he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Kiana Khansmith
shark vs the universe
YOU ARE THE REASON
oozey mess
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
The Bowery Presents
No title available
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Misplaced Lens Cap
Xuebing Du
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Noah Kahan
roma★
ojovivo
Mike Driver
The Stonewall Inn
No title available
Cosmic Funnies
if i look back, i am lost
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Malaysia
seen from Philippines
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Austria
seen from Brunei
seen from United States
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Spain
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
@jacksisnotok
Masterlist + Introduction
Hi everybody! I'm Jacks, and I'm 21 years old. I started writing fanfiction many years ago but only just decided to start publishing. Please forgive me for any mistakes, I'm new to this and still learning!
Bias Groups: ATEEZ, SEVENTEEN Accepting Requests For: Mature content (must be an unanon ask, and have an age [18+] on your blog!), Fluff, Angst Accepting Oneshots For: Pretty much any member of any group! I will write mainly for ATEEZ and SEVENTEEN
Masterlist
it's so encouraging as a writer when people actually WANT to read what i write.
like you're freaky like me??? you like my brand of freak???
it makes me want to write more and i just find that really nice. i nearly teared up :')
Sweetheart, Illegal is My Middle Name Promo!
Title: Sweetheart, Illegal is My Middle Name
Written for A Midsummer Carat’s Dream collab by @studiosvt
Pairing: SlightlyCriminal!Soonyoung x FBestFriend!Reader
Genre: Idiots to lovers, Hoshi is mildly involved in some criminal activities, both reader and Hoshi are #clueless, crack, fluff, mild angst, smut
Summary: Kwon Soonyoung has been in love with you since he could remember. He believed in soulmates simply because of you. Now, as an adult whose career choice is certainly less than legal, he’s made it his life’s mission to provide you with every possible convenience just to say he loves you. You, on the other hand, are completely clueless to both his feelings and his job. What could possibly go wrong?
Warnings: 18+ MINORS GO AWAY, criminal activities, some drinking, mentions of drugs, Hoshi is #downbad, literal crack fic I’m not sorry, eventual smut
(Smut warnings below the cut)
Smut Warnings: Sex but sloppy style, whining Hoshi, he’s so vocal I can’t, so much cum, sweaty sex, multiple positions, multiple orgasms, fingering, oral sex (f. and m. receiving), sloppy kisses, body worship (come on we love a man who knows his place), just whatever nasty smut my brain can think of bc I’ll probably come back later and edit the tags since this is just a promo
something goofy i made in the process of my new banner lol
Sweetheart, Illegal is My Middle Name Promo!
Title: Sweetheart, Illegal is My Middle Name
Written for A Midsummer Carat’s Dream collab by @studiosvt
Pairing: SlightlyCriminal!Soonyoung x FBestFriend!Reader
Genre: Idiots to lovers, Hoshi is mildly involved in some criminal activities, both reader and Hoshi are #clueless, crack, fluff, mild angst, smut
Summary: Kwon Soonyoung has been in love with you since he could remember. He believed in soulmates simply because of you. Now, as an adult whose career choice is certainly less than legal, he’s made it his life’s mission to provide you with every possible convenience just to say he loves you. You, on the other hand, are completely clueless to both his feelings and his job. What could possibly go wrong?
Warnings: 18+ MINORS GO AWAY, criminal activities, some drinking, mentions of drugs, Hoshi is #downbad, literal crack fic I’m not sorry, eventual smut
(Smut warnings below the cut)
Smut Warnings: Sex but sloppy style, whining Hoshi, he’s so vocal I can’t, so much cum, sweaty sex, multiple positions, multiple orgasms, fingering, oral sex (f. and m. receiving), sloppy kisses, body worship (come on we love a man who knows his place), just whatever nasty smut my brain can think of bc I’ll probably come back later and edit the tags since this is just a promo
"oh my god i have so many ideas i'm gonna write all day"
*proceeds to rot in bed and read other people's fics*
Traveller || lc
(banner by @sailorsoons)
Traveller Khonsu!Chan x f! Reader
Written for the Sands of Time collab. Please check out the other works!
Genre: friends to lovers, dramady, bits of Egyptian God stuff, like two sentences of barely smut NSFW - minors DNI
Summary:
At night, Khonsu rules the dream realm. God of the Moon, Traveller, Protector - his titles and jobs are many during moonlit hours. When the moon sets, Khonsu is trapped - silenced and frozen - inside his mortal host. His mortal host, who is in love with his best friend - you. His spirit calls out for yours, and so Khonsu’s spirit calls you forth to the dream realm time and time again. He can’t stop it from happening - he and his host are too enmeshed. Unfortunately, the other spirits of the dream realm know you don't belong… and they want you out.
WC: 13k Warnings: minor character death, language, recreational drinking, kissing, fingering, penetrative sex, no use of Y/N A/N: thank you to @jihopesjoint for beta-ing and to @sailorsoons for doing 100% of the collab work!!
—
Twenty-six years ago
He is going to die, and soon.
His breaths rattle like reeds at the Nile’s edge. His pulse weakens, a trickle. His mind goes wispy, untethered.
Khonsu is almost sad. Of the hundred or so mortals who have housed his spirit, this one had earned his respect. He’d been an honest man, good to his family. He’d traveled and learned, which Khonsu appreciated. It could be boring, trapped inside a mortal.
The man gasps in another breath, raw and audibly arduous. Khonsu almost hopes his time will come more quickly. He’s fond of this host, doesn’t like to see him in pain.
His host lies in a hospital bed, crisp white linen up to his chest. Monitors beep around him - Khonsu has long wanted to smash them, the incessant noise driving him to insanity. But he is only a viewer inside his host - has no powers of old, or even the agency of movement like a mortal. He can only watch.
The man’s family has been in and out for days. Khonsu likes that they care. He’s glad his host is loved, and will be properly mourned.
Khonsu will be gone from that family too, when the time comes. They won’t know, though. He won’t be mourned or missed. None of the mortals know he’s watched them through his host’s eyes all these years. He’s a bit fond of them, too - the rowdy children who are now grown and greying themselves, their mother with her soft and loving gaze, the grandchildren who used to screech and laugh now quiet with the solemnity of the hospital room and the weight of their teenage troubles.
Another gasp - less of a breath this time. More of a twitch. The time is upon him.
You were a fine host, Khonsu thinks warmly. Now you get to rest.
They will speak soon, and Khonsu finds himself almost excited for it. Khonsu will be the one who shepherds this man’s soul across the sky, following the trail of the moon, to bring him into the afterlife safely. This is what Khonsu has done since time immemorial, just one of his many tasks as a god of the moon.
And then, with this soul safely deposited and sent on its way, Khonsu will awaken inside a new host, and the cycle will begin again.
The man’s throat spasms. No air is brought in. His heartbeat, weak thumps, quiets even more, and finally stills - its first chance to rest in over eighty years.
Khonsu stands up straighter and waits to welcome the soul of his mortal host - waits to carry him home.
—
Now
Chan forces a bright smile as his friends sing him Happy Birthday. He’s grateful that they’re here, knows he’ll have fun tonight.
He’s just tired. Always.
Sleep studies found nothing. Vitamins and supplements and regular exercise don’t touch it. The exhaustion that dogs him is as part of him as his arteries.
He blows out the candle without making a wish, though he pretends to think of one. It isn’t worth it to make a wish. Wishing won’t do shit for him.
The room is still dark - the lights were turned out when the candles on the cake were lit. His friends move around him noisily, shapes in the dark. Chan lifts his eyes and finds you, right across from him, your eyes on him.
You smile, happy. He smiles back, big, and hopes he’s selling it. His heart twists.
No… there’s no use wishing. If you want him, he doesn’t want it to be because he wished it.
His love for you is as part of him as his arteries.
—
“Hey, are you okay?”
Chan’s body is warm next to yours as he leans close.
“Totally fine,” you say, watching as Mingyu passes by with a garbage bag in hand, collecting abandoned cups and paper plates. “Why?”
“You look funny,” Chan says seriously, peering at you.
“It’s late,” you offer.
In his quest to clean the living room, Mingyu pauses, a red solo cup freezing in its journey from floor to garbage bag.
“He’s right,” he notices. “Your eyes are all glassy. Are you high?”
“Did you see me go sequester myself in the basement with Vernon and Seungcheol?” you snap. “Of course I’m not high.”
Your friends look at you silently, both still. You swallow, feelings off-kilter and watched.
You snapping at them is not common, and you all know it.
“Sorry,” you murmur, dropping your gaze. “Maybe I’m hungover early or something. I guess I have a bit of a headache.”
Now that they mention it, now that you’re stopping to take stock of what your body is telling you, you realize you do have a full-blown headache. You wince; once you’ve noticed, you can’t stop noticing. It pulses behind your eyes, and you press your fingertips to where it hurts. The pressure doesn’t help.
“We should probably get you home,” Chan says, and you can hear his effort to sound off-handed.
Chan’s living room feels uncomfortable, suddenly - too small, a little too warm, the way you curl forward illuminating an ache across your shoulders that hadn’t been there an hour ago. You shift, seeking comfort or relief, but none comes.
Mingyu abandons the garbage bag and digs for his keys in his jacket pocket, face scrunching as they elude him. He was your ride tonight. Beside you, Chan watches you carefully, silent.
“I’m fine,” you assure him, no bite in the words this time.
He tries to smile at you, but worry mars it. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, “but you look pretty bad. And I never think that.”
“Gee, thanks,” you mutter with an eye-roll, missing the compliment entirely.
“Come on, Typhoid Mary,” Mingyu says, keys in hand.
Chan snorts, and you elbow him.
“You guys are being so annoying,” you protest. “I don’t even feel that bad.”
You can already tell, though, as you pull your jacket on, that this is no longer true. Along with the pounding pain in your head, your stomach suddenly twists in a way that makes you grateful you’d gone easy on the drinks.
“Humor us,” Chan says gently, his hand hovering near your elbow as you head towards the door. “I think you might have a fever.”
It’s not like Mingyu to baby you - not the way Chan always does - but he circles your block twice until a spot opens for him to pull up right in front of your building instead of letting you walk from the corner as he usually does.
“Get some rest,” he advises as you close the door. Above you, a crescent moon gains light against the late-night-early-morning sky.
Normally, catching the moon in all its glory is one of your favorite things; it’s a long-standing joke between you and Chan to stop and point it out with a dramatic, “The moooooooooon,” with the same cadence that the Toy Story aliens croon, “The claaaaaaaaaaw".
Tonight, you barely notice the glowing sliver in the sky above as you make your way through your brain fog and into your building.
The lobby lights are glaring and dizzying as you cross quickly to the elevator. You will your stomach to settle, squint your eyes against the bright overheads, and pray for the machinery to move a little quicker.
Your apartment is dark and silent when you swing the door open, an instant relief. You drop your bag in the doorway without ceremony, fish your phone out of your pocket, and then weave your way to the bathroom.
You dig the digital thermometer out of the medicine cabinet behind the mirror and sit heavily on the closed toilet lid as you press the thermometer under your tongue and wait.
By the time it beeps, your eyes have already drifted shut.
The thermometer confirms what you already suspected - you’ve spiked a fever.
You’re too exhausted for a full shower, so you wash up as well as you can at the sink, brush your teeth, and head out to the living room. You pause in the kitchen to grab a can of flavored water, downing a small fistful of pain reliever and fever reducer.
You don’t have the energy to make it to your bedroom; you shuffle out of your restrictive jeans and collapse on the couch, pulling a blanket off the back of it. You toss and kick it around until it’s covering you from toes to shoulders.
You exhale, eyes closed, colors dancing and swirling against your eyelids. Your entire body hurts - your arms, your hips, your calves. Your headache pounds, and you realize with a sinking feeling that your throat feels like there’s glass in it when you swallow.
It occurs to you that you might be really sick. For the first time, you start to feel a little afraid.
You blearily open your eyes and take in the dark room. Floating swatches of color swirl through the darkness, shapes in corners become lurking figures through the eyes of your fever. You reach out and slap at the tv remote on the coffee table, grateful when the room lights up in blues and whites, banishing anything your imagination might have conjured.
You close your eyes again, only partly listening to the television as it plays some fuzzy, 1990’s archaeology documentary. On the floor, still in the pocket of your jeans, your phone buzzes. With a groan, you reach down and feel for it blindly, your fingers tapping around the floor until they find the fabric. By the time you bring the phone close enough to your face to read the screen, the caller has given up.
You tap at it, waiting as it rings back whoever had tried to call you.
“Did you make it home?”
If you weren’t feeling so awful, you might find it sweet that Chan is so worried.
“Mingyu watched me walk into the building,” you point out. “What could have happened between the front door and my apartment?”
Chan says your name flatly.
You smile a little, despite your current state of misery. “I am on my couch.”
Something rustles on the other line. “How do you feel?”
“Terrible,” you admit. “I have a pretty high fever - I checked.”
The rustling stops. “Do you need me to bring you anything?”
“I took a bunch of meds and I am hydrating,” you recite.
“Okay, good,” he says, his voice softer now, somehow tender. “Get some sleep, then.”
You can, in fact, feel sleep creeping over you, your heavy eyes fluttering shut even as you try to keep them on your phone screen. “Hope I didn’t infect you guys,” you murmur.
“Don’t worry about us,” Chan says. “I just wish I could do something to help you feel better.”
You don’t remember hanging up, but when you open your eyes again, your phone screen is dark and the room is silent but for the documentary still playing on the tv. You reach out to your coffee table, chug some water, then roll over and close your eyes again, your whole body shuddering and shivering even as you feel sweat gathering anywhere it can.
Something in you wonders if you should go to a walk-in urgent care clinic, or even call one of your friends to come make sure you don’t die.
You don’t have the energy for either option. Instead, you keep your eyes closed, the blanket from the back of the couch suddenly way too warm. You shift, trying to use your feet to move it lower on your shoulders.
The entire room goes bright and hot at once and you whine in frustration, kicking at the blanket in earnest and rolling back over to face your living room. You reach for the remote, assuming the bright light is from the television.
You freeze in place, one hand outstretched in midair. The television isn’t there. Nor is the coffee table.
The light is not from the tv screen, and the heat is not from the fever. Your living room has fallen away, replaced with blazing sun in a cloudless blue sky above you and endless, infinite rolling sand below you. There’s nothing but sand and sky for as far as you can see.
Your breath catches and you scramble to stand, heart pounding and a wave of dizziness accompanying the panic and confusion that are suddenly warring for attention inside your head.
As soon as you’re on your feet, sand blazing hot under the soles of your feet, the couch vanishes too. Just - poof. Gone.
You feel your pulse spike even higher as you remember that you were sleeping pantsless, but you seem to be covered in a rough linen than hangs loose on your body and flaps in the breeze. You touch it gingerly, disbelieving, and the fabric is tough and textured under your fingertips. Real, despite the fact that this cannot be.
Your breaths come in panicked gasps, a second wave of dizziness washing over you as your mind tries to make sense of it.
“Do not fear,” a voice says, and you jump, looking around for a source. You see nothing, no one, save for the distant form of a single bird, gliding closer.
You blink again and the bird is no longer in the sky. A man - or something like it - stands before you in the sand, draped in off-white cloth and adorned with beads and jewels. His head belongs to a falcon, his intelligent, all-black eyes fixed on you. Your eyes snag on the frighteningly sharp hook at the end of its beak.
This is a dream, you think, your heart galloping and stuttering against your chest. A fever dream.
The falcon heads dips in agreement “This is a dream,” his voice says, though his mouth - beak? - does not move. His voice is deep and booming and seems to come from all directions, not from the body before you.
“This is a dream,” he repeats. “You are asleep. Regardless, I am real. This place is real.”
You blink at him. And then you faint.
You watch the scene as if from above - your crumpled body unmoving on the sand, the strange bird-man looking over you.
Then, he moves, holding his staff aloft over you, tipping his head back towards the sky, and letting out a bellow that rolls across the land like a sonic wave. You flinch, though you feel nothing now that you are floating like this.
Did you die? Are you a spirit now?
The being continues to speak - a language you don’t understand. His voice rolls over the distant sand dunes, rains down from the unwrinkled blue sky, rises up through the grains of sand. His voice vibrates and breathes like the earth itself, echoing and rolling like thunder, like the crack of a falling forest majesty, like the roar of ocean waves desperate to break through rock. The hairs on your arms rise in alarm.
He throws his hands wide as his voice crescendos even further. The sky seems to split, a black rip in fabric stretching above you, and everything shakes and trembles, worse than any earthquake you’ve ever lived through.
Horror crawls over you, sharper than fear. You feel a scream tear up your throat, but it comes out soundless. You remain just a spirit, uselessly watching the world come undone around your motionless body below you.
The falcon-headed man bellows again, pounds his staff into the sand, and the shaking goes still. There is a single, blinding flash, and when your eyes have adjusted again it is as if the rip across the sky never happened. Unmarred blue reaches in all directions, as if it had been that way all along.
The stillness and silence seem louder than the roar of power that had deafened you only seconds ago. Your ears ring with the quiet.
The man - creature - lowers his arms and turns to you - you, the spirit, the hovering nothing, your physical body crumpled in the sand.
“The demon is banished,” he tells you, his voice rolling like a summer storm across an open field. “For now.”
Demon? You cannot answer him. You do not have a mouth, do not have a voice.
He dips his head again, as if nodding. “You will be well again.”
He is no longer standing before you; a bird grows smaller against the horizon. You blink against the glare of the sun, and you hear his voice echo one last time, coming from all around you - just your name. Nothing else.
There is something familiar and tender in how his voice wraps itself around the syllables of it.
—
You awaken drenched in sweat, the blanket so tangled between your legs that you can’t pull your feet free without concentrated effort. The morning sun lights your apartment in a familiar and comfortable thin, yellow light.
“What the ever-loving fuck,” you whisper, sitting up and pulling at the blanket until your feet are freed.
You sit back against the couch, looking around and trying to settle yourself from what has to be the weirdest dream you’ve ever had. Your pulse was racing as you woke, but it slows now as you calm down bit by bit.
Last night you’d been almost too sick to take care of yourself - sick enough to warrant a trip to the doctor. But this morning, as you take stock of how bad your situation is, you realize - it isn’t bad.
You feel… almost fine.
Your head isn’t pounding, and the deep ache in your joints is gone - good signs that your fever passed already, you think. You drink the rest of your flavored water from yesterday, grimacing as you realize the carbonation’s gone flat, and then make your way to the bathroom.
You take your temperature again and confirm it - your fever is gone. You take the shower you needed last night, get dressed, and brew coffee. As it percolates, you sit at the kitchen table, assessing your situation. You feel a bit weak, a bit spacey, not quite well - but definitely better.
You remember a bit abruptly to check your phone - and sure enough, you’ve got missed texts. Your battery is also clinging to life.
Late last night, Mingyu had sent you “i TOLD you you looked bad! rest up” to which you send back an eye-roll emoji before moving on.
There is nothing to move on to. You frown, realizing you’d expected messages from Chan, realizing that you are now disappointed that they aren’t there.
Ridiculous.
Mingyu had been the one to interrogate you about Chan, not that long ago. You’d been the last two at the bar, finishing the last of your beer before heading out. The late hour, the drinks, and the dark had given the moment a liminality, and you blame this for Mingyu feeling brave enough to say the thing that no one else would.
The three of you - you and Chan and Mingyu - have been friends since undergrad, ages ago. Over the years, the friendships have shifted, grown - made room for Post-Grad work, new jobs, internships in other cities, new relationships and consequent break-ups (though, none with one another).
But that night at the bar when Mingyu had asked, full of good intention, “So… what’s up with you and Chan?” you’d frozen. You didn’t know the answer - that was the truth.
You and Chan love each other. Sometimes you’re certain that you and Chan love each other. But no one ever pulls the trigger.
You don’t know why.
Maybe you’re both content with how it is. Maybe you’re both waiting. Maybe you’re both cowards.
I don’t know sounds like a lie, though. Mingyu hadn’t bought it.
“We’re the same as we’ve always been,” you’d argued. “That’s what’s up with me and Chan.”
Mingyu had given you a side-long look that could only be described as withering.
“My question remains the same,” he said flatly.
“Me and Chan are just… me and Chan,” you’d said, and that was the only explanation you could give. The only explanation you have, even now. You and Chan are just… you and Chan. Best friends, effortlessly close, way too deep in each other’s business. That’s all it is - that’s all it’s ever been.
“You have to take chances sometimes,” Mingyu had scolded, exasperated, and you’d given him the gift of your middle finger prominently in view as you tipped your glass skyward and downed the remainder of your drink.
“I don’t have to do anything,” you grumble to yourself now in your empty kitchen, remembering the conversation sourly.
There’s a muffled thump near your door and you jump, startled, turning to look at your entryway in accusation. The thump comes again, followed by a distinguishable curse. You’re already moving, smiling, knowing what you’ll find when you open the door.
Chan looks at you sheepishly, a bit breathless, balancing a tray of to-go coffees in one hand and a bag of something greasy in the other hand.
“Hashbrowns,” he explains, when you eye the bag.
“There are better ways to get my attention than kicking my door,” you inform him mildly, and reach out to take the tray of drinks before he can drop them. You’ve been through this before.
“Hands were full,” he pants, gratefully allowing you to take the coffees and following you in. “The stairs were particularly challenging, too.”
