but expensive, the fabric shedding the rain. He was dry. He held a neat, black umbrella, and his face, defined and intelligent, was a study in calm, unsettling neutrality.

"You should have planned it wisely," the boy said. His voice was not unkind. It was a clinical assessment, a statement of fact.

A sudden, hot spike of shame and rage pierced Mingi’s cold misery. It was so potent it made him gag. He surged up from the ground, grabbing the front of the boy’s pristine coat in his filthy hands. "What the hell do you know about it?!" he snarled, his voice cracking, spittle flying from his lips. "You spoiled, rich nothing."

The boy didn't flinch. His eyes didn't even widen. A small, unbothered smile touched the corner of his mouth. It was a scalpel of a smile, precise and cutting. "We're just alike."

The words were a blasphemy, an incomprehensible, searing insult. Alike? This clean, dry, fed creature? Mingi shoved him, hard, putting all his wiry, desperate strength into it. "We're nothing alike!"

The boy stumbled back, catching his balance with an easy, infuriating grace. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. It wasn't a few bills. It was a thick, impossible stack. He dropped it into the puddle by Mingi’s knee. The bills soaked, staining the grey water.

"Buy yourself some food," he said, then turned and walked away, his footsteps silent in the rain.

Mingi stared at the money, a dark, soaking clump of paper in the gutter. It was an impossible, insulting sum, more than he had seen in his entire life. He watched the rainwater bleed the ink from the bills, turning the puddle a faint, dirty green. Each sodden bill was a separate, stinging slap in the face.

A wave of profound humiliation washed over him, a thing so cold and deep it eclipsed the rain, sinking straight into his bones. It was the humiliation of being seen. Not just as a thief, but as a failed one. A pathetic, starving rat, beaten and left in the trash, only to be pitied by... him.

He hated the boy. He hated him with a sudden, searing intensity that surprised him with its venom. He hated the calm, assessing eyes that looked at him not as a person, but as a puzzle. He hated the effortless, unbothered way he existed, as if the world couldn't possibly touch him. He hated him for his clean coat, for his dry umbrella, and most of all, for the scalpel-sharp smile that said, "We're just alike." It was the cruelest, most arrogant lie he’d ever heard. But the deepest, blackest hate was reserved for the pity. The boy hadn't seen a person; he'd seen a problem he could solve by throwing money at it, a stray dog to be tossed a scrap.

He hated the money. It was a brand, a mark of his absolute failure. It was a chain, linking him to the boy's casual, dismissive charity. And yet... his stomach cramped, a vicious, betraying reminder of the hollow ache that had driven him here. His hunger was a separate, traitorous animal inside him, and it wanted that money.

He hated the world. He hated the raw, screaming, structural injustice of it. The "cruel, close proximity" that allowed two boys of the same age to exist in the same city, one so full he could throw a fortune into a puddle and walk away, the other so empty he had to steal, and fail, for a single loaf of bread.

His hand, shaking with a cocktail of fury and desperate, animal need, darted out and grabbed the sodden cash. The bills were slick and cold, like dead skin. The act of taking it was a capitulation, a final surrender of his pride that sent a fresh wave of self-loathing through him, so strong it made him want to vomit. His anger was a hot, bitter stone lodging in his throat, a taste like pennies and bile. It was a different kind of anger from the fear-laced rage his father inspired. This was a quiet, systemic anger, the cold, bitter fury of the powerless. And as he shoved the wet, dirty money into his pocket, the paper clinging to his skin, he made a promise to that indifferent, grey sky: he would never be this weak again. He would never be the one in the puddle. Ever.

Months passed. The bruises faded and were replaced. The hunger ebbed and flowed. He never saw the boy again. The memory of him became a private thorn, a reminder of his own place in the world.

Then came his fifteenth birthday. It was a rare day, a fragile truce. His father was out, on a bender. His mother, using ingredients she had hoarded for weeks—a little flour, a bit of sugar, two precious eggs—had baked a small, lopsided cake. It was a sugary miracle, a small, sweet defiance in their grey world. It smelled like heaven. For a few hours, the house felt almost warm.