“Might be a sign that you need to start jogging again,” you say, taking the seat you’d just vacated a moment ago.
He scrunches his face in distaste. “No thanks,” he says, and starts passing you food.
For a few moments you eat and drink in silence, a routine well-rehearsed over many years. Then, Chan taps at your foot with his under the table.
“I notice you aren’t on death’s door this morning,” he says. “I wasn’t sure you’d be able to get up to let me in. You sounded awful on the phone last night.”
“Weird, right?” you ask. “After we hung up, I was sure it was over for me. I feel pretty normal today, though. It just… went away.”
“You must’ve slept it off,” Chan murmurs, glancing at a text that had popped up on his phone. You recognize his boss’s name, even upside down. Chan answers it quickly, stashes his phone back on the table, and rummages in the paper bag he’d brought for more food.
“I guess,” you say, swirling your coffee around in the paper cup.
Chan watches you carefully, something intent and focused in his gaze that puts to mind the eyes of the bird-headed man in your dream. It comes back to you in a flash, the sensations of all-encompassing desert heat, sand beneath your feet, the sharp and insistent sound from the bird. It had sounded, in a way, like a war-cry.
“I had a weird-ass dream,” you say, remembering. Burning sand, blinding sun. A voice that came from everywhere.
“A high fever will do that,” Chan notes.
“I’m sure that was it,” you muse. “I was, like, burning hot in the dream - probably was in real life, too.”
You remember the bird-thing saying, This place is real.
Chan’s lips go a bit thin, his eyes on the breakfast in his hands, but then he takes another bite and it’s hard to tell if you imagined it or not.
“What?” you ask.
He shakes his head, meaning, It’s nothing.
“Chan,” you say flatly, and poke his shin with your toes.
He smiles sheepishly at you. “I just wish you didn’t live alone, sometimes. Like last night.”
“You offering to split rent with me?” you tease.
“I’d love to,” he says dryly. “Please let me.” It lands like sarcasm, but you get the niggling feeling that you’ve missed the joke.
“I don’t think we’d make very good roommates,” you muse.
“No,” he agrees. “I think that would effectively kill the friendship.”
You snort. You’re sure he means because you’d drive each other crazy, but you can think of a hundred very different reasons that having Chan under the same roof at all times would definitely kill your friendship. You can’t even imagine sitting on the couch while he was in the shower. You’d go insane.
“Couldn’t agree more,” you tell him.
—
You go to bed early that night, nervous that you’ll wake up feeling worse again if you don’t get enough rest. Sleep takes you quickly, the feeling of it sticky in your head as it claims you bit by bit. You dream of water, of blinding sun.
You blink, and you aren’t dreaming anymore. Everything is as it was last night, when the fever was claiming you - you stand on burning sand, your pajamas replaced with linen dress, the heat so unbearable that you feel your pulse start to race in alarm.
You blink, and the falcon-headed being stands before you. He asks you something, his voice coming from all directions, but you’re gasping in the heat, your breaths drowning out even his otherworldly voice. Your vision is starting to narrow to a pinpoint of black, and you’re sure you’ll faint just like you did last time.
“It’s too hot,” you gasp. “I can’t - I can’t think -”
You blink, and a cool breeze brushes your cheeks affectionately. The being blinks back at you, quick and inquisitive, certainly not quite human.
“Are you well now?” he asks. His voice comes from every direction, not his mouth, but it is gentler than last night - not booming thunder, not the crack of tectonic shift.
Behind him, water rushes mightily. He has transported you to a riverbank. Or, you assume that this relocation was his doing.
“This is better,” you say, trying to breathe. “Where am I? Why am I back here? What are you? What’s happening?”
His head cocks to the side as he considers you and your barrage of questions.
Last night, he’d told you that this was both dream and reality. You aren’t sure if you believe it.
“You are here because I have called your spirit here,” his voice tells you, after some time. “This is my world.”
The words mean nothing to you. “I don’t understand,” you whisper, overwhelmed by the many questions you have currently unanswered. You don’t feel like you can organize them all, put them in a neat line, make them make sense.
“My world, here, is for dreams and spirits. Mortal bodies cannot come here,” he says calmly. Behind him, the river gurgles and slaps, whitecaps visible farther from the shore you stand on. “Only their spirits, and only if summoned.”
I am in a realm of dreams, you catalogue immediately. I was summoned here.
His head tilts the opposite way as if he has heard your thoughts. This seems to mean yes.
“Why?” you manage, the word a bit breathy, thin from fear and confusion. You know it’s a dream, and yet you can’t help but take it seriously, try to unravel it. You find yourself unable to accept the dream for what it is and enjoy the mystery.
“The spirit of my mortal host calls to your spirit. He is called to you, and so I am called to you. I cannot separate from it.”
“Your… mortal host,” you repeat hollowly.
He inclines his head again. “When he wakes, I am held within him, only able to watch. When he sleeps, I come here - where I have my power again.”
Fear causes goosebumps to rise along your arms and legs, and you fight a shiver. “I don’t… understand.”
“I am not here to bring harm to you,” he promises. “In fact, I have been called Protector by many.”
You stand silently, letting those words process for a moment. By many. This being is - or, was - known to others.
“By humans? Mortals?” you clarify, and he nods.
“Yes. They had many names for me - Protector, Healer, Traveller, He Who Feasts on Hearts,” he answers, the word full and deep in his echoing voice.
“That last one’s a little auspicious,” you mutter, eyeing him warily.
He seems entirely not to care, just watches you, his body uncannily still.
You look around. It’s a dream, you remind yourself. It is a mantra to keep you calm. Just a dream. Just a dream. You are not actually transported to a spirit realm - you are just dreaming. You are not brought here because a non-human entity says he is called to you - that is just a dream speaking. This is not a puzzle you must solve - it is only a dream.
“What happened yesterday? The sky was all dark - and your voice was so loud -”
“An evil spirit took you,” he says, blinking twice. “Couldn’t you feel it in your world?”
You think about this. “I was ill,” you reason. “I felt the fever.”
His beak dips, allowing this. “Outside of the dream realm,” he says, “that is how it would seem. The demon attacks your consciousness - if you are dreaming, it will find you here. If you are awake, it will manifest in your world.”
You catalogue again. I got the fever because my spirit was being attacked by a demon? The fever broke because the demon was sent away?
You watch him. His hands - human hands - fold together calmly above his navel. “You sent it away?” you confirm. That’s what it seemed like, from your perspective. But you are unsure of everything.
“For now,” he says. “It knows you are here now - you are a spirit that does not belong. It will return as long as you do.”
Your eyes flutter closed and you breathe slowly - in for four, holding for four, out for six.
“Am I in danger? Can it really hurt me?”
Traveller looks at you evenly, his black eyes unreadable. “Yes,” he allows. “But when the demon comes, I will send it away. I will protect your spirit. That is my purpose - one of my tasks.”
“Can you make it go away… like, forever?” you ask. “Can we… defeat it, or stop it somehow?”
“No,” he says. “The dream realm is its home, where it belongs. You are the one who does not belong here. It will stop attacking only when you stop coming.”
Your heart stutters behind your ribs. “But I can’t stop coming - I don’t know how - you said you called me here!” you splutter.
He regards you so stoically that you feel judged, hunching your shoulders to shrink yourself smaller, fighting to keep your breathing even. I want to wake up, you think.
“I cannot help calling you here any more than you can help answering the call,” he says finally, and though he’d looked frightening as he thought about it, his tone seems apologetic.
You look up at him, wide-eyed, frightened. “There’s no way to make it stop? Will I just be attacked in my dreams, forever?”
That is, assuming any of this is real enough to be true.
“There is a way,” he admits. “But you must discover it for yourself.”
“What? By myself? Why?” you demand, and the being vanishes in a blink and reappears on your other side, power and fury radiating from him so tangibly that the grounds quivers below your feet.
“It is a test,” he booms, his voice suddenly coming from the sky like thunder now that he’s been angered. You fight the urge to cower, to cover your head like in an earthquake. “I will decide if you are worthy.”
You struggle against your wild fear, your heart racing and your breathing coming too quick.
This is only a dream.
“What will happen when I wake up?” you ask desperately. “Will I remember this?”
How can you solve the puzzle, pass the test, if the dream slips from your mind like smoke, the way most dreams do when you wake?
He moves so quickly you barely see more than a streak of ivory and brown, stopping face to face with you, his falcon’s beak frighteningly close. You step back instinctively, putting more space between you.
“You must,” he says insistently. “Now.”
“What?” you utter, confused and frightened again.
“You must wake up.”
You obey without trying, blinking in the darkness of your bedroom. You can still feel the breeze of the riverside, can still hear the babbling of the running river.
No, that running water isn’t from the fading dream - it’s from your bathroom.
“Shit,” you hiss, flicking on your bedside lamp and shuffling towards the bathroom.
Water pours out of the ceiling tiles, and you stare at it in dumbfounded disbelief. It pools on the tile floor, stretching from the edge of the bathtub clear to the door. Under your feet, it’s beginning to affect the hallway carpet, which squishes slightly beneath your toes.
You grab a few towels from the linen closet and try to make a little barrier at the bathroom’s edge, then go back for your phone to call your Super. Behind you, the water pours as steadily as rainfall.
Traveller’s voice echoes in your mind, willing you to wake up - because he knew your mortal world needed your attention.
—
Chan knows a lot about you. He’s had a lot of time to learn.
He knows how you take your coffee - sugar’s a must but you’re extremely unpicky when it comes to milk versus cream.
He knows that you can only stay hydrated by using electrolyte packets because you won’t drink plain water.
He knows that you’re not a bad cook, that you understand the art of it, but that you hate being stuck at the stove or a cutting board - and you’d rather lick glass than stand and wash pots and pans in the sink.
He knows that nothing makes you happier than a dish with noodles, and that you’d eat your body weight in those little gummy Nerds clusters if no one intervened.
He knows that the sound you make when you take your first sip of coffee or take your first bite of noodles makes him feel like his heart is getting an erection.
(“You like her,” Soonyoung had said through a scrunchy, disgusted face, the only time Chan had been drunk enough to voice this thought. “And please don’t ever say it like that again.”)
He knows that you’re happiest in hoodies, that your fingers and toes turn pale and numb when they get chilly because of a circulation problem you inherited from your mother, that you can only sleep with a fan on even in the dead of winter.
He knows that you love thunderstorms, hate driving in the city, tolerate your little brother, don’t tolerate your little brother’s group of idiot friends.
He knows that you earned your last promotion by pulling almost a month of all-nighters, that you’d cried four nights before it happened because you were convinced all that hard work was going to be for nothing, that you aren’t even sure you like your field and that you consider leaving it all the time.
He knows you’re scared of clowns, spiders, and parking garages. He knows that he’d kill a million spiders for you if it made you feel safer in his world.
(“You like her,” Mingyu had told him with an eye-roll, how many years ago? He isn’t sure.)
He knows your favorite color-food-sweater-song-season.
He knows he has dreams that you’re in danger - dangling from a cliff, in a plane about to crash, screaming from the window of a burning building - and he wakes panicked, heart racing, hands reaching for you when you’re miles away, tucked safely in your own bed.
He knows he loves you.
He just doesn’t know how you feel.
So, in the end, he doesn’t know enough.
Tonight, he dreams that you’re drowning. Your feet kick frantically and one hand presses through the churning water towards him, desperate, but he can’t reach it no matter how hard he tries.
He screams your name when your hand finally slips beneath the surface, and he wakes himself up with this shout.
His room is dark and quiet around him, and he breathes a moment before reaching for his phone in annoyance. He’s been sleeping like shit lately - waking up often, feeling exhausted from the second his alarm goes off, as if he didn’t even rest. It’s starting to get to him.
It’s almost five in the morning, but still pitch black outside. He figures he’ll just scroll around on social media for a little, but when his screen comes to life he sees missed texts.
You: guess why I’m awake :)
You: if you guessed “the upstairs neighbor’s shower is leaking through the floor and there is a waterfall coming out of my ceiling” you’d be right!!!
Chan blinks, brings the screen closer to his face, checks the time-stamp on the texts. Only minutes ago.
He calls you.
“Why are you up?”
He can hear the sound of water in the background.
“Maybe my Bestie Senses were tingling,” he says. “Did you call your Super?”
“Yeah,” you tell him glumly. “He’s on his way to turn the water off. Then, I guess the maintenance workers will be in and out all day to like… I don’t know. Fix the actual problem, replace my ceiling tiles, hopefully replace the wet carpet outside the bathroom door?”
“I’ll come get you.”
You laugh, and the sound hurts Chan’s feelings, somehow. It feels like a rejection.
“What would that accomplish? Just stay in bed, Chan. This doesn’t need to ruin your day too.”
“You can get a few more hours of sleep while the maintenance team does their thing,” he reasons. “I’m awake anyway. Grab your stuff for work tomorrow - I’ll head over.”
Your hesitation is palpable, but he ignores it. “I’ll be there in fifteen,” he promises - or warns - and then hangs up.
—
“Yeah, this is fucked,” Chan says from your bathroom doorway, peering at the mess. Water still drops from the ceiling - though the waterfall has stopped, so the Super must have turned the source off.
“Yes, I am aware,” you huff. He turns away, takes your overnight bag from your hands, and heads to the door. You follow, exhausted and frustrated.
You ride back to his place in silence - even the stereo is turned down so low that you can only barely hear the songs.
When he parks, you both stay still for a moment.
“You didn’t have to do this,” you say quietly. “Like, I appreciate it. But you didn’t have to.”
“Yes, I am aware,” he parrots back at you, and you aren’t sure if you imagine the edge of sarcasm to it.
Inside, he sets himself up on the couch, tells you to get ready for work quietly, and then pulls the blanket over his head. He’s snoring before you even get into his bedroom.
You’ve been in Chan’s room a million times, but usually not alone.
You’re still in the pajamas you’d been wearing at home, so you plug in your phone, reset your alarms, and slide into bed. Chan’s bed.
It smells like him. When you close your eyes, it feels like him. Having his blankets over your shoulders feels like, maybe, how being in his arms might feel. Safe, comfortable.
At home, before Chan came to get you, you were scared to go back to sleep. Scared that you’d get pulled back into the dream realm, back to Traveller - a frightening something who roared that he is testing you, expecting you to solve a puzzle you barely understand. You were scared you’d get pulled back to the place where an evil spirit wants to eradicate you because it knows you don’t belong, like the body’s immune system going after a rogue cell.
You press your face to Chan’s sheets, breathe him in, remind yourself that you are safe, that he is here.
It takes quite a while, but eventually you fall asleep alone in Chan’s bed, and blessedly, you do not dream of anything.
—
You get ready for work quietly, as requested, in Chan’s non-flooded bathroom. When you leave for work, he’s still snoring.
Your morning goes entirely as expected, save for the few phone calls you have to take from your building’s Super. He informs you that it’ll be three days until the repairs to your floor and ceiling are done. You are technically allowed to be there, but that’s your only bathroom, and there will be maintenance members in and out until it’s done, and the bathroom is connected to your bedroom. It feels weird, the idea of being home while strangers traipse back and forth through the place, with nowhere to go that’s completely out of their way.
You mull over what to do as you walk to lunch - the park where you meet Chan every Thursday. There’s a lady with a baby stroller on Your Usual Bench, so you press further in and sit down on an empty one. It’s a beautiful day - sunny and clear, not too hot. The park is full of people walking, jogging, sitting around, riding bikes. It puts you in a good mood, despite the shitshow the night before.
“Any update on the Great Flood?” Chan drops heavily beside you on the bench, an iced coffee in his hand.
“Did you eat?”
“Yes, Mom.” He rolls his eyes.
“Don’t call me that. Gross.”
He sends you a cheeky smile, but you mentally note that his eyes are blood-shot. “Yes, I ate. How’s your apartment? Hear anything?”
You fill him in, adding, “I can probably sleep there, since the maintenance guys will be gone at night. But it’s weird that they’ll be coming in and out all day.”
“Stay with me.”
“Chan.” You give him a flat look.
“I’m serious,” he says.
“I can’t accept that offer,” you tell him, unease squiggling in your belly. “It’s too much.”
“I’ve always taken care of you,” he points out, and there’s something lower than normal in his tone, something heavier weighing it down.
“And I’ve always told you to stop it,” you tease, but you’re watching him carefully, trying to figure him out.
You lapse into silence - mostly because you have to eat, and your mouth is full. As you chew, you find yourself scanning the distant sky and the top of the treeline. Looking for birds, you realize. Looking for falcons. Because, maybe, Traveller is one of them. Maybe his “mortal host” in this world is a falcon, like his head.
Silly, you think. He already told you that when he’s here, he’s in mortal form. It’s more likely that “mortal” means human.
Sillier, you think. He’s a dream. It isn’t real, anyway.
Maybe.
You can’t help but think that your brain has never given you repeat characters in dreams before, unless they were people you knew - family, friends, coworkers. And the dreams feel awake, alive. The conversations you had with him were linear, logical. They aren’t muddled and unclear, and you remember them as easily as you remember a day at work. Very different from your normal dreams. It felt different.
When you finish eating, you both stand and head back towards the main road, where you’ll go your separate ways. Chan’s been quiet since you started eating, but tension radiates from him.
You start to head down the stairs to exit the park, but Chan grabs your hand, tugs you back.
You stumble a little and turn to look at him, the question on your face.
“Listen,” he implores, and there’s something open in his voice, something that makes you obey. “Finish your day. Go check on your ceiling, pack a bag for a few days. And then come over. Okay? Will you, please?”
The moment is so unlike you and Chan that it makes you feel frozen. This is not “the same as we’ve always been”. This is something new, and it makes you scan him - again - for anything on his face that might give a clue about what is happening here.
He looks tired.
He looks exhausted, actually, his expression drawn, eyes tight, shoulders drooped.
“Chan,” you say slowly, “are you okay?”
You watch him force a smile. “Just come stay with me. It’ll make me feel better to know that you’re okay.”
His fingers are still tight around yours. Neither of you had thought to pull away.
“Alright,” you tell him quietly. “If you’re sure you want me to… then, okay. I will.”
This time, his smile is real. “Okay,” he says, more like himself again. “Then I’ll see you later.”
—
That night, you sit beside Chan on his couch. On the coffee table, his beer sweats a ring onto the coaster he put under it. Yours is in your hand, the top of the bottle pressed to your chin as you look at your best friend thoughtfully.
He’s quiet tonight, eyes on the tv, slumped against the back of the couch.
You leave him alone, instead going over the weird happenings in your last two dreams.
Part of you wonders if the flood in your bathroom came from the evil spirit, just like your fever did.
“You look exhausted.”
The words surprise both of you. You hadn’t realized that you were still watching Chan’s face, making note of all the evidence written on it.
He smiles a bit sheepishly but doesn’t say anything. Chan’s medical battle against his fatigue is nothing new.
“Let me sleep on the couch tonight,” you demand. He should at least get his bed. He’s already running on fumes.
“It won’t help,” he insists. Then he turns exasperated. “I’m trying to take care of you. Why are you fighting me so hard?”
Because it feels like changing our boundaries, you think, the answer immediate and certain.
Annoyingly, it’s Mingyu’s voice you hear in your head - So let them change. You have to take chances sometimes.
You deflate. “Fine. But if stuff isn’t cleared up in my apartment by the weekend, I’m getting a hotel room.”
You stand and clear the plates and drinks from the table, then hover near Chan’s bedroom door.
He looks up at you flatly, unamused by your refusal to back down. “You wound me,” he sighs finally, then rises to get ready for bed.
“Yeah, yeah,” you say mildly. “Go get some sleep, roomie.”
Then you close his bedroom door.
—
When you open your eyes, you’ve skipped the blazing desert and gone straight to the rushing riverside.
You wonder if the being has learned how to keep you comfortable. You wonder if the being cares.
He waits for you, silent and patient.
“Hello again, ancient being called Traveller,” you greet him wryly. “We meet again?”
“We will continue to meet, it seems,” he replies, his beak never moving. His black eyes glitter, unreadable and unknowable. “Was your world made right? The spirit came again.”
You freeze. “The spirit flooded my apartment?” You’d wondered… but now you know.
He doesn’t answer this. He seems at once present and far away. “It knows you are here,” he warns. “It will return.”
You grimace, wondering how the spirit’s attack will affect your world this time. Will it flood Chan’s apartment?
“I cannot say,” Traveller answers, though you hadn’t said the question aloud. “How it manifests in the mortal world is beyond my control. I can only hunt it, here in your dreams, and try to keep it at bay.”
You have more questions - why is this happening? Will it ever stop?
Instead, what you say is, “Why Traveller? Why is that what you are called?”
“I travel the sky each night, with the moon,” he explains. His eyes seem to be on the horizon even as he answers you. “That is why I can only exist in this form here, in the realm of dreams. My power lies with the moon.”
“Do you have many forms? Or just… this, and the mortal?” you ask, curiosity piqued.
“I have many,” he says, and for the first time you hear something in his voice that might be a bit wistful. “This is my truest form, but it cannot travel to where the mortals reside anymore.”
“You could, before?”
“Long ago. Worship gives us power,” he explains. “With that power, I could cross the realms as I am. Now there are no temples, no offerings, no belief - and so in the mortal world I must only reside within my mortal host. I have no power there to be anything else - to do anything else.”
It feels like a riddle. You wish you had a notebook, to write down everything you’ve learned. You’re afraid that when you wake up, the dream will elude you, no longer make sense, the way dreams so often do.
A being called Protector, Traveller. There were once temples and offerings in his name. Is he a god? From what area? From what era?
A being, perhaps an ancient god, who cannot take his true form when in your world, only in dreams.
An ancient god who says he is called to you. Who is protecting you from an evil spirit. Who is testing you by expecting you to solve how to stop coming here.
And, the question looming largest of all: is any part of this real?
“Does he - your host - know? That your spirit is in there? Do you control him?”
“The mortal does not know that my spirit resides in him. I do not control him at all - I am simply there, a secret he must uncover in order for me to rest. He is entirely himself.”
You latch onto this. “What do you mean, a secret to uncover? What do you mean, to rest?”
It seems that if Traveller could smile, if his beak could bend, he would.
“Ah,” he says, and there is something warm in his tone. “You are asking the right questions. Once the mortal knows I am within him - when he knows who I am - it is called a Rejoining. We will not be split as we are now - him in power during the day, me in power at night. We will both be conscious and at peace, both awake and in dream.”
You consider this. “What would happen to you, then?”
“No mortal has ever successfully Rejoined with me,” he admits. “But if the others like me are to be believed, then it would set me free from being trapped within the host - but it would also prevent me from visiting the mortal world at all. I would exist only in the dreamscape, in my full power. And he would be free of me as well.”
“Do you want to be free from him? Or do you like coming to the mortal world?”
He seems to ponder his answer. “What I want is to have my full power in both realms again.” There is an ache to his voice as he says this, and images and sounds seem to flash through your mind - his symbol etched into limestone, his likeness painted onto a wall, a chorus of voices chanting something magical and powerful in a language you’ve never heard. You feel the flow of power at your fingertips, but it is a whisper - a memory of what once was.
“I do not like being trapped in mortal form,” he decides. “I would rather be free.”
You pace, thinking out loud. “So if you have a Rejoining, then your host will be free from your spirit, your spirit will be free in the dream realm, and my spirit will stop getting brought here when I sleep - because the host will no longer be connected to you at all. So, like, you won’t be calling me here anymore.”
“So eloquently put,” he says, but despite the mocking it seems to mean yes.
“And then,” you continue, ignoring the jab, “the demon will stop attacking me, because my spirit that doesn’t belong here isn’t here anymore - and my real life will stop falling apart?”
“I believe that is so,” he says again, as steady as ever.
“That… sounds like a solution to the problem,” you hedge. “For all of us. How long would that last?”
He blinks at you. “Until his mortal time ends, and the cycle begins again.”
“And all that needs to happen for a Rejoining is the mortal who carries your spirit has to become aware of it?”
“He must call me by name,” Traveller corrects. “My true name. Not Protector. Not Traveller.”
“Not He Who Feasts on Hearts,” you say dryly.
Traveller looks at you flatly.
“So all I have to do is discover your true name - which you won’t tell me, because that’s the stupid test for my worthiness or whatever - and then find the mortal that’s your host and tell him your name. Sounds easy,” you mutter, letting out a wry little laugh. “How do I even begin to narrow it down? Can your host be… anyone? In the whole world?
“There are no bounds to which mortal can be a host,” Traveller allows. “Mortals are mortals. Gods are not concerned with the imaginary lines drawn on earth by fragile men. My power and influence was never limited to a mortal’s map. In other lands, they called my name with different tongues and worshiped with different rites - but it is all the same.”
You feel defeated. “So, I just have to find the one out of seven billion. No problem.”
It was meant sarcastically, but Traveller dips his head and says, “Ah. But you have found him.”
You scramble to face him more fully. “What? I have?”
You blink, and wake up in Chan’s bed.
—
When you emerge from Chan’s room in the morning, he’s sitting up on the couch, his head in his hands, bangs hanging to obscure his face.
“Good morning?” It comes out like a question.
He looks up at you blearily. For a second, it feels like he doesn’t know who you are, or why you’re there, and then he blinks and it comes together.
“Morning,” he croaks.
Concern lances through you, and you move to sit down next to him even though you should’ve been out the door minutes ago.
“That’s it,” you tell him firmly. “You need to sleep in your bed. I’ll get a hotel tonight. Or, at least let me have the couch.”
“The couch isn’t the problem,” he tells you, the words a bit fuzzy. He’s still looking at the floor, like lifting his head takes too much energy.
You reach for his hand, lacing your fingers together. You’ve only done this once or twice, usually camouflaged as a joke.
“Chan,” you say gently, and he doesn’t look up at you. You take in his profile, your stomach tightening with worry. “Can you really carry on like this?”
He extracts his hand from yours, shifting away from you slightly. It stings - it feels like a rejection.
“I don’t have a choice,” he answers, not looking at you.
You want to press it, but you’re already going to be late to work. You rise, still watching him.
“Okay,” you say finally. “I have to get to work. See you tonight?”
“Yeah,” he says.
When you glance at him once last time before closing the front door, he’s sitting in the same position, staring down at the hand that you’d tried to hold.
Last night he’d dreamed that you were lost in a labyrinth. He’d taken turn after turn, could hear your voice crying out for him, but he never got closer than your shadow around the next corner before he lost you again.
—
You refuse to sleep in the bed that night. “Lee Chan, I am fine on the couch,” you say. “Either sleep in your bed or I’ll go get myself a hotel room. Those are your choices.”
“You’re so bossy,” he grumbles, but he gives in. It’s all you can do to not follow him in there and tuck him in, the urge to fix him is so strong.
You don’t. You leave him alone.
When you open your eyes to the vibrant greens and blues of the riverbank, you have questions prepared.
“So… you know which mortal your spirit’s in?” you ask, instead of greeting him. “Can you just tell me his name, so I can look him up on social media or something? I need to know your real name, too, so I can tell him and release you, or whatever.”
Traveller cocks his head, but there seems to be a scolding in it this time.
“If you are worthy, then you will discover for yourself,” he says. Yes. The test.
You remember the first time your spirit came to him - how he’d bellowed across the land and it had sounded like the sound came from the earth itself, how the sky had split apart and repaired itself at his command. Since then, the most uncanny thing he’s done has been to read your thoughts and respond to them.
You sound petulant even to your own ears when you say, “So what are you, technically? A god? You don’t really seem like a god.”
“I have been trying not to frighten you,” he says, and there is something heavy to the words.
You think about how safe you’ve felt in his presence, despite how little you’ve understood what’s going on. “I’m not sure you could,” you admit.
He gives you no warning before launching into a display of how wrong you are.
You are standing on the riverbank and then you are surrounded by walls of leaping flames, the heat sizzling and drying every cell on your body - you are struggling beneath roiling waters as a school of fish darts around you - you are atop a mountain up to your shins in burning cold snow - you are in your childhood home, your mother’s hand in yours, her lullaby sweet in your ears - you are a star looking down on earth - you are ancient, watching hands raise in worship surrounded by carvings and colors - you are dirt - you are stardust - you are making life - you are ending it, too - you are inside a storm that whips around you, pulling your hair and your limbs into the fury - you are lightning, exploding on contact, burnt and crackling -
You are kneeling on the riverbank, gasping for air, one hand braced against the ground and one hand pressed to your galloping heart.
Traveller looks down at you without sympathy.
You lower your forehead to the dirt, your limbs shaking so hard that the tremors are visible, gasping and gasping. You close your eyes, trying to breathe in more slowly. Your body feels all of it - fried, frozen, expanded, shrunken, alive alive, powerful, Godly. You breathe, limp on the earth, until your body has stopped sweating, your muscles have stopped seizing. When you can, you roll to look at him again, accusatory.
“Point made,” you whisper, too weak to push yourself to standing. When your breaths are calm enough to come without gasping, when the trembling remains only in your fingers, you sit up. He hasn’t moved.
“I am a protector,” he says, his voice like ice, “but do not forget that doing so is a choice.”
“I’m sorry if I insulted you,” you say, chastised. You want to wake up. Now you are afraid.
Suddenly, he spins away from you. His anger no longer simmers around you like desert heat. “The demon is on the horizon. I will do what I can from here. You must wake up - I will fight it.”
You know before you open your eyes that there’s going to be some bullshit in your day.
—
The subway breaks down.
You heave a sigh, closing your eyes in defeat. You’ll be late to work, will probably get written up for it. There’s nothing you can do.
Above you, the speakers crackle as the operator assures you you’ll be up and moving in no time. Disbelieving, you pull out your phone and use the time to research. Chan had said something this morning that has you thinking.
You’d actually had time for coffee before leaving for work, both of you standing in the kitchen stirring the mugs in your hands.
“You feel any better?” you’d asked, and he’d shook his head mournfully. The urge to wrap him up in your arms and let him rest ate away at you. Your Chan, your favorite person. You hate that he suffers like this.
“Are you having nightmares?” you pressed, and he’d stilled a bit. Yes.
“Only some of the time,” he said finally. Your heart hurt, and you’d promised yourself to push this issue later - after work, when you both weren’t trying to get out the door - and ask more questions, find out what was bothering him so much that it was plaguing him at night.
“Mine haven’t been nightmares, really,” you’d told him, “but I’ve been having the weirdest dreams. They’re all different but they have this like… recurring character? It’s like an ancient god or something, with a man’s body but a falcon’s head.”
“Kinky,” Chan deadpanned.
“I hate you.” You kicked at his leg lightly.
He stared at his coffee thoughtfully for a minute. “Kind of sounds like Ra? The bird-head thing?”
“Ra?” You’d echoed. “Like, the Egyptian sun god?”
“Yeah.” He’d drained the last of his coffee and leaned across you to place it in the sink. He smelled good. It made your knees weak and that made you annoyed at yourself. “Have a good day. See you tonight?”
Now, trapped on the broken subway, you pull up a list of Egyptian gods, scanning for anyone with a falcon’s head.
Egyptian gods with falcon head, you type.
The first result is Horus, but when you scan the article it doesn’t seem to align with what you know.
You keep scrolling. A reddit thread informs you that many Egyptian deities had bird-heads.
Sighing, you add the word traveller to the end of the search. Still Horus.
You add the word moon to the beginning of the search, and the results finally change.
Khonsu the Traveller.
A zing goes down your spine. You know without even clicking the first link that you’ve got it. But you click the link anyway, eyes scanning almost faster than you can read.
“Khonsu (Chonsu, Khensu, Khons, Chons or Khonshu) is an Egyptian deity belonging to the religion of ancient Egypt, God of the Moon, time and knowledge,” you read silently. “His name means traveler and could refer to the moon’s journey across the night sky.”
This is it. You read the whole article, enraptured.
You say his name in your mind - Khonsu - and the subway lights flicker back on as it lurches forward, stuck no longer.
—
You return home - to your home - buzzing with excitement, and your good mood is buoyed when your Super stops you in the hallway to let you know that your bathroom repairs are done.
You call Chan as you search through your fridge to see if there’s anything worth cooking for dinner.
“Great news,” you tell him, the phone pressed between your shoulder and ear. “I’m moving out.”
He snorts at this. “Apartment’s all fixed?”
“Yep,” you confirm. “Congratulations. You get your bed back.”
“I’m for real about to take sixteen sleeping pills,” he grumbles, but you know it’s hyperbole.
“Hey, are you going to Mingyu and Soonyoung’s party on Saturday?” You pause, eyes on your calendar by the fridge, where the date is circled. You’d been meaning to ask him.
“Mmm,” Chan responds, and you’re not sure if he’s even awake.
“Chan? Are you going on Saturday?”
“Yeah, I’m supposed to be helping them set up. Maybe we just don’t stay too late?”
“Okay, Grandpa,” you tease. But you’re stuck on the we of it all, the way he’ll only address the event as if you two are a unit.
You are. You want to be. Maybe it’s time you make it happen. Maybe it’s time to take some chances.
“Get some sleep, young lady,” he says, leaning into the bit, and you smile for the next hour.
—
You put your feet in the river. The water rushes over them, freezing cold and running fast enough that you have to try to keep them in place - like the river is very willing to just carry you away.
At some point, you’ve stopped telling yourself that Traveller’s realm isn’t real.
“I know your name,” you tell him, smug and excited in equal parts.
He stares at you, unblinking, waiting.
“Khonsu.”
You get the feeling that if he could smile, he would be. His pride fills you with warmth. Worthy.
“Well done,” he says, the words surrounding you like a cloak.
“Protector. Traveller. God of the moon,” you recite. He ducks his head, accepting each title.
“I have been called all of this and more,” he says. “You have conveniently left out He Who Feasts on Hearts.”
“Didn’t find that one in my google search.”
He seems to sniff haughtily. “The internet is mankind’s worst invention.”
You let this go, smiling quietly, splashing your feet in and out of the rushing water. You think this place - dream realm though it is - might be inspired by the Nile.
“Does it make you sad?” you ask, looking over your shoulder at him. “That your existence is just being trapped in one mortal after another?”
“There is no purpose to feeling sad,” he answers evenly. “It is the way of things. One host’s time ends, and my spirit finds a new host - a mortal with a protector’s spirit. The cycle will continue, as steady as the path of the moon, until the day comes that I am known as a God again.”
“Will that happen?”
“I am certain it will. These things come and go. There is more history than you mortals know. My time will come again, and my true power with it. Until then, I do what duties I can by the power of the moon. I travel the sky each night, protect who I am able.”
“Well,” you say wryly, eyes on the moving river, “you have my belief. If it helps.”
His hand lands gently on your shoulder, the first time he’s touched you.
“It helps,” he says, and the sun grows brighter around you.
You think about something Traveller said - a mortal with a protector’s spirit.
Something clicks inside your mind. The person who protects you from everything. The person who has spent his whole life chasing sleep, never feeling rested - because at night, his spirit is being dragged through dream realm errands.
You look at Traveller sharply, pulse racing, and he is looking back at you expectantly. He’s heard what you are thinking, but he will wait for you to say it.
“Why is your spirit called to mine? You said your host’s spirit calls to me - what does that mean?”
Traveller seems amused; he knows you’ve got it. You can see the smile in his narrowed eyes.
“Ah. An excellent question, from a worthy mortal. His spirit calls to yours because he loves you.”
Your heart gallops. “He loves me,” you repeat, “as his best friend? Or… he loves me?”
But you know. You know.
“It’s Chan,” you say aloud, not needing an answer. “Your host is Chan. Of all the people on the planet, your spirit is housed inside my idiot best friend, Chan.”
My idiot best friend whose smile is like sunlight. My idiot best friend who protects me from everything. My idiot best friend who always stops on the sidewalk with me to look up and admire the moon.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” you ask, though you know the answer.
Traveller, Khonsu, has ordered you to wake up before, when you were in danger. This time, he says it gently, a suggestion.
“Wake up,” he says, his voice a hush. “Wake up, and go tell him. Then we can all be at peace.”
—
Chan’s phone is off. You call almost all day until finally you get a response - a text.
“Sorry - phone died. Helping Soonyoung and Mingyu set up for tonight. Everything ok?”
You answer, “I need to talk to you.”
He calls you back instead of texting. “I’m kind of trying to carry a keg right now. You’re on speaker.”
To prove this, Soonyoung bellows hello to you in the background. “What did you need?”
“I need to talk to you about something,” you tell him. “But… privately. Sorry, Soonyoung. No offense.”
You hear him sniff, “I’m hurt,” but then Chan seems to be shifting away, trying for some privacy.
“I’ll come pick you up as soon as I’m done with the keg,” Chan suggests. “We can talk in the car.”
“That’s fine,” you tell him. You’re anxious, eager, excited, frightened - all of it.
You have to tell him he’s Khonsu. He might not believe you, might think you’re crazy. There’s no way to know if he’ll take you seriously, if he’ll believe the reasons you lay out.
It is a chance you have to take.
You have to tell him you love him. He might panic, might reject you. He might admit to loving you, but refuse to risk the friendship. He might tell you he only loves you as a friend, as family.
It is a chance you have to take.
Your stomach twists. You feel ill.
And then he cancels on you, not even an hour later.
“You won’t believe this,” he says, annoyed, “but my car has a flat. Can you just meet me at Soonyoung’s? That’ll be faster than waiting for me to put on the spare, and then coming to get you.”
Something feels off. Something feels wrong. You feel the same prickling wariness that you did when Khonsu warned you that the demon was on the approach.
Not now, you think desperately. Not here.
You rush to get ready, foregoing most of what you’d do before a party at Soonyoung and Mingyu’s house - no time to be picky about how your hair looks, no time for a more dramatic eyeliner, no time to try on three or four outfits and send the pictures to Chan for approval.
As you pull away from your house, you note that your body is tensed, thrumming, prepared for danger.
The demon is ahead of you. The road you normally take is closed, a cop car pulled across it to block traffic, lights spinning.
You make a u-turn, you try the highway.
Traffic’s at a stand-still. You’re stuck in it, at least two miles to the next exit.
Your fingers drum on the steering wheel nervously. You feel the rise of imminent threat as strongly as you’d feel a rising tide if you were standing in the river.
By the time you pull up to the house and park, not only are you not early, you’re fashionably late. The moon is rising, bright white glow illuminating the empty front yard as clearly as a floodlight.
Inside, the house is slammed with people. The rooms are loud with conversation and music thumps and pulses from the speakers strewn throughout. You push your way through the crowd as politely as you can, scanning every face, desperate to find Chan.
A mist follows behind you, ankle-level, the color of ink. It spreads across the floor, gaseous, filling each space that you enter. You don’t notice, don’t look behind you, but you can feel your hairs standing on end, your heart racing faster, your hands starting to shake.
You find yourself facing the sliding glass door that leads out to the deck and that’s when you notice in the reflection - the smog between everyone’s feet in the room behind you. The demon, crossing realms, chasing you down. You whirl around, trying to decide if your eyes are playing tricks on you.
They’re not; of course they’re not.
No one else seems to notice the mist curling around their ankles, tendrils wrapping up their calves. This only frightens you more.
You can’t do anything about it from this world. Khonsu has to banish it from the dream realm - and Chan isn’t sleeping. He’s wide awake, out on the deck with a beer in his hand, and Khonsu is trapped inside him, helpless.
But if Chan Rejoins with him, right now, then Khonsu will have his full power in the dream realm again. He’ll be able to banish the spirit for the final time.
What if it doesn’t work?
Your heart thuds and you press your shoulder into the wall to ground yourself and close your eyes, thinking hard. You remember Khonsu saying that he had power in the mortal world back when he was still worshipped. How could you transfer some of that believing power to him? How did the worshippers of old do it?
Altars, you think. You pull out your phone, but you have no idea what to type in. How to create a 21st century altar for an ancient Egyptian God if you want to bring him back to power probably won’t pull many results.
You start with what did Egyptian altars have and the results seem to be conclusive: food and drink items, sensory items, and devotional items.
“Okay,” you breathe. “We can make that happen. Kind of.”
You slip outside, slip your fingers around Chan’s wrist so he can’t get away. “Hi,” you say, your voice strangled and frightened.
He rears back, trying to look at you better, alarmed. “Hi,” he answers, uncertainly. “Are you okay?”
“No.” You start pulling him inside, and he lets you, leaving Mingyu alone at the grill.
“What’s going on?” he asks, allowing you to steer him away from the crowd into a hallway.
“Do you trust me?” you ask him, once your voices are covered by the music and laughter. The smog has entered the kitchen, thinly covering the linoleum.
“Implicitly,” he says, right away, without having to think about it. “To the end of the earth.”
Maybe, if you weren’t staring down the evil demon cloud, this might have made your heart tumble. Right now, you don’t have time.
“Great,” you say, all business. “I need you to find a candle and some fruit and meet me in Soonyoung’s room.”
His eyes scan you, a question on his face, but he doesn’t ask it. He nods, once. “Got it,” he says.
“And matches!” you add. “Hurry.”
In Soonyoung’s room, you look around frantically, trying to decide what you can use. You tuck a bottle of cologne under your arm and grab an ancient, well-loved Spiderman figurine with a missing arm. Everything else from his dresser-top, you sweep onto the floor. You can apologize later.
Then you open your phone and start searching, fingers moving so quickly that you mis-tap more than once.
Chan appears behind you and dumps his loots beside you.
“Go lock the door,” you murmur. You set up the cologne bottle and the Spiderman and start working with what Chan brought - a Glade candle from the bathroom, a handful of lime slices that were meant as a drink garnish, and a mini-box of matches that fit in your palm.
You fish a sharpie out of the Pen Cup on Soonyoung’s desk and scrawl Khonsu’s symbol - a lunar disc resting atop an upward crescent moon - eyeing your phone to make sure you’re doing it right.
“Soonyoung’s going to kill you,” Chan mutters from behind you.
“I do not care,” you answer tersely, the marker cap firmly between your teeth as you finish your drawing. Finished, you toss the marker somewhere to your right and pull out the matches.
Your hands shake too badly; you can’t get it lit.
Chan’s hands are steady and gentle as they come over yours. “I’ll do it,” he says quietly. “Just light the candle?”
“Yeah,” you say breathlessly. “Thank you.”
From the other side of the door, you can distinctly hear Mingyu shouting about the limes he spent all afternoon slicing. You ignore it. The light under the door has gone out - the spirit is finding its way under the crack.
You look at the make-shift altar before you, assessing. You’ve never done this before. You know it’s all wrong, but it’s the best you can do.
Something is missing.
The wind blows through Soonyoung’s open window, the curtain fluttering.