But, his father came home early.

The door slammed open, tearing the fragile peace to shreds. He was drunker than usual, his rage a tangible thing, a black fire in his eyes. He saw the cake on the table.

"Wasting money," he’d slurred, "on this? On this bastard?"

His mother stood in front of Mingi, her small body a shield. "Please," his mother begged, she was trembling as she stepped in front of the table. "It's his birthday. Just a little cake."

The man's arm swept out. The cake, their small, precious victory, hit the wall and slid to the floor in a pathetic, smeared heap. And for the first time in his life, Mingi didn't cower. The word 'bastard,' the sound of his mother's stifled sob, the sight of that ruined cake—it snapped something deep inside.

"You're the bastard," he’d spat, his voice shaking with a new, terrifying strength. "Leave her alone."

His father turned, his eyes narrowing in drunken disbelief. "What... did you say?"

"I said," Mingi repeated, standing up, his fists clenched at his sides, "I'm not the bastard. You are."

The slap was a crack of thunder. Mingi’s head snapped back, his cheek stinging, the taste of blood in his mouth. His mother shrieked, a sound of pure terror, throwing herself between them. "No! Please! Stop! Not him!"

His father shoved her. "Get out of my way, you stupid—" He never finished. She fell backward, a clumsy, awful stumble. Her head hit the sharp corner of the wall, where the plaster had chipped away to reveal the brick beneath. A sound like a muffled crack.

She didn't get up. She just... slid down. A pool of dark red began to spread, obscene on the grimy floor. Mingi was frozen, the smell of gin and ruined sugar and something new, something terrifyingly warm and metallic, filling his lungs.

He finally moved, fell to his knees beside her. Her eyes were unfocused, struggling to find him. She tried to lift a hand, her fingers smudged with blood instead of flour. "Run," she whispered in a wet rattle. "Mingi... go. Get... help..." He was sobbing, shaking his head, trying to hold her. Her fingers brushed his cheek, leaving a wet, red streak. "Happy... birthday..." she breathed. "I... I love you."

Her hand fell. Her eyes went vacant.

He ran. His hands and shirt were painted with her blood, hot and sticky. He burst out into the night, into the rain that had started again, screaming. "Help! Please, somebody help! My mother! She's hurt!"

He pounded on doors, his bloody fists leaving smears on the wood. "Please!"

Lights flicked on, then off. Faces appeared in windows, stared for a moment at the poor, hysterical, bloody boy screaming in the street, and then vanished. A wall of indifferent, closed doors. No one wanted to get involved. Not with that house. Not with that man.

He collapsed onto the wet pavement, the sobs ripping from him, it was like an animal sound of pure desolation. "Please... somebody..."

The rain, which had been soaking him to the bone, suddenly stopped.

Mingi looked up, his vision blurred by tears. The boy was there, standing over him, holding the same perfect, black circle of an umbrella. He crouched, his gaze landing on Mingi's bloody hands, then on his face. His calm, neutral expression finally flickered with something unreadable.

"Do you need help?" he asked.

Mingi bit his lip so hard he tasted his own blood. The pungent, coppery tang was a grounding shock, the only real thing in a world that had just dissolved into a nightmare. He didn't want his help. Of all the people in the world, not him. His throat closed, thick with a poisonous, burning pride. This was the ultimate humiliation, a thousand times worse than the sodden money in the alley. To be found at his absolute lowest—covered in his mother's blood, screaming and ignored in the gutter—by the one person who represented everything he was not. He wanted to scream at him, to hit him, to bloody that perfect, calm face and wipe the unreadable pity from it. He wanted to tell him to go away, that this wasn't a game, that this sacred, horrific moment was his and not for some rich kid to observe like a tourist.

His entire being recoiled from the act of asking. It felt like kneeling. It was an admission that his rage, his pain, and his entire worthless life were not enough to save the only person who mattered. To ask this boy was to admit that his world was bankrupt, that he was powerless, and that this clean, privileged, alien creature held all the cards.

But the image... God, the image of his mother, a broken doll in a growing, obscene pool of her own blood, crashed through the fragile, stupid wall of his pride. Her face, her whispered 'get help' It was a hammer blow. Pride was a luxury. Pride was a stupid, childish game. Pride couldn't stop the bleeding. Pride couldn't make her breathe.

A single, agonizing tear, hot with shame and terror, finally escaped, carving a clean path through the blood and grime on his cheek. It was a total surrender. He nodded, a jerky, spastic collapse of his neck. The plea tore from his throat, a raw scrape of sound that barely sounded human.

"My... my mom. He hurt her. She's bleeding."

The boy’s expression didn't change, but he acted instantly. He pulled out a sleek phone and dialed 911. His voice was calm, clear, and full of an impersonal authority that Mingi had never heard. He gave the address, stated the nature of the emergency—"domestic dispute, severe head trauma"—with chilling precision.

The sirens came, a wail that tore the night, but it felt agonizingly slow, as if time itself was stretching, mocking him. Mingi rode in the ambulance, a silent, shivering, bloody knot, vaguely aware that Yunho had followed, a clean, unruffled presence who simply appeared at his side and refused to leave. The hospital was a different kind of cold, a sterile, fluorescent-lit world of hushed voices and the antiseptic smell of bleach. He was shunted aside, a dirty piece of evidence, as they wheeled his mother through double doors that swung shut with a pneumatic sigh.

A doctor, his face a mask of practiced exhaustion, emerged much later. He spoke words that floated in the air: "massive subdural hematoma," "intracranial pressure," "did everything we could"—but all Mingi heard was the finality. She was pronounced dead on arrival. The words were a flat, clinical hammer blow, a sterile end to a life of quiet, unending suffering. She hadn't died in a warm bed, surrounded by love. She had died on a cold, dirty floor, because of a lopsided cake and a man who was an affliction.

The "justice" that followed was a second, more calculated violence. His father, suddenly sober and pathetic in a borrowed suit, wept for the judge. He painted a picture of a life of hardship, of the demon drink, of a tragic accident. "A misunderstanding," his state-appointed lawyer called it. "A simple push, your honor. A terrible, tragic accident."

Manslaughter, not murder.

Mingi, sitting numbly in the back row of the courtroom, an orphan in state custody, realized the court didn't see his mother; they saw a statistic, the predictable end for a drunkard's wife in a poor neighborhood. They saw a tragedy, not a crime. His father's plea—that he was under the influence of alcohol, that he hadn't meant it, that he was sick—was accepted. The system agreed. Three years. The worth of his mother's life, of fifteen years of terror and silent endurance, was thirty-six months, with a high probability of parole for good behavior. The gavel fell, a small, polite, wooden sound that sealed the profound, structural injustice of it all.

The funeral was a quiet, pathetic affair under a weeping grey sky. There was no one else. No family to come, no friends to mourn. Just Mingi, the state-provided chaplain who mumbled generic words about peace, and the men from the funeral home, eager to lower the cheap pine box and be done. He stood on the muddy grass, an island of cold grief, holding the small, framed photo of his mother—one of the few she had, a younger version of her with a tired smile that felt like a lie. He was numb, hollowed out, a building after a fire, the structure still standing but everything inside charred to ash. The rain was a cold, indifferent drizzle, a fitting punctuation.

Then, footsteps on the wet grass.

The young boy.

He didn't say anything, didn't offer any useless, pre-packaged words of comfort. He didn't hold an umbrella. He just stood beside Mingi, a silent, second shadow, letting the cold rain soak his expensive-looking coat, a quiet, profound act of solidarity that spoke louder than any words. He was simply present, a fixed point in Mingi's dissolving world.