That’s it.
You hurry to push the curtains aside, letting the moonlight stream in. The moonbeam misses the dresser by a few feet.
“Help me move this?” you ask.
Chan might not understand why, but he moves to help you, and you manage to slide the dresser into the moonlight.
Yes. It feels right instantly.
You turn to Chan, reach for his hands. His face is contorted with confusion, but he lets you take them.
“You gonna explain any of this, or -?”
“Chan,” you say, “this might be a bit shocking.”
He swallows, nervous. “Okay,” he says steadily. It sounds the same as I trust you.
“You’re housing the spirit of an ancient Egyptian god.”
The tension drops from him - he thinks you’re joking.
“I beg your finest pardon?”
“I know,” you say, exasperated. You squeeze his fingers, willing him to believe you. “Please trust me. You have to Rejoin - you have to acknowledge him within you.”
Chan pulls his hands away. “Ma’am.”
“I know how this sounds, okay? But this is why you’re so tired - your spirit is doing god shit at night.”
He stares at you.
You explain as quickly as you can - about the dreams, about Khonsu’s mortal hosts, about the demon, about how you figured out it was Chan.
“So the bad spirit is… at the party. Should we offer it a drink?”
“Chan, this is serious! You have to Rejoin with him so he can fight it from the dream realm. You have to say his name.”
He hesitates. “I don’t know.”
“Please, believe me,” you implore, your eyes on his. “I promise I’m not making this shit up.”
“No, I know you wouldn’t,” he assure you, giving your fingers a squeeze. “I just - I feel silly.”
“You have to trust me,” you say seriously. “We’re actively in danger right now. Look.”
This is what gets him - the light under the door has entirely gone out. The sounds of the party - loud and raucous only moments ago - have faded to almost nothing.
“Alright,” he says, turning to face the moonlit altar. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. Then, very clearly, he says, “Khonsu.”
For a moment, nothing happens. The moment is long enough that you feel a razor-sharp slice of panic - it didn’t work, you were wrong, you missed something - and then…
Chan’s body begins to glow.
White light pours from him, from his eyes, from his fingers, from his chest, from his shocked, open mouth. His whole body streams more and more beams of light like sand pouring in an hour-glass, the light growing until it’s too much - it’s blinding - and you can’t see anything at all.
You try to call his name, but your voice is stuck in your throat.
You blink away the bright light, your hands reaching blindly for him, and you find yourself at the familiar riverside.
You wheel around, looking for Khonsu. He appears before you, solelm and still.
“…Chan?” you ask.
You blink and Khonsu is gone. A falcon screams overhead. You look up, then back to where he’d been standing just in time to see a lifetime of faces flash over where his falcon head should be - a blur of ages, races, genders, people - and then you aren’t seeing faces anymore, but phases of the moon - crescent growing swollen and then waning into a sickle again over and over, the cycle unbroken.
Chan stands before you, eyes wide and chest heaving. You step towards him, and then he is Traveller again, beady falcon eyes blinking at you.
“You’ve done it,” he says.
There’s no time. “The demon -”
“Consider it handled.”
“For good?”
He inclines his head, as he always does. “We are Rejoined. You will not be called to this realm again. The spirit will cease to hunt you. All will be well, now.”
“And you’ll be free?”
A human’s face flashes across him for a moment, so that you can see him smile. “And I am free. I thank you for it, mortal.”
You blink, and Chan is before you. You expected him dazed and frightened as you’d seen him moments ago, but instead he’s smiling, steady.
He steps towards you, hands coming to cup your elbows. “You were right,” he whispers.
“I told you to trust me,” you answer, and you’re not sure why you’re whispering, too. Everything seems gone from this place - Khonsu, the spirit, all of it. It’s just you and Chan and the river. You know, somehow, that when you both wake you won’t see this place again.
“How did you figure it out?” Chan asks, hushed and awed. His hands are still on your arms, like he’s holding you in place.
A pleased smile crosses your face, unbidden. “Khonsu told me his mortal host loved me. Loved me back.”
You barely catch the understanding flash across his face before his mouth is meeting your urgently, one hand raising to cup your jaw, the other snaking around to your lower back.
You press your mouth against his firmly, trying to let your body speak for you, trying to tell him I love you, I’ve wanted you, yes to all of this without having to stop kissing him long enough to say it.
You’re undressing, undressing each other, trying to do so while still kissing. It’s messy and it’s punctured and silly and you’re both giggling a little and it’s so perfectly you and Chan that you wouldn’t change a second of it, wouldn’t script it any other way if you could.
The laws of the dream realm work in your favor; when Chan lays you back against the warm, cradling sand, it doesn’t stick all over you. He presses his lips to your collarbone, your throat, your mouth again, and he presses his fingers into your heat. You groan, pressing your head back into the warm sand, pressing your hands to his waist, his back, his chest.
“Wanted this for so long,” he breathes as you buck against him, whining in your throat. “Thought I couldn’t sleep because I was fucking heartsick over you -”
“I’m sorry,” you gasp, carding your fingers through his hair. “I was scared. Should have asked you so long ago -”
“Doesn’t matter,” he murmurs, pulling his fingers from you just to touch you everywhere else, hands tracing your hips, your ribs, caressing your thighs, your breasts. “We’re here now.”
When he lines up and buries himself inside you, you both inhale on a gasp, grasping at each other like lifelines, holding on for survival.
When you come around him, he presses his lips to your temple and tells you you’re beautiful-perfect-everything-absolutelyeverything.
When he finishes, your name strangled in his throat, he places your hand over his heart so you can feel it galloping inside his chest, so you can feel what you’ve done to him.
When you’ve cooled down, he pulls away from you, eyes tracing your face, and whispers I love you.
When you wake up, you both remember the dream.
Was it a dream? You’re tangled on the floor - thank god, not in Soonyoung’s bed - undressed, deliciously sore and pulse still pounding in the come-down.
The moonlight has shifted from the altar, where the Glade candle has gone out, and illuminates Chan’s million-watt smile. He brushes hair from your forehead gently, affectionately.
“Come home with me tonight?” he asks. “I need a witness to see if I actually sleep.”
You smile back at him. “I’ll come back with you,” you say, feeling suddenly shy, and he leans forward to kiss you again, eager. The moonlight on your skin feels like a blessing. It feels like a goodbye. You settle in it, content to just be in this moment, your fingers gliding along Chan’s bare arm, your legs tangled together, his heartbeat keeping time.
A sharp pounding on the door startles you both. You whirl around to stare at the door.
“Hey!” Soonyoung yells from the other side. “Did you two steal my poop candle?”
You muffle your laughter in Chan’s bare shoulder, your bodies both shaking with mirth.
Later, tucked against his side beneath his blankets, you dream of something completely benign. Beside you, Chan’s eyelids flutter as he rests properly for the first time.
Far away, in another realm, Traveller crosses the sky, chasing the moon, evading the dawn, as is his duty. As he will do, until the cycle begins again.
--
thank you for reading! please check out the rest of the collab!
*crying* who's cutting the onions stop this was so sweet i loved it
DIRTY LITTLE SECRET (ch.1)| hvc
✮⋆˙pairing: guitarist!loser!vernon x mean girl!fem!reader
✮⋆˙synopsis: You know how there is this one guy in your life who is obstinate, inflexible, unyielding to good plain common sense, and just overall absolutely infuriating? That's Hansol Vernon Chwe. But there's something about him which you can't deny: He fucks really good. Don't get it wrong, this isn't your greatest pleasure or something you're really proud of… But it is your Dirty Little Secret.
✮⋆˙genre: enemies to enemies w/ benefits to lovers, smut, fluff
✮⋆˙word count: 3,253
✮⋆˙warnings: suggestive, implied penetration (vernon makes a joke), reader will be very annoying (but that's on purpose), she's a mean girl but she's also lowkey a diva, implied sex when drunk, the writing may be bad (this is my first fic and i wrote something after 2 years, pls be kind) [THESE ARE FOR THIS CHAPTER ONLY]
THE LOUD MUSIC coming from the frat house calls to you as you park your vintage convertible outside the frat house. You check your reflection in your car’s rear view mirror, running your hands through your hair and adjusting the bunny ears on your head. You reapply your lip gloss as the final touch before stepping out of the vehicle.
“C’mon losers, let’s go to this party, we’re already late.” You say to your friends without looking back at them as you strut towards the frat house’s entrance in your stilettos. You hear your friends’ footsteps walking beside you, “you know, we wouldn’t actually be late if it weren’t for you,” Joshua comments as he opens the door, stepping inside with Sana. You just roll your eyes at him, slightly annoyed as they walk ahead.
The bass of the party rattles your ribs as you stand at the entrance of the frat house. Your hands rest on the door frame, nails drumming against it as your eyes scan the party, taking in the sight of drunk bodies grooving to the beat of the music. You catch the gaze of a few people staring at you. You raise your chin up and step inside. You’re moving through the physiques of characters and creatures seamlessly when your eyes are covered by big, rough hands.
“Guess who?” The familiar voice calls near your ear over the music, putting a smile on your face as you turn around to see the man, who is currently dressed as an F1 driver. Mingyu takes off his helmet to reveal his smiling face to you. Kim Mingyu, also known as the man of your dreams. Hot, jock, unable to be locked down by anyone. Well… except you. At least you hope he will be soon enough.
“Mingyu!” you exclaim, wrapping your arms around his neck, making him laugh and wrap his muscular arms around your waist. Your nails grazing the blades of his broad shoulders. “Nice party, could’ve been a little better though,” you whisper in his ear teasingly, making him chuckle softly. You pull back slightly, just enough to see his face “make me a drink?”
Mingyu pulls away with a ‘sure’ and puts his hand on the small of your back, guiding you towards one of the counters where Joshua and Sana are already standing with the vice president of the Sigma Beta Tau fraternity, Yoon Jeonghan. Mingyu gives a brief greeting to your friends, while Jeonghan narrows his eyes towards the both of you in interest, his lips twitching as if he wants to laugh. You smile back at Jeonghan before rolling your eyes and focusing your attention on Mingyu again.You lean towards him, pretending to be a little off balance so his hand comes up to rest on your back to balance your figure. You look up at him with an almost innocent expression if not for the finger trailing down his arm flirtatiously, “can I have a vodka cranberry please?” you request him with a small smile.
Mingyu, oblivious to your flirtations and the effect of his hand on your back, just nods and walks away over to the drinks station to get you your vodka cranberry. You hear a little snicker coming from Jeonghan causing you to turn around towards the other three again, your smile falling from your face the moment Mingyu gets out of your eye lane. Jeonghan leans forward, biting the inside of his cheek like he’s trying not to smile, “hey there…” his eyes rake up and down your body, “bunny girl.”
You meet him eye to eye, not falling apart under his gaze, greeting him back. “Hey yourself, Loki.” The staring contest lasts for a good few seconds before Jeonghan scoffs out a laugh and breaks away. Your eyes still follow him as he moves, thumbs cracking the knuckle joints of your fingers as Jeonghan walks away from the counter to meet with other people..
Your death glare continues to follow Jeonghan when Sana comes up to you and tucks a strand of your hair behind your ear, “you know, if looks could kill…” you hear her sweet voice in your ear and turn to face her, about to make a snide remark when Mingyu returns with your drink. “One vodka cranberry for you, bunny,” your face lights up again, eyes softening as you turn around, voice getting slightly higher in pitch as you turn around. “Oh my god, thank-” you stop as you see a girl with him, “... you. Thank you.” Your eyes narrow slightly before you compose yourself again and extend a hand out towards the black swan. You notice her head is a bit bowed.
“Hi! What’s your name?” You say, your voice sickeningly sweet as you address her. She’s struggling with her words, stuttering and continuously fidgeting with her cuticles. You wait patiently, eyeing her down but Mingyu answers for her, “this is Aria, we just met while I was making your drink.”
“Yeah.” Aria breathes out as she shakes your hand with her own, her hands feeling clammy against your own. You tilt your head to the side with a saccharine smile, squeezing her hand just a little too hard that she pulls away with a start. She rubs her hand, her smile faltering a little bit while you take a sip of your vodka cranberry, still keeping eye contact with her. “Well, it’s nice to meet you Aria. Are you a first year student?”
Sana clears her throat behind you as a signal to calm down. Aria desperately tries to look anywhere but your face. “Y-yeah I’m a first year,” Aria stammered out, flashing you an awkward smile. It would’ve been so adorable, if not for Mingyu looking at her surprised and reaching over to squeeze her shoulder, flashing his golden retriever smile at her. You watched her ease up a little, her gaze going over to Mingyu for a second before watching the floor again, the tips of her ears turning red. “Damn, that means this is your first big university party,” Mingyu said and did a goofy little curtsey, showing his natural fangs, “I hope I did a good job. First frat party, the stakes are high.”
You watch Aria giggle and nod her head, “the party is awesome, you did a great job, Mingyu.” He laughed softly as well, rising from his curtsey, rubbing his neck with his hand, “I’m glad you’re liking it then.”
Oh, hell no.
You nudge Mingyu slightly with your shoulder, leaning against his side, “SVT always throws the best parties because they have Mingyu. Otherwise this whole thing would be a mess.” You reach an arm up and boop Mingyu’s nose. He gets a little flustered by the boop and loosely rests his hand on your shoulder while you glance at Aria again, her shoulders deflating slightly as her gaze focuses on Mingyu’s hand resting on your shoulder. “You would not know, of course, being new and all.”
Her red lips twitched, faltering for a second before she tried to speak again. “Oh, well I plan to come to more.” She says and you coo at her like she’s a child, “that’s cute, but only if you get invited to more.”She stares at you dumbfounded while you just raise an arm to softly play with a strand of Mingyu’s hair.
“Gyu, your hair’s all messy from the helmet.” You say, your voice pitched slightly higher than normal as you lift both your hands to his hair to fix them. “Oh… thanks,” he mumbles a bit, taking a step back from you. You drop your hands a bit, acutely aware that Aria saw Mingyu stepping back from you, before wrapping them around his bicep, “c’mon, let me fix ‘em,” you run a hand through his hair, pushing them back from his forehead. He lets out a little ‘woah’ but ultimately lets you do whatever you want.
“Your hair looks much sexier when it’s pushed back,” you turn your head to look at Aria who is still standing there, awkwardly looking anywhere else but at the both of you, her eyes darting around the sea of people. “Hey! Doesn’t his hair look sexy pushed back?” You call her, head leaning against Mingyu’s shoulder, eyes looking at her expectantly with an innocent pout. As if her opinion really matters.
“Oh, yes—yes it does—um…” she scratches the back of her head and huffs out an awkward laugh before pointing in some random direction. “I should probably go… my friend, y’know?”
You notice her fidgeting with the skin of her nails again , eyes poring over her body one last time with a smile. “You should, bye!” You agreed hastily, waving your fingers at her. Mingyu looks between the both of you before looking at Aria, “oh, maybe I can help you -” That angel of a man tried to offer to her, but she just waved her hand dismissively, mumbling a ‘no thank you’ as she stumbled away cutting him off.
You lean against the counter, looking at Mingyu’s disappointed expression as she walks away, and pick up your vodka cranberry again, inspecting it for a few seconds before taking a sip. You notice your friends are nowhere to be seen, having lost track of them due to this stupid engagement. Not that you want them here right now, your priority is right in front of you.A smaller, more genuine smile sits on your lips again, “anyways, where were we?” You poke Mingyu’s bicep to get him to look at you again.
He sighs and smiles at you as well and you begin talking. The next thirty minutes felt amazing as you both talked and laughed with each other without the intrusion of anyone else. You keep count of everything. The moments your hands made contact with his, the times he might have been implying something flirtatious, the times he did flirt back despite not catching most of your hints. Your conversion remained very friendly, but the conversation was leading somewhere. Hopefully a date, or his bed, you weren’t picky about how your amazing love story would start, a beautiful love story to battle the disney princess movies themselves.
Your finger trails down his chest as you purr, “I was wondering, do you wanna go somewhere after this party?” You try to pull him closer with the fabric of his costume. Before you can hear Mingyu’s answer though, a loud guitar sound fills the room, cutting off EDM which was playing on the speakers before. There are a lot of cheers from the crowd as you look around, many people also look around, trying to find the source of the noise. You find Soonyoung dragging Seungcheol, the president of the frat, with him excitedly. Seungcheol breaks away to shout Mingyu’s name. You’re about to pull Mingyu back to yourself again when you hear this agitating, grating voice from the speakers which replaced the amazing music playing from the speakers.
You feel your right eye twitch as you clench your jaw, suddenly wanting to wipe the goofy smile off Mingyu’s face as he hastily apologises, hooting and hollering for the said agitating, grating voice, as he walks away from you to Seungcheol and Soonyoung. You also walk a few steps, trying to catch him. “Hey,you don’t answer… the question,” you shout as the man of your dreams disappears into the crowd. Probably going to where Riot Circuit is performing. You remember coming to the frat house to meet with Mingyu, Jeonghan and Joshua 2 days ago to see the preparation for the halloween party of the frat and completely dismissed the little makeshift podium Mingyu had made in the main hall after clearing and emptying the place for the party. You feel stupid now.
Mingyu is friends with Seokmin, which means he actually likes that little band of losers, which means of course Riot Circuit was performing. Of course Hansol Vernon Chwe— the most annoying, and irritating person you know is here. That goddamn loser. It’s not like you hate him. It’s just that… You know how there is this one guy in your life who is obstinate, inflexible, unyielding to good plain common sense, and just overall absolutely infuriating? That's Hansol Vernon Chwe. You don’t hate him.
Ok, fine, you hate him.
And now he’s ruining your chance with Mingyu when you finally had a breakthrough with him. Your hold on the half empty glass of your drink tightens as you down the rest of the drink in one go. The noise of the party fades as you stare into the empty red solo cup, taking long shallow breaths to calm the large burn you feel in your throat as the cup crinkles under your grip.
You snap out of your mini trance when you feel Sana by your side, slinging her arm around your shoulders with a long, drawn out ‘heyyy’. You huff softly and roll your eyes, starting to feel a little wobbly, the effects of the liquor hitting as you let her drag you towards one of the corners where you can rant peacefully to Sana and Joshua. And the fact that you’re going to have to hear Hansol’s singing, just ugh. He’s always been the background noise to your misery. But leaving the party is not an option because you’ve never left a party.
Your friends listen to you with fake solemn expressions when a gasp rips out of you mid rant. You reach out and grab hold onto Joshua’s arm, shocking him as you pull him towards you. You admit you might have had a drink or two more to fuel your irritation. “What if Jeonghan saw Mingyu completely ignoring and leaving me, he isn’t going to let me live!” Joshua just sighs and pats your head once, “he didn’t see you and Mingyu, he was nowhere near both of you, and if he did, he’s not going to post it on The Diamond Life.”
You scoff and swat Joshua’s hand away from your head, adjusting your bunny ears and checking any nearby surface which is even slightly reflective to make sure your hair’s perfect. “He’s not going to post it just like how he didn’t post about me getting absolutely wasted and throwing up on the street last year?” You scoff and pull out your phone to make sure you’re not disheveled. Usually, getting wasted and throwing up on the street in a college party is not a big deal, but when you’re running for the president of the sorority it is.
You’re about to reach for another drink before pausing your hand—learning from mistakes—and reaching for the bottle of water instead. Joshua’s still searching for an answer to your retort, left a bit speechless. He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose when Sana says something which makes you choke on your water.
“You could always sleep with Vernon.”
You slam both your hands on the counter, coughing, but when you catch a few people looking at you, you compose yourself. Not that it matters, Joshua is still laughing as Sana continues, “I don’t understand why you hate him so much, he’s hot.”. You fist your hands, looking at them as the knuckles go white. You stay quiet for a while and then you open your palms again, running your hands down your costume, preparing to give the already well rehearsed answer. “He’s a loser, that’s why. He is literally a basic ass white boy who thinks listening to punk rock makes him sooo cool and different. He listened to one Weezer song in his teens and made it his entire personality.” You pause to take a breath, and then declare.
“I will never—EVER—sleep with Hansol Vernon Chwe.” Your best friends are quiet for a few seconds, letting the rock music flood your ears. Sana just takes a sip of her drink while looking at you like you’re the most fascinating creature she’s ever seen. You raise your eyebrows and shake your head a little, waiting for her to comment further about the situation, but she says nothing, sipping her drink. Both of you just stare at each other.
“If only you put this much passion into- oof” You elbow Joshua’s stomach before he can continue. He bursts into a fit of laughter, Sana follows a second later and you can’t help yourself covering your mouth with your hand, shoulders shaking in reluctant laughter. “I hate you guys,” but your mouth is stretched in a smile as you speak.
────𑣲⋆────
You wake up when you hear the chirp of birds and feel the sunlight hit your face. You bury your face in the pillow, still disoriented from the sleep and hangover. Your head is pounding and you’re planning to sleep in when you feel a breeze in your nether regions. You snap your face up from the pillow, which is not your pillow, as memories from the party start flooding back. Joshua and Sana had dragged you to the dance floor, you’d had shots with the boys of the frat, you remember having really really good sex. You smile to yourself at the last thought. You squint your eyes and try to look around the room. This would finally be the beginning of your epic love story with Mingyu and you’re going to slam it in Jeonghan’s stupid face and…
Huh. Mingyu has a lot of posters of rock bands in his room, you never knew he liked rock. That is when more memories of the night start to flood your mind, specifically the face of the person you left the party with. The grogginess leaves your body as your mind collects itself, getting replaced by horror. No, no, no, you think, hoping this is just a nightmare as you slowly turn around, only to find the other naked body on the bed.