"I'm going to kill him," Mingi whispered, the words an acid promise, not just to the raw earth of his mother's grave, but to himself. It wasn't a wish. It wasn't a possibility. It was a statement of fact, the only piece of his future that was clear, the only thing that made sense. "When he gets out. I'm going to find him, and I'm going to kill him."

He expected shock, or pity, or a lecture. He felt a hand slide into his. It was small, like his, but steady and warm, an anchor in the cold.

"I know," Yunho said, he was calm and certain as the rain. And then, "I'll help you."

It wasn't a question. It wasn't a moral judgment. It was a vow, a mirror to Mingi's own, offered without hesitation. It was the most terrifying and comforting thing Mingi had ever heard.

Mingi finally turned to look at him, really look at him. This boy who was an enigma, who appeared at the worst, most pivotal moments of his life like a fated angel. "Who are you? What's your name?"

"Yunho."

Mingi knew, in that moment, that their lives were now knotted together. The boy from the alley, the boy with the phone, the boy in the rain. This wasn't a debt. This wasn't friendship. It was something deeper, a dark, intricate knot of shared purpose, tied in blood and grief, that could never be undone.

Three years passed. The orphanage was a clean, cold, sterile place that bleached the color from his world. It was a grid of pale green walls, antiseptic smells, and the hollow echo of footsteps in long corridors. He was a ghost in it, a body existing on a regimen of bells and bland, starchy food.

Mingi had expected the boy—Yunho—to disappear, a strange anomaly, a fever dream. But he came. He showed up at the orphanage a week after the funeral, his clothes just as neat, his expression just as infuriatingly neutral.

"Why are you here?" Mingi had snapped, cornering him by the weak sapling in the barren courtyard. "To see the animal in his cage?"

Yunho just looked at the building, at the grey, barred windows. "I used to live here," he said. "This was my first placement. Room 8A."

Mingi’s carefully constructed world of resentment—the neat, clean box he'd put Yunho in—shattered. "What?"

"I was a ward of the state until I was eight," Yunho explained, still not looking at him. "Then I was adopted." He finally turned, and his eyes were not the eyes of a rich kid. They were the eyes of someone who had also waited for food, who had also been invisible. "My new family... they have a lot of money. But they're not... warm. They wanted a perfect son. I'm just good at pretending."

He was the "thief" from Yunho's own nightmares, Mingi would later realize, perpetually failing to be what his new world demanded.

The anger Mingi held for him didn't just fade. Rather, it collapsed and replaced by a stunned, confused recognition. We're just alike. The boy's words from the alley. It had been the truth. They were two sides of the same coin, two boys shaped by different kinds of poverty—one of the wallet, one of the soul.

They became friends in the way that only hopelessly lonely people can. It was an unspoken alliance. Yunho would visit, using his family's name to sign Mingi out for afternoons. They would go to Yunho's house. It wasn't a warm, happy home. It was a place so large and cold it felt like a mausoleum. The wallpaper in the halls was old, lifting in some places just like in Yunho's nightmares, and the air always smelled of floor wax and something sour. They didn't need to talk. They would sit in Yunho's cavernous room, Mingi reading, Yunho practicing piano, the notes precise and melancholy. That silence was better than any conversation Mingi had ever had. It was a shared, comfortable void, a respite from a world that was too loud and too sharp. Mingi no longer resented Yunho; he was, in the truest sense of the word, his only fixed point in a world that had come untethered.

Then the letter came. It was on cheap, beige paper, an official stamp from the corrections department. His father was being released months early before the end of his sentence. Good behavior.

The long-suppressed rage, the fever, returned instantly, as if it had only been dormant, waiting under a thin layer of ice. It was a physical jolt, a coiling of heat in his gut that made his hands shake. He felt betrayed by the system all over again, the same system that had valued his mother's life at a paltry three years. He showed the letter to Yunho on a park bench, the paper crumpling in his white-knuckled grip.