His eyes are already open as he greets you in his deep morning voice, “Good morning, bunny.” You yelp and fall off the edge of the bed with a thud. You exclaim in pain and hug your knees to your chest to hide your body from him.
“Hansol Vernon Chwe…” You breathe out angrily and close your eyes, rubbing at them with the heel of your palms, hoping to wake up from this nightmare, but when you open your eyes you’re still on the cold floor of Hansol’s room. He’s at your edge of the bed now, looking at you with a head propped up on his hand. He breathes out your full name as well, “don’t you think that’s a bit formal for somebody who was inside you last night-” You pick up a pillow from the bed and hit his face twice as you stand up from the floor. You hug the pillow to your body as you create distance between both of you, your legs trembling while walking backwards, sore from the night’s activities.
Images of his hands and mouth on your body, of yourself begging for more, of yourself moaning underneath him as he made you feel so so good, flood your mind again. Your lower abdomen tingles at the memories of the night. You have to physically shake your head to get them out of your head before you look at Hansol again. His smile is still bright and smug. That goddamn bastard is enjoying your misery again just like he always has.
The sex was really good though. You hate that.
────𑣲⋆────
a/n: OMFG CHAPTER ONE IS FINALLY HERE, it feels like i posted the teaser aeons ago and i'm so fricking sorry, but i guess i just wanted to feel good about writing again because it's been two years since i wrote anything, but now that this is here i'm very motivated to write so ch 2 will hopefully be here sooner because i've already started working on it (i love rodrina so much and vernon just fits so right in this). Likes, comments and reblogs are very much appreciated!!
taglist: @miyx-amour @fluffybnuny @gayterry1000 @angstylittleb1tch @epelletart @spacehamster13 @stefacoustic @hansiris @dk-is-dok-yumm @yeojalover56 @artgukk @svtts
distinctly off-putting
My mom: "do you really need to make bts stickers"
Me: "this is SEVENTEEN, mom. i don't even like bts! and yes, i do. it's funny. you wouldn't understand"
My mom: *sighs*
looking for pics to make my stickers with and like
????????
Rabbit | welcome back (c.hs)
PAIRING: Syndicate!Vernon x Undercover!Reader SUMMARY: Revenge is the only thing that kept you alive after your family’s betrayal. When the police force you to earn your place by infiltrating the same syndicate that destroyed you, you step back into a world that feels far too familiar - especially Vernon, who seems to see right through you. WC: 9,884 AU: Modern Syndicate, Criminal GENRE: Childhood Acquaintances to lovers, heavy angst, smut RATING: 18+ Minors are strictly prohibited from engaging in and reading this content. It contains explicit content and any minors discovered reading or engaging with this work will be blocked immediately. WARNINGS: Criminal behavior, morally gray characters, mentions of witnessing parents death, reader has obvious ptsd and memory suppression, police corruption (whats new), reader being forced into an undercover role that she doesn't want, a lot of accusations about her character because of her parents, reader literally has to go to jail for the bit, angst about going back to an old life that got her parents killed, high anxiety at all times, allusions to sex crime and trafficking and coercion of foreigners, explicit language DISCLAIMER: I don't typically write fics that are explicitly set in South Korea because I never want to misrepresent its people, culture, or lived experiences. However, as this story is heavily inspired by My Name, I've chosen to use South Korea as its setting. This work is not intended to reflect or comment on the country or its culture, and any locations, customs, or depictions should be understood as part of a fictional story rather than an accurate representation. As an American, I recognize there may be inaccuracies or misunderstandings despite my research, and if you come across something that is incorrect, insensitive, or offensive, I genuinely welcome you letting me know. AN: This is for the SVTFLIX collab that I am very late for. Thank you @100vern for being so patient with everyone on deadlines and for letting me get a whack at this Vernon I've been wanting to write forever. A/N 2: Thank you to @daechwitatamic for beta reading this and making this my first legible fic in months. KDRAMA INSPIRATION: My Name
MAIN M. LIST | SERIES M. LIST | ASK | SVTFLIX COLLAB | NEXT CHAPTER
2026.04.28 SEOUL METROPLITAN POLICE AGENCY
THE INTERROGATION ROOM SMELLS LIKE CIGARETTES, THE SMELL PERMANENTLY SEEPED INTO THE CONCRETE WALLS. The entire building belonging to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency smells like cigarettes, honestly. That, and the shitty coffee in every break room that is inevitably burned no matter who makes it.
Fluorescent lights flicker overhead, casting everything in a sickly white that makes the scratched up metal table between you and Detective Han look more like an operating table than an interview table. You suppose it is an operating table in a way, the man across from you ready to dissect every ounce of you, leaving no organ or thought or iota unturned.
You know that's why you're here, and you know that you're the only member of your graduating class that will have been brought to an interrogation room like this for questioning. It makes you grind your teeth as you stare at the muddy reflection of the detective in the table, a washed out shadow and suggestion of what a person might look like.
Han hasn't touched his coffee. You haven't touched yours either, the steam long gone. Neither of you wanted the coffee. He wanted a prop for this conversation and you'd wanted something to warm your hands on because the interrogation room is freezing, which you know is on purpose - interrogation tactics had been part of the academy training.
"Your father moved product for the Kang syndicate," Han notes. His voice is flat and to the point, like he's reading something as simple as a grocery list and not bringing up a past you'd tried for years to forget. "Your mother kept some books for them and stored product, using a nail salon as a front. You grew up just in the backroom."
Outside, Seoul traffic hums. You hear the distant wail of sirens backtracked by the dull buzz of the lights and the drone of the aircon in the corner of the room. You pick at the paper coffee cup and shrug. There's no point in hiding it - you'd never tried to hide who you were when you applied to the academy. You'd only foolishly hoped that it wouldn't matter.
"I passed all my exams, you know?" You ask. "Top of my class. No criminal record."
"I don't give a fuck what you passed," he laughs, leaning back as the chair groans. "You're the fuckin' kid of two dead syndicate deadbeats who got exactly what they earned. And you thought you could - what? Become a cop to erase what they did?"
He slides a folder across the table, leaving it unopened. The manila is worn at the edges and you stare at it. It's thicker than you expected, probably filled with every terrible thing your parents did, every terrible thing that you were witness to and already testified for. The judge had agreed that a child couldn't be responsible for the crimes of her parents, and turned you over to the city for placement in a home.
The walls are closer than they were a minute ago. Painted institutional gray, water-stained in the corners where the building's age shows through. There's a mirror on your left and when you glance at the one-way glass, you see your face reflected back at you. You look like something dredged up from the Han River, exhausted and beat down from the grueling hours spent to get here, to be the best.
Only for this bullshit.
"What do you want?" You snap. "You didn't bring me here for one-on-one humiliation, though from what I hear about you, you've got the humiliation kink."
"Listen, you fuck-"
You lurch forward, slamming your hands on the table. He flinches backward, hand going for his gun. "No, you listen. The Kang family killed my parents and SMPA did fuck-all. Wouldn't let me testify to put anyone behind bars. They were my parents and I want to finish the job none of you could get your heads out of your asses to do."
Han doesn't move for a second, staring at you with so much contempt that you almost get to your feet and leave, to hell with these fucking assholes. But something in him shifts, settling in the chair as his hand drifts from his gun.
"Kang is expanding." Han crosses his arms. "New operations in Gangnam, Itaewon, Hongdae. Tighter security, fresh blood." He leans over and grabs a new folder, tossing it between you. "We need someone on the inside. Someone they'd believe with the right name and the right reasons."
Your heart kicks against your ribs like it's trying to escape. It’s a familiar feeling, the panicked feeling of needing escape. You remember the exact moment you felt it for real the first time. Suddenly, you can't hear the aircon or the lights humming above you and instead, you hear the hammering of a foot against a door, the splintering of wood, the screams of your mother as she slammed a door and threw what she could against it, her voice begging you to run, Rabbit, run.
Without warning, your eyes close. You take a few deep breaths, feeling the fluttering of your lashes as the memories from that night press against you, threatening to crack through the eggshell wall of your mind and spill everywhere, coating your thoughts.
You lurch away from the memories and instead think of the color of the sky. The texture of sand. The warmth of pavement. The smell of fresh cut grass. You cycle through the steps your therapist recommended until you're back in the interrogation room, Han staring at you, smug like he knows exactly what reaction he's caused. You hate that he's right.
"You want me to go back." It's not a question. It's a statement, the implication plain in his approach. "You think I can be a rat."
"I want you to earn your badge. I want you to infiltrate and dismantle them." He pauses. "Do this and you're one of us. A detective. Everything you've worked for."
The fluorescent lights hum. The room shrinks. You see it again, the warehouse in Mullae-dong. The concrete floor, the smell of rain. The cool metal of the AC duct, cramped and dark and perfect for your mother's little rabbit to press her palms flat to her ears and drown out the sounds of her parents dying.
You twitch a little, finger flexing as you think of the sound of the ocean. The smell of jasmine in your neighbor's garden. The taste of a tangerine, ripe and fresh.
"And if I say no?" You ask, opening your eyes. "What then?"
Han opens the folder. Photos spill out, countless photos of you and people who should be behind bars - that are behind bars. Faces you recognize, connections that are no longer tangible in adulthood but still tie you to a life you have spent over a decade trying to escape.
"We'll charge you as an accessory."
Rage floods through you and you look up at him. "I was a fucking eight year old-"
"We'll make it stick. If we can't find something that sticks, we will."
The fluorescent lights buzz louder now. You stare at the photos fanned across the table, grainy surveillance shots, old mugshots, faded family Polaroids that somehow survived the raid on your parents’ nail salon. Your mother’s tired smile in one corner, your father’s arm slung around a man you now know was a mid-level Kang enforcer. Evidence of a life you never chose.
Accessory. The word tastes like fucking bile because of course they’d twist it and warp it, bury you under enough procedural bullshit that no academy record or clean test scores would matter. You’ve seen it before, how the system chews up people with the wrong last name and spits out convenient convictions. Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency: protectors of the city, except when it’s easier to use the daughter of dead criminals as cannon fodder. You think about writing to their public relations department, but you’re sure they’re no stranger to spinning webs out of death threats.
Han watches you with the flat patience of a man who’s done this dance a hundred times. His fingers drum once against the folder, then still. He doesn’t need to say more. The threat hangs heavier than the burned-coffee air.
You lean back slowly, forcing your hands flat on the cold metal so they stop shaking. The chair creaks under you and the mirror on the left reflects only you, hiding whoever is watching this little fucked up performance. Probably someone from Internal Affairs, if you had to guess. Someone higher up who doesn't want to be in the room, too important to have their fingerprints on this conversation.
“You’re a real piece of shit, Han,” you say, voice low and steady. “Using the same bastards who murdered my parents to blackmail their kid. Real justice.”
He shrugs unapologetically. “Justice is a luxury. Results aren’t. Kang’s moving product through Gangnam clubs now, designer shit mixed with fentanyl analogs that’s killing kids in Itaewon. Hongdae’s turning into their new laundering hub. We’ve lost three informants in six months. They smell cops from a block away.” His eyes narrow. “But you? You’ve got the blood. The name."
"My parents fucked up and they killed them."
"So tell them you're there to make it right. That you're looking to do right to the family business. They live for that shit."
The warehouse memory surges again - bones breaking, wet screaming, the shadow of falling bodies across the airvent slits. You shove it down harder again, imagining dirt between your toes. A scraped knee. The laughter from the school yard down your block.
You can't imagine slipping back into that world of late-night hand offs, smiling and playing poker with men who might have ordered the hits on your parents. Playing pitiful daughter come home, tail tucked between her fucking legs while feeding scraps of information to Han. And then what? Extraction at some unpromised point in the future? A shiny badge - maybe even a bullet in the head when they figure it out.
“And if I do this,” you say, testing the words, “what’s my cover? How deep? Who’s my handler? Because if I’m going in alone with you holding my leash from this room, I’m as good as dead before I even reach Gangnam.”
Han’s expression doesn’t soften, but something like amusement flickers across his face. He slides another folder over, thinner this time. You nudge it open with a reluctant finger, looking at the thin biography of your fabricated story except - it's not all that fabricated.
"I haven't been arrested like this says," you note, scoffing. "They'll sniff that out."
"So are you in?"
Outside, another siren wails, closer this time. Traffic pulses like the city’s heartbeat, indifferent and relentless. You think of the other graduates right now that are probably celebrating postings, dreaming of clean collars and commendations. None of them are being blackmailed. None of them are being called a piece of shit.
You pick up one of the photos, the one of you as a scrawny kid, maybe eight, standing in the salon doorway with a half-finished manicure set on your lap. Your mother’s hand on your shoulder. Protective. Doomed.
“I want it in writing,” you say finally, voice like gravel. “Immunity. Full record expungement. And if I die in there, my story doesn’t get buried with me. The press gets everything.”
Han studies you for a long beat, then nods once. “We can do that. But understand that this isn't academy training anymore. No rules of engagement. No backup on speed dial. You’ll do things that make you hate yourself. Things that make you wonder if you’re any better than them.”
"Alright."
"Good. You're under arrest."
You look up at him. "What?"
"You were right," he grins, standing from the table. "You need to do real time for it to be believable."
- 2004.01.01SEOUL YEONGDEUNGPO POLICE STATION MULLAE PATROL DIVISION
The room is freezing cold. Your legs dangle off the chair, sneakers scuffed and damp from walking here in the freezing rain. Your finger tips haven't regained much feeling yet, and your thin, long-sleeve shirt clings to you. The blanket wrapped around you does little to ward off the cold, leaving you shaking in uncontrollable waves that rattle the uneven chair legs against the concrete floor.
A door scrapes open and you flinch, looking up as a woman walks in. She's pretty, dressed in a soft cardigan the color of oatmeal. She carries a clipboard and a notebook, moving slowly like you might bolt if she walks too fast. She sits across from you and sets her things down gently on the table, her eyes kind but tired.
"Hi," she says softly. "My name is Jieun. I'm here to talk with you. Is that okay?"
You stare at the muddy reflection of your small face on the metal table and manage the smallest nod.
She folds her hands. “It’s very cold in here, isn’t it? I’m sorry. They don’t make these rooms kind for little girls.” She watches the way your shoulders tremble under the thin blanket. “You’ve been through something terrible. I know you’re scared. Anyone would be. But you’re safe now. No one is going to hurt you here.”
Your fingers twist together in your lap, knuckles stiff and unmoving. The warehouse keeps flashing behind your eyes - rain on concrete, the smell of gunpowder, your mother slamming a door and throwing whatever she could find. You swallow hard, throat raw.
“Can you tell me what happened last night?” she asks gently. “Anything you remember. Even the small things.”
“They broke the door," you answer haltingly, voice raw. "Eomma told me to run. I hid in the vent because I fit. I heard a lot of loud noises and then eomma was screaming. They hurt eomma a lot while appa laid on the ground. He didn't say much."
She writes something down slowly. “You were very brave to stay hidden like that." A pause. “Did you see any of the people who came? Even just a little bit?”
You shake your head. The shivering has settled into a deep, bone-cold tremor that makes your teeth click together. Your toes feel numb inside your damp sneakers. “It was too dark. I covered my ears. I didn’t want to hear."
It's not a lie but it feels like one. You didn't see your father's friend Seo Minho, but you knew his voice. Could hear him saying awful, terrible things to your mother. You don't tell this woman that.
The memories press against the thin walls in your mind, threatening to spill everywhere and you panic, biting down on your tongue until you taste blood. The pain is grounding and you swallow mouthfuls of blood, looking up at Jieun, who watches you like she knows you just hurt yourself.
"You're doing really well," she murmurs. "Tell me if you need to stop, okay?" You nod. "Your parents were friends of the Kang family, right?"
You flinch at the name. It feels like a knife sliding between your ribs. You nod once, barely.
She asks a few more careful questions, about whether your parents seemed scared in the days before, about anything strange you might have seen in the salon backroom. You answer in broken pieces, eyes fixed on the table, body still shaking under the useless blanket. Every word hurts. Every memory claws at you. The smell of acetone and cash. Your father’s laugh when he thought you weren’t listening. Your mother’s hand on your shoulder.
After what feels like forever, you can’t hold it in anymore.
“My rabbit,” you whisper, interrupting her. "White rabbit. With floppy ears. I left it in the air vent or maybe I dropped it. I need it. Please."
Jieun’s face softens. “I’ll find your white rabbit. I promise. We’ll look everywhere. As soon as we finish talking, I’ll ask the officers to search right away.”
"Thank you."
"You have very good manners. Did you learn that from your parents?" You nod wordlessly. Jieun closes her notebook and sighs. "You did very well. The city is going to find you a safe place to stay while we figure everything out. And I won’t forget the rabbit. Okay?”
"Okay."
She stands, then hesitates at the door. “Your parents loved you very much. Even when they made mistakes. You know that, right?”
You don’t answer. Love didn’t stop the door from breaking. Love didn’t keep the bad men away.
-
2026.08.04SEOUL
The processing area of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency - the same building you sold your soul to a few months ago - reeks. The paperwork is already done, the minor drug possession that normally would get you almost five years cut to four months and a hefty ass fine that was paid for by your humble friend and ally Detective Han. You're not sure if you could have fabricated the stint, but Han had assured you that you couldn't, which means the crime is actually on your record.
Not on your record is your time at the academy. You're not sure how they managed that one, but it's like you never even existed there. To the people you graduated with, you probably hadn't. They hated you the same way the popular kids at school didn't like the low income students sitting too close to them, and they hated you even more when you had the balls to do better than them.
You sign the last form with a steady hand, collect the plastic bag containing your belongings, and step out into the muggy Seoul evening. Thick summer air heavy with exhaust hits you immediately, the smell of street food grease heavy. The distant hum of millions of lives grinding against one another is disorienting after being in a utilitarian, clean space.
Neon signs bleed pink and green across puddles on the sidewalk and you pull the hood up on the jacket they gave you on release and disappear into the crowd at the station exit. No one looks twice, just another person blending into the crush of bodies as people rush home, the press of a rainy Friday night making everyone feel a little smaller.
A rattling subway ride later, you emerge in Gangseo-gu on the western edge of Seoul where the shine of Gangnam doesn't quite reach. The streets here are narrower, lined with aging mid-rise apartments squeezed between auto repair shops and convenience stores with flickering signage. Graffiti tags crawl up alley walls, and the air smells of kimchi jjigae from open windows mixed with wet asphalt from an earlier rain.
Your new apartment building squats on a side street, six stories of faded beige concrete stained with years of water leaks. No one pays you mind as you walk up the inclined street, cracked and worn with use before you walk up the stairs, each step to the fourth floor more agonizing than the last.
The door to unit 402 sticks when you type in the code, but after a hard shoulder to the door, it pops open, the wooden door frame swollen with the humidity and the heat.
Inside isn't much. It's a small apartment that's cramped and blessedly filled with your belongings. At least it's functional with a tiny kitchen with a two-burner stove, a sink full of mismatched mugs, and a fridge that hums too loudly. The living room barely fits a sagging couch draped with a faded floral throw, a low coffee table scarred with old burn marks, and a small TV on a wobbly stand.
You walk the space. Someone has set up your worn jewelry box on a dresser, the few cheap pieces your mother had owned hidden inside. Old photos hang on the walls, carefully curated images of you as a child in the nail salon backroom, all evidence that you had grown up exactly as you needed - in the syndicate. A white rabbit stuffed animal, worn almost bald in places, rests on the bed, your heart skipping when you see it. You walk over, pausing to brush your fingers along its floppy ear.
Clothes hang in the closet. You strip out of the jail clothes and shower in the tiny bathroom, water sputtering lukewarm from rusted pipes. Once clean, you towel off and dress quickly in black jeans, a black hoodie, and the leather jacket that used to be your days. It's the kind of clothes that let you fade into the nightlife crowd, unknown and uncared for.
Opening the night stand, you huff. There is a single non-standard issue pistol, a switch blade, and a wallet. You pick up the wallet, the switch blade and the single phone that's your clean phone. You take the burner and walk into the kitchen, finding a plastic bag before dropping it in, sealing it, and walking to the bathroom to drop it in the back of the toilet before putting the lid back over it. The last thing you want is for someone to find the single phone Han can call you on.
It's dark when you jog down the steps. Somewhere, a cat yowls while a couple fights and you grin, thankful for sounds that aren't someone snoring in a cot next to you or crying and praying for the lord to forgive them for smoking a little weed. Night air kisses the back of your neck as you walk to the nearest convenience store, buying a pack of cigarettes and a bowl of ramen that you devour at a small table before heading out.
The subway ride to Itaewon takes forty minutes, packed to the brim with businessmen heading home and young people chasing the night. There are a ton of foreigners packed on the train, a cacophony of languages you don't know. You shove earbuds in and pull your hood up, scanning faces out of habit as music floods your ears and drowns out the noise.
Itaewon greets you with its chaotic energy when you surface, the streets pulsing under strings of colorful lights and towering neon signs in multiple languages. Tourists and expats spill out of bars and clubs, laughter mixing with the thump of bass from open doorways. The air is thick with grilled meat smoke from street vendors, perfume, spilled soju, and the underlying rot of overworked drains.
Foreigners cluster in groups - soldiers on leave, backpackers, clusters of girls - all drawn by Itaewon's reputation as Seoul's international playground while locals swarm around them, going from bar to bar with the confident familiar flow of people who live here. It's the perfect hunting grounds for the Kangs' new product, the entire point of being here.
You walk deeper into the district, shoulders hunched against the sticky heat. The main drag gives way to narrower side streets where the grit shows more clearly - cracked pavement, overflowing trash bins, graffiti-covered shutters on closed shops. Hookah lounges compete with fried chicken spots and discreet gentlemen's clubs that make your stomach lurch.
Down the alley, you see the club you're looking for, Midnight. It's got new management with Kang connections, pushing new designer pills to foreigners brave enough to try them out. They're supposed to promise euphoria without the immediate crash, but they're laced with something nastier that ends with dead girls in hotel rooms or dumped in alleyways.
The streets grow louder as you approach. A group of drunk Americans stumbles past you, one of them retching into the gutter while his friends laugh. The bass from Midnight vibrates through the walls, a flickering motif over the dimly lit entrance calling to you. It's tucked between a vape shop and a tattoo parlor, both contacts of Kang as well.
Bouncers with thick necks and dead eyes stand at the door, eyeing the crowd on the streets. Inside, you can already imagine the haze of smoke and flashing lights, but the flow of people hasn't even started. Nights start late here, but you need a head start to get your bearings.
You pause across the street, lighting a cigarette to buy time. Your heart kicks against your ribs, but you keep your face neutral, blowing out the acrid smoke. This is the first real step. Reconnect. Gather intel. Make friends.
You crush the cigarette under your heel, the ember dying with a faint hiss against the damp pavement, and cross the street toward Midnight. The bouncers give you a once-over and jerks his chin without saying a word. You slide past him, the bass hitting you like a physical force before you even get inside.
Inside, the air is thick and humid, saturated with the sweet stench of spilled soju, vape clouds, and sweat-soaked bodies pressed too close. Purple and red neon strips snake along the low ceiling, casting everything in a bruised, flickering glow that makes faces look hollow and eyes too bright. The walls are painted matte black, scuffed and sticky with years of grime, covered in half-peeled posters for underground DJs and faded warnings about ID checks. A long bar runs along one side, mirrored backing reflecting the chaos in distorted fragments.
The dance floor is still half-empty this early, but bodies are already grinding to the heavy trap beat spilling from speakers mounted in the corners. Women in tight dresses and men in designer knockoffs cluster near the VIP booths at the back.
The floor sticks to your boots with every step, a mix of beer and something sweeter, more chemical. Your pulse syncs unwillingly with the music, and for a second the anxiety spikes so sharp it feels like the eggshell wall in your mind might crack right here.
It’s too easy. The way your body remembers the rhythm of these places, the way your eyes automatically scan for exits, for familiar silhouettes, for threats. You grew up in the backrooms of spots just like this, watching your parents count cash under dim lights, learning to keep your head down while men with guns laughed too loud. The muscle memory makes your stomach twist. You shouldn’t slip back in this smoothly. Not after everything.
You head toward the bar, weaving through clusters of foreigners laughing too loud. You order a whiskey and the bartender passes you something watered down. You throw crumbled bills his way before turning and leaning backward on the sticky bar top, letting your gaze drift across the room.
Near a cluster of worn leather booths along the far wall, a small group holds court like they own the place. And in a way, they do. Or their bosses do, because you recognize one of them immediately. It's been years since you've seen Joshua Hong - over a decade at least - but you recognize the polished man, tall and lean with dark hair styled neatly back from a face that could pass for an actor or an idol if you didn't know any better.
Late twenties looks good on him, with a sharp jawline and warm brown eyes that are good at looking friendly even when he's not. He's in a black button-up rolled up at the sleeves revealing tattoos that snake up his forearms, a glass held loosely in his hands, posture relaxed but alert.
Beside him, Kim Mingyu is still tall as ever - taller than you remember, even. Definitely broader, the kind of build that makes people step aside on the sidewalk. His hair is shorter now, dark and slightly tousled, and a faint scar cuts through one eyebrow. He’s dressed more casually than Joshua in a black t-shirt stretched tight across his chest, silver chain glinting at his throat.
Mingyu’s laugh booms over the music as he claps one of the older guys on the back, but his eyes scan the room constantly, predator-sharp. You remember him as one of the sons of an enforcer, and as far as you know, he's taken up that mantle himself.
A few of the older crowd linger with them, men in their forties and fifties with hard faces and heavier guts, the kind who ran with your parents back in the day. One of them, a stocky guy with a gold tooth and a faded dragon tattoo peeking from his collar, does a double-take when his gaze lands on you. Recognition flickers across his face, followed by a slow, crooked smile.
"Holy shit," he calls out. Heads turn and Joshua's gaze snaps to you. "If it isn't the little rabbit."
Your heart slams against your ribs as the nickname lands like a punch to the throat. You force a tired half-smile, pushing off the bar and walking over like this is normal. Like you’ve been waiting for this reunion.
"Hi, Dragon," you say, voice carrying over the bass. "Been a long time."
They pull you in without hesitation. The older men clap your shoulder, murmur half-sincere condolences about your parents. Someone slides you into the booth beside Joshua, the leather cracked and warm from bodies while glasses clink and someone starts pouring soju.
"What the fuck happened to you?" Dragon asks, leaning in. His breath smells like garlic but you fight the urge to lean away. "Knew you grew up in the home. Heard you got pinched recently. That would have made your old man laugh his ass off."
You sip the soju, letting the burn ground you. "Got out today, actually."
Joshua watches you over the rim of his glass, expression unreadable but not hostile. “Bold move, coming straight here on your first night out. Most people would lay low.”
You shrug, meeting his eyes. “Laying low never fed anyone."
"Who says we'll let you eat at the table?"
Dragon laughs loudly and slaps you on the back, but Joshua doesn't look as amused. His gaze is assessing and cool, and you feel it pressed against your throat like a knife. You stare back at him. Joshua isn't the soft little boy he was when you were in grade school - that much is obvious. But you're not the scared little rabbit you were back then, either.
"I can earn my way, Hong," you tell him coolly. You lean back and cross one knee over the other. "I've got time and connections."
Mingyu barks out a laugh, clapping his hands. "Holy shit, she's got balls. Her dad was good on the deliveries, maybe we let her have a go."
"Easy, Mingyu," Joshua warns. "Don't let nostalgia make you say stupid things. Rats wear so many faces these days."
The word rats lands heavy. You feel the way your heart slams in your chest, but your face remains neutral as you shrug and say, "I'm not much for cheese."
Dragon slaps the table, grinning wide enough to flash the gold in his teeth. "Fire, just like her mother."
You settle in, letting the conversation pull you deeper. Dragon launches into old stories of your father's near-miss on a delivery in Mullae-dong, your mother’s iron grip on the books that kept the nail salon looking spotless while cash flowed underneath. The nostalgia tastes like rust in your mouth, but you laugh at the right moments, adding small details from what you remember.
"Your old man had ice in his veins," Dragon continues, pouring another round of soju into the small glasses scattered across the table. "Remember that time the cops rolled up on him in Yeouido? Had two kilos in the trunk, registration expired, and he just smiled at them like he was picking up his kid from school."
You do remember. Not the incident itself, but the way your father came home that night, silent as always, and how your mother had gripped his face between her hands, kissing his forehead hard enough to leave a mark.
"He told them he was lost," you add, your voice steady despite the tightness in your throat. "Asked for directions to some restaurant that didn't exist."
"Exactly!" Dragon slaps the table again, delighted. "They gave him a fucking map and sent him on his way. Your mother nearly killed him when he got home."
"She did," you say quietly. "Threw a bottle of nail polish remover at his head."
The men laugh, and you force yourself to smile, but inside you're eight years old again, watching through a crack in the door as your mother screamed at your father about being reckless, about what would happen to you if he got caught. The memory sits like broken glass in your chest.
Suddenly, you wish you had the white bunny in your lap. Your fingers twitch, aching to run the ears between them, soft and worn and familiar. You swallow past the memories, focusing on the feeling of the humid air against your neck, the smell of soju, the sound of the humming base.
Joshua watches you through the haze of cigarette smoke, his expression unreadable. You meet his gaze and hold it, refusing to flinch despite trying to hold off the overwhelming onslaught of memories with a single, shaky hand.
The music shifts to something with a heavier bass that makes the glasses on the table vibrate. The crowd on the dance floor thickens, bodies pressing together in the purple-red glow. You're about to say something, anything to fill the silence stretching between you and Joshua, when movement catches your eye.
A man approaches the booth, cutting through the crowd with the kind of ease that comes from familiarity. Tall, lean, dressed in a black button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. Dark hair cut shorter and styled a little wild. There's something about the way he moves that makes your stomach drop before you even see his face clearly.
When he steps into the light, you freeze.
You know him. Or you knew him. The recognition hits like a punch to the stomach. A face from childhood, blurred at the edges by time and trauma. He's older now, sharper. The softness of youth has been carved away, leaving behind clean lines and a jaw that could cut glass. But his eyes, dark and guarded, are the same.
Vernon.
Your heart hammers against your ribs. Does he remember you? He must. You were both kids in the same circles, running through the same backrooms while your parents conducted business. But maybe not. Maybe you were just another face in the background, forgettable and small.
He stops at the edge of the booth, and his gaze sweeps across the table - Dragon, Mingyu, Joshua - before landing on you where he hesitates. It's barely a second, a fractional pause in his movement, but you catch it. His eyes widen just slightly, recognition flickering across his face before he shuts it down, his expression smoothing into something neutral and professional.
"Vernon," Joshua says, his voice cutting through the music. He gestures to the empty space beside him. "Sit."
Vernon slides into the booth without looking at you again, sliding his phone to set it on the table, screen-down. You feel the way your heart pounds in time with the bass, the club narrowing to a needle-like focus that is only Vernon’s messy hair and the chains tucked under his shirt out of sight. Your eyes flicker to his the hem of his shirt, loose enough to hide a gun in the waistband of his pants if he wanted to.
"We need to talk," Vernon says, his voice low and even. "About the shipment coming in next week."
Joshua's demeanor shifts immediately, his posture straightening. The easy nostalgia of the last half hour evaporates, replaced by something colder and more focused. You try not to visibly perk up, turning to look as though you’re watching the group of drunk girls stumble in while you sip your drink. If Joshua buys it, it doesn’t matter.
"Alright," Joshua says and you turn to look at him. "Rabbit, give us a minute."
The dismissal is casual but absolute. You feel it like a door closing in your face, and though you want to protest and push back because you want to know what that shipment is, you have no choice. You grind your teeth, letting your irritation bleed through as you begin to stand. Irritation is good. It shows him that you want in. Eager isn’t a terrible thing to be here, but you know that you have to let it bleed through in small, carefully designed doses.
Dragon cuts in, his voice rough, "Come on, Hong, she's part of the old family. Her parents bled for this organization, she should be able to stay."
Joshua's smile doesn't reach his eyes. He leans back, one arm draped across the back of the booth, and looks at Dragon with something that might be amusement if it weren't so cold.
"Old family," Joshua repeats, tasting the words. "Sure, but she's not current family, is she? And that's what matters."
Joshua's words carve a knife through you and the sand, drawing a line between who you were and who you are now because it matters. Your parents' history and loyalty doesn't matter - not when the younger generation are calling the shots now, people who care nothing for the people who gave their lives to give them what they have now.
Dragon opens his mouth to argue, but you shake your head slightly, cutting him off. "It's fine. I'll catch up with you later, it was nice seeing you."
You slide out of the booth, your movements smooth and unhurried. You won't give Joshua the satisfaction of seeing you rattled. He smirks as you lean over and kiss Dragon on the cheek, waving by to the others before your gaze catches on Vernon again.
He's looking at you now, really looking, and there's something in his expression you can't quite read. Not hostility, but not anything friendly either, rather something between the two. Your gaze holds his for a beat too long, and you feel the tension stretch between you before you turn and walk away, weaving through the crowd toward the bar.
You don't look back, but you feel Vernon's eyes on you the entire time, a brand you can't shake off.
- 2003.06.15MULLAE NEIGHBORHOOD PARK
The grass is warm under your feet, the sunlight streaming through the trees above you, casting dappled shadows on the ground. The park smells like the sweet-and-sour scent of the ginkgo trees, fruit baking and rotting in the sun. Kids scatter across the playground on swings and climbing the jungle gym with its chipped blue paint.
Your heart beats wildly in your chest as you catch your breath, squinting up as the rest of the kids jog toward you for another round of tag. As usual, no one will let you be the tagger - they always complain that you're too fast and that it's too easy. Instead, you're often the target, which doesn't seem to make most of the kids happy either, least of all Eunwoo who is glaring at you now, arms crossed over his chest.
"How do you even run in those shoes?" He demands loudly. "They're ugly and they look like boy shoes. Are you a boy?"
The other kids laugh and you frown, looking down at your shoes. They don't look like boy or girl shoes to you - they just look like shoes. They're practical, black sneakers with velcro straps because you can't tie laces and your mother hasn't had time to teach you. Instead, she'd bought you these to make you more independent while getting dressed in the morning, the struggle with laces bypassed.
You glance at Eunwoo's shoes. His shoes don't look like girl or boy shoes either. They just look like white sneakers with blue detailing and clear bottoms that light up when he runs. They're cool, but you don't understand much of the difference between yours and his.
"They're just shoes," you murmur back.
"Yeah, well they're ugly shoes. I wouldn't wear them."
Again, the laughter surrounds him. You don't say anything back, looking at the group of kids as they cackle, some of them pointing at your shoes. You're not even sure if they're being mean or just following the leader, but it makes your throat feel tight and the sudden urge to cry makes you shoot to your feet.
But instead of saying anything, you run.
You don't know where you're going, only that you need to be away from the playground, away from Eunwoo's stupid light-up shoes and the laughter that follows you. Your legs pump hard, carrying you past the swings and the benches where all the ajummas sit gossiping, past the water fountain, past the bridge. You run until you're gasping for air and doubling over, trying to catch your breath.
You end up near the edge of the park where the trees grow thicker and the ground slopes down toward the street. Your chest heaves and your eyes burn, tears streaking down your cheeks. You wipe at them furiously because you're not crying. You're not.
Except you kind of are. The tears come hot and fast, spilling down your cheeks before you can stop them. You hate that Eunwoo made you cry, but you're upset that he insulted your shoes. You thought they were nice, a favor from your eomma to make things easier, to help you. You'd never thought of them as ugly before, but now that you look at them, you think maybe he's right. They don't have light up soles or cool laces, and they're not pink with ponies on them like Mina's.
"Hey!"
You spin around, sucking in a sharp breath, startled. There's a boy standing a few meters away that looks around your age. His hair sticks up in the back like he forgot to brush it, and the shirt he's wearing is way too big for him, hanging loose over his lanky frame. His sneakers are scuffed and white without lights - but at least he has laces, you guess.
You recognize him vaguely. He's one of the kids who hangs around the edges of the playground sometimes, not really playing with anyone but not alone either. You've seen him before, maybe at the convenience store or near the nail salon where your mother works - you think maybe with someone your mom knows.
"You run fast," he notes.
You don't say anything. Your face is hot with embarrassment, and you can feel the tears still wet on your cheeks. You turn away, wiping at them again with your sleeve.
"Why'd you run?" he asks.
"None of your business."
"Was it Eunwoo? He's a jerk."
You glance back at him, surprised. He's watching you with an expression that's hard to read. He doesn't look friendly like Wonwoo or Mingyu at the nail salon, but he doesn't look mean or like he's making fun of you, which is a win.
"He said my shoes are ugly," you admit, sniffing.
He looks at them. "They're fine. They look like shoes."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah. Plus, Eunwoo is stupid anyway."
You almost smile, but the sting of everyone laughing at you is still fresh. "He made everyone laugh at me."
"So what?" He tilts his head. "You gonna let him do that every time?"
You blink, confused. "What do you mean?"
"Well you have to stand up for yourself." He says it like it's the most obvious thing in the world, crossing his arms over his chest. "Tell him to shut up. Push him if you have to. They'll leave you alone if you do."
You stare at him. No adult has ever told you to push someone. Your mother always says to ignore mean kids, to be the bigger person, but this loner is telling you to hurt someone.
"I'm not sure," you murmur.
"Just do it," he says. "Next time he says something, say something back. Or hit him. Doesn't matter which. Just don't run."
You wipe your nose with the back of your hand, considering this. It sounds scary, but you think of the way they pointed at your shoes and the way Eunwoo scrunched up his nose and you think that maybe - just maybe - it's possible.
"Okay. I'll try."
He grins, lopsided and pleased. "Good. I'm Vernon, by the way."
"My mom calls me Rabbit."
"Cause you're fast?" You nod. "Cool. I'll see you later, Rabbit."
Then he turns and starts walking back toward the playground, hands shoved in his pockets. You watch him go, standing alone under the trees with your ugly shoes and your tear-stained face. The sun filters through the leaves above you, the hush of the leaves comforting as they sway in the breeze. You stay there for a few more minutes, letting the tears dry on your cheeks, feeling the weight of his words settle into something solid and real.
Stand up for yourself.
Maybe you'll try.
- 2026.08.17DONGJAK DISTRICT, SEOUL
For a hole in the wall coffee shop, the cafe tucked between a laundromat and medspa is absolutely packed with people. K-pop plays through overhead speakers, something bright and synthetic, all auto-tuned vocals and electronic beats that clash with the gray drizzle streaking the windows and the din of voices overlapping with one another. The espresso machine hisses and gurgles, punctuated by the barista calling out orders in a shrill voice.
You're standing at the counter waiting for your order when you feel the cool mist of rain at your back as someone comes in. Something prods at your instincts and when you turn to look over your shoulder, you see Detective Han standing three feet away looking like he's been dragged through the trenches of hell, coat rumpled, collar askew, shirt wrinkled. His eyes are bloodshot, the whites threaded with broken capillaries, dark circles carved deep beneath them like bruises.
His jaw is tight, his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, and there's a fury in his eyes that makes your stomach drop. He jerks his head to head back outside into the misting rain and you grind your teeth and nod before he vanishes out the door.
The barista chooses that minute to call your name, and you snatch the iced coffee from the counter before you follow him out onto the narrow street, the door swinging shut behind you and muffling the sound of the cafe.
Most of the rain has stopped, though the air is still misty with drizzle. The pavement is slick, reflecting the people rushing by with black umbrellas, shoes splashing shallowly. You see Han dart between an alley way and you follow, throwing your hood up, heart pounding as you follow him, glancing around before you turn down the alley.
"Two weeks," he hisses the moment you're close enough. "Two fucking weeks and nothing. Not a word. Not a text. You didn't even turn on the burner."
You stare at him, incredulous, your fingers tightening around the plastic cup in your hand. The condensation is cold and slick against your palm. "Are you serious right now?"
"Dead serious. You think this is a game and you can just go dark when you fucking feel like it?"
"I've been working," you growl. "You know, the thing you blackmailed me into doing?"
"Working my ass. You haven't passed over a single piece of fucking intel. For all I know, you're sitting in some Kang safehouse right now, laughing your ass off."
The accusation lands like a slap and your anger spikes so fast you step closer to him, sneering. He actually takes a step back but you don't care, pressing onward. "You want to know why? Because I'm not fucking stupid and because they're not stupid either. They don't trust me yet, and with you showing up like this while I probably have eyes on me, you're going to get us both killed, you impatient fuck!"
Han's jaw works, the muscle jumping beneath the stubble. "Your job is to get intel."
"My job is to stay alive long enough to get you what you need and I can't do that if you blow my cover because you're so fucking nervous about your own job that you blow your load early!"
He opens his mouth to argue, but you cut him off, your voice rising just enough to carry over the sound of a bus rumbling past, kicking up a spray of dirty water from a puddle.
"Do you know how reckless this is?" You demand. "You showing up here, in broad daylight, cornering me like I'm some suspect you're hauling in for questioning? What if someone saw?"
Han's expression falters. Just for a second, but you see it, the flicker of doubt, the realization that maybe, just maybe, he fucked up. You simmer down, dropping your tone back down as he runs his hands through his hair.
"I'm not a fucking criminal you're using as a contact," you growl. "I graduated from the academy, I'm not going to randomly drop off the face of the earth and go dark."
The silence that follows is thick, tense, broken only by the distant hum of traffic and the drip of water from a gutter overhead. A woman walks past, her heels clicking against the wet pavement, her phone pressed to her ear, oblivious to the standoff happening three feet away.
Han looks away, his jaw still tight, but the fight has drained out of him. He exhales through his nose, a sharp, frustrated sound, and runs a hand through his hair again. It's greasy, unwashed, sticking up at odd angles. It's obvious that this assignment means a lot to him, which is information you file away for later.
"I just need to know you're in," he says finally. "And that you're not gonna fuck me."
"I'm not gonna fuck you. I don't have the choice to not be in. But if you pull another stunt like this, you're going to get me killed."
"So what do you want? Radio silence until you decide to grace me with an update?"
"No." You cross your arms, the iced coffee sweating in your hand, cold droplets running down your wrist. "We set a protocol. Something that works for both of us."
Han's eyes narrow. "I'm listening."
"No more in-person meetings," you say. "Too risky. Too visible. If you need to reach me, you don't. I will reach you."