Yunho’s face remained unreadable, but his eyes were frozen, sharp with contempt. "Do you remember what you said at the funeral?" he asked.

"Every damn word," Mingi said.

"I have a plan," Yunho said, as if discussing homework. "He has no money. He'll go back to the house. It's condemned. The electricity is cut. There's a storm coming in tonight. A bad one. No one will be out. No one will hear anything." He looked at Mingi. "That place is a shell. Vagrants and copper thieves use it all the time. They're desperate. If a new parolee shows up, tries to claim the space, and interrupts them... they'll panic. They might kill him for a few dollars in his pocket. A robbery gone wrong. The police won't look twice. They'll be glad to close the file."

Mingi looked at his friend, at this calm, meticulous, terrifying boy who must have been planning this for three years. He simply nodded.

The night of his father's return, the old house was a tomb. It had been condemned, but he had nowhere else to go. The air was thick with dust, the smell of rat droppings and final, wet decay. Mingi sat on the sagging couch, a column of patient shadow in the viscous dark, and waited.

He heard the stumble, the fumbled keys, the drunken, slurred cursing at the door. "Useless... fucking... lock..."

His father lurched in, a shadow against the faint, watery light of the street. He reeked of cheap liquor and body odor. He was annoyed by the darkness. "USseless. Everything... useless."

He fumbled in his pocket and lit a match, the small sulfur-flare flaring. The candlelight illuminated his face—puffy, older, the skin sallow and blotched, but otherwise unchanged. The same weak mouth, the same dull, hateful eyes. Then the small light found Mingi, sitting motionless on the couch.

His father’s shock curdled into a familiar, snarling sneer. "You. What the hell are you doing here? Ungrateful brat. Come to welcome me home?" He lunged, his hand raised, a fifteen-year-old reflex, for a slap that had always landed.

This time, Mingi's hand shot out and caught the wrist.

The sound was a crisp, solid thud of flesh on flesh, a sudden, shocking stop. His father's eyes widened in the flickering match-light. He tried to pull away, but the grip was iron. He couldn't. The bones in his wrist grated.

Mingi slowly stood up. In three years, he had grown. The orphanage's meager but regular food, the hard, angry labor he'd volunteered for, had layered lean, wiry muscle onto his frame. He was no longer a small, angular child, all jutting bones and bruises. He was eighteen, and he was now a full head taller than this man. The candlelight, held in his father's trembling hand, cast Mingi's shadow over him like a shroud, swallowing him whole.

"Let go!" his father snarled but with a new, unfamiliar note: panic. He swung with his other hand, a wild, clumsy punch.

Mingi didn't block it. He absorbed it, turned with it, using his father's own clumsy, drunken momentum. A pivot, fluid and cold. He drove his elbow into the man’s solar plexus. The air whooshed out of his father in a wet, surprised gasp. As he doubled over, Mingi brought his knee up, a brutal, cracking impact against the man's jaw. The match flew from his hand, plunging the room back into near-darkness.

His father scrambled backward, falling over a broken chair, his limbs flailing like a panicked insect. He was sobbing, a high-pitched, terrified sound. "Help!" he screamed, his voice thin and reedy. "Help me! Someone!"

Mingi advanced, a shadow detaching from the shadows. "No one can hear you." He tilted his head. Outside, as if summoned by Yunho's perfect planning, the heavens opened. A heavy rain began to pour, drumming on the corrugated roof like a thousand angry fists, a wall of sound. "And even if they could," Mingi said in a quiet, cold blade, "no one would come. Not for you. Not for this house."

His father, desperate, scrambled for the only escape he could see—the cellar door at the back of the room. He crab-walked backward, his limbs flailing, and fumbled for the knob, pulling the door open to a rectangle of deeper blackness. It was the same cellar he used to lock Mingi in, the one that smelled of damp earth and rot, the place where he’d wait, small and terrified, for hours in the pitch black.

"I'm sorry!" he shrieked as he tried to get onto the steep steps leading down. "Mingi, please! It was an accident! I didn't mean it! I was drunk!"

Mingi advanced on him, not stopping, and looking down at the man he had feared his entire life. He saw it now. The thing that had terrorized him, that had murdered his mother, that had haunted his nightmares. It wasn't a monster. It wasn't a force of nature. It was just a man. A weeping, pathetic man trying to scuttle into the same hole he used as a prison.

The fear that had been Mingi’s skin for eighteen years evaporated, leaving a core of pure, unadulterated ice.

"This is for her," Mingi said calmly. He wasn't angry anymore. He was just... empty.

He reached the door just as his father got one foot on the top step. His father, seeing the cold, empty finality in his eyes, raised a trembling hand. Mingi didn't stop. He shoved him. A single, hard, piston-like push to the chest.

The man shrieked, a high, thin sound. His balance was already precarious. He stumbled backward into the open void. His arms windmilled, finding no purchase. He fell. The sound of him tumbling down the rotting cellar stairs was a wet, heavy series of thuds, followed by the sickening crunch of bone on the concrete floor. A low, gurgling moan rose from the darkness below.

Mingi stood at the threshold, his breathing ragged. The gurgling, pleading sound from the cellar was the only sound in the house. He had done it. He had broken him. He turned and fled, stumbling out of the house, a ghost escaping a tomb. He burst out into the storm, running, a high-pitched keening sound in his own ears.

He was unaware of the second shadow detaching itself from the alley across the street. Yunho watched him go, his face impassive in the rain. He waited until Mingi was gone, then slipped into the pitch-black, silent house, the small crowbar heavy in his hand. The only sound was the storm and the wet, agonized whimpering from the hole in the floor.

Yunho walked to the edge of the cellar steps and looked down. Below him, in the black, damp-smelling pit, Mingi's father was a broken heap, trying to drag himself with one arm. "Help... me... please..." he rasped, his eyes wide and white in the gloom, looking up at the new shadow.

Yunho found a half-broken chair and dragged it to the edge of the hole. He sat, the crowbar resting on his knee, and simply watched. He watched the man sob and plead, his voice growing weaker. After a long, silent minute, Yunho leaned forward, his face a pale, impassive mask. "People like you," he said, it was no longer than a calm whisper, "don't deserve to have children. You don't deserve to be called a parent."

The man's eyes widened in terror. "Please... I... I'll give you..."

Yunho stood up, lifting the crowbar. "This is for Mingi," he said. He walked down the steps, each footfall a deliberate, solid sound on the wood. He did not rush.

The man tried to scuttle backward, his broken body betraying him. He was sobbing. "No... no... please..."

Yunho reached the bottom of the stairs. He stood over the man like a heartless executioner. He raised the crowbar high.

"And this," Yunho said softly, to the whimpering creature at his feet, "is for his mother."

He brought it down. A wet, definitive thud. He struck again, and again, each movement economical and efficient, a grim, methodical erasure. The gurgling sound stopped. The only sound was the metal on bone and the roaring of the rain.

A few moments later, Yunho emerged from the cellar, breathing calmly. His expression was unchanged. He got to work, finishing the plan.

As Mingi walked all the way to the graveyard. The rain was a baptism, a chilling, scouring force, washing the grime and the smell of the house from him. He stood in front of his mother's grave, the sobs finally coming. They were not the thin, hot tears of grief or the scalding tears of rage. They were a pure, physical purge, a terrible, agonizing release. It was the sound of a knot, held tight in his stomach for eighteen years, finally, painfully, uncoiling. The constant, low-frequency hum of fear that had been the soundtrack to his entire life—it was gone.

He wasn't just free of his father. He was free of the cellar, free of the flinch, free of the small, terrified, bruised boy he had been forced to be. That boy, the one who lived in the grey fog behind his eyes, the one who counted floorboards while the world exploded, had died tonight, too, in the ruined, rotting house.