"That's not-"
"Every two weeks, I send you a text. That way you know I'm alive, and I'm not sitting in a Kang safehouse laughing my ass off," you sneer. "But you don't contact me. You don't show up at coffee shops. You don't do anything that puts a spotlight on me. Understood?"
He stares at you for a long moment, weighing it. The rain picks up again, tapping down on the top of your head, tracing down your temples like cool, wet fingers. A car horn blares somewhere down the street, and he flinches, just slightly.
"Two weeks," he says finally. "And if I don't hear from you, I'm coming to find you."
"You won't need to."
"I mean it." His voice hardens again, the exhaustion giving way to something sharper. "You miss a check-in, I assume you're compromised."
"Fine," you say. "Two weeks."
He nods, once, sharp and curt. Then he turns and starts walking away, hands back in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the damp chill. His footsteps echo against the wet pavement, fading as he disappears around the corner as you watch him go, standing alone on the wet street.
You take a sip of your coffee. It's watery and bitter, already starting to separate. The ice has melted, diluting the espresso into something weak and unpleasant and you curse under your breath. Fucking Han.
Pivoting, you leave the alleyway, the adrenaline not fully dissipated. You toss the unfinished coffee and shove your hands in your jacket pockets and start walking, head down, shoulders hunched against the drizzle.
The street is busy with pedestrians weaving around you accompanied by the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the distant clatter of construction, and someone's phone ringing as they shoulder past you. You're halfway down the block when you notice someone leaning against the wall of a convenience store ahead of you, hands in his pockets of a black bomber jacket.
Vernon.
Seeing him sends a jolt through you and your steps falter, nearly slowing. He's dressed in dark jeans and white sneakers like the day you remember him so vividly at the park. He has a plain black cap pulled low over his forehead, and his eyes are on you.
Seeing him is strange. He's not the lanky kid you barely knew anymore, the boyish awkwardness sharpened into something striking and handsome. His features have settled into clean, defined lines, his cheekbones high and sleek, his jaw strong. The damp air clings to him, and for a second you feel the old familiarity clash violently with this new, magnetic version of him. He looks like he belongs here, like the city itself has molded him into someone who commands attention without trying.
The anxiety hits you immediately, pulse spiking again. You have no idea if it's a coincidence that he's here or if he's tailing you, and you have no idea if he saw you talking to Han. You scan the street without moving your head too much, scanning for others or any sign that this is a set up. You see nothing obvious, but that doesn't mean anything when it comes to the Kang family.
If Vernon saw you with Han, if he clocked the body language, the tension, the way Han was walking - you're done. Not just burned, but dead. They don't forgive informants. You've seen the photos Han showed you during the interrogation. Bodies in dumpsters. Bodies in the Han River. Bodies that were never found at all.
You force yourself to keep your breathing even, but your body is screaming at you to run. Fight or flight. Every instinct honed by years of survival is telling you to bolt, to disappear into the crowd, to get the fuck out of here before this goes sideways, but you don't.
Instead, you pick up your pace, nodding your head in greeting to let him know that you see him too. He straightens and pushes off the wall, coming right toward you until you both stop. Pedestrians flow around you like water around a stone, oblivious to the tension that crackles in the air the moment Vernon stops in front of you.
"Hey," he says, casual and calm.
"Hey yourself."
He tilts his head slightly, his gaze flicking over you. "You good?"
The question is simple, but the way he asks it isn't. There's an undercurrent there, something probing, like he's testing the waters. Like he's trying to figure out if you're about to bolt or if you're going to stand your ground.
"Yeah, the rain kind of sucks." That makes his mouth twitch a little. "I didn't think you remembered me."
"Took me a minute," he admits. "What have you been up to?"
The question sounds casual on the surface, but you can hear the careful edge beneath it. He's not making small talk. He's fishing, circling for information.
"Not much," you say, keeping it vague. "Just... settling in."
"Settling in," he repeats, like he's tasting the words. His mouth quirks, not quite a smile. "That what we're calling it?"
"What else would I call it?"
Vernon says nothing for a beat. You hold his gaze, forcing yourself to appear relaxed, to breathe normally even as your heart tries to hammer its way out of your chest. The silence stretches between you, thick and taut. You're hyper-aware of everything: the dampness seeping through your shoes, the reassuring weight of the knife tucked in your back pocket, the exact distance separating the two of you. If he reached for you right now, would you be fast enough?
Probably not.
"Why'd you come back?"
It's the last question you expect and it makes your chest tighten. Your first instinct is to deflect, to lie, to give him some bullshit answer about wanting to reconnect with old friends or needing a fresh start. The lies are right there, ready to deploy. You've rehearsed them - practiced them in the mirror until you were tired of hearing your own voice. You know exactly what to say to sound convincing, but something in his eyes stops you.
"I didn't have anywhere else to go," you admit softly.
It's not a lie. You don't elaborate or try to soften it, because there's no point. No family. No real friends. The academy had made that painfully clear - you didn't belong there either. Your only lifeline is this world that has already taken everything from you.
He nods slowly then. "Yeah. I get that." He shifts his weight again, glancing down the street before looking back at you. "You want in?"
You blink. "What?"
"Work. For Kang. If you're serious."
Your mind goes blank for a second, then kicks into overdrive. One wrong word and you're done, one wrong move and you're burned. You have no idea if this is a test or if this is some kind of game, but you know you have to answer correctly. Only, the question is more complicated than he makes it sound.
Do you want in? No, because the idea of going back to what killed your parents makes you sick. No, because the thought of working for the man responsible for their deaths makes you want to tear out your insides and paint the streets in blood. No, because you wanted to be more than some fucking lowlife crimincal.
Do you want in? Yes, because at least the syndicate is familiar. Yes, because growing up in foster care bouncing from home to home and never belonging anywhere had sucked. Yes, because you thought you could escape this life and become a cop, but you didn't fucking belong there either. Yes, because even if it's fucked up, this is the only family you've ever known, even if it did kill your parents.
"Yeah," you say finally. "Yeah."
He nods again, slower this time, like he's processing. Then he steps closer, close enough that you can smell the faint scent of cigarette smoke clinging to his jacket, the sharp tang of cologne underneath and the proximity makes the air feel thinner.
"Stick around," he murmurs. "That's my advice. Be useful. It doesn't matter who your parents were. Just be visible to Joshua and he'll wear down eventually. Just make sure you don't fuck up the opportunity when he gives it to you."
You swallow. "Alright."
He holds your gaze for another long beat, those dark eyes unreadable, before stepping back and shoving his hands into his pockets again. "Good."
He turns to leave, then pauses, glancing over his shoulder. "And hey," he says, his mouth quirking into something that might actually be a smile this time. "Welcome back."
Then he's gone, melting into the flow of pedestrians, his black jacket blending seamlessly with the crowd. You stand there for a moment longer on the wet street, heart still racing - not from fear but from something more complicated.
You pull your jacket tighter around yourself and start walking, your footsteps echoing against the pavement, the city swallowing you whole.
when i say i go feral for hali's syndicates!seventeen i mean i go FERAL
it's all panic, no disco ☹️
orbit
i'm an astronaut, you’re the moon. i stare at you, i sing to you, i circle you.
how cruel that the universe would teach me your face before it taught me i could never touch it.
you are the first thing i search for when the darkness opens. the last thing i lose when morning arrives.
i know the silver of your smile better than i know my own reflection,
i know the quiet valleys of your light, the places where shadows refuse to leave. i have memorized every inch of you from a distance measured in lifetimes.
i spend my days falling toward you.
almost close enough to press my forehead to yours. almost close enough to whisper that i have loved you since before i learned what love could cost.
i become another lonely satellite, dragging my heart around you until it forgets how to beat for anything else.
let me die like this—
with your light in my visor, your name caught in my radio static, and my heart forever calling circling you "coming home"
you're so vain — jww
PAIRING: TA!wonwoo x TA!reader GENRE: college au, e2l, smut/suggestive [18+ MDNI] WC: 5,699 WARNINGS: kissing sloppy style, semi-public sex but like barely, light breast play, dry humping, they're a lil toxic but it's fine, fade-to-black sex A/N: requested by @minisugakoobies for my milestone event!! sorry i made him so annoying in this asfkhasjfdf but i hope you like it ♡ (not beta'd)
SUMMARY: Your TA job would be perfectly fine and well if it weren't for your pretentious, nearly-insufferable coworker. Wonwoo seems to have made it his life mission to do everything in his power to irritate you, which is why you're blindsided when he asks you on a date completely out of the blue one day.
Every single thing Wonwoo Jeon does pisses you off.
It's bad enough having a co-TA that's pretentious as fuck. You studied English in undergrad, and every single male English major you ever met was a big-headed know-it-all, so you're (unfortunately) used to the type. But on top of being full of himself, Wonwoo has apparently made it his life's mission to do everything in his power to one-up you in every regard. No matter how early you show up to anything, he is somehow always already there; no matter how fast you grade papers, he's always finished well before you; no matter what the discussion subject is, he always has to repeat everything you say in a way that sounds smarter than the way you said it. There are seven trillion nerves in the human body, and he manages to get on every single one of them.
So when you walk into your own office hours one day to see him sitting at your desk, talking to your students, it takes everything in you not to snap.
"Wow, I wasn't expecting to see you at my office hours!" you say with a forced grin, your words dripping with sarcasm.
"Y/n, how lovely of you to show up," he smiles smugly at you. "I thought I'd use my free time to actually help out our students."
"Well aren't you a saint."
"Just doing my job."
"That's funny, because you seem to be doing my job right now."
"Well now, I wouldn't have to do your job if you were capable of showing up on time."
"I am only," you scowl, lifting your wrist to glance at your watch. "Four minutes late."
"You're right," he waves his hand dismissively. "It's fine to waste people's time if it's only four minutes."
The two undergrads sitting between the both of you look visibly uncomfortable. There's a lot of things you wish to say right now, none of them polite — but since you have an audience, you refrain.
"Well, since you clearly don't need me here, I'll just go home then," you tell Wonwoo with a huff. "Have fun running my office hours."
You storm off before he can say anything else, letting the door slam shut behind you.
You're fuming all the way home. Normally, you are very patient with others, even when it comes to jerks with less than savory personalities — but something about Wonwoo grinds your gears like nothing else. The problem is that he knows he can get under your skin with bare minimum effort, and, for whatever fucking reason, he takes every opportunity he can to weaponize this against you.
With your unanticipated bit of free time, you decide to channel your rage into productivity, working on your thesis for the remainder of the afternoon. Thankfully, it works, and by dinnertime you've forgotten all about your annoying coworker.
The next day is off to a great start. You got up early, giving yourself plenty of time to stop by the campus cafe and grab a bagel and coffee. You sip the hot beverage as you walk to the Literature Hall for your 10am discussion, strolling along with an extra bit of pep in your step as you enjoy the peaceful, pleasant morning. Everything is going great — until you step into the classroom and see Wonwoo sitting at one of the desks in the back, stretched out casually like he fucking lives here.
"Oh, what are you doing here today Wonwoo?" you ask with a faux grin, playing dumb. There's already a handful of students in the room, so despite the fact that you're suddenly seeing red you are forced to be civil.
"Oh, just had some free time this morning," he answers blithely. "Thought I'd pop in and join the discussion."
"You sure seem to have a lot of free time for someone in grad school," you remark.
Wonwoo shrugs arrogantly. "What can I say, I'm efficient at managing my time."
You would love to walk back there and slap that dumb look off his dumb face. Instead you decide to ignore him for the remainder of the hour — a task that proves to be unfeasible, due to his constant self-insertion into the conversation. Unfortunately, he is extremely smart and articulate, so the students eagerly engage with his bullshit.
It's the fucking Great Gatsby, you think to yourself. Does he really have nothing better to do than flex his knowledge on a boring, easy book to a bunch of clueless freshmen??
The remainder of hour passes at an excruciatingly slow pace, and you wish to bang your head against the wall about it. At five-til Wonwoo decides to bring up a completely new topic, seemingly trying to get this session to drag on forever, but you're not having any of it today.
"Very interesting points you bring up there, Wonwoo," you loudly interrupt him. "But class is over now. Next week we will discuss the remaining chapters, so be sure to finish reading the book before then."
The students begin to shuffle out, and Wonwoo is quick to make his exit.
"Oh, Wonwoo, I had a question for you," you call out to him before he can make it out of the room, but he doesn't stop.
"Sorry, gotta run," he replies smugly. "Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to talk!" With a wave he zips out the door and disappears.
Needless to say, you did not shoot him an email; but by late-afternoon, much to your chagrin, he is in your inbox anyway.
Dear y/n, You had a question for me earlier, however I noticed that you hadn't reached out to me about it yet, so I figured I'd contact you since you clearly forgot. What can I help you with? Best, WJ
"Pretentious little fucking prick," you grumble to yourself. You delete the email and shut your laptop.
After a lovely, Wonwoo-free weekend, you have the misfortune of starting off your week with him in your weekly TA/professor check-in first thing Monday morning. Of course, despite you getting there ten minutes early, Wonwoo is already in Professor Sosa's office, balls deep in some bullshit conversation about whatever bullshit book he's been reading recently. You sit down in the remaining chair, without a word, waiting for them to be done so you can get this painful meeting over with — but to your dismay, neither one of them seem to be in any rush. You peek at your watch a couple times, trying not to appear as annoyed as you currently are. Wonwoo definitely notices, though.
"I could talk about Wallace's use of the unreliable narrator for days," he grins, turning to you. "But I don't want to bore y/n any further. Shall we get started on the midterm?"
You take a deep breath as the professor begins to discuss the essay topics. You're going to try your hardest not to let him get on your nerves this early in the day — a task that's already proving itself to be a challenge. The next thirty minutes drag on at the slowest imaginable pace; you do your best to focus on the work at hand, but of course Wonwoo keeps going off on ostentatious tangents, and purposefully dragging you into the conversations no less. When the meeting finally ends, you're ready to book it out of there; you reach for your notebook sitting on the table beside you, but despite you just sitting it down a few moments ago it's not there. You look around, but you don't see it on the floor anywhere. Maybe you put it away already — but a peek into your backpack comes up empty-handed.
You notice Wonwoo watching you, wearing his usual arrogant expression, but you ignore him. The moment the professor leaves, he leans over to you.
"Looking for this?" he asks smugly, holding your missing notebook out to you. You go to grab it, but he quickly pulls it back out of reach.
"Seriously?" you ask, not bothering to hide your exasperation.
"What's the rush?" he taunts. "I know you don't have anywhere to be until 2."
"And how would you know that?" you narrow your eyes at him.
"I memorized your schedule."
You stare back at him, looking genuinely confused. "Why??"
He shrugs. "Figured it'd be good to know."
You'd love to know exactly what he means by that, but you don't want to make this conversation any longer than necessary.
"Well isn't that just wonderful," you say as sarcastically as possible, rising to your feet; Wonwoo follows suit. "Now will you give me my notebook back?"
You reach for it again, but he lifts it above his head — well out of your reach.
"What the actual fuck is your problem?!" you raise your voice. He looks surprised, but a cocky grin spreads across his face.
"It's okay, y/n, I'm just messing with you."
"Well, don't!!"
You glare at him, but he still wears that dumb, satisfied smirk.
"You don't have to act like you hate me, you know."
"It's not acting."
"Of course it's not," he smiles, unbothered. "Anyway, I wanted to ask you something."
"Okay," you sigh exasperatedly. "What do you want to ask me, Wonwoo?"
"What's your favorite restaurant?"
"What??"
"Your favorite restaurant," he repeats. "I'd like to take you out to dinner."
You stand there aghast. "You're not serious," you say to him.
"I am."
"What on earth makes you think I want to go on a date with you?!"
"It doesn't have to be a date," he responds. "We can go as friends."
"We are not friends," you reply coldly, snatching your notebook out of his hands and shoving it into your backpack before he can stop you.
"See you in class tomorrow!" he calls out warmly as you storm out of the room, clearly not affected by anything you said.
You want to tell him to go fuck himself, but you hold your tongue, instead letting the door slam behind you as you exit the office without another word.
The next day you show up to class right on time, and not a moment sooner. You figured if you got there right as the lecture begins, Wonwoo wouldn't be able to talk to you — and thankfully, you were right. He's sitting two chairs down, and you feel his eyes on you the whole hour, but you do not turn to look at him even once. When the lesson finally concludes, you book it out of there, but apparently that's exactly what he was expecting you to do.
"Y/n!" he calls out as he hurries after you. You keep walking, pretending not to hear him, but he catches up to you quickly.
"Hey, I was wondering if you—"
"The answer is no," you cut him off.
"You don't even know what I was going to ask," he smiles at you.
"Whatever it is, I'm not interested."
"Alright, guess I'll find someone else who's interested in first row tickets to Death Cab for Cutie on Saturday."
You stop in your tracks, your head snapping over to him.
"You do not have first row tickets to Death Cab for Cutie," you call him out. "That show has been sold out for weeks."
"I have connections."
"Right. Do you even like Death Cab?" you ask doubtfully.
"I don't know, I've never heard any of their songs," he answers matter-of-factly. "But I know they're your favorite band."
"And why do you know that??"
He shrugs. "I pay attention."
"So let me get this straight. You bought concert tickets to my favorite band in hopes that I'd go on a date with you?"
"It doesn't have to be a date if you don't want," he replies. "We can go as friends."
"I already told you," you glare at him, lowering your voice so none of the students passing by can hear you bickering. "We are not friends."
"But we can be," he smiles softly. "Just give me one chance. We have more in common than you think, y/n."
You roll your eyes. "I'm not having this conversation with you," you tell him, walking away.
"Think about it," he calls out as you head off down the hall.
"I won't" you grumble quietly under your breath.
Unfortunately you're not able to get Wonwoo and his concert tickets off your mind. You even end up ranting to your roommate about it, but to your dismay she thinks you should accept the offer.
"Are you crazy?!" Sana asks. "You're not seriously going to pass up free concert tickets to your favorite band just because you don't want to go on a date?"
"It's not even a date," you complain. "He just wants to go as friends."
"Okay, even better! What's the issue then?"
"The issue," you answer, "is that he's the most pretentious, insufferable douchebag to ever walk the face of the earth."
"He can't possibly be that bad."
You roll your eyes. "You'd be surprised."
"Come on, y/n," she insists. "You can literally take advantage of him! Just go to the concert and then never talk to him outside of class again. You know you'll regret it if you don't."
You grimace, because she's right. It's not even just concert tickets — it's front row concert tickets, for free. You'd be a fool not to accept the offer. But you can't help that spending an entire evening with Wonwoo genuinely sounds like your own personal hell.
"I'll think about it," you reply to Sana with a deep sigh.
You do think about it — far too much, perhaps. By Thursday, despite hating yourself a bit for it, you come to the conclusion that when he asks again you will accept. So you wait for him to inevitably send you an email, or show up unannounced at your office hours, but you don't see or hear from him once. Strange, considering how much he usually goes out of his way to bother you, but honestly you're enjoying the peace while it lasts. You've all but given up on the concert when finally, late in the Friday afternoon, you get an email from Wonwoo.
Dear y/n, I assume you've changed your mind about the concert by now, so I will plan to pick you up at 5pm tomorrow — that way we can go to dinner before the show. Please let me know your favorite restaurant so I can make a reservation accordingly. Best, WJ
With a sigh, you type up your reply.
Hello Wonwoo, I like Thai food — you take your pick of restaurant. See you tomorrow. —y/n
It pains you to hit send, but you do anyway. You're getting a free dinner and concert out of this, you remind yourself. You can suck it up and deal with Wonwoo for one night.
And you know it's true. You've dealt with bigger bullshit before than spending a few hours with one annoying man — besides, like Sana said, how bad could it possibly be? Still, you can't shake the anxious feeling that he has some ulterior motive here. Maybe he's just doing this to fuck with you, maybe he's going to do everything he can to make your night as miserable as possible. But maybe he's not. You can't fathom that he's doing this out of the goodness of his heart — if anything, he's probably just trying to get into your pants. But, you suppose there's only one way to find out.
True to his word, Wonwoo showed up to your apartment at 5pm on the dot to pick you up. You were lowkey regretting agreeing to go to dinner with him — at least at the concert you won't have to engage in actual conversation, but an hour or so spent one-on-one with him, making small talk? What were you thinking?? But it was too late to back out, so here you are, sitting across the dinner table from your mortal enemy at a Thai place on the other side of town that you've never even heard of before.
"How did you even find this place?" you ask him as you peruse the menu. "This is so far from campus."
"I'm attempting to try every restaurant in town," he answers casually, not looking up from his menu. "It's something of a hobby of mine."
"Oh, really?" you reply. Wonwoo glances up at you, a peek of a grin poking at his lips.
"You sound surprised."
"I guess I just didn't know that about you," you shrug.
"What did you think I do for fun, then?"
"I… Well, I don't know," you answer truthfully. "I guess I never thought about that before."
"So you assumed I sit in my house all day reading books," he jests.
"I didn't say that!" you protest.
"I know, y/n, I'm just teasing you," he smiles. He nudges his head toward your menu. "What are you thinking of getting?"
"I'm debating between the pad see eiw and the green curry," you answer, still staring at the page.
"The curry is really good," he tells you. "It's got the perfect amount of spice, if you like spicy."
"I do," you nod, setting your menu down too. "What are you getting?"
"I'm going with the khao moo deng."