Mingi was no longer just a reaction. He was a person. He looked at the date carved on the stone. His birthday. A day he had hated, a day that smelled of iron and rage. But now, with the monster gone, perhaps it was no longer a monument to his violence. Perhaps, one day, it could just be a memory of her love.

"I'm free, Mom," he wept, his shoulders shaking as he dropped to his knees on the wet grass. "I'm finally free."

An hour later, long after the sobs had hollowed him out and become dry, shuddering breaths, a hand rested on his shoulder. Through the curtain of rain, he saw him. Yunho. He was holding the black umbrella, a familiar, almost fated silhouette against the storm. 

Mingi stared. This was the same boy he had once hated with all the ferocious, impotent rage in his small body. The privileged kid in the alley. The same boy who, with that same infuriating calm, had held an umbrella over him while he screamed on the curb, his hands sticky with his mother’s blood. The same boy who had just orchestrated a murder for him. The old resentment was a distant echo, a ghost of a feeling, long since burned away and replaced by this fierce, terrifying, and absolute bond.

He wasn't just a friend. He was a witness. An accomplice. The only other person on earth who knew the truth.

"Thank you," Mingi whispered, the words barely audible over the rain.

Yunho’s expression didn't change. He just held the umbrella steady, shielding them both, though it was far too late. "I told you I'd help," he replied. "We're the same, remember?"

Mingi looked at him, at this impossible, steady boy who had seen the fever in him and, instead of running, had helped him aim it. He finally, truly understood what Yunho had meant in that alley all those years ago. They were the same. Both trapped by the lives they were born into, both willing to climb out using any means necessary. He didn’t argue. He just nodded, a single, brisk dip of his chin. "Yeah. We are."

The next morning, the local news reported exactly what Yunho had planned, the broadcast a bland, passionless summary of the night's brutality. A parolee, returning to his condemned home in a drunken state, had apparently been set upon by unknown assailants. The authorities, citing evidence at the scene, suggested a robbery gone wrong. A violent struggle. A fatal fall down the cellar stairs. The scene was described as "messy"—the man’s pockets turned out, a back window shattered from the inside, the crowbar left gleaming on the floor—all the perfect, meticulous touches Yunho had added after Mingi had fled. The case was closed quickly, deemed another tragic data point in a forgotten neighborhood. No evidence, no witnesses.

And Mingi? He had an iron-clad, high-society alibi. He had been at the grand, suffocating home of his friend, Jeong Yunho. He had picked Mingi up from the orphanage hours before, and they had sat at the long, polished mahogany table for dinner. Yunho’s adoptive, influential parents—the same ones from Yunho's own nightmares, with their paper-thin air and sterile presence—had barely registered one more quiet, well-behaved boy at their table before retreating to their own wing of the house. Mingi's presence was a blip, a polite nod, an inconvenient but ignorable fact.

It was this casual, privileged indifference that Yunho had counted on. The system that had failed his mother so spectacularly, the one that had valued her life at a mere three years, had, with Yunho's chillingly, meticulous guidance, been perfectly and contemptuously manipulated to protect her son.

The lock on Halazia’s front door clicked shut, a sound of final, steely punctuation. San and Wooyoung were gone. The energy they had brought—a bracing, authoritative cold—vanished with them, leaving a vacuum.

The bar felt desolate again. The jukebox, by some miracle, had cycled to a slow, mournful blues track, all weeping guitar and whispered vocals. The rain lashed the windows, a persistent, rhythmic drumming that matched the throb behind Mingi’s temples. He and Yunho stood on opposite sides of the bar, the space between them the same disputed country they had almost come to blows over. Yunho was meticulously wiping the bar top with a rag, erasing the rings from their glasses.

Mingi slid back onto his stool. The silence was heavier than the argument had been. He cleared his throat, "Hey."

Yunho’s hands stilled, but he didn't look up. "Yeah."

Mingi swallowed, the whiskey and shame a bitter cocktail. "I... I'm sorry. For shoving you. And... for what I said."

Yunho finally looked at him. His eyes were clear, the anger gone, leaving only that familiar, deep exhaustion. "I'm sorry, too. I shouldn't have said it like that. Like it was a... a business decision." He tossed the rag onto the counter. "You're not collateral, Mingi. You're... you're it. There's no plan that works without you."

"Same," Mingi breathed, the word thick with everything he couldn’t articulate. "You're it for me, Yunho."

The admission hung in the air, fragile and absolute. The tension finally, truly, broke.

Yunho nodded once, a quick, definite movement. "Wait here."

"Where are you—"

But Yunho was already disappearing, not toward the door, but toward the small back kitchen Wooyoung used for prepping garnishes and bar snacks. Mingi watched him go, a confused frown settling on his face.

A moment later, a loud thunk echoed from the back, and the bar was plunged into absolute darkness. The jukebox died mid-wail. The neon sign outside the window ceased its blue tremor. Even the ambient hum of the coolers vanished. There was nothing but the sound of the rain and Mingi’s own, sudden, startled intake of breath. His hand instinctively went to his waist.

"Yunho?" he called out "What the hell? This isn't funny."

No answer. Just the darkness, thick and sudden, recalling a cellar, a locked door.

"Yunho, I swear to God—"

A small, warm light flickered to life in the kitchen doorway. A single, tiny point of flame, then another, and another. Yunho emerged from the blackness, walking slowly. He was holding something.

The scent hit Mingi first, a warm, impossible ghost in the cold, rain-washed air. Vanilla. Sweet cream. And a faint, delicate trace of almond.

Yunho was holding a small, round cake, the very same simple, white-frosted cake his mother had somehow managed to conjure from flour and hope every year. It was glowing, a small constellation of candles pressed into its surface.

He stopped in front of Mingi’s stool, the tiny flames illuminating his face, chasing the shadows from his eyes. His expression was impossibly soft. He began to sing, his voice quiet, a little rough, completely off-key.

"Happy birthday to you..."

Mingi just stared. He was frozen. He couldn't feel his hands. He hadn't just forgotten his birthday; he had actively buried it, piling years of grief and trauma on its grave. It was not a day for celebration. It was a day of ash. It was the day he'd lost her.

"Happy birthday..."

Yunho's voice didn't waver, even as Mingi's eyes began to burn.

"Happy birthday, dear Mingi..."

This man. This impossible, infuriating, steady man. He had remembered. He had listened to a story told once, years ago in a dark orphanage room, and he had remembered.

The song finished. The silence rushed back in, save for the rain. Yunho held the cake out.

"Make a wish, idiot. Blow them out."

Mingi looked from Yunho's face to the flickering candles. His throat was so tight he couldn't speak. He closed his eyes. The smell of burning wax and vanilla. He didn't wish for the heist to work. He didn't wish for money, or for safety. He made the only wish he had ever truly had, the one that had been sitting under his ribs since he was eighteen.

Let us be happy. Just us. Together. Please.

He opened his eyes and blew. The flames vanished in a single breath, plunging them back into darkness, a ribbon of sweet-smelling smoke rising in their place.

A beat passed. Then the thunk of the breaker, and the bar roared back to life. The lights were blinding, the jukebox restarting with an electronic screech. Mingi blinked, spots dancing in his vision.

When his eyes cleared, Yunho was standing right in front of him, having set the cake on the bar. He had that small, rare smile on his face, the one that never reached his eyes unless he was looking at Mingi.

"Happy birthday, Mingi."

Mingi's heart did a violent, painful lurch, a heavy thump against his ribs that stole his breath. It was the whiskey. It had to be. It was the shock, the sugar, the lack of sleep. It was the stupid, overwhelming relief. It couldn't be anything else.

He saw the smile, the softness in Yunho's eyes, the way the harsh bar light caught the rain still damp in his hair.