"Oh my god, like the hippo!"
"What?" he asks, raising his brow at you.
"You know, Moo Deng! The baby hippo who went viral," you explain. "She's from Thailand — they named her after the dish."
"Oh, I don't use social media," he replies plainly.
"Now that doesn't surprise me."
Wonwoo grins. "What are you implying? That I'm uncool and out of touch?"
"I mean yeah, pretty much," you admit.
"I can live with that," he chuckles.
You order, slightly worried about the quality of the food considering that there is only one other occupied table in the whole restaurant; but as soon as the server sets the aromatic dish in front of you, your mouth starts watering. The curry is incredible — some of the best you've ever had, even. You hate to admit it, but Wonwoo did manage to pick a great restaurant. By the time you finish eating, you realize you've been yapping nonstop the whole time. A bit annoying, considering that you more or less hate his guts, but you're just glad the evening hasn't turned out to be a complete disaster yet.
Despite your protests, Wonwoo pays for your dinner, and it is time to head to the concert. Stupidly, you have butterflies in your stomach the whole way there, but you chalk it up to your sheer excitement over finally seeing your favorite band for the very first time. Making your way into the theater, you walk with Wonwoo all the way to the front of the auditorium, suddenly becoming very self-conscious about possibly being perceived with him of all people. But, you don't want to think about that right now, so you just hope and pray no one you know is here.
"Holy shit," you remark as you take your seats. "I've never been this close at a concert before."
"Me neither," Wonwoo replies. "Though, I suppose I've never been to any concert before."
"Wait," you say, turning to look at him. "Are you serious?"
He turns to face you, making you realize that the two of you are currently very uncomfortably close to each other.
"Yes," he answers. "Though, I suppose I did see the New York Philharmonic while I was visiting NYC a few years ago."
"I mean, sure, but that's not a concert concert."
He grins at you. "What would you consider a concert concert, then?"
"You know, like a band that's on tour. That you would buy albums of."
"Well, I suppose most of the artists I listen to aren't touring so much these days."
"Yeah I think Beethoven's a little dead at this point."
Wonwoo laughs. "I meant more so that I listen to a lot of classic rock from the 60s and 70s," he explains. "So you're not entirely wrong about them being dead."
"I didn't know you were into the classics," you respond, surprised to find out that you have that in common. "I grew up listening to that era of music too."
"You never asked," he shrugs.
The lights in the theater dim, and the crowd begins to cheer as the shadowy figures of the band take to the stage in the dark. As the first song begins, you suddenly feel overwhelmed — you're not much of a concert person usually, but hearing the music you've been listening to since you were young live and in person is making you feel inexplicably emotional. You quickly blink the tears from your eyes, and the sensation soon dissipates, returning you to the music and the atmosphere of fans singing along to all the lyrics. The show is so incredible that for the remainder of the night you barely even recall who it is you came here with in the first place. You're having too much fun to notice, but Wonwoo's eyes keep flickering over to you, a soft look of affection etched onto his face.
The concert-goers flood out of the theater in droves, chattering and laughing as everyone is still riding the rush of adrenaline from the show. You and Wonwoo make your way across the parking lot, the chill of the night air refreshing as it tingles against your cheeks.
"So, how was it?" Wonwoo asks as you walk in the general direction of his car. Free of the joyful environment of the concert, you remember now how much he has always annoyed you. But, much to your surprise, the annoyance you typically feel around him is not present, nor is the smug attitude that usually colors his voice.
"That was amazing," you admit, smiling blissfully. "I still can't believe I actually got to experience my favorite band live."
"Good," he smiles at you. You approach his car, Wonwoo brushing past you to open the passenger side door for you. You give him a confused look, but you just thank him and let yourself into the car. Once you're in he shuts the door, and you watch him as he walks around to the driver's side. You don't particularly want to inflate his ego any further, but you know you have to genuinely thank him for the whole experience.
He gets in the car, turning the keys in the ignition, the engine coming to life.
"Thank you for the ticket, Wonwoo," your voice comes out softly as he reaches for the gear shift. His hand pauses atop it, looking over to meet your gaze. You were standing next to him all night, but the distance between the two of you suddenly feels extremely close; yet, it's not uncomfortable.
"You're welcome, y/n," he smiles at you.
"I have to ask, though," you continue. "Why did you do it?"
He cocks his head at you slightly. "What do you mean?"
"I mean…" you start hesitantly. You don't want to be too blunt, but you also don't feel the need to beat around the bush.
"I mean, why buy me concert tickets when I've made it very clear I don't even like you?"
Wonwoo grins slightly. "Why do you think?"
"Honestly?" you reply. "Probably to get in my pants, I don't fucking know."
"Well, that's certainly not something I'd be opposed to," he chuckles. "But that's not why."
"Okay," you concede. "Why, then?"
He gazes back at you with an intensity that makes your stomach flutter anxiously.
"Because I knew it would make you happy," he answers. "And I want you to be happy whether you like me or not."
You feel your stomach drop, your face suddenly burning hot. That was not the answer you were expecting, and you quite frankly don't know how to respond.
"I—" you stammer quietly. "I… Sorry, I don't know what to say to that," you admit, trying to hide your embarrassed face behind your hand.
"You don't have to say anything," he tells you gently, shifting the car into reverse and pulling out of the spot. You sit there silently as he waits in the slow-moving line to exit the parking lot, wishing you could disappear. You're considering hopping out of the car and finding another ride home, but the line finally starts moving. As Wonwoo heads toward the exit, he turns to look at you.
"Can we take a brief detour on the way home?" he asks casually. "I want to show you something."
"Sure," you answer after a few seconds of silence. Wonwoo nods, switching the turn signal from right to left, pulling out into the street and driving off in the opposite direction of home. He drives for a few minutes in seemingly the wrong direction away from anything, and you're starting to wonder if you should be worried.
"Where are we going?"
"You'll see in just a minute," he replies nonchalantly.
"Is this when I find out you're actually a serial killer?" you joke. Wonwoo laughs.
"No, definitely not a serial killer, I promise."
"Ooookay," you say, still unsure.
True to his word, in about another minute or so he turns onto a dirt road you didn't even see from the main road. He drives slowly as the road turns into an incline, clearly going up a steep hill.
"Sorry," he says, having noticed that you look a bit nervous. "This part of the road is a bit nerveracking, but we're almost there," he assures you.
The surrounding trees soon begin to become more sparse, eventually opening up to what looks to you like a small clearing at the top of the hill. A big metal guard rail wraps around the area; as Wonwoo pulls up to it to park the car, you gasp. Beyond the guard rail is an incredible view of the whole town, the orange glow of the streetlights and houselights making it look so warm and picturesque that it seems like a scene straight out of a movie.
"Holy shit," you say softly, awestruck by the unreal sight. Wonwoo grins, then hops out of the car. You follow suit and join him by the railing, taking in the stunning view.
"I had no idea there was anything like this around here," you say softly.
"Isn't it beautiful?" he asks. Your eyes flicker over to him, finding his gaze fixated on you.
"How did you find this?" you ask, the same rush of heat as earlier returning to your cheeks.
"My roommate last year told me about it — he grew up around here, apparently it was a popular place for high schoolers to take their dates."
"So you've brought me to a make-out point," you reply, raising your brow at him.
"I suppose so," he chuckles. "But genuinely, I just wanted to show you the view."
"So you don't want to make out with me then."
Wonwoo smiles, his eyes still locked onto yours. You feel a wave of heat overtaking you again, this time burning achingly in your core. If this had happened yesterday, you would be peeved; but the usual feeling of displeasure you feel in his presence is nowhere to be found.
"I don't want to do anything you don't want to do," he answers plainly.
"And what if I do want it?"
The words feel foreign on your tongue, your voice so soft you almost didn't recognize it as yours. But you said it, and for reasons you cannot explain, you meant it.
Wonwoo takes a small step toward you. "Want what?" he asks, the cheekiness in his words not going unnoticed.
"Want you to kiss me," you say, taking a small step toward him. Your mouths are mere inches apart, and Wonwoo's eyes definitely keep flickering down to your lips.
"You do?" he asks, a grin overtaking his face.
"Yeah," you answer, the words coming out in barely more than a whisper. "I do."
Wonwoo smiles, then the next thing you know his lips are crashing into yours. The kiss starts out soft, sweet — his mouth presses against yours delicately, savoring your taste for the first time, his fingers brushing lithely over your jaw, sending a rush of electricity coursing through your body as you accept the kiss. His hands slowly drift to your sides, slipping into your open coat and resting upon your hips. Before you can even think twice you're leaning into him, the warmth of his torso instantly blocking the chill of the late autumnal air. He kisses you slowly at first, but that doesn't last long — not with you being tangled up in each other's grasp. His lips start tugging at yours with sudden urgency, and you eagerly reciprocate. The ridiculousness of you making out with the coworker you up until tonight absolutely could not stand is not lost on you, but right now you could not care less.
His lips depart yours far too soon, his hands maintaining their grip on your waist as you stare up into his eyes. You've never seen Wonwoo from this close up — why would you have? But you don't recall his eyes ever being so soft and warm as they are gazing back at you through his lenses right now. A chill overtakes you, and you shiver slightly as the wind cuts through your layers.
"C'mere," he tells you, taking hold of your hand and starting to pull you back toward his car. "It'll be warmer in here."
He opens the door to the backseat, gesturing for you to enter first; you slide across the soft leather to the other side, allowing him room to climb in after you, but as soon as he's inside with the door closed he grabs you again, taking hold of your arms and dragging you into his embrace. Without the wind now, inside the car quickly becomes a bit too toasty. Wonwoo hastily removes your coat, tossing it into the front seat and following suit with his own jacket. He pulls you over onto him, your thigh swinging over his legs as you sit straddled across his lap, your arms draped over the top of the backseat as you lean in to kiss him again. This time his tongue swipes at your lips; you part them, allowing him entrance, your tongues now dancing against each other with fervent need. His hands slip beneath the hem of your sweater, running up your stomach and resting atop the cups of your bra. You break the kiss momentarily, the corners of your lips twisting into a sly smile.
"Go on," you say to him, nudging your head toward your sweater. "Take it off."
He grins back at you, the red glow of his cheeks apparent even in the dim lighting. Grabbing the hem he lifts the garment over your head and practically flings it onto the seat next to him. Shirtless now, he stares at your cleavage before him, his hands grasping at the soft flesh through your bra.
"I've thought about this exact scenario a thousand times," he mutters, licking his lips. "But god, it's even better than I imagined."
He peers up at you again, staring at you hungrily for the briefest of seconds before he suddenly reaches for his glasses, ripping them off his face and tossing them onto the seat with your sweater before diving back into your lips. He kisses you as his hands wander to your lower back, and your grind your hips against him — an involuntary action, but it causes your clit to press into the stiff bulge forming in his trousers. You let out a soft sigh at the sensation, exhaling against his lips as he holds you tight in his arms. Eventually his fingers return to your boobs, grazing gently over your cleavage, sending a delicious chill up your spine.
"We don't have to do this if you don't want to—" he starts breathily, but you shake your head immediately.
"I want to," you tell him softly, and a mischievous grin flickers at his lips. "What?" you laugh.
"Nothing, just remembering how much you hated my guts a few days ago and here we are now," he replies cheekily, squeezing lightly at your boobs.
"I didn't 'hate your guts'," you refute as you roll your eyes. "I just found you annoying and insufferable."
"Oh, is that all?" he smirks.
"Shut up," you mumble, leaning your forehead against his as you hover your lips right above his mouth. "Do you wanna kiss me or not?"
"I do, very much so," he smiles, lightly dragging his bottom lip across yours. His hands slide to your hips, pressing your core into his erection again as he grinds you against his lap.
"Fuck," you gasp, followed by an embarrassed laugh. "Sorry, I just… it's been a little while," you admit.
"Don't apologize," he says, kissing down your down your chin, nudging his face into your neck as he places a delicate string of kisses onto the tender skin. The sensation makes you melt, sinking your clothed cunt further into his bulge. "We can take this as slow as you want."
"Who said I want to go slow?"
He lifts his head, meeting your eyes again, finding them eager and needy.
"God, you're gonna drive me crazy if you keep saying stuff like that," he says with a lazy smirk.
"Good," you reply with a grin, muttering into his lips. "Then we'll be even."
"Is that so?" he mumbles back. "Guess I'll just have to try harder to get on your nerves now."
"Oh god, please don't."
Wonwoo lets out a laugh — the sound warm and hearty.
"So, do we have a truce then?" he inquires.
"I suppose so," you answer. "Who knew all it would take for you to leave me alone is for me to fuck you?"
He grins. "A bit toxic of us, don't you think?"
"Probably," you reply with a shrug, dragging your hand down his torso, reaching for his belt and tugging at the buckle, making his eyes widen excitedly.
"But we can worry about that later."
taglist: @kyeomiis @hannieween @smiileflower @hanniebub
@luvseungcheol @escoupsue @shininghoshstar @coupsv
@coupsarchive @seonyiyeon
PROFESSOR WONWOO DRIVES ME INSANE BTW???
The Reef In Bloom Masterlist
Spring is about rebirth, change, and fresh starts — and we want to celebrate that with stories, recommendations, and a lot of love for writers and readers alike.
The wonderful Merfolk at Do Re Reef have worked hard the past couple of months to put together a collection of stories to share; all centred around the theme of Spring! Our members have both written some spring themed stories, and found some written by other brilliant writers here on Tumblr to recommend.
Please show the fics and their writers love and support by reblogging the stories you read, and leaving a kind comment to let the writer know how much you enjoyed the story.
🌸 Spring with S.Coups
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @thestraybunny
Spring Storm - Now Blooming.
14.5k. Angst. Slowish Burn. Smut. Strangers to Lovers. 90s AU. Small Town AU. Carpenter Seungcheol. Waitress Reader.
Seungcheol thought he had his life planned out. From his job to his home to who he was going to spend his life with. You were just a lost soul trying to find a place to call home, a new face to the small town of Diamond Ridge. Coming into his life and make him question if he really had it planned out?
🌸 Spring with Jeonghan
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @thestraybunny
It’s always you - Now Blooming.
14.5k. Fluff. Childhood friends to Lovers. Non-Idol AU. Yearning. Angst. Smut.
Growing up, you and Jeonghan were inseparable, best friends, partners in crime, each other’s rocks when needed. It was always you and him against the world. Then you grew up. You moved away for college while he stayed behind. Lives took you in different directions, further away from your hometown, from the world you knew, from Jeonghan. But you both made a promise, the year you turned 31, you two would meet again no matter where life took you. To reconnect, to catch up, to remember your friendship. It was meant to be a rebirth of your friendship, but really it was the beginning of something more. And remind you that he's home.
🌸 Spring with Joshua
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @livmarauder
through the cherry seasons - Now Blooming.
11.9k. Soulmate AU. Strangers to Childhood friends to Lovers. Fluff. Idol Joshua.
a tale of five destined encounters of fated lovers who meet through different seasons of spring and the amazing love story that came from it.
🌸 Spring with Jun
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @gam3bo17
Free Love - Now Blooming.
13.8k. Angst. Yearning. Second Chance. Rich reader. Stable boy Jun. Non-Idol AU.
The first time you saw him you didn’t know his name, only that he didn’t look at you the way everyone else did. The countryside air felt different: cleaner, lighter, like it didn’t matter who you were. No chauffeurs. No bodyguards hovering nearby. No people trailing behind you like shadows. For the first time in your life you felt normal. Not the child of the family that owned Pledis Industries. Not the face plastered across city billboards and magazine covers. Not someone people bowed to before they spoke. Just you.
🌸 Spring with Hoshi
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @gam3bo17
Under the Cherry Blossoms - Now Blooming.
5.7k. Angst. Fluff. Best friend’s brother. Open Ending. Military AU. Non-Idol AU.
You wanted this spring to be your new beginning but you didn’t know it was going to be with your best friend's brother Soonyoung.
🌸 Spring with Wonwoo
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @mellow-wishes
A Perfect Meal - Now Blooming.
2.6k. Fluff. Acquaintances to Lovers. Mutual pining.
jeon wonwoo visits your restaurant with his daughter, jeon bomi, every morning before he takes her to school. after much begging from her about his horrible cooking skills, you teach him how to make a good meal.
🌸 Spring with Woozi
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @thestraybunny
Simple - Now Blooming.
4.9k. Strangers to ???. Fluff. Yearning. Non-Idol AU
Jihoon likes to live simple. He’s not into flashy stuff, he’s modest, and he’s content where his life is, but one thing isn’t simple. Is the girl who works the counter of the shop by his house.
🌸 Spring with DK
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @mylovesstuffs
husbandable - Now Blooming.
2.8k. Fluff. Romance. Established Relationship. Non-Idol AU.
You say you have high standards. Unfortunately for you, your boyfriend, Lee Seokmin, is exactly what your mental list calls for; as you joke about him being ‘too husbandable’ during a walk under cherry blossoms, he decides to fix that problem permanently.
🌸 Spring with Mingyu
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @woozilovespinkunderwear
The Season You Return - Now Blooming.
2.4k. Slow Burn. Angst. Hurt/Comfort. Mutual pining. Friends to Lovers. Spirit Mingyu. Fantasy AU.
Every spring, he returns. For six years, you’ve watched Kim Mingyu appear with the first bloom of cherry blossoms and disappear before summer arrives. No explanations. Just soft smiles, afternoons, and a love that only exists between March and May. But this spring feels different. Because after years of waiting, you finally decide to uncover the truth behind the boy who belongs more to the season than to the world itself, even if it means learning that some beautiful things were never meant to stay forever.
🌸 Spring with The8
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @nothoughtsjustfic
You Make Me Glow - Now Blooming.
7.6k. Fantasy. Fluff. Some humour. Strangers to Friends to Lovers. Neighbours AU. Witch Minghao.
After divorcing your cheating asshole of an ex-husband, you use the very generous money you gain from the ordeal to buy a house on the complete opposite side of the country to make a fresh start. The online photos of the house are beautiful, and the gardens even more so, though the reality is a little different by the time you arrive. Still, you love it and are determined to turn this house into a home. It’s just a matter of doing your best to ignore the man who seems to have serious issue with you moving into the house, and makes his feelings known with glares that are the furthest thing from neighbourly as a person can get. It’d be a whole lot easier to ignore him if he wasn’t so damn attractive.
🌸 Spring with Seungkwan
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @mellow-wishes
Back Then - Now Blooming.
4.1k. Childhood friends to Lovers. Idiots in Love. Unrequited Love. University AU.
you visit your old neighborhood for spring break, meeting an old friend, you remember the tidbits of your time being close with seungkwan. maybe it was right that you still love him that way.
🌸 Spring with Vernon
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @mylovesstuffs
ships passing in the night - Now Blooming.
12.1k. Angst. Modern AU. Non-Idol AU.
And just like that, you realize that no matter what you say, no matter how much you ask, no matter how much you plead, no matter how much you cry, he’s already decided… and you can’t change his mind.
🌸 Spring with Dino
WRITTEN BY OUR SCRIBE @nothoughtsjustfic
For The Record - Now Blooming.
9.1k. Fluff. Humour. Strangers to Friends to Lovers. Vet reader. Simp Chan.
The day Chan first lays eyes on you, his life changes. The day after that, he suddenly becomes very interested in animals, with absolutely no relation to you being the new vet in town. Not that anyone believes him about that. After all, subtlety has never been Chan’s strong suit.
FICS FOUND BY OUR EXPLORERS @yethoughts & @mylovesstuffs
🌷finding spring by @joshujin
Junhui x Reader. 22k for Part One. Slow Burn. Strangers to Lovers. Smut in Part Two (18+).
Tale tells of a water spirit bound to the Elysian River, destined to guard the very magic her human body once sought after. She lives where the animals come to drink, where the children wade in the water, where the river empties into the sea. And she is waiting for the chance to be freed.
🌷Flowers for Sunshine by @supi-wupi
Seokmin x Reader. 3.3k. Fluff. Slow burn. Idol Seokmin. Florist Reader.
DK visits your flower shop after every performance, always buying the same bouquet. You think it’s for someone he loves. It is — he just hasn’t given them to you yet.
🌷Love in Bloom by @welcometomyoasis
Seungkwan x Reader. 6.1k. Fluff. Doctor AU
Seungkwan always makes it a point to bring fresh flowers to brighten up the Emergency Department every week… or at least that’s the reason he tells himself whenever he visits the hospital’s (very cute) florist.
🌷The Way of The House Husband by @wonustars
Mingyu x Reader. 19k. Angst. Fake Marriage AU. Fluff. Smut (18+). Ex-Mafia Mingyu. House Husband Mingyu.
you and mingyu (a former mafia member and also your ex-fiancè's former best friend) are forced into witness protection. All you’ve been told is that you’re meant to act like a happily married couple. Pushed into a cookie cutter house, and a suburban neighbourhood far from the city, where people bring you baked goods on your first day and partake in small talk, it’s all foreign and new. There’s so many things you don’t know about him, but for a man who’s only known violence and all things illegal, he’s somehow the perfect house husband.
🌷caught in bloom, caught on you by @wheeboo
Minghao x Reader. 8.3k. A Pinch of Angst. Fluff. Hurt/ Comfort. Strangers to Friends to Lovers. Florist Minghao.
in which you find yourself becoming a regular𑁋or perhaps more than that𑁋at minghao's flower shop.